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Show Chapter XIII. Baier's Hume 542 those moral virtues of feeling and sensibility that would make effortless the 13 enactment of duty, and in fact presupposed love of others, and sympathy, as 14 a precondition of subjection to the moral law. But again it is hard to see how Baier's agenda of replacing rational control with parental love as a condition of raising morally healthy agents can ever get off the ground, if we are not even allowed to exercise rational control in order to cultivate the parental love she advocates. We are none of us angels of compassion, and often do feel - in addition to love - irritation or anger at our children. We can either vent that anger at our children, or we can control it. Baier cannot possibly think it would serve the cause of raising morally healthy agents (or moral authenticity, either) to make a practice of venting it. So what would she have morally committed parents and teachers do? Evacuate their children to an air raid shelter when they feel an outburst of temper coming on? Give them up for adoption if one judges oneself too irascible to raise them? What she says we should all do, under such circumstances, is to exercise Humean passional reflection rather than Kantian rational control. The problem here is that her analysis of Humean reflection is not sufficiently distinguishable from Kant's actual conception of reason to do the job. Take her description of reflection as "a response to a response ... a sentiment directed on sentiments" (MP 72), and Hume's own characterization of passions as "'returns upon the soul' of remembered experience of good and of evil" (MP 83). We can feel a desire for a desire, or anger about our anger, or gladness for our joy. But to desire a desire is to desire an intentional object we must be able to identify as a desire. To feel angry at our anger is to react to an intentional object we must be able to identify as our anger. In the first case the object of our intentional attitude may or may not be a remembered experience; in the second case it is. In either case, in order to remember the experience of good or evil that now returns upon the soul as the object of our desire or anger respectively, we must be able to conceive it as being the kind of object it is. This point merely generalizes to all intentional objects the representational analysis of desire offered in Chapter II.2.1. In all such cases, we must be able to judge the intentional object by ascribing predicates to it as subject in a categorical indicative judgment. This is the essence of reasoning for Kant. It is not necessarily linguistic, but it is necessarily conceptual; i.e. it involves what Hume would call "ideas." And in order to have had the experience that now returns upon the soul in the first place, and to which we are now responding passionally, we had to have made a similar judgment about the extrinsic state of affairs to which that 13 14 Op. cit. Note 8, The Doctrine of Virtue, Ak. 387-388; Ak 391-3; 457; 477-486. Ibid. Ak. 399, 401-2, 456-8. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
