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Show Chapter XIII. Baier's Hume 556 Hume as the "great enlarger of our reason" (PS 283; see generally PS 281-284). "Our capacity for judgment," she claims, "outruns our capacity to reduce our judgments to rule" (PS 281). But in fact judgment just is the application of general rules and principles to particular cases, and so part of what Baier needs to answer these questions. And her major objection to Scanlon's analysis is that our behavior provides no evidence that we accept his suggested principles (MP 134, 141-142), nor that we necessarily want anything so restrictive as can be encapsulated in any principle (MP 168-176). But the pressing question is not what we in fact do or do not want or accept, any more than it is whether or not we want to do what we must to protect our ability to trust, or to contain the damaging effects of a Humean shame morality. My suggestion is that these two problems are related: We increase our ability to trust to the extent that we decrease the shaming consequences of openly acknowledging our moral vulnerability; and we do that to the extent that we meet our moral obligations to treat one another with tolerance, compassion, and respect, i.e. as ends in ourselves. The question, then, is rather what is morally required in order that a climate of trust can flourish, in which a rational and morally decent trustor can function. Essentially, Baier's analysis answers the tactical question of how best to protect our moral innocence in an environment we must always fear is morally corrupt. Under the circumstances, that is an important and realistic question to try to answer. But if we want to know how, strategically, to create a moral environment in which such self-protective, blind groping for security is unnecessary, we need to know what reciprocal moral obligations we must voluntarily shoulder in order to realize that state of affairs. That we are required to fulfill certain basic moral obligations of trustworthiness, tolerance, compassion, and moral dependability in order that we each may feel reciprocally comfortable in exposing our weaknesses, flaws, dependencies, and moral vulnerabilities to one another is a fact that Baier's objections do not refute. So although her analysis of trust once again succeeds in making a persuasive case for reorienting the focus of normative ethics accordingly, it does not do so at the expense of the Kantian Contract-Theoretic model she purports to reject. 7. An Assessment of Baier's "Stylistic Experiment" My treatment of Baier's version of Hume has so far not mentioned the very unusual, pervasive and disturbing style of exposition of Moral Prejudices - that element of it that best explains its title; and, in addition, most fully justifies my description of it in Section 1 as taking a quintessentially Humean indexical approach. Because this element figures very prominently in the experience of reading this book, I examine this aspect of it in some depth in this concluding section, and describe its effect on the reader. I suggest that Baier takes the indexical approach to doing philosophy far beyond the limits © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
