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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 567 satisfy our desires is itself an end that reason may be used to achieve. Thus on this view we are thinking rationally if we successfully and appropriately perform those intellectual operations characteristic of theoretical reason on the traditional view. We are acting rationally if we successfully deploy these operations in realizing our desired final ends. We saw in Chapter III that one immediate implication of the utilitymaximization model of rationality as I have stated it is that reason has nothing to say about whether one's desired final ends themselves are rational; thus were generated the problems of rational final ends and moral justification discussed earlier in this volume. Call this the negative utilitymaximization thesis. Like the positive utility-maximization thesis, this negative one does not follow from the traditional view of reason, but it does follow from the utility-maximization model of rationality. For this model regards reason itself as nothing more than a means for achieving our ends. Of course reason, on this view, may enable us to discover what ends we genuinely want, and may enlarge the scope of ends from which we may choose. But as we have seen in discussing Frankfurt, Watson, Williams, Slote, Rawls, Brandt, and others, it provides no criteria for identifying those ends themselves as rational, independently of their efficiency as means for promoting further ends to which they may be subordinate. Reason functions solely as the unique second-order means for determining the logical or material first-order means to our ends, whatever they may be. Together the positive and negative theses constitute an informal characterization of the utility-maximization model of rationality. I argue here that Hume himself embraces both theses; therefore the utility-maximization model of rationality in its entirety; and therefore the belief-desire model of motivation that furnishes its conative force. Although this model is first articulated in Hobbes' Leviathan, the positive and negative theses of the utility-maximization model of rationality receive their first detailed explication and justification in Hume's Treatise1, and the negative thesis is defended most forcefully there. Hume's most celebrated passages include those in which he characterizes reason as nothing but the "slave of the passions" (T 415), and as wholly silent on the question of whether I should "chuse my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. 'Tis as little contrary to reason," Hume continues, "to prefer even my own acknowledg'd lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter" (T 416). These David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). Henceforth all page references to the Treatise will be parenthecized in the text, preceded by T. All paragraph/page references to the second Enquiry (David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), will also be parenthecized in the text, preceded by E. 1 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
