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Show Chapter I. General Introduction to the Project: The Enterprise of Socratic Metaethics 38 final end, nor justify our doing so, then either these arrangements must be justified instrumentally, as in some sense a means to desire-satisfaction; or else they cannot be rationally justified at all - in which case the enterprise of substantive moral philosophy, and the acknowledged standards of transpersonal rationality that guide it, are futile. Chapter IX criticizes three Humean varieties of metaethical justification that wrestle with this dilemma: Noncognitivism, Deductivism, and Instrumentalism. I argue that Anderson's Noncognitivist theory of value reduces to a conformist and socially conservative, Rawlsian conception of interpersonal validation; that Gewirth's ambitious and comprehensive Deductivist justification of his Principle of Generic Consistency is subverted by his allegiance to the belief-desire model of motivation; and that the utilitymaximizing strategy of Instrumentalist justification deployed by Rawls, Brandt, Gauthier, Harsanyi and others is inherently self-defeating. Chapters X and XI then examine two of the most prominent Instrumentalists - Rawls and Brandt - in depth. I show, first, that the Humean structural similarities between their attempts at justification override their contrasting ideological allegiances; second, that both founder on exactly the same Humean vulnerabilities; and third, that both thereby illuminate some of the pitfalls that a satisfactory solution to the problem of moral justification must avoid. Chapter XII then applies these conclusions to the most quintessentially Humean normative moral theory. Classical Utilitarianism presupposes the belief-desire model of motivation in its conception of human agency, and the utility-maximizing model of rationality in its Instrumentalist metaethical justification. This theory received its most rigorous formulation from Sidgwick at the turn of the twentieth century, and its most significant mid- to late century refinements from Hodgson, Gibbard, and Lewis. But the insolubility of the Free Rider problem within these constraints demonstrates that Humean Instrumentalism is no more conceptually coherent at the level of normative moral theory than it is at the level of metaethical justification. I argue that each one of the above normative moral theories contains much to recommend it. But all of them come to grief over their Humean assumptions about justification. Thus I conclude that the above three problems - of moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification - can be solved only by replacing the unreconstructed Humean conception with a more comprehensive, Kantian conception of the self which the Humean conception, suitably reconstructed, implicitly presupposes. So my approach to refuting Humeans is in the end the same as Kant's to refuting Hume: essentially to accept much of what Hume said, but then to articulate the necessary foundational presuppositions that enabled him to say it. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
