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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 183 instantiated by keeping promises we make, whether to ourselves or to others - and so by any contract we make. However, because it is based in the "particular actions" and choices that Kant abjures, resolute choice does not require keeping promises or honoring contracts independently of the informed preferences and known circumstances on which such choices are based. Thus McClennen's model of resolute choice succeeds where Kant failed in the Groundwork, namely in deriving a more fine-grained and suitably qualified conception of promise-keeping from the very concept of reason. 8. Free Riding and Moral Emotion Because McClennen's model of resolute choice can be justified independently of utility-maximization, it provides an even more "secure footing for a rational commitment to practice rules (PRR 215; italics in text)" than McClennen himself claims, and so an even more fertile solution to the free rider problem. As we saw in Volume I, Chapter XII, the free rider is an agent who enjoys the benefits of others' compliance with a rule but breaks it when this is personally advantageous. Tax evasion, welfare fraud, insurance fraud, accounting fraud and failure to contribute to public radio would be examples. If everyone reasoned as the free rider does, there would be no benefits to enjoy. Because the free rider's reasoning is equally available to everyone, free riding is a threat to the continued existence of those benefits. So the challenge is to somehow discourage free riding - either by showing the reasoning to be defective, or by establishing viable social sanctions against it. One reason why the problem has seemed intractable to some philosophers is that it has been viewed as a strictly interpersonal coordination problem.12 Hobbes' original introduction of the problem begged the question of how to solve it by stipulating that the Fool "declares he think it reason to deceive those that help him, … [he] breaketh his covenant, and consequently declareth that he thinks he may with reason do so,"13 as though in acting to obtain the personal advantages of breaking a rule that others keep, the free rider thereby announced to those others his violation of it. Under these circumstances the distinctly less than clever free rider of course would have reason to heed Hobbes' warning as to the dangers of getting caught (Fool that he is). But this would make free riding nothing more than a pointless exercise in self-destructive behavior. Hobbes offered no viable answer as to why a Here I discuss only historical approaches to the problem. But for a useful overview of contemporary Humean approaches that reformulate the free rider problem as the problem of public goods and connects it with the Sorites paradox, see Richard Tuck, "Is there a free-rider problem, and if so, what is it?" in Ross Harrison, Ed. Rational Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 147-156. 13 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Ed. Michael Oakeshott (New York: Macmillan/Collier Books, 1977), 115; italics added. 12 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
