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Show Chapter IV. McClennen on Resolute Choice 184 clever, and therefore secretive free rider should not exploit for personal gain others' compliance with the rule, because there is no room in his protoHumean conception of the self for a noninstrumental, supervisory role for reason. For Hobbes, if considerations of personal advantage justify entering into the social contract, considerations of personal advantage similarly justify breaking it under certain circumstances. That is, Hobbes' Fool lacks a conscience. Kant's answer to the free rider is similarly unsatisfactory, for several reasons. First, even if the free rider had a conscience of the sort that functioned in the manner of Kant's noninstrumental conception of reason, we have seen that it would still be possible to justify violating many beneficial social covenants simply by tinkering with the formulation of the maxim. Second, Kant's principle of "bare conformity to law as such" requires only that the free rider entertain the counterfactual conditional of whether the rule violation could be universalized. Even if the relevant maxim could not be reworked so as to satisfy this requirement, attempting to universalize it would demonstrate only the social and political impossibility that everyone could behave as the free rider does in fact. It would not demonstrate that this particular free rider should not so behave, assuming others do not do so as well. Indeed, the very conceptual possibility of a free rider depends on the assumption that most other people do not behave similarly. Third, therefore, no such counterfactual appeal is likely to move the free rider to reform her ways, because her proto-Humean psychology is such that she lacks the moral and rational susceptibility to such an appeal. Finally, Mill's practical solution, that laws and social arrangements should place the happiness or (as, speaking practically, it may be called) the interest of every individual as nearly as possible in harmony with the interest of the whole; and, secondly, that education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and the good of the whole … so that not only he may be unable to conceive the possibility of happiness to himself, consistently with conduct opposed to the general good, but also that a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one of the habitual motives of action14 abandons the attempt to find flaws in the free rider's reasoning, and instead opts for a radical form of social coercion that simply eliminates it, along with the very ability to conceptualize self-interest altogether. Mill basically proposes that the resources of law, social sanction, and education should be deployed as tools of propaganda to reprogram all individuals, by erasing any John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Ed. George Sher (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 1979), 17; italics added. 14 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
