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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 199 This second set of characteristics of the commitment to duty as a form of long-term conduct imply a third, that duty as a secondary motive is not tokenguiding. An agent need not be constantly preoccupied by her duty, nor with trying to ascertain what her duty is (131): A responsible moral agent should take an active interest in a wide range of moral questions…. None of this says … how often she should reflect on these things. What is important is that … she should be committed to changing herself … or less isolated in her own affairs, and more aware of social injustices and prepared to contribute to ameliorating them (132). … duty operating principally as a secondary motive … attaches primarily not to individual actions but to conduct, to how one lives, and only derivatively to isolated actions. It serves generally as a limiting condition and at the same time as an impetus to think about one's conduct, to appraise one's goals, to be conscious of oneself as a self-determining being, and sometimes to give one the strength one needs to do what one sees one really should do. ... [it plays the role of] prompting us to reflect on our conduct and in maintaining or heightening our moral sensitivity (134). Thus duty as a secondary motive does not require repeated, continual, moment-to-moment acts of conscious attention to each in the sequence of individual act-tokens an agent performs. It does not require the agent to monitor and evaluate each such act with respect to its accordance with or violation of the mandates of duty. This is the corollary of the second feature of duty as a secondary motive, that the long-term maintenance of this secondary motive is compatible with occasional violations of its strictures because it involves attention to long-term conduct rather than to "isolated actions." In this regard, secondary motives are comparable to the consistency constraints of literal self-preservation. The former need not be enduring intentional objects within an agent's perspective; whereas the latter, as mentioned above, cannot be. However, the two are dissimilar in that in Baron's secondary motive of duty, one's attention is weighted toward longterm conduct rather than isolated act-tokens; whereas observation of the consistency constraints of literal self-preservation shape long-term conduct in virtue of screening each isolated act-token. In the ideal case considered here, individual actions that violate these constraints are not performed, whereas those candidates for action that satisfy them are. Over time, this selective mechanism through which consistent actions are filtered functions to habituate the agent to act consistently, thus forging enhanced psychological support for the highest-order disposition to literal self-preservation that already is deeply inscribed in the structure of the self. However, the passage directly above raises further questions. We have already seen that Baron means to distinguish acting from duty as a primary motive from so acting as a secondary motive; and I have collated only those © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
