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Show Chapter V. How Reason Causes Action 200 passages in which Baron addresses acting from duty solely as a secondary motive. However, at page 134 above she first explicitly identifies this as her subject, but then describes duty as a secondary motive as serving "generally as a limiting condition and at the same time as an impetus to think about one's conduct … [and] prompting us to reflect on our conduct etc." (italics added). Here she uses the language of primary motivation - of, as she later describes it, "a force within us that causes us to act accordingly" (189); of "a picture of agency on which agents act from inner pushes or urges or tugs or drives" (191). Now Baron means to repudiate such a picture on Kant's behalf. I think this is misguided, both on Kant's behalf and on her own; I air this opinion at greater length in Section 4.2 below. The points to be made here are, first, that Baron's own description of secondary motives is in fact compatible with such a picture, since presumably the process of fashioning a valued course of longterm conduct for oneself must proceed via moment-to-moment habituation, i.e. by occurrently reminding oneself of that value on at least most of the occasions of "isolated action" that are relevant to it. Otherwise the agent's commitment to acting from duty would not come to much. Second, therefore, Baron's conception of duty as a secondary motive is not only compatible with such a picture but also requires it, since unless there is some identifiable juncture at which "to think about one's conduct, to appraise one's goals, to be conscious of oneself as a self-determining being" actually translates into causal efficacy, it is very hard to see how such reflective mental activity could, in fact, "give one the strength one needs to do what one sees one really should do;" i.e. how it could be anything more than self-indulgent wheel-spinning. However, if these two aspects of duty as a secondary motive are, indeed, not only compatible but necessarily interconnected, then duty as a secondary motive bears the same complex relation to isolated act-tokens on the conscious psychological level that the consistency constraints of literal selfpreservation bear to isolated candidates for rationally intelligible experiences more generally on the pre-conscious metaphysical level. For in both cases, the process of fashioning the relevant behavioral dispositions is additive and cumulative. On the conscious psychological level, the agent deliberately undertakes a program of moral self-improvement that consists in cultivating certain attitudes and dispositions through habituation. Habituation consists in practicing the valued actions - i.e. in instantiating the relevant normative principles in individual act-tokens - on at least most of the occasions on which one is offered the opportunity. Once these principles are firmly embedded as attitudinal and behavioral routines, the agent's conduct over the long term will reflexively reinforce and extend them, cumulatively, with each such acttoken that further instantiates them. Analogously, on the pre-conscious metaphysical level, literal self-preservation requires observation of the consistency constraints from moment to moment, even though the particular © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
