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Show Chapter VI. Moral Interiority 274 or lacks vision; or, alternately, that he is too invasive, self-abnegating, or meddlesome to behave reliably as a moral agent. We come to see that what distinguishes compassion from vicarious possession and self-absorption is the more general requirement of a strictly impartial moral theory, that we treat another's moral personhood with no more or less than the care and respect we accord our own - i.e. with the care and respect due a moral person impartially considered. 7. Moral Motivation and Moral Alienation Revisited But strictly impartial moral theory regulates our imaginative responses in a second respect, by providing the impartial principles that motivate and guide moral conduct. We have seen in Volume I, Chapters VI and VIII that on the Humean conception of the self, any account of moral motivation to act on impartial principles must either presuppose a desire to act on those principles, in which case my compassionate response to another's suffering is "morally alienated," or else it can issue only from the impersonal point of view of those principles themselves. But on the Kantian conception of the self defended in this volume, the self just is that coherent psychological entity which is constituted and rationally structured by the concepts and principles - i.e. the functions (to use Kant's term) by which lower-order concepts and particulars are subsumed under higher-order concepts - that define its perspective at a given moment. In Chapter V above we also have seen how such rational principles can provide both necessary and sufficient conditions of action. Moral principles that satisfy the requirements of horizontal and vertical consistency over time are rationally intelligible to the agent who holds them, and so are a species of rational principle. Hence on this conception, moral conduct in the ideal case is motivated directly and without mediation by those rational, strictly impartial, specifically moral principles that are partly and necessarily constitutive of the agent's own point of view. 7.1. Motive versus Purpose Applying these conclusions specifically now to the case of morally motivated conduct, reconsider Blum's question as to our moral obligations toward a friend in need. Suppose the case to be that ceteris paribus est situation in which the bonds and obligations of friendship are the tie-breaker, such that my symmetrical and strict impartial moral theory condones my rescuing my best friend Ellsworth from drowning first, and before the stranger nearest to me on the sinking ship that holds us all. Let us heighten the Kantian cast of this example by describing it as a case of my being motivated to rescue Ellsworth first, by respect for a strictly impartial moral imperative, derived from that part of my moral theory which assigns me special obligations to friends, to aid friends first, other things equal, when rendering aid to the imperiled. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
