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Show Chapter VI. Moral Interiority 278 of a forward-looking motive. There are other examples of backward-looking affectively motivating states. Free-floating anxiety, consequent on my perceived social incompetence, causes me to roll my napkin into little balls at dinner. Irritation at my government's obtuseness causes me to bang the plates and cutlery while setting the table. Fear, consequent on my awareness that I could be hauled into court by the Internal Revenue Service for income-tax evasion, causes me to pay my taxes. Similarly, feelings of respect for the moral imperative to aid imperiled friends first (other things equal), consequent on my awareness of Ellsworth as an imperiled friend, causes me to rescue Ellsworth first. An intentional object, i.e. a friend's peril and my prima facie obligation to aid him, causes a backward-looking affectively motivating state, i.e. respect, which in turn causes a purposeful action, i.e. my rescuing Ellsworth first. I feel respect for imperatives thus derived from my moral theory, because - as I argued in Chapter V.5.1 - I feel the force of logic, and also the immediacy of the application of this theory to our situation. My moral theory governs my understanding of the events I perceive - i.e. that Ellsworth is imperiled and that I must rescue him right away; and it motivates my responses to them - i.e. my direct and unambivalent attempt to rescue him. But my moral theory would neither inform my perception of this emergency situation nor precipitate my rescue of Ellsworth, if it furnished no guidance for the treatment of friends, nor for rendering aid to the imperiled. And of course no one would be tempted to take seriously a moral theory as impoverished as that. Only a theory capable of guiding and making sense of moral experience in practice can elicit our respect - or, for that matter, our attention. However, I could not identify Ellsworth as an imperiled friend relative to my respected moral theory, were it not for my prior, unmediated affection and concern for him. Anti-Rationalists tend to speak as though to have an overriding personal investment in an impartial moral theory is not only to suppose that moral principles apply to all human agents (true), but also to be motivated primarily by concern to conform to the imperatives of this theory to enter into personal relationships in the first place (false). Thus Bernard Williams claims that for the Kantian, "personal relations at least presuppose moral relations. … [T]hey are applications to this case of relations which the lover, qua moral person, more generally enters into."13 Similarly, Michael Stocker argues about Utilitarianism as follows: Suppose you embody this Utilitarian reason as your motive in your actions and thoughts toward someone. Whatever your relation to that person, it is necessarily not love (nor is it friendship, affection, fellow feeling, or community). The person you supposedly love engages your Bernard Williams, "Person, Character and Morality," in Moral Luck (New York: Cambridge, 1981). 13 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
