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Show Chapter VI. Moral Interiority 284 whistle-blower knows going in that she will not chicken out. This is what it means when a whistle-blower says that she could not have lived with herself, had she not taken the action she did. In this comment she expresses her awareness that she is a consistent self that persists through time; that she must at each moment carry forward the implications and consequences of choices she has made in the past; and that she must now choose in such a way as to be able to justify that choice to the self she will later become as the result of them. My psychology of choice describes this awareness; McClennen's psychology of choice describes the overriding value the agent consciously ascribes to it. This is the awareness Socrates expresses when he says, Wherever a man's station is, … there it is his duty to remain and face the danger … it would be very strange conduct on my part if I were to desert my station now … when the god has commanded me … to spend my life in searching for wisdom, and in examining myself and others. To say that an agent places an overriding value on consistency of choice through time, i.e. on acting on her genuine preferences, is to say that she is committed to resolute choice as a principle that regulates the choices she makes at each moment in time. Second, therefore, the whistle-blower has a highly developed interiority. Feelings of fear, greed, or self-seeking are controlled, suppressed, and ultimately outweighed by the vividness and intensity of her perception of the injustice; by that of her symmetrical modal imagination of the harm to others this injustice does; by the force of the moral emotions she experiences in response; and by the force of the impartial, normative moral or religious concepts and principles that saturate her perceptions, precipitate and systematize her responses, and chart the particular course her intertemporally consistent choices take. These are the causal factors that decisively effect the whistle-blower's action. Her action is a response to these gripping interior cognitive states and events - not to any desire to maximize her utility or impulse to cave in to external pressure. This is the response that Socrates defends as an overriding value when he says, My friend, if you think that a man of any worth at all ought to reckon the chances of life and death when he acts, or that he ought to think of anything but whether he is acting justly or unjustly, and as a good or a bad man would act, you are mistaken. In this passage Socrates not only expresses his overriding commitment to the demands of his own interiority in acting as he has; but argues that this priority - of the interior demands of conscience and principle over external threats or inducements - should be overriding for "a man [or woman] of any worth at all." Third, therefore, the whistle-blower has a motivationally effective intellect that marshals and organizes her perceptions, modal images, and emotions under the normative moral or religious concepts and principles that © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
