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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 285 define her perspective and saturate her character dispositions. These concepts and principles turn the raw, sensory data of her perceptions and reactions into meaningful experiences. These, in turn, reinforce and underscore the causal efficacy of the principled dispositions that motivate and guide her actions. For Socrates, the overriding principles were justice, virtue, self-analysis and the search for wisdom. Other principles cited by whistleblowers include honesty, humility, truth, justice, reason, loyalty to the public, and altruism. The final measure of the motivational efficacy of these principles is in the actualized dispositions to action that instantiate them. In the end no other measure, including verbal allegiance, is important. Now one of the traits of the whistle-blower that most stymies attempts to explain such behavior in Humean terms is his capacity to resist the pressure of his peers to remain silent and conform - to "go along in order to get along." Of course the whistleblower's resistance to the pressure of morally indefensible conformity can be reduced to no more than a particularly interesting instance of sacrificing self-interest in order to act on moral principle. But it is more than that. The whistle-blower's resistance involves not only personal sacrifice and discomfort, but also a willingness to sacrifice the intersubjective interpretation of his moral obligations that receives affirmation and validation from a consensus shared with others, to an interpretation that may be affirmed, validated and shared with no one other than himself. That is, it involves a willingness to come into direct conflict with the actual moral community whose shared practices have in the past given life and physical substance to the moral principles on which he now acts; this is the moral motive that, as we saw in Volume I, Chapter IX.1.4, Anderson's Noncognitivist model of moral justification could not accommodate. The whistle-blower's resistance to social pressure thus involves sacrificing that part of himself that most directly connects him to those others whose actions helped to instill and reinforce the principled dispositions he in this instance upholds. In order to uphold the moral principles his actions embody, he must reject the counsel - and the demands, and the pressure, and the bribes, and the threats - of those in whom he has previously found validation for them; and face the punishing consequences of doing so, in addition to the punishing consequences of blowing the whistle itself. In order to detach himself from the consensus opinion of his surrounding moral community, and so leave behind that part of himself that identified himself as part of it, he must distinguish sharply between the moral conviction that arises solely from his own, rational evaluation of the situation; and that which arises as the result of interpersonal dialogue with and mutual affirmation by others. He must distinguish between these two, and reject his morally supportive relationship to others - to friends, to family, to community, to peers. This is no easy thing to do. What enables the whistle-blower to do this - and so what distinguishes him from the vast majority of his peers - is precisely the possession in © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
