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Show Chapter VI. Moral Interiority 286 preponderance of the above three traits: genuine preference, interiority, and motivationally effective intellect. In Chapter IV.8 we saw that an agent's violation of her commitment to resolute choice called forth sanctioning moral emotions - guilt, shame and resentment - directed by herself toward her own moral dereliction; and that violations of intertemporal consistency were sufficient to inflict on herself such sanctions even in a putatively non-moral case like breaking a diet. With the aid of the concepts of interiority and strict impartiality, we can now see that in fact there is no purely nonmoral case and no purely nonmoral action: An agent is always answerable to himself, his memories and his emotions for the intertemporal consistency of every action he performs - for its present consequences in his life; the interior recollections, responses and habits it instills in him; and the expectations and attitudes about the future it implants. The symmetry requirement of strict impartiality that holds between the self and the other holds between the self at one time and the self at another as well. This is the essence of Nagel's and McClennen's - and my - rejection of pure time preference as a principle of rational choice. So in order to act as she does, the whistle-blower must draw not on her previous bonds with others and the support she derived from her interactive relation to them; but rather on her own, constantly evolving bonds with her own, earlier incarnations and the support she derives from her interactive relation to them. These bonds of mutually reinforcing action over time, according to principles that regulate all such act-tokens as they occur, forge a strong and internally consistent psychological foundation of entrenched dispositions of character that fortify her interior moral conviction against the disapproval, rejection and retaliation she experiences at the hands of that external moral community she must now disown. We all like to think we would do the right thing if placed in a situation in which we were forced to choose between morality and self-interest - that is, in which we could do the right thing only at the cost of considerable inconvenience, sacrifice or danger to ourselves. But in fact these situations never present us with choices in the ordinary sense of that word. Rather, they offer us the opportunity to find out which of the guiding concepts and principles we espouse are in fact motivationally effective for us, what our true priorities are, what we are made of, and who we truly are. We are all offered ample opportunity for such self-knowledge on a daily basis; in Chapters VII and VII below, I anatomize the resourceful strategies by which we often evade it. For in fact any agent presented with those same opportunities reacts in a way analogous to that of the whistle-blower, regardless of how he chooses: When the whistle-blower says of herself that she "had no choice," or was "forced or compelled" to act, what she is really saying is that given all of the causally effective elements that combine to constitute her character, acting in character was the only choice she had. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
