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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 295 presumably they are not fully compelling, period. I will end up asking myself, ‘It's obligatory, and that carries some weight; but what other reasons are there for doing it?' (155). Since such principles enter into the constitution of one's interior selfconception, a morally anomalous impulse or desire that violates the agent's moral theory is analogously a threat to its rational integrity. As Kant so clearly saw, desire exerts a gravitational effect on the intellect, pulling it off center and biasing it towards the satisfaction of that desire. Morally anomalous desire has the same effect, but does even greater damage, by not only biasing the intellect toward its satisfaction, but in addition inciting the intellect to fabulate a self-deceptive rationale for doing so. In what follows I refer to an event, object or state of affairs that is anomalous relative to one's theory of oneself or the world as a theoretical anomaly. Theoretical anomaly is a species of conceptual anomaly. I define it further in Section 4, below. The relation between such a desire and the agent's morally inflected selfconception is analogous to the relation between a first-person conceptual anomaly, such as a sudden surge of aggression in an otherwise placid character, and the coherent conscious experience that it disrupts. Just as denial functions to relegate such an impulse to the unconscious in the latter case, similarly it functions to relegate desire to the subconscious in the former. Whether conceptual or theoretical, the anomaly thus denied may continue to affect the agent's intellect, behavior and perspective - without, however, receiving the conscious recognition that would integrate it as rationally intelligible within that perspective or theory respectively. However, we have seen in Chapter V.2.2 above that a rationally coherent self is a necessary condition for even having a desire, so the analogy can never be an equivalence. A conceptual anomaly is a threat to the rational integrity of the self and to the rational intelligibility of an agent's perspective; whereas a merely theoretical anomaly puts pressure primarily on the agent's morally inflected self-conception or theory of the world. How closely or loosely entwined this is with the agent's perspective, hence how closely or loosely theoretical anomaly is with conceptual anomaly more generally is discussed in Section 4 below. So although morally delinquent desire may disrupt that self-conception and call forth the mechanisms of pseudorationality to perform repairs, it does not necessarily undermine the coherence of the self whose desire it is. An agent's morally inflected self-conception can be fully destroyed by her own anomalous and delinquent impulses without necessarily destroying the rational integrity of the self whose self-conception it is. This is one reason why it is not possible to derive any particular normative moral theory directly from the rational criteria of a genuine preference. An agent whose morally inflected self-conception has been destroyed or debased by her own delinquent desires is very dangerous; I discuss this case further in Chapter IX. But this does not entail that she is irrational. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
