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Show Chapter VIII. First-Person Anomaly 330 conceive myself as a fair, generous, and sympathetic individual, and that most of my actions square with this morally inflected self-conception: I am in fact loyal to my friends, actively concerned to promote others' well-being, and so on. However, I also spread unfounded and damaging gossip about individuals I dislike, thereby causing them severe personal and professional distress. This behavior would seem to be a clear instantiation of a motivationally effective principle that is horizontally inconsistent with those governing the rest of my conduct, and so violates the morally inflected selfconception they define. My highest-order disposition to literal selfpreservation may lead me to defend the internal coherence of my selfconception by denying, perhaps sincerely, that I behaved in this way at all; or recall the behavior but deny that it is an instance of spreading unfounded or damaging gossip. Rather, I may rationalize it as merely an instance of indulging confidentially in harmless speculation - thereby denying as well the very real damaging consequences of that behavior, and ultimately my own responsibility for bringing them about. Or I may rationalize my conduct by arguing, say, that everyone gossips without thereby victimizing their subjects, and that no one need worry who has nothing to hide (thus defending the implicit thesis that anyone who is damaged by unfounded gossip must have deserved it). Finally, I may dissociate my behavior from that constellation of motivationally effective principles and concepts I identify as my self. By pleading that I am neurotic and easily threatened by others, and that mobilizing a network of social condemnation against them is a self-defensive reflex over which I have no control, I locate the cause of my behavior outside the scope of my voluntary agency.7 In this case, too, my delinquent behavior is theoretically anomalous relative to a favored theory of who I am at which the cynical or misanthropic might snort. A more inclusive theory that rendered my gossip-mongering fully intelligible might be more informed or cosmopolitan, but not necessarily any more forgiving for that. A diminished inclination to self-deception brings with it a heightened taste for unflinching self-appraisal. These self-defensive mechanisms for resolving internal incoherencies are just as inadequate to integrate first-person affective and conative anomalies in an agent's socially circumscribed or morally inflected self-conception as they were to integrate first-person anomalies of belief; and just as inadequate to integrate third-person anomalies in our theory-laden perspective on the physical world. All put a strain on the self that forces it to engage in yet more elaborate and irrational attempts to preserve its coherence - as, for example, My gloss on dissociation owes much to John Wilson's "Freedom and Compulsion," Mind 67 (1958), 29 - 60; and to Harry Frankfurt's "Identification and Externality," in Amelie O. Rorty, Ed. The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); although I am not in final agreement with much of what they have to say. 7 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
