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Show Chapter VIII. First-Person Anomaly 332 believe, rather, that being a sensitive or virtuous individual, or being interesting, or politically committed, is more important than anything else. And then one will feel impelled, under attack, to defend one's behavior at all costs in these terms, even in the face of glaring inconsistencies, and regardless of the psychological discomfort it causes one to do so. One will be disposed to deny, dissociate, or rationalize any evidence that undermines this defense. Of course this self-deceptive response itself will strongly indicate that those values did not, in fact, have primacy in one's hierarchy after all. For in this case, the defense of one's own behavior requires the suppression or distortion of one's values in the service of pseudorationality, and thus sacrifices them for the appearance of rationality. But it is precisely the appearance of rationality that the self-deceiver is, on my thesis, most centrally disposed to preserve. Any such principles that are not vertically and horizontally consistent with the principles of theoretical rationality will be sacrificed similarly, in order to preserve the appearance of rationality against the reality of the self's interior disintegrity. This is the point at which the inadequacy of the utility-maximizing model of rationality by itself becomes very clear: Enormous sacrifices in all of the nonvacuous indices of utility - time, money, energy, reputation, human resources, credibility - may be sacrificed in order to maintain the illusion of rational coherence. One (but far from the only) case study in the public sector would be the dedicated corporate and employee behavior of the Philip Morris tobacco company in the 1990s.8 Thus do we resolve in practice the problem of moral paralysis raised in Volume I, Chapter VIII.2.2. In fact, we are seldom torn by conflicting dispositions of the self, or inhibited from acting by uncertainty about our moral rectitude. More frequently, self-deception simultaneously resolves the conflict and ensures our moral rectitude by appealing to some conceptualization of our actions that succeeds in preserving their coherence with the rest of our behavior, and thereby permits us to keep peace with our consciences. It is only to the extent that we fail recognizably to preserve coherence that we are led, by our highest-order disposition to literal selfpreservation, to change our ways. 3. Third-Person Moral Anomaly and an Origin of Evil The above examples describe situations in which an agent's own unethical behavior is theoretically anomalous relative to his morally inflected Two well-researched anatomies of this exercise in rational unintelligibility are Philip J. Hilts, Smokescreen: The Truth Behind the Tobacco Industry Cover-up (New York: AddisonWesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1996) and Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). 8 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
