| OCR Text |
Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 337 intelligibility of our theory-laden perspectives on ourselves, we find a way to explain them away. In such a case, there are many "nobler motives" with which we may flatter ourselves. In dealing dismissively with a salesclerk, for example, we may tell ourselves that we are merely respecting the boundaries of privacy and impersonality between two strangers who wish only to perform a business transaction as quickly and efficiently as possible. Under the "mere false pretence of the Idea" of respect for her privacy, we may arrogate permission to run roughshod over her essential singularity. After all, this is what the telemarketer does to us, when he repeats by rote the same sales pitch to anyone irrational enough to answer the telephone before the answering machine picks up. We can be sure such "nobler motives" are a bit of selfaggrandizing flattery because there is of course no necessary conflict between respecting another person's uniqueness, and respecting her boundaries of privacy. But our ennobling self-conception may relegate this obvious fact to the status of theoretical anomaly. For Kant, what goes wrong in such cases is that we misapply the concept of respect for the impersonality of a transaction to what is in fact a violation of the moral obligation to respect others' singularity. We do this through biased predication, by distorting the scope of the concept of respect for privacy or impersonality. We magnify the properties of the situation that instantiate this concept - for example, making much of the fact that our interaction is with an anonymous salesclerk who surely has no interest in forging a deeply authentic connection with us. And we minimize those properties that fail to do so - for example, that she is elderly, has been on her feet behind a counter all day; probably works without commission for $6.50/hour, and so on. Philosophers may be particularly susceptible to the temptations to rationalize away such first-person anomalies of behavior, because of the intellectual agility we learn as part of our training in reasoning and analysis. We like to play at being Humpty Dumpty, making words mean what we want them to mean, revising those definitions when they no longer serve our purposes, and formulating and reformulating moral principles accordingly. Philosophers may be more nimble than lay people in these precarious intellectual activities, because of their training. But we are hardly alone. Philosophy as a discipline is merely a rational reconstruction of informal theorizing about what goes on in other parts of the self, in addition to what goes on in the world outside it. The use of euphemism and spin is hardly a specifically philosophical vice, and by now it should be clear that rationalization is not different in kind from euphemism or spin. So our training as philosophers does not enable us any more easily to resolve the interior conflicts and anxieties that are expressed in rationalization, whether inflicted on ourselves or on our audience. These anxieties are exacerbated by the violence we do to concepts and principles by © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
