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Show Chapter IX. "Ought" 364 rather than conforming to it: Whereas before, your friends thought of you as rather priggish, you find that you have gained in popularity among them, as well as increasing the intimacy of your friendship with each, by relaying and gossiping at length about this juicy tidbit. Simultaneously, the authority of consensus is undermined, when you observe that your internal feelings of guilt or defilement are not buttressed by any rejecting or ostracizing behavior toward you on the part of your community; and that your peer group not only condones but actively prefers certain entertaining derelictions over strict adherence to the moral ideal. You thereby discover that retaining membership in the group is not only not synonymous with strict adherence, but rather requires what we might call "consensual deviation," i.e. deviation from the moral ideal that involves the complicity of the very community that ostensibly advocates it. This attitude of complicity as a value defines and fashions the social environment against which the whistle-blower struggles. Finally, and most complexly, the authority of fact is undermined, when you acknowledge that you have, indeed, betrayed this moral ideal; that you are yourself not one of the "nice people" who always keep their promises. However, as we saw in Chapter VIII.4, it takes most adults a long time to reach this realization, and many of us never do. Despite the evidence of our own behavior, we pseudorationally continue to suppose ourselves to be the type of individual described by the ideal moral theory. The reason for this cognitive recalcitrance is the greater interior disintegrity created by firstperson than by third-person moral anomaly. It is correspondingly easier for us to distinguish between our beliefs about others and their actual behavior, than to distinguish between our beliefs about ourselves and our own actual behavior. For another to violate our moral expectations invites at best our condemnation; at worst our rejection, punishment, or ostracism of that person. This response will be of great or little moment to the other, depending on his personal investment in our opinion of him. But a person who does not in general think of himself as a good, kind, generous, trustworthy, generally virtuous individual is susceptible, if he is socialized in the ordinary way, to the continual and severe reproaches of conscience, whether or not he heeds them. If he has internalized the ideal descriptive moral theory in the first place, then to believe sincerely of himself that he generally fails to conform to it is to believe sincerely of himself that he is bad, mean, stingy, untrustworthy, and vicious. This is to sacrifice the basis of moral self-respect. It is thereby to live with the anticipation that all the punitive sanctions of the authority of fact, consensus and reward just described will be inflicted on him - and this, of course, is psychologically to inflict them on himself. Of course each of us are aware of our failures to live up to a shared social ideal in some respects; for instance, by not being popular, athletic, smart or © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
