| OCR Text |
Show Chapter IX. "Ought" 374 others is denied. An example would be an Anglo-American who rationalizes her refusal to visit impoverished areas or countries on the grounds that she wishes to avoid reminding their inhabitants by her presence of how deprived they are. This is not genuine innocence, because it is based on studied, deliberate ignorance of a pseudorational sort. A concomitant of disingenuous innocence is often a lack of imagination, moral insight, or sympathy for those who undergo the torments of moral temptation. To acknowledge understanding of these torments would be to acknowledge experience of them, which is anathema to a disingenuous innocent. I would side with Kant, and against Aristotle, in suggesting that someone who lacks this kind of understanding is not capable of genuinely moral conduct. By contrast, there is ignorance of moral corruption, not in general, but as a viable alternative for oneself under particular circumstances: You see the wallet lying open, unclaimed, and stuffed with bills near the cash machine, and it simply does not occur to you to claim it as your own. This is not pristine innocence either, but rather the effect of a deeply internalized moral theory at work in the sense explained in Chapter VIII.6. For what is lacking is not the understanding that people steal things, but rather the interpretation of your own situation as one in which considerations of personal profit take precedence over the deliverances of moral principle. It is, however, possible in rare cases to be both a fully mature and competent adult and a naïf, as we have seen in Chapter VII.4.1. Whereas the pristine innocent is fully invested in the factual truth of her normative moral theory, the naïf is not thus invested at all. Whereas the pristine innocent has the theoretical apparatus necessary to make both positive and negative moral judgments, the naïf does not. The naïf does not thereby avoid experience of wrongdoing, injustice or harm. Nor does the naïf necessarily lack the empathy, sympathy, and modal imagination necessary for compassion toward those who are victimized by them. But because the naïf does not view moral wrongdoing through the lens of a moral theory, nor the world in general through the lens of heavily theory-laden preconceptions, he is not vulnerable to the moral disillusionment we experience upon discovering the fallibility of our moral theories - and therefore to the anxiety and ambivalence against which we then must struggle. For within the realization of K's fallibility, there is of course room for uncertainty as to whether K is therefore without observational support altogether - the attitude of moral corruption; or whether, on any given occasion, it may yield a well-confirmed prediction after all - the attitude of innocence reluctantly lost. The attitude of innocence reluctantly lost is that expressed by the realization that, on the one hand, we are not as we supposed ourselves to be; and on the other, we are not supposed to be merely as we are. The moral "ought" thus expresses ambivalence in our theory-laden perception of the agent to whom we apply it. We acknowledge her moral imperfections, © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
