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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 377 sought, it also desensitizes and demoralizes us - literally - by its frequency. With the resources of global electronic and print media and the glut of information we obtain from them, we now know we are virtually surrounded by such agents. This raises the question of why any actual agent ought to meet this challenge; why, that is, any actual agent should retain any allegiance to K at all. Why ought we ever refrain from doing, when in Rome, as the Romans do? This is a particularly pressing question for Kantian moral philosophers, because unlike Humeans, Kantians cannot justify short-term moral dereliction instrumentally, with reference to its long-term beneficent consequences. Kantian moral philosophers face the same dilemma as the whistle-blower: Given the yawning chasm between an ideal descriptive moral theory such as K and the non-ideal reality of pervasive moral corruption with which we must all make our peace, why ought such an agent ever do the right thing, knowing that this may well lead to punishment, betrayal, danger, or death? Now I have already explored some transpersonal reasons why such an agent might so choose in Chapter VI.8, above - genuine preference, interiority, and motivationally effective intellect foremost among them. But this much merely explains the particular elements of transpersonal rationality that make the whistle-blower tick. What I have not yet done is to rationally justify to us the whistle-blower's transpersonal choice of moral principle over convenience, gratification, profit, or safety. That is, I have not yet made the case that anyone in this non-ideal world ought to be a whistle-blower. A reason for choosing as the whistle-blower does is because, as the whistle-blower would put it, it is the right thing to do. But what does "being the right thing to do" mean? The right thing to do strengthens our cognitive allegiance to a moral theory such as K, by providing us with as many confirmatory instances of it as possible. When we run out of inspiring biographies to read, or arrive reluctantly at Kant's sad conclusion that one must listen to a long, melancholy litany of complaints against humanity: of secret deceit even in the closest friendship, so that a restraint on trust in the mutual disclosures of even the best friends is counted as a general maxim of prudence in interaction (R, Ak. 33; also see G Ak. 407-8 on Kant's doubts about the existence of virtue), our own right conduct may be, in the end, the only source of such instances that remains; for - as the free rider demonstrates - in the end we cannot rely on others, or on any actual community of others, to sustain our own interior moral conviction. By doing the right thing, repeatedly or, if possible, whenever our moral convictions are thus tested, we supply ourselves with multiple, successive demonstrations that K - i.e. the right thing to do - has relevance to actual human beings, and practical application in the non-ideal case, even though we may find few such applications in the third-personal behavior we witness. The more such confirmations of K's explanatory power © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
