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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 379 instantiations of it. By recognizing ourselves and acting as members of this ideal community, we create a safe and protected interior moral environment for ourselves that is independent of our actual surroundings and resistant to others' attempts at intimidation. And through the consistency of our actions, we represent this community as an invulnerable force of right conduct to those who would make such attempts. The interior value of this ideal, and of the transpersonally rational integrity we protect by so acting comes to outweigh any actual, threatened disadvantages contingent on such conduct. Unless we thus reinforce our cognitive allegiance to K, the landscape of exterior social reality looks so unbearably harsh, ugly and desolate that danger or death might even seem preferable by comparison. There are many factors that may contribute to or detract from our success in retaining some such cognitive allegiance to our ideal descriptive moral theory, in the face of overwhelming evidence that disconfirms it. One is the extent to which this theory is deeply embedded in a more general explanatory theory of the world. If one's moral theory is embedded in an explanatory metaphysics that invokes the same theoretical constructs to explain other events as it does moral and immoral behavior - for example, God, or rational purpose, or cosmic consciousness, then one cannot abandon the moral part of the theory without threatening the rest of it. If this more general theory is itself deeply entrenched in one's thinking, it may be that no amount of disconfirming evidence will be sufficient to force the abandonment of the theory. One may deploy pseudorational strategies to dispose cognitively of this evidence; or one may modify the theory to accommodate it; or one may position the theory as an object of faith rather than justified true belief. By contrast, if one's moral theory is conjoined with a mechanistic and materialistic theory of the natural world the truth of which is independent of it, the latter may be more vulnerable to evidential attack, and more readily dispensable accordingly. A second factor that affects the dispensability of the moral theory in the face of disconfirming evidence has to do with how thoroughly and how early in one's development the ideal described by the theory has been violated by parents or authoritative others. If, for example, a young child has regularly experienced abuse, witnessed family violence, or had affection and nurture withdrawn by her parents or authoritative others, a genuine personal investment in Theory K may never develop. Under these circumstances, she will have no evidence that K holds true, even within a limited realm, and so no motivation to conform her own behavior to it. Any talk of promisekeeping, helping the needy, and so forth will be quite futile, and the moral "ought" will be little more than a meaningless sound. One may have the disquieting feeling, in the presence of such a "street-wise" individual, of talking nonsense, sounding naïve, and certainly of being completely ineffectual in one's moral exhortations. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
