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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 455 discriminators are adept at the tactics of pseudorationality because they have so much self-esteem to lose by modifying their beliefs. But we must not be taken in. For above all, higher-order political discriminators need to understand that no one is fooled by their tactics. With the aid of this understanding, they may someday learn to stop fooling themselves. 5. Corrigibility and Vertical Consistency How might higher-order political discriminators come to such an understanding? Are they even capable of achieving self-awareness of the pseudorational tactics that buttress their political discrimination, and the deep-seated xenophobia that fuels it? Recall the Kantian thesis on which Chapter II.4 was based, that if a perception fails to conform to the categories of thought that unify and structure the self, it cannot be experienced by that self at all. Applying this general thesis in Chapter VIII, I argued that if we cannot make sense of the data of third-person moral anomaly in terms of the familiar concepts that structure our experience, we cannot register it as one of them. I also distinguished, in Section 2 above, between the innate idea of personhood as a hard-wired - or, in Kant's terminology, transcendental - concept; and our empirical, contextually determined conception of people. And in Section 3.1 above, I argued that sometimes, our empirical conceptions of other people are so limited that if an individual is unfamiliar enough, we may be incapable of discerning her personhood through the theoretically anomalous and threatening manifestations of her empirical personality. This suggests two ways in which the cognitive failures that underlie higher-order political discrimination might function: (A) A higher-order political discriminator might regard someone as fully a person if and only if she also recognizes him as falling within her familiar conception of people; or (B) She might recognize him as a person even if he violates her limited and familiar conception of people. (A) identifies the dogmatist described in Chapter VII.4.4, who conceives her experiences as hers if and only if she conceives them as instantiating her favored theory - in this case, her favored theory about people in general. If (A) describes my cognitive failings, then an anomalous other who violates my limited conception of people thereby violates my transcendental conception of personhood as well. I am then strongly disposed to regard such a being as a thing, or as an animal, or as subhuman or unnatural or unholy, or in any of the other similar ways by which we demonize others in order to rationalize our mistreatment of them. On the proposed Kantian conception, this cognitive disposition has a deep cause. We have already seen in Chapter II.4 that the concept of personhood is at best an instantiation of the transcendental © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
