Adrian Piper - Contributions in Philosophy

Contributions in Philosophy

Adrian Piper taught philosophy at Georgetown, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, UCSD, and Wellesley College. Following in the steps of trailblazing pioneer Dr. Joyce Mitchell Cook, in 1987 she became the first tenured African American woman professor in the field of philosophy. For her refusal to return to the United States while listed as a Suspicious Traveler on the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s Watch List, Wellesley forcibly terminated her tenured full professorship in philosophy in 2008. Her principal philosophical publications are in metaethics, Kant, and the history of ethics.

"Buffeted and bruised by the currents of desire and longing for once to ride the wave, we may cast about for some buoyant device from which to chart a rational course; and, finding none, ask ourselves these questions:
Do we at least have the capacity ever to do anything beyond what is comfortable, convenient, profitable, or gratifying?
Can our conscious explanations for what we do ever be anything more than opportunistic ex post facto rationalizations for satisfying these familiar egocentric desires?
If so, are we capable of distinguishing in ourselves those moments when we are in fact heeding the requirements of rationality, from those when we are merely rationalizing the temptations of opportunity?
I am cautiously optimistic about the existence of a buoyant device – namely reason itself – that offers encouraging answers to all three questions. Without hard-wired, principled rational dispositions – to consistency, coherence, impartiality, impersonality, intellectual discrimination, foresight, deliberation, self-reflection, and self-control – that enable us to transcend the overwhelming attractions of comfort, convenience, profit, gratification – and self-deception, we would be incapable of acting even on these lesser motives. Or so I argue in this project."

-- Opening passage from Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Chapter I. General Introduction to the Project: The Enterprise of Socratic Metaethics

Her two-volume study in Kantian metaethics, Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception and Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception, was accepted for publication by Cambridge University Press in 2008 and has been available since at her website as an open access e-book. This study critically surveys the major moral theories of the late 20th century, develops a Kantian metaethical theory anchored in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and integrates standard decision theory into classical predicate logic.

Rationality and the Structure of the Self was the culmination of 34 years of work, parts of which were previously published in article form. One early article, "Two Conceptions of the Self" (1985) introduced Piper’s distinction between the Humean and the Kantian conceptions of the self, motivation and rationality. In Rationality and the Structure of the Self, she argues that the second half of the 20th century saw the development in Anglo-American analytic philosophy of a battle for supremacy between these two competing conceptions in ethics. Piper defines the Humean conception as consisting in the belief-desire model of motivation plus the utility-maximizing model of rationality; and the Kantian conception as modeling both motivation and rationality on the canons of deductive and inductive logic. The Kantian conception of the self thereby accords priority to freedom, autonomy and moral obligation over the satisfaction of desire and the maximization of utility. Piper claims that in this competition, both combatants have been handicapped by their own assumptions. In Rationality and the Structure of the Self she surveyed this historical development and proposes solutions to several of the still-unresolved problems it engendered.

Piper examined the Humean conception of the self in depth in Volume I: The Humean Conception. There she acknowledges the impressive historical pedigree of this conception in Hobbes, Hume, Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick; and analyzes the foundations it provides to contemporary utilitarianism, virtue theory and social contract theory in philosophy. Piper also traces the influence of the Humean conception in economics, psychology, and political theory because of its technical formalization in decision theory and neoclassical economics by Ramsey, Savage, von Neumann & Morgenstern, Allais, and others. She argues that its wide sphere of influence in the social sciences has led late-20th century moral philosophers to presuppose the Humean conception as a given in constructing foundations for their normative moral theories.

"This analysis also implies that we perceive the external world through the lens of our wants, i.e. as a source of respects in which we are lacking, wanting, or insufficient. All external states of affairs are implicitly evaluated and graded with regard to their suitability as instruments, resources, or approximations of objects of desire, such that the higher the desire-satisfaction rating of a particular state of affairs, the greater its perceptual salience for the subject. This is the essence of egocentrism. Since every state of affairs is assessed according to this criterion, no state of affairs is neutral with respect to it. Different desires may give different colorations and ratings to the same state of affairs at different times, depending on whether it is perceived as an opportunity or a setback relative to one's desires at that time. To the extent that a state of affairs is gradable neither as opportunity nor as setback, neither as attraction nor aversion, it effectively fails to exist for the Humean self. A state of affairs that bears no relation to the defining evaluative function of the self, i.e. desire, bears no relation to an egocentric self at all."

-- Excerpt from Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception, Chapter II. The Belief-Desire Model of Motivation

However, she contends, close analysis of both the belief-desire model of motivation and also the utility-maximizing model of rationality, in both informal and axiomatized versions, reveals that all such formulations are not only either vacuous or internally inconsistent. They also conceal intensional presuppositions that make it impossible to state in what, exactly, the irrationality of a cycle ordering consists; and therefore rob decision theory’s technical apparatus of a viable and formally valid consistency criterion.

Piper criticizes Humean moral philosophers for having displaced these problems onto a straw man: the consequentialist/deontologist debate, rather than confronting them head-on. Consequently, Piper argues, Humean moral philosophers as varied as Rawls, Nagel, Brandt, Gewirth, Baier, Williams, Frankfurt, Gibbard, Lewis, Goldman, Anderson, Anscombe and others have appropriated the Humean conception of the self for foundational purposes. Yet they have been at the same time unsuccessful in their attempts to solve the three insoluble metaethical problems that the Humean conception engenders: of moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification. Volume I of Rationality and the Structure of the Self concludes that the Humean conception of the self can be rescued only by embedding it as a special case in a more comprehensive Kantian conception that it implicitly presupposes.

However, Piper also views many Kantian moral philosophers as having also tied their own hands in attempting to formulate an alternative to the Humean conception, by restricting their attention to Kant’s moral philosophy alone. In two earlier articles on Kant-exegesis, "Kant on the Objectivity of the Moral Law" (1994) and "Kant’s Intelligible Standpoint on Action" (2000), she contended that Kant’s own moral theory cannot be properly interpreted without reference to the historically prior Critique of Pure Reason, in which all of the significant technical terms that inform the Groundwork and second Critique are introduced. She suggests that ignoring Kant’s first Critique makes it impossible for contemporary Kantian moral theory to outcompete the Humean conception’s highly refined and systematized formalization of action theory, which proves its success through practical application in the social sciences.

With Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception, Piper aimed to remedy these oversights. She finds in Kant’s first Critique inspiration for proposed alternative models of motivation, rationality, and the self that are constructed on the relatively firm foundation of classical predicate logic – the same foundation on which Kant’s own conception of reason relied. She proposes a way to integrate standard decision-theoretic axiomatizations into this foundation without loss of predictive power, by (1) rendering explicitly the intensionality of preference orderings using classical predicate logic; and (2) extending the Boolean connectives and quantificational notation of that logic to subsentential constituents. In addition, she argues that integrating the Humean belief-desire model of motivation into a Kantian model of reason as motivation implies solutions to the problems of moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification that the Humean conception engendered.

"With memory, imagination and intellection flourishes the ability to dwell on slights, nurse resentments, and exaggerate injuries – of which there are, of necessity, many, since the succession of these are what necessitate self-control in the first place. With these abilities also flourish the abilities to recall and reflect on the past, to derive meaning, illumination and satisfaction from it; to extend the lessons and values learned from it into principles and theories that guide present action and future planning; and to imagine counterfactual alternatives to actual states of affairs. In the flowering of these abilities consists the development and growth of transpersonal rationality. They extend the agent’s awareness past the boundaries of the present moment and situation, past the boundaries of the body and the self, past their felt needs and drives, past the boundaries of an individual human lifespan, and indeed far past the boundaries of the physical world. The achievement of interiority releases individual awareness from the funnel vision of immediate drives and impulses into an unbounded universe of theory-laden modality, in which necessities, facts, and possibilities at all levels of abstraction compete for the agent’s interest. Interiority at this level is an authentic expression of transpersonal rationality."

-- Excerpt from Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception, Chapter V. How Reason Causes Action

In this second volume, Piper develops a conception of human agency, based on a foundation of logical consistency as literal self-preservation. She proposes two criteria of consistency for the set of concepts that rationally structure the self in the ideal case: horizontal consistency of cognitively operative concepts with one another, which applies the quantified law of non-contradiction to subsentential constituents; and vertical consistency of lower-order concepts with higher-order ones, which applies the quantified law of modus ponens to the inferential relationship among such constituents. Final ends that satisfy these two criteria are rational; substantive moral theories that satisfy them are rationally justified; and actions that are guided by them include those that are morally motivated.

Piper argues that human beings are naturally disposed to preserve at least the appearance of such consistency, both in their cognitions and in their actions, even when the practical reality falls short. This practical shortcoming she refers to as pseudorationality. She argues that this overriding disposition explains how reason can be motivationally effective in the absence of desire, and why it so rarely is in practice. Piper applies this conception of the self and agency, first, to both analyze and also justify the practice of whistle blowing; and second, to an analysis of xenophobia that implies both its inevitability and also its susceptibility to rational reform. In an early article, "Moral Theory and Moral Alienation" (1987), Piper concluded that the phenomenon of moral alienation that has received so much attention in the metaethical literature is a natural by-product of possessing and exercising our cognitive and rational capacities. She concludes Volume II of Rationality and the Structure of the Self with the further argument that without so-called moral alienation, we would be unable to grasp meaning, forge relationships with others, or act transpersonally in the service of selfless or disinterested moral principles.