Moral Deliberation and Desire Development: Herman on Alienation

I

In chapter nine of The Practice of Moral Judgment (1996b) and her later article 'Making Room for Character' (1996a), Barbara Herman offers a distinctive and interesting response to a set of concerns involving the idea that Kantian ethics objectionably alienates us from personal relationships and commitments. Broadly speaking, these concerns take one of two general forms: some accounts emphasize the practical marginalization of personal interests and relationships, arguing that the Kantian's open-ended commitment to impartial overriding moral requirements threatens to leave the agent little or no practical room for the sorts of relationships and commitments that we think of as important in (or essential to) a recognizably human life. A related but more formal variant emphasizes the internal perspective of the agent and the structure rather than the scope of moral commitment. On this account, the problem is said to lie in the requirement that we are only to act on reasons justifiable from an impersonal universalizing point of view and the way in which this requirement precludes the kind of partial and personal reasons for action said to be essential to individual agency and a sense of self.¹

Responding to concerns like these, Herman argues that we should think of practical deliberation and the way in which desires are formed and become interests differently: she proposes a deliberative field model of practical deliberation in which interests are normalized against the background of other concerns and a developmental model of desire formation in which desires evolve in the context of a deliberative field, becoming developed incentives and interests that directly internalize other norms. The result is a complex integrated value model² meant to reconcile the moral and the personal in a distinctive way: one that assigns moral value to personal interests but also preserves a robust sense of partial and direct commitment to these interests in a way that is intended to be responsive to an imagined critic's demand for more than a mere permission to act from motives of connection.³

I argue here that while Herman's model offers us an attractive and plausible account of practical deliberation and desire formation, it cannot ultimately meet the critic's concerns. I claim that the deliberative field model does not change the basic structure of moral deliberation troubling to the critic and that the significant changes here are found specifically in organic elements in the account of desire formation and the integrated value model these elements imply. I then argue that thinking of desires as developing in the reason-responsive manner she envisages will not, itself, satisfy the critic either in the sense of offering us an affirmative moral endorsement of personal relationships or in the more limited sense of a structural accommodation of these interests. Instead, I argue that the Kantian must be able to defend these interests on specifically moral grounds, that they can and should do so on the basis of indirect arguments, and that these arguments need not be seen as objectionably alienating.

II

Herman initially discusses a cluster of issues associated with the charge of alienation in Chapter 2 of The Practice of Moral Judgment. Adopting what has become a fairly common strategy in response, she suggests here that we can think of moral commitment as ordinarily operating in the background in a way that allows appropriately personal commitments. As long as it is true that the motive of duty functions in the agent's willing in a limiting condition role constraining and informing her choices, the claim is that the agent can routinely defer to other motives and act directly from them and that in doing so her will is still good. So, for example, the duty of beneficence may require me to render assistance to people, including my friends, but I will also typically want to help friends and have reason to think that they would prefer being helped personally by me (in a way that directly acknowledges our mutual affection). In these circumstances it is suggested that there is no necessity that I act directly from...