Hello again! Here comes my first substantive post, starting in with the concept of a 'true self.' It's possible that some of you will already be familiar with the ideas discussed in this one, but if you get bored with this first post, I hope I can rekindle on your interest with the next one. Anyway, here goes...
A lot of important work on the notion of a true self has been shaped in various ways by Harry Frankfurt's very intriguing example of the unwilling addict. Here is the basic idea:
Suppose that Mark is a heroin addict and has a very strong desire to get another hit of heroin. Now suppose that Mark also has the belief that doing heroin is deeply wrong. As a result, he wishes that he did not have this desire. He hates this aspect of himself and wants nothing more than to get clean and start a very different kind of life.
Mark is experiencing an inner conflict, but many people have the intuition that the two sides of this conflict are not simply on a par. Instead, it seems that Mark's true self is the part calling him to get clean and that if he continues using heroin, he will be betraying his own true self.
This strikes me as a very important fact, which reveals something fundamental about our understanding of the self. But what exactly does it reveal? If we start out with the assumption that the self is basically a collection of mental states, we will be immediately drawn to explain this intuition in terms of facts about the type and content of these states (desires, beliefs, second-order desires, emotions, etc.).
Philosophers who take this approach may then be tempted to spell out the intuition that Mark's true self is calling him to get clean in terms of the fact that his second-order desires go in that direction, or that his beliefs do, or in some other way in terms of the type of mental state that is drawing him in this direction as opposed to the other.
This whole approach seems to me to be mistaken. The thing that makes us regard this aspect of his self as the true self is, I think, completely unrelated to facts about which type of mental state is pulling him in which direction. To see this, consider a different case:
Suppose that Mark is gay and has a very strong desire to be with another man. Now suppose that Mark also has the belief that homosexuality is deeply wrong. As a result, he wishes that he did not have this desire. He hates this aspect of himself and wants nothing more than to fall in love with a woman and start a very different kind of life.
In this latter case, our experimental studies show that most liberals have exactly the opposite sort of intuition. They conclude that Mark's true self lies in precisely the aspect of him that he reflectively rejects. Then they think that if he acts on the aspect of his self that he reflectively endorses, he will be betraying his own true self.
In light of this result and others like it, we are coming to think that the notions of reflective endorsement, second-order desire, etc. just don't have anything to do with people's conception of the true self. Instead, this conception seems to be deeply tied to issues of value. On this hypothesis, the difference between the two cases comes down to something extraordinarily simple. It is that Mark's desire for heroin is bad whereas Mark's desire to be with another man is good.
To really spell out this idea in a broader philosophical framework, we are going to need to switch away from this emphasis on thinking of the agent's various mental states and instead adopt an approach that allows us to see why issues of value might be absolutely central here. But for that, we will have to wait till the next post!
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