Abstract

We might consider, as if they must remain distinct, two questions: "Which of my desires should I act to satisfy?" and "What should I aim at that will make my life most worthwhile?" Thus construed, the first will appear to postulate an economics of desire-satisfaction, privileging segregated Desire over desirability; the second, postulating the existence of objective reasons and worth, will privilege "genuine" Desirability over desire. ;I argue that desire and desirability are inseparable. Given the emergence of self-consciousness, to the extent that the relationship between desire and desirability can no longer be fully grasped against the background of evolutionarily set value, their further, interdependent development is best understood in terms of their indeterminate, dialogical construction. The moral self-conception of self-conscious beings presupposes no radical capacity to transcend the constraints of contingent desire, nor any concomitant promise of reasoned emancipation predicated on the cognizance of moral necessity. It will follow that ethical theory can provide no account which both explains and justifies a universalist, objective morality. ;I argue, further, that our self-conception is nonetheless necessarily a conception of self-in-relation-to-others. Our understanding of agency and action, at once, is possible only through the sanctioning exchange of justificatory accounts. While prescinding from appeals to the Unconditioned, I adumbrate a version of a universal "internal view"--a view which cannot sensibly be called pre-reflective. Responsibility, accordingly, is seen to require the pragmatic limitation of excusing conditions, the conditioned nature of action notwithstanding. ;To this point, I will have used for illustrative purposes various attempts to classify excuses. I conclude with a more sustained argument against any attempt to categorize excuses and justifications in isolation from one another, tracing the plausibility of such a separation to erroneous convictions exposed in the previous chapters.