Identity and conflict

Social Research, Spring, 2007 by Isaac Levi

Such a situation implies not only conflict between X's value commitments but inconsistency in X's full beliefs (Levi, 1986: 7). X's commitment to promise keeping and to feeding X's family presupposes that satisfying both can be implemented. Logically possible scenarios where joint satisfaction is not feasible are ruled out as not serious possibilities. When X recognizes that joint satisfaction is not feasible, X faces an inconsistency in full beliefs from which he or she should retreat. So X must modify his full beliefs.

But that is not all. Once X recognizes that X is confronting a situation where the scope of X's value commitment to promise keeping and the scope of X's value commitment to feeding X's family both apply, X faces another incoherence. The constraints of the two value commitments cannot be jointly satisfied. X should alter X's system of value commitments in order to escape from this form of rational incoherence.

X faces three options for doing so: 1) restrict the scope of the commitment to promise keeping so as not to cover the problematic situation and retain the scope of the commitment to feed X's family, 2) retain the commitment to promise keeping and restrict the scope of the commitment to feed X's family so as not to cover the problematic situation, or 3) restrict the scope of both commitments.

If option 3 is taken, presumably X will retain the constraint from the injunction to keep promises for those cases of choice where there is no conflict with feeding X's family. Similarly, the obligation to feed X's family will be endorsed in those cases where there is no conflict with promise keeping. X will also need to provide a constraint on permissible utility functions to cover the problematic cases where conflict arises. I have suggested elsewhere that X should initially recognize as permissible all utility functions that are permissible according to one or the other initial value commitments. In addition, X should recognize as permissible all potential compromises between any pair of utility functions as represented by the convex hull of the two extended value structures on offer. If this extended value structure is deemed too indeterminate, inquiry aimed at reducing the indeterminacy may be undertaken.

IDENTITY AND SYSTEMS OF VALUE COMMITMENTS

As I have characterized value commitments, agents will generally endorse many distinct value commitments covering different types of decision problems. And just as agents seek to systematize their beliefs about the world with the aid of explanatorily comprehensive theories, so too they seek to organize their value commitments into systems they judge to "make sense." (6)

I have already argued that it is neither necessary nor sufficient to identify with a group to endorse a value commitment or system of value commitments associated with a group. In this respect I advocate "identity neglect." But there may be some stronger sense of identification associated with the organization of a set of value commitments into a system. In this stronger sense, identity neglect may no longer be appropriate.