Comments welcome: Katarzyna.Paprzycka@usm.edu

Katarzyna Paprzycka

According to a psychologists’ report,¹ small children when presented with a picture of a child looking under a bed, under which a cat is hiding, offer simple belief-desire explanations of the variety "the child wants to play with the cat," "the child thinks the cat is under the bed" and so on. There would be nothing controversial (and so perhaps interesting) in these reports were it not for what they are taken to show. They are taken to confirm the view that the very key to understanding human action lies in belief-desire explanations, which we quite skillfully employ since only four or five years old.

In this paper, I shall argue that while belief-desire explanations (and intentional explanations more generally) are important, their importance has been misconceived. Their primary function is not explanatory for that function is just as well (if occasionally not better) fulfilled by explanations that instead of appealing to the agent’s desires appeal to others’ desires, wishes, commands, etc. Rather, the primary function of intentional explanations is normative – they play a crucial role in shaping us as persons, as individuals, acting on our own reasons.

I begin (section 1) by introducing the distinction between explanatory individualists who insist that an action must be explained by some desire of the agent and explanatory nonindividualists who deny this claim. In section 2, I consider and undermine some reasons and arguments that may appear to favor explanatory individualism. Section 3 introduces the hypothesis that our folk psychology operates at two levels. The nonindividualist position is the correct position to hold at the explanatory level. The individualist position, on the other hand, is generally accepted at the normative level.

1. Explanatory Individualism vs. Explanatory Nonindividualism

Let us return to the children looking at the picture of a cat under a bed and a child looking under the bed. Let us ponder what explanations the children would give if presented with a slightly different picture. As before, let the picture depict a cat under a bed, a child kneeling at the bed’s side, looking under it; but now, let us add a young woman to the picture, standing on the side, looking at the child. The above explanations are still plausible, but interesting new ones can be added: "the mother told the child to look under the bed," or "the mother asked the child where the cat is."² Indeed, it would be extraordinary if none of the children offered explanations of this sort. And yet it should be evident that the additional explanations are not belief-desire explanations, not on their faces at any rate. If the explanation why the child is looking under the bed in terms of his mother having told him to do so, appeals to a desire at all, then it is the mother’s not the child’s desire.

In fact, the thought that our folk psychology invokes others’ desires, wishes, commands, requests, etc. as potentially explanatory of an agent’s actions should strike us as very natural. When one is asked for salt at dinner, one responds to the request by passing the salt – one acts on another person’s wish. When one is a part of a highly trained rescue team and is ordered to jump into water, one does so at a moment’s notice – one responds to an order. For many of us, there used to be a time when our mothers’ call for dinner resulted in our coming to dinner – whether we wanted to or not. And many of us have experienced the power of other people’s desires (in particular charismatic or powerful people’s desires) when complying with them – frequently despite ourselves. A powerful illustration of the latter phenomenon can be found in Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience.³

These phenomena are quite natural. They are of philosophical interest in part because there are at least two ways of understanding them. One might insist that all of these ways of understanding the agent’s action are enthymematic: they fail to register the agent’s desire (pro-attitude)⁴ that is (and must be) operating behind the scenes, as it were. This is the position of explanatory individualism, according to which an explanation of a ’s action must appeal to some desire of a . But one might take the phenomena for what they appear to be and accept the fact that it is part and parcel of our folk psychological ways of viewing the world that one person’s action can be explained in terms of another’s desire. This is the position of explanatory nonindividualism, according to which it is possible for an explanation of a ’s action to appeal to a desire of another person b without appealing to any desire of a . According to explanatory individualism we always ultimately act on our own desires. According to explanatory nonindividualism, we sometimes act on our own desires but sometimes on the desires of others.

Although there are a few explanatory nonindividualists,⁵ the position is generally either not considered or dismissed as untenable. I will confront some of the reasons for this assessment in the next section. At present, it will be well to clarify it a little further. Note first that to allow someone else’s desire to explain the agent’s action is not tantamount to allowing everyone’s desires to play the same role. If I admit that I once did something because my mother thought it the right course of action for me, this need not mean that I would have done it if my mother-in-law thought it the right course of action for me. There might be particular persons who have more influence on the agent than others, there might be particular situations in which the agent is under the influence of particular persons. But beliefs and desires also do not function out of contexts, they are highly defeasible. Simply because a tells b to do something does not mean that b will do it, just as simply because b desires to do something does not mean that b will do it. b might not do what a told b to do, perhaps because g asked b not to do it, or perhaps because b hates doing it, or perhaps because b hates doing what a tells him to do. And quite similarly, b might not do what b desires to do, perhaps because b desires not to do it even more, or perhaps because a forbade b to do it, or perhaps because a told b never to follow this desire of his.

2. Why is Explanatory Individualism so Prominent?

Despite the fact that explanatory nonindividualism is a natural position for us to hold, the reign of explanatory individualism remains almost undisputed among philosophers. The reasons for this are manifold. Although I cannot do justice to all of them,⁶ the following can be taken to be representative of a significant portion of individualist motivations.

Cartesianism. One prominent source of motivations arises from the meta-philosophical picture prominent since Descartes. It is in part since Descartes that we find it natural to interpret the question "What moves the agent to act?" as the narrower "What (within the agent) moves the agent to act?".⁷

While this methodological restriction is accepted widely (it underlies rational choice theories, for example), it is not clear that there is any decisive consideration that forces it. After all, we are social animals embedded in interactions with others. It is true that to some extent we grow to be independent individuals who can evaluate the world (including the social world) from their own point of view. But we only develop into beings that approximate such an ideal from complete dependence on others. As Annette Baier pointedly remarks, "My first concept of myself is as the referent of ‘you’, spoken by someone whom I will address as ‘you’."⁸ It might therefore seem quite appropriate to investigate human agency not in abstraction from but precisely in full recognition of the social embeddedness of human beings, in particular in full recognition of their dependence on other human beings.

Another point is worth mentioning in this connection. There is a way of interpreting folk psychology as providing us with the description of the kinds of gears that operate within our heads, and so as being at least candidates for reduction or replacement by the developments in neuroscience.⁹ Daniel Dennett describes this as a "subpersonal" interpretation of folk psychology.¹⁰ On such a reading, it might indeed appear that explanatory nonindividualism is unintelligible. Another person’s desire cannot be understood as a kind of gear that be found in the agent’s head. Needless to say, the debate between explanatory individualism and nonindividualism is meant to occur only at a personal level. The truth of explanatory nonindividualism would thus be prima facie quite compatible with any of the positions on what occurs at the subpersonal level within the heads of the actors (whether taking inspiration from intentional psychology á la Fodor or from neuroscience á la Churchlands).

Action at a distance. None of this will help alleviate the impression that acting on another’s desire would involve a kind of action at a distance. How could another person’s desire move one to do anything unless it is mediated by the agent? Recall, however, that the nonindividualist is not committed to there being no mediation. He insists only that it is possible for there to be no mediation by the agent’s desires. But this is quite compatible with the action being mediated by the agent’s beliefs. So, one might insist that another person’s desire is going to explain the agent’s action only if the agent believes that the other desires it of him. It will only make sense to explain that a child went to the store because his mother wanted him to if the child believed that the mother wanted him to go.¹¹

It is also important to emphasize that the nonindividualist does not hold that anyone’s desire can move everybody else to act. To the contrary, the nonindividualist position is highly context-bound. Only in certain contexts (usually of close interpersonal interaction) will one person’s wanting another to do something have the power to actually cause her to do so.

Others’ desires are idle. The thought that the agent’s beliefs are necessary mediators may lead to invite the following objection. One may argue not so much (at least not directly) that there must be some desire on the part of the agent but rather that it cannot be the other person’s desire that does the explaining. Consider two cases. In one case, a child goes to the store because his mother wants him to. The nonindividualist will insist that it is possible to understand the case as involving at least three explanatory elements: (a) the mother’s desire for the child to go to the store, (b) the child’s belief that his mother desires him to go and (c) the absence (or at least inefficacy) of the child’s desire to go to the store (under some description). The individualist will then suggest another analogous case that is lacking (a). Suppose that the situation is analogous except that the child believes that his mother desires him to go to the store while she does not in fact do so. (One can imagine the mother substituted by a robot, etc.) In such a situation, it seems plausible to think that the child will act in exactly the same way. The mother’s desire is not necessary to explain his action. In the original case, then, whatever it is that explains the child’s action it is not the mother’s desire, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.¹²

It is not exactly clear how the individualist conclusion is to follow. Note first that the nonindividualist can embrace the claim that the mother’s desire is not necessary to explain the child’s action. But the nonindividualist need only be construed as claiming that it is efficacious as a matter of fact not that it is somehow necessary. (Just because the same event can be brought about by different causes does not undercut the causal efficacy of either of the causes.)

Presumably, however, the individualist means something stronger than this. It is not just that the efficacy of one (alleged) cause is to be undermined by the possibility of there being another. Rather the point is that one of the causes (the belief) screens off the other (the desire). Had the desire not been present, the belief would still suffice to bring about the action. Once again, however, this conclusion is not inescapable. Consider the following example from Lynne Rudder Baker.¹³ Suppose that a brick falls on John’s foot causing him to cry out in pain. Baker points out that there is an intermediate cause of his crying out in pain, a certain state of the nervous system S. It would appear that S "screens off" the brick falling on John’s foot. If the brick did not fall on John’s foot but his nervous system were in S, John would still cry out in pain. Yet we want to resist the thought that when the brick actually falls on John’s foot, it is not the brick falling on his foot but rather the state of his nervous system S that causes him to cry out in pain. Rather, what we ought to say is that the brick’s falling causes John to cry out in pain via (causing) a certain state of his nervous system. Likewise then we should say about the case envisaged by the individualist that the mother’s desire causes the child to act via (causing) him to acquire an appropriate belief.

Flexibility of Intentional Psychology. Even if nonindividualism were not deemed to be incoherent on the above grounds, it seems to be an extremely implausible position. After all, as the psychologists’ experiments show, we learn to apply intentional psychological categories very early. As a result, it is exceedingly easy for us always to find some desire that could explain the action. Moreover, in cases where one agent acts on another’s desire, it is after all possible for the agent to have not so much the desire to perform an action per se but rather the desire to satisfy another person’s desire for him to perform the action. Even if the child does not want to go to the grocer’s he may want to oblige his mother.

I will say more about this feature of intentional psychology in a moment. For now, let me note that the mere fact that it is always possible to concoct some pro-attitude (however meek) on the part of the agent does not yet vindicate explanatory individualism. There is a difference between the agent having a reason to act and the agent acting for that reason.¹⁴ Just because we can always find some desire that could explain (rationalize) the action does not mean that we can always find some desire that actually does explain the agent’s action. An argument would be needed to establish the stronger explanatory connection between the action and some desire on the part of the agent. Indeed, the individualist can offer such an argument – the argument from breakdown cases.

The Argument from Breakdown Cases. Consider an example of an action that is apparently explained by another person’s desire. Suppose a child goes to the store because his mother wants him to get some carrots. The individualist will claim that not only is it possible to attribute some desire on the part of the child but that it is imperative that we do so or else the action will remain unexplained. To see that the child must be moved by some desire of his own consider what would happen if he did not have such a desire. Clearly, if he did not want to go to the store (under some description¹⁵), he would not have gone ceteris paribus. So, since the child did go to the store, he must have wanted to go to the store (under some description).

The argument seems to be credible at first sight. The only potentially problematic premise central to the argument (had the child not wanted to go to the store, he would not have done so; henceforth, (C)) is highly plausible. After all, we have little difficulty imagining that had the child really dug in his heals, he would not have gone to the store. A closer inspection, however, suggests at least three problems with the argument, all of which center around the central premise (C).

The first problem concerns the fact that (C) is in fact scope-ambiguous with respect to negation. A claim of the form "a doesn’t want to j " can mean either that a wants to not-j (a has a con-attitude toward j ing) or that it is not the case that a wants to j (a lacks a pro-attitude toward j ing). We are notorious for obscuring the difference between these two readings. Consider the exclamation "I have no intention of complying with the court’s order!" Contrary to the form of words used, which indicates the latter reading, in fact the former is intended.

There are accordingly two possible readings of (C):

(C₁) Had the child lacked a pro-attitude toward going to the store (under some description), he would not have gone to the store ceteris paribus.

(C₂) Had the child had a con-attitude toward going to the store (under some description), he would not have gone to the store ceteris paribus.

In order to establish that the pro-attitude is necessary to explain the action, the individualist would have to rely on (C₁) rather than (C₂). At the same time, however, it is only (C₂) that he can make use of. When we imagine the child digging in his heals and not wanting to go, we are imagining not merely that the child lacks a pro-attitude toward going but rather that he has a con-attitude toward going. Indeed, intentional psychology can only aspire to telling us not what happens when agents lack intentional attitudes but rather what happens when they have intentional attitudes.¹⁶ If so, however, then the argument does not and cannot establish that a pro-attitude on the part of the agent is necessary for him to act. Even if the nonindividualist accepts everything so far there is still room for her to claim that in cases where the agent lacks a con- and a pro-attitude toward performing an action, i.e. in cases where the agent is indifferent toward performing the action, another person’s desire can move him to act.

It is not clear, however, that the nonindividualist should accept the central premise so easily in the first place. She could argue that the ceteris paribus clause in fact already covers up nonindividualist contents. So, while we might believe that very often when the child wants not to go to the store, he will not go to the store, we might also believe that when his parent wants him to go to the store he will go ceteris paribus, whether or not he wants to. This seems to be a very natural thought given the kind of dependence structure that is if not inherent then at least preponderant in parent-child relationships. And there are numerous further cases that support the thought that we do sometimes act contrary to our intentional attitudes. Milgram’s experiments on obedience spring to mind.

Finally, note that (C) is extremely vague. The qualifier "under some description" is meant to remind us that in the case under consideration it may not be so much that the child wants to go to the store as that the child wants to help his mother or perhaps that he wants to fulfill the mother’s desire or … But it is surely open to the nonindividualist to object at this point that the qualifier functions as a catch-all for the rich repertoire of desires that intentional psychology allows us to attribute to the agent. Recall that the argument from breakdown cases was supposed to demonstrate that it is not just that we can always find some desire of the agent that will rationalize the action but that we will find some desire of the agent that will actually explain it. All that the argument would afford (if successful, which it is not as argued above) is a schema for arguing that any particular desire (say, the desire to go the store, or the desire to help the mother) has been efficacious. But it gives us no assurance at all that it would be possible to find some desire that would be efficacious. It does not exclude the possibility that in some particular case we would have to reject as inefficacious all the desires that our flexible intentional psychology would produce as candidates.

Despite the overwhelming popularity of explanatory individualism, the nonindividualist picture of agency is not unfamiliar. It portrays us as only sometimes independent of others’ will, but other times as quite dependent on the will of others. Sometimes we act because we want to – whether or not others want us to; other times, we act because others want us to – whether or not we want to. It will not be in vain to note that this way of seeing us as agents is not so very flattering. There we are, occasionally at the mercy of others’ wants and wishes, now and again managing to resist them but also capable of uncritically unreflectively following others. Far from always being independent, tough-minded, strong-willed, we are sometimes dependent, feeble-minded, weak-willed. But as we know from our experience, quite frequently there is a gap between what we (like to) think about ourselves and what we should think about ourselves.

3. Two Levels of Folk Psychology

We arrive at an impasse. On the one hand, I hope to have given some reasons for thinking that the explanatory nonindividualist position is extremely natural and that what makes it unnatural are philosophical arguments. On the other hand, however, I have done nothing to suggest that individualism is not an intuitive position. Indeed, perhaps the sense that both of these positions are natural adds some ammunition for the explanatory individualist who seeks to reconcile our intuitions by arguing for a reduction of the nonindividualist intuitions in terms of the individualist ones (it is not the mother’s desire but the son’s desire to fulfill the mother’s desire that moves him to act). In the remainder of the essay, I want to suggest a reconciliation of a different sort. I will conjecture that folk psychology operates at two levels: normative and explanatory. On the explanatory level, nonindividualism is the correct position to hold: explanatory individualism is false. But there is room for an individualist position at the normative level.

The aims of folk psychology at the explanatory level are familiar: to offer an account, however provisional, of why people do what they do as well as to offer some means for predicting one another’s behaviors. Unlike explanatory individualism, explanatory nonindividualism pictures our explanatory practices as being extremely messy. Not only are the generalizations, if any, half-baked but they are relative to various social contexts.

At the normative level, the concern is not so much with the explanation of our actions but with casting them in a special light. The guiding purpose is to offer such explanations that would further the image of ourselves as independent, autonomous, strong-willed individuals and thus help shape us as persons or individuals. It is thus that the individualist thought finds its place. It is not so much that we do act on our own reasons but that we should act on our own reasons. At this level of folk-psychological discourse, only those explanations that foster such an image of ourselves are acceptable.

Consider two examples that support this division. Imagine a housewife answering the question why she cleans the house, mends the socks, cooks the food, and so on, by (seriously) explaining that it is her social role as a housewife and that the social role is a part of the on-going patriarchal order of things. There is something wrong (we think), even though many (and perhaps by now most) of us believe that the facts to which she would appeal are true, and are more than likely to indeed explain why she cleans house, mends socks, cooks food. So why is our explanation of her action not all right when she offers it? Why should not her saying it simply confirm our explanation?

Her explanation of her actions in terms of the patriarchal structure of the society is not all right because it is not the kind of explanation that we want from her. G.E.M. Anscombe¹⁷ was surely right – we want to know her reasons. While the factual claim that ordinary explanations of action always cite the agent’s reasons is questionable, it seems nonetheless true that the reason why we find the housewife’s sociologically sophisticated explanation hard to accept is that it does not give her own reasons to so act. To the contrary, it seems to offer reasons for her not to so act. After all, who would want to continue living in servitude?

Take another example. After Milgram conducted his famous obedience experiments, he contacted the subjects, asking in particular those who have obeyed the commands of the experimenter to the end to reflect on what and why they did. One kind of response he obtained is particularly revealing: "I don’t know." There is a level (the explanatory level) at which the response is obviously false. He proceeded to the end because the experimenter commanded him to. But there is a level (the normative level) at which the response is exactly to the point. What the person is expressing is that there is no explanation of his behavior of the sort that is wanted. He can give no reasons (of his own) that would support the behavior as compatible with the image of self he should be fostering.

It is significant to emphasize that the extreme flexibility and ease with which intentional psychology can be applied makes it a perfect tool for this normative purpose. It provides a plethora of attitudes to choose from in giving the most charitable account of the action. The ambiguity noted in rebutting the argument from breakdown cases is instructive in this context. We will remember that we are notorious for confusing the lack of a pro-attitude with the presence of a con-attitude. It is instructive to see how the mentioned ambiguity renders the law of excluded middle as applied to the having of a pro-attitude:

(LEM) for any action, either it is the case that the agent wants to perform it or it is not the case that the agent wants to perform it,

More idiomatically: for any action, the agent either wants to perform it or does not want to perform it. Our slick equivocation allows one to render (LEM) as the false:

(PPA) for any action, the agent either has a pro-attitude toward performing it or the agent has a con-attitude toward performing it.

We might call this rendition of (LEM) the principle of polarization of attitudes (PPA), for what it licenses us to do is to attribute to the agent some attitude (whether pro- or con-) for any action. This is important for in view of the ideal to which we aspire, the worst that could happen is if the agent had no attitude, was indifferent. – You ate spinach, so you must have liked it, because had you not liked it you would not have eaten it; you did not eat spinach – so you must have disliked it, because had you liked it you would have eaten it. Of course, it is possible for you to offer another reason (like the fact that you did not want to be rude), i.e. to exhibit another attitude, but exhibit an attitude you must. The possibility of your having simply eaten the spinach, without having shed one thought, like or dislike, vanishes under the universal reign of (PPA). (PPA) makes sure that you stand behind your actions, that your attitudes reflect your actions.

Let us close by considering some further corroborating evidence for the suggestion that the purpose of intentional psychology is to further a certain picture of ourselves. I have already remarked on the extreme flexibility of intentional psychology. Aside from its ability to provide us with a multitude of attitudes to choose from it leads to instructive conceptual tensions. What is instructive about them is that they arise exactly at the places one would expect them to arise if the intentional framework were geared toward giving us the picture of ourselves as independent strong-willed individuals. The very attempt to try to understand phenomena such as altruism, akrasia or enslavement in intentional terms leads to a reversal of the intuitions we harbor about those phenomena.

Perhaps the most famous conceptual tension is the paradox of altruism. Although much more is involved, one argument nicely summarizes the issue:

With regard to altruism, the ... intuition is that since it is I who am acting even when I act in the interests of another, it must be an interest of mine which provides the impulse. If so, any convincing justification of apparently altruistic behavior must appeal to what I want.¹⁸

The very attempt to formulate what an altruistic action is, viz. action done for the sake of another, seems doomed because we must understand the action as done because of what the agent wants or intends. (After all, had he not wanted to...) And if so then his action must be conceived as furthering the agent’s end (even if that end will be to further another’s end), and must ultimately be conceived not as an altruistic action as might have been thought but as an egoistic one.

The paradox of altruism is interesting because it arises out of nowhere, out of the very way that the vocabulary functions, and yet contrary to the thoughts that are to be conveyed. Of course, one may take this fact to show that we indeed are egoists, or one may try to specify the kinds of wants that could be candidates for confirming that we are egoists. But one may also try to look back at the phenomena and juxtapose a greedy businessman and someone who stakes his life for the life of another. It is when one does the latter and hears someone insisting that both are egoists in some sense that Wittgenstein’s diagnosis of our language sometimes going on a holiday seems the most appropriate. But it is more than a holiday. There is a deeper purpose that this function of the intentional language is designed to play, viz. to present the individual agent as autonomous master of his actions.

A similar tension has been involved in the conceptualization of the very phenomenon of weakness of will. When we imagine an akratic agent who resolves not to j , is fully motivated not to j , and then j s, we are almost immediately drawn into supposing that he must have wanted to j in some sense. (After all, had he not wanted to...) Perhaps a momentary desire to j , a momentary change of mind, governed his action, so that his action was not weak-willed after all. And indeed if one looks at particular cases of akratic actions, it is very tempting to reconstruct them in ways that turn the weak-willed into strong-willed actions. As a result, we are more confident in the existence of akrasia as a phenomenon than in the existence of particular instances of akratic actions. Once again, our skill in interpreting actions as strong-willed is remarkably consistent with our charity toward the individual.

One last example of a conceptual tension involves cases of undue influence of others on the agent. On one conceptualization of such cases, most of us have a tendency to respond with hostility if exposed to continued acts of malevolence on the part of another. However, there comes a point when if the acts of malevolence increase in intensity our tendency to respond with hostile actions becomes broken and we tend to respond with benevolent acts.¹⁹ The telling examples here involve cases of people who have been "broken." The best literary example is Winston Smith.²⁰ Others include prisoners, soldiers, mental patients, women, slaves, subjected to mental, physical and situational torture. When a person in such a situation behaves with benevolence toward her oppressor, we want to interpret the action as servile. But when we try to understand the action intentionally, the agent acting because she wants to be benevolent or even because she wants to be servile, the characterization of the action as servile seems threatened. It is almost as if we want to say that she is within her rights to do as she wants, and if she wants to behave in that way toward her oppressor that is her privilege. But if this is the psychological portrait of the agent then she appears as a strong-willed independent person, not servile at all. Once again, the intentional explanation seems to turn around the intuitions that we harbor about the phenomena.

In these three cases, of altruism, of akrasia, and of enslavement, we see a tendency for intentional explanations of actions to falsify our intuitions about the phenomena. It is as if our intuitions are hard to express in intentional terms. To say that it is hard to express our intuitions using intentional language is not yet to say that it is impossible. Volumes have been devoted to the casting of those phenomena in intentional terms with the help of various distinctions. The point I am making concerns only a simple-minded application of intentional language. But the existence of the tensions at this pre-systematic intuitive level is all that is needed to support the picture of the place of intentional psychology I am advocating.

4. Final Comments

I have suggested taking an alternative perspective on the variety of folk-psychological explanations of actions, in particular explanations in terms of others’ desires. It is common to take the explanatory individualist approach and think that such explanations are enthymematic – that they need to be reduced to or at least supplemented with belief-desire explanations. The outstanding reason for the prominence of this position is that the explanatory nonindividualist approach appears to be incoherent. I have tried to argue that this appearance is deceiving. I have further suggested a nonindividualist explanation of the source of the popularity of the individualist position. The reason why we find individualism so inescapable derives not from the fact that it offers us an accurate reconstruction of our folk-psychological explanatory practices for explanatory nonindividualism fares better at this level. Rather it derives from the fact that intentional psychology is perfectly suited (due to its flexibility, for example) to playing the normative role in helping us shape our selves on the model of independent individuals. It is at this normative level that the individualist thought that we (should) act on our own desires is constitutive of the kind of explanations that are eligible. This means, however, that the apparent inescapability of individualism is the worst reason for thinking that it is true. It is the best-intentioned false consciousness but a false consciousness nonetheless.