INTRODUCTION

The present chapter offers a number of applications of the ideas introduced in II.3 and IV.3. The basic argument is simple. When acting, people can have any number of motivations. Often, these motivations can be ranked in terms of how acceptable they are to the actor or to other people. In III.4, for instance, I suggested that among the Greeks justice, revenge, interest, and envy were ranked in that order. To act on a motivation that the actor finds unacceptable is painful. To act on a motivation that other people condemn is also painful. Typically, perhaps, the former pain is that of guilt, the latter that of shame. (Yet as we saw in III.2, people's emotions can make them feel ashamed as well as guilty.) To avoid pain, the actor has an incentive to transform the motivation from a less acceptable to a more acceptable one. The words “transform” and “transformation” are used here as general terms for two distinct species. On the one hand, a motivation may be transmuted into another that is more acceptable to the agent. This is an unconscious mechanism, operating “behind the back” of the person. On the other hand, the agent may consciously misrepresent his motivation to others. These two phenomena are the topics of V.2 and V.3 respectively.