Self-Creation and Responsibility
Aspiration, unlike Talbot Brewer’s “dialectical activities,” is a learning process in which someone moves from an inadequate to an adequate grasp of some value. Because we cannot learn what is not there, we can only take ourselves (or others) to aspire when we think there is something there to aspire to. Aspiration is distinct from ambition, in which agents make large-scale changes in the world without coming to learn why they are doing so. If some pursuit—e.g., becoming a gangster—is bereft of value at the endpoint, it cannot be engaged in aspirationally. This gives rise to an asymmetrical theory of moral responsibility for self: we are responsible for our valuational successes to the extent that we arrived at them aspirationally, and we are responsible for our valuational defects to the extent that they are the products of culpable failure to aspire.