Responsibility and planning

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 1, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 27-43

  Bratman, Michael E ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Intention; Planning; Responsibility; Shared intention; Strawson

Indexed keywords

EID: 0009125775     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1009703818699     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. See my Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), in which I develop what I call a planning theory of intention.
2. S. Wolf, Freedom within Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 5, 41.
3. First published in 1962 and reprinted in G. Watson (ed.), Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 59-80. Page references will be to this volume.
4. See e.g. H. Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person," Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971), pp. 5-20
5. W. Neely, "Freedom and Desire," The Philosophical Review 83 (1974), pp, 32-54
6. K. Lehrer, "Freedom, Preference and Autonomy," The Journal of Ethics 1(1) (1997), pp. 3-25, this issue.
7. There is a complexity here. A number of philosophers suppose that an intention to A is an intention that that very intention to.A lead to one's A-ing. G. Harman, in "Desired Desires" [in R.G. Frey and C.W. Morris (eds.), Value, Welfare and Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)], has pointed out that if we see intention as self-referential in this way. then any intention involves a second-order attitude. I will not try here to assess the significance of this challenge to hierarchical accounts of responsible agency.
8. Theories that are hierarchical in Frankfurt's sense do not, of course, preclude the introduction of embeddings of intentions within larger plans. Indeed, in a more recent essay.
9. Frankfurt has argued, in response to concerns about identification and a threatened regress of higher-order desires, for the importance of certain kinds of coordinating decisions. He writes: a person who makes a decision concerning what to do⋯ adopts a rule for coordinating his activities to facilitate his eventual implementation of the decision⋯ a function of decision is to integrate the person both dynamically and statically. Dynamically, insofar as it provides ⋯ for coherence and unity of purpose over time ⋯ ("Identification and Wholeheartedness" in F. Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1087), pp. 27 45, p. 43)
10. A "rule for coordinating his activities" is, I take it, a kind of partial plan for action. Frankfurt is, it seems, adding plans and planning to his theory.
11. Versions of this distinction can be found in G. Watson's distinction [in his "Responsibility and the Limits of Evil" in F. Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 256-286]
12. between excusing and exempting conditions, and J. Wallace's distinction [in his Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994)] between blameworthiness conditions and accountability conditions. This distinction plays an important role in P. Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment," a paper to which I turn below.
13. There is a lively debate here, and the Model Penal Code has rejected the test of "premeditation and deliberation" as necessary for first-degree murder. For useful discussion see J. Kaplan and R. Weisberg, Criminal Law: Cases and Materials, second edition. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co.. 1991). pp. 335-347.
14. I take this to be a modest and defensible version of an idea that Hume overstates in his A Treatise Concerning Human Nature, edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1888) Bk. 11, Part III, Sec. II. Wallace criticizes Hume's version in Wallace, pp. 122-123.
15. Strawson, p. 67.
16. Strawson, p. 67.
17. Strawson, p. 66.
18. Strawson, p. 70.
19. Strawson, p. 71.
20. Strawson, p. 72.
21. Wallace, p. 35, notes some odd aspects of this way of characterizing the different kinds of reactive attitudes, but we do not need to sort out these details here.
22. Strawson, p. 71.
23. Contrary to a suggestion of D. Dennett's, an objective attitude need not see another as a non-intentional system. I can try to predict and control the behavior of someone by way of predicting and controlling his or her relevant intentional states [see his "Mechanism and Responsibility"in G. Watson (ed.), Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 150-173,e.sp.p. 158]
24. Watson, "Responsibility," p. 257.
25. Strawson, p. 66.
26. Strawson, p. 70.
27. As C. Ginet emphasized in conversation.
28. Strawson, p. 65.
29. Strawson, p. 65.
30. The terminology of "excuses" and "exemptions" follows Watson, "Responsibility."
31. Strawson, p. 69.
32. Strawson's examples of such incapacities include "the fact that his picture of reality is pure fantasy,⋯ or ⋯ that his behavior is, in part, an unrealistic acting out of unconscious purposes"(p. 69). In this quoted passage Strawson is explaining a reason for taking the objective attitude rather than a personal reactive attitude. As I read Strawson, though, he has a similar conception of why we take the objective attitude rather than impersonal reactive attitudes. See his discussion on p. 73.
33. For a useful discussion of related issues about criminal insanity see M. Moore, Law and Psychiatry: Rethinking the Relationship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), Chap. 6.
34. Scanlon, for example, writes: one needs to know more about what these relationships are. about why moral reactive attitudes depend on them, and about how these relationships are undermined or ruled out by factors such as insanity. ("The Significance of Choice" in S.M. McMurrin (ed.), Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Vol. VIII (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1988), pp. 149-216, p. 165)
35. (See also Scanlon's remarks on p. 163.) Bennett says we are not told why the psychiatrist- patient relationship in which an objective attitude is common on the part of the psychiatrist - is not an "ordinary" relationship ["Accountability" in Z. van Straaten (ed.), Philosophical Subjects (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 14-47, p. 35].
36. For this case, though. Strawson might say that what is special about this relationship is that each agrees that the therapist is to take primarily an objective attitude towards the patient within the context of the therapy.
37. Strawson, p. 63.
38. Wallace, p. 164.
39. Other recent work influenced by Strawson's essay has tended, like Wallace's, to focus on specifically moral relationships. G. Watson (in Watson, "Responsibility") has argued that to be a responsible agent one must be capable of entering into certain relations of moral communication. T. Scanlon has highlighted inter-relations of "possible participants in a system of co-deliberation. Moral praise and blame can thus be rendered inapplicable by abnormalities which make this kind of participation impossible"(ScanIon, p. 167). In contrast, I want to explore some implications of Strawson's original focus on the garden- variety category of "ordinary" relationships. I will argue that among the capacities normally needed fully to participate in such relationships are certain planning capacities. Of course, it might also turn out that capacities for planning agency are also normally needed fully to participate in the specfically moral relationships highlighted by Scanlon, Wallace, and Watson (there are hints of such an idea in Scanlon, p. 174).
40. Bennett, p. 42.
41. Strawson, p. 63.
42. Bennett, p. 43.
43. Bennett, p. 44.
44. My appreciation of this point has been deepened by discussions with B. Ackerman.
45. As noted, Watson, "Responsibility," sees specifically moral communication as central to responsible agency.
46. See his "Meaning," first published in 1957 and reprinted in his Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 213-223.
47. As Grice would emphasize. See his discussion of "the Cooperative Principle" in his "Logic and Conversation" in his Studies, pp. 22-40, pp. 26-30.
48. See my "Shared Cooperative Activity," The Philosophical Review 101 (1992), pp. 327-341
49. and my "Shared Intention," Ethics 104 (1993), pp. 97-113. To be more, precise, T think there is a network of inter-related concepts here: shared intention, shared intentional activity, and shared cooperative activity. Here I draw only on some general features of my proposed account of this network.
50. J.M. Fischer articulates a version of this concern in his The Metaphysics of Free Will (Cambridge, MA: Black well, 1994), pp. 212-213. Strawson acknowledges and briefly responds to such a concern in Strawson, p. 80.
51. Strawson, p. 80.
52. Strawson, p. 66.
53. O. Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York: Summit Books, 1985), pp. 22-41, Thanks to K. Machina for reminding me of Sacks's work and pointing out its relevance to my discussion.
54. Sacks, p. 25.
55. A point noted by G. Yaffe.
56. Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will, p. 163.
57. Wallace criticizes Fischer along these lines, claiming that a psychopath might satisfy the reasons-responsiveness condition (Wallace, p. 189). Fischer discusses a similar case in his "Responsiveness and Moral Responsibility" in F. Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 81 - 106, p. 90, note 11
58. and again in his The Metaphysics of Free Will, p. 243, note 8.
59. As do (in different ways) Scanlon, Watson, "Responsibility,"
60. and Wallace. S. Wolf offers a related view in her"Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility" in F. Schoeman (ed.). Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 46-62
61. and in her Freedom within Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Let me note here an important complexity in Scanlon's view. Scanlon focuses on the moral relationship of participation in a system of co-deliberation. He sees the capacity to enter into such a relationship as having both a "specifically moral component" and a "nonmoral component" (Scanlon, p. 174). He cails the nonmoral component "the capacity for critically reflective, rational self-govermance." Scanlon goes on to note a connection between this general capacity and a "kind of coherence over time. Conclusions reached at one time will be seen as relevant to critical reflection at later times unless specifically overruled" (Scanlon. p. 174).
62. This may suggest a potential connection with ptanning capacities, and so perhaps a point of agreement between Scanlon and me. But whereas Scanlon arrives, perhaps, at a concern with planning by way of reflection on participation in a system of co-deliberation, I have arrived at it by way of a consideration of basic aspects of (as Strawson says) ordinary inter-personal relationships.
63. Frankfurt has also noted the importance of such organization and coordination. See above, footnote 6.