Two problems about human agency

Proceedings of the Aristotelean Society

Volumn 101, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 309-326

  Bratman, Michael E ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33644697552     PISSN: 00667374     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0066-7372.2003.00033.x     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. See my 'Reflection, Planning, and Temporally Extended Agency', Philosophical Review 109 (2000): 35-61
2. 'Valuing and the Will', Philosophical Perspectives: Action and Freedom 14 (2000): 249-265
3. and 'Hierarchy, Circularity, and Double Reduction', in S. Buss and L. Overton, eds., Contours of Agency: Essays on the Philosophy of Harry Frankfurt (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, forthcoming). My discussion draws from ideas discussed in these essays. I have sometimes also called 'self-governing' higher-order policies that concern only the motivational efficacy of a desire. Here, however, I limit the term, as indicated, to policies about deliberation
4. My understanding of the very idea of a policy is grounded in the planning theory of intention I develop in my Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987-re-issued by CSLI Publications, 1999)
5. This is one way to understand Donald Davidson's view in his 'How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?' and 'Intending' in his Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). See e.g., 31, 86
6. See Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), chap. 5
7. and J. David Velleman, 'Introduction', and 'The Guise of the Good', in his The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). The examples to follow are drawn from these and other essays in this recent literature
8. See J. David Velleman, 'What Happens When Someone Ads?' in his The Possibility of Practical Reason, at 132
9. Velleman refers to related discussions of John Bishop in his Natural Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
10. See also Velleman's 'Introduction' to The Possibility of Practical Reason
11. and R. E. Hobart's remarks about 'the analytical imagination', in his 'Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It', Mind 93 (1934): 1-27
12. See both his The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge University Press, 1988)
13. and his Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge University Press, 1999)
14. Watson, 'Free Agency', Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975): 205-220, at 218
15. Watson is responding to Frankfurt's 'Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person', reprinted in The Importance of What We Care About
16. 'The Faintest Passion', in Necessity, Volition, and Love. I discuss some Frankfurtian steps along the way to this idea in my 'Identification, Decision, and Treating as a Reason', in my Faces of Intention: Selected Essays on Intention and Agency (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 185-206
17. 'On the Necessity of Ideals', in Necessity, Volition, and Love, at 111-112
18. 'The Faintest Passion', 104
19. This, anyway, seems to me one reasonable reading of 'On the Necessity of Ideals', 111-112
20. 'Identification, Decision, and Treating as a Reason', in Faces of Intention, at 194-195
21. 'Reflection, Planning, and Temporally Extended Agency', at 48-49
22. Cp. David Lewis's proposal that 'valuing is just desiring to desire' in his 'Dispositional Theories of Value', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society suppl. vol. 73 (1989): 113-137, at 115. Note, though, the difference in the precise content of Lewis's second-order desires and Frankfurt's second-order volitions
23. See Korsgaard's The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. 100-104 and 227-232
24. Except as noted, I limit my brief discussion of Korsgaard's views to this book. A fuller treatment would also consider her more recent 'Self-constitution in the Ethics of Plato and Kant', The Journal of Ethics 3 (1999): 1-29
25. Sources, 101
26. Rachel Cohon ['The Roots of Reasons', Philosophical Review 109 (2000): 63-85] argues that further endorsement of the conception of practical identity may not be needed for that conception to ground a reason for action. The point I go on to make is, instead, that an appeal to this further endorsement brings us back to the need to say in what sense it is the agent's endorsement
27. In my 'Hierarchy, Circularity, and Double Reduction' I suggest that certain cases of what Allan Gibbard calls being in the 'grip' of a norm will involve processes in the agent that mimic such deliberation even though they are not endorsed by the agent. See Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 60. According to Stephen Darwall, Ralph Cudworth made a related distinction between, as Darwall puts it, a 'process in the person' connecting evaluative belief and action, and 'something the agent can, in some suitable sense, himself direct'
28. See Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), at 134
29. Cp. Korsgaard: 'When the person is viewed as an agent, no clear content can be given to the idea of a merely present self 'Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency', in Christine M. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge University Press, 1996): 363-397, at 372
30. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 54
31. Indeed, I believe that a full theory will also need to appeal to a kind of satisfaction with the higher-order attitudes that play such roles in the temporal extension of agency. See my 'Reflection, Planning, and Temporally Extended Agency', 48-50
32. Cp. Frankfurt, 'Identification and Wholeheartedness', in The Importance of What We Care About, 175
33. See Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason and Faces of Intention
34. See 'Reflection, Planning, and Temporally Extended Agency'
35. The claim is not that higher-order intentions, plans, and policies are necessary for the temporal persistence of the agent; the claim is that these higher-order attitudes have the constitution and support of temporally extended agency as part of their function. A further point is that we shall, I believe, need to extend this view to include, in the grounds of agential authority, what I have called 'quasi-policies'. [See 'Reflection, Planning, and Temporally Extended Agency', at 57-60.] But we can safely ignore this complexity here
36. A more detailed discussion would also need to consider higher-order singular intentions to treat, this time, a desired end as justifying in deliberation. I discuss these matters in my 'Hierarchy, Circularity, and Double Reduction'
37. 'Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency', at 378
38. See Allan Gibbard's discussion of these experiments in his Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, at 58-61
39. Lawrence Beyer discusses cases of theoretical reasoning that are to some extent analogous in his The Disintegration of Belief (Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University, 1999)
40. I think this model allows for either a cognitivist or an expressivist understanding of such thinking. See T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 58
41. This formulation is intended to allow for cases in which, from the outside, we would be more critical of (a) than of (b). (Suppose the self-governing policy is morally corrupt.) It is also intended to leave open the possibility of cases in which other features of the agent's overall psychology override this presumption. For a discussion of related matters see Nomy Arpaly, 'On Acting Rationally against One's Best Judgment', Ethics, 110 (2000): 488-513
42. In his discussion of authority in the political domain Christopher McMahon distinguishes (i) subordinating authority from (ii) authorized authority. When we turn from the political to the psychological we can say that (ii) corresponds roughly to agential authority, whereas (i), when seen within the agent's perspective, corresponds roughly to presumptive normative authority. See his Authority and Democracy: A General Theory of Government and Management (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), chap. 2