A desire of one's own

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 100, Issue 5, 2003, Pages 221-242

  Bratman, Michael E ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33847069883     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil200310055     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. This JOURNAL, LXVIII, 1 (January 14, 1971): 5-20;
2. reprinted in his The Importance of What We Care About (New York: Cambridge, 1988), pp. 11-25.
3. For this terminology, see my "Two Problems about Human Agency," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, CI (2001): 309-26.
4. "Free Agency," this JOURNAL, LXXII, 8 (April 24, 1975): 205-20.
5. "Identification, Decision, and Treating as a Reason," reprinted in my Faces of Intention (New York: Cambridge, 1999), pp. 185-206;
6. "Reflection, Planning, and Temporally Extended Agency," Philosophical Review, CIX (2000): 35-61;
7. and "Two Problems about Human Agency."
8. I develop the planning theory of intention primarily in Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (Cambridge: Harvard, 1987; reprint, Stanford: CSLI, 1999).
9. The argument for this draws on distinctive ways in which such intentions and policies organize our temporally extended lives by way of relevant psychological continuities and connections - see "Reflection, Planning, and Temporally Extended Agency."
10. I say more about why such policies about practical reasoning normally involve hierarchy in my "Autonomy and Hierarchy," Social Philosophy and Policy, XX (2003): 156-76.
11. Eleonore Stump emphasizes a need for some such evaluative grounding in her "Sanctification, Hardening of the Heart, and Frankfurt's Concept of Free Will," this JOURNAL, LXXXV, 8 (August 1988): 395-420.
12. And see Susan Wolf, "The True, the Good, and the Lovable: Frankfurt's Avoidance of Objectivity," in Sarah Buss and Lee Overton, eds., Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt (Cambridge: MIT, 2002), pp. 227-44.
13. This is one of the challenges posed by Watson's Platonic proposal in his "Free Agency." (Watson, however, qualifies this proposal in his discussion of "perverse cases" in his "Free Action and Free Will," Mind, XCVI (1987): 145-72.)
14. Jan Bransen points to a closely related challenge in "True to Ourselves," International Journal of Philosophical Studies, VI (1998): 67-85, see p. 76. Michael Ridge has pressed this issue in correspondence, as have Agnieszka Jaworska and Covert den Hartogh in conversation.
15. This seems to be Frankfurt's view. For example, as Jennifer Rosner has emphasized, in his 1971 article, Frankfurt held that "a person may be capricious and irresponsible in forming his second-order volitions and give no serious consideration to what is at stake" (p. 19n). More recently, Frankfurt says that higher-order "support or rejection of first-order desires need not include, or be based upon, any favorable or unfavorable attitude concerning how desirable or worthy of approval those desires may be" - "Reply to Michael E. Bratman," in Buss and Overton, eds., Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt, pp. 86-90, see p. 87.
16. Frankfurt does, however, note that "[n]eedless to say, it is better for us to care about what is truly worth caring about..." - "On Caring," in his Necessity, Volition, and Love (New York: Cambridge, 1999), pp. 155-80, see p. 162.
17. "Identification and Wholeheartedness," in The Importance of What We Care About, pp. 159-76, on p. 170.
18. I think Frankfurt's later appeals to satisfaction and to volitional necessity also fit into the cited mold, though they aim at a kind of commitment that - in contrast with the 1987 view - need not involve decision - see Frankfurt's "The Faintest Passion," "On the Necessity of Ideals," and "Autonomy, Necessity, and Love," in his Necessity, Volition, and Love.
19. This change allows Frankfurt to say that one can decide in a particular case not to act on a desire for X and still not reject that desire: one might simply give it a lower priority than a competitor in the present circumstance. See Frankfurt's remarks about two different kinds of conflict in "Identification and Wholeheartedness," see p. 170.
20. I discuss this point in "Identification, Decision, and Treating as a Reason," pp. 192, 195-98.
21. See also Joseph Raz, "When We Are Ourselves: The Active and the Passive," in his Engaging Reason: On the Theory of Value and Action (New York: Oxford, 1999), pp. 5-21, see p. 18.
22. "Identification and Wholeheartedness," p. 170.
23. The agent also needs to be, to use Frankfurt's term, satisfied with the policy. I propose a way of understanding such satisfaction in "Reflection, Planning, and Temporally Extended Agency," at pp. 48-50 and pp. 59-60. My proposal there allows for satisfaction with such a policy even in the face of certain strongly felt, first-order desires to the contrary. This feature of the proposal might be challenged, but this is a challenge we need not address here. What is important for present purposes is, rather, that such satisfaction need not in general involve the kind of strong evaluative judgment cited by the Platonic challenge; more on this below.
24. This was Frankfurt's response in conversation. See also J. David Velleman, "What Happens When Someone Acts?" in his The Possibility of Practical Reason (New York: Oxford, 2000), pp. 123-43, on p. 134.
25. See "Two Problems about Human Agency," pp. 318-19.
26. "Free Action and Free Will," p. 150.
27. See Raz's important discussion of related ideas in his The Morality of Freedom (New York: Oxford, 1986), chapter 14, especially pp. 385-90.
28. "Intending," originally published in 1978 and reprinted in his Essays on Actions and Events, second edition (New York: Oxford, 2001), pp. 83-102.
29. See my "Davidson's Theory of Intention," reprinted in Faces of Intention, pp. 209-24. I argued there that if we were instead to cite a weaker evaluative judgment - say, that there is something good about A, or that A is as good as its alternatives - we would run into difficulties concerning the rational agglomerativity of intention.
30. See "Davidson's Theory of Intention,"
31. and Edna Ullmann-Margalit and Sidney Morgenbesser, "Picking and Choosing," Social Research, XLIV (1977): 757-85.
32. Consider Stuart Hampshire's description of a person who makes a decision in the face of a certain kind of conflict: "he will probably recognize that his choice of a way of life is undetermined by the arguments that support his decision.... He often would not wish to say that his decision on the right course is objectively right, in the sense that in making the decision he is at the same time claiming universal agreement for it.... But the word 'commitment' carries a more positive implication; the implication is that he has himself recognized that his choice is undetermined by the reasons that support it, and, secondly, that he accepts responsibility for the choice as being his and his alone, without the support of any external authority" - Two Theories of Morality (New York: Oxford, 1977), p. 52.
33. David Wiggins points to related ideas in his discussion of the "doctrine of cognitive underdetermination" - see his "Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life," in Need, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value, third edition (New York: Oxford, 1998), pp. 87-137, especially p. 124.
34. See also Wolf, "The True, the Good, and the Lovable: Frankfurt's Avoidance of Objectivity," at pp. 234-35;
35. Richard Holton "Intention and Weakness of Will," this JOURNAL, XCVI, 5 (May 1999): 241-62, at p. 245;
36. and Robert Nozick's suggestive discussion in Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge: Harvard, 1981), pp. 446-50.
37. (I discuss these views of Nozick in "Nozick on Free Will," in David Schmidtz, ed., Robert Nozick (New York: Cambridge, 2001), pp. 155-74.)
38. Keith Lehrer also highlights the relation between hierarchical theories and a kind of underdetermination in his Self-Trust: A Study of Reason, Knowledge, and Autonomy (New York: Oxford, 1997), chapter 4.
39. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (New York: Random House, 1957), p. 179.
40. See Ullmann-Margalit and Morgenbesser, "Picking and Choosing."
41. See Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, p. 297.
42. Taylor, "Leading a Life," in Ruth Chang, ed., Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason (Cambridge: Harvard, 1997), pp. 170-83, at p. 183.
43. Cf. Frankfurt, "The Faintest Passion," p. 101.
44. An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, section IX.
45. The Moral Problem (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994), p. 173.
46. See also Michael Smith, "In Defense of The Moral Problem: A Reply to Brink, Copp, and Sayre-McCord," Ethics, CVIII (1997): 84-119, at pp. 88-90.
47. Cf. Wiggins: "Often we have to make a practical choice that another rational agent might understand through and through, not fault or even disagree with, but (as Winch has stressed) make differently himself..." - "Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life," p. 126.
48. See especially Frankfurt's "The Faintest Passion." I do not try here to settle the further issue of precisely how to understand such wholeheartedness. For present purposes, the important point is only that wholeheartedness does not require the cited kind of intersubjectively accountable strict comparative evaluation.
49. So our conscientious objector may reflectively decide to reject his inclination towards loyal military service and yet not think, as J. David Velleman puts it, that this "is what anyone would think in response to the relevant practical question, and would think that anyone would think, and so on" - see Velleman's "The Voice of Conscience," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XCIX (1998): 57-76, at p. 69.
50. And compare Frankfurt's observation that "it is not very likely...that what each of us considers most important to himself is exactly the same" - "Autonomy, Necessity, and Love," at p. 132.
51. And it is related to Allan Gibbard's distinction between an "existential commitment" and acceptance of "a norm as a requirement of rationality" - see Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard, 1990), pp. 166-70.
52. See also (in an essay to which Gibbard here refers) P. F. Strawson's discussion of "the natural diversity of human ideals" - "Social Morality and Individual Ideal," in his Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (New York: Methuen, 1974), pp. 26-44, at pp. 42-13.
53. This proposal is broadly in the spirit of a suggestion of Velleman about how Davidson's theory of intending might be developed to respond to Buridan cases. Velleman made this suggestion in his contribution to a symposium on my Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason at the 1988 meetings of the Central APA. A related idea is in Wolf, "Two Levels of Pluralism," Ethics, CII (1992): 785-98, at p. 796.
54. Such an advisor would favor something analogous to what Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroeder call "inverse akrasia" - see their "Praise, Blame and the Whole Self," Philosophical Studies, XCIII (1999): 161-88.
55. So the agent in our example may believe, roughly, that prior to her identification neither selfishness nor selflessness was superior to the other, that her selfishness after her identification is superior to her selfishness prior to her identification, but that even after her identification neither her selfishness nor her selflessness would be superior to the other. Raz would say that by her lights her case bears "the mark of incommensurability" - see The Morality of Freedom, pp. 325-26.
56. Ruth Chang would offer a different way of conceptualizing such a case - see her "Introduction" to Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason, pp. 23-27. What matters for my purposes here, however, is only that our agent does not arrive at a relevant instance of (P) even though she identifies with the selfish desire.
57. Here I have benefitted from related remarks of Velleman in his "What Good Is a Will?" (unpublished manuscript).
58. See also R. Jay Wallace's remarks about "a hazardous by-product of the capacity for self-determination" in his "Normativity, Commitment, and Instrumental Reason," Philosophers' Imprint, I, 3 (2001): 1-26, at p. 10.
59. On my account this is a special case of the general phenomenon that prior intention-like commitments can reasonably function as a stable (though defeasible) default, given their central role in cross-temporal organization. See, for example, my "Shared Valuing and Frameworks for Practical Reasoning," in Wallace, Philip Pettit, Samuel Scheffler, and Michael Smith, eds., Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz (New York: Oxford, forthcoming). (Shelly Kagan, in correspondence, suggested a parallel here with the judicial doctrine of stare decisis.)
60. See also Barbara Herman's insightful characterization of Frankfurt's views in her "Bootstrapping," in Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt, pp. 253-74, at p. 259.
61. In "Are Intentions Reasons? And How Should We Cope with Incommensurable Values?" - in Christopher W. Morris and Arthur Ripstein, eds., Practical Rationality and Preference: Essays for David Gauthier (New York: Cambridge, 2001), especially pp. 114-19 - John Broome explores the potential role of prior intentions in incommensurability cases; but Broome is skeptical about the idea that intentions and the like have the cited kind of reasonable stability.