A theory of value

Ethics

Volumn 118, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 410-436

  Velleman, J David ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 48749104450     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/528782     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (51)

1. For this approach to value, see Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
2. There is one subtle difference between these cases, though it makes no difference, in my view. The considerations whose influence makes the difference between behaving and acting are called reasons for acting (not reasons for behaving), whereas the considerations whose influence makes the difference between responding and valuing are called reasons for responding as well as reasons for valuing.
3. Everything I will say about crying could be said, mutatis mutandis, about laughing as well. Both are reflex behaviors that can be taken up, to a greater or lesser extent, into voluntary actions.
4. See Lee Strasberg, A Dream of Passion: The Development of the Method (New York: Plume, 1988). Strasberg used the term 'sense memory' for the technique of vividly recalling the sensory qualities of an experience that once aroused the emotion to be portrayed.
5. For an extended inquiry into the analogy between everyday action and improvisational theater, see R. Keith Sawyer, Creating Conversations: Improvisation in Everyday Discourse (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2001),
6. and Pretend Play as Improvisation: Conversation in the Preschool Classroom (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1997).
7. See also Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor, 1959).
8. Also relevant here is my paper "Artificial Agency" (to appear in American Imago 65 [2008]).
9. The phrase 'in character' is potentially misleading in some contexts. In the character-based arts, such as theater, film, and animation, creating a believable character requires endowing him with a relatively small set of clearly recognizable characteristics. Though such a characterization is necessary in order to make a fictional figure believable, it is actually unrealistic; for if it were applied to a real person, it would be so simplistic as to be a caricature. I think that when we speak of a real person as acting "in character" or "out of character," we are in fact comparing his behavior to just such a simplistic stereotype, representing a few of his most marked characteristics. We mean that he is acting "to type" or "against type." But when I transfer these notions from the theater to real life in the discussion that follows, I will use the term 'character' to denote, in the first instance, a person's self-concept, which is far more complex and subtle than a stereotype. I think of the self-concept as including a representation of his standing traits, his personal history, and the occurrent thoughts and feelings that he has at the present time. In my sense of the phrase, then, "acting in character" will mean, not "acting to type," but rather acting in accordance with everything that the agent knows or thinks about himself.
10. Of course, this concession goes too far. When interacting with others, an ordinary agent is indeed standing before an audience to whom he must give a plausible rendition of himself.
11. I discuss this point further in "The Centered Self," in Self to Self: Selected Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 253-83.
12. Goffman suggests that being his own audience commits the agent to inauthenticity: "Self-deception can be seen as something that results when two different roles, performer and audience, come to be compressed into the same individual" (The Presentation of Self, 81 n. 6). I disagree. The agent can play a role for his own observation without self-deception, provided that the role he performs is one of a self-observing performer.
13. See also Goffman's concluding remarks on 248-55 of The Presentation of Self : "In our society the character one performs and one's self are sometimes equated, and this self-as-character is usually seen as something housed within the body of its possessor, especially the upper parts thereof, being a nodule, somehow, in the psychobiology of personality. I suggest that this view is an implied part of what we are all trying to present, but provides, just because of this, a bad analysis of the presentation. In this report the performed self was seen as some kind of image, usually creditable, which the individual on stage and in character effectively attempts to induce others to hold in regard to him. While this image is entertained concerning the individual, so that a self is imputed to him, this self itself does not derive from its possessor, but from the whole scene of his action, being generated by that attribute of local events which renders them interpretable by witnesses. A correctly staged and performed scene leads the audience to impute a self to a performed character, but this imputation - this self - is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it."
14. This view of the self is explored in detail by Daniel Dennett (see, e.g., "The Reality of Selves," in Consciousness Explained [Boston: Little, Brown, 1991], chap. 13).
15. I criticize Dennett's version of the view in "The Self as Narrator," in Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays, ed. Joel Anderson and John Christman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 56-76;
16. reprinted in Self to Self, 203-23.
17. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 5-6.
18. Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 253-54.
19. See also Mark Johnston's discussion of "the projectivist epoche" in "The Authority of Affect," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (2001): 181-214.
20. In some cases, what would make the most sense for an agent is not to entertain conscious thoughts about his external situation but to let go of self-awareness altogether. Someone who initially decided to swim with a flood of grief by having a cry may subsequently let himself sink back into that flood, forgetting himself in thoughts unaccompanied by the self-conscious "I think. . . ." Lost in thought about his troubles, he will no longer be enacting a conception of what makes sense for him to do; and yet this departure from making sense may have been perfectly understandable. Self-enactment is not always the most intelligible mode of behavior. Sometimes it's more intelligible to let oneself grieve mindlessly, without acting out one's grief - which is just to say that perseverating in the exercise of rational agency is not always a rational thing to do. There is also an intermediate stage between losing oneself in an activity and consciously putting it into action. Even when letting oneself get carried away by a behavior such as crying, one can retain enough self-awareness to pull up short if the behavior becomes discordant with one's thoughts. In this third case, one's thoughts and one's behavior proceed in parallel, connected only counterfactually by one's readiness to stop if the two should diverge. The ability to think along with oneself in this way, with thoughts that neither follow nor lead one's behavior, depends on a degree of self-knowledge that can be attained only through long practice in the more deliberate, thought-first mode of action. It is a long-term accomplishment of rational agency. I have discussed these issues further in "What Good Is a Will?" in Action in Context, ed. Anton Leist and Holger Baumann (Berlin: de Gruyter/Mouton, 2007),
21. and "The Way of the Wanton," in Practical Identity and Narrative Agency, ed. Kim Atkins and Catriona MacKenzie (London: Routledge, 2007).
22. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 59. In my view, Sartre is less than clear about the nature of the waiter's bad faith. Sartre says that the waiter is in bad faith simply in virtue of "playing at being a waiter"; but he also points to the deliberately mechanical style of the waiter's movements as symptomatic of his bad faith. As I see it, this simulated automaticity shows, not that the man is playing at being a waiter, but rather that he is playing at being a waiting-machine - that is, something that does what a waiter does but without enacting an idea of it.
23. In this case, he resembles the agent described in the first part of n. 11.
24. See S. Schachter and J. E. Singer, "Cognitive, Social and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State," Psychological Review 69 (1962): 379-99.
25. I describe related research in "From Self-Psychology to Moral Philosophy," Philosophical Perspectives 14 (2000): 349-77;
26. reprinted in Self to Self, 224-52.
27. S. E. Brodt and P. G. Zimbardo, "Modifying Shyness-Related Social Behavior through Symptom Misattribution," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 41 (1981): 437-49. The founders of attribution theory concluded that emotion is nothing more than generic arousal accompanied by the subject's interpretation of it as one emotion or another. This conclusion seems implausible in light of the various emotion-specific behaviors that are clearly reflexive and thus, presumably, prior to any self-interpretation. One reflexively cowers when afraid, or cries when aggrieved, even before interpreting one's agitation as fear or grief. But a weaker form of the attribution theorists' conclusion is plausible indeed, as I explain in the text.
28. See J. D. Laird, "The Real Role of Facial Responses in Experience of Emotion: A Reply to Tourangeau and Ellsworth, and Others," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 47 (1984): 909-17;
29. S. E. Duclos, J. D. Laird, E. Schneider, M. Sexter, L. Stern, and O. Van Lighten, "Emotion-Specific Effects of Facial Expressions and Postures on Emotional Experience," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57 (1989): 100-108.
30. In "The Authority of Affect" (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 [2001]: 181-214), Mark Johnston argues that the positive or negative affect involved in a desire can render its motivational force intelligible by presenting its object as "appealing" or "repellent." I am not speaking of intelligibility in this sense; I am speaking instead of the psychological-explanatory intelligibility of a response, in light of its role in a person's mental economy.
31. See, e.g., John McDowell, "Values and Secondary Qualities," in Morality and Objectivity: A Tribute to J. L. Mackie, ed. Ted Honderich (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 110-29.
32. On a particular occasion, of course, the relevant similarity may not be an intrinsic quality of the joke itself: what makes it intelligible for me to laugh on this occasion may be that I'm drunk or nervous, which would make it intelligible for me to laugh at just about anything. Yet I amalso under rational pressure to identify kinds of jokes that regularly tend to amuse me by themselves, so that I can comprehend my responses to jokes more generally, without reference to the circumstances. And a joke that's amusing for me on this occasion because I'm drunk or nervous may not be intrinsically amusing for me - not "really" amusing, I might say - because it is not the kind of joke that generally makes it intelligible for me to laugh.
33. This example illustrates a phenomenon that I discussed earlier. In thinking of himself as lazy, the agent thinks only about his laziness, but he thinks about it disapprovingly, and insofar as his thinking is conscious, it makes him aware of his disapproval as well. As I have argued, philosophical accounts of practical reasoning tend to limit themselves to the explicit content of the agent's thoughts and neglect what he expresses to himself by thinking them, whereby he makes more than their explicit content available to his self-understanding.
34. Of course, there is a sense in which theoretical or practical reasoning can be described as being about what to believe or what to do, simply in virtue of being such as to conclude in a belief or an action. But I am discussing the explicit topic of each mode of reasoning, the question that is explicitly under consideration. For a discussion of deliberation about what to believe, see Nishi Shah and J. David Velleman, "Doxastic Deliberation," Philosophical Review 114 (2005): 497-534.
35. This hypothesis was a major theme of Elizabeth Anscombe's book Intention (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). It then runs throughout all subsequent philosophy of action, where the opposite of 'agent' is not usually 'patient' (as it is in moral theory) but rather 'onlooker' or 'observer'.
36. Here are some examples. "The agent is originating, the spectator is only contemplating" (Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], 54);
37. "One's capacity to govern one's conduct is undermined. . . . One is reduced to a spectator" (Robert Audi, "Acting for a Reason," Philosophical Review 95 [1986]: 511-46, 534);
38. "The sense of autonomy is the sense that one is not merely a witness to one's life but rather fashions it from the world as one finds it" (Gary Watson, "Introduction" to Free Will [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 1);
39. "The agent must not be a mere bystander or onlooker of what happens" (Philip Pettit, A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency [New York: Oxford University Press, 2001], 10);
40. "This makes it seem as if getting up from a chair is something that happens to a man, something to which he is at best a spectator" (Ilham Dilman, Free Will: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction [London: Routledge, 1999], 264);
41. "I am not just a spectator of my life, but the real actor in it" (Ted Honderich, How Free Are You? The Determinism Problem [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002], 86);
42. "One is not normally in a passive relationship with such features of one's behavior, and is an agent who deliberates, decides, and acts out one's decisions, not a spectator of forces carrying one along" (Saul Smilansky, Free Will and Illusion [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002], 207);
43. "Thinking is not something that occurs to you, like the beating of your heart, something concerning which you are a mere spectator. Thinking is something you do" (John Heil, Philosophy of Mind: A Contemporary Introduction [London: Routledge, 1998], 73);
44. "In the experience of deliberation, we are not mere spectators of a scene in which . . . contending desires struggle for mastery with ourselves as the prize" (P. F. Strawson, Analysis and Metaphysics: An Introduction to Philosophy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992], 134-35);
45. "The thoughts that beset us do not occur by our own active doing. It is tempting, indeed, to suggest that they are not thoughts that we think at all, but rather thoughts that we find occurring within us" (Harry Frankfurt, "Identification and Externality," in The Importance of What We Care About [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], 58-68, 59);
46. "When you determine yourself to be the cause of your action you must identify yourself with the principle of choice on which you act. . . . In this kind of case, you do not regard yourself as a mere passive spectator" (Christine Korsgaard, "Practical Reasoning and the Unity of the Will," lecture II in the John Locke Lectures, Oxford University, 2002);
47. "It is sometimes said that Hume develops hismoral theory from the standpoint of a spectator rather than an agent" (Jerome B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 361);
48. "One may be conscious of what one is doing, not qua agent, but qua spectator" (M. R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003], 252).
49. See also Al Mele, "Agency and Mental Action," Mind, Causation and World, Philosophical Perspectives 11 (1997): 231-49, 238;
50. Charles L. Griswold Jr., Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), the index under "spectator."
51. I expand on this point in "What Good Is a Will?"