Planning agency, autonomous agency

Personal Autonomy: New Essays on Personal Autonomy and its Role in Contemporary Moral Philosophy

Volumn , Issue , 2005, Pages 33-57

  Bratman, Michael E ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 84922228185     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511614194.002     Document Type: Chapter

References (80)

1. “Autonomy and Hierarchy,” 156-157, 168.
2. J. David Velleman, “What Happens When Someone Acts?” in his The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000): 123-143
3. R. E. Hobart, “Free Will as Involving Determination andInconceivable Without It,” as reprintedin BernardBerofsky, ed., Free Will and Determinism (New York: Harper & Row, 1966): 63-95, esp. 65-66.
4. As for the provision of fully sufficient conditions, though, see my qualifications below in remarks about core elements of autonomy. AlfredR. Mele also pursues a strategy of seeking sufficient (but perhaps not necessary) conditions for certain forms of autonomy. And Mele addresses issues about the historical backgroundof autonomy, issues that, as I explain below, I put aside here
5. Mele, Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1995): 187.
6. Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987;
7. CSLI Publications, 1999; and my Faces of Intention.
8. See his review of my Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason in Philosophical Review (1991): 283.
9. “Autonomy andHierarchy,” 157.
10. Andit wouldbe amodel of what I have called“core features of human agency.” See my “Reflection, Planning, andT emporally ExtendedAgency,” 35-36. I point to a similar idea in talking about “strong forms of agency” in “A Desire of One's Own,” 222 n. 3.
11. Harry Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
12. Harry Frankfurt, Necessity, Volition, and Love (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For relatedid eas
13. Gerald Dworkin, “Acting Freely,” Nôus 4 (1970): 367-383
14. Wright Neely, “Freedom andDesire,” Philosophical Review 83 (1974): 32-54
15. Keith Lehrer, “Reason andAutonomy,” in Paul, Miller, and Paul, eds., Autonomy, 177-198.
16. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” in his The Importance of What We Care About, 20. (It is interesting to note that in this passage Frankfurt appeals to something the agent is doing-namely, securing the citedconformity.)
17. Frankfurt points to this condition of explanatory role in his “Identification andWholehearted ness,” in The Importance of What We Care About, 163.
18. Frankfurt's “Autonomy, Necessity andLove” in his Necessity, Volition, and Love, 129-141. For a helpful discussion of some issues of Frankfurt interpretation that I am skirting over here
19. James Stacey Taylor, “Autonomy, Duress, andCoercion,” in Paul, Miller, andPaul, eds., Autonomy, 129 n. 5.
20. Gary Watson, “Free Agency,” Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975): 205-220.
21. R. Jay Wallace endorses similar objections in his “Caring, Reflexivity, and the Structure of Volition,” in Monika Betzler and Barbara Guckes, eds., Autonomes Handeln (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000): 218-222.
22. Watson, “Free Agency,” 218.
23. Talk of agential authority comes from my “Two Problems About Human Agency”; talk of wiggles in the psychic stew comes, I admit, from my “Reflection, Planning, andTemporally ExtendedAgency,” 38.
24. Watson notes that there are elements in Frankfurt's essay-in particular, Frankfurt's talk of an agent who “identifies himself decisively with one of his first-order desires”-that suggest that it is not conative hierarchy that is doing the main theoretical work but, rather, the idea of decisive identification.
25. But, Watson remarks, if “notions of acts of identification and of decisive commitment… are the crucial notions, it is unclear why these acts of identification cannot themselves be of the first order…. ” (The quote from Frankfurt is in Watson's “Free Agency,” at 218, while the quote from Watson is at 219.) I discuss this exchange between Frankfurt and Watson in “Identification, Decision, and Treating as a Reason,” in my Faces of Intention, 188-190.
26. Watson, “Free Agency,” 216.
27. Watson, “Free Agency,” 219.
28. Frankfurt made this point in conversation. Also see
29. Velleman, “What Happens When Someone Acts?” 134.
30. Frankfurt, “The Faintest Passion,” in his Necessity, Volition, and Love, 103-105.
31. Frankfurt, “The Faintest Passion,” 104.
32. Bratman, “Identification, Decision, and Treating as a Reason,” 194-195. And see
33. Bratman, “Reflection, Planning, andTemporally ExtendedAgency,” 49, for my strategy for avoiding this difficulty within my own account.
34. Watson, “Free Action and Free Will,” Mind 96 (1987): 150. Also see my “A Desire of One's Own,” 227.
35. Joseph Raz, “Incommensurability andAgency,” as reprintedin his Engaging Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 46-66. I discuss this trio of possibilities in “A Desire of One's Own.” 25.
36. Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1981): 446-450.
37. Talk of the shape of a life comes from Charles Taylor, “Leading a Life,” in Ruth Chang, ed., Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997): 183.
38. Keith Lehrer, Self Trust: A Study of Reason, Knowledge, and Autonomy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997): chap. 4.
39. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1984): 206-208; and my
40. Derek Parfit “Reflection, Planning, andT emporally Extended Agency,” 43-45.
41. Bratman, “Reflection, Planning, andTemporally ExtendedAgency,” 46.
42. “Hierarchy, Circularity, and Double Reduction,” 78-79.
43. “Hierarchy, Circularity, andDouble Reduction,” 70-78;
44. “T wo Problems about Human Agency,” 322-323.
45. Barrett Cullity and Philip Gerrans, “Agency andPolicy,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 104 (2004): 315-25, and my
46. “Three Forms of Agential Commitment: Reply to Cullity andGerrans,” pp. 327-35.
47. My efforts to spell out an appropriate sense appear in my “Reflection, Planning, andTemporally ExtendedAgency,” 49-50, 59-60.
48. I think there is also another reason for such reflexivity, one associatedwith the concern about reasoning to which I allude in note 34 and the essays cited there.
49. A closely relatedid ea is in Keith Lehrer, Self-Trust, 100-102;
50. Keith Lehrer “Reason andAutonomy,” 187-191. For the basic idea of seeing intentions as reflexive
51. Gilbert Harman, Change in View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986): 85-88. However, my appeal here to reflexivity is not part of a view that, like Harman's, sees all “positive” intentions in this way. Further, because my appeal to reflexivity is against a backgroundof a Lockean story of agential authority, together with a Frankfurtian appeal to satisfaction, the job of such reflexivity within my account of autonomy is considerably more limited than its job within Lehrer's.
52. I shouldemphasize that the relevant notion of stability here is in part a normative one: It will involve norms of reasonable stability. It is an important question how exactly to understand such reasonable stability. For some efforts in this direction, see my “Toxin, Temptation, and the Stability of Intention”
53. “T emptation Revisited.” Note that the appeal to reasonable stability is not an appeal to “volitional necessities” in the sense invokedby Frankfurt in his “Autonomy, Necessity, andLove,” 138.
54. For references and further discussion, see my “A Desire of One's Own.”
55. In seeing deliberation as primarily first-order, but also seeing the valuings that enter into deliberation as involving conative hierarchy, my view is in the spirit of certain aspects of Simon Blackburn's approach to these matters. (I provide a different treatment of the relevant hierarchy, however. And my view remains neutral with respect to the basic debate between cognitivist approaches and expressivist approaches of the sort championedby Blackburn.)
56. Blackburn, RulingPassions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning (Oxford andNew York: Clarendon/OxfordUniversity Press, 1998). (Blackburn's remarks about a “staircase of practical and emotional ascent” are at 9; his remarks about valuing are at 67-68; and his remarks about deliberation are at 250-256.)
57. As Samuel Scheffler and others have notedin correspondence and conversation.
58. Gilbert Harman argues that (1) “positive intentions are self-referential,” so (2) all creatures who have positive intentions have higher-order conative attitudes, and so (3) “Frankfurt's appeal to second-order volitions is not the key to distinguishing autonomy from nonautonomy.” Though I would not defend a simple appeal to second-order volitions as this “key,” my remarks in the text do point to a response on Frankfurt's behalf to this criticism. Frankfurt can say that what provides the key is the capacity for broad conative hierarchy, a capacity that goes beyondthe hierarchy built into the purported reflexivity of positive intentions. See Gilbert Harman, “DesiredDesires,” as reprintedin his ExplainingV alue and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000): 122-126.
59. For ease of exposition, in the discussion to follow of reasons for broad hierarchy I will simply speak of hierarchy where I mean broadhierarchy. Also, I do not claim that the pressures to be discussed exhaust the field. There may be other pressures for conative hierarchy that wouldneedto be considered in a more extensive discussion.
60. Frankfurt, “Identification and Wholeheartedness,” 171.
61. Frankfurt, “Reply to Michael E. Bratman,” in Sarah Buss andLee Overton, eds., Contours of Agency (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002): 88.
62. Though Christine Korsgaardshares with Frankfurt an interest in selfconstitution, she also embraces such a model of deliberation when she writes: “When you deliberate, it is as if there were something over and above all your desires, something which is you, and which chooses which desire to act on” (The Sources of Normativity, 100).
63. For Korsgaard's concerns with self-constitution, see her “Self-Constitution in the Ethics of Plato and Kant,” Journal of Ethics 3 (1999): 1-29.
64. Though Frankfurt himself does not seem so inclined. (See his “Reply to Michael E. Bratman,” 89-90.)
65. See her “Caring andInternality,” unpublishedmanuscript. The example to follow comes (with a change in gender) from that paper.
66. John Cooper, “Some Remarks on Aristotle's Moral Psychology,” reprintedin his Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999): 237-252. As Cooper puts the view, “non-rational desires will be desires no part of the causal history of which is ever any process (self-conscious or not) of investigation into the truth about what is goodfor oneself” (242). Cooper notes that this is compatible with holding, as Aristotle did, that “non-rational desires carry with them value judgments framedin (at least some of) the very same terms of goodand bad, right and wrong, etc., that also reappear in our rational reflections about what to do and why” (247). (In contrast, I wouldwant to allow for some nonrational desires that do not involve such value judgments.) What is central, Cooper indicates, is “the permanence in human beings and the independence from reason… of the nonrational desires”(249).
67. For a similar focus on this practical problem-though not in the service of a hierarchical model-see
68. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986): chap. 4. Note that the commitments that needto be supported by self-management will include shared commitments-for example, our sharedcommitment to a certain project.
69. “Autonomy and Hierarchy.” Note that I do not claim that these are the only policies that may be relevant here. For example, as AlfredMele has noted, the agent may also have a policy in favor of simply trying to remove a certain desire.
70. In including in some such policies a direct concern with X, as well as with associated desires and what they are for, I am extending (as anticipated earlier) what it is that is accorded subjective normative authority.
71. Though we, as theorists, can reason in this way, as part of what Paul Grice called“creature construction.”
72. Grice's “Methodin Philosophical Psychology (from the Banal to the Bizarre)” (Presidential Address), in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association (1974-1975): 23-53. I pursue such a methodology in “Valuing and the Will” and in “Autonomy andHierar-chy,” In “Autonomy andHierarchy” I see self-governing policies as a solution to a pair of pervasive human problems: the needfor self-management and the need to respond to underdetermination by value judgment. 55.
73. T. M. Scanlon, “Self-Anchored Morality,” in J. B. Schneewind, ed., Reasons, Ethics, and Society: Themes from Kurt Baier with His Responses (Chicago: Open Court, 1996): 198. As I see it, one use of Gricean creature construction is to help us achieve such self-understanding. Note that in locating this question about conative hierarchy within the enterprise of self-understanding, I do not suppose that the basic concern to which our answer to this question appeals must be a concern with self-understanding. Indeed, the relevant concern to which my answer appeals is a concern with the effective pursuit of basic commitments. For a view that sees this basic concern as, in contrast, a concern with self-understanding, see
74. J. David Velleman, “Introduction,” The Possibility of Practical Reason, 1-31.
75. These roles are multiple and interconnected: They include the organization of thought and action over time, relatedforms of agential authority, and roles in shaping what has subjective normative authority. This contrasts with a thin conception of the will as primarily a matter of deciding what to do in present circumstances.
76. Susan, Wolf, Freedom within Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990);
77. Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, 317-332; and
78. Gideon Yaffe, “Free Will andAgency at Its Best,” Philosophical Perspectives 14 (2000): 203-229. We needto be careful, though, to remember that our concern here is with autonomy and not directly with moral accountability. For a relatedcaveat
79. Gary, Watson, “Two Faces of Responsibility,” Philosophical Topics 24 (1996): 240-241
80. Nozick on Free Will.