Recent accounts of emotional action intend to explain such actions without reference to goals. Nevertheless, these accounts fail to specify the difference between goals and other kinds of motivational states. I offer two remedies. First, I develop an account of goals based on Michael Smith’s arguments for the Humean theory of motivation. On this account, a goal is a unified representation that determines behavior selection criteria and satisfaction conditions for an action. This opens the possibility that mental processes could influence (...) behavior without such a unified representation and hence, without goals. Second, I develop a model of emotions and appetites on which behavior selection criteria can be decoupled from satisfaction conditions. If this model is correct, then in many cases, there is no unified representation that determines the behavior selection criteria and satisfaction conditions of emotional actions. In contrast with many traditional accounts of action, the model suggests the following: Whether or not a behavior constitutes an action does not depend on the agent’s grasp of the behavior’s aim. Rather, a behavior constitutes an action if it was organized by the agent, where an agent can organize actions without a coherent grasp of their aim. Some emotional actions are manifestations of this possibility. (shrink)

Peterson, Karlawish, and Largent’s “Supported Decision Making with People at the Margins of Autonomy” brings welcome attention to the rights of people with cognitive impairment and provides...

Empirical evidence indicates that much of human behavior is unconscious and automatic. This has led some philosophers to be skeptical of responsible agency or personhood in the moral sense. I present two arguments defending agency from these skeptical concerns. My first argument, the “margin of error” argument, is that the empirical evidence is consistent with the possibility that our automatic behavior deviates only slightly from what we would do if we were in full conscious control. Responsible agency requires only that (...) our actions more or less express our conscious goals and values. My second argument is a non-realist defense of moral agency. If we are willing to reject metaethical realism about agents, then there may be good reasons why we should retain the concept of agency in our moralizing, even if automaticity undermines the belief that we are really in conscious control of our behavior. We can do this by adopting a “reactive attitudes” approach to moral responsibility. On this view, agency is determined not by actual features of human psychology but by the attitudes and practices that we ought to adopt in response to the actions and motivations of individuals. (shrink)

Peterson, Karlawish, and Largent’s “Supported Decision Making with People at the Margins of Autonomy” not only elucidates the conceptual framework but also the practical importance of suppor...

The Hypothesis of Extended Cognition (HEC)—that many cognitive processes are carried out by a hybrid coalition of neural, bodily and environmental factors—entails that the intentional states that are reasons for action might best be ascribed to wider entities of which individual persons are only parts. I look at different kinds of extended cognition and agency, exploring their consequences for concerns about the moral agency and personal responsibility of such extended entities. Can extended entities be moral agents and bear responsibility for (...) actions, in addition to or in place of the individuals typically held responsible? What does it mean to be autonomous when one’s cognition is influenced and supported by a milieu of environmental factors? To answer these questions, I explore strong parallels between HEC’s critique of individualism in cognition, and feminist critiques of individualist accounts of self, agency, and autonomy. This relational and social conception of autonomous agency, as scaffolded and supported (or undermined and impaired) by a milieu of social, relational, and normative factors, has important lessons for HEC. Drawing together these two visions of distributed and decentralized aspects of personhood highlights how cognition, action, and responsibility are inextricably linked. It also encourages a reconceptualization of all cognition and all concerns about responsibility for actions, not simply as sometimes extended around individuals, but as fundamentally communal, social, and normative, with individual cognition and individual moral responsibility being derivative special cases, not the paradigm examples. Individuals are merely one of many possible loci of cognition, action, and responsibility. (shrink)