This chapter contains sections titled: References.

My central philosophical concern for many years has been with what it is to be a person. Of course, we persons are agents, indeed agents of a special sort, so understanding personhood has of course led me to think about that special sort of agency. Yet my background in the philosophy of mind leads me to think that any account of this special sort of agency must appeal to psychological capacities that are themselves grounded (...) in an account of the relation between the mind and the body. Here I have in mind not the thought that we must provide a compatibilist account of free will (though I do think that is true) but rather the thought that it is all to easy for philosophers of action to make what turn out to be false presuppositions about the nature of psychological capacities like belief and desire and the role they play in motivation. Conversely, I think, philosophers of mind, focused too narrowly on worries about intentionality and consciousness, have offered accounts of various psychological capacities that are inadequate to understanding the sort of agency characteristic of us persons. Before I begin, I need to acknowledge my general orientation in philosophy of mind. Mental states and capacities are to be understood in terms of their place within an explanatory framework. Psychological explanation, however, I take to be fundamentally normative, a matter of locating particular phenomena within a broader pattern of rationality. This is a broadly Davidsonian or Dennettian orientation to the mind, according to which, as Davidson says, rationality is the constitutive ideal of the mental.1 In.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Saving Honor:The Ideology of Equal Esteem and the Good of Honor, Friendship, and Glory according to St. ThomasDominic Verner O.P.In his book Natural Law and Human Rights, Pierre Manent assesses and critiques a practical ideology that he finds pervasive within the European academy and sees increasingly informing the practical sensibilities of much of the Western world. "Our governing doctrine," as Manent calls it, is chiefly (...) characterized by the primacy of right over law and the rejection of any objective principle by which actions and persons might be judged.1 It is "the plasticity of the human form" itself which demands respect.2 The only non-constructed and thus normative characteristic of equal human nature is the power of being an "individval-conatus," the power to be one's own rule and reason for acting.3 And the only generally recognized purpose of this "individual-conatus" is to satisfy the desire for power, which is the sole universal motive of human action.4 Such an individual can be legitimately ruled and governed only by himself, a claim reflected in the ideal of the autonomous subject and representative government.5 In sum, Manent characterizes this ideology in terms of a thoroughgoing [End Page 335] rejection of any objective rule, "any law of God or of nature," according to which man is defined and judged.6Manent warns that this ideology is opposed to the very wellsprings of action, since an operation is rightly called an action only when it is performed according to some deliberate choice, which requires some rule and reason. If all rules and reasons are entirely self-generated, then there is no principle according to which deliberation might occur. Such a so-called autonomous subject purports to command himself, but in fact he is more patient than agent: the subject is moved by desires and preferences which cannot be weighed according to any discriminatory rule or principle, since the desires and preferences themselves are the only rule the subject acknowledges. Aside from submitting to the movement of the inexplicably strongest preference, the only positive reason for acting that remains is to destroy any vestiges of objective rules or reasons for acting—that is, the law—that might hinder the realization of individual preference: "The acting animal is now the prisoner of the very audacious and ingenious arrangement that he once devised to escape the urgency and to avoid the difficulty of the practical question. Caught in the realm of inaction, he seeks out, in a kind of terminal fever, the last corners of social existence that still escape the laissez-faire idea and where the very idea of the law might suffer its final defeat."7What is a Christian to make of this practical ideology? What natural inclinations does it privilege and how might the goods it seeks be sought rightly? Manent argues that the sole universal motive for action explicitly recognized by this practical ideology is a certain kind of power: the power of self-determination. According to the governing doctrine, this power is the only universal human motive that can be relied upon to construct common life and political order. Manent's response to this ideology is therefore to propose a recovery of a natural law account of the heterogeneity of universal human motivations to include useful, pleasing, and honorable goods. In this article, I will argue that Manent's own account of the ideology he critiques suggests a more fundamental motive driving the ideology, namely, a desire for an unassailable esteem. And since it is a desire for esteem that best explains the attractiveness of the ideology of modern freedom, an alternative vision of practical life will need to address the desire for esteem and articulate its proper bases. In advancing this argument, I will first show that Manent's own analysis highlights the importance of the desire for esteem in motivating the ideology of modern freedom. I will then turn to the anthropology of Thomas [End Page 336] Aquinas to show that the desire for esteem is manifested in the desire for honor and for friendship and is rooted in a fundamental inclination to have certain knowledge of one's... (shrink)

This Article doDespite obvious differences in the Aristotelian and Stoic theories of responsibility, there is surprisingly a deeper structural similarity between the two. The most obvious difference is that Aristotle is (apparently) a libertarian and the Stoics are determinists. Aristotle holds adults responsible for all our "voluntary" actions, which are defined by two criteria: the "origin" or cause of the action must be "in us" and we must be aware of what we are doing. An "involuntary" action, (...) for which we are not responsible, is one that fails to meet either one of these two criteria. Aristotle is a libertarian insofar as he insists that all voluntary actions are "in our power" to perform or not. As determinists the Stoics cannot admit this sort of freedom, but they still consider the agent to be a vital link in the chain of events, so they redefine what is "in our power" as what comes about "through us." The terminology is different, but I argue that these actions, for which the Stoics hold us responsible, are in fact coextensive with Aristotle's voluntary actions. An "impression" is the first necessary condition for action, and is a sort of visual image of the object stimulating one to act. The right sort of impression activates the agent's "impulse," an internal movement of soul or mind, which is the direct cause of action. But impulse is always accompanied by "assent," which is the mind's affirming the truth of the proposition that we ought to go after the object stimulating our impulse. Thus, since assent is a necessary condition for action, we always act knowing what we are doing. This means that all actions caused by our own impulse and assent are by Aristotle's criteria voluntary, where impulse provides the internal origin of the action and assent provides the awareness of what is being done. I conclude that the Stoic and Aristotelian classes of what one is responsible for are coextensive, their criteria defining responsible actions are nearly identical, and the only substantial difference is that Aristotle claims such actions are in our power to do or not do while the Stoics say that such actions are necessitated (by our internal nature as well as external factors). es not have an abstract. (shrink)

The objective of this book is to produce a theory of rational decision making for realistically resource-bounded agents. My interest is not in “What should I do if I were an ideal agent?”, but rather, “What should I do given that I am who I am, with all my actual cognitive limitations?” The book has three parts. Part One addresses the question of where the values come from that agents use in rational decision making. (...) The most comon view among philosophers is that they are based on preferences, but I argue that this is computationally impossible. I propose an alternative theory somewhat reminiscent of Bentham, and explore how human beings actually arrive at values and how they use them in decision making. Part Two investigates the knowledge of probability that is required for decision-theoretic reasoning. I argue that subjective probability makes no sense as applied to realistic agents. I sketch a theory of objective probability to put in its place. Then I use that to define a variety of causal probability and argue that this is the kind of probability presupposed by rational decision making. So what is to be defended is a variety of causal decision theory. Part Three explores how these values and probabilities are to be used in decision making. In chapter eight, it is argued first that actions cannot be evaluated in terms of their expected values as ordinarily defined, because that does not take account of the fact that a cognizer may be unable to perform an action, and may even be unable to try to perform it. An alternative notion of “expected utility” is defined to be used in place of expected values. In chapter nine it is argued that individual actions cannot be the proper objects of decision-theoretic evaluation. We must instead choose plans, and select actions indirectly on the grounds that they are prescribed by the plans we adopt. However, our objective cannot be to find plans with maximal expected utilities. Plans cannot be meaningfully compared in that way. (shrink)

Aristotle conceives of ethical theory as a field distinct from the theoretical sciences. Its methodology must match its subject matter—good action—and must respect the fact that in this field many generalizations hold only for the most part. We study ethics in order to improve our lives, and therefore its principal concern is the nature of human well-being. Aristotle follows Socrates and Plato in taking the virtues to be central to a well-lived life. Like Plato, he (...) regards the ethical virtues (justice, courage, temperance and so on) as complex rational, emotional and social skills. But he rejects Plato's idea that a training in the sciences and metaphysics is a necessary prerequisite for a full understanding of our good. What we need, in order to live well, is a proper appreciation of the way in which such goods as friendship, pleasure, virtue, honor and wealth fit together as a whole. In order to apply that general understanding to particular cases, we must acquire, through proper upbringing and habits, the ability to see, on each occasion, which course of action is best supported by reasons. Therefore practical wisdom, as he conceives it, cannot be acquired solely by learning general rules. We must also acquire, through practice, those deliberative, emotional, and social skills that enable us to put our general understanding of well-being into practice in ways that are suitable to each occasion. (shrink)

INCONTINENCE, HONOURING SUNK COSTS AND RATIONALITY According to a basic principle of rationality, the decision to engage in a course of action should be determined solely by the analysis of its consequences. Thus, considerations associated with previous use of resources should have no bearing on an agent’s decision-making process. Frequently, however, agents persist carrying on an activity they themselves judge to be nonoptimal under the circumstances because they have already allocated resources to that activity. When this is the (...) case, agents are said to be honouring sunk costs. Honouring sunk costs is thus typically viewed as irrational economic behaviour. Two striking findings of the psychological literature on the sunk cost effect are that it is, in general, not lessened by having taken previously courses in economics, and that agents who did take such courses and that do honour sunk costs seem to be frequently aware of a cognitive dissonance in their behaviour. Davidson’s account of the possibility conditions of incontinent action renders continent action materially unfeasible. The very idea of incontinent action becomes thus a hollow one. I’ll present an alternative description of these possibility conditions that renders continent action materially feasible, and both, continent and incontinent action, cognitively plausible. In a nutshell, my proposal rests upon the drawing of an essential cognitive contrast between explicit processes of deliberative reasoning and lower level heuristic procedures. I conclude the paper arguing that my redescription of incontinent action accounts for the above mentioned cognitive dissonance effect better than the alternatives and that viewing at least an important subset of behaviours of honouring sunk costs as incontinent actions will enable us to consider them as peculiar manifestations of a more general and meaningful pattern in human behaviour. (shrink)

Decision-theoretic planning is normally based on the assumption that plans can be compared by comparing their expected-values, and the objective is to find an optimal plan. This is typically defended by reference to classical decision theory. However, classical decision theory is actually incompatible with this “simple plan-based decision theory”. A defense of plan-based decision theory must begin by showing that classical decision theory is incorrect insofar as the two theories conflict, so this paper begins by raising objections (...) to classical decision theory. First, there is a discussion of the considerations arising out of the Newcomb problem that have given rise to causal decision theory. Next, counterexamples are constructed for classical decision theory turning on the fact that an agent may be unable to perform an action, and may even be unable to try to perform an action. A proposal is made for how to repair classical decision theory in light of these counterexamples. But then turning to the concept of an “alternative” that is presupposed by classical decision theory, it is argued that actions must often be chosen in groups rather than individually, i.e., the objects of rational choice are plans. It is argued that optimality cannot be defined for plans, and even if it could be, it would not be reasonable to require rational agents to find optimal plans. So simple plan-based decision theory must also be rejected. An alternative called “locally global planning” is proposed as a replacement for both classical decision theory and simple plan-based decision theory. (shrink)

Intending the recovery of human agency with the aid of theories of human socio-cultural life, Turner and Harre do so however in terms of conflicting conceptions of the embodying of persons. Consequently, their theories share the problem of determinism and embodied human agency. This is the problem of the proper location of agency with regard to the person, the body, and society. These theories then are in fundamental conflict on exactly this issue of the proper location of (...) agency. Turner's thesis of location: in the beginning is the body, and therefore the person. Thus Turner's recovery of agency: the effectiveness of persons resides in the discourse-independent agency of the bodies of persons. Harre's thesis of location: in the beginning is the person, and therefore the body. Thus Harre's recovery of agency: the effectiveness of persons resides in the discursive agency of persons embodied. For both Turner and Harre the intent to recover agency through embodiment is also a scientific intent. Thus, the problem of the proper location of agency requires that agency must be formulated in terms of ubiquitous determinism and not regularity determinism: only the former provides a conception of causal powers. To answer the question of location Turner is led to Merleau-Pontian phenomenology and its conception of the lived body. Instead, Harre enlists a realist philosophy of science with its special conception of causual powers. A systematic conception of agentive causation is shown to constitute the recovery of human agency and to enable us to make principled determinations in the assignment of agency. It is argued that, since phenomenology presumes the ontology of regularity determinism, it cannot provide us with what it in fact denies, a conception of causal powers. It is argued that Merleau-Ponty moved from his idea of the actual body as lived to the actual body as flesh, and in that reformulation it is best understood as causal powers. It is argued that without a conception of causal powers Turner's use of the lived body to establish the agency of effective persons must fail, revealing instead that the effectiveness of persons is the discursive agency of persons embodied. Persons discursively embodied enact the practices of speech acts and action signs systems. (shrink)

I will begin by considering how the social world appears to the scientific observer and ask the question of whether the world of scientific research, with all its categories of meaning interpretation and with all its conceptual schemes of action, is identical with the world in which the observed actor acts. Anticipating the result, I may state immediately that with the shift from one level to the other, all the conceptual schemes and all the terms of interpretation must (...) be modified.Proceeding in this direction, I encounter several problems overlapping with the problem of rational action and the “rational act unit” in Professor ParsonsParsons, Talcott’ sense. First: The conceptual scheme of rational action presupposes a more or less definite knowledge of, or orientation within, the world in which this action is performed. In this sense the term, “rationality”, is not specific to the conceptual scheme of action; it embraces the conceptual scheme of the world in general and is only one element in it. Therefore, we also must examine the problem of orientation in this world. Second: We ought to keep in mind that all interpretation of the social world has to start from the actor’s subjective point of view. Therefore, we cannot accept the term, “unit act”, as such, without trying to reduce it to its subjective meaning. Here I have to discuss in general terms why I insist on the subjective point of view. This is more than the whim of a few social scientists; social science cannot be built up except by taking cognizance of the subjective meaning the actor connects with his acting. Finally, I have to discuss the fact that there are social sciences operating on high theoretical levels that, like economics, apparently prefer to deal with statistical curves and mathematical formulae rather than with actions of human beings in the social world, yet they use the term, “rational action”, as an indispensable element of their systems. I will have to show what modification this term undergoes in these types of social sciences..). (shrink)

It seems to be a humdrum fact of human agency that we act on intentions or decisions that we have made at an earlier time. At breakfast, you look at the Taco Hut menu online and decide that later today you’ll have one of their avocado burritos for lunch. You’re at your desk and you hear the church bells ring the noon hour. You get up, walk to Taco Hut, and order the burrito as planned. (...) As mundane as this sort of scenario might seem to be, philosophers have raised a problem in understanding it. If you are simply abiding by this morning’s decision, how are you acting autonomously? Your earlier self seems to be calling the shots; if you are just acting accordingly, without thinking through it or in some other way trying to ensure that the past decision conforms to your present standpoint, it is not clear how this amounts to an exercise of your present autonomous agency. It seems, rather, that your earlier self has succeeded in slaving you to her own purposes. She was the one who wanted (intended, judged it to be good, etc.) to have an avocado burrito. In simply following through, your current self seems to be just an automaton performing the commands left behind by your former self. Of course, you might not allow yourself to be shackled by your earlier self. You might refuse to follow anything but your own present judgments: you will only go to Taco Hut if this is what you judge you should do right now, and once at Taco Hut you will only eat the avocado burrito if that is what you want to eat once there. But if this is the way you generally operate, this seems to block your ability to make effective future-directed decisions. The puzzle, then, is one of explaining how the future self can do the bidding of her past self without losing her autonomy. We call this “the Problem of Diachronic Autonomy.” Philosophers raising this problem take it to show that there must be reasons or rational requirements to follow-through with our past decisions. According to these philosophers, we can only make sense of our diachronic autonomy if our past decisions put rational pressure on us to follow through. We argue that there is no Problem of Diachronic Autonomy. There is, in other words, no puzzling situation that needs explaining. Consequently, there is no need coming from this purported puzzle to think that our future-directed decisions generate reasons or rational requirements to follow through. The correct view of our diachronic autonomy is the “naïve” one: the “future self” can do the bidding of the “past self” without giving up its autonomy because, very simply, the past self is the same agent as the future self. I am acting autonomously when I get the avocado burrito, because I was the one who decided to get the burrito. I am acting on my own freely-formed decision. (shrink)

The idea of basic action is a fixed point in the contemporary investigation of the nature of action. And while there are arguments aimed at putting the idea in place, it is meant to be closer to a gift of common sense than to a hard-won achievement of philosophical reflection. It first appears at the stage of innocuous description and before the announcement of philosophical positions. And yet, as any decent magician knows, the real work so often gets done in (...) the set-up. I argue that the seemingly innocent idea of basic action is, in fact, bound up with a wide-spread conception of the nature of bodily or physical action (section 3). Its legitimacy is vital to the intelligibility of the causal theory of action, according to which physical action consists of a mere event and a condition of mind joined (in the right way) by the bond of causality. Left unchecked, means-end reason threatens to permeate physical action, and thus threatens the sovereignty of the sphere of material events at the center of the causal theory: such events, including the movements of one’s body when one intentionally moves it, are thought to be constitutively independent of the subject’s rational capacities. Basic action is a necessary countermeasure, a sort of metaphysical containment wall needed to preserve the separate jurisdictions of the mind of the acting subject and what merely happens. I argue that so long as action theory proceeds under the assumption that there must be basic action, it must regard our relation to the progress of our own deeds as not different in principle from Marx’s understanding of the relation of the non-worker (Nichtarbeiter) to the material processes that realize his own ideas, namely the work done on the factory floor. Each is alienated from the progress, or getting done, of his deeds. In each the process of doing something intentionally turns out to be a case of delegating tasks to another power. How the process comes to completion is not willed, and at best watched: the causal work is not the agent’s work, his knowledge not self-knowledge (section 5). We should find this unacceptable. And if this is right, it should be a pressing question whether there must be basic action. I argue that we have no good reason to think so: basic action is not forced on us by argument (sections 2 and 4). It is open to us to consider an alternative, one on which action is not, in the fundamental case, barren of means- end structure, but instead permeated by it: we register as a force in nature not at the limit of the means-end order but precisely in its constitution. [from article introduction]. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Worth of Persons by James FranklinLouis GroarkeFRANKLIN, James. The Worth of Persons, New York: Encounter Books, 2022. 272 pp. Cloth, $30.99In The Worth of Persons, James Franklin, the well-known Aristotelian mathematician, sets out to provide an account of the very first principles of ethics and morality. Franklin argues that morality begins with an acknowledgment of the intrinsic worth of human persons, understood as beings possessing (...) “dignity” or “absolute inner worth.” As it turns out, we recognize naturally, without epistemic complication, that human beings have innate moral value.Although Franklin does not use the term “personalism” and does not discuss that specific philosophical tradition, he traces his own account to a familiar source: Kant’s personhood formulation of the categorical imperative. He has, however, little use for Kant’s rigid absolutism and prefers something much closer to a natural law formulation of ethical obligation, in large part because it allows for casuistry, a negotiation of the messy circumstances of everyday life that confront us with moral dilemmas and competing duties requiring some kind of moral calculation.But Franklin’s book is not so much about normative ethics. It is an exercise in metaethics, an attempt to make sense of morality as a root cause of value in the world. Franklin wants to secure an epistemological basis from which we can “deduce” moral principles. He is particularly impressed with contemporary discussion of “supervenience” or “metaphysical grounding” as a bridge over the alleged is–ought gap that has preoccupied analytic philosophers following in the footsteps of David Hume [End Page 349], G. E. Moore, and J. L. Mackie. Franklin shows, very effectively, that similar “gaps” can be found in logic, mathematics, linguistics, computer science, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and so forth. As examples of supervenience, he mentions the way necessary mathematical concepts supervene on the physical, the way the meanings of words are added to spoken or written symbols, the way logical inference arises from premises and conclusion in an argument, the way social organization emerges from a collection of individuals, and the way the identity of a statue of Hercules arises from its disposition of physical parts. The point is that an empiricist fundamentalism that reduces reality to perceptible facts without any higher (or “emergent”) identities provides an overly narrow account of the metaphysical content of human experience.If ethical value supervenes on some nonethical base, it does not follow that moral judgments and obligations are a human fabrication without any grounding in the world. If we can intellectually access the moral worth of human beings the way, for example, we intellectually access necessary mathematical concepts, we can deduce moral obligations from the worth of persons in a way that preserves the epistemic status of morality against noncognitive challenges. Once we recognize that individual humans have worth (because of the potentialities inherent in their natures), we can, for example, infer moral axioms such as “human beings must be respected” and, further, infer that murder is morally wrong because it involves the wanton destruction of human beings. Franklin does not focus on the normative content of specific actions, duties, obligations, or virtues. His basic point is that moral knowledge is possible once we rationally access (through understanding) the first principle of morality: that human beings are (to use Kantian terminology) ends in themselves, beings that rational agents will value as loci of dignity and moral value.This is a thorough treatment. Franklin is moderate, cautious, careful, diligent; he adds together technical points in present-day academic discussion to produce a well-rounded worldview. He writes in an accessible manner, with good examples and flashes of wit throughout, referring to a wide range of issues and authors: Pseudo-Dionysius, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Husserl, Moore, Wolterstorff, Mackie, Oderberg, MacIntyre, Midgley, Finnis, Korsgaard, Dworkin, Baier, Williams, Singer, Murdoch, and so on.The book includes eight chapters that discuss contrary positions, ethical concepts, supervenience, moral personhood, aesthetic worth, the value of animals and ecosystems, moral epistemology, and metaphysical systems compatible with a realist view of morality. There is a useful index, a modest bibliography, and a full section of notes, which contains many further references.The treatment seems a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Human Rights and Women's RightsAngela KnobelMainstream feminists insist, with a degree of unanimity that is sometimes surprising, that access to abortion is an essential precondition of female equality. That feminism, which is in other respects so flexible, inclusive, and uncategorizable, should be so unyielding with respect to this particular issue seems surprising to many. It is especially surprising to those who, while sympathetic to other (...) feminist goals, also oppose abortion.1 Why is access to abortion so important? Why must one's views about the equality of women stand or fall on one's views about the value of unborn human life? If feminism has to have a flagship issue, why must that issue be abortion? In this paper, I will propose that Pierre Manent's Natural Law and Human Rights offers a possible answer to this question. I will argue that, to the extent that mainstream feminism assumes the truth of what Manent calls the "philosophy of human rights," it cannot not advocate abortion access. Similarly, I will argue that pro-life feminist attempts to defend the contrary position—namely, that abortion is antithetical to feminism—invariably assume the natural law that the philosophy of human rights rejects. My argument, if correct, suggests the pivot point in discussions of abortion and feminism occurs much further back than many acknowledge: in our very understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.In what follows I will first briefly summarize Manent's account of what he calls the "philosophy of human rights." With this background in place, [End Page 275] I will consider the mainstream feminist claim that access to abortion is a necessary precondition of female equality. When "equality" is understood through the lens of the philosophy of human rights, I argue, the mainstream feminist insistence on access to abortion becomes coherent: a feminism that assumes the truth of the philosophy of human rights cannot not insist on access to abortion. The pro-life feminist reply that abortion harms and oppresses women, by contrast, is coherent only to the extent one assumes the framework of natural law.2Natural Law or Human Rights?To believe in natural law is to believe that nature itself sets the standard for human life. What the "law" commands is simply action necessary for the realization of the potential implicit in our nature. Under such a framework, Manent notes, "natural inclinations and natural differences, if they exist, constitute a kind of language of nature."3 The fact that human beings are naturally rational or naturally social, or that biological males are (typically) attracted to biological women, helps provide insight into nature's "law": "Natural law issued commands in the name of a teaching implicit in human nature, in a tendency of human nature to society and to knowledge, or in a natural difference among ages, sexes, and capacities, a tendency or difference that reason once made explicit and on the basis of which it founded its commandments and recommendations."4 Nature's laws can be and frequently are violated: cultures or individuals can choose to live up to nature's laws or not. For this reason, Manent says that, under the traditional framework of natural law, human beings are "free under the law."5 Natural law is something we freely choose to follow or freely choose to reject, but because it stems from our human nature, it does not cease to bind even those who reject it.The philosophy of human rights, by contrast, accepts the notion of freedom but rejects the notion of any overarching "law" against which our free choices are to be measured. While the philosophy of natural law is rooted in the language of nature, and thus sees human beings as free "under the law" of nature, the philosophy of human rights puts freedom prior to [End Page 276] law and recognizes law only as a means of preserving freedom.6 While the philosophy of natural law understands individual human beings in terms of their human nature, and thus in terms of their natural inclinations and natural differences, the philosophy of human rights rejects the language of "nature" in favor of an "impoverished common denominator," namely equality... (shrink)

In the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna lays out three paths of yoga as the means to achieve human perfection: the path of self-less action, the path of knowledge, and the path of devotion. In this paper I will argue for an interpretation of the Gita in which the path of devotion is the last step that leads to moksha. This is not to claim that bhakti yoga is more important than karma and jnana yoga, but rather that the (...) latter two are more elementary. In order to practice bhakti yoga, one must first have practiced karma and jnana yoga. All three forms of yoga are equally important—but there is a prioritized order in which they are to be practiced. On my reading, bhakti is more than having an intense feeling of love for God, because practicing devotion to God is an intellectual love of God that entails an intuitive understanding of the essence of things. My approach is to cross-examine the concept of human perfection as discussed in the Gita and Spinoza’s Ethics. Human perfection is characterized in both texts as a total liberation from being guided by things external to oneself other than one’s own nature. In other words, the aim of life is to liberate oneself by acquiring the right kind of knowledge. The freer one becomes and the more knowledge that one has, the more perfect one becomes. Thus, Spinoza’s idea of the “free man” resembles the self-realized agent in the Gita, because a human being becomes more “perfect” when he expresses God’s power to a greater degree. Bhakti yoga is the last step on the path to attain knowledge of God because in bhakti yoga, one employs the method of intuition to grasp God’s essence. As such, unlike karma and jnana yoga, the knowledge acquired in bhakti yoga is not empirical. In the Gita, rational devotion is a single act of both the mind and the heart, which, in turn, will lead to the practice of self-less actions. (shrink)

The focus in this paper is on deliberate human action. The central questions addressed are: whether purely rational choice is possible; whether choices may be induced by chance alone; or whether there is always a mixture of rationality and chance, as well as other factors such as habit, emotion, imitation and irrationality. The approach is a factualist one, upholding the view that, although human action can be explained by its antecedents, this is not incompatible with the (...) notion of "free choice". It is the actual choosing process that determines the final choice of action. Whatever the sources of the elements involved in the choosing process, the choice of action is a specific outcome created by the acting agent. It is in this choosing process and decision making that both rationality and chance enter. The conclusion is that rationality is the element which links intentionality with goal seeking and attainment, but that the actual choice is determined by a complex interactive process in which both logic and chance play a part. (shrink)

The renowned philosopher John Searle reveals the fundamental nature of social reality. What kinds of things are money, property, governments, nations, marriages, cocktail parties, and football games? Searle explains the key role played by language in the creation, constitution, and maintenance of social reality. We make statements about social facts that are completely objective, for example: Barack Obama is President of the United States, the piece of paper in my hand is a twenty-dollar bill, I got married in London, (...) etc. And yet these facts only exist because we think they exist. How is it possible that we can have factual objective knowledge of a reality that is created by subjective opinions? This is part of a much larger question: How can we give an account of ourselves, with our peculiar human traits DS mind, reason, freedom, society - in a world that we know independently consists of mindless, meaningless particles? How can we account for our social and mental existence in a realm of brute physical facts? In answering this question, Searle avoids postulating different realms of being, a mental and a physical, or worse yet, a mental, a physical, and a social. There is just one reality: Searle shows how the human reality fits into that one reality. Mind, language, and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. Searle explains how language creates and maintains the elaborate structures of human social institutions. These institutions serve to create and distribute power relations that are pervasive and often invisible. These power relations motivate human actions in a way that provides the glue that holds human civilization together. Searle shows how this account illuminates human rationality, free will, political power, and human rights. Our social world is a world created and maintained by language. (shrink)

This dissertation argues that an agent's particular commitments are an integral and necessary part of his autonomy. I refer to Hegel's Philosophy of Right to argue that the autonomous self is in fact a committed self. According to Hegel, freedom is only possible when the agent inhabits roles within a family, civil society, and the greater community of the state. These roles make up the agent's practical identity, or the set of commitments and characteristics around which he (...) orients his actions. His practical identity provides him with norms: he has specific obligations as, for instance, a parent, police officer, or judge. ;Chapter One critiques Christine Korsgaard's Kantian account of practical identity, arguing that it is inadequate because of its insistence on an ontologically divided self. Chapter Two argues that practical identity according to Hegel must include consideration of an agent's contingent circumstances. Chapter Three claims that Hegel's agent knows himself and other humans to possess universal rights and to be sources of moral certainty. Chapter Four discusses social institutions and the norms they generate. When the agent freely embraces roles in these institutions, he embraces the obligations that accompany those roles. He gives himself these obligations and is autonomous through them. ;Chapter Five argues that Hegel's definition of conscience crucially depends on his theory of practical identity. Hegel's conscience is not a source of arbitrary, unimpeachable conclusions but refers to the norms of rational institutions. It does not neglect an agent's particular commitments within those institutions such as commitments to particular causes, family members, or political organizations. It rather explains the freedom of his actions through those commitments. So defined, conscience allows for both inner certainty and external sanction. Chapter Six argues that a wide range of professions describe their ethical experience in terms of conscience, and that Hegel's definition of conscience makes sense of this experience. By referring to roles, Hegel's conscience also requires the agent to be involved in the evaluation and reformation of institutions. As such, his theory is of great relevance to contemporary ethical life. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Decision-theoretic approach and a nonlinguistic theory of norms are applied in the paper in an attempt to explain the nature of scientific rationality. It is considered as a normative system accepted by scientific community. When we say that a certain action is rational, we express a speaker’s acceptance of some norms concerning a definite action. Scientists can choose according to epistemic utility or other rules and values, which themselves have a variable nature. Rationality can be identified with (...) a decision to accept a norm. This type of decision cannot be reduced only to its linguistic formulation; it is an act of evolvement of the normative regulation of human behavior. Norms are treated as decisions of a normative authority: a specific scientific community is the normative authority in science. These norms form a system and they are absolutely objective in the context of individual scientists. There exists an invariant core in all the norms of rationality, accounting for their not being liable to change, as compared with the flexibility of legal norms. The acceptance of and abidance by these norms is of social importance – it affects the aims of the community. A norm only defines the common framework and principles of scientific problem-solving; its application is a matter of professional skills and creative approach to a particular problem. It is of no importance at all, if an agent’s cognitive abilities do not live up to the requirements of a norm. Such discrepancy can be compensated for by the fact that a scientist carries out work in a conceptual and normative framework established by a respective scientific community. (shrink)

Does the fact that my actions cause someone to lack access to the objects of her human rights make me a human rights violator? Is behaving in such a way that we deprive someone of access to the objects of her human rights even when we could have avoided behaving in such a way, sufficient to maintain that we have violated her human rights? When an affluent country pursues domestic policies that (...) will foreseeably cause massive deprivation abroad in order to improve its already prosperous economy, has this country violated the human rights of the very poor just by doing so? If international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization pursue policies that lead to an increase in the global poverty rate, are such organizations human rights violators? Can an individual undertaking certain actions in the market place that render insecure the access of the worst-off to the objects of their human rights be blamed for violating their rights?In this article I discuss the thesis that claims that whenever we cause, or contribute to the cause of, someone else's lack of access to the objects of her human rights, we are human rights violators. I contend that this thesis, which seems to underpin the arguments of many cosmopolitan authors taking part of the global justice debate, is mistaken. In order to achieve this end, I analyze several alternative formulations of the causal thesis. My conclusion is that before it can be said that an agent has violated someone else's human rights, it has to be proven that this agent has caused, or contributed to the cause of, a state of affairs where someone lacks access to the object of some of her human rights, by infringing a duty not to do so. Furthermore, I maintain that this must be a perfect, as opposed to an imperfect, duty. (shrink)

In this paper, I address two connected issues that arise when one considers a rational agent facing a decision problem. One is whether or not the agent may find that the dictates of rationality are such that they cannot all be followed. For example, one may ask whether or not the requirements on the agent's actions imposed by rationality can conflict in an irreconcilable way, making it impossible to satisfy all of them. Put differently, one may (...) ask whether or not any apparent conflict of this type must in fact be capable of rational resolution. I shall say that an agent who is in a position in which the requirements of rationality cannot all be satisfied faces a feasibility dilemma, and I shall characterize certain conceptions of rationality that differ according to whether or not they admit such a possibility. A second issue concerns the number of options that may be deemed rational in a decision problem. Is rationality sufficiently determinate that it always dictates precisely one choice, or may there be more than one rationally permissible option? Is there anything about rationality itself that guarantees that any of the possible options could rationally be chosen? I shall call this issue – whether the concept of rationality itself places any limits on the number of options that may be deemed rational in a given problem – the numbers problem. (shrink)

In deriving his moral code, Hobbes does not appeal to any mind-independent good, natural human telos, or innate human sympathies. Instead he assumes a subjectivist theory of value and an egoistic theory of human motivation. Some critics, however, doubt that his laws of nature can be constructed from such scant material. Hobbes ultimately justifies the acceptance of moral laws by the fact that they promote self-preservation. But, as Hobbes himself acknowledges, not everyone prefers survival (...) over natural liberty. In this essay I show that Hobbes can argue that the desire for self-preservation is rationally required by modifying his subjectivist theory of the good to equate what is good for an agent only with the satisfaction of desires (for her own life) that she has at the time that they are satisfied. It is thus irrational to prefer postmortem glory over survival since an agent must be alive for glory to have any value for her. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:276 THE WILL AS IMPRESSION Hume writes, in the Treatise: Let no one, therefore, put an invidious construction on my words, by saying simply, that I assert the necessity of human actions, and place them on the same footing with the operations of senseless matter. I do not ascribe to the will that unintelligible necessity, which is suppos'd to lie in matter. But I ascribe to (...) matter, that intelligible quality, call it necessity or not, which the most rigorous orthodoxy does or must allow to belong to the will. I^ change, therefore, nothing in the receiv'd systems, with regard to the will, but only with regard to material objects. It is surely false that Hume changed "nothing in the receiv'd systems, with regard to the will." In one such "receiv'd system," that of Thomas Aquinas, the concept of will or volition is presented as internally related to two further concepts: that of the "final cause" or goal of the action, and that of "practical intellect," a form of cognition which is productive of its object. Will is always the will to something, a goal to be reached or a product to be produced. Thus will and final cause are concepts which presuppose one another. The mark, however, of the fact that someone wills to do something, i.e., that s/he in fact has some goal, is precisely that that agent knows, non-inductively and without observation, what s/he is doing or will do. The basis of this knowledge is neither evidence nor proof, but rather what Aristotle called "the practical syllogism." We will ask below what it means to describe the relationships among will, final cause, and practical knowledge as 'internal.' 277 The question to be explored here is this: what in fact becomes of the 'receiv'd concept of will' when one contends, in the empiricist spirit common to both Locke and Hume, that all of our knowledge about matters of fact is based on observation and induction? The answer to this question will turn out to be that, in the absence of a notion of "practical knowledge," the concept of final cause becomes unintelligible (since the final cause is precisely the object of practical knowledge); and thus the notion of will must be reconstrued, for Hume as an impression. As an impression it is a brute given, one that is furthermore mute (or lacking in propositional content). Hume views volition as an event, that object of inner experience which is the (Humean) cause of our voluntary actions. In what follows I shall first of all sketch Thomas Aquinas' view of the will (section I), following this with a discussion of the important hybrid view in Locke's Essay, where older notions of volition are presented within an incompatible epistemological framework. In section III we look at Hume's sharp response to Locke, and in section IV at his own doctrine of the will as impression. In the final section I attempt to distinguish two strands of causality in Hume's philosophy of human action, drawing at the same time a moral for the contemporary dispute about reasons and causes. One of the most fully developed of the "receiv'd systems with regard to the will" was that of St. Thomas Aquinas, who combined Neo-Platonist, Patristic, and Aristotelian sources into an 2 impressive and influential synthesis. Thomas' 278 doctrine on the will is guided by a Grand Analogy, one inspired by the Creation story in Genesis. He writes, at the beginning of the second main part of his Summa : Man is made to God's image, and since this implies... that he is intelligent and free to judge and master of himself, so then, now that we have agreed [in part one of the Summa] that God is the exemplar cause of things and that they issue from his power through his will, we go on to look at this image, that is to say, at man as the source of actions which are his own and fall under his responsibility and control. The analogy is this: God, the Divine Craf tsperson, is to the Creation as human agents are to their... (shrink)

We care not only about how people treat us, but also what they believe of us. If I believe that you’re a bad tipper given your race, I’ve wronged you. But, what if you are a bad tipper? It is commonly argued that the way racist beliefs wrong is that the racist believer either misrepresents reality, organizes facts in a misleading way that distorts the truth, or engages in fallacious reasoning. In this paper, I present a (...) case that challenges this orthodoxy: the case of the supposedly rational racist. We live in a world that has been, and continues to be, structured by racist attitudes and institutions. As a result, the evidence might be stacked in favour of racist beliefs. But, if there are racist beliefs that reflect reality and are rationally justified, what could be wrong with them? Moreover, how do I wrong you by believing what I epistemically ought believe given the evidence? To address this challenge, we must recognize that there are not only epistemic norms governing belief, but moral ones as well. This view, however, is at odds with the assumption that moral obligation requires a kind of voluntary control that we lack with regard to our beliefs. This background assumption motivates many philosophers to try to explain away the appearance that beliefs can wrong by locating the wrong elsewhere, e.g., in an agent’s actions. Further, even accounts that accept the thesis that racist beliefs can wrong restrict the class of beliefs that wrong to beliefs that are either false or the result of hot irrationality, e.g., the racist belief is a result of ill-will. In this paper I argue that although the these accounts will capture many of the wrongs associated with racist beliefs, they will be only partial explanations because they cannot explain the wrong committed by the supposedly rational racist. The challenge posed by the supposedly rational racist concerns our epistemic practices in a non-ideal world. The world is an unjust place, and there may be many morally objectionable beliefs it justifies. To address this challenge, we must seriously consider the thesis people wrong others in virtue of what they believe about them, and not just in virtue of what they do. (shrink)

Decision-theoretic approach and a nonlinguistic theory of norms are applied in the paper in an attempt to explain the nature of scientific rationality. It is considered as a normative system accepted by scientific community. When we say that a certain action is rational, we express a speaker‘s acceptance of some norms concerning a definite action. Scientists can choose according to epistemic utility or other rules and values, which themselves have a variable nature. Rationality can be identified with a (...) decision to accept a norm. This type of decision cannot be reduced only to its linguistic formulation; it is an act of evolvement of the normative regulation of human behavior. Norms are treated as decisions of a normative authority: a specific scientific community is the normative authority in science. These norms form a system and they are absolutely objective in the context of individual scientists. There exists an invariant core in all the norms of rationality, accounting for their not being liable to change, as compared with the flexibility of legal norms. The acceptance of and abidance by these norms is of social importance—it affects the aims of the community. A norm only defines the common framework and principles of scientific problem-solving; its application is a matter of professional skills and creative approach to a particular problem. It is of no importance at all, if an agent‘s cognitive abilities do not live up to the requirements of a norm. Such discrepancy can be compensated for by the fact that a scientist carries out work in a conceptual and normative framework established by a respective scientific community. (shrink)

The performance of one option can entail the performance of another. For instance, baking an apple pie entails baking a pie. Now, suppose that both of these options—baking a pie and baking an apple pie—are permissible. This raises the issue of which, if either, is more fundamental than the other. Is baking a pie permissible because it’s permissible to bake an apple pie? Or is baking an apple pie permissible because it’s permissible to bake a pie? Or are they (...) equally fundamental, as they would be if they were both permissible because, say, they both accord with Kant’s categorical imperative? I defend the view that the permissibility of an option that entails another is more fundamental than the permissibility of the option that it entails. That is, I defend maximalism: the view that if an agent is permitted to perform a certain type of action (say, baking a pie), this is in virtue of the fact that she is permitted to perform some instance of this type (say, baking an apple pie), where φ-ing is an instance of ψ-ing if and only if φ-ing entails ψ-ing but not vice versa. If maximalism is correct, then, as I show, most theories of morality and rationality must be revised. (shrink)

Descartes is often accused of having fragmented the human being into two independent substances, mind and body, with no clear strategy for explaining the apparent unity of human experience. Deborah Brown argues that, contrary to this view, Descartes did in fact have a conception of a single, integrated human being, and that in his view this conception is crucial to the success of human beings as rational and moral agents and as (...) practitioners of science. The passions are pivotal in this, and in a rich and wide-ranging discussion she examines Descartes' place in the tradition of thought about the passions, the metaphysics of actions and passions, sensory representation, and Descartes' account of self-mastery and virtue. Her study is an important and original reading not only of Descartes' account of mind-body unity but also of his theory of mind. (shrink)

This dissertation is a defence of agent-regret and an exploration of its role in our lives. I argue that agent-regret shows that an agent takes seriously her status as an agent who impacts the world, but who only has fallible control over it. To accept responsibility for any outcomes, she must accept responsibility for unintended outcomes, too: agent-regret is part of being a human agent. In doing this, I try to defend and develop Williams’s own conception (...) of agent-regret. -/- In the first part, I explore the nature of agent-regret. Agent-regret is distinct from guilt because we can feel agent-regret without being at fault. I argue that several challenges that seek to reduce agent-regret to a form of guilt fail. I further argue that agent-regret takes as its object not only something one has done, but the fact that one did it; I discuss this in terms of what Bernard Williams called taking an “external” view on one’s own action. -/- I suggest that we can best understand the object of agent-regret as one’s responsibility for an outcome. I argue that this form of “responsibility” is conceptually separate from liability or answerability; it concerns whether the outcome can be ascribed to an agent. This is a restricted form of causal responsibility but retains its agential character. I suggest that we can be responsible for outcomes even when we did not intend to bring them about. -/- In the second part, I vindicate the propriety of agent-regret against the ideas that we are not responsible for unintended outcomes or that such responsibility is not important. I set out several challenges to this effect. I argue that we are responsible for unintended outcomes because in order to be responsible as agents at all, we must use fallible abilities. When we exercise these abilities but fail, we are responsible as agents for those unintended outcomes that arise. I then consider the importance of being responsible for particular unintended outcomes and analyse the idea that this affects our identities. I argue that responsibility for an outcome affects a form of identity, but that it does not involve essential features of a person. Instead, our responsibility for outcomes is a contingent feature that nonetheless plays an important role in our interpersonal interactions and self-conceptions. I argue that these reactions are appropriate, because our responsibility for particular outcomes is independently significant—but these reactions also lend this responsibility added significance as part of inescapable human practices. -/- Thus our responsibility for outcomes is important. Its importance means that it can serve as an appropriate object of agent-regret that vindicates the propriety of agent-regret. I end by considering several interesting features of agent-regret, including its expression and “pure” cases, which are cases where an agent feels agent-regret despite not regretting the result of her action. (shrink)

People act for reasons. That is how we understand ourselves. But what is it to act for a reason? This is what Fred Schueler investigates. He rejects the dominant view that the beliefs and desires that constitute our reasons for acting simply cause us to act as we do, and argues instead for a view centred on practical deliberation--our ability to evaluate the reasons we accept. Schueler's account of 'reasons explanations' emphasizes the relation between reasons and purposes, (...) and the fact that the reasons for an action are not always good reasons. (shrink)

This paper concerns the credibility problem for commitments. Commitments play an important role in cooperative human interactions and can dramatically improve the performance of joint actions by stabilizing expectations, reducing the uncertainty of the interaction, providing reasons to cooperate or improving action coordination. However, commitments can only serve these functions if they are credible in the first place. What is it then that insures the credibility of commitments? To answer this question, we need to provide an account of (...) what motivates us to abide by our commitments. We first discuss two conceptions of the nature of the commitments present in joint action and of the norms that govern them. We contend that while normative considerations may have some motivational force, there are reasons to doubt that they, by themselves, could provide a sufficient motivational basis to fully explain why agents abide by their commitments and thus why their commitments are credible. In the next two sections, we discuss two proposals regarding further sources of motivation, reputation management and social emotions. We argue that while reputation management and social emotions certainly play a role in motivating us to act as committed, there are both theoretical and empirical reasons to think that neither captures the most basic motivational force at work in sustaining commitments. We propose instead that the need to belong, i.e., the need to affiliate with others and form long-lasting bonds with them, is what primarily motivates us to interact and engage with those around us and act so as to preserve and reinforce the bonds we have forged with them. We argue that the need to belong is a more basic proximate motivation for conforming to commitments, in the sense both that affiliative behaviors are evidenced much earlier in human development than either reputation management or social emotions and that the need to belong is at least part of an explanation of why we care for our reputation and why we care about others’ assessments of our behavior. (shrink)

Galen Strawson has claimed that "the impossibility of free will and ultimate moral responsibility can be proved with complete certainty." Strawson, I take it, thinks that this conclusion can be established by one argument which he has developed. In this argument, he claims that rational free actions would require an infinite regress of rational choices, which is, of course, impossible for human beings. In my paper, I argue that agent causation theorists need not (...) be worried by Strawson's argument. For agent causation theorists are able to deny a key principle which drives the regress. Oversimplifying things a bit, the principle states that if one is responsible for her rational actions, then she was antecedently responsible for the reasons on which she acted. (shrink)

Agents are entities that act upon the world. Rational agents are those that do so in an intelligent fashion. What is essential to such an agent is the ability to select and perform actions. Actions are selected by planning, and performing such actions is a matter of plan execution. So the essence of a rational agent is the ability to make and execute plans. This constitutes practical cognition. In order to perform its principal function (...) of practical cognition, a rational agent must also be able to acquire the knowledge of the world that is required for making and executing plans. This is done by epistemic cognition. Rational agents embedded in a realistically complicated world (e.g., human beings) may devote more time to epistemic cognition than to practical cognition, but even for such agents, epistemic cognition is in an important sense subservient to practical cognition. (shrink)

In virtue of their capacity for political agency, political agents can possess special rights, powers, and responsibilities, such as rights to political participation and freedom of speech. Traditionally, political theorists have assumed that only cognitively unimpaired adult humans are political agents, and thus that only those humans can be the bearers of these rights, powers, and responsibilities. However, recent work in animal rights theory has extended the concept of political agency to nonhuman animals. In this article, (...) I develop an account of political agency that identifies the capacities that one must possess to be a political agent and captures the fact that political action is a distinctive type of action. Crucially, this account makes sense of the standard assumption that only some humans count as political agents, and explains why few nonhuman animals, human infants, and severely cognitively impaired humans are likely to possess the capacity for political agency. I go on to reject the view, recently advanced by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, that nonhuman animals can be ‘nonintentional political agents’. I conclude by suggesting that most nonhuman animals, as well as human infants and humans with severe cognitive impairments, cannot straightforwardly be assigned rights to political participation. (shrink)

Collingwood's faith in the historian's intuitive capacity for discerning the meaning of past actions by re-enactment" is too unqualified. However, his thesis that through actions alone can reasons and inner meanings be discovered is true. This assumes that actions can be traced to recognizable agents and that these agents are able to acknowledge their reasons. The relation between knowing and doing and between knowing and understanding is a form of causality not inconsistent with teleological reasoning. (...) Characteristic of human action are the constitutive nature of causality, the delimiting effect of rationality on human autonomy, and the role of purpose as a mediating link between intention and outcome. Despite the fact that emphasis on impersonal actions and interactions seriously calls into question Collingwood's theory of understanding, any radical revision of this theory proves no less problematical. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that we have obligations not only to perform certain actions, but also to have certain attitudes (such as desires, beliefs, and intentions), and this despite the fact that we rarely, if ever, have direct voluntary control over our attitudes. Moreover, I argue that whatever obligations we have with respect to actions derive from our obligations with respect to attitudes. More specifically, I argue that an agent is obligated to perform an (...) action if and only if it’s the action that she would perform if she were to have the attitudes that she ought to have. This view, which I call attitudism, has three important implications. First, it implies that an adequate practical theory must not be exclusively act-orientated. That is, it must require more of us than just the performance of certain voluntary acts. Second, it implies that an adequate practical theory must be attitude-dependent. That is, it must hold that what we ought to do depends on what attitudes we ought to have. Third, it implies that no adequate practical theory can require us to perform acts that we would not perform even if we were to have the attitudes that we ought to have. I then show how these implications can help us both to address certain puzzling cases of rational choice and to understand why most typical practical theories (utilitarianism, rational egoism, virtue ethics, Rossian deontology, etc.) are mistaken. (shrink)

Why do humans reason? Many animals draw inferences, but reasoning—the tendency to produce and respond to reason-giving performances—is biologically unusual, and demands evolutionary explanation. Mercier and Sperber advance our understanding of reason’s adaptive function with their argumentative theory of reason. On this account, the “function of reason is argumentative… to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade.” ATR, they argue, helps to explain several well-known cognitive biases. In this paper, I develop a neighboring hypothesis called the intention alignment model and (...) contrast it with ATR. I conjecture that reasoning evolved primarily because it helped social hominins more readily and fully align their intentions. We use reasons to advance various proximal ends, but in the main, we do it to overwrite the beliefs and desires of others: to get others to think like us. Reason afforded our ancestors a powerful way to build and maintain the shared outlooks necessary for a highly collaborative existence. Yes, we sometimes argue so as to gain argumentative advantage over others, or otherwise advantage ourselves at the expense of those we argue with, but more often, we reason in ways that are mutually advantageous. In fact, there are excellent reasons for thinking this must be so. IAM, I suggest, neatly explains the available evidence, while also providing a more coherent account of reason’s origins. (shrink)

There exist many competing philosophical definitions of joint action and no clear criteria to decide between them; so far the search for definitions has by and large been a semantical enterprise rather than an empirical one. This chapter describes and assesses several constraints that could help converge towards a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for joint action. The tightness constraint favours definitions that fit joint actions in which the links between agents are as relaxed as possible, (...) so as to better pinpoint the conceptual core of jointness. The developmental constraint asks for definitions based on realistic psychological states that could be entertained by agents less cognitively developed than ideal human beings. The motor constraint holds that definitions should refer to psychological mechanisms involved in actual human coordination. These first three constraints are discussed and dismissed, mainly because they manage to establish vague limits at best (for various reasons). I then introduce a fourth one, the efficiency constraint, based on the fact that most of our joint actions are generally successful, and according to which definitions should involve conditions that help justify this success. Finally, the rational and evolutionary versions of the efficiency constraint are examined and defended against objections. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant’s Theory of ActionLara DenisRichard McCarty. Kant’s Theory of Action. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xxiv + 250. Cloth, $74.00.This significant, stimulating contribution to Kantian practical philosophy strives to interpret Kant’s theory of action in ways that will increase readers’ understanding and appreciation of Kant’s moral theory. Its thesis is that Kant combines metaphysical freedom and psychological determinism: our actions within the phenomenal world (...) are causally determined by our prior psychological states in that world and are appearances of our free action in the noumenal world. McCarty argues for a metaphysical, “two-worlds” interpretation of Kant’s transcendental distinction between appearances and things in themselves over epistemological or methodological “two-standpoints” interpretations familiar from Christine Korsgaard [End Page 533] and Henry Allison (along the way, McCarty also challenges Allison’s “Incorporation Thesis”). Some of the book’s arguments are textual, displaying perceptive readings of Kant’s lecture notes, published works, and philosophical influences. Others primarily concern the philosophical plausibility or moral tenability of various positions one might attribute to Kant. The book’s greatest strength is McCarty’s positive account of Kant’s theory of action. He presents a coherent, even elegant, two-worlds model. His interpretations of maxims, incentives, empirical character, and Gesinnung are insightful.The book’s first two chapters introduce McCarty’s understanding of maxims and incentives and begin tackling what he calls “the problem of justification and explanation.” Chapter 3 defends the claim that Kant embraced psychological determinism. Chapters 4 and 5 present McCarty’s two-worlds interpretation of the transcendental distinction, defend it from objections, and argue for its superiority over two-standpoint interpretations. Chapter 6 focuses on moral motivation, presenting respect for the moral law as an incentive capable of explaining morally justified actions, and distinguishing between morally worthy and virtuous action so as to defend Kant’s ethics from common objections. Chapter 7 similarly disentangles notions of a good will and virtue, provocatively claiming that all human agents have both a good will and virtue. The main task of chapter 7, however, is analysis of the radical evil in human nature. Chapter 8 raises questions about Kant’s conception of the highest good—particularly, the afterlife in which we are to continue our moral progress—as an object of rational hope.I read the book’s main argument as follows:1. Kant’s theory of action must solve “the problem of justification and explanation”: it must show how the reasons that justify a judgment that one ought to do something can also explain one’s doing it. Kant’s theory of action must solve this problem because if what justifies an action cannot also explain it, such justification is “irrelevant.” Only if our actions are explicable in terms of practical reasoning is justification of action by practical reasoning (e.g. by reference to hypothetical or categorical imperatives) “relevant” to our conduct. The problem of justification and explanation arises as it does within Kant’s ethics because Kant holds that pure reason is capable of issuing in action; yet he also holds that human beings and other imperfectly rational agents do not invariably act as we recognize we ought. So we cannot explain our acting as we ought (when we do) simply by appeal to “ought implies can,” internalism, or “the causality of freedom.”2. Psychological determinism, combined with a metaphysical interpretation of Kant’s transcendental distinction, allows Kant to solve the problem of justification and explanation. Through a timeless, free act in the noumenal world, we each fix our empirical character, which serves as the “causal law” for our actions in the phenomenal world. Maxims, which function as both major premises in practical syllogisms and rules of our empirical characters, provide bases for both the imperatival justifications and motivational explanations of human actions. The “logical force” of a maxim justifies action on it; the “psychological force” of the maxim—specifically, of the incentive incorporated into the maxim—explains action on it.3. Psychological determinism is compatible with and beneficial for Kant’s moral theory. Most crucially, it is compatible with the freedom necessary for moral agency and responsibility.4. Two-standpoint... (shrink)

This paper concerns acting for reasons and how this can inform debates about the metaphysics of time. Storrs-Fox (2021) has argued against the A-theory of time on the grounds that it cannot adequately account for the explanation of actions. Storrs-Fox assumes that explanation is forever. He argues that this is incompatible with the A-theory because the reasons people act for are the explanantia of their actions, though according to the A-theory these reasons, that is facts, often (...) do not obtain forever and therefore nor do the explanations. I will argue that many particular explanatory relations are not forever because reasons for actions must often fade as a person cannot now have a reason to do something at an earlier time. Generally, people cannot affect the past and therefore cannot have rational obligations to do so. Therefore, the A-theory does not face the problem Storrs-Fox suggests. In fact, the A-theory says what ought to be said and accounts for the wider phenomena of responding to reasons better than the B-theory. It is often the case that an agent acts rationally only if that agent acts on the basis of a present tensed belief. This implies that present tensed beliefs capture facts that no tenseless beliefs do, because the rationality of an action is determined by the reasons an agent acts for, not the beliefs through which the agent is aware of these. However, the B-theory, unlike the A-theory, denies there are any facts thus uniquely captured by present tensed beliefs. (shrink)

Kant famously made a distinction between actions from duty and actions in conformity with duty claiming that only the former are morally worthy. Kant’s argument in support of this thesis is taken to rest on the claim that only the motive of duty leads non-accidentally or reliably to moral actions. However, many critics of Kant have claimed that other motives such as sympathy and benevolence can also lead to moral actions reliably, and that Kant’s thesis is (...) false. In addition, many readers of Kant find the claim that we should deny moral worth to a dutiful action performed from friendly inclination highly counterintuitive. Moreover, Kantian commentators disagree about the status of actions in conformity with duty, some claim that these can be taken as equally morally worthy as those performed from duty, while others argue that they are not even permissible. -/- It has also been claimed that Kant’s theory of moral worth should be related to the theory of the Gesinnung developed in the Religion. Thus, some authors claim that, in order for an action to possess moral worth, the agent has to be unconditionally committed to morality, that is, the agent must possess a virtuous character or good fundamental maxim (i.e. a good Gesinnung). However, according to Kant’s radical evil thesis (that is, the thesis that man is evil by nature ), the default position for man is to possess an evil Gesinnung, i.e. a Gesinnung which is only conditionally committed to morality insofar as morality does not demand a great sacrifice of our own happiness. So, an unwelcome consequence of this line of interpretation is that in Kantian ethics morally worthy actions become very rare indeed. -/- The paper is divided in two parts. The first part aims to clarify why Kant thought that only actions from duty are morally worthy, replying to some common objections against Kant’s view. I argue that Kant’s non-accidental condition should not be understood in terms of reliability because such interpretation is incompatible with Kant’s theory of motivation and rational agency. I propose an alternative interpretation which supports Kant’ s claim that only the motive of duty leads nonaccidently to dutiful actions, and thus only actions from duty possess moral worth. I end by showing that although actions in conformity with duty are worthless from the moral point of view, they are not (in many cases) impermissible. The first part concludes that the criterion for the permissibility of actions is different to the criterion for the ascription of moral worth. Thus, rightness, which pertains to actions performed on maxims that can be willed as universal laws, and moral worth, which pertains to actions performed from a sense of duty, should be understood as two different levels of moral assessment. -/- The second part of the paper examines Kant’s conception of virtue with the aim of showing that although only agents with a virtuous character (good Gesinnung) will reliably act from duty, a person with an evil character (evil Gesinnung) could on frequent occasions act from duty. I argue that we should not deny moral worth to actions performed from duty even when the agent has an evil Gesinnung. Goodness of Gesinnung is not a necessary condition of the action of an agent possessing moral worth; reliability of motivation is necessary for the ascription of virtue but not for the ascription of moral worth. It follows that virtue, which refers to the agent’s character or fundamental maxim (i.e. the agent’s Gesinnung), and moral worth are also two different levels of moral assessment. The paper concludes that three levels of moral assessment can be distinguished in Kant’s ethical system: (i) rightness, (ii) moral worth and (iii) moral virtue. Moral virtue is the highest level of moral perfection for a human being. Striving towards virtue requires constant progress and effort and ultimately a ‘revolution of the heart.’ The important point is that even when we are still striving to achieve virtue (i.e. an unconditional commitment to morality), we can ascribe moral worth to actions performed by a genuine sense of duty. It turns out that, contrary to many influential interpretations, Kantian ethics is not merely concerned with the rightness or wrongness of particular actions nor is Kantian ethics primarily an ethic of virtue. Instead, Kant’s ethical system is complex and allows for different levels of moral assessment in which both an action-centred and agent-centred perspective can be integrated. (shrink)

This paper argues that contemporary philosophical literature on meaning in life has important implications for the debate about our obligations to non-human animals. If animal lives can be meaningful, then practices including factory farming and animal research might be morally worse than ethicists have thought. We argue for two theses about meaning in life: that the best account of meaningful lives must take intentional action to be necessary for meaning—an individual’s life has meaning if and only (...) if the individual acts intentionally in ways that contribute to finally valuable states of affairs; and that this first thesis does not entail that only human lives are meaningful. Because non-human animals can be intentional agents of a certain sort, our account yields the verdict that many animals’ lives can be meaningful. We conclude by considering the moral implications of these theses for common practices involving animals. (shrink)

Counterexamples are constructed for the theory of rational choice that results from a direct application of classical decision theory to ordinary actions. These counterexamples turn on the fact that an agent may be unable to perform an action, and may even be unable to try to perform an action. An alternative theory of rational choice is proposed that evaluates actions using a more complex measure, and then it is shown that this is equivalent (...) to applying classical decision theory to "conditional policies" rather than ordinary actions. (shrink)

We are creatures of habit. Familiar ways of doing things in familiar contexts become automatic for us. That is to say, when we acquire a habit we can act without thinking about it at all. Habits free our minds to think about other things. Without this capacity for habitual action our daily lives would be impossible. Our minds would be crowded with innumerable mundane considerations and decisions. Habitual actions are not always mundane. Aristotle famously said that acting morally (...) is a matter of exercising the right habits.2 For him, a lack of conscious thought is no bar on an action’s moral status. Habits are involved in our most prized activities. Of course our natural capacity for acquiring habits is sometimes a nuisance, and we acquire bad habits all too easily. But we nevertheless could not do without a vast array of habits which are not like this, and we can’t help but exercise them in our daily lives. It does not seem too strong to say that we spend much more of our time acting habitually than we do acting in the light of conscious thought. We are also rational creatures. It is because of our rationality that we naturally think that most human actions are different in kind from the behaviour of other animals. This difference is manifest in the fact that we hold rational creatures personally responsible for what they do, in ways that would make no sense for nonrational creatures. Our rationality, then, appears to give our actions a unique quality. (shrink)

The subject of human acts has been one of the controversial topics of kalām since the first centuries of Islam. A lot of concerning human acts –from divine attributes to divine decree and destiny, from the issue of good and evil (ḥusn and Qubḥ) to the boundaries of the reasoning, from the accountability with impossible things to the rational accountability, from the topics of substance and accident to causality- has been said and written in the history of (...) Islamic tought. In this study, the subject was discussed especially within the scope of man’s on his own action in connection with the divine knowledge, will, and power. On this issue, the Muʻtazila argues that human beings are independent in doing their good and evil acts with the power that God has given to them because of His will and wisdom, and that the evil actions that they have done cannot be associated with the divine attributes in any way. Sunnī theologians assert that God creates human actions through man’s orginated power. They also arguethat evil acts are not independent of the Divine Creation although human beings are the reason of evil in terms of thier acquisition (kasb) and will (irāda). Nevertheless, the representetives of the Sunnī kalām (Asharites and Māturīdis) differ on their account of acquisition, which expresses man’s agency in his acts. In contrary to the Mātūrīdiya, the Ashʻariya holds that acquisition is a created act of God. On the other hand, the Mashshai (peripatetic) philosophers, who are opposed by teologians on some issues such as divine attributes and the working of activity/acts in nature, consider human’s actions part of the eternal chain of cause-effect that emanate (al fayḍ) from the First Principle. However, according to them, every link of this chain is formed by the divine providence (al-ināyah). They also attribute morally evil acts not to the First Principle which is complete (tām) and full good (hayr), but to agents in the cause-effect chain. In summary, according to both teologians and philosophers, the ultimate source of human acts is the divine will and power. The acts that are morally or religiously evil, are not independent of man’s will. Thus, human beings are accountable for their actions. Philosophers and teologians, who agree on these issues, have explained their views and build their opinions on different concepts and principles. They have shown a very different attitude in their discourse and secondary principles, while all of them basically try to express the same idea. This difference has revealed within the frame of the following questions: Is man’s accountability for his actions because of his created power or will? Can evil actions, which are willed by human beings and therefore created by God, attributed to Him? Does the fact that the world emanates from God, the First Principle, due to His knowledge and essence, necessitate Him to be a willless and ineffective agent, and therefore to be a cause cause that has no effect on man's actions?Although teologians and philosophers have put forward different views in the context of the answers to these questions, they agree on the issues we have mentioned above. As this study shows, there is actually a common purpose in this subject, man’s actions, which causes deep divisions between theologians and philosophers in Islamic history. Primary sources of the study are the basic texts of the schools mentioned above. Additionally, the study were limited to the subject the effect of human on acts. It consists of two parts: the main part and the conclusion part. In the main section, the approaches of schools were examined from two aspects, in in terms of divine attribute and human effectiveness, and in the conclusion section, the common purposes behind the discussions were determined. (shrink)

Various special investigative methods are more often applied nowadays; their use is unavoidably induced by today’s reality in combating organised crime in the spheres such as corruption, prostitution, drug trafficking, trafficking in persons, money counterfeit and etc. Therefore, special secret investigative methods are more often used and they are very effective in gathering evidence for the purpose of detecting and investigating very well-organised or latent crimes. Both the Convention on the Protection on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms itself, i.e. (...) its Article 6, and other international instruments, such as the Council of Europe’s Criminal Law Convention, the Council of Europe’s Convention on Laundering, Search, Seizure and Confiscation of the Proceeds from Crime and others, do not prohibit the use of special investigative methods, provided that their use does not violate human rights. The use of special investigative methods, such as undercover agents or other undercover investigative methods, cannot in itself infringe human rights and the right to a fair trial; however, its use must have clear limits and safeguards. The recent judgements of the European Court of Human Rights regarding the use of undercover agents confirm that the use of undercover agents in certain types of cases is often unavoidable and also very problematic, because the Court imposes on the member states of the Convention increasingly wider obligations. Partly this is determined by the fact that the current jurisprudence of the Court is still in the state of formation, therefore many questions are left unanswered. (shrink)

Actors may be called on to judge their reasons for action at two different points in time: once when they form an intention to act in the future and again at the time of action. At the time the actor forms her intention, her perspective is a general one, encompassing a range of possible circumstances that cannot be narrowed or fully specified in advance of action. At time of action, the actor's perspective is particularized, with more evidence available about (...) reasons for action. This difference in perspective presents a dilemma for rational agents. In many contexts, reliable advance planning has great value. It allows for intra-personal and interpersonal coordination and minimizes bias in favor of salient or emotionally charged facts. At the time of action, additional evidence about the context of the act clarifies, or appears to clarify, current reasons for action. I describe this dilemma in two contexts: rule-following and promissory commitment. In each case there may be significant practical reasons for agents to stand by their original intentions, treating them as exclusionary reasons for action. Yet, if the agent revisits her intentions at the time of action, her reasons for action may support, or appear to support, a change in course. I begin by examining theories of practical rationality that extend rationality over time and thus permit agents to act on their initial intentions. Understood in this way, practical rationality may require agents to follow rules or honor promises without further consideration of reasons for action. I argue, however, that on a plausible understanding of epistemic rationality and epistemic responsibility to respond to evidence, acting without reflection may be epistemically irrational. If this is correct, then the dilemma of general and particular decisionmaking persists, and affects important aspects of human life. We manage only by being imperfectly irrational. (shrink)

Interactions between an intelligent software agent and a human user are ubiquitous in everyday situations such as access to information, entertainment, and purchases. In such interactions, the ISA mediates the user’s access to the content, or controls some other aspect of the user experience, and is not designed to be neutral about outcomes of user choices. Like human users, ISAs are driven by goals, make autonomous decisions, and can learn from experience. Using ideas from bounded rationality, we frame (...) these interactions as instances of an ISA whose reward depends on actions performed by the user. Such agents benefit by steering the user’s behaviour towards outcomes that maximise the ISA’s utility, which may or may not be aligned with that of the user. Video games, news recommendation aggregation engines, and fitness trackers can all be instances of this general case. Our analysis facilitates distinguishing various subcases of interaction, as well as second-order effects that might include the possibility for adaptive interfaces to induce behavioural addiction, and/or change in user belief. We present these types of interaction within a conceptual framework, and review current examples of persuasive technologies and the issues that arise from their use. We argue that the nature of the feedback commonly used by learning agents to update their models and subsequent decisions could steer the behaviour of human users away from what benefits them, and in a direction that can undermine autonomy and cause further disparity between actions and goals as exemplified by addictive and compulsive behaviour. We discuss some of the ethical, social and legal implications of this technology and argue that it can sometimes exploit and reinforce weaknesses in human beings. (shrink)

Artificial agents are progressively becoming more present in everyday-life situations and more sophisticated in their interaction affordances. In some specific cases, like Google Duplex, GPT-3 bots or Deep Mind’s AlphaGo Zero, their capabilities reach or exceed human levels. The use contexts of everyday life necessitate making such agents understandable by laypeople. At the same time, displaying human levels of social behavior has kindled the debate over the adoption of Dennett’s ‘intentional stance’. By means of a comparative (...) analysis of the literature on robots and virtual agents, we defend the thesis that approaching these artificial agents ‘as if’ they had intentions and forms of social, goal-oriented rationality is the only way to deal with their complexity on a daily base. Specifically, we claim that this is the only viable strategy for non-expert users to understand, predict and perhaps learn from artificial agents’ behavior in everyday social contexts. Furthermore, we argue that as long as agents are transparent about their design principles and functionality, attributing intentions to their actions is not only essential, but also ethical. Additionally, we propose design guidelines inspired by the debate over the adoption of the intentional stance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On the Necessity of TheaterNoël CarrollDespite the fact that theater was the first art form to be examined in depth by Western philosophers, it has not received a great deal of attention by contemporary philosophers of art. Essays on literature, music, and cinema are more likely to appear in journals such as the British Journal of Aesthetics and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism than are (...) articles on theater. But with the publication of Paul Woodruff's The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched, James Hamilton's The Art of Theater and the recent anthology Staging Philosophy, edited by David Zucker Saltz and David Krassner, the tide seems to be turning. Philosophers are interested in theater again. Perhaps some lovers of theater may regard this as bad news, recalling what Plato, Augustine, and Rousseau attempted to do to theater. But contemporary philosophers of theater belong more to the school of Aristotle than to that of Plato.Of these recent contributions to the philosophy of theater, Paul Woodruff's book is the one that most resembles Aristotle's Poetics, especially in terms of its analyses of plotting, characterization, conflict, choice, and mimesis. This is maybe no surprise, since Paul Woodruff is not only a professor of philosophy, but also a professor of classics at the University of Texas at Austin. [End Page 435]One thing that is immediately striking about The Necessity of Theater is the elegance of its intellectual design. Woodruff begins with the hypothesis that theater is the art by which human beings make or find human action worth watching in measure time and place. That is, theater is art of being watched and watching. This distinction between being watched and watching, then, provides Woodruff with the means to, on the one hand, examine the elements that go into making theater, and, on the other hand, the elements that go into watching or appreciating theater.Creating theater involves making something worth watching—something that will hold the audience's attention. What sorts of things command our attention? Human action, notably as it is organized in terms of a plot which Woodruff, like Aristotle, emphasizes must be of a magnitude sufficient to be cognitively manageable. Since actions require choices, Woodruff follows his analysis of plot, naturally enough, with a discussion of the choices that give rise to those actions for much the same reason that Aristotle includes dialogue as one of the components of tragedy.In order to be worth watching, Woodruff recommends that these choices be free and coherent. Since choices derive—or are thought to derive—from character, theater, in order to hold our attention, needs characters. These characters must be agents and, in addition, they must be capable of engaging our emotions, not just pity and fear, but the gamut of emotions, although the most important of these, on Woodruff's view, would appear to be the elicitation of care on the part of the audience on behalf of the characters on stage. Woodruff contends that care for a character is engendered by giving the character a past as well as hopes for the future (an aim, a project, a problem) and by making that person a center of love (that is, someone who loves and/or is loved by or who cares and is cared for by other people).Theater primarily makes us interested in watching people by encouraging us to respond to characters emotionally. It is able to do this because it traffics in mimesis. Woodruff understand mimesis as a matter of a mimetic object, a theater piece, bringing to the fore certain effects of the object of which it is a representation. With respect to a theater piece, the relevant effects are emotional effects. Because mimesis is selective, it may be able to achieve those effects more intensely than its off-stage model can; the selectivity of the theater piece both places greater emphasis on the emotion-provoking features of situations while also blocking out otherwise [End Page 436] interfering detail. However, theater does require the complicity of the audience who must fill-in the model imaginatively.The introduction of the role of the audience's... (shrink)

Suppose that it is rational to choose or intend a course of action if and only if the course of action maximizes some sort of expectation of some sort of value. What sort of value should this definition appeal to? According to an influential neo-Humean view, the answer is “Utility”, where utility is defined as a measure of subjective preference. According to a rival neo-Aristotelian view, the answer is “Choiceworthiness”, where choiceworthiness is an irreducibly normative notion of a (...) course of action that is good in a certain way. The neo-Humean view requires preferences to be measurable by means of a utility function. Various interpretations of what exactly a “preference” is are explored, to see if there is any interpretation that supports the claim that a rational agent’s “preferences” must satisfy the “axioms” that are necessary for them to be measurable in this way. It is argued that the only interpretation that supports the idea that the rational agent’s preferences must meet these axioms interprets “preferences” as a kind of value-judgment. But this turns out to be version of the neo-Aristotelian view, rather than the neo-Humean view. Rational intentions maximize expected choiceworthiness, not expected utility. (shrink)