I will argue that this intuitive description is in fact accurate: that we can and do perform actions we know to be wrong simply because we fail to decide what to do. I will then try to show that once we recognize this fact, we can identify a character trait which any plausible moral theory which is not strictly self-defeating must require that we develop. Finally, I will sketch some implications of this argument for the role of virtue in moral (...) theory, and for the nature of moral objectivity. (shrink)

In my 1987 book I tried to understand intentions as, in the basic case, elements of larger and typically partial plans whose primary roles in our lives are ones of coordination and organization, both cross-temporal and social.1 I called this the planning theory of intention. Central to the planning theory is the idea that intentions – in contrast with ordinary desires -- are both embedded in characteristic regularities and are subject to distinctive rational pressures for consistency and coherence. There is, (...) in particular, a rational demand that one’s intentions, taken together with one’s beliefs, fit together into a consistent model of one’s future. There is, further, a rational demand that one’s intentions be means-end coherent in the sense, roughly, that it not be true that one intends E, believes that E requires that one intend means M, and yet not intend M.3 And these norms of consistency and coherence are operative in a planning agent’s practical reasoning. (shrink)

What happens to our conception of mind and rational agency when we take seriously future-directed intentions and plans and their roles as inputs into further practical reasoning? The author's initial efforts in responding to this question resulted in a series of papers that he wrote during the early 1980s. In this book, Bratman develops further some of the main themes of these essays and also explores a variety of related ideas and issues. He develops a planning theory of intention. Intentions (...) are treated as elements of partial plans of action. These plans play basic roles in practical reasoning, roles that support the organization of our activities over time and socially. Bratman explores the impact of this approach on a wide range of issues, including the relation between intention and intentional action, and the distinction between intended and expected effects of what one intends. (shrink)

Cognitivists about Practical Rationality argue that we can explain some of the (apparent) requirements of practical rationality by appealing to the requirements of theoretical rationality. First, they argue that intentions involve beliefs, and, second, they show how the theoretical requirements governing those involved beliefs can explain some of the practical requirements governing those intentions (or they show how these apparently practical requirements are actually theoretical requirements). This paper avoids the ongoing controversy about whether and how intentions involve beliefs and focuses (...) instead on this second part of the Cognitivist approach, where I think Cognitivism faces significant difficulties. I proceed by considering two attempts by Cognitivists to explain (apparent) requirements of practical rationality and I argue that neither of them succeed. (shrink)

This paper presents an objection to the view that intentions provide reasons and shows how this objection is also inherited by the more commonly accepted Tie-Breaker view, according to which intentions provide reasons only in tie-break situations. The paper also considers and rejects T. M. Scanlon's argument for the Tie-Breaker view and argues that philosophers might be drawn to accept the problematic Tie-Breaker view by confusing it with a very similar, unproblematic view about the relation between intentions and reasons in (...) tie-break situations. (shrink)

My goal is to define intending. I defend the view that believing and desiring something are necessary for intending it. They are not sufficient, however, for some things we both expect and want (e.g., the sun to rise tomorrow) are unintendable. Restricting the objects of intention to our own future actions is unwarranted and unhelpful. Rather, the belief involved in intending must be based on the desire in a certain way. En route, I argue that expected but unwanted consequences are (...) not intended, examine the two senses of "desire," distinguish intending from being willing, and relate intending to a variety of other propositional at? titudes. (shrink)

This paper defends an internalist view of agency. The challenge for an internalist view of agency is to explain how an agent’s all-things-considered judgment has necessary implications for action, a challenge that lies specifically in the possibility of two species of akratic break: between judgment and intention, and between intention and action. I argue that the two breaks are not importantly different: in each case akrasia manifests a single species of irrational self-mistrust. I aim to vindicate internalism by showing how (...) rational agency rests on our capacity for trusting receptivity to the verdict of judgment. To call the relation receptivity is to characterize it as fundamentally passive. To call it trusting receptivity is to ensure that the passivity is not incompatible with agency, since trust retains a crucial degree of control. I argue that the best way to meet the externalist argument from akrasia is to abandon the assumption that the will must be a locus of activity. (shrink)

Some philosophers worry that it can never be reasonable to act simply on the basis of trust, yet you act on the basis of self-trust whenever you merely follow through on one of your own intentions. It is no more reasonable to follow through on an intention formed by an untrustworthy earlier self of yours than it is to act on the advice of an untrustworthy interlocutor. But reasonable mistrust equally presupposes untrustworthiness in the mistrusted, or evidence thereof. The concept (...) of an intention, I argue, codifies the fact that practical reason rests on a capacity for reasonable trust. (shrink)

Is a belief that one will succeed necessary for an intention? It is argued that the question has traditionally been badly posed, framed as it is in terms of all-out belief. We need instead to ask about the relation between intention and partial belief. An account of partial belief that is more psychologically realistic than the standard credence account is developed. A notion of partial intention is then developed, standing to all-out intention much as partial belief stands to all-out belief. (...) Various coherence constraints on the notion are explored. It is concluded that the primary relations between intention and belief should be understood as normative and not essential. CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    What's this? (shrink)

What, if anything, has faith to do with intention?1 By ‘faith’ I have in mind the attitude described by William James: Suppose...that I am climbing in the Alps, and have had the ill-luck to work myself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Being without similar experience, I have no evidence of my ability to perform it successfully; but hope and confidence in myself make me sure I shall not miss my aim, and nerve (...) my feet to execute what without those subjective emotions would perhaps have been impossible. But suppose that, on the contrary, the emotions of fear and mistrust preponderate; or suppose that...I feel it would be sinful to act upon an assumption unverified by previous experience,—why, then I shall hesitate so long that at last, exhausted and trembling, and launching myself in a moment of despair, I miss my foothold and roll into the abyss....There are then cases where faith creates its own verification. Believe, and you shall be right, for you shall save yourself; doubt, and you shall again be right, for you shall perish.2.. (shrink)

In an all too familiar part of our lives, we are sometimes strongly tempted to do things we think we shouldn’t do. Consider the burning desire to eat one of the donuts your coworker brought to work while you are on a diet. Often times we surrender to temptation. But sometimes we fight the urges and refrain—we exhibit will-power. Much of our ordinary thinking involves reference to “the will” in this sort of way. Yet for quite some time many contemporary (...) philosophers have avoided talk of the will in their accounts of human action. This is largely because the will was thought to be a mysterious and superfluous thing—a ghostly cog in psychological theory that serves no explanatory purpose. However, there is a growing trend in philosophy that is bringing back talk of the will. Willing, Wanting, Waiting is, refreshingly, part of that trend. Holton develops a unique account of the will and related phenomena that is both empirically informed and philosophically rigorous in a way that is accessible to an interdisciplinary audience. (shrink)

In his "Purposive Intending" T.L.M. Pink (1991) instructively criticized a popular view about intentions and advanced an alternative position of his own. I challenged a pair of theses to which Pink's position committed him (Mele 1992a). Pink now agrees that both theses are false. His mistake, he says, was to express his view in terms of reasons; his position is now to be framed in terms of "justifications" (1993).

T. L. M. Pink, in his (1991) "Purposive Intending", raises an important question about intentions, instructively criticizes a familiar response, and advances an interesting answer of his own. Pink's question is this (p. 343): "What psychological attitudes rationalize and explain intentions to act?" The burden of this note is to show that his answer is problematic.

Al is nearly finished sweeping his kitchen floor when he notices, on a counter, a corkscrew that should be put in a drawer. He intends to put the corkscrew away as soon as he is finished with the floor; but by the time he returns the broom and dustpan to the closet, he has forgotten what he intended to do. Al knows (or has a true belief) that there is something he intended to do now in the kitchen. He gazes (...) around the room and tries to recall what it was. Within a minute or so, without seeing the corkscrew, Al recalls. He puts the corkscrew away. Did Al have an intention to put the corkscrew away that persisted from the time he acquired the intention until he put the corkscrew away? That is one of my guiding questions in this article. (shrink)

As this passage from a recent book on the psychology of decision-making indicates, deciding seems to be part of our daily lives. But what is it to decide to do something? It may be true, as some philosophers have claimed, that to decide to A is to perform a mental action of a certain kind – specifically, an action of forming an intention to A. (Henceforth, the verb ‘form’ in this context is to be understood as an action verb.) Even (...) if this is so, we are faced with pressing questions. Do we form all of our intentions? If not, how does forming an intention differ from other ways of acquiring one? Do we ever, in fact, form intentions, or do we rather merely acquire them in something like the way we acquire beliefs or desires? These are some of the questions that will occupy me here. My aim is to clarify the nature of deciding to act and to make a case for the occurrence of genuine acts of intention formation. (shrink)

In this paper, I restrict the discussion to overt intentional action, intentional action that essentially involves peripheral bodily movement. My guiding question is this: If there is a specific motivational role that intention is plausibly regarded as playing in all cases of overt intentional action, in virtue of what feature(s) of intention does it play this role? I am looking for an answer that can be articulated in the terminology of intentionalist psychology.

My aim in this paper is to refute an intriguing argument of Hugh McCann's for the thesis that'S tried to A' entails 'S intended to A. I shall call this the strong intention thesis about trying, or SIT. SIT implies, as McCann observes, that even an agent who thinks that the probability of her A-ing is close to zero intends to A, provided only that she tries to A.

What is it, precisely, that an agent intends when he intends, as we might say, to clean his stove today? What is the content of his intention? In recent years, Gilbert Harman and John Searle have maintained that all intentions are self-referential -- that is, that an adequate expression of the content of any intention makes essential reference to the intention whose content is being expressed. I shall call this the self-referentiality thesis (SRT). Harman, in his paper 'Practical Reasoning', argues (...) that "the intention to do A is the intention that, because of that very intention, one will do A". Searle, in his book, Intentionality, contends similarly that the "Intentional content" of an agent's "prior intention" to A identifies that very intention as a cause of the agent's (prospective) A-ing. In Sections 1-3 below, I show that the main arguments for the SRT are unsuccessful and that the thesis is problematic. In Section 4, I sketch an alternative account of the contents of intentions. (shrink)

Cognitivism about practical reason is the view that intentions involve beliefs, and that the rational requirements on intentions can be explained in terms of the rational requirements on the beliefs that figure in intentions. In particular, cognitivists about practical reason have sought to provide cognitive explanations of two basic requirements of practical rationality: a consistency requirement, according to which it is rationally impermissible to have intentions that are jointly inconsistent with one’s beliefs, and a means-end coherence requirement, according to which, (...) to a first approximation, it is rationally impermissible to intend an end while failing to intend what one regards as a necessary means to this end. In order for the cognitivist to explain these requirements, she must arrive at an account of the beliefs that figure in intentions, on the basis of which she can show that any agent who violates these requirements of pratical rationality must have beliefs that violate the requirements of theoretical rationality. Providing such an account, however, turns out to be no easy task. (shrink)