Whereas The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure supplements Evolution of the Social Contract by examining some of the earlier work’s strategic problems in a local interaction setting, no equivalent supplement exists for The Dynamics of Rational Deliberation . In this article, I develop a general framework for modeling the dynamics of rational deliberation in a local interaction setting. In doing so, I show that when local interactions are permitted, three interesting phenomena occur: (a) the attracting deliberative equilibria (...) may fail to agree with any of the Nash equilibria of the underlying game, (b) deliberative dynamics which converged to the same deliberative outcome in The Dynamics of Rational Deliberation may lead to different deliberative outcomes here, and (c) Bayesian deliberation seems to be more likely to avoid nonstandard deliberative outcomes, contrary to the result reported in The Dynamics of Rational Deliberation , which argued in favour of the Brown–von Neumann–Nash dynamics. (shrink)

One of the reasons for adopting hyperbolic discounting is to explain preference reversals. Another is that this value structure suggests an elegant theory of the will. I examine the capacity of the theory to solve Newcomb's problem. In addition, I compare Ainslie's account with other procedural theories of choice that seem at least equally capable of accommodating reversals of preference.

Thomas Nagel's The Possibility of Altruism (1970) is one of the few sustained attempts to reject instrumental and prudential conceptions of practical reason and to defend the possibility of practical reason that is impartial or altruistic. Nagel makes claims about both moral motivation and practical reason, and each claim has both negative and positive constituents.

Abstract In this paper, I ask why Aristotle thinks that ethical virtue (rather than mere self-control) is required for practical wisdom. I argue that a satisfactory answer will need to explain why being prone to bad appetites implies a failing of the rational part of the soul. I go on to claim that the self-controlled person does suffer from such a rational failing: a failure to take a specifically rational kind of pleasure in fine action. However, this still leaves a (...) problem: could there not be someone who (unlike the self-controlled person) took the right kind of pleasure in fine action, but who failed to be virtuous on account of bad appetites? If so, would such a person be practically wise but not virtuous? I end with some suggestions about how Aristotle might answer this. (shrink)

I propose a model of intention formation and argue that it illuminates and does justice to the complex and interesting relationships between intentions on the one hand and practical deliberation, evaluative judgements, desires, beliefs, and conduct on the other. As I explain, my model allows that intentions normally stem from pro-attitudes and normally control conduct, but it is also revealing with respect to cases in which intentions do not stem from pro-attitudes or do not control conduct. Moreover, it makes the (...) connection between forming an intention and altering one's deliberative framework transparent, and directly accounts for the fact that while intentions can affect how it makes sense for an agent to reason and what it makes sense for her to do, one cannot make an action that one is tempted to perform worth performing simply by forming a related intention. (shrink)

I sketch my general model of the roles of intentions in the planning of agents like us-agents with substantial resource limitations and with important needs for coordination. I then focus on the stability of prior intentions: their rational resistance to reconsideration. I emphasize the importance of cases in which one's nonreconsideration of a prior intention is nondeliberative and is grounded in relevant habits of reconsideration. Concerning such cases I argue for a limited form of two-tier consequentialism, one that is restricted (...) in ways that aim at blocking an analogue of Smart's concerns about rule-worship. I contrast this with the unrestricted two-tier consequentialism suggested by McClennen. I argue that my restricted approach is superior for a theory of the practical rationality of reflective, planning agents like us. But I also conjecture that an unrestricted two-tier consequentialism may be more appropriate for the AI project of specifying a high level architecture for a resource-bounded planner. (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)

Most familiar approaches to social conflict moot reasonable ways of dealing with conflict, ways that aim to serve values such as legitimacy, justice, morality, fairness, fidelity to individual preferences, and so on. In this paper, I explore an alternative approach to social conflict that contrasts with the leading approaches of Rawlsians, perfectionists, and social choice theorists. The proposed approach takes intrinsic features of the conflict—what I call a conflict's evaluative 'structure'—as grounds for a rational way of responding to that conflict. (...) Like conflict within a single person, social conflict can have a distinctive evaluative structure that supports certain rational responses over others. I suggest that one common structure in both intra- and interpersonal cases of conflict supports the rational response of 'self-governance'. Self-governance in the case of social conflict involves a society's deliberating over the question, 'What kind of society should we be?' In liberal democracies, this rational response is also a reasonable one. (shrink)

On a ‘comparative’ conception of practical reasons, reasons are like ‘weights’ that can make an action more or less rational. Bernard Gert adopts instead a ‘toggle’ conception of practical reasons: something counts as a reason just in case it alone can make some or other otherwise irrational action rational. I suggest that Gert’s conception suffers from various defects, and that his motivation for adopting this conception – his central claim that actions can be rational without there being reasons for them (...) – does not require adoption of the toggle conception. The more intuitive comparative conception of reasons for action can accommodate the insight. (shrink)

An autonomous reason for intending to A would be a reason for so intending that is not, and will not be, a reason for A-ing. Some puzzle cases, such as the one that figures in the toxin puzzle, suggest that there can be such reasons for intending, but these cases have special features that cloud the issue. This paper describes cases that more clearly favour the view that we can have practical reasons of this sort. Several objections to this view (...) are considered and rejected. Finally, it is considered whether the existence of such reasons would conflict with an attractive coherence principle linking the rationality of intending with that of acting as intended. The paper concludes with a qualified affirmation of autonomous reasons for intending. (shrink)

methods that have shown promise for improving extreme risk analysis, particularly for assessing the risks of invasive pests and pathogens associated with international trade. We describe the legally inspired regulatory regime for banks, where these methods have been brought to bear on extreme ‘operational risks’. We argue that an ‘advocacy model’ similar to that used in the Basel II compliance regime for bank operational risks and to a lesser extent in biosecurity import risk analyses is ideal for permitting the diversity (...) of relevant evidence about invasive species to be presented and soundly evaluated. We recommend that the process be enhanced in ways that enable invasion ecology to make more explicit use of the methods found successful.. (shrink)

The paper shows why and how an empirical study of fast-and-frugal heuristics can provide norms of good reasoning, and thus how (and how far) rationality can be naturalized. We explain the heuristics that humans often rely on in solving problems, for example, choosing investment strategies or apartments, placing bets in sports, or making library searches. We then show that heuristics can lead to judgments that are as accurate as or even more accurate than strategies that use more information and computation, (...) including optimization methods. A standard way to defend the use of heuristics is by reference to accuracy-effort trade-offs. We take a different route, emphasizing ecological rationality (the relationship between cognitive heuristics and environment), and argue that in uncertain environments, more information and computation are not always better (the “less-can-be-more” doctrine). The resulting naturalism about rationality is thus normative because it not only describes what heuristics people use, but also in which specific environments one should rely on a heuristic in order to make better inferences. While we desist from claiming that the scope of ecological rationality is unlimited, we think it is of wide practical use. (shrink)

The standard account of weakness of will identifies it with akrasia, that is, with action against one's best judgment. Elsewhere I have argued that weakness of will is better understood as over-readily giving up on one's resolutions. Many cases of weak willed action will not be akratic: in over-readily abandoning a resolution an agent may well do something that they judge at the time to be best. Indeed, in so far as temptation typically gives rise to judgment shift -- to (...) a tendency to change one's judgment so that one values the tempting option as the best -- weak willed action will typically be akratic. But conversely, strong willed action now looks as though it will be akratic. I argue though that it need not be, once we distinguish between actual judgment, and dispositions to judge. Within this framework, the issue of inverse akrasia looks rather different. I argue that whilst Huckleberry Finn plausibly does show weakness of will in abandoning his resolve to turn Jim in, it is far from clear that he is akratic: a point brought out well in Twain's later additions to the text. Whilst cases of inverse akrasia are clearly theoretically possible, I suggest that, given cognitive dissonance mechanisms, they are unlikely to be very common. (shrink)

Choice is one of the central elements in the experience of free will, but it has not received a good account from either compatibilists or libertarians. This paper develops an account of choice based around three features: (i) choice is an action; (ii) choice is not determined by one's prior beliefs and desires; (iii) once the question of what to do has arisen, choice is typically both necessary and sufficient for moving to action. These features might appear to support a (...) libertarian account, but they do not. Instead it is argued that all three features can be accommodated within a compatibilist account, where choice is needed because of agents' inabilities to arrive at judgements about what is best. Choice differs though from random picking: in choosing, agents frequently (though not always) deploy abilities that enable them to make good choices. In such cases, judgements about what is best will frequently follow the choice. Finally choice is distinguished from agency, and, on the basis of the distinction, the claim that choice is an action is made good. (shrink)

In everyday life, situations in which we act adequately yet entirely without deliberation are ubiquitous. We use the term “situated normativity” for the normative aspect of embodied cognition in skillful action. Wittgenstein’s notion of “directed discontent” refers to a context-sensitive reaction of appreciation in skillful action. Extending this notion from the domain of expertise to that of adequate everyday action, we examine phenomenologically the question of what happens when skilled individuals act correctly with instinctive ease. This question invites exploratory contributions (...) from a variety of perspectives complementary to the philosophical/ phenomenological one, including cognitive neuroscience, neurodynamics and psychology. Along such lines we try to make the normative aspect of adequate immediate action better accessible to empirical research. After introducing the idea that “valence” is a forerunner of directed discontent, we propose to make progress on this by first pursuing a more restricted exploratory question, namely, ‘what happens in the first few hundred milliseconds of the development of directed discontent?’. (shrink)

Niko Kolodny It is often said that there is a special class of norms, ‘rational requirements’, that demand that our attitudes be related one another in certain ways, whatever else may be the case.1 In recent work, a special class of these rational requirements has attracted particular attention: what I will call ‘requirements of formal coherence as such’, which require just that our attitudes be formally coherent.2 For example, we are rationally required, if we believe something, to believe what it (...) entails. And we are rationally required, if we intend an end, to intend what we take to be necessary means to it. The intuitive idea is that formally incoherent attitudes give rise to a certain normative tension, or exert a kind of rational pressure on each another, and this tension, or pressure, is relieved just when one of the attitudes is revised. As John Broome observes, these requirements are, by their nature, ‘wide scope’, which is to say that there is no particular attitude that one must have or lack in order to satisfy them. This is because they require just formal coherence, and there is no particular attitude that one must have or lack in order to be formally coherent. (shrink)

Research on patients with damage to ventromedial frontal cortices suggests a key role for emotions in practical decision making. This field of investigation is often associated with Antonio Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis–a putative account of the mechanism by which autonomic tags guide decision making in typical individuals. Here we discuss two ‘myths’ surrounding the direction and interpretation of this research. First, it is often assumed that there is a single somatic marker hypothesis. As others have noted, however, Damasio’s ‘hypothesis’ admits (...) of multiple interpretations (Colombetti, [2008]; Dunn et al. [2006]). Our analysis builds upon this point by characterizing decision making as a multi-stage process and identifying the various potential roles for somatic markers. The second myth is that the available evidence suggests a role for somatic markers in the core stages of decision making, i.e. during the generation, deliberation or evaluation of candidate options. To the contrary, we suggest that somatic markers most likely have a peripheral role, in the recognition of decision points, or in the motivation of action. This conclusion is based on an examination of the past 25 years of research conducted by Damasio and colleagues, focusing in particular on some early experiments that have been largely neglected by the critical literature. (shrink)

Chrisoula Andreou says procrastination qua imprudent delay is modeled by Warren Quinn’s self-torturer, who supposedly has intransitive preferences that rank each indulgence in something that delays his global goals over working toward those goals and who finds it vague where best to stop indulging. His pair-wise choices to indulge result in his failing the goals, which he then regrets. This chapter argues, contra the money-pump argument, that it is not irrational to have or choose from intransitive preferences; so the agent’s (...) delays are not imprudent, not instances of procrastination. Moreover, the self-torturer case is intelligible only if there is no vagueness and if the agent’s preferences are transitive. But then he would delay only from ordinary weakness of will. And when it is vague where best to stop indulging, rational agents would use symmetry-breaking techniques; so, again, any procrastination would be explained by standard weakness of will, not vagueness. (shrink)

I reject three theories of practical reason according to which a rational agent's ultimate reasons for acting must be unchanging: that one is rationally obliged in each choice (1) to be prudent--to advance all the desires one foresees ever having (the self-interest theory), rather than just those one has at the time of choice, or (2) to cause states of affairs that are good by some timeless, impersonal measure (Thomas Nagel), or (3) to obey permanent, universalizable deontic principles (Kant). Whether (...) a rational agent's reasons consist in her desires, in the goodness of certain states, or in deontic principles, her reasons now can ask her to take different, conflicting things as reasons later; and contradiction results of rationally obliging her not to take the new things for reasons. (shrink)

Gauthier claims: (1) a non-maximizing action is rational if it maximized to intend it. If one intended to retaliate in order to deter an attack, (2) retaliation is rational, for it maximized to intend it. I argue that even on sympathetic theories of intentions, actions and choices, (1) is incoherent. But I defend (2) by arguing that an action is rational if it maximizes on preferences it maximized to adopt given one's antecedent preferences. (2) is true because it maximized to (...) adopt preferences on which it maximizes to retaliate. I thus save the theory that rational actions must maximize, and extend it into the rational criticism of preferences. (shrink)

David Gauthier thinks agents facing a prisoner's dilemma ('pd') should find it rational to dispose themselves to co-operate with those inclined to reciprocate (i.e., to acquire a constrained maximizer--'cm'--disposition), and to co-operate with other 'cmers'. Richmond Campbell argues that since dominance reasoning shows it remains to the agent's advantage to defect, his co-operation is only rational if cm "determines" him to co-operate, forcing him not to cheat. I argue that if cm "forces" the agent to co-operate, he is not acting (...) at all, never mind rationally. Thus, neither author has shown that co-operation is rational action in a pd. (shrink)

We argue against a positive case Enoch offers for thinking that there are non-natural normative properties. Enoch had argued that there is a general difference in how we should treat preference disputes and factual disputes--a difference that shows that normative disputes look more like factual disputes than like preference disputes. We argue that that is not so.

Commentators on the Nicomachean Ethics (NE) have long been laboring under the influence of a serious misunderstanding of one of the key terms in Aristotle's moral philosophy and theory of action. This term is prohairesis (choice), the importance of which is indicated by Aristotle's assertions that choice is the proximate efficient cause of action (NE 6. 1139a31--32) and that in which "the essential elements of virtue and character" lie (NE 8. x 163a2'~-23). The accepted view is that Aristotle employs two (...) importantly different notions of choice in the NE, one on which the term refers exclusively to means or things which are pros (toward, related to)' ends and another on which it does not have this reference? (shrink)

Rational agents, it seems, are capable of adopting intentions which make actions rational, which they would otherwise have reason not to do. This paper considers, and rejects, two explanations of this: Constraint Accounts, claiming that adopting such intentions renders one unable to act or to will otherwise; and Indirection accounts, claiming that doing so makes the intended action preferred to its alternatives. I argue that some such explanations are inconsistent with the claim intentions are conduct-controlling pro-attitudes, and others with the (...) claim an action is intentional only if caused and rationalized by some combination of mental states. (shrink)

How should we understand the relation between decision-making and motivation? Thomas Pink has recently argued (Pink 1996) that decisions perpetuate pre-existing motives, and that whatever motivated the formation of a decision should, after that decision is taken, also motivate the action. In this article I argue that this view has certain problems, and that these problems can be solved if we assume instead that decisions are motive-generating.

The traditional form of the backward induction argument, which concludes that two initially rational agents would always defect, relies on the assumption that they believe they will be rational in later rounds. Philip Pettit and Robert Sugden have argued, however, that this assumption is unjustified. The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct the argument without using this assumption. The formulation offered concludes that two initially rational agents would decide to always defect, and relies only on the weaker assumption that (...) they do not believe they will not be rational in later rounds. The argument employs the idea that decisions justify revocable presumptions about behaviour. (shrink)

In their attempt to provide a reason to be moral, contractarians such as David Gauthier are concerned with situations allowing a group of agents the chance of mutual benefit, so long as at least some of them are prepared to constrain their maximising behaviour. But what justifies this constraint? Gauthier argues that it could be rational (because maximising) to intend to constrain one's behaviour, and in certain circumstances to act on this intention. The purpose of this paper is to examine (...) the conditions under which it is rational to form, and to act on, intentions. I introduce and examine in detail what Gauthier has to say on these issues, argue that it suffers from various problems, and propose an alternative account which I claim avoids them. (shrink)

This book presents a new theory of the will - of our capacity for decision making. The book argues that taking a decision to act is something we do, and do freely - as much an action as the actions which our decisions explain - and that our freedom of action depends on this capacity for free decision-making. But decision-making is no ordinary action. Decisions to act also have a special executive function, that of ensuring the rationality of the further (...) actions which they explain. This executive function makes decision-making an action importantly unlike any other, with its own distinctive rationality. Pink's original and highly persuasive study uses this theory of the will to provide new accounts of freedom, action and rational choice. The author argues that, in a tradition that runs from Hobbes to Davidson and Frankfurt, Anglo-American philosophy has misrepresented the common-sense psychology of our freedom and action - a psychology which this book now presents and defends. (shrink)

In this chapter, I articulate the structure of a general concept of autonomy and then reply to possible objections with reference to Ulysses arrangements in psychiatry. The line of argument is as follows. Firstly, I examine three alternative conceptions of autonomy: value-neutral, value-laden, and relational. Secondly, I identify two paradigm cases of autonomy and offer a sketch of its concept as opposed to the closely related freedom of action and intentional agency. Finally, I explain away the autonomy paradox, to which (...) the previously identified pair of paradigm cases seems to give rise in the context of mental disorder. By addressing this paradox, we learn two valuable lessons. The first is about the relationships between the three conceptions of autonomy above. The second is about the relationship between autonomy and mental disorder. (shrink)

This paper presents a number of apparent anomalies in rational choice scenarios, and their translation into the logic of everyday reasoning. Three classes of examples that have been discussed in the context of probabilistic choice since the 1960s (by Debreu, Tversky and others) are analyzed in a non-probabilistic setting. It is shown how they can at the same time be regarded as logical problems that concern the drawing of defeasible inferences from a given information base. I argue that initial appearances (...) notwithstanding, these cases should not be classed as instances of irrationality in choice or reasoning. One way of explaining away their apparent oddity is to view certain aspects of these examples as making particular options salient. The decision problems in point can then be solved by ‘picking’ these options, although they could not have been ‘chosen’ in a principled way, due to ties or incomparabilities with alternative options. (shrink)

Why can't deliberation conclude in an intention except by considering whether to perform the intended action? I argue that the answer to this question entails that reasons for intention are determined by reasons for action. Understanding this feature of practical deliberation thus allows us to solve the toxin puzzle.

Sarah Stroud and Christine Tappolet present eleven original essays on weakness of will, a topic straddling the divide between moral philosophy and philosophy of mind, and the subject of much current attention. An international team of established scholars and younger talent provide perspectives on all the key issues in this fascinating debate; the book will be essential reading for anyone working in the area. Issues covered include classical questions, such as the distinction between weakness and compulsion, the connection between evaluative (...) judgment and motivation, the role of emotions in akrasia, rational agency, and the existence of the will. They also include new topics, such as group akrasia, strength of will, the nature of correct choice, the structure of decision theory, the temporality of prudential reasons, and emotional rationality. Because these questions cut across philosophy of mind and ethics, the collection will be essential reading for scholars, postgraduates, and upper-level undergraduates in both these fields. (shrink)

“What do you see when you look at your face in the mirror?” asks J. David Velleman in introducing his philosophical theory of action. He takes this simple act of self-scrutiny as a model for the reflective reasoning of rational agents: our efforts to understand our existence and conduct are aided by our efforts to make it intelligible. Reflective reasoning, Velleman argues, constitutes practical reasoning. By applying this conception, Practical Reflection develops philosophical accounts of intention, free will, and the foundation (...) of morals. This new edition of Practical Reflection contains the original 1989 text along with a new introduction and is the latest entry in The David Hume Series of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Reissues, which keeps in print previously published indispensable works in the area of cognitive science. (shrink)

Suppose that rational choices are to be defined as choices that maximize some sort of expectation of some sort of value. What sort of value should this definition appeal to? According to a familiar 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 – the notion of an action that is good in a certain way. This (...) paper argues against the neo-Humean answer, and in favour of the neo-Aristotelian answer. Various possible 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 measuring those preferences by means of a utility “function”. 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. (shrink)

I propose a model of intention formation and argue that it illuminates and does justice to the complex and interesting relationships between intentions on the one hand and practical deliberation, evaluative judgements, desires, beliefs, and conduct on the other. As I explain, my model allows that intentions normally stem from pro-attitudes and normally control conduct, but it is also revealing with respect to cases in which intentions do not stem from pro-attitudes or do not control conduct. Moreover, it makes the (...) connection between forming an intention and altering one's deliberative framework transparent, and directly accounts for the fact that while intentions can affect how it makes sense for an agent to reason and what it makes sense for her to do, one cannot make an action that one is tempted to perform worth performing simply by forming a related intention. (shrink)

Is there a mode of sincere advice in which the standards of the adviser are put aside in favor of the standards of the advisee? I consider two sorts of cases that appear to be such that the adviser is evaluating things from within the advisee’s system of standards even though this system conflicts with her own; and I argue that these cases are best interpreted in ways that dissolve this appearance. I then argue that the nature of sincere advice (...) precludes an adviser’s putting aside her own system of standards in favor of a competing system of standards. It follows that, contrary to what some have suggested, it cannot be that practical reason judgments—which are concerned with what an agent has reason to do or not to do and which can figure as advice— evaluate actions from within the agent’s (as opposed to the judger’s) system of standards. (shrink)

This paper examines Moran’s argument for the special authority of the first-person, which revolves around the Self/Other asymmetry and grounds dichotomies such as the practical vs. theoretical, activity vs. passivity, and justificatory vs. explanatory reasons. These dichotomies qualify the self-reflective person as an agent, interested in justifying her actions from a deliberative stance. The Other is pictured as a spectator interested in explaining action from a theoretical stance. The self-reflective knower has authority over her own mental states, while the Spectator (...) does not. I highlight the implications of this construal for a theory of action, and call attention onto some other interesting normative relations between the self-reflective agent and the Other that escape both the first-person and the third-person approach. My contention is that the authority of self-reflection (and of reason) is best understood as a relation of mutual recognition between self and others, hence from a second-person stance. (shrink)

In deciding whether to read this paper, it might seem reasonable for you to base your decision on your confidence (i) that, if you read this paper, you will become a better person. It might also seem reasonable for you to base your decision on your confidence (ii) that, if you were to read this paper, you would become a better person. Is there a difference between (i) and (ii)? If so, are you rationally required to base your decision on (...) your confidence in one of the two conditionals, rather than the other? Keith DeRose (2010) proposes a provocative pair of answers to these questions. In this paper, I argue that DeRose’s answers are incorrect, and I defend a rival pair of answers. (shrink)

In this paper I am not so much concerned with movements of the mind, as movements of the will. But my question bears a similarity to that of the tortoise. I want to ask whether the will is under the control of fact and reason, combined. I shall try to show that there is always something else, something that is not under the control of fact and reason, which has to be given as a brute extra, if deliberation is ever (...) to end by determining the will. This is, of course, a Humean conclusion, and the only novelty comes in the way I wish to argue for it. I believe that many philosophers think, erroneously, that Hume relies on a naive and outdated conception of facts, or on an even more naive and outdated conception of reason, in order to put passion on their throne. My tortoise defends Hume: what we do with our premises is not itself construed as acceptance of a premise. As it stands the project is only described metaphorically. Presumably everything, including movement of the will, is under the control of facts in some sense, for even if they are only facts about our physiology or chemistry, still, they make us move. I am interested only in cognitive control, or control by the apprehension of fact and reason. (shrink)

There is an apparent tension in current accounts of the relationship between reason giving and self knowledge. On the one hand, philosophers like Richard Moran (2001) claim that deliberation and justification can give rise to first-person authority over the attitudes that subjects form or defend on the basis of what they take to be their best reasons. On the other hand, the psychological evidence on the introspection effects and the literature on elusive reasons suggest that engaging in explicit deliberation or (...) justification leads subjects to report attitudes that are not consistent with their previous attitudes or with their future behavior. On the basis of these findings, Tim Wilson (2002) argues that analyzing reasons compromises self knowledge. I shall defend a realistic account of the effects of reason giving which is compatible with the empirical findings on introspection and also with the claim that deliberation and justification have epistemic benefits. (shrink)

This chapter sketches a model of deliberation that is anchored in plan-like commitments of the agent, commitments that constitute a form of valuing. These anchors need not be inescapable, they can sensibly vary from person to person, they can stand in complex relations to judgments about the good, and they play basic roles in the coss-temporal organization of practical thought and action. And deliberation so understood is, I conjecture, central to autonomy and self-government. The model sketched here is located in (...) the space between Frankfurtian appeals to volitional necessity and Platonic appeals to judgments about the best. It sees anchors for deliberation as valuings that have agential authority, are potentially revocable, can diverge across rational agents, and bear complex relations to judgments about the best. Their reasonable stability involves defeasible presumptions both against reconsideration and against revision, presumptions characteristic of plan-like commitments and supported by considerations of cross-temporal instrumentality, integrity and autonomy. And this support for stability by connections to cross-temporal organization goes in part by way of the connection between cross-temporal organization and agential authority. (shrink)

We are planning agents and we are, or so we suppose, responsible agents. How are these two distinctive aspects of our agency related? In his "Freedom and Resentment" Peter Strawson understands responsible agency in terms of "reactive attitudes" like resentment and gratitude, attitudes which are normally embedded in "ordinary inter-personal relationships." I draw on Strawson''s account to sketch an answer to my question about responsibility and planning. First, the fact that an action is plan-embedded can influence the agent''s degree of (...) culpability for that action; for such embeddings can constitute or indicate important facts about the quality of the agent''s will. Second, general planning incapacities can to some extent exempt an agent from normal judgments of responsibility. My argument for this second claim appeals to the normal roles of planning in "ordinary inter-personal relationships.". (shrink)

I sketch my general model of the roles of intentions in the planning of agents like us-agents with substantial resource limitations and with important needs for coordination. I then focus on the stability of prior intentions: their rational resistance to reconsideration. I emphasize the importance of cases in which one's nonreconsideration of a prior intention is nondeliberative and is grounded in relevant habits of reconsideration. Concerning such cases I argue for a limited form of two-tier consequentialism, one that is restricted (...) in ways that aim at blocking an analogue of Smart's concerns about rule-worship. I contrast this with the unrestricted two-tier consequentialism suggested by McClennen. I argue that my restricted approach is superior for a theory of the practical rationality of reflective, planning agents like us. But I also conjecture that an unrestricted two-tier consequentialism may be more appropriate for the AI project of specifying a high level architecture for a resource-bounded planner. (shrink)

In Section 1, I rehearse some arguments for the claim that morality should be ``action-guiding'', and try to state the conditions under which a moral theory is in fact action-guiding. I conclude that only agents who are cognitively and conatively ``ideal'' are in general able to use a moral theory as a guide to action. In Sections 2 and 3, I discuss whether moral ``actualism'' implies that morality cannot be action-guiding even for ideal agents. If actualism is true, an ideal (...) agent will know about her own future actions. Since such foreknowledge is often thought to be incompatible with deliberation, and since action-guidance presupposes the possibility of deliberation, there is an apparent difficulty in combining actualism with the requirement of action-guidance. In opposition to an argument by Jan Österberg, I try to show that actualism and action-guidance are in fact compatible. (shrink)

Most familiar approaches to social conflict moot reasonable ways of dealing with conflict, ways that aim to serve values such as legitimacy, justice, morality, fairness, fidelity to individual preferences, and so on. In this paper, I explore an alternative approach to social conflict that contrasts with the leading approaches of Rawlsians, perfectionists, and social choice theorists. The proposed approach takes intrinsic features of the conflict—what I call a conflict's evaluative 'structure'—as grounds for a rational way of responding to that conflict. (...) Like conflict within a single person, social conflict can have a distinctive evaluative structure that supports certain rational responses over others. I suggest that one common structure in both intra- and interpersonal cases of conflict supports the rational response of 'self-governance'. Self-governance in the case of social conflict involves a society's deliberating over the question, 'What kind of society should we be?' In liberal democracies, this rational response is also a reasonable one. (shrink)

On a ‘comparative’ conception of practical reasons, reasons are like ‘weights’ that can make an action more or less rational. Bernard Gert adopts instead a ‘toggle’ conception of practical reasons: something counts as a reason just in case it alone can make some or other otherwise irrational action rational. I suggest that Gert’s conception suffers from various defects, and that his motivation for adopting this conception – his central claim that actions can be rational without there being reasons for them (...) – does not require adoption of the toggle conception. The more intuitive comparative conception of reasons for action can accommodate the insight. (shrink)

Let’s say that you are omniprescient iff you always believe—occurrently and with maximal confidence—all and only truths, including ones about the future. Several philosophers have argued that an omniprescient being couldn’t engage in certain kinds of activity.[1] In what follows, I present and assess the most promising such argument I know of—what I’ll call the Serious Deliberation Argument (SDA). It concludes that omniprescience rules out serious deliberation—i.e., trying to choose between incompatible courses of action once you know that none is (...) conclusively favored by your reasons.[2] The SDA—which (I’ll argue) should disturb many traditional theists—derives from an argument due to Tomis Kapitan[3]; and my favored objection to the SDA—roughly: that it fails because dependent on the alleged incompatibility of omniprescience and freedom—superficially resembles a reply to Kapitan’s argument due to David Hunt.[4] Along the way, then, I’ll briefly discuss Kapitan’s argument, and Hunt’s reply, to show how they differ from the SDA and my favored objection to it. I begin by presenting the Serious Deliberation Argument. (shrink)

In this paper we present an account of practical rationality and weakness of will in terms of rational capacities. We show how our account rectifies various shortcomings in Michael Smith’s related theory. In particular, our account is capable of accommodating cases of weak-willed behaviour that are not ‘akratic’, or otherwise contrary to the agent’s better judgement. Our account differs from Smith’s primarily by incorporating resolve: a third rational capacity for resolute maintenance of one’s intentions. We discuss further two ways to (...) explain the importance of resolve to practical rationality: one based on Richard Holton’s recent work, and an alternative, non-consequentialist account. (shrink)

Incompatibilists often claim that we experience our agency as incompatible with determinism, while compatibilists challenge this claim. We report a series of experiments that focus on whether the experience of having an ability to do otherwise is taken to be at odds with determinism. We found that participants in our studies described their experience as incompatibilist whether the decision was (i) present-focused or retrospective, (ii) imagined or actual, (iii) morally salient or morally neutral. The only case in which participants did (...) not give incompatibilist judgments was when the question was explicitly about whether one’s ignorance of the future was compatible with determinism. This lends empirical support to claims made by incompatibilists about the experience of agency, while also showing that compatibilist accounts of ability are inadequate to the reported phenomenology. Our results also inform recent debates about the presuppositions of deliberation. (shrink)

There is a surprising disconnect between formal rational choice theory and philosophical work on reasons. The one is silent on the role of reasons in rational choices, the other rarely engages with the formal models of decision problems used by social scientists. To bridge this gap, we propose a new, reason-based theory of rational choice. At its core is an account of preference formation, according to which an agent’s preferences are determined by his or her motivating reasons, together with a (...) ‘weighing relation’ between different combinations of reasons. By explaining how someone’s preferences may vary with changes in his or her motivating reasons, our theory illuminates the relationship between deliberation about reasons and rational choices. Although primarily positive, the theory can also help us think about how those preferences and choices ought to respond to normative reasons. (shrink)

I take issue with two claims of DeRose: Conditionals of deliberation must not depend on backtracking grounds. ‘Were’ed-up conditionals coincide with future-directed indicative conditionals; the only difference in their meaning is that they must not depend on backtracking grounds. I use Egan’s counterexamples to causal decision theory to contest the first and an example of backtracking reasoning by David Lewis to contest the second claim. I tentatively outline a rivaling account of ‘were’ed-up conditionals which combines features of the standard analysis (...) of counterfactuals with the contextual relevance of the corresponding indicative conditionals. (shrink)

In this essay, I defend a view I call “Robust Realism” about normativity. According to this view, there are irreducibly, perfectly objective, normative truths, that when successful in our normative inquiries we discover rather than create or construct. My argument in support of Robust Realism is modeled after arguments from explanatory indispensability common in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mathematics. I argue that irreducibly normative truths, though not explanatorily indispensable, are nevertheless deliberatively indispensable, and that this kind (...) of indispensability is just as respectable as the more familiar explanatory kind. Deliberative indispensability, I argue, justifies belief in normative facts, just like the explanatory indispensability of, say, theoretical entities like electrons justifies belief in electrons. In the introduction I characterize the view I will be arguing for and sketch the main argument of this essay. In chapter 1 I draw the analogy between explanatory and deliberative indispensability, and argue that there is no non-question-begging reason to take the former but not the latter seriously. Here I also present the master-argument of the thesis, and clarify the argumentative work that needs to be done by each of the following chapters. In chapter 2 I address the worries of the antirealist who is willing to reject arguments from explanatory indispensability as well. In other words, in this chapter I try to justify the move from indispensability (of whatever kind) to belief. In chapter 3 I develop an account of deliberation that supports the premises about deliberation needed for my master-argument to go through. In chapter 4 I reject some alternative views, showing that none of them can allow for sincere deliberation. In this chapter, in other words, I support the indispensability premise: I argue that it really is impossible to deliberate sincerely without believing in irreducibly normative truths.. (shrink)

This paper discusses whether rationality, morality or prudence impose process-requirements upon us. It has been argued that process-requirements fulfil two essential functions within a system of rational, moral or prudential requirements. These functions are considered to prove the existence of process-requirements. First, process-requirements are deemed necessary to ensure that rationality, morality or prudence can guide our deliberations and actions. Second, their existence is regarded as essential for the correctness of our ordinary explanations of why a person possesses a certain degree (...) of morality, rationality or prudence. However, I argue that these two functions are unable to show the existence of process-requirements. Instead, I propose a different essential function for process-requirements: they are necessary for attributing the correct degree of rationality, morality or prudence to a subject who is not entirely rational, moral or prudent. This function, I argue, necessitates the existence of process-requirements. (shrink)

Suppose rationality requires you to A if you believe you ought to A. Suppose you believe that you ought to A. How can you satisfy this requirement? One way seems obvious. You can satisfy this requirement by A-ing. But can you also satisfy it by stopping to believe that you ought to A? Recently, it has been argued that this second option is not a genuine way of satisfying the above requirement. Conditional requirements of rationality do not have two ‘symmetric’, (...) but only one ‘asymmetric’ satisfaction condition. This paper explores the consequences of this argument for a theory of the requirements of rationality. I seek to show that thisview conflicts with another powerful intuition about the requirements of rationality, i.e. ‘rational consistency’: if rationality requires you to X, then it is not the case that rationality requires you to not-X. I shall conclude that ‘asymmetric’ satisfying is based on a misleading intuition, for which we should not sacrifice ‘rational consistency’. (shrink)

Kant frequently speaks as if all voluntary actions arise from our maxims as the subjective principles of our practical reason. But, as Michael Albrecht has pointed out, Kant also occasionally speaks as if it is only the rare person of “character” who acts according to principles or maxims. I argue that Kant’s seemingly contradictory claims on this front result from the fact that there are two fundamentally different ways that maxims of action can figure in the deliberation of the agent: (...) an agent can act on a maxim either because it promises agreeable results or because he deems it to be an intrinsically correct principle of action. Kant describes a maxim of the latter sort as “firm” and as indicative of “character” in the honorific sense. If the agent’s commitment to his maxim is instead conditional on its agreeable results, we can say he does not act “on principle” and in that sense does not act on maxims at all: rather than aiming at a set of results because the action that produces them conforms to his maxim, he acts according to his maxim because doing so promises (and only as long as it promises) the results he desires. Such an agent thus lacks the principled maxims of a person of character since his maxims are always for sale to the highest bidder. Kant allows that an evil person can approximate the ideal of a principled indifference to results, but claims that only morally good action can be wholly principled. This is also why maxims of action in conformity with duty can be acquired gradually through habituation whereas an authentically moral maxim must instead arise from a “revolution” in thought. (shrink)

There seems to be a special relationship between belief and truth that can be metaphorically expressed by saying that belief “aims” at truth or that belief’s “direction of fit” is “to fit the world.” There is an Aristotelian thesis, according to which the special relationship between belief and truth is the same as the special relationship between desire and goodness. Assuming that belief “aims” at truth, then, desire “aims” at goodness. This contrasts with a Humean thesis, on which, while belief (...) “aims” at truth, desire has no analogous “aim.” This paper defends the Aristotelian thesis. (shrink)

Suppose an agent has made a judgement of the form, 'all things considered, it would be better for me to do a rather than b (or any range of alternatives to doing a)' where a and b stand for particular actions. If she does not act upon her judgement in these circumstances would that be a failure of rationality on her part? In this paper I consider two different interpretations of all things considered judgements which give different answers to this (...) question, one suggested by Donald Davidson, the other by Paul Grice and Judith Baker. I argue that neither interpretation is adequate. However, a third interpretation that combines features of the Grice/Baker view with the Davidsonian view is possible. In the final section of the paper I defend this interpretation against two objections. (shrink)

What is the point of asking yourself what to do and then thinking hard about it if all the thinking is settled in advance? What is the point of trying to figure out how to run your life if determinism governs your every reflection? Do we not have to suppose that determinism is false if we are to take our own deliberations seriously? The question has long been taken to bedevil the doctrine of determinism. It has been supposed that determinists (...) can have no good answer to it. Well, Professor Kapitan is one good philosopher who thinks otherwise. He takes things forward. His piece will repay your close attention. (shrink)

By deliberation we understand practical reasoning with an end in view of choosing some course of action. Integral to it is the agent's sense of alternative possibilities, that is, of two or more courses of action he presumes are open for him to undertake or not. Such acts may not actually be open in the sense that the deliberator would do them were he to so intend, but it is evident that he assumes each to be so. One deliberates only (...) by taking it for granted that both performing and refraining from any of the acts under consideration are possible for one, and that which is to be selected is something entirely up to oneself. What is it for a course of action to be presumed as open, or for several courses of action to present themselves as a range of open alternatives? Answering these questions is essential for an understanding of deliberation and choice and, indeed, for the entire issue of free will and responsibility. According to one common view, a deliberator takes the considered options to be open only by assuming he is free to undertake any of them and, consequently, that whichever he does undertake is, as yet, a wholly undetermined matter. Built into the structure of deliberation, on this theory, is an indeterministic bias relative to which any deliberator with deterministic beliefs is either inconsistent or condemned to a fatalistic limbo. An unmistakable challenge is thereby posed: is there an alternative conception of the presuppositions underlying deliberation more congenial to a deterministic perspective yet adequate to the data? Convinced that there is, I develop a partial account of deliberation that, though highly similar to the aforementioned view, diverges at a critical juncture. (shrink)

In his discussion of normative concepts in the first part of On What Matters ( 2011 , On What Matters , vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press), Parfit holds that apart from the ‘ought’ of decisive reason, there are other senses of ‘ought’ which do not imply any reasons. This claim poses a dilemma for his ‘reason-involving conception’ of normativity: either Parfit has to conclude that non-reason-implying ‘oughts’ are not normative. Or else he is forced to accept that normativity (...) needs only to involve ‘apparent reasons’ – a certain kind of hypothetical truths about reasons. I argue that both of these options are inacceptable. In the course of the discussion, I present a general objection to ‘apparent reason accounts’ of the normativity of rationality as advocated not only by Parfit, but also by Schroeder (2009) and Way (2009). (shrink)

Objectivists and perspectivists disagree about the question of whether what an agent ought to do depends on the totality of facts or on the agent’s limited epistemic perspective. While objectivism fails to account for normative guidance, perspectivism faces the challenge of explaining phenomena (occurring most notably in advice, but also in first-personal deliberation) in which the use of “ought” is geared to evidence that is better than the evidence currently available to the agent. This paper aims to defend perspectivism by (...) developing a perspectivist account that captures the phenomena in question. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a reductive account of intentions which I call a gate-based reductive account. In contrast with other reductive accounts, however, the reductive basis of this account is not limited to desires, beliefs and judgments. I suggest that an intention is a complex state in which a predominant desire toward a plan is not inhibited by a gate mechanism whose function is to assess the comparison of our desires given the stakes at hand. To vindicate this account, (...) I rely on several considerations: the similarity between epistemic feelings and the feeling of being decided that tells us that we have an intention, the necessity of postulating a gate mechanism to explain our hesitating behavior, and the tight link that exists between the realization of our actions and our desires. In agreement with non-reductivists, I nevertheless acknowledge that intentions encompass plans, although I emphasize that the planning capacity must also be dependent on our motivational life and the general evaluative mechanisms that explains our emotions. (shrink)

This paper considers the question of whether predictions of wrongdoing are relevant to our moral obligations. After giving an analysis of ‘won’t’ claims (i.e., claims that an agent won’t Φ), the question is separated into two different issues: firstly, whether predictions of wrongdoing affect our objective moral obligations, and secondly, whether self-prediction of wrongdoing can be legitimately used in moral deliberation. I argue for an affirmative answer to both questions, although there are conditions that must be met for self-prediction to (...) be appropriate in deliberation. The discussion illuminates an interesting and significant tension between agency and prediction. (shrink)

Many important thinkers in the philosophical tradition, like Aristotle or Hume, have used an explicit theory of action as the basis of their respective normative theories of practical rationality and morality. The idea behind this architecture of theories is that action theory can inform us about the origin, bonds, reach and limits of practical reason. The aim of this book is to revive this direct connection between action theory and practical philosophy, in particular to provide systematic action-theoretical underpinnings for the (...) discussion about the normative structure of practical reason. This book brings together a collection of specially commissioned essays from internationally prestigious scholars in the field and represents the state of the art in contemporary philosophy of action. The book is divided into three parts: i. conceptual work about what actions, intentions and intentional actions are; ii. empirical theory of practical deliberation; and iii.theories about the action theoretic features of autonomy. The volume significantly advances these three lines of research and offers important new contributions to each of them. (shrink)

Chrisoula Andreou says procrastination qua imprudent delay is modeled by Warren Quinn’s self-torturer, who supposedly has intransitive preferences that rank each indulgence in something that delays his global goals over working toward those goals and who finds it vague where best to stop indulging. His pair-wise choices to indulge result in his failing the goals, which he then regrets. This chapter argues, contra the money-pump argument, that it is not irrational to have or choose from intransitive preferences; so the agent’s (...) delays are not imprudent, not instances of procrastination. Moreover, the self-torturer case is intelligible only if there is no vagueness and if the agent’s preferences are transitive. But then he would delay only from ordinary weakness of will. And when it is vague where best to stop indulging, rational agents would use symmetry-breaking techniques; so, again, any procrastination would be explained by standard weakness of will, not vagueness. (shrink)

I reject three theories of practical reason according to which a rational agent's ultimate reasons for acting must be unchanging: that one is rationally obliged in each choice (1) to be prudent--to advance all the desires one foresees ever having (the self-interest theory), rather than just those one has at the time of choice, or (2) to cause states of affairs that are good by some timeless, impersonal measure (Thomas Nagel), or (3) to obey permanent, universalizable deontic principles (Kant). Whether (...) a rational agent's reasons consist in her desires, in the goodness of certain states, or in deontic principles, her reasons now can ask her to take different, conflicting things as reasons later; and contradiction results of rationally obliging her not to take the new things for reasons. (shrink)

To the normal reasons that we think can justify one in preferring something, x (namely, that x has objectively preferable properties, or has properties that one prefers things to have, or that x's obtaining would advance one's preferences), I argue that it can be a justifying reason to prefer x that one's very preferring of x would advance one's preferences. Here, one prefers x not because of the properties of x, but because of the properties of one's having the preference (...) for x. So-revising one's preferences is rational in paradoxical choice situations like Kavka's Deterrence Paradox. I then try to meet the following objections: that this is stoicist, incoherent, bad faith; that it conflates instrumental and intrinsic value, gives wrong solutions to the problems presented by paradoxical choice situations, entails vicious regresses of value justification, falsifies value realism, makes valuing x unresponsive to x's properties, causes value conflict, conflicts with other standards of rationality, violates decision theory, counsels immorality, makes moral paradox, treats value change as voluntary, conflates first- and second-order values, is psychologically unrealistic, and wrongly presumes that paradoxical choice situations can even occur. (shrink)

Gauthier claims: (1) a non-maximizing action is rational if it maximized to intend it. If one intended to retaliate in order to deter an attack, (2) retaliation is rational, for it maximized to intend it. I argue that even on sympathetic theories of intentions, actions and choices, (1) is incoherent. But I defend (2) by arguing that an action is rational if it maximizes on preferences it maximized to adopt given one's antecedent preferences. (2) is true because it maximized to (...) adopt preferences on which it maximizes to retaliate. I thus save the theory that rational actions must maximize, and extend it into the rational criticism of preferences. (shrink)

We argue against a positive case Enoch offers for thinking that there are non-natural normative properties. Enoch had argued that there is a general difference in how we should treat preference disputes and factual disputes--a difference that shows that normative disputes look more like factual disputes than like preference disputes. We argue that that is not so.

This book covers a broad spectrum of positions on practical reasoning—from the nihilist view that there are no legitimate forms of practical inference, and ...

David Gauthier and Edward McClennen have claimed that it could be rational to form an intention to A because it maximizes utility to intend to A, and that acting on such an intention could be rational even if it maximizes utility not to A. Michael Bratman has objected to this way of thinking, claiming that it is equivalent to the familiar rule-utilitarian mistake of rule-worship. The purpose of this paper is to argue that, so long as one is aware at (...) the time of forming an intention to A that it maximizes utility not to A, then acting on that intention need not be rule worship, but the result of a rational refusal to reconsider an issue which has already been adequately considered. (shrink)

Rational agents, it seems, are capable of adopting intentions which make actions rational, which they would otherwise have reason not to do. This paper considers, and rejects, two explanations of this: Constraint Accounts, claiming that adopting such intentions renders one unable to act or to will otherwise; and Indirection accounts, claiming that doing so makes the intended action preferred to its alternatives. I argue that some such explanations are inconsistent with the claim intentions are conduct-controlling pro-attitudes, and others with the (...) claim an action is intentional only if caused and rationalized by some combination of mental states. (shrink)

This thesis proposes that an account of first-person reference and first-person thinking requires an account of practical knowledge. At a minimum, first-person reference requires at least a capacity for knowledge of the intentional act of reference. More typically, first-person reasoning requires deliberation and the ability to draw inferences while entertaining different 'I' thoughts. Other accounts of first-person reference--such as the perceptual account and the rule-based account--are criticized as inadequate. An account of practical knowledge is provided by an interpretation of GEM (...) Anscombe's account in her landmark monograph "Intention". (shrink)

Granted that desire is always present in the genesis of human action, is it something on the presence of which the agent always reflects? I may act on a belief without coming to recognize that I have the belief. Can I act on a desire without recognizing that I have the desire? In particular, can the desire have a motivational presence in my decision making, figuring in the background, as it were, without appearing in the content of my deliberation, in (...) the foreground? We argue, perhaps unsurprisingly, that yes, desire can figure in the background without figuring in the foreground: we call this the strict background view of desire. But we then show, and this is where the surprise comes, that the strict background view of desire has significant implications for contemporary moral philosophy. (shrink)

This introduction consists in a historical overview of the debate about practical irrationality, as illustrated by weakness of will. After a brief reminder of the discussions after Davidson, we consider three important moments of the debate: the ancient debate from Socrates to Xenophon, the medieval debate from Augustine to Buridan, and the modern debate after Descartes. We suggest that it is useful to distinguish weakness of will (a failure to act as one wills) from so-called strict akrasia (a failure to (...) will according to one's better judgment) and raise the question of the metaphysical underpinnings of the internalism/externalism debate. (shrink)

It is a popular view thatpractical deliberation excludes foreknowledge of one's choice. Wolfgang Spohn and Isaac Levi have argued that not even a purely probabilistic self-predictionis available to thedeliberator, if one takes subjective probabilities to be conceptually linked to betting rates. It makes no sense to have a betting rate for an option, for one's willingness to bet on the option depends on the net gain from the bet, in combination with the option's antecedent utility, rather than on the (...) offered odds. And even apart from this consideration, assigning probabilities to the options among which one is choosing is futile since such probabilities could be of no possible use in choice. The paper subjects these arguments to critical examination and suggests that, appearances notwithstanding, practical deliberation need not crowd outself-prediction. (shrink)

In this chapter, I articulate the structure of a general concept of autonomy and then reply to possible objections with reference to Ulysses arrangements in psychiatry. The line of argument is as follows. Firstly, I examine three alternative conceptions of autonomy: value-neutral, value-laden, and relational. Secondly, I identify two paradigm cases of autonomy and offer a sketch of its concept as opposed to the closely related freedom of action and intentional agency. Finally, I explain away the autonomy paradox, to which (...) the previously identified pair of paradigm cases seems to give rise in the context of mental disorder. By addressing this paradox, we learn two valuable lessons. The first is about the relationships between the three conceptions of autonomy above. The second is about the relationship between autonomy and mental disorder. (shrink)

Many among philosophers and non-philosophers would claim that well-being is important in moral theory because it is important to the individual whose well-being it is. The exact meaning of this claim, however, is in need of clarification. Having provided that, I will present a charge against it. This charge can be found in the recent work of both Joseph Raz and Thomas Scanlon. According to the latter the concept of well-being plays an unimportant role in an agent’s deliberation. As (...) I will show, to claim this much is to undermine our initial claim; and to do that is to undermine some of the most central theories in normative ethics. I will focus on Scanlon’s discussion in particular because it affords us with two criteria for the assessment of the importance for a person of a value-concept such as well-being. I will claim that much of Scanlon’s case rests on the idea that well-being is an inclusive good, a good constituted by other things that are good in and for themselves. Then, I will put forward a case against Scanlon’s challenge by (1) showing that inclusiveness, when properly understood, does not lead to the conclusion Scanlon is led to and (2) showing that on at least the reading Scanlon prefers, his criteria are inappropriate. (shrink)

In his important recent book Schroeder proposes a Humean theory of reasons that he calls hypotheticalism. His rigourous account of the weight of reasons is crucial to his theory, both as an element of the theory and constituting his defence to powerful standard objections to Humean theories of reasons. In this paper I examine that rigourous account and show it to face problems of vacuity and consonance. There are technical resources that may be brought to bear on the problem of (...) vacuity but implementation is not simple and philosophical motivation a further difficulty. Even supposing vacuity is fixed, the problems of consonance bring to light a different obstruction lying in Schroeder’s path. There is a difference between the general weighing of reasons and the context specificity of the correct placing of weight on them in deliberation and this difference cannot be fixed by the resources in the account. For these reasons we are still waiting for a plausible Humean theory of reasons. (shrink)

This paper challenges the soundness of an argument given in support of a Ramseyan analysis of belief defended by Dokic and Engel in their 2001 book.

Why can't deliberation conclude in an intention except by considering whether to perform the intended action? I argue that the answer to this question entails that reasons for intention are determined by reasons for action. Understanding this feature of practical deliberation thus allows us to solve the toxin puzzle.

Believing that p, assuming that p, and imagining that p involve regarding p as true—or, as we shall call it, accepting p. What distinguishes belief from the other modes of acceptance? We claim that conceiving of an attitude as a belief, rather than an assumption or an instance of imagining, entails conceiving of it as an acceptance that is regulated for truth, while also applying to it the standard of being correct if and only if it is true. We argue (...) that the second half of this claim, according to which the concept of belief includes a standard of correctness, is required to explain the fact that the deliberative question whether to believe that p is transparent to the question whether p. This argument raises various questions. Is there such a thing as deliberating whether to believe? Is the transparency of the deliberative question whether to believe that p the same as the transparency of the factual question whether I do believe that p? We will begin by answering these questions and then turn to a series of possible objections to our argument. (shrink)