Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good* forthcoming in Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy Paul Boswell GRIN/CRÉ, Université de Montréal Abstract According to the Guise of the Good, an agent only does for a reason what she sees as good. One of the main motivations for the view is its apparent ability to explain why action for a reason must be intelligible to its agent, for on this view, an action is intelligible just in case it seems good. Thismotivation has comeunder criticism in recent years. Most notably, Kieran Setiya has argued that merely seeing one's action as good does not suffice to make the action intelligible. In this paper, I show that this objection has bite only because the Guise of the Good's theory of intelligibility has yet seen little sustained articulation. Properly understood, this theory holds that an action is intelligible to an agent only if it appears to them to possess some substantive evaluative property. I then argue that this response to the objection has a significant implication for contemporary Guise of the Good theories, for it shows that the currently ascendant version of the theory, the attitudinal theory, cannot avail itself of the intelligibility motivation. Dave claims he had never before considered suicide, and he doesn't recall being depressed or even sad at the time. But late one otherwise-ordinary night, while walking down a quiet street, Dave saw a car approaching, and it occurred to him that - as he later put it - "what I should do would be to kneel in the street and be hit by the car. It seemed to make perfect sense to me. And so that's what I did".1 The car screeched to a halt just in front of him, and a man got out and demanded to know what he was doing. According to Dave, "I looked at him, and I said, I don't know. I had no idea. I had no explanation for him. ... I still today -what, 25 years later - don't understand what that was and why I did that".2 In spite of the fact that in some way it made sense to him to kneel down, in another way it must have been utterly unintelligible to Dave to kneel. After all, he could find no reason for his action. Cases like Dave's thus motivate what is often called the Intelligibility Constraint (IC) on action for a reason: *Thanks to Samuel Asarnow, Daniel Drucker, Mauro Rossi, Christine Tappolet, Valéry Giroux, Kieran Setiya, Uriah Kriegel, Nandi Theunissen, Jens Gillessen, Angie Pepper, Sarah Buss, StephenWhite, two referees at the Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy, and audiences in Paris, Montreal, and Evanston, for comments that greatly improved the paper. 1Recorded in Glass (2002). 2Ibid. Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good (IC) If an agent φs for a reason, then φing is intelligible to her (according to a certain sense of "intelligible"). IC is not exactly a platitude, concerning as it does an intuitive but yet-unarticulated notion of intelligibility (about which more later). Moreover, it depends upon a particular notion of action for a reason that entails having a genuine reason of one's own for acting. If instead, after months of psychotherapy, Dave were to unearth a repressed fear of appearing to be a failure to his father, and to discover that his genuflection so many years ago was a kind of prayer for forgiveness, then there would be another sense in which he knelt for a reason: he did it in the hope that he would be forgiven. (Call this case "Freudian Dave.") But so long as we stipulate that at the time of action this motivation was fully repressed and that Freudian Dave then had absolutely no idea why he was kneeling, then such a motivation does not speak to a reason of his for kneeling. To be a bit more explicit, I can grant that Freudian Dave has motivating reasons for action in his unconscious beliefs and drives. The sense in which he does not have a reason for action, however, is Anscombian (1963, p. 9): it is because there is no positive answer to the "Why [did you do that]?" question, at least as addressed to him. This latter, full-blooded sense of reasons for acting is the sense I am concerned with throughout. IC, then, claims that there is a deep connection between this full-blooded sense of acting for a reason and a certain way in which actions may or may not be intelligible to their agents. One traditional and perennially popular theory in the philosophy of action, the Guise of theGood (GG), is often held by its proponents to explain IC.3 According toGG, an action done for a reason must be seen as good by its agent, for a certain sense of "seen as good". Furthermore, it holds that action for a reason must be intelligible to its agent because for an action to be intelligible in the relevant way just is for it to be seen as good, in that sense of "seen as good".4 Now, it so happens that current GG theories can be divided almost neatly into two camps according to how they think of such appearances of the good. Some, attitudinal views, hold that these appearances have a presenting-asgood character but that normative notions need not figure in the content of these states. 3See Anscombe (1963); Quinn (1993); Raz (1999, 2010); Tenenbaum (2007); Sussman (2009); Johnston (2001, pp. 189-90); Schapiro (2009, pp. 251-3); Boyle & Lavin (2010, pp. 188-9), among others. Note that Johnston and sometimes Anscombe focus more on how a certain relation to evaluation can make desiring, as opposed to acting, intelligible. Especially in the case of Johnston, this leaves to some extent open the question of whether they accept the precise form of GG I am interested in here, one that concentrates on action for a reason. I will leave this exegetical point aside in the rest of the paper, however. For a concern about whether Quinn accepts IC, see note 22 below. 4See Anscombe (1963, pp. 70-8); Tenenbaum (2007, pp. 32-3); Wiland (2012, pp. 49-52). 2 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good Others, assertoric views, hold that these appearances are better understood as representationswith normative content that are presentedwith assertoric rational significance- that is, the rational significance possessed by belief and perception that consists in their power to defeasibly license further beliefs and inferences from that content.5 In this paper I present a dilemma for the attitudinal theorist who aims to explain IC. The dilemma arises out of an objection from Kieran Setiya (2010), who argues that merely seeing an action as good does not suffice to render that action intelligible.6 (Indeed, as we will see, Dave's case is proof of the possibility.) If that is so, it imperils GG's explanation of IC. I show that the very feature that GG theories need to answer this objection - the feature of motivation's presenting a specific form of the good - forces them to characterize their view in a way that either favors the assertoric model or fails to capture the intelligibility of action. The crux of the argument is that attitudinal views are fundamentally unable to account for agents' mental access to the good. The immediate upshot of the paper is that GG theorists should move to assertoric formulations of the view, at least insofar as they rely on the intelligibility motivation. But in another way the impact of the argument is broader. Near the end of the paper, the dilemma I present will give way to a general argument that attitudinalist accounts of the intelligibility of action, whether they are GG views or not, fail precisely because action is intelligible to an agent in virtue of the content of the agent's mental states. A subsidiary aim of this paper is to articulate an account of the intelligibility motivation for GG, a motivation which is frequently referenced in the literature but rarely set out at length. I will give a limited defense of it here, focusing exclusively on defending it from Setiya's objection. This I do in §2 after introducing the Guise of the Good more thoroughly in §1. Section 3 then presents the dilemma against attitudinal views. 1 The Guise of the Good GG is really a family of views which all hold that human action or motivation to act, of some special kind or another, is only possible insofar as the agent acts or is motivated to act because of the good she sees in so acting.7 According to these views, goodness, or apparent goodness, plays a primary role in themotivation and rationalization of action.8 Before setting out the attitudinal and assertoric versions of the view, I'll flag four key features of the GG family. 5Schroeder (2008), Schafer (2013), and Baker (2014, pp. 4-5) refer to similar distinctions between kinds of GG theories. The term "assertoric" was introduced to the debate by Schafer (2013), though he uses it to qualify a kind of Fregean force that he holds explains the rational significance of perception and belief. 6Derek Baker (2014) has also pressed a version of this objection. 7See Tenenbaum (2013) and Orsi (2015) for recent overviews. 8See for instance Raz (2009) on what he calls the "normative/explanatory nexus". 3 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good GG has been held by various authors to be a constraint on action for a reason (Raz 1999, pp. 22-3); intention, will, or intentional action (Aquinas ST I-II 1.1, 94.2; Davidson 1970, p. 22; Raz, ibid.; Buss 1999, p. 400); or, chiefly, desire (Anscombe 1963, p. 75; Stampe 1987; Oddie 2005; Tenenbaum 2007; and many others). Because my concern is with GG theories generally, and because it is reasonable to assume that GG will constrain action for a reason if it constrains intentional action or desire, here I investigate the weakest form of the view, one holding only that action for a reasonmust appear good to its agent. There is a related dispute over the nature of the appearance of the good that the view requires. Many authors hold that desires are appearances of the good (Tenenbaum 2007), or that they involve or express thoughts about or perceptions of the good (Quinn 1993, p. 36; Scanlon 1998, pp. 37-41), but others hold that these required appearances are distinct from desires, such as motivating beliefs about the good (e.g. Buss 1999; Gregory 2013). I am skeptical that desires are appearances of the good, but the argument in this paper does not require me to take a side on this issue. My focus is on the form and content of these allegedly required, motivating appearances of the good, whatever they may be. For that reason I'll speak generically of motivation as an appearance of the good. GG theorists can substitute for "motivation" their favored appearance-state, be it desire, evaluative belief, etc. GG requires more than that when agents act for a reason, they see that act as good. It further requires that they act because of that (apparent) good, or that they are guided by that good.9 Similarly, GG requires more than that action for a reason is guided by the good in someway or another, for it entails that agents who act for a reason are guided by their mental access to the good. This point differentiates GG from constitutivism, which attributes necessary aims or standards to agency butwhich is not generally committed to epistemic claims about agents' access to those standards.10 An implication of this same point is that GG is not equivalent to the claim that agents, in acting for a reason, are guided by a formal aim of acting or practical reasoning, even when conjoined with the 9This "because" in the formulation of GG is intimately connected with that of reason-explanations of actions, but it should not be construed as entailing that when an agentφs for a reason, her reason forφing is that φing is good, as such. This would otherwise tend to beg the question against attitudinal views. For there is independent pressure to think that an agent's (non-psychological) reasons for acting are all to be found among the contents of her beliefs, and as we will see below, attitudinalists believe that the good need not figure in the content of an agent's mental states. 10Paradigm constitutivists include Velleman (1996), Korsgaard (2009), and Smith (2013). Note that Velleman rejects GG while holding that agents are necessarily guided by representations of what de re justifies action, though they need not conceive them under that guise. See Velleman (2000, p. 28 n. 34); Silverstein (2016) gives an exceptionally lucid presentation of Velleman's view on this issue. 4 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good claim that the good is that formal aim.11 Indeed, it is possible for an agent to be guided by something of which they have no intimation, as when unnoticed environmental cues affect an agent's choice.12 We can also easily imagine a constitutivist theory that holds that agents are guided by the good but not in virtue of their access to it: Suppose it is a conceptual truth that agents are guided by certain dispositions, say, to realize their final desires and to know the world in which they live. These dispositions fix an intrinsic standard for agency, so that a perfect agent is one who exercises these dispositions perfectly. The theory could furthermore hold that states of affairs are good relative to an agent just in case, and because, that agent's perfect counterpart desires them.13 On this theory, it falls out of the concept of agency that agents are guided by what is good relative to them. However, this is not because of any epistemic access that agents may have to what is good relative to them, but merely because agents are guided by dispositions the perfect exercise of which makes something good relative to them. They are guided by the good but in a "blind" way, as a dynamical system is guided by an attractor.14 So let me re-emphasize that GG is a double requirement: the agent who acts for a reasonmust be (a) guided by the good, and (b) this in virtue of her access to it. According to GG, the appearance of goodness is crucial to the generation of action for a reason. Andwere the agent to have no access to what guides them, the guidance would be blind, and not the agent's rational guidance, as action for a reason must manifest.15 Lastly, "good" here must not be presumed to refer to value, much less to good-for or tomoral, public, or agent-neutral value; indeed, "Guise ofNormative Force" or "Guise of Justificatory Force" would be more apt titles for the thesis, if less catchy. The GG family thus embraces "Guise of Ought" (Schafer 2013; Massin 2017) and "Guise of Reasons" (Gregory 2013) theorists too. 1.1 The attitudinal model The attitudinal model is a long-popular way of understanding appearances of the good. Typically it is applied to desire as the motivation of choice. The point of departure for the attitudinal model is a supposed analogy between belief and truth on the one hand, and desire and the good on the other. The formal object of belief is truth, it is held, and 11Contra Saemi (2015). 12The most well-known evidence of this is found in Nisbett &Wilson (1977). 13The toy theory here is inspired by, but distinct from, the constitutivist theory in Smith (2013). 14Some may take issue with describing such agents as guided by the good. Isn't it more accurate to say that they are guided towards what is good by their dispositions? But the crucial point, I think, is that given the theory we could explain such and agent's action (say, an attempt to realize a final desire) by saying that they did it because it was good. This non-causal explanation already gives a deflationary sense in which an agent is guided by the good. 15See Schapiro (2014, pp. 132-3) for an excellent articulation of this point. 5 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good furthermore to believe is necessarily to regard the propositional content of one's belief as true. But truth cannot plausibly be held to necessarily be part of the propositional content of belief, as if regarding one's belief as true were like regarding a project to be a success, since that would set off a problematic regress.16 So, truth must relate to some aspect of belief apart from its content. Truth may, for instance, be held to figure in the intentional mode of the attitude of belief, that is, in the manner in which belief represents its propositional content: to believe that P is to represent-as-true that P . According to the attitude model of GG, appearances of the good have the same relationship, at least in broad outline, with respect to the good. After all, when one is motivated to bring about that P , one is not motivated to bring about that it be good that P , but simply that P . From this it would appear that goodness need not be part of the content of motivation. So on the attitudinal model, motivation is held instead to be a primitive presenting-as-good attitude (Stampe 1987; Tenenbaum 2008; Schafer 2013; Kriegel 2018), or goodness is considered part of the form of motivation (Saemi 2015), or it is suggested that it is constitutive of a motivation to bring about thatP that it aims to get it right as to whether P is good (Velleman 1992, though Velleman goes on to reject GG). 1.2 The assertoric model On the assertoricmodel of GG, an appearance of the good possesses goodness-including content which it presents with the rational significance of belief or perception.17 Two cognitive, and in a broad sense of the term, representational states can share content and yet differ with respect to rational significance. One's merely imagining that John Rawls is standing in the doorway would not even defeasibly rationalize the belief that John Rawls is standing in the doorway. However, a perceptual experience with the same content would. Thus perception and belief, but not imagination, share rational significance insofar as they both have the power to defeasibly license belief or inference. The thought is then that the motivations at the center of GG are to be understood in terms of beliefs or perceptions concerning good actions. In the assertoric camp belong Raz (1999), Buss (1999), and Gregory (2013), who all hold that action for a reason requires a belief about the good or about one's normative reasons; Davidson (1978, p. 86), who holds that desires express evaluative judgments; and Oddie (2005) and Hawkins (2008), who take desires to be perception-like experiences of the good. 16I present the regress explicitly on p. 18 below. 17Here I use "presentation" and its cognates in Brentano's sense as a merely contentful state that of itself entails no commitment to the truth, appropriateness, etc. of its content, and which can can be taken up into an attitude that does entail some such commitment. See Brentano (1874, p. 61ff.). 6 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good The assertoric model is frequently rejected as over-intellectual, as it is alleged that it requires animals and small children, who clearly have desires and who arguably can act for reasons, to possess evaluative concepts and exercise them whenever they act for a reason.18 I am optimistic that the problem is more apparent than real since motivation should be thought to have nonconceptual evaluative content. However, the present paper is not the place to pursue this idea.19 There is also support for a hybrid model in the literature. This model agrees with the assertoric model that motivation can be associated with an evaluative content, but disagrees with its assimilation of motivation to an evaluative perception or belief. A version of this model might hold that agents desire the good as such, or aim to do what is good. Brewer (2006, esp. pp. 271-2) could be interpreted as falling in this camp. At any rate, since the hybrid view appeals to evaluative content, in principle it possesses the same content-based resources as the assertoric view to account for the intelligibility of action, so I will not discuss it separately here. 2 Intelligibility In this section I first present a brief tour of the notion of intelligibility with the aim of thereby rendering IC, as well as GG's explanation of it, prima facie plausible. I then argue that a proper understanding of intelligibility defuses an objection from Kieran Setiya. I should note that both supporters and critics of the intelligibilitymotivation have, at times, targeted other notions of intelligibility than the one I sketch below. Most notably, although the notion of intelligibility sketched above owes a great deal to Anscombe, it owes yet more to Warren Quinn. Anscombe holds that statements or agents under a certain description (typically as wanting something) are intelligible or not absolutely, and the notion of intelligibility she has in mind seems to be analogous to that according to which "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is not intelligible.20 Regrettably, considerations of space prevent me from giving this interpretation its due in this paper; suffice it to say that I think the more compelling version of the intelligibility motivation relies on intuitions not about what is interpretable as an agent, as Anscombe's does, but about our own relationship to our action. 18See for instance Velleman (1992); Schroeder (2008); Saemi (2014). 19I investigate just such a view in Boswell (2016, Ch. 4). See also Oddie (2005, p. 80); Hawkins (2008). 20Anscombe op. cit., pp. 14, 19, 26, et passim; cf. MacIntyre (1986, p. 64). Vogler (2002, pp. 49, 51) and Raz (2016, pp. 11-3) seem to rely on Anscombe's notion while Raz (1997a, p. 118) and Tenenbaum (2007, pp. 33-5) seem to avail themselves of both Quinn's and Anscombe's notions of intelligibility. 7 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good 2.1 Intelligibility of an action to an agent The notion of intelligibility at play is specific in that an action is intelligible to its agent only if the agent has some consideration in mind, generally a property thought to be instantiated by the action, in virtue of which it is intelligible to him. Take for instance Quinn's infamous RadioMan, who finds himself in a bizarre functional state that causes him to turn on any radio at hand - though he does not turn them on in order to hear anything, or indeed in order that anything else happen. It is just something that he is disposed to do (Quinn 1993, p. 32). What is most conspicuously lacking in Radio Man is an idea of what is to be accomplished by his turning on radios - what the point of it is.21 But what reason for acting could he have if he has no idea what the point of the action might be?22 Because it concerns the sense the agent made of her action, the notion of intelligibility is also agent-relative and actual: IC requires of any action for a reason that its agent actually saw, that is, actually hadmental access to, some point to the action. In this sense, the action is not intelligible in virtue of falling under some type that would be intelligi21GG-insiders may recall that Quinn (op. cit.) focuses a little less on the intelligibility of action than on the thesis that desires must be evaluative if they are to rationalize action. Some philosophers have also taken desire's rationalization of action to be a main explanatory payoff of GG. One might wonder why I focus on intelligibility, then. One difficulty is that "rationalization" is used in different ways: is a rationalization (1) an explanation of an action in terms of the agent's own reason for it (Davidson 1963, p. 3)? Or does something rationalize action just in case it (2) makes that action rational, or alternatively, (3) grounds or "gives" the existence of a pro tanto or prima facie reason for it (Quinn 1993, p. 40)? All these interpretations pose problems for GG's potential to explain how motivation rationalizes action. In brief, whether it's plausible to claim that only evaluatively-construed motivations contribute to the rationality of action, as on (2), depends on the correct theory of rationality, and as for (3), many GG theorists hold that desires track reasons but do not ground them. For (1), GG can indeed explain why the agent does not act on a reason of her own when her action does not appear good to her, but it does this precisely by using GG to explain the unintelligibility of such action, as in Quinn's article. So I regard the intelligibility requirement, andGG's explanation of it, as more fundamental than and key to GG's explanation of how desire (or certain motivations) rationalizes action. 22A referee pointed out that it is not at all clear that Quinn accepts IC. After all, doesn't RadioMan walk across the room for a reason - so as to turn on the radio - in spite of the unintelligibility of doing so? In a sense the criticism is fair. Quinn is interested not in the conditions for an action's being done for a reason but for its having a rationalization, where "rationalization" is interpreted as (3) and not (1) (see previous note), and so there are not sufficient grounds for counting Quinn as endorsing IC. On the other hand, nor are there sufficient grounds for counting Quinn as rejecting it. That would require Quinn to hold that one can act for a reason without having an attitude that gives one's reason for acting, since for Quinn an attitude's giving a reason for acting entails the existence of that reason, and Quinn also holds that there is no reason for Radio Man to take means to turning on radios (ibid, pp. 32-3). This in turn undercuts the necessary connection between practical thought and the good that Quinn is trying to draw (ibid, pp. 29-30). A more coherent position for Quinn would be that all action for a reason is for a (at least prima facie) reason that rationalizes that action, but that mere goal-directed action is not necessarily done for a reason. Regardless, this exegetical point is not crucial to the argument of the paper; the goal of this section is to draw out the intelligibility motivation as it has generally been understood. 8 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good ble to someone else in other circumstances, nor in virtue of being intelligible in some absolute sense. To be sure, an intelligibility requirement built solely on this idea - that in order to φ for a reason there must be some consideration the agent takes to be the case and in light of which φing is intelligible to them - is neither controversial nor interesting.23 Quite plausibly it falls out of the very concept of acting for a reason that one have at least some reason in mind in acting. But the special interest in the GG theorist's conception of intelligibility is that not just any feature, consequence, or aspect thought by the agent to be instantiated by the action suffices to make that action intelligible to the agent: Suppose, for example, that you notice me spray painting my shoe. You ask why I am doing that, and I reply that this way my left shoe will weigh a little more than my right. You ask why I want the left shoe to weigh a little more. Now suppose I just look at you blankly and say, "That's it." I seem not to understand your puzzlement. You grasp for straws. "Is this some sort of performance art, on the theme of asymmetry?" "No." "Is someone going toweigh your shoes as part of some game?" "No. Why do you ask?"24 Here it is clear that there is an oddness about the Shoe Painter's explanation even though they have correctly identified a plausible consequence of spray painting their shoe. Thus there appear to be substantive constraints on intelligible-making properties. Being instrumental to something one is compelled to do does not make an action intelligible. Nor does thinking of one's action as possessing a thin normative property, such as being what one should do as such, render it intelligible, as Dave's example shows.25 So if indeed action for a reason must be intelligible to its agent, what explains why such action can occur under the guise of its instantiating certain properties and not others? GGproposes just such an explanation: the property must be, as Anscombe put it, "one of the many forms of good" (op. cit., p. 77),26 i.e. a particular or substantive evaluative property or kind of good.27 Thus we arrive at GG's account of the intelligibility of action: an action 23See Schapiro (2009, pp. 235-9) for a longer, nuanced discussion on this point. Schapiro takes Quinn's argument to ultimately show that thinking of desires as dispositions neglects their crucial role as proposing courses of action. 24Clark (2010, pp. 234-5). 25I consider an objection to this interpretation below, p. 13. 26For echoes of Anscombe on this point, see Quinn (1993, pp. 41-2), Johnston (2001, pp. 189-90), and Vogler (2002, p. 51). 27For the sake of simplicity I will write throughout of specific evaluative properties or kinds of good. Guise of Reasons and Guise of Ought theorists will need to find equivalent notions. However, these are ready at hand. Just as it is plausible that there are distinct kinds of value, it is also plausible that there are distinct kinds of reasons and oughts, such as moral, prudential, and aesthetic. 9 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good is intelligible to its agent just in case, and because, it seems to the agent to instantiate or promote a substantive value-property. Together with GG's claim that an action done for a reason must be seen by its agent as good, this account of intelligibility can explain why IC is true, that is, why action for a reason must be intelligible to its agent. Before moving on to Setiya's objection, let me address a worry about this understanding of the relation between GG and the intelligibility motivation. There are two parts to this explanation: first is the account of the intelligibility of action in terms of seeing that action as good, and the second is the claim that this account and GG together can explain why IC is true. One could imagine both steps going differently, however. After all, GG is compatiblewith constructivist approaches that explain the good in terms of features of rational agency, or indeed with a no-priority view about the relation between rational faculties and the good.28 Since it is furthermore plausible to hold that finding an action intelligible belongs to rational agency and is an aspect of our rational faculties, it would seem possible that a GG theorist could attempt to explain what it is for an agent to see her action as good in terms of what she finds intelligible, or to hold that necessarily an agent sees as good just what she finds intelligible, without assigning explanatory priority to either notion. Such a theorist could then deploy such an account, together with IC, to explain GG. On this way of understanding the problem, we begin with the question, "Why must actions done for a reason be seen as good by their agents?", and the response is that to see an action as good just is to find it intelligible, and action for a reason must be intelligible to its agent.29 But the affinity between constructivism and the seeing-good-to-intelligibility direction of explanation is more apparent than real. It is one thing to explain the good in terms of the possibility of rational evaluation or in terms of finding an action an intelligible object of choice, and a separate issue whether notions like rational evaluation and being an intelligible object of choice should or should not be understood in terms of seeing good in the action. At any rate, whatever the GG theorist's account of the relation between rationality and the good, it seems to me she faces considerable pressure to understand the intelligibility of action in terms of seeing good in the action. First, an explanation in the other direction threatens to reduce away the normative guise that is essential to GG: if the GG theorist tells us that agents must see as good all actions they do for a reason, but then clarifies that by "see as good" she means "find intelligible" or "make sense of", then it is not clear that she has told us anything particularly controversial. Even as staunch a GG opponent as Setiya (2007) could in principle adopt this 28See Tenenbaum (2007, Ch. 3) for a Kantian view that is at least consistent with constructivism and Raz (2011, p. 86) for the latter, no-priority view. 29Thanks to a referee for pressing me to address a possibility along these lines. 10 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good theory by in turn understanding the intelligibility of action in terms of the agent's having a causal-historical explanation for it. Thus, this direction of explanation threatens GG with triviality.30 And second, the no-priority view seems to me an option of last resort, insofar as it posits an unexplained necessary connection between seeing good and finding intelligible.31 2.2 Setiya's objection Once we clarify that seeing an action as good can render it intelligible only when an agent has a particular good in mind, we can neatly sidestep an otherwise worrisome objectionKieran Setiya first raised toGG's explanation of IC. The objection centers around the fact that merely noting that someone's action was performed under the guise of the good does not suffice to make the action intelligible. Setiya's version of the objection alludes to a famous line in Raz (1997b, p. 8) which is intended to illustrate the idea that rules of rationality constrain choice, and that one of these constraints is that one can only choose for what one takes to be a good reason for that choice: "I cannot choose to have coffee because I love Sophocles," he writes. To this Setiya responds that merely conceiving one's options explicitly under the guise of the good need not make them any more intelligible, and he illustrates the point with the following dialogue (Setiya 2010, p. 97): "She is drinking coffee because she loves Sophocles." "What? That makes no sense at all." "Oh yes it does! She thinks it is a reason to drink coffee." I think Setiya's dialogue is best taken as illustrating just what Dave's story does: it sure seems possible - indeed, actual, given Dave - for someone to think that an action would be good, or what she ought to do, or what she has reason to do, etc., and yet for this not to make the action any more intelligible. But, given §2.1, the GG theorist can plausibly reply that what has gone wrong here is that we are not given any kind of good under whose guise the coffee-drinker drinks. If we were told that she is drinking coffee because she thinks this honors Sophocles, we may be confused as to why she'd think that. But we would then appreciate her goal of honoring a literary figure, and 30I discuss a related triviality worry for GG in greater detail in Boswell (2016, pp. 31-7). 31Once we have established that the GG theorist should explain intelligibility in terms of seeing good, we still face the question of whether we might instead see this account together with IC as supporting GG. However, the choice between the two is a matter of rhetorical strategy and would not affect the central conclusions of the paper. 11 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good thus find it intelligible as she does.32 Thus, Setiya's objection does not undermine the intelligibility motivation for GG, once it is properly understood. Derek Baker (2014, p. 20) has recently pressed a version of the same objection to views of desire as evaluative perception-like seemings, and it fails for the same reason. Taking up a Radio Man-like example from Johnston (2001, pp. 189-90), he asks us to imagine someone who acts on a blind urge to turn a knob counterclockwise. Baker grants that the action will strike its agent as unintelligible, especially if the she believes it not good to turn it, but he then supposes the same agent now acts on a perception-like feeling that there is a reason to turn the knob, even though she knows this feeling to be inaccurate. Baker objects that this addition of a seeming of a reason does not make the turning any more intelligible. But of course, we can now see that this is not an effective test of the intelligibility motivation. For that we would need to suppose that the agent feels there to be a specific kind of reason to turn the knob, even though she disbelieves this feeling. So let us suppose instead that the agent desperately feels that by turning the knob she'll be free of the dungeon in which she is trapped, though she knows the door is locked. Does this feeling, a misleading anticipation of freedom, make sense of her turning the knob? The answer is clearly yes. She can see a point to her turning, though the point goes beyond her own hope of fulfilling it. So it appears that there are guises of the good such that acting under them does not suffice for action for a reason. Why might this be so? By returning to the groundwork of GG laid down in §1, I think we can glimpse why actingmerely under the guise of normative notions like "ought", "reason", "good", or "desirable" will not suffice. According to GG, there is a constitutive, formal aim of whatever motivations it holds are appearances of justificatory force: they function to register or reflect ways in which actions may be justified. Because GG holds that these appearances also guide one to act because of the justificatory force registered or reflected in them, it follows that action itself is constitutively regulated by justificatory force, at least when it is done for a reason. But one's reason for acting cannot reflect merely that the action meets this constitutive aim, any more than one's reason for believing a proposition can be that merely that it is true. (Supposing, of course, that belief is constitutively regulated by the norm of truth.) A genuine reason must offer intelligible support, and intelligible support cannot be so directly question-begging. A reason for acting must reflect a particular way in which the 32One might think that Setiya's objection fails for a different reason, that quite generally possessing the testimony that P need not make P intelligible to one. I may, for instance, accept that some mathematical theorem I do not understand is true simply because Professor Conway told me it was. Quite plausibly, this general truth relies on a distinct kind of intelligibility, that of simply not fully grasping a proposition. But in Setiya's dialogue we are to imagine that the interlocutor does understand the last line, and finds the purported reason unintelligible nonetheless. 12 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good constitutive aim of action for a reason is met, just as a genuine reason for believingmust reflect a particular way in which the constitutive aim of belief is met.33 Now, as we also saw in §1, the notions of what one ought to do, has reason to do, and what is good to do, are simply different candidates for this formal aim of action. Their suitability to playing this role of the formal aim of action is thus precisely what prevents action merely under their guise from rendering action for a reason intelligible. Let me turn to three objections to this strategy of response to Setiya. First, there is an alternative way of understanding the import of cases like Dave, the Shoe Painter, and drinking coffee for love of Sophocles. Onemight think that these cases do not show thin normative concepts themselves incapable of rendering action intelligible, and instead show only that their ability to render action intelligible is conditional on these concepts being intelligibly applied in a given case. This view holds that the Shoe Painter's action is unintelligible not because she saw no specific kind of good that painting her shoe would accomplish (taking for granted, of course, that making her shoe a little heavier is not of itself good), but because she could not intelligibly take making her shoe a little heavier as itself a reason for painting the shoe. The idea is that taking anything to be a reason for an action suffices to make that action intelligible, so long as the thing taken to be a reason can intelligibly be so taken. Indeed, there is one way of reading Raz's discussion of drinking coffee for love of Sophocles on which this is the very moral that he offers: his point may be that there are substantive constraints on what could be taken to be a reason for choice or on how an action may be seen to be good if it is to be done for a reason, and that on his view these constraints derive from a theory of value.34 However, I fail to see howmaking one's shoe a little bit heavier could simply be conceptually ineligible to be taken as a reason for paining one's shoe. Indeed, the interlocutor in the Shoe Painter example suggests two contexts which could make this a perfectly intelligible reason for that action- and it bears noting that both contexts (a sports competition, an artistic piece) plausibly render the action intelligible by connecting the reason to a specific kind of good (winning a game, aesthetic value). The situation is even worse for the objector once we turn to other thin normative concepts. Is it really plausible to 33One might object that there are many cases in which a good reason for believing P is simply that it seems to one that P is true; perhaps, indeed, we cannot rebut skeptical arguments without a like entitlement. Isn't this a question-begging reason for belief? (Thanks to a referee for this objection.) But there are twoways to read the offered reason, that "it seems to one thatP is true". On the first, less plausible reading, one's reason is simply that P is true, as it seems to one to be the case. That is directly question-begging, and not an intelligible reason for believing P . On the second, one's reason is that one has a seeming as of P being true. That is an intelligible reason for believing P , but it is also not directly question-begging insofar as it appeals to a state distinct from belief in P that may well confer justification on it. 34Thanks to a referee for suggesting a response along these lines. 13 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good suppose that the unintelligibility of Dave's kneeling in the street in front of the oncoming car is due to the fact that it is simply unintelligible to think that one should kneel down in the street in front of an oncoming car? On the contrary, it is clear that we can make such a thought intelligible by connecting it to a kind of good, for instance by supposing that Dave thought kneeling before the car the only way to save the lives of five children tied down to the road further ahead. The objector may after all be right that seeing a thin good in an action is conditionally sufficient for rendering the action intelligible, but the condition involves the agent's seeing a specific kind of good in the action. Second, onemight try to extend Setiya's objection by finding cases inwhich an agent does see some substantive kind of good in acting but in which that action is not intelligible to them. To see the idea, suppose that a moderate form of judgment externalism is true - in particular, that moral judgments do not necessitate motivation. One might then think that caring about something, and not merely judging it good in some specific way, is what makes action intelligible.35 Imagine a miser who always judges it charitable to give bonuses to his employees, but who is left entirely cold by the idea, and so - the objection runs - does not find the prospect of actually giving out a bonus intelligible. If that is possible, GG fails to give a sufficient condition for intelligibility. To this theGG theorist should respond thatGG is not committed to holding that every way of cognizing an action as good amounts to seeing the action as good in the sense relevant to intelligibility, just as GG is not committed to holding that any sort of motivation or action whatsoever occurs under the guise of the good.36 And indeed, there seems to be an important difference between abstractly assenting to the proposition that something would be the charitable thing to do and really getting, feeling, recognizing, or having a practical intuition of its value, though different GG theories will have different ways of cashing this thought out.37 So a GG theorist could plausibly respond that the miser did not really see a substantive kind of value in bonus-giving in the relevant sense of "see", and that is why it was not intelligible to him.38 35See Stocker (2004, 1979). 36Tenenbaum (2007, pp. 73-5) effectively makes the same point. 37See Johnston (2001, pp. 192-3) for an illustration of how what he calls "affective collapse" can lead an ongoing activity to resemble mere habit or automatic action, even if one still believes, in an abstract, non-affective way, that the activity is valuable. 38Of course, other responses to this challenge are possible. One could deny that the miser ever fails to find bonus-giving intelligible, and that what changes is merely his motivation to do it. Tenenbaum (2007) argues against judgment externalism (as part of what he calls the "separatist thesis"), and so can deny the coherence of the supposition that the miser really believed bonus-giving good but did not find bonus-giving intelligible at all. Roughly, Tenenbaum's view implies that themiser finds bonus-giving only conditionally intelligible (op. cit., Ch. 8). 14 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good Third, one might object that finding oneself with the inexplicable intuition that drinking coffee somehow honors Sophocles hardly makes more sense of drinking coffee than the bare intuition that one ought to drink it. What does the kind of good add?39 I agree that thinking that coffee-drinking honors Sophocles, absent further beliefs that rationalize this belief, is odd. But the oddness is that of having an odd theory about honor, and for the resolution of our puzzlement we require only some story of the agent's history that shows her to have arrived at this theory through familiar psychological mechanisms. This puzzlement contrasts with that about someone who thinks that some action just ought to be done, without any further idea as to its import - even supposing that they point to the promotion of some other non-normatively described property as their claimed reason for acting. ("I am placing this book here because that way I'll have 17 green books placed horizontally on my roof, which seems like the number I ought to have.") Any historical explanation of this state of mind would still leave us saying, "That alone can't be his reason for acting, if he really has one." We cannot see how his action could be intelligible to him, absent some further story of how that action appeared to him to be related to some further, specific kind of good. 3 Against the attitudinal model Note that the assertoric model is well-positioned to account for the sense in which the intelligibility of action requires an appeal to specific evaluative properties. This is simply because it can hold that whatever motivations are appearances of the good must have some such evaluative property as part of its representational content, with no expectation that the same good is part of the content of everymotivation. Take, for example, the view that emotions are appearances of the good with evaluative content. This view can hold that fear presents approaching a growling dog as dangerous while anger presents retaliation as payback. Dangerousness and payback are just different values, and they make different sorts of actions intelligible. In contrast, according to the attitude model, it is constitutive of motivation (of whatever sort GG is concerned with) to φ that it presents-as-good φing, in much the same way that belief presents-as-true its content. Generally speaking, proponents of this version of GG hold that the motivation in question is desire, so for ease of exposition in discussing their view I'll frequently replace talk of motivation with talk of desire. But it would appear that this reliance on a feature of presenting-as-good that is common to all desire is also what prevents the attitude model from accounting for the intelligibility of action. As we saw above, if GG is to explain the intelligibility of action, 39Thanks to StephenWhite for impressing on me the importance of this objection. 15 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good it must explain it by reference to the appearance to the agent of a particular kind of good or evaluative property. That was precisely what we needed to respond to Setiya's objection above. Yet is hard to see how the attitude model can deliver this. The attitude view cannot simply hold that we act under the guise of a thin notion of good, as in the case of a view that holds that any desire presents its content as choiceworthy, desirable, or as what one should bring about, as such. For, recall that if this were so, then the attitude model would secure the intelligibility of desired action only if Dave's action is intelligible to him. After all, it appeared to Dave that what he should do is kneel down and be hit by the car, and nevertheless his action wasn't intelligible to him. Clearly it makes the action no more intelligible if we substitute "is desirable for me to do" or "is the choiceworthy thing to do" for "should do". The attitudinalist thus needs to thicken up her notion of good. There are a number of conceivable ways to accomplish this, but one attitudinalist already appears to possess the resources to deal with this problem. According to Sergio Tenenbaum, desires not only present their contents as meeting the formal aim of desire, but they present it under a certain perspective (Tenenbaum 2007, §1.5). The perspective under which one desires is then to explain the particular way in which one's desiring is intelligible. The bare fact that Sue wants to damageMs. S's boat does not intelligibly explain why Sue is throwing stones at it. But if we are told that Suewants to damageMs. S's boat out of envy, it appears we have been given an explanation that shows her stone-casting to be intelligible.40 Other perspectives that can make certain actions intelligible include honesty, being a cinephile, a gourmand, or a good parent - all of which can be plausibly understood as organized around specific kinds of good. Here is a general version of the strategy at work. The attitudinal strategist is weakening the proposed analogy with truth in a certain respect. According to the story told in §1, the connection between belief and truth is constitutive of and common to any belief, for all beliefs present-as-true their content. But perhaps token desires may present different substantive evaluative properties. Perhaps it is constitutive of desire that it present some good or other, even though no particular good may be required. Truth is one and good many, it might be said. Some such necessary connection between desires and specific evaluative properties is needed to overcome Setiya's objection, and it also seems to be what Tenenbaum is trying to secure. Unfortunately, this connection is not ultimately available to the attitudinal theorist. I'll consider two formulations of this view. The first characterizes the connection between motivation and a specific evaluative property in terms of an adjective embedded 40Ibid., p. 43; Tenenbaum's example. 16 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good within a verb: a token appetite presents-as-tasty a treat, say. The second, Tenenbaum's way, characterizes it adverbially: Sue desires enviously. Against the first I will argue there is no obvious, good reason to think that it characterizes an aspect of an attitude as opposed to its content, and that there is reason to think the opposite. Against the second, I argue that it cannot secure the needed mental access to the specific good which GG requires. This leads me to advance in the final section a general argument against attitudinal views. 3.1 The adjectival formulation What is an attitude? Orthodoxy has it that it is a relation between a subject and a content, usually a propositional content.41 Most of the disagreement on this question is over the deeper nature of this relation. Staying at the level of commonly accepted platitudes, we could say that the content of amental state giveswhat themental state presents to the mind, what it is about, and the attitude provides how that content is presented, or the way in which the subject takes that content or that presentation. So when the attitudinal theorist tells us that the desire for a treat presents-as-tasty the treat, should we take her at her word that she has characterized an aspect of the attitude of desire? Against this, note that nearly all the substantive, intelligible-making goods, such as health, success, beauty, and tastiness, are properties of the things, states of affairs, and people that our motivations are concerned about. They are not properties of representational entities like propositions. If your appetite for the treat presentsas-tasty the treat, then it seems your attitude can also be expressed by saying that you take it as true that the treat is tasty. You in some way attribute tastiness to the treat; that's why it is intelligible to you to eat it. And of course, we would naturally think that "tasty" figures in specifying the content of the attitude when expressed this way. But it is distinctive of attitudinal views that the good is not supposed to play a role in motivation by figuring in the content of a mental state. These reflections point to a sufficient condition for construing a property P as figuring in the content of an attitude-typeA: AC If attitude A presents-X-as-P , where (in a token case) X is what A is about and P is a property thatX could instantiate, and P is not exclusively a property of a representational entity like a proposition, thenA's content (in that token case) is thatX is P . This principle has the great benefit of not misconstruing the contents of beliefs and perceptions, contrary to an accusation Karl Schafer (2013, p. 269) has brought against 41E.g. Fodor (1978), generalizing slightly. 17 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good assertoric views. Here is one way to see the worry, and how AC avoids it. As we noted above (p. 6), beliefs present or regard their contents as true, but the mere fact that a belief thatX presentsX as true cannot suffice for the content of that belief being (X is true). If that were true, the belief thatX would also be the belief that (X is true), since the content of a belief is what follows the complementizer "that" in "the belief that". But as a belief, it would also present (X is true) as true. Thus a regress begins. So it cannot be a general truth about attitudes that if an attitude presents-X-as-P , then P is part of its content. From this it would appear that appealing to the fact thatmotivation presents an action as good in support of an assertoric view is simply special pleading. AC does not entail that truth is part of the content of belief, however, for the simple reason that if belief presentsX as true, thenX must be a proposition, and a proposition is a representational entity. Nor are propositions what most beliefs are about; they are about taxes, fish, and all other things under the sun, most of which are not truth-apt. AC also captures why the formal objects of a number of attitudes are best construed as part of their content. Fear of a dog presents the dog as dangerous, and some find it natural to say that the content of this fear is that the dog is dangerous;42 AC explains why. Or, take the class of beliefs about people's hairiness, and suppose that this class forms a type of attitude. We may then note that my belief that Steve is hairy presents-as-hairy Steve. But AC explains why we should not construe attitudes in this class in terms of a primitive presenting-as-hairy attitude that takes people as contents. "Hairy" qualifies Steve, not the manner in which he is represented to me.43 AC has the effect of limiting what properties the attitudinalist may substitute for P in an attitude A that presents-X-as-P to those that either cannot be instantiated by whatever the attitude is about, or those that, like accuracy and the alethic modes, are exclusively properties of representational entities. This might seem unnaturally disjunctive. It may also seem that the latter restriction in particular hides the bone of contention, since what is at issue is whether normative properties such as the good-which surely do not exclusively apply to representational entities - can ever be substituted for P without figuring in the content of A. But there is, I believe, an attractive, general, and altogether orthodox picture of the relation between attitudes and their content that 42Those most inclined to find this intuitive are emotional perceptualists like Tappolet (2016) and cognitivists like Solomon (1973) and Nussbaum (2001). Emotional attitudinalists deny this, however; see Deonna & Teroni (2012). 43It must be granted that AC's implications on other attitudes, particularly attitudes of confidence and doubt, are less clear. A suspicion that X presents X as somewhat likely. But does it present an event as likely, or does it present the proposition thatX as likely-true? I am inclined towards the latter, since the relation between probability and credence is broadly similar to that between outright belief and truth. But there is no space to pursue the issue here. 18 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good supports AC. According to this picture, the content of an attitude "gives" what the attitude is about by representing what the attitude is about, and when A presents X as P , P quite generally figures inA's content - except whereX is the content ofA, and P is taken as modifying themanner in which that content, qua representation, is held before the mind. But where P functions to modify what the attitude is about (taxes, fish, etc.), it is difficult to see how P could do so without figuring in the content of the attitude itself, at least so long as we hold on to our platitudes about the distinction between attitude and content. Alternatively, the attitudinal theorist could reject the assumption that contents of attitudes are representational, but this seems to me to be extraordinarily costly.44 Thus, to reject AC the attitudinalist would need to construct a different conception of the relation between attitudes and their content. The attitudinalist may at this point object that there is a difference between an attitude that presents-X-as-P and the attitude of taking it to be true thatX is P , for the former can be possessed by a creature without the concept of P while the latter cannot.45 But the principle this objection implicitly relies on - that one can only possess an attitude with content C if one possess all the concepts required for a specification of C - is a rather contentious one insofar as it rejects the possibility of nonconceptual content.46 Moreover, the attitudinalist would owe us a justification for thinking that we can say that the creature presents-X-as-P even though she objects to saying that it takes it to be true thatX is P . What could the difference be? Now, in the foregoing I assumed that the "presents-as-good" locution is to be understood in terms of an attribution of a specific kind of goodness. With this assumption in place, AC is particularly intuitive. Some may seek to object to this assumption, once it is seen that it leads to a rejection of the attitudinal view. However, if we do not understand the locution this way, it is hard tomake sense of it, especially as an articulation of a GG view. What could it mean to take-as-beautiful a painting, if not to attribute beauty to it? What sort of manner of response to a content would that be? The attitudinalist cannot say that it means that one takes a certain kind of pleasure in the painting. For, to avoid circularity, she would then need to provide a non-attitudinal evaluative account of pleasure in order to secure GG. It isn't clear to me how she could do this without ascribing evaluative content to pleasure, in which case the view would be a convoluted 44In brief, it seems to me that such views either cannot explain the failure of existential generalization from attitudinal contents ormust rely on amysterious relation tomere possibilia. But obviously, the debate on this question is long and intricate, and cannot be settled here. 45Thanks to Christine Tappolet for this objection. 46Nonconceptual content is frequently attributed to perceptual experiences and emotions. For an overview, see Bermúdez (2009). 19 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good version of the assertoric strategy. Perhaps then it means, whatever manner is appropriate to a beautiful object.47 But why would that manner necessarily imply that the subject has mental access to the relevant good, as GG requires?48 Lastly, if the adjectival locution is not understood as implying an attribution of goodness, it does not seem to allow the possibility of motivation's being mistaken about the good. Yet the ability of GG to secure the sense in which one's motivations can be mistaken is often considered one of the explanatory benefits of GG.49 Thus this first version of the attitudinal view of GG could indeedmake sense of how the appearance of specific goods makes actions intelligible - but it can do this only by surreptitiously dropping the attitudinal view and taking up the assertoric view. Briefly put, if a mental state of presenting-X-as-good is to make action intelligible it needs to be understood as attributing goodness toX , and it can only do this if goodness figures in the content of the state. As we will see in the next section, the second version of the attitudinal view faces a different but complementary problem: it cannot account for the way in which acting under the guise of the good involves the agent's mental access to the good. 3.2 The adverbial formulation On Tenenbaum's view, Sue's desire to throw rocks at Mrs. S's boat has an adverbial characterization: she desires enviously to throw rocks at it. Judging by Tenenbaum's development of the view, it is clear that this is a refinement of the attitude strategy. In order to act out of envy Sue need not have the explicit aim of acting out of envy; envy need not enter into the content of her mental states. She does not necessarily desire to be envious. Rather the envy is held to figure in the manner in which the world and practical possibilities appear to her. She enviously desires the destruction of the boat, and this manner of appearance is mademanifest in the options for action she takes seriously, her irritability towards praise of the boat, the comments she makes about Ms. S, etc. However, it turns out that this maneuver does less good for the attitude theorist than she might have hoped. Clearly there are such modes of acting and desiring, and we can appeal to them in order to give third-personal rationalizing explanations of agents' actions. But to say that an agent acted from a certain perspective is not always to explain 47As noted above, many attitudinal theorists take the presenting-as-good character of desire to be primitive. The responses just considered are unavailable to these theorists, who are unable to explain this character in more basic terms and thus face extraordinary difficulty explaining why "good" should be thought to characterize an aspect of an attitude apart from its content. 48Note the contrast with belief here: it is not at all clear that belief involves mental access to the truth of a proposition over and above access to the proposition itself. In believing one is generally guided by defeasibly justified inferences, but this guidance need not take the form of tracking appearances of truth. 49See Tenenbaum (2007), as well as Baker (2014) for a critical discussion. 20 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good the action in terms of the agent's point for that action. Suemight be self-consciously envious, but it is also possible that she is completely ignorant of her own enviousness. Her conscious motivations may have been limited to thoughts thatMs. S was fundamentally at fault, and that she needed to be taken down a peg. One can easily imagine a friend confronting Sue about her enviousness and Sue, upon realizing the truth about herself, coming to terms for the first time with her own envy. This reckoning would be rather like Freudian Dave's discovery in psychotherapy that he was motivated to lie down in the street by his repressed fear of failure: both agents may be said to have learned about their reasons for acting, but not in the sense of "reasons for acting" we are looking for, since in both cases the motivation (envy or fear) was opaque to the agent.50 Thus, while it may be that when one acts for a reason, one acts under a perspective on the good, this latter cannot by itself explain the intelligibility of action for a reason. Tenenbaum's best reply might be to make a tactical retreat. Conceivably he could admit that desiring or acting under an unconscious perspective like Freudian Dave's envy does not make an action intelligible to its agent, but conscious perspectives do. The view is tempting, but it only reveals the fatal flaw with the attitudinal approach. For what could consciousness provide to intelligibility except further content? To hold otherwise would amount to an extreme kind of adverbialist treatment of perspectives, in the sense derived from the philosophy of perception (Ducasse 1942, pp. 252-3; Chisholm 1957). Perhaps to be motivated consciously under the perspective of courage is, in being motivated, to be presented-to-courageously, where being presented-to-courageously is a nonintentional modification of a subject. But the absence of any relation to an intentional object or content of experience - say, to a desired action which might be courageous if one were to perform it - is precisely what renders this view incapable of capturing how awareness of specific evaluative properties renders action intelligible.51 50Indeed, Tenenbaum seems to acknowledge that the perspective under which one acts can sometimes be opaque to the agent; see ibid., p. 50. 51Dokic & Lemaire (2015) raise a similar problem for the view that emotions are evaluative modes. This point against the attitudinal theory mirrors an influential critique of perceptual adverbialism, the many properties problem, which holds that this latter cannot account for the intentional structure of experience (Jackson 1977). For a somewhat closer analogy see Martin (1998), who argues that adverbialism cannot account for the fact that we are aware of our experiences through awareness of their intentional objects. However, there is at least one major reason to think that the present problem is much worse for the attitudinalist than these problems are for the adverbialist. Perceptual adverbialism is motivated by a desire to avoid reference to objectionable entities like sense-data. But this motivation is not incompatible with attributing genuine intentional content to experience, for adverbialism can be interpreted as an alternative account of intentionality that still attributes content to experience, albeit in a deflationary way. (See Kriegel 2008 for an example of this strategy.) The attitudinal version of GG, however, needs to avoid reliance on content in explaining the good's contribution to intelligibility. 21 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good 3.3 Content makes actions intelligible We have come at last to the fundamental reason attitudinal theories fail to capture the intelligibility of action, which is that intelligibility requires relation to a content, which is precisely what attitudinal theories reject. We can make this thought explicit in the following argument: 1. (IC) If an agent φs for a reason, then φing is intelligible to her. 2. If an agent φs for a reason, then φing is intelligible to her in virtue of a state of mental access to a (apparent) kind of good possessed by φing. 3. If φing is intelligible to an agent in virtue of a state S of mental access to something, then S is a state of consciousness of that thing. 4. If S is a state of consciousness ofX , thenX figures in the content of S. 5. So, some kind of good figures in the content of the state that makes action for a reason intelligible. Premise 2 captures how GG explains IC: intelligibility is to be explained by a state of mental access to a kind of good. Freudian Dave's case is extremely good evidence that unless this state gives conscious access to a kind of good, an agent does not have the right kind ofmental access to the (apparent) good of his action, and thus this state cannot explain the intelligibility of action. This justifies premise 3. Premise 4 is supported from what is quite generally taken as a starting-point in the philosophy of mind: the content of consciousness just is whatever we are conscious of. From this we need to go only a little further and hold that the content of a state of consciousness of something is just that of which it is a state of consciousness.52 From these premises, the conclusion in 5 follows. But 5 contradicts attitudinal views that aim also to account for the intelligibility of acting, according to which goodness need not figure in the content of desire. (Importantly, note that we could replace "kind of good" in this argument with a term denoting any property that is held to make action intelligible, and the corresponding argument would still follow. Hence, the argument shows that attitudinalist-construed accounts of the intelligibility of action in general fail.) 52It must be admitted that premise 4 is more contentious when certain varieties of self -consciousness are at issue. When I am struck with an awareness of a leg that is mine, or that my visual point of view differs from yours, must I figure in the content of such awareness? Fortunately, what is at issue for the present argument is consciousness of actions and their properties, not the self directly, nor even whose actions they are. With that granted, premise 4 can be understood as tacitly excepting self-consciousness and the argument will go through. (Thanks to Jens Gillessen for raising this issue.) 22 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good The substantially new premises in this argument are 3 and 4. Because premise 4 is the more innocuous of the two, it will be best to concentrate on objections to premise 3.53 One thing to note about premise 3 is that at this point in the dialectic, the attitudinal theorist appears bound to accept it, for they need it to avoid predicting that Freudian Dan's kneeling is intelligible to him. Nevertheless, the attitudinal theorist might try one of two ways out of this corner. The first is to object that premise 3 takes the perceptual analogy that GG invites far too seriously. Perhaps to say that a motivation presents its action as good just is to say that it has an actionor intention-rationalizing Fregean force (Schafer 2013, pp. 275-7). This implies nothing about the content of that motivation. Furthermore, to capture the way in which intelligibility is specific, we could postulate as above (p. 16) that differentmotivations or perspectives rationalize different kinds of actions. Desiring under the perspective of courage rationalizes bold actions, say, while desiring under the perspective of envy rationalizes spiteful actions. However, whatever the attractions of this view, it is not at all clear it is a Guise of the Good view. GG explains the rationalizing power of motivation in terms of motivation's relation to an appearance of the good, but this alternate view characterizes appearances of the good in terms of rationalizing motivations. This threatens GG with triviality, since it is uncontroversial to claim that when one acts for a reason, one acts on a motivation that rationalizes that action.54 Furthermore, the notion of having mental access to the good is purely honorific on this view, amounting to no more than being in a state that in fact rationalizes action. It is hard to see how this would entail an epistemic state - unless, of course, we then explained rationalization in terms of mental access to the good. The second strategy is to search for less than fully conscious attitudes that nevertheless contribute non-instrumentally, and not in virtue of their content, to the intelligibility of action. The clause "non-instrumentally" is crucial, since the above argument (and specifically premise 2) is consistent with unconscious states being causally responsible for the intelligibility of action, for GG offers a theory of what intelligibility consists in. Suppose that my name is Woolstonecraft, and that at work I overhear two low voices 53Of course, attitudinal theorists are free to define a notion of content on which premise 4 is false. However, this still leaves a very intuitive notion of content, expressed in that premise, for which it will be true that intelligibility requires goodness to figure in mental content. So for an attitudinalist who is determined to reject this premise, the burden will be on her to develop and defend the importance of this different notion. 54Recall that we uncovered a similar triviality problem above when discussing the possibility of understanding seeing an action as good in terms of finding it intelligible, p. 11. 23 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good plotting against Woolstonecraft. To save my skin, I immediately decide to foil their plans. My knowledge that I amWoolstonecraft is crucial to the intelligibility of foiling their plans, and I do not need to consciously rehearse it for it to have this effect. But it is not what makes foiling their plans intelligible me, which is rather the recognition that self-preservation demands that I foil their plans. My unconscious knowledge is simply a causal antecedent of that recognition. So what kinds of non-conscious states could contribute non-instrumentally to the intelligibility of an action? Here are two salient possibilities. First, sometimes we explain what made sense to an agent by appealing to an entire worldview, a general way of conceiving things. It is hard to explain why suicide would seem the only honorable response to career failure to an ancient patrician Roman without appealing to moral assumptions that might have passed unnoticed in Roman times, but which come to light when we contrast them with our own moral assumptions. These assumptions may figure mentally not as content-bearing elements of one's belief box but in individuals' patterns of thought, motivation, and intention. However, these assumptions or patterns of response only instrumentally explain the intelligibility of suicide. They explain it by explaining why the Roman in dire straits would come to see suicide as honorable. This conscious recognition, in turn, would non-instrumentally explain the intelligibility of suicide. The second possibility is to hold that while completely unconscious motivations do not make actions intelligible, except perhaps instrumentally, consciously accessible motivations do. After all, in executing a prior intention to φ we need not consciously rehearse our reasons for φing. When the time comes, we simply φ. Still we retain our reasons for φing, and so φing must be intelligible to us. But if this is right, it does not show that the intelligibility of φing is not to be explained in terms of the content of a state. What enables φing in this case to be done for a reason is that one's reasons for φing are consciously accessible, either through being actually conscious, or being available to consciousness through attention or recall. After all, if one φs for a reason in the full-blooded sense at issue in this paper, then one must have an answer to the question "Why [did you do that]?" which gives one's reasons for acting, and it seems the only way one has such an answer is if one's reasons for acting are consciously accessible. Now, according to GG, motivation makes action intelligible by making it appear good in some respect. If it does so in virtue of the content of some state of appearing-good when that state is conscious, then it seems that if action can also be intelligible in virtue of such a state being consciously accessible but not accessed, then it is still the goodness-bearing content of that state that enables its contribution to action's 24 Intelligibility and the Guise of the Good intelligibility. For, mental states do not massively change their content just for being consciously accessed. In other words, the attitudinal theorist may complain that the sense in which GG requires mental access to the good requires only that the good of one's action be consciously accessible, not that it be actually accessed. But amending premise 2 to reflect this possibility would not help her, for what is at issue is only the accessibility of a state with goodness-bearing content. When an action is intelligible to an agent, it is still in virtue of the content of some of their mental states, contrary to what the attitudinal model holds. 4 Conclusion The intelligibility constraint provides an attractivemotivation for theGuise of theGood. Warren Quinn pointed out that without seeing something good about acting, action isn't intelligible. It "fails for want of a point" (op. cit., p. 34) - fails, that is, to have a reason that rationalizes it. GG theorists are inclined to agree. But an important class of GG theorists, the attitudinalists, are unable to keep up with the commitments that ultimately derive from this basic insight. In order to reply to Setiya's objection from apparent thin goods, these theorists need to appeal to a specific good that makes action intelligible. 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