Abstract
According to reductionists about agency, an agent’s bringing something about is reducible to states and events (such as desires and beliefs) involving the agent bringing something about. Many have worried that reductionism cannot accommodate robust forms of agency, such as self-determination. One common reductionist answer to this worry (which I call ‘identification reductionism’) contends that self-determining agents are identified with certain states and events, and so these states and events causing a decision counts as the agent’s self-determining the decision. In this paper I discuss J. David Velleman’s identification reductionist theory, according to which an agent is identified with his desire to make most sense of himself. I develop two constraints that an adequate identification reductionist theory must satisfy and show that Velleman’s theory cannot satisfy both. In particular, I argue that Velleman’s account founders on cases of self-determined self-transformation.
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Notes
The notion of self-determination I am after differs from the one recently discussed by Buss (2012). She gives a functional definition of self-determination or autonomy: “An agent stands in the self-governing self-relation that interests me here if and only if the roles she plays in forming her intention is such that if she has the general capacity to appreciate the force of moral requirements and if she has adequate opportunity to discern the moral significance of what she is doing, she is blameworthy if her action is morally wrong and praiseworthy if it is morally admirable” (2012, p. 649). As I understand the literature on identification, the notion of self-determination at play there is not as intimately connected to moral accountability as Buss’s notion. For example, Velleman is explicit that one can be morally accountable for an action even if one does not self-determine it. For Velleman, moral accountability requires the capacity of self-determination, not its exercise (1992, 127, no. 13). For this reason some of Buss’s objections to these accounts of self-determination miss their target (cf. Mitchell-Yellin 2014).
Bishop (1989) offers an example of a reductionist model that restricts the reductive base of states and events to desires, beliefs, and intentions, even when seeking to account for self-determination.
It is important to note the order of the quantifiers in the scope constraint, the existential quantifier being within the scope of the universal. This principle does not entail that for every self-determined action there is the same state that the agent is identified with, but only that for every self-determined action, there is some state or other that the agent is identified with.
One might reasonably think Velleman (1992) denied that we are identified with this desire. Consider: “If there is…an attitude [that plays the self-determining agent’s causal roles], then its contribution to the competition’s outcome can qualify as his—not because he identifies with it but rather because it is functionally identical to him” (Velleman 1992, p. 142). It seems that Velleman is denying that a state’s playing my causal roles counts as my playing my causal roles only if I am identified with it. But in fact there is no disagreement here. Just prior to the passage quoted, Velleman argues that an agent cannot “disown” the desire to act for reasons and remain a self-determining agent (Velleman 1992, p. 141–142). The reference to “disowning” strongly suggests the notion of identification I am deploying. In claiming that a self-determining agent cannot disown this motive and remain a self-determining agent, Velleman is, I believe, claiming that the self-determining agent is essentially identified with such a motive. It may well be that Velleman is operating with a somewhat different notion of identification than I am. But what is clear is that Velleman thinks that it is crucial that the state that plays my causal or functional role is one that I cannot (in some sense) disown and it is this very phenomenon that I have used the notion of identification to capture.
In this way it seems that Velleman’s account is immune to Watson’s (1975) original objection to Frankfurt’s (1971) account. The desire that plays the causal roles of the self-determining agent for Velleman is not a mere desire, but a desire that is constitutive of one’s self-determining agency.
Let me note here that my presentation of Velleman’s account differs from his own. Where Velleman writes of ‘an agent’ I write of ‘a self-determining agent.’ This is merely a verbal difference. By ‘an agent’ Velleman means ‘a self-determining agent.’ Throughout his article Velleman uses ‘action’ and ‘agency’ to mean ‘action par excellence’ and ‘full blooded [i.e. self-determining] agency’ (cf. Velleman 1992, p. 124).
Velleman prefers this account for two reasons. First, he contends that a de dicto reading would be too conceptually demanding, requiring that self-determining agents have the concept of acting for a reason, and a specific conception of what counts as a reason and makes some reasons better than others (Velleman 2000, p. 15). Second he contends that “if autonomous action were behavior guided in part by the desire to act in accordance with reasons so described, then an agent could never autonomously do something other than what he believed he had most reason for doing” (2000, 14, no. 20).
That the notion of making sense is akin to a kind of predictability on the basis of a character’s psychological make-up and situation is made clear in Velleman (2009, p. 132). When we are seeking to determine what would make sense of a character we are seeking to predicate what the character would do given the kind of person he is and the kind of situation he is in.
I do not mean to suggest that Velleman’s notion of making most sense must entail that for every situation, there is a single action that makes most sense of the agent. Presumably there are many circumstances in which there is no single action that makes most sense, but rather a range of options. However, I do insist that if this notion is to have any determinate content, it cannot be that in every case of self-determined moral transformation, the transformative action is among the range of options that makes most sense of the agent.
References
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Franklin, C.E. Self-determination, self-transformation, and the case of Jean Valjean: a problem for Velleman. Philos Stud 172, 2591–2598 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0423-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0423-8