Abstract

A central ethical intuition is that an agent's responsibility for something she did may depend crucially on whether she did it intentionally. Philosophical accounts of what it is to do something intentionally, however, do not allow that notion to bear the ethical significance intuition suggests. This is because on such accounts, one does something intentionally only if one intended to do it, that is, only if one did it for a reason. An agent $\phi$s for a reason just in case there is a description of her action under which she $\phi$s, and she believes that $\phi$ing will help to produce an end she is trying to achieve. It follows that an agent cannot be said to have done something intentionally she was aware she would do, if she had no reason, in the above sense, for doing it. In some cases, this conclusion severely strains our ethical intuitions: an agent who blows up a plane for the sake of insurance money, aware he will thereby kill the passengers, is responsible for their deaths. In our ordinary ways of thinking about responsibility, however, the thought that he is responsible for their deaths seems to go hand-in-hand with the thought that he killed them intentionally. ;This dissertation re-examines the end-oriented, or teleological, structure of intentional action. It asks whether there is a way of understanding the intentional that makes it a suitable ground for the necessarily broader attributions of responsibility entailed by judgments of culpability. In particular, it considers whether there might be an account of acting for a reason that extends that notion to those things an agent is aware of doing when she acts. The dissertation proposes one such account, where the notion of acting for a reason is understood in terms of what is chosen by an agent, instead of in terms of what agents do for the sake of an end