According to Paul Boghossian and others, inference is subject to the taking condition: it necessarily involves the thinker taking his premises to support his conclusion, and drawing the conclusion because of that fact. Boghossian argues that this condition vindicates the idea that inference is an expression of agency, and that it has several other important implications too. However, we argue in this paper that the taking condition should be rejected. The condition gives rise to several serious prima facie problems and (...) the reasons which have been offered in favour of it fail to convince. (shrink)

Traditional accounts of the perception/cognition divide tend to draw it in terms of subpersonal psychological processes, processes into which the subject has no first-person insight. Whatever betides such accounts, there seems to also be some first-personally accessible difference between perception and thought. At least in normal circumstances, naïve subjects can typically tell apart their perceptual states from their cognitive or intellectual ones. What are such subjects picking up on when they do so? This paper is an inconclusive search for an (...) answer. At its end, I conclude, without joy, that we may have to simply accept the perception/cognition distinction as a primitive and inexplicable bright line within the sphere of conscious phenomena. (shrink)

According to the Motive of Duty Thesis, a necessary condition for an action to have moral worth is that it be motivated at least in part by a normative assessment of the action. However, this thesis has been subject to two powerful objections. It has been accused of over-intellectualizing moral agency, and of giving the wrong verdict when it comes to people who hold false moral theories that convince them that their actions are in fact morally wrong. I argue that (...) both of these objections can be convincingly answered using resources from the Guise of the Good view, which holds that for an agent to intend to requires that they take Φing to be good. Furthermore, I argue that combining the motive of duty thesis with the Guise of the Good view allows us to recognize an important further condition on moral worth—namely, that the agent recognize that their reason for action requires, rather than merely permits, their action. Thus, while no action lacks moral worth in virtue of being motivated by no normative evaluation at all, an action can still lack moral worth in virtue of failing to be motived by the correct normative evaluation, namely that the action is required. (shrink)

It is undeniable that human agents sometimes act badly, and it seems that they sometimes pursue bad things simply because they are bad. This latter phenomenon has often been taken to provide counterexamples to views according to which we always act under the guise of the good. This paper identifies several distinct arguments in favour of the possibility that one can act under the guise of the bad. GG seems to face more serious difficulties when trying to answer three different, (...) but related, arguments for the possibility of acting under the guise of the bad. The main strategies available to answer these objections end up either undermining the motivation for GG or failing to do full justice to the nature of perverse motivation. However, these difficulties turn out to be generated by focusing on a particular version of GG, what I call the “content version”. But we have independent reasons to prefer a different version of GG; namely, the “attitude version”. The attitude version allows for a much richer understanding of the possibility of acting on what we conceive to be bad. Drawing on an analogy with theoretical akrasia and theoretical perversion, I try to show how the attitude version can provide a compelling account of perverse actions. (shrink)

Inquiry, Volume 57, Issue 3, Page 384-411, June 2014.

According to the doctrine of the guise of the good, all that is desired is seen by the subject as good to some extent. As a claim about action, the idea is that intentional action, or acting for a reason, is action that is seen as good by the agent. I explore the thesis' main attractions: it provides an account of intentional behavior as something that makes sense to the agent, it paves the way for various views in meta-ethics and (...) normative ethics, and it offers a unified account of practical and theoretical reason. In response to common objections, I examine points of current debate: what is it for something to appear as good? Is value or normative reasons the basic concept at work? How to explain akrasia, perversity in action, and expressive action? I conclude with an overview of alternatives to the guise of the good. (shrink)

Moral experience comes in many flavors. Some philosophers have argued that there is nothing common to the many forms moral experience can take. In this paper, I argue that close attention to the phenomenology of certain key emotions, combined with a clear distinction between essentially and accidentally moral experiences, suggests that there is a group of (essentially) moral emotions which in fact exhibit significant unity.

In contemporary analytic philosophy of mind, Franz Brentano is known mostly for his thesis that intentionality is ‘the mark of the mental.’ Among Brentano scholars, there are also lively debates on his theory of consciousness and his theory of judgment. Brentano’s theory of will and emotion is less widely discussed, even within the circles of Brentano scholarship. In this paper, I want to show that this is a missed opportunity, certainly for Brentano scholars but also for contemporary philosophy of mind. (...) Brentano’s accounts of the will and of emotion are, I will argue, both insightful, creative, and surprising, on the one hand, and strikingly plausible, upon reflection, on the other. (shrink)

Is Anscombean practical knowledge independent of what the agent actually does on an occasion? Failure to understand Anscombe’s answer to this question is a major obstacle to appreciating the subtlety and plausibility of her view. I argue that Anscombe’s answer is negative, and turns on the nature of mistakes in performance, and reveals a distinctive implicit metaphysics of mind and knowledge, structured by related capacities and exercises of capacities. If my interpretation is correct, then practical knowledge shares features with knowledge-how (...) and knowledge-that, but deserves its own epistemic category. (shrink)

Cognitivists about intention hold that intending to do something entails believing you will do it. Non-cognitivists hold that intentions are conative states with no cognitive component. I argue that both of these claims are true. Intending entails the presence of a belief, even though the intention is not even partly the belief. The result is a form of what Sarah Paul calls Non-Inferential Weak Cognitivism, a view that, as she notes, has no prominent defenders.

This paper provides an opinionated guide to discussions of acting and believing on the basis of reasons. I aim to bring closer together largely separate literatures in practical rea- son and in epistemology. I focus on three questions. First, is basing causing? Causal theories of basing remain popular despite the notorious Problem of Deviant Causal Chains. Causal theorists in both the epistemic and practical domains have begun to appeal to dispositions to try and solve the problem. Second, how unified are (...) acting and believing on the basis of reasons? I consider an important challenge to their unity due to Setiya. I sketch a response, which posits unity of causal structure across acting and believing on the basis of reasons. Third, how does acting or believing on the basis of a good reason relate to acting or believing on the basis of a reason simpliciter? I generalize a recent argument of Lord and Sylvan's to include acting as well as believing. The conclusion is that, for both believing and acting, ϕing on the basis of a good reason does not amount to ϕing on the basis of a reason that just so happens to be good. (shrink)

Recently it has been argued that we cannot intend at will. Since intentions cannot be true or false, our involuntariness cannot be traced to “the characteristic of beliefs that they aim at truth”, as Bernard Williams convincingly argues. The alternative explanation is that the source of involuntariness is the shared normative nature of beliefs and intentions. Three analogies may assimilate intentions to beliefs vis-à-vis our involuntariness: first, beliefs and intentions aim at something; second, beliefs and intentions are transparent to the (...) true and the good respectively; third, beliefs and intentions are answers to questions other than that of whether to endorse them. The purpose of this paper is to argue that attempts to ground involuntariness in normativity rather than truth imply that we cannot act at will. I assume that actions are the paradigm case of doing something at will, and utilize this assumption as a restriction on any account of our inability to believe at will: it should not be possible to generalize it to actions. Any account of doxastic involuntarism that implies that we cannot act at will is false—if we cannot act at will, what can we do at will? I close by offering a notion of doing something at will that is based on Williams’ insight that truth—rather than reason—matters to our inability to believe at will. (shrink)

This thesis motivates a novel account of desire as the best explanation of an intuitive datum. The intuitive datum is that often when an agent desires P she will immediately, outright know that she has a reason to bring P about. Existing explanations of the intuitive datum cannot simultaneously satisfy two desiderata. We want to explain how desires enable outright knowledge of reasons and also explain the fallibility of desires. Existing views satisfy the first desideratum at the expense of the (...) second, or vice versa. I propose an epistemological disjunctivist account of desire that satisfies both. On this view, a desire for P represents the value of P in a manner analogous to perception. Desires come in two distinct epistemic kinds: an awareness of value or an illusion of value. An awareness of value enables outright knowledge of reasons and allows the agent to tell by reflection that she has such knowledge. An illusion of value merely seems to provide grounds for knowledge, which explains the fallibility of desires. The proposed account is a strong candidate for the truth because it best explains central features of our practical agency. (shrink)

If a person's head moves, she may or may not have moved her head, and, if she did move it, she may have actively performed the movement of her head or merely, by doing something else, caused a passive movement. And, if she performed the movement, she might have done so intentionally or not. This short array of contrasts (and others like them) has motivated questions about the nature, variety, and identity of action. Beyond the matter of her moving, when (...) the person moves her head, she may be indicating agreement or shaking an insect off her ear. Should we think of the consequences, conventional or causal, of physical behavior as constituents of an action distinct from but ‘generated by’ the movement? Or should we think that there is a single action describable in a host of ways? Also, actions, in even the most minimal sense, seem to be essentially ‘active’. But, how can we explain what this property amounts to and defend our wavering intuitions about which events fall in the category of the ‘active’ and which do not? (shrink)