Character and the will are rarely discussed together. At most, philosophers working on the one mention the other in an eliminativist vein—if character is represented as something chosen, for example, it can be chalked up to the work of the will; if the will consists merely of a certain arrangement of mental states, it can be seen as little more than a manifestation of character. This mutual neglect appears perfectly justified. If both character and will are determinants of action, to (...) treat them separately would be to overdetermine agency at best, and at worst to fragment it. While defending this reasoning, I argue that things are not so simple, because character and will serve distinct explanatory and normative functions, respectively. The difference in function, however, does not prove that character and will must be ontologically distinct sources of agency; only that our discourse about them must keep them apart. (shrink)

J.S. Swindell has argued that Harry Frankfurt's analysis of ambivalence is ambiguous and that it fails to do justice to the full range of this psychological phenomenon. Building on her criticism of Frankfurt, Swindell offers an analysis of ambivalence which is supposed to clarify ambiguities in Frankfurt's analysis and reveal varieties of ambivalence that Frankfurt's analysis allegedly overlooks. In this brief reply, I argue that Frankfurt's analysis of ambivalence is neither ambiguous nor objectionably narrow. I conclude with remarks on Swindell's (...) analysis of the relationship between ambivalence and weakness of the will. (shrink)

There is no abstract for this chapter. The following is a summary. -/- We distinguish between, explicit, inadvertent, and habitual racist actions. We argue that while inadvertent bigots and habitual racists are inclined to (sincerely) deny that they committed a racially motivated action, they have different reasons for their denial. Inadvertent bigots are denying it because, however deeply they search, they are not going to find any such motive. Habitual racists, by contrast, may hold explicit egalitarian attitudes but they are (...) nonetheless implicitly racially motivated. There is thus an implicit stressful conflict between their covert racist intentions and their overt egalitarian attitudes. While they aren’t aware of the source of this distress, cognitive dissonance theory predicts that they nevertheless will engage in dissonance-reducing strategies. Specifically, we argue that habitual racists will be inclined to confabulate a description of the action in non-racial terms. (shrink)

Abstract:Contemporary common sense holds that authenticity is an ethical ideal: that there is something bad about inauthenticity, and something good about authenticity. Here we criticize the view that authenticity is bad because it detracts from the wellbeing of the inauthentic person, and propose an alternative moral account of the badness of inauthenticity, based on the idea that inauthentic behaviour is potentially misleading.

Although the standard objections to Harry Frankfurt's early hierarchical analysis of identification and its variants are well known, more recent work on identification has yet to be subjected to the same degree of scrutiny. To remedy this I develop in this paper objections to Frankfurt's most recent analysis of identification as satisfaction that he first outlined in his paper ?The Faintest Passion?. With such objections in place I show that they demonstrate that Frankfurt's analysis fails because it is based on (...) the attitudes that the person whose identification with his desires is in question adopts towards them. I then develop a new (objective and cognitive) analysis that avoids the difficulties that Frankfurt's subjective approach is prey to. I conclude by considering and rebutting some preliminary objections to this new analysis. (shrink)

The phenomenon of ambivalence is an important one for any philosophy of action. Despite this importance, there is a lack of a fully satisfactory analysis of the phenomenon. Although many contemporary philosophers recognize the phenomenon, and address topics related to it, only Harry Frankfurt has given the phenomenon full treatment in the context of action theory – providing an analysis of how it relates to the structure and freedom of the will. In this paper, I develop objections to Frankfurt's account, (...) all revolving around the charge that his account contains a serious ambiguity between willing and identifying. With such objections in place, I then develop an analysis that avoids the difficulties and ambiguities that Frankfurt's analysis is prey to. I briefly distinguish ambivalence from other types of internal conflict. This paper aims to offer conceptual clarification on the phenomenon of ambivalence, which will then allow for discussions about the normative merits and demerits of ambivalence, the effects of ambivalence on autonomous action, and methods of resolution of ambivalence. (shrink)

Heidegger, like Kierkegaard, has recently been claimed as a narrativist about selves. From this Heideggerian perspective, we can see how narrative expands upon the psychological view, adding a vital teleological dimension to the understanding of selfhood while denying the reductionism implicit in the psychological approach. Yet the narrative approach also inherits the neo-Lockean emphasis on the past as determining identity, whereas the self is fundamentally about the future. Death is crucial on this picture, not as allowing for the possibility of (...) a final meaning to our lives, but as determining Dasein as ‘pure unactualizable possibility.’ Ultimately, therefore, narrative is not what constitutes selfhood – but this does not mean that narrative is not relevant to personal identity, because narrative allows identity to be expressed in action. (shrink)

The heavily discussed (neo-)Lucretian symmetry argument holds that as we are indifferent to nonexistence before birth, we should also be indifferent to nonexistence after death. An important response to this argument insists that prenatal nonexistence differs from posthumous nonexistence because we could not have been born earlier and been the same ‘thick’ psychological self. As a consequence, we can’t properly ask whether it would be better for us to have had radically different lives either. Against this, it’s been claimed we (...) can form preferences as to which ‘thick’ (psychological) self our ‘thin’ (metaphysical) self would be better off ‘associated’ with. I argue that these discussions draw the right distinction, but do so in the wrong place: understanding the ‘thin’ self phenomenally instead of metaphysically allows us to understand how we can rationally form preferences to have been somebody else. (shrink)

This essay seeks to explain a morally important class of psychological incapacity—the class of what Bernard Williams has called “incapacities of character.” I argue for two main claims: (1) Caring is the underlying psychological disposition that gives rise to incapacities of character. (2) In competent, rational adults, caring is, in part, a cognitive and deliberative disposition. Caring is a mental state which disposes an agent to believe certain considerations to be good reasons for deliberation and action. And caring is a (...) mental state which structures an agent’s practical deliberation, by establishing presumptive boundaries on the landscape of possibilities over which her deliberative imagination ranges. Incapacities of character are a consequence of the structure which these presumptive boundaries give to an agent’s deliberation. (shrink)

Reflection on free agency has largely been motivated by perceived threats to its very existence, which, in turn, has driven the philosophical conversation to focus on the question of whether we have the freedom required for moral responsibility. The Stoics were early participants in this conversation, but they were also concerned about an ideal of inner moral freedom, a freedom over and above that required for responsibility, and one to which we might aspire over the course of our lives. Though (...) some details of the Stoic ideal would be difficult for many of us to accept, I argue that it merits our attention for the way it focuses on the removal of inner obstacles to virtue, leading to improved moral vision and the willingness to follow that vision. I then show how we can harness resources from contemporary theorizing on responsible agency to capture the structure and scalar nature of such an ideal, thereby helpfully situating ideal moral freedom in relation to the freedom relevant to moral responsibility. I outline three possible contemporary versions of such an ideal, noting how each will be sensitive to related commitments in metaphysics, moral psychology, and normative theory. (shrink)

Are we being manipulated online? If so, is being manipulated by online technologies and algorithmic systems notably different from human forms of manipulation? And what is under threat exactly when people are manipulated online? This volume provides philosophical and conceptual depth to debates in digital ethics about online manipulation. The contributions explore the ramifications of our increasingly consequential interactions with online technologies such as online recommender systems, social media, user-friendly design, micro-targeting, default-settings, gamification, and real-time profiling. The authors in this (...) volume address four broad and interconnected themes: • What is the conceptual nature of online manipulation? And how, methodologically, should the concept be defined? • Does online manipulation threaten autonomy, freedom, and meaning in life, and if so, how? • What are the epistemic, affective, and political harms and risks associated with online manipulation? • What are legal and regulatory perspectives on online manipulation? The Philosophy of Online Manipulation brings these various considerations together to offer philosophically robust answers to critical questions concerning our online interactions with one another and with autonomous systems. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in moral philosophy, digital ethics, philosophy of technology, and the ethics of manipulation. (shrink)

Obtaining informed consent from patients is a moral and legal duty and, thus, a key legitimation for medical treatment. The pivotal prerequisite for valid informed consent is decision-making capacity of the patient. Related to the question of whether and when consent should be morally and legally valid, there has been a long-lasting philosophical debate about freedom of will and the connection of freedom and responsibility. The scholarly discussion on decision-making capacity and its clinical evaluation does not sufficiently take into account (...) this fundamental debate. It is contended that the notion of free will must be reflected when evaluating decision-making capacity. Namely, it should be included as a part of the appreciation-criterion for decision-making capacity. The argumentation is mainly drawn on the compatibilism of Harry Frankfurt. A solution is proposed which at the same time takes the notion of free will seriously and enriches the traditional understanding of decision-making capacity, strengthening its justificatory force while remaining clinically applicable. (shrink)

S. Kierkegaard argued that our highest task as humans is to realize an “intensified” or “developed” form of subjectivity—his name for self-responsible agency. A self-responsible agent is not only responsible for her actions. She also bears responsibility for the individual that she is. In this paper, I review Kierkegaard’s account of the role that our capacity for reflective self-evaluation plays in making us responsible for ourselves. It is in the exercise of this capacity that we can go from being subjective (...) in a degraded sense—merely being an idiosyncratic jumble of accidental and arbitrary attitudes and affects—to being a subject in the ideal or eminent sense. The latter requires the exercise of my capacity for reflective self-evaluation, since it involves recognizing, identifying with, and reinforcing those aspects of my overall make-up that allow me to express successfully a coherent way of being in the world. Kierkegaard argues that taking immortality seriously is one way to achieve the right kind of reflective stance on one’s own character or personality. Thus, Kierkegaard argues that immortality as a theoretical posit can contribute to one’s effort to own or assume responsibility for being the person one is. (shrink)

Ethical evaluation of deep brain stimulation as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease is complicated by results that can be described as involving changes in the patient’s identity. The risk of becoming another person following surgery is alarming for patients, caregivers and clinicians alike. It is one of the most urgent conceptual and ethical problems facing deep brain stimulation in Parkinson’s disease at this time. In our paper we take issue with this problem on two accounts. First, we elucidate what is (...) meant by “becoming another person” from a conceptual point of view. After critically discussing two broad approaches we concentrate on the notion of “individual identity” which centers on the idea of “core attitudes”. Subsequently we discuss several approaches to determine what distinguishes core attitudes from those that are more peripheral. We argue for a “foundational-function model” highlighting the importance of specific dependency relations between these attitudes. Our second aim is to comment on the possibility to empirically measure changes in individual identity and argue that many of the instruments now commonly used in selecting and monitoring DBS-patients are inappropriate for this purpose. Future research in this area is advised combining a conceptual and an empirical approach as a basis of sound ethical appraisal. (shrink)

Disavowals such as "That's not who I am" are one way to distance ourselves from unsavory actions in order to try to mitigate our responsibility for them. Although such disclaimers can be what Harry Frankfurt calls "shabbily insincere devices for obtaining unmerited indulgence," they can also be a way to renew our commitments to new values as part of the processes of aspiration and moral improvement. What, then, separates backsliding aspirants from those in denial who seek unmerited indulgence? Drawing on (...) Christine Korsgaard, on the one hand, and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, on the other, I propose a two-dimensional account of practical identity that makes sense of a certain kind of self-ignorance and helps us distinguish the aspirant from the superficially similar cases of denial and resignation. A key factor is how one responds to what I call residual practical identities. (shrink)

She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg, if there was a draught, she sat in it—in short, she was so constituted that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to sympathise always with the minds and wishes of others. — Virginia Woolf (1979, 59).

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 51, Issue 3, Page 195-233, Summer 2023.

In this paper, I propose a novel deliberation-based theory of autonomy which grounds an agent’s autonomy in her nature as a rationally-reflective being. I defend that theory against competing approaches to autonomous agency by arguing that the theory I propose is best equipped to handle two of the more troublesome problems that theories of autonomy face: the regress problem and the problem of manipulation. Sarah Buss and Peter Railton have each recently claimed that the regress problem which plagues many prominent (...) accounts of autonomy indicates the need to abandon the notion that autonomous agency is to be understood in terms of deliberation, endorsement, or any other activity on the part of the agent, and adopt instead a “passive” approach to autonomous agency. Against this claim, I argue that despite their shift to the passive mode, the theories offered by Buss and Railton also face a version of the regress problem, and that the general solution to that problem implicit in their passive theories is available also to “active” theories of autonomy, such as the deliberation-based theory I propose. I go on to explain that because the solution to the regress problem I extract from the theories of Buss and Railton requires an “unmoved mover” of autonomy, the history of which is necessarily irrelevant, it invites manipulation objections. I argue that the theory I propose offers the most promising response to such objections, and thus escapes these two prominent problems in better stead than do the competing approaches to autonomous agency. (shrink)

Although most people still behave like happy meat eaters, there are good reasons to think that many are in fact ambivalent about meat. Following up on earlier findings, in this paper we describe how, in focus groups, cultured meat triggered much discussion about meat, especially among older people. While young people wondered whether they would eat cultured meat products, older people thought about diet changes in a historical perspective and wondered if and how cultured meat might become a societal success. (...) Beneath the surface of everyday behavior, in which they followed mainstream norms, many of our research participants harbored moral concerns and in various ways expressed an interest in collective change. Reflecting on the focus group discussions, we suggest, first, that appreciating the important role of ambivalence in processes of moral change requires rethinking relations between ambivalence and morality. Second, the entanglement of ambivalence with ambiguity increases the “fluidity” of such processes of change: when it is no longer clear what exactly meat is, the meanings and experiences of eating it also become unsettled. This has implications for thinking about morality in times of change. Studying consumer choices cannot do justice to processes of ambivalence and ambiguity below the surface of behavior. More generally, the idea that morality resides in making up our minds about clear moral choices gives way to the need to become skilled, collectively as well as individually, in dealing imaginatively with ambivalence and ambiguity. (shrink)

While “dignity” plays an increasingly important role in contemporary moral and political debates, there is profound dispute over its definition, meaning, and normative function. Instead of concluding that dignity’s elusiveness renders it useless, or that it signals its fundamental character, this paper focuses on illuminating one particular strand of meritocratic dignity. It introduces a number of examples and conceptual distinctions and argues that there is a specific strand of “expressive” meritocratic dignity that is not connected to holding a special office (...) or rank, but that is ascribed to individuals who are able to engage in autonomous self-expression. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Harry Frankfurt's work (both on volitional necessity and on Descartes) can help us to understand the argument that is at the heart of P. F. Strawson's classic article, "Freedom and Resentment". Strawson seems to say that it is both idle and irrelevant to ask whether the participant attitude (the framework within which we see others as morally responsible agents) is justified, but many have been puzzled by these remarks. In this paper I contend that (...) we can better understand Strawson's argument by taking him to be saying that the participant attitude is volitionally necessary. (shrink)

The Western focus on personal autonomy as the normative basis for securing persons’ consent to their treatment renders this autonomy-based approach to informed consent vulnerable to the charge that it is based on an overly atomistic understanding of the person. This leads to a puzzle: how does this generally-accepted atomistic understanding of the person fits with the emphasis on familial consent that occurs when family members are provided with the opportunity to veto a prospective donor’s wish to donate after she (...) has died and her organs are being considered for harvesting? It is argued in this paper that this charge can be met and this puzzle dissolved once it is recognized that autonomy is an inherently social concept. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Many ‘deep self’ theories of moral responsibility characterize the deep self as necessarily requiring that an agent be able to reflect on her own cognitive states in various ways. In this paper, I argue that these metacognitive abilities are not actually a necessary feature of the deep self. In order to show this, I appeal to empirical evidence from research on autism spectrum disorders that suggests that individuals with ASD have striking impairments in metacognitive abilities. I then argue that metacognitive (...) conceptions of the deep self are implausible insofar as they fail to give a satisfactory account of the responsibility of persons with autism. (shrink)

Harry Frankfurt’s Unwilling Addict and Willing Addict cases accomplish something fairly unique: they pull apart the predictions of control-based views of moral responsibility and competing self-expression views. The addicts both lack control over their actions but differ in terms of expression of their respective selves. Frankfurt’s own view is that—in line with the predictions of self-expression views—the unwilling addict is not morally responsible for his drug-directed actions while the willing addict is. But is Frankfurt right? In this essay, I put (...) together a systematic defence of Frankfurt’s position. (shrink)

Many philosophers maintain that neither one’s reasons for action nor well-being are ever grounded in facts about what we desire or favor. Yet our reasons to eat a flavor of ice cream we like rather than one we do not seem an obvious counter-example. I argue that there is no getting around such examples and that therefore a fully stance independent account of the grounding of our reasons is implausible. At least in matters of mere taste our “stance” plays a (...) normative role in grounding reasons. (shrink)

Many forms of contemporary morality treat the individual as the fundamental unit of moral importance. Perhaps the most striking example of this moral vision of the individual is the contemporary global human rights regime, which treats the individual as, for all intents and purposes, sacrosanct. This essay attempts to explore one feature of this contemporary understanding of the moral status of the individual, namely the moral significance of a subject’s actual affective states, and in particular her cares and commitments. I (...) argue that in virtue of the moral significance of actual individuals, we should take actual cares and values very seriously—even if those cares and values are not expressions of the person’s autonomy—as partially constituting that individual as a concrete subject who is the proper object of our moral attention. In particular, I argue that a person’s actual cares and values have non-derivative moral significance. Simply because someone cares about something, that care is morally significant. In virtue of this non-derivative moral significance of cares, we ought to adopt of a commitment to accommodate others’ cares and a commitment not to frustrate their cares. (shrink)

Many people believe that for someone to now be responsible for some past action, the agent of that action and the responsible agent now must be one and the same person. In other words, many people that moral responsibility presupposes numerical personal identity. In this paper, I show why this platitude is false. I then suggest an account of what actual metaphysical relationship moral responsibility presupposes instead.

In this paper, I want to discuss the relation between ambivalence and the unity of the self. I will raise the question whether a person can be both ambivalent about his own will and nevertheless be wholehearted. Since Harry Frankfurt’s theory is my main point of reference, I briefly introduce his account of the will and the reasons for his opposition towards ambivalence in the first section. In the second section, I analyse different interpretations of ambivalence. In the third section, (...) I provide a narrative account of a diachronic integration of the self that allows for the integration of volitional ambivalence. Finally, I scrutinise different meanings of the unity of the self, since disintegration, not ambivalence, seems to be bad for us. I conclude that persons can indeed be wholeheartedly ambivalent. (shrink)

This article is a critical assessment of Harry Frankfurt's hierarchical theory of freedom. It spells out and distinguishes several different and irreconcilable conceptions of freedom present in Frankfurt's work. I argue that Frankfurt is ambiguous in his early formulation as to what conception of freedom of the will the hierarchical theory builds on, an avoidability or a satisfaction conception. This ambiguity causes problems in his later attempts to respond to the objections of wantonness of second-order desires and of infinite regress. (...) With his more recent idea of freedom as being satisfied with harmony in one's entire volitional system, Frankfurt may solve the infinite regress objection but he does so at the cost of ending up with a description of freedom, which comes very close to being identical to his own description of the wanton. Frankfurt's account leaves open the question of whether the satisfactory harmony is caused by the inability to do otherwise, or is independent of it. To answer this question, Frankfurt's hierarchical theory needs to be complemented with a number of “autonomy variables” (Double). Satisfaction may be a necessary condition of freedom, but it is not sufficient. We also need to know how the person came to be satisfied. If being satisfied is merely something that happens to one, it fails to be an adequate description of a free person – and it also contradicts some of Frankfurt's own earlier insights. (shrink)

Objective Hermeneutics is a qualitative method that focuses on few sequences of texts, which helps understand single cases. It is used to explore how consumers cope with the contradiction between their enjoyment for meat and their empathy for animals without using frameworks drafted by social scientists. Five cases are analysed, which range from strong references towards the societal norm of meat eating to a feeling of uncertainty in the face of the animals’ death. None of the cases, however, sees the (...) necessity to find a rationale for their own meat consumption. The study concludes by raising the question about the persistence of a societal consensus for meat consumption. (shrink)

How do we know what our intentions are? It is argued that work on self-knowledge has tended to neglect the attitude of intention, and that an epistemological account is needed that is attuned to the specific features of that state. Richard Moran’s Authorship view, on which we can acquire self-knowledge by making up our minds, offers a promising insight for such an account: we do not normally discover what we intend through introspection. However, his formulation of the Authorship view, developed (...) primarily with the attitude of belief in mind, is found wanting when applied to intention. An alternative account is proposed for knowledge of one’s own intentions that gives a central role to the mental act of deciding what to do. It is argued that we can come to know what we intend by making a decision about what to do and self-ascribing the content of that decision as our intended action. (shrink)

The concept of identification is often appealed to in explanations of how it is that some actions are authored by an agent, and so autonomous, or free. Over the last several decades, different conceptions of identification have been advanced and refined, and the term is now commonplace in moral psychology and metaethics. In this paper I argue that two dominant accounts of identification implicated in self-unity fail to acknowledge the significance of a related form of self-unifying activity, self-recognition. Self-recognition is (...) self-authoring because it involves identification with a new description of oneself, but it is excluded by standard accounts of identification which over-emphasize action and volition in autonomous agency. Although self-recognition is unlikely to produce immediate action, it accords with the activity of self-unity that is said to be constitutive of identification. (shrink)

The concept of identification is often appealed to in explanations of how it is that some actions are authored by an agent, and so autonomous, or free. Over the last several decades, different conceptions of identification have been advanced and refined, and the term is now commonplace in moral psychology and metaethics. In this paper I argue that two dominant accounts of identification implicated in self-unity fail to acknowledge the significance of a related form of self-unifying activity, self-recognition. Self-recognition is (...) self-authoring because it involves identification with a new description of oneself, but it is excluded by standard accounts of identification which over-emphasize action and volition in autonomous agency. Although self-recognition is unlikely to produce immediate action, it accords with the activity of self-unity that is said to be constitutive of identification. (shrink)

Two intuitions lie at the heart of our conception of free will. One intuition locates free will in our ability to deliberate effectively and control our actions accordingly: the ‘Deliberation and Control’ (DC) condition. The other intuition is that free will requires the existence of alternative possibilities for choice: the AP condition. These intuitions seem to conflict when, for instance, we deliberate well to decide what to do, and we do not want it to be possible to act in some (...) other way. I suggest that intuitions about the AP condition arise when we face ‘close calls,’ situations in which, after deliberating, we still do not know what we really want to do. Indeed, several incompatibilists suggest such close calls are necessary for free will. I challenge this suggestion by describing a ‘confident agent’ who, after deliberating, always feels confident about what to do (and can then control her actions accordingly). Because she maximally satisfies the DC condition, she does not face close calls, and the intuition that the AP condition is essential for free will does not seem to apply to her. I conclude that intuitions about the importance of the AP condition rest on our experiences of close calls and arise precisely to the extent that our deliberations fail to arrive at a clear decision. I then raise and respond to several objections to this thought experiment and its relevance to the free will debate. (shrink)

Confabulation is typically understood to be dysfunctional. But this understanding neglects the phenomenon’s potential benefits. In fact, we think that the benefits of non-clinical confabulation provide a better foundation for a general account of confabulation. In this paper, we start from these benefits to develop a social teleological account of confabulation. Central to our account is the idea that confabulation manifests a kind of willful ignorance. By understanding confabulation in this way, we can provide principled explanations for the difference between (...) clinical and non-clinical cases of confabulation and the extent to which confabulation is rational. (shrink)

The temporal period between the moment of deliberation and the execution of the intention varies widely—from opening an umbrella when one feels the first raindrops hit to planning and writing a book. I investigate the distinctive ability that adult human beings have to deliberate for their far future selves exhibited at the latter end of this temporal spectrum, which I term prospective deliberation. What grounds it when it is successful? And, why does it fail in some cases? I shall argue (...) that an agent is warranted in deliberating for a future self when her reasons give her the right kind of cross-temporal authority. I argue that this authority is distinctive and cannot be accounted for by theories of agential authority that take desires, value judgments, or willings as the ground of authority in standard cases of deliberation. According to the theory I propose having the right kind of cross-temporal agential authority is not only a matter of having epistemic access to a future self’s reasons or being the same metaphysical person as a future self, it requires confidence that the agent’s reasons support undertaking such a normative commitment and that that future self will see the normative force of those reasons as the agent sees them. In other words, cross-temporal agential authority requires that the past self and the future self share a normative perspective. I show that this further condition only obtains if the agent sees her reasons in deliberation as having certain features. (shrink)

Patients who experience difficulty making medical decisions are often referred to as “ambivalent.” However, the current lack of attention to the nuances between a cluster of phenomena that resemble...

In a number of recent papers, Michael Bratman has defended a policy-based theory of identification which represents the most sophisticated and compelling development of a broadly hierarchical approach to the problems about identification which Harry Frankfurt drew our attention to over thirty years ago. Here I first summarize the bare essentials of Bratman's view, and then raise doubts about both its necessity and sufficiency. Finally I consider his objections to rival value-based models, and find those objections to be less compelling (...) than he makes them out to be. (shrink)

The Humean theory of motivation remains the default position in much of the contemporary literature in meta-ethics, moral psychology, and action theory. Yet despite its widespread support, the theory is implausible as a view about what motivates agents to act. More specifically, my reasons for dissatisfaction with the Humean theory stem from its incompatibility with what I take to be a compelling model of the role of motivating reasons in first-person practical deliberation and third-person action explanations. So after first introducing (...) some assumptions about the nature of agency in section one, I will turn to articulating and defending this account of motivating reasons in sections two through four of the paper. Section five then provides some background on the Humean theory before I argue directly against it in section six and critically examine the leading arguments for the view in section seven. Given limitations of space, however, I save the task of developing a positive anti-Humean view for another occasion. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have become convinced that the best way of trying to understand human agency is by arriving at an account of identification. My goal here is not to criticize particular views about identification, but rather to examine several assumptions which have been widely held in the literature and yet which, in my view, render implausible any account of identification that takes them on board. In particular, I argue that typically identification does not involve either reflective consideration of (...) our mental states or endorsement of those states. If it did, we would rarely be agents. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to provide a philosophical account of our sense that some people are more their own person than others. I begin by exposing the weaknesses in three possible accounts, which I label the "interventionist", the "existentialist" and the "ideal" accounts. I then go on to argue that the distinguishing feature of those who are their own person is that their natural inclinations are accurately expressed in their behaviour.

It is sometimes argued that having inconsistent desires is irrational or otherwise bad for an agent. If so, if agents seem to want a and not-a, then either their attitudes are being misdescribed – what they really want is some aspect x of a and some aspect y of not-a – or those desires are somehow 'inconsistent' and thus inappropriate. I argue first that the proper characterization of inconsistency here does not involve logical form, that is, whether the desires involved (...) have the form 'a and not-a', but rather the possibility of fulfilling all one's desires; and secondly, that the 'essential' conflicts involved in such inconsistencies are quite common and no worse for an agent than contingent conflicts. I draw implications concerning moral epistemology, moral realism and the logic of attitudes. (shrink)

Is there anything irrational, or self-undermining, about having "inconsistent" attitudes of caring or valuing? In this paper, I argue that, contra suggestions of Harry Frankfurt and Charles Taylor, the answer is "No." Here I focus on "valuations," which are endorsed desires or attitudes. The proper characterization of what I call "valuational inconsistency" I claim, involves not logical form (valuing A and not-A), but rather the co-possibility of what is valued; valuations are inconsistent when there is no possible world in which (...) what is valued can co-exist. Essentially conflicting valuations, I show, are no worse for an agent than contingently conflicting ones, which are common and no threat to rationality or well-being. Partly based on reflections about a conflicted mother, who values staying at home and also having a career, I argue that valuational inconsistency does not render a person unable to act, does not make a person's actions ineffective because of vacillation, does not undermine a person's autonomy, and need not make a person dissatisfied with himself. I defend my characterization of inconsistency as an apt one; I offer some reasons to value inconsistency itself; and I draw out some implications for coherence thinking in moral philosophy. (shrink)

In Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person, Harry Frankfurt put forward a theory that what is essential to be a person is second-order volition. The notion of second-order volition can be used as a key conceptual tool in understanding the conflict between desires. By means of the notion, this paper argues that the conflict between desires in our minds lies in the conflict between second-order volitions, other than the conflict between first-order desires. Based on this claim, (...) this paper suggests that, due to the misunderstanding of the nature of the conflict between desires, the analysis of unwilling addict and wanton addict given by Frankfurt is thus wrong, and in his follow-up articles he made wrong description of the phenomenon concerning the conflict between desires. (shrink)