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ABSTRACT
The question ‘Why care about being an agent?’ asks for reasons to be something that appears to be non-optional. But perhaps it is closer to the question ‘Why be moral?’; or so I shall argue. Here the constitutivist answer—that we cannot help but have this aim—seems to be the best answer available. I suggest that, regardless of whether constitutivism is true, it is an incomplete answer. I argue that we should instead answer the question by looking at our evaluative commitments to the exercise of our other capacities for which being a full-blown agent is a necessary condition. Thus, the only kind of reason available is hypothetical rather than categorical. The status of this reason may seem to undermine the importance of this answer. I show, however, that it both achieves much of what we want when we cite categorical reasons and highlights why agency is valuable.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Tiffany [Citation2012: 224] notes that Enoch's ‘shmagency’ challenge is a basic version of the question ‘Why be moral?’
2 Rosati [2016] argues that her view is not constitutivist.
3 See Morton [Citation2011] on the metaphysical and conceptual readings of this claim.
4 See Enoch [Citation2009], Street [Citation2010], Silverstein [Citation2012], Bagnoli [Citation2014], and O'Hagan [Citation2014]. Compare these with Fitzpatrick [Citation2013].
5 Enoch [2006: 171] argues that the constitutivist argument depends on the false claim that we must have the aim of being the best sort of rational, moral, and prudential agents—an aim that he describes, following Korsgaard, as the aim of self-constitution—in order to be agents in any sense of the term. He thereby challenges the constitutivist attempt to build an account of morally normative requirements from whatever is constitutive of agency. He does so by arguing that one can be an agent without having the aim of self-constitution—that is, one can be a ‘shmagent’.
6 See Tiffany [Citation2012: 224].
7 I call the person who raises The Challenge a sceptic, to maintain the proposed analogy with ‘Why be moral?’
8 Unlike ‘Why be moral?’, this question does not refer to an ‘action-requiring’ reason. This omission is intentional, given that being a full-blown agent is a way of acting rather than an action. I owe this point to an anonymous referee.
9 I owe this point to an anonymous referee.
10 Some constitutivists—particularly Korsgaard [Citation2008, Citation2009]—will contend that these two questions amount to asking the same thing. We cannot, they will say, ask The Challenge without also asking a question about why we should be morally good agents. And we cannot ask ‘Why be moral?’ without making reference to our distinctive agential capacities. Whether the constitutivist is right is beyond the purview of this paper. Nothing about my argument in answer to The Challenge rules out the possibility that it could provide the foundation for an answer to ‘Why be moral?’ But it also does not rule out the possibility that we may answer The Challenge, and yet determine that there are no good reasons to be moral. In this regard, my argument is not ecumenical in an important sense: it denies that we must make the constitutivist assumption that these two questions are related. As I suggest in my discussion of the constitutivist argument, however, one can denude the constitutivist argument of this assumption and still produce a coherent (albeit ultimately unsuccessful) answer to the Challenge.
11 Although Ferrero is responding to Enoch's shmagency objection, we can apply it to The Challenge.
12 Plausibly, being an agent does not require exercising all of the capacities discussed earlier. Due to space constraints, I cannot address this issue. See my [ms] and Arruda and Povinelli [Citation2016, ms].
13 Tiffany [2012: 233] draws a similar conclusion.
14 But might systematically ignoring one's capacities for full-blown agency require some of the capacities constitutive of full-blown agency (e.g. autonomy)? Not if we interpret ‘systematically ignoring’ as merely ‘intentionally failing to develop’ the relevant capacities.
15 This claim is consistent with Enoch's conclusions about constitutivism.
16 I owe this way of framing ‘external to agency’ to Connie Rosati.
17 I am grateful to Connie Rosati for encouraging me to consider my argument in these terms.
18 Claiming that being a full-blown agent is a means does not entail that it is not additionally valuable for its own sake.
19 This conceptual necessity is a product of a determinate, practical problem—namely, how to pursue activities that matter to us. It thus piggybacks on practical necessity, as exemplified by Velleman's claims discussed above.
20 This observation does not require that we have a conception of full-blown agency; rather, whatever way it is understood, there will be capacities that fall into each of the three categories above.
21 This does not entail that capacities can only be in one category.
22 Here ‘endorsement’ involves more than Frankfurt proposes, given his [Citation1998a] suggestion that endorsement represents both what I want myself to want and the attitudes that I want to be effective when I will actions.
23 Since I want to be relatively ecumenical about what full-blown agency is, it seems reasonable to include capacities that have an important connection to agency but that we can fail to exercise while nonetheless being full-blown agents. In making this claim, I recognise that constitutivists (and perhaps a Frankfurtian who interprets Frankfurt's accounts of endorsement and wholeheartedness in robust terms) are unlikely to be convinced by this way of distinguishing among capacities. Should they disagree with the list of examples above, we can create another set of activities for which a richer view of full-blown agency will be a necessary condition. No one, not even the constitutivist, can deny that there are some activities for which full-blown agency is a necessary condition—in fact, one would think that this is precisely why constitutivists such as Korsgaard take a richer view of agency to be important. The main disagreement, then, concerns which capacities to disaggregate.
24 What if Marcela half-heartedly pursues her ends? If this possibility were to present a serious objection to my argument, then I would have to rewrite my argument as follows: if one genuinely, deeply cares about some activity for which being a full-blown agent is a necessary condition, then one should care about full-blown agency. This is not my argument, for the simple reason that even pursuing one's ends half-heartedly requires that one aim to be, more generally, a full-blown agent for whom these ends matter in some limited sense.
25 Here one may object that appealing to the requirement of consistency sneaks in one of the capacities characteristic of full-blown agency, thereby making the argument circular. But ‘consistency’ is a requirement of rationality rather than a capacity distinctive of full-blown agency. We could raise an Enoch-style shmagency argument against the requirements of rationality as well, but this would not be an argument specifically about agency. It would target the claim that we have a reason to care about being rational, which philosophers such as Kolodny [Citation2005] and Broome [Citation2005, Citation2007] have addressed.
26 Parfit describes moral theories as ‘agent-relative,’ but his description applies equally well to reasons.
27 See Wedgwood [Citation2003: 198–9] for an explanation of why we can coherently cite both subjective and objective reasons in favour of an action: the only relevant question, he argues, is that of which type of reason is more primary. This is consistent with granting that there are subjective reasons not to drink the ‘gin’ in Williams’ [Citation1981: 103] infamous petrol/gin case (contrary to one interpretation of Williams’ explanation), even if the subjective reasons are grounded by objective considerations.
28 I owe this objection to an anonymous referee.
29 I presented earlier versions of this paper at The University of Texas at El Paso and the Annual Rocky Mt. Ethics Congress at the University of Colorado-Boulder. I am grateful to my audiences as well as to Sonya Charles, Suzy Kilmister, Connie Rosati, John Symons, and two anonymous referees for their comments on various versions of this paper.