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Abstract
Harry Frankfurt and David Velleman have both offered accounts of paradigmatic action. That is, they have offered theories as to which capacities allow us to maximally express our agency. To greatly over simplify, Frankfurt ultimately roots our agency in our capacity to care, while Velleman places it in our cognitive capacity to make sense of ourselves. This paper contends that both have an important piece of the truth and that we should accept a pluralistic approach to paradigmatic agency. It argues that we manifest a capacity that is distinctive of an agency when we have so fully embraced a motivation we are no longer capable of consciously controlling whether we act on it or not.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Tom Adajian, Chip Bolyard, Jeff Goodman, David Lambie, and Diana Meyers for helpful discussion with these issues.
Notes
Audi (1986) reprinted in Mele (1997).
Bratman Citation(2007) is a further example.
Frankfurt and Velleman, my models for the paradigmatic approach to agency, often speak as if full-blooded action is simply equivalent to autonomous action. They disagree though whether autonomous action needs to be rational action. I take no position on that debate here.
I borrow this strategy from Jaworska Citation(2007). In that paper, she argues that internality does not depend upon reflectiveness or evaluation. My case of the caring child is based on one of her examples.
My presentation of Velleman's view is based primarily on the introduction to The Possibility of Practical Reason.
He actually says it is clear that it is not autonomous action. However, as I suggested above, it is not clear that we should equate autonomy with all forms of paradigmatic agency.
One argument for this view is that if there are reasons for action, then action must have a constitutive aim. Velleman claims that for there to be reasons there must a norm for action. Moreover, to avoid skepticism about the norm, the standard must be internal to the nature of action. A constitutive aim for action, something action must aim at to be an act at all, can play both these roles. Evaluating this argument is beyond the scope of this paper. There are a number of accounts of practical reason, many of which reject the constitutive aim approach. It would bring us too far a field to consider whether any of these accounts are adequate. The introduction to Cullity and Berys Citation(1997) provides an overview of some alternatives.
A different response Velleman might make is to draw attention to the issue of action-individuation. Velleman might contend that when we focus on the larger action that these activities are components of we will see that they are not problems for his view. The purported counterexamples are skill-based activities. Surely, the agents at one time employed their practical reason in developing these skills. Hence, by taking too narrow of a view, we distort the role practical reason had in their development. In response let me say that while it is true that higher-order motives of rationality are involved in the development of these responses, it is not true that this motive functions in all expressions of agency. As I will argue, an agency can be expressed through reactions that spring from settled dispositions that are partly constitutive of realizing a motivational ideal. So while the ability to rationally evaluate motivations will play a role in the development of any agent, this ability may be lost for some courses of action when one fully embraces a motivational ideal.
I describe this model as following Frankfurt because it borrows from two of his attempts to solve the problem of identification for his theory. Frankfurt first tried to solve the problem by appealing to decisions. Later on he invoked wholeheartedness as the key. My approach focuses on the history of the agent and how decisions might lead one to become wholehearted.
I am not claiming that all volitional necessities, as Frankfurt describes them, are commitments that give rise to paradigmatic actions. Frankfurt says we sometimes discover a volitional necessity that we are surprised to find. Consider his discussion of military officers who find they are incapable of following certain orders (1999, 111). My discussion focuses solely on commitments that arise from deciding to pursue an ideal.
Velleman Citation(2007) seems to move toward an account that is more compatible with the one offered here. There he discusses skill-based actions, modeled on Daoist ideals, in which an agent suspends his capacity to make evaluative judgments. He describes it as a form of wantonness, but also as a step beyond reflective agency. But he insists that capacity to evaluate options must remain for the person to be an agent. My argument aims to show that this is not the case.
I thank anonymous referees for pushing me to face this challenge more directly.
Recall, though that on the pluralist account defended here, such motivations are only a sufficient condition for action, not a necessary one. There are other ways to be fully active which have very little to do with the capacity under discussion here.
See Chang Citation(1997) for some alternative ways to understand such situations.