Reasons in Action: A Reductionist Account of Intentional Action 9780198845034, 0198845030

Table of contents :
Cover
Reasons in Action: A Reductionist Account of Intentional Action
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction and Outline of the Book
1: Acting and Thinking
1.1 Acting and Causing
1.2 Thinking and Believing
2: The Purport of Reason-Conditionals
2.1 The Conditional Form of Reasons
2.2 Varieties of ‘Can’
3: The Reference to Desire in Reasons for Action
3.1 Kinds of Reasons for Action
3.2 Desiring in General
3.3 Decisive Desiring
3.4 Motivational Cognitivism or Conativism
4: Reasoning about Means
4.1 Deriving Desires for Means from Desires for Ends
4.2 Means and Morality
4.3 Reasons for Emotions
5: The Intentionality of Actions: Basic and Non-Basic
5.1 The Intentionality of Basic Actions
5.2 The Intentionality of Mental Acts
5.3 The Intentionality of Non-Basic Actions
6: Refraining: Its Nature and Normative Role
6.1 Letting Be by Refraining from Action
6.2 Causal and Contentual Relations
6.3 The Experience of Self-Determination and Freedom
6.4 Refraining and ‘Ought’
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 30/07/19, SPi

Reasons in Action

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 30/07/19, SPi

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Reasons in Action A Reductionist Account of Intentional Action INGMAR PERSSON

1

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Ingmar Persson 2019 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019939267 ISBN 978–0–19–884503–4 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

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Contents Acknowledgementsvii

Introduction and Outline of the Book

1

1. Acting and Thinking

13

2. The Purport of Reason-Conditionals

31

3. The Reference to Desire in Reasons for Action

42

4. Reasoning about Means

76

5. The Intentionality of Actions: Basic and Non-Basic

90

6. Refraining: Its Nature and Normative Role

122

Conclusion160 References Index

165 169

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Acknowledgements This book is based on my PhD thesis from 1981, Reasons and ReasonGoverned Actions. After finishing my thesis, I did not get around to preparing it for proper publication because my philosophical curiosity drove me on to other issues. But I never lost interest in the philosophy of action, and some concepts central to my thesis, like the concepts of a desire and reasons for desire and action, played important parts in my later publications. Through the years my account of what it is to act for a reason in such a way that the action becomes intentional has been revised and refined but, basically, it has remained the same. The present book is nevertheless quite different from my thesis. I have deleted around half of the material of my thesis, mainly critical discussions of rival views which now seem out of date, but also added some material, especially an account of refraining from action in Chapter  6 and of mental acts in 1.2 and 5.2. Indirectly, this book owes most to the advice I received when writing my thesis, in particular from my supervisor at Oxford, John Mackie. More directly, it has benefited from the help of two anonymous Oxford University Press readers and Michael  J.  Zimmerman who generously read the whole draft and peppered it with penetrating comments. In this case as in the case of my other Oxford University Press books, I am immensely grateful to Peter Momtchiloff, for his efficient assistance in turning my script into a book. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the Uehiro Foundation for Ethics and Education for generously providing financial and academic support through the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.

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Introduction and Outline of the Book

The principal aim of this book is to analyse what it means to act for a reason in such a way that we intentionally do what we have a reason for doing and intentionally attain the end for which we do this action, as specified by the reason. This analysis will also cover the simpler case in which we perform actions intentionally without having any reasons to perform them, for their own sake. It is, however, of interest to see how reasons fit in with intentional actions, since by far most of them are performed for reasons. By contrast, it will transpire that the analysis needs to be adapted to suit situations in which we let something be the case, or allow it to be the case, by refraining from acting. I regard it as a virtue of the analysis of intentional action here presented that its analysans does not appeal to any concepts that are distinctive of the domain of action theory, like the concept of an intentional action itself. This analysis does not appeal to any primitive concept of an act(ion), whether in the guise of a unique type of agent-causation, which is irreducible to causal connections between facts or events, or in the guise of irreducible mental acts, like acts of will, volitions, decisions, or tryings. Nor does it appeal to any unanalysed attitudes essentially related to intentional action, like intentions and desires (to do something). Instead, the intentionality of actions will ultimately be understood in terms of (physical) states of agents causing facts because this will fit how agents think of them. The direction of fit between thought and fact is here the opposite to what it is when something (propositional) is thought to be a fact: it is causing something to be a fact which is designed to fit the content of a thought rather than—as in standard cases of belief—thinking something which is designed to fit a fact. Notwithstanding these opposite directions

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2  Introduction and Outline of the Book

of fit, the pivotal notion of this analysis is that of a (­propositional) thought fitting a fact, and this is a notion of a more general application than the context of action theory. Thus, it could reasonably be claimed that the analysis put forward here is a reductionist analysis of intentional action which does not leave any action-theoretical residue. As such, it promises to be more informative as well as simpler than analyses which harbour such residues. Regarding reasons for action, I suggest in Chapter 2 that they can be put in a conditional form, in which the antecedent features a description of the action that the reason is a reason for performing, and the consequent specifies an outcome of this action that in the eyes of the agent counts in favour of performing it, in other words, something that qualifies as an end or goal of the action. Of course, I do not claim that reasons for action are always phrased in accordance with this mould in everyday life—that would be patently false. But it seems to me inescapable that when a reason for doing an action is made fully explicit, it must contain both a reference to the action for which it is a reason, or which it is about, and a mention of a consideration which counts in favour of doing this action. In a reason-conditional such as ‘If I scratch my head, this will make the itch that I am feeling disappear’: my scratching my head is the act for which this conditional is a reason, or the act which the reason is about, and its consequence that my itch disappears is what counts in favour of doing this act. If we take it that something can be an action only if some action is intentionally performed when it is performed, we have an account in which a reference to the analysandum of an analysis of acting intentionally crops up in the analysans, since the antecedent of a reason-conditional is a description of an action. This would imply, implausibly, that we could not perform an intentional action, unless we were already in possession of the notion of an intentional action. More plausibly, it is the other way around: we acquire this notion by acting intentionally; thus, we cannot be self-consciously aware of acting intentionally until we have had some experience of acting intentionally. In order to circumvent this awkwardness, I shall contend in 1.1 that there is a broader or wider concept of action which does not involve any intentionality. According to this concept, you act just in case you—that is, some facts to the effect that something happens to you—cause

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Introduction and Outline of the Book  3

something to happen, and these facts need not imply that what you cause is intentional under any description. The cause could be a spasm, or a stimulus—such as an object approaching your eyes—that elicits an act on reflex. It is this broad, less specific concept of action that figures in the antecedent of the reason-conditional. In the case of an action like scratching my head, and most other kinds of action, this claim is plausible, for whether my scratching relieves the itch does not depend on whether or not it involves intentionality. What is specified in the antecedent is more precisely a type of act. Particular exemplifications or instantiations of this type will be equipped with many details which do not belong to the type. For instance, a particular scratching of my head will be conducted by some of my fingers moving at a precise speed in precise ways. It may also have the relational property of resulting from an intention. These features do not belong to the type if they are not relevant to the occurrence of what is specified in the consequent of the conditional. Although it is relatively uncontroversial, it should be explicitly stated that the concept of propositional thinking, or thinking that something is true, that is invoked by the analysans is not an act. There are some related phenomena that may be acts, such as thinking of a proposition, thinking about whether a proposition is true, or saying something to yourself silently in your mind. These may be acts which can be intentionally executed, but thinking that something is true, such as a conditional proposition, is something that happens to you rather than something that you do. However, thinking that p is true can be the outcome of the act or activity of thinking about whether or not p is true. Alongside the concept of an action or act, thinking is the subject matter of Chapter 1, more precisely 1.2. Here it will emerge, as will be further discussed in 5.2, that intentional mental acts require a somewhat different treatment than intentional physical acts. The reason-conditional should not be understood as a material implication; for instance, the falsity of the antecedent should not be assumed to suffice to make the conditional true. Rather, a reason-conditional presupposes that the truth of the antecedent is in some sense possible and asserts something about this possible situation, namely that it ensures or makes highly probable the truth of the consequent. So, in order for it to be true that if I scratch my head, this will result in the disappearance

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4  Introduction and Outline of the Book

of the itch, it must in some sense be possible for me to scratch my head in a broad sense of acting. This sense of possibility must be clarified, along with the purport of the conditional. It is in part merely an epistemic possibility, having to do with the fact that it is in principle impossible for us to predict our own decisions. Although the truth of the antecedent must ensure or make highly probable the truth of the consequent in order for an ‘if-then’ conditional to be true, the truth of such a conditional is compatible with the consequent being true even if the antecedent is not, if its truth then is significantly less than highly probable. So, when I am scratching my head for the reason that my itch will then disappear, I might think that there is some possibility that my itch will disappear even if I do not scratch my head, provided that I think that this is markedly less likely than that my scratching will make it disappear. The possibility of it disappearing even in the absence of scratching is excluded if I am thinking that the itch will disappear only if I am scratching my head. However, if I do not then think that it is also true that if I am scratching my head, the itch will disappear, or that there is something else that I can do which along with scratching my head will make up a sufficient condition in the circumstances for relieving the itch, I do not have any reason to scratch my head. These issues about reason-conditionals and their possibility presupposition form the topic of discussion in Chapter 2. I shall argue in 3.1 that in order for me to act for the reason that if I am scratching my head, my itch will be relieved, I must want or desire the consequent to be true, but this attitude of wanting or desire is not part of the content of my reason. Its content is simply what is expressed by the conditional; the reference to desire is instead a part of the characterization of this conditional as a reason for me to act. In this book, I talk primarily about reasons for which we act. Facts to the effect that we have these reasons in mind explain the actions that we perform, whereas these reasons themselves—that is, the contents of some of our conditional thoughts—justify these actions in our eyes. These ­reasons may not in fact justify the actions. For one thing, the reasonconditionals may be false (the itch may not in fact disappear). For another thing, the favouring or motivating factor may not be a state of affairs

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Introduction and Outline of the Book  5

that is good all things considered for us (the itch may serve the function of keeping me alert, which is crucial in the situation), in which case it is a mistake to desire it all things considered. If the reason-conditional is false, our reason is merely an apparent reason, not a real reason that really justifies our action, or even contributes to its justification; this requires the truth of the reason-conditional. An apparent reason for an action is a reason that at least in the eyes of the agent contributes to justifying the action, but in the absence of its truth it does not do so in reality. Something may be a real, justifying reason for us, even though we are not aware of its existence, and have no desire with respect to its consequent. Some claim that real reasons are independent of our desires to the extent that they need not specify anything that we would desire even if we were aware of it. I have elsewhere argued that real reasons do not possess such desire-independence (see esp. Persson 2005: chs. 9 and 10; 2013: ch. 12), but I can steer clear of this debate here. My present contention is only about apparent reasons: it is to the effect that in order for it to be true that we act for a reason(-conditional), we must want its consequent to be true. The sense of ‘wanting’ or ‘desiring’ involved must also be explicated. I shall advance a dispositional analysis of what I term ‘decisive’ desiring in Chapter 3. A decisive desire is a desire that emerges victoriously when you balance the strength of all your known desires bearing on the action alternatives at your disposal. It must also be a desire whose object is an act that you are fairly sure that you can perform. Forming a decisive desire is in effect to make a decision which, I believe, consists in the formation of an intention; thus, in my view, a decisive desire can be equated with an intention. I might realize that if I am scratching my head, I shall cause not only the itching to stop, but also a scratching sound in my head, although this is an effect to which I am indifferent. If this is so, this state of affairs does not provide an additional reason for me to scratch my head; nor would it be an end or purpose of my performing this action. This fact by itself might make us reluctant to say, when I am scratching, that I am causing this sound intentionally, though we might go along with saying that I am causing it knowingly, consciously, or wittingly. Whereas foreseeing that my scratching would not relieve the itch would make me abstain from

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6  Introduction and Outline of the Book

the scratching, foreseeing that it would cause no sound in my head would not. This implies that we need not want what we believe to be consequences of something we want. Thus, if I want to scratch my head, because I think that it will relieve my itch, and think that it will cause a sound in my head as well, it does not follow that I must want the latter. This would follow, I hypothesize, only if we make the unrealistic assumption that causing the sound is a sort of means for me to do something that I want, like the disappearance of the itching (or, even more unrealistically, my scratching of my head). The sound being a means implies, I shall contend in 4.1, that I can ascertain that it occurs prior to, and thus independently of, ascertaining the disappearance of the itching, so that I could use the occurrence of the sound as a sign that the itch will vanish. Means that we can apply intentionally to accomplish ends are necessarily epistemically prior to them in the present sense. Causes are often epistemically prior to their effects; that is why causes are cut out to be the most frequent type of means. This type of means may be called manipulative means: they are means to do something, as opposed to epistemic means, which are means to tell whether something is, has been, or will be the case. It follows from what has been said that m ­ anipulative means that are intentionally applied to accomplish an end can also function as epistemic means to tell that this end is being accomplished, though the reverse is not true. When we employ something as a means to an end, we can distinguish between that to which we do something as a means and that which we use as a means. Thus, when we scratch our heads, we use, for instance, our fingernails as a means to do something to the skin of our heads. It may be asked whether it is this distinction, or the distinction between manipulative and epistemic means, that the well-known doctrine that it is morally worse to harm somebody as a means than as a side effect turns on. These issues about means-end reasoning and the notion of means compose the subject matter of Chapter 4. So much for the business of clarifying the notion of having a reason for action for which we act. But we may have a reason for action for which we act, and yet fail to do anything intentionally. When I have a reason for scratching my head for which I act, I may fail to act intentionally because the action I am performing is not scratching my head but,

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Introduction and Outline of the Book  7

say, scratching your head. But even if I succeed in scratching my head, my act need not be intentional because the connection between my reason and the resulting action is deviant or non-standard: perhaps because, unbeknownst to me, somebody has put some sort of extensions on my fingertips. To spell out the connection which makes the resulting actions intentional is the task of Chapter 5. Realizing, to my surprise, that what I am doing is not what I thought that it would be—namely scratching my head—but scratching your head would probably make me stop or modify what I am doing. We know how to perform many simple acts, such as scratching our heads—though, as a rule, this is knowledge-how that we cannot verbalize—and I now did something because I thought that it would be putting into effect my knowledge of how to scratch my head. If I am receiving sensory feedback—in particular, by sight and proprioception—showing that what I am doing is not scratching my head, I shall in all likelihood modify my behaviour. I call this the correspondence control model of intentional action, CORCON: we execute the action of scratching our heads because we take it to be what we have learnt to be scratching our heads, an event which we believe will achieve our end of removing an itch; and we continue doing what we are doing only if we receive sensory feedback confirming that it is indeed scratching our heads (and that it relieves the itching). If we receive such confirmation, we are intentionally scratching our heads. This is in outline the account of the intentionality of basic action offered in 5.1, but there is also the intentionality of non-basic actions to account for, like the relieving of the itching. The distinction between basic and non-basic actions can be drawn with respect to both action in a broad sense and intentional action. Non-basic actions are actions that we perform by (means of) performing some other actions; basic actions are actions that we do not perform by performing other actions.1 In the case of actions in the broad sense, basic actions can consist in actions that cause the results of other actions: for instance, the squeezing of a trigger causes a shot to be fired and a victim, Vic, to be killed, and as a consequence we have performed the non-basic actions of firing a shot and killing Vic by squeezing the trigger. By contrast, the results of our 1  This distinction was introduced by Arthur Danto (1963), (1965), and (1973).

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8  Introduction and Outline of the Book

basic actions are not themselves caused by any other actions of ours. So, our action of squeezing the trigger qualifies as a basic action only if its result is not caused by any other action of ours. It is not evident that this is so. We perform such non-basic actions as firing a shot intentionally by squeezing the trigger intentionally if we perform the latter action intending by means of it to fire a shot, and successfully implement this intention, while the action of squeezing the trigger is an intentional basic action if our successfully implemented intention to perform it is not an intention to perform it by means of any other action. It will be seen that it is harder, but fortunately less important in the present context, to identify basic actions in the broad sense than intentional basic actions. It is the notions of intentional basic and non-basic actions that I shall attempt to clarify in 5.1 and 5.3, respectively. CORCON implies that it is essential that basic actions are, as I shall put it, ‘contactual’, as opposed to non-basic actions which can be ‘consequential’. Your contactual actions consist in your causing some change as regards either just your body, or your body and a material thing in contact with it, such as an instrument of action, which you use as a means, or something you act on, or do something to, with (some part of) your body or the means used. Your consequential actions consist in changes that you bring about—by means of contactual actions—which extend beyond your body and what is in contact with it. Thus, stabbing and strangling victims are contactual acts, while harming and killing them are consequential acts. When the consequences of your contactual actions include someone else causing something, that is, acting, these actions may be included in your consequential actions, but in case the actions caused are contactual they will not be your contactual actions. Thus, if you cause me to have a spasm which makes me pull a trigger and fire a shot that kills Vic, you may be said to have killed Vic, or caused her death. But you could not be said to have pulled the trigger, for pulling the trigger is a contactual act which entails that the agent’s body is in contact with the trigger. For obvious reasons, the concept of contactual acts does not apply to mental acts, which may be exemplified by attending to or visualizing something, but the distinction between intentional basic and non-basic

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Introduction and Outline of the Book  9

actions applies to mental acts: for instance, you can intentionally make yourself excited or embarrassed by intentionally visualizing an erotic scene. However, an analysis of intentional basic and non-basic physical actions cannot be carried over to mental actions without modification, as will be explained in 5.2. One reason for this is that the mental episodes which, according to CORCON, participate in making basic ­physical acts intentional would interfere with the execution of mental acts. But it will be seen that this type of restriction is of less importance, since basic mental acts cannot have as long a duration as basic bodily acts, and consciousness does not have parts with which we can ­simultaneously perform different acts. By contrast, our bodies do have such parts which enable us simultaneously to do such things as to clap our hands and tap our feet to the beat of music, and these acts need to be coordinated. In general, our repertoire of basic mental acts is much more limited than our repertoire of basic bodily actions. Most of us can reliably perform such acts as visualizing the faces of familiar people as intentional basic acts, but occasionally we unexpectedly fail to accomplish this. What we can do in such circumstances, and when we try to call to mind the images of things more unusual, is to utilize the fact that images can stand in relations to other images which enable us to associate from images that are present to us to absent images. These relations, e.g. resemblance, are relations that images have to each other in virtue of their contents. I shall argue in 6.2 that conscious episodes, qua such, are not causally connected, though they are presumably correlated with physical events (in the brain) that are causally connected but, as such, conscious episodes are only contentually related. We can facilitate the occurrence of content-related associations by interrupting competing associations, and minimizing distracting sensory input through closing our eyes and being silent and immobile. But these means are less reliable than the ones usually at our disposal with respect to non-basic physical actions, so the latter can be more diversified and far-reaching than non-basic mental actions. When you refrain from acting and, thereby, let or allow it to be a fact that p, you do not cause p to be a fact. For it to be true that you let it be the case that p, you must be aware of the fact that you could cause something, q, to be a fact that will prevent p from being a fact, which it

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10  Introduction and Outline of the Book

otherwise would be. But, owing to your not finding sufficient reasons to form such a desire, you form no decisive desire to cause (it to be a fact that) q, with the result that it becomes the case that not-q and p. You do not have to form a decisive desire not to cause q, as you would have to do if you had to take action to prevent yourself from continuing a causal process already under way, such as your sliding or running downhill. It should be stressed, however, that in order for you to qualify as refraining from causing q, your forming no decisive desire to cause q must have a specific explanation to the effect that you do not find any sufficient ­reasons to form this desire. If you do not form such a desire because, say, you lose consciousness or are distracted by something else, you obviously do not refrain from causing q, and let p be the case, though it is true that you do not cause q, and p becomes a fact because of that. These are matters to be discussed in 6.1. Although I shall not argue for it here (but see Persson, 2013: 3.2), it is my view that whenever you simply let something be a fact or the case, this is true because you refrain from or omit some preventive action that you could have committed, and never because you commit some action. You do not simply let something be a fact if, say, you remove an obstacle and then let it remain out of the way with the result that something happens that would not otherwise have happened. When you let p be a fact, you cannot decisively desire it to be a fact, since decisively desiring something to be a fact is decisively desiring to cause it to be a fact. But you could adopt some other non-conative attitude to it, such as wishing or being glad that p becomes a fact. Since there is no decisive desire or intention that p be the case when you let it be the case, I do not think that it qualifies as intentional, strictly speaking. Letting p be the case by refraining from causing q is rather something that you engage in knowingly, consciously, or wittingly because you anticipate that p will be the case when you do not form a decisive desire to perform the preventive action of causing q. Whereas you do not cause anything if you simply let it be the case, when you knowingly or intentionally perform an act, that is, cause something to be a fact, you must of course be the cause of something. According to the analysis of the concept of desiring that I advance in Chapter  3, this concept refers to a state of your organism—in all

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Introduction and Outline of the Book  11

probability a state of your brain—which is causally operative along with a thought that it presupposes to the effect that you can perform the relevant action. In 6.2 I argue, however, that, strictly speaking, mental episodes, like thoughts, are not causes; instead, it is the neural processes with which they are correlated that are causes. As already remarked, mental episodes are related to each other and to bodily events in terms of their contents. This may be clearest in cases in which we infer a proposition from some other propositions that we think true because it logically follows from them, but similarity between what mental images are images of, and the fact that they are images of things that have regularly accompanied each other, are other examples of the contentual relations that we exploit when we engage in those psychological associations in which our intentionally imagining or thinking of something consists. Furthermore, according to CORCON, when we act intentionally, the relation between what we in fact cause and what we think that we cause is also contentual: the former corresponds to and makes true the content of the latter. The direction of fit is here opposite to what it is in the case of thinking something true on the basis of perception, which is involved in the sensory feedback that we normally receive when we act. Although the explanatory relations on the mental level are contentual, I believe that they presuppose the truth of causal explanations on a ­physical level, between the neural states with which the mental states are correlated. When letting p be a fact by refraining from acting explains why p is a fact, it is clear that the explanation cannot be causal. It has been seen that we do not experience our decisions—whether they be decisions to do or believe—as being caused and that they are in principle unpredictable by us. 6.3 appeals to these facts together with the fact, established in 4.1, that practical decisions cannot be contentually constrained in the way beliefs can be by premises that entail them, or by perceptions that verify them, to offer a debunking explanation of the strong sense that we have that these decisions are up to us or determined by us. Such an illusory sense of self-determination is presumably what lends credence to libertarian conceptions of free will. Finally, 6.4 examines whether it must be true that we can refrain from (not) doing what we ought (not). My conclusion is that this is not necessarily so, though when we cannot refrain, we could at least have eschewed responsibility

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12  Introduction and Outline of the Book

for this failure. But normally we can refrain in a sense of ‘can’ which is compatible with determinism. Responsibility is, however, a side issue which cannot be fully explored in the present book, but it is i­mportant to indicate that there is a sense in which we are responsible. Otherwise, it could not be true that we act intentionally for reasons and do what we ought or have most reason to do.

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1 Acting and Thinking 1.1  Acting and Causing Philosophers differ over whether the concept of action necessarily involves intentionality. For instance, Donald Davidson claims that you perform an action just in case there is something that is intentional under some description, that is, just in case there is something that you do intentionally (1971: 6–7). On the other hand, Judith Thomson for one thinks that inanimate objects can act in the same sense as animate beings (1977: 252–4). I side with her: it seems to me evident that there is a broad or unspecific concept of action which is applicable to us and inanimate objects alike. We act in this sense even when we do something on reflex—such as blinking or withdrawing a hand from something painful—automatically—such as most instances of breathing, swallowing, and tapping our feet to the beat of music—or involuntarily, as can happen when we sneeze, laugh, or pull a trigger because of a spasm. Suppose that I break a window when I am withdrawing my hand on reflex; then it seems obvious to me that in breaking the window, I am acting, doing something to the window just as, for instance, a rock does when it breaks it. I am behaving in a way that could be intentional were it intended. To act in this wide sense, we do not even have to move our bodies: for instance, we can score a goal by a ball hitting us and ­bouncing into the goal when we are standing still, unaware of what is going on. Brian O’Shaughnessy rightly argues (2008: ch. 10) that the extension of the concept of an action that is intentional under some description is wider than it might initially appear, for instance, that when you do something absent-mindedly, such as bringing a pen instead of a key to a lock, what you do might be intentional under some rather vague description, like bringing to the lock a thing of a rough key-like shape and size that you keep in a certain pocket (2008: 350–1). He is, however, correctly doubtful about whether this manoeuvre succeeds in making

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14  Acting and Thinking

everything that strikes us as an act or activity intentional under some description, say, the tongue movements that we might indulge in when we concentrate on balancing something (2008: 357–62). The classification of something as an act does not hinge on settling such vexing cases if we accept a broader sense of action which does not require anything like intentionality, and which is applicable even to inanimate things. As a matter of course, I also follow Thomson in regarding acting in this sense as causing something to happen: when I or the rock is breaking the window, we cause it to break. In the case of the rock, it is uncontroversial that when it causes something, it does so in virtue of some of its properties, for instance, it causes the window to break because it is hard and hits it with a certain momentum. It is, however, controversial whether it is also true of us that whenever we cause something, this is elliptical for some facts about us causing this. Roderick Chisholm (1966), Richard Taylor (1966), and a string of later philosophers deny this, believing in an irreducible form of agent-causation. Having argued against this approach elsewhere (Persson, 2005: 424–8), I shall not do so now; instead, I shall simply proceed on the assumption that whenever we are described as causing something, it is more precisely certain facts or events about us that are doing the causing. In the present context, what is primarily of interest is what these facts or events must be for an action to be intentional. It is, however, hardly true, conversely, that whenever something about us causes something, we could be said to cause it and, thus, to be acting. For instance, our hearts pump our blood by beating, but this surely does not imply that we pump it around. What is missing is, I suggest, that we do not perceive or are conscious of this piece of causation: of course, we perceive and are conscious of the beating of our hearts, but not that this causes our blood to be pumped around. This claim assumes, as I shall soon argue, pace Hume, that we can perceive instances of causation. The tenability of this constraint of consciousness is, however, less relevant for present purposes than that attributions of causation to ourselves are analysable in terms of event- or fact-causation. Turning now to the specification of the effect caused in action, it should be noted that some verbs—‘bend’, ‘cool’, ‘dissolve’, ‘harden’, ‘melt’, ‘move’, ‘sink’, ‘soften’, ‘warm’, etc.—have both a transitive and an intransitive use. In these cases, specifying the effect caused in action is often simple.

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Acting and Causing  15

Thus, when you move a finger in the transitive sense, you cause a finger to move in the intransitive sense. More precisely, you cause it to be a fact that a finger of yours is moving. For I shall assume that, strictly speaking, effects as well as causes are facts—‘dynamic’ facts to the effect that something happens or changes—rather than events. An event is roughly the instantiation of an indefinite set of properties in a certain spatial region or in a substance at a certain time, whereas a fact is the instantiation of a specific property somewhere or by something at a certain time. For example, the fact that your finger is now moving consists in your finger now instantiating the property of moving. Therefore, an advantage of casting facts in the roles of cause and effect is that these relata will be more precisely described than if events are cast in these roles (but it is not crucial for the purposes of this book whether facts or events are cast in the role of causal relata). Another, more practical advantage is that I am able to use propositional variables, like ‘p’, ‘q’, etc. for what is caused. Obviously, in order to make the notion of a fact more precise, the notion of a property must be explicated, since the identity conditions of facts hinge on the identity conditions of properties. I shall not argue for it, but I am inclined to adopt a fine-grained approach to property-identity, according to which not even the logical equivalence of two predicates suffices for it to be true that they attribute the same property to the subject. For instance, being an equiangular triangle and being an equilateral triangle strike me as different properties, although it is necessarily true that something has one of these properties if and only if it has the other.1 But in the present context, it is enough to insist, less controversially, that the material equivalence of two predicates is not sufficient for them to express the same property. This point is essential for my claim in 6.2 that the properties that mental predicates express are distinct from the properties that any neural or other physical predicates express. 1  Derek Parfit accepts (2017: 130) Frank Jackson’s claim (1998: 125–7) that these are the same property even in Parfit’s ‘description-fitting’ sense of property, preferring instead to rely on the strength of his example of being the only even prime number and being the positive square root of 4 to demonstrate that we need a narrower criterion of property identity than necessary co-extensionality. But although a triangle which is equiangular and equilateral has only one shape, its ‘sides are distinct from angles’, as Jackson himself notes (1998: 127). To my mind this is sufficient for its equiangularity and equilaterality being distinct properties; it implies, for instance, that we have to use different procedures to check whether triangles have these properties. However, Parfit’s example is enough to make the point that necessary co-extensionality does not suffice for property-identity.

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16  Acting and Thinking

It is not always so straightforward to spell out what you cause in an action, as in the case of your moving a finger. For instance, it is harder to specify what you cause when you eat—harder but not impossible: you cause your lower jaw to move in such ways that the food in your mouth is chewed, and so on. Effects that are entailed by the performance of actions are sometimes called their (intrinsic) results (following von Wright, 1963: 39–41); thus, a finger movement is the result of the action of moving a finger, and death a result of killing. An action can have several results, some of which are entailed by others, as a finger movement is entailed by an obscene finger movement. According to my conception, an action is an (at least partially causal) process, which can be quite protracted temporally. It starts with the occurrence of the cause, and does not terminate until its result occurs (cf. Thalberg, 1977: ch. 5; Thomson, 1977; and Ginet, 1990: ch. 3). Thus, imagine that you kill Vic by giving her a very slow-working poison. Then your action starts when some facts about you cause some movements of your body which constitute giving her the poison, but it does not end until the poison has caused her death, perhaps months later. This means that you may be dead when your action of killing Vic is completed. Some find this corollary—that agents can continue to act after their demise— implausible. This provides them with a reason to identify the action of killing somebody with some bodily or other basic action performed in order to perform the killing (cf. Anscombe, 1957: 37–47 and Davidson, 1971). These theories, however, carry an implication which seems at least as implausible, namely that Vic can be killed before she dies. A distinction between what might be called contactual and consequential actions might help us deal with this conundrum. Contactual actions consist in causing some change as regards either just the agent’s body, or the agent’s body and/or some material thing in contact with it, such as an instrument that the agent uses, or something that the agent does something to with the instrument, or acts on. The ‘contact’ must be of the robust, material sort, not the sort of contact that you can have with the aid of radio transmitters, remote controls, etc. Thus, if you cut Vic with a knife, this is a contactual action which consists in your acting on Vic’s body with the instrument of a knife. Consequential actions consist in changes that you bring about by means of contactual actions, and whose results extend beyond your body and what is in contact with

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it. For example, while stabbing and strangling victims are contactual acts, harming and killing them are consequential acts. Consequential actions are necessarily non-basic actions—they are executed by (means of) the execution of contactual actions—but contactual actions are not uncontroversially basic. Some—notably, Davidson (1971)—claim that basic actions are restricted to bodily actions, so that when a contactual action such as pulling a trigger is executed, the basic action performed is just moving a finger in a certain manner, and that the pulling of the trigger is something that you do by moving the finger. But, analogously, it might be claimed that moving a finger is done by contracting some muscles; thus, the basic action performed would rather be contracting these muscles. However, these ­muscle contractions are effects of electric impulses being sent along efferent pathways, so perhaps you contract the muscles by releasing these electric impulses, and so forth. This goes to show, as remarked in the Introduction, that it is tricky to identify basic actions in the case of actions in a wide sense. That is a reason why I have introduced the less contentious and more observational concept of a contactual action. It is less contentious because saying that you perform one contactual action such as moving a finger does not rule out that you simultaneously perform many other contactual acts, be they less capacious, like contracting certain muscles, or more capacious, like moving some external object in contact with your finger. And the concept is observational because the contact in question must be of a ‘robust’ sort (though we should not expect precision as regards what qualifies as such). Now, on the one hand, it seems that ‘killing’ describes a consequential action and means roughly the same as ‘causing the death of ’. This would explain why we would not say that we have killed Vic until what we have done has caused her death, and her death has occurred. On the other hand, we would not say that we are killing someone when we have performed the contractual act which will cause their death, but which has not yet caused it. But nor would we say that we have killed. Instead we might say that we have not yet killed, but have performed an action that will kill or cause death. Apparently, we would not say that we are killing, unless it is true that we are then performing a contactual action that will cause death.

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18  Acting and Thinking

Often death occurs so soon after the performance of the contactual action causing it that there is no need to distinguish between the timing of this contactual action and the consequential action of killing or causing death. This might nurture the claim that these actions are identical,2 but they are distinct and their timing could differ. For instance, contactual acts which cause death can rarely be performed post mortem (excepting a few actions in the broad sense, for example, if you drop dead on a baby, you may cause it to die somewhat later by the weight of your body crushing it), whereas the consequential act of causing death is more frequently completed post mortem. When there is a clear difference in their timing, the failure to distinguish between these two acts can explain why we are led to hold, when we have performed the contactual act, but it has not yet caused death, that, paradoxically, we have not yet killed, but are no longer in the process of killing, though we are later prepared to say that we have killed. Thus, the situation seems to be this: we do not say that we are causing what our contactual actions are causing when we are no longer engaged in performing them, but we say that we have caused what they have caused when they have caused it, even when this happens after we have stopped performing them. It is readily comprehensible why we are reluctant to say that we are causing what our contactual actions are causing: this could lead to it being true that we are performing innumerable consequential actions at any one moment, many of which we would not be able to specify, since we cannot look far enough into the future. In this type of situation, we rather distinguish between our ‘actions’—meaning roughly our contactual actions—and their ‘consequences’, which continue to unfold after the completion of our (contactual) actions. We would say, for instance, that we have not yet killed or caused death, but have executed the actions that will kill or cause death. But, after the unfolding of the consequences, we ascribe to ourselves consequential actions whose results are constituted by the consequences of our contactual actions. So, consequential actions can continue after the demise of their agents, though we would not then describe these agents as performing these actions. On the other hand, we would not say that we have killed before our 2  Cf. Davidson’s claim: ‘Doing something that causes a death is identical with causing a death’ (1971: 22).

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Acting and Causing  19

actions have caused death, as those who advocate the identification of consequential actions with some contactual actions would want us to say. Intuitively, it seems plausible to claim that two act-descriptions describe the same action only if the actions they describe occur in the very same spatio-temporal region. According to this criterion, consequential actions of a causal sort are distinct from the contactual actions by means of which they are performed in virtue of including as results the causal consequences of the contactual actions. These contactual actions are distinct from and causes of the results of consequential actions: for instance, your contactual action of moving a finger and pulling the trigger of a loaded gun causes a shot to be fired and Vic to die. If this contactual action had been identical to the consequential actions of firing a shot and killing Vic, the latter would also have been causes of the events of a shot being fired and Vic dying. This sounds distinctly odd (cf. Goldman, 1970: 2). To be sure, it might be retorted that this merely sounds odd because when an action is described as a firing of a shot or a killing, some intrinsically unspecified action is described in terms of these causal consequences of it. The oddity would then be like that of saying ‘An action which causes a shot being fired and Vic’s dying causes these events’. But the ‘odd’ claim that this rendition is supposed to capture strikes me as false rather than as platitudinous as the rendition is. It is false because the consequential actions of firing a shot and killing Vic encompass these events, and this is incompatible with them being causes of these events. I conclude, then, that consequential actions are processes which stretch as far as the consequences of the contactual actions by means of which they are performed, though sometimes—when they take noticeably longer time to complete than these contactual actions—consequential actions are not reported as such when they are going on. The consequences of contactual actions may include the actions of other agents. For instance, if you cause me to have a spasm which makes me pull a trigger and fire a shot which kills Vic, you may be said to have killed Vic (and be responsible for her death). But you could not be said to have pulled the trigger, albeit pulling the trigger caused Vic’s death, and you can be said to have caused her death, for pulling the trigger is a contactual action which entails contact with the trigger (perhaps with the help of some other material thing).

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20  Acting and Thinking

One thing that would stop this expansion is if the agent involved is responsible for the act executed. Thus, if you accept swallowing the pill I offer to you knowing that swallowing it will kill you, I am normally not described as having killed you, or caused your death; at most, I have assisted your suicide. But if you do not know that the pill will kill you, and would not have accepted it had I not led you to believe that it is harmless, I would be described as having killed you. Since responsibility is not among the central topics of this book, I refer readers to the ­explanation of why this is so that I have given elsewhere (Persson 2013: 3.4 and 4.4). My analysis of the concept of an intentional action obviously presupposes that the concept of causation is primary relative to this concept. G. H. von Wright champions the opposite view that ‘the idea of a causal or nomic relationship can be said to depend on the concept of action’ (1971: 72). His reason for this view lies in the role he assigns to intervention and experimentation in the verification of causal judgements (1971: 60–82). Following his lead, E.  J.  Lowe has more recently propounded that ‘only a creature capable of intentional action can acquire knowledge of causal relations between events from experience’ (2008: 134) because such knowledge in effect requires ‘active intervention and experimentation’ (2008: 135). Lowe concludes: ‘It cannot be that we first learn to apply the concept of event causation to observable events and only then learn to conceive of ourselves as agents’ (2008: 135). This is a view that Thomas Reid may also have had in mind when he wrote: ‘From our consciousness of our own activity, seems to be derived . . . the only conception we can form of activity, or the exertion of active power’ (1788: 36). Contrary to Hume’s celebrated claim that we cannot perceive causal connections (1739–40: book I, part iii), I maintain that we can be conscious of or perceive causation not only when we act—not necessarily intentionally—but also when external things act on us. We have proprioceptive sensations of how our bodies are passively moved, penetrated, scratched, warmed up, etc. by alien things, just as much as we have when we have proprioceptive sensations of our actively moving, bumping into, or changing the shape of such things. On my view (cf. Persson 2013: 3.2), the commonsensical notion of causation is derived from such proprioceptive experience of our bodies in different ways affecting and being affected by the physical world around us. This notion

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Acting and Causing  21

is as little analysable and definable as, say, our notions of colours or flavours, which are also derived from sensory experience, but it can still be used to give a non-circular analysis of intentional action. It follows from this account of the origin of our concept of causation that some causal knowledge can be gained without performing any kind of action, be it intentional or not. Thus, it is false that causal knowledge presupposes intentional action, e.g. in the form of ‘active intervention and experimentation’, although it might nonetheless be true that the more extensive causal knowledge manifested in science in practice presupposes this. Compare your seeing and feeling yourself bending a spoon with just seeing somebody else bending a spoon (as we would ordinarily put it). In the first case, you could have a feeling of the spoon pressing against your fingers and gradually yielding to the force that you are exercising on it. There is nothing comparable to this perceptual content in the latter case: here the content is compatible with what you are seeing being that the spoon is bending of itself, without the seen hands exercising any bending force on it. It seems to me that an accurate way of characterizing the difference between your sense impressions in these two cases would be to say that, whereas you are feeling yourself bending the spoon— which entails causing it to bend—you merely see the spoon bending as somebody else’s fingers remain in contact with it. The thing is that we perceive or feel our own bodies in a special way, from the inside, since they are innervated through and through. I believe that this proprioception of our own bodies provides us with our concept of a body or thing, which is a prerequisite for our acquisition of the concept of causation. Proprioception supplies us with sensations of our own body filling a three-dimensional volume of space, and a body or thing is, I submit, by definition something three-dimensional that is tangible and that has a three-dimensional shape that can be felt.3 In contrast, tactile 3  O’Shaughnessy recognizes—as will be seen in 5.1—that ‘[p]roprioception is in general essential to physical action’ (2008: 514), and he explores proprioception at length (2008: ch. 7). His analysis of it differs principally from mine in that he maintains: ‘The immediate object of “body sense” awareness . . . is the limb itself ’ (2008: 259). Thus, whereas he takes outer sense perception to be ‘mediated’ by sensation, he denies that this is so in the case of proprioception, ‘that there is a distinct sensuous three-dimensional entity . . . sandwiched between limb-thing and awareness-of-limb-thing’ (2008: 262). Consequently, with respect to phantom limb cases he claims that ‘there exists no something that is such that the “phantom limb” phenomenon is awareness of that something’ (2008: 260). But this denial leaves him without any clear account of the facts of these cases, e.g. of where the pain of a phantom limb is (felt). It should be added,

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22  Acting and Thinking

perception is only a perception of surfaces, not of anything filling or pervading three-dimensional spaces. Vision can provide us with a perception of a three-dimensional volume of space, like the empty space between our bodies and a wall, but it does not present us with a perception of such a volume of space being filled with anything thing-like. Without such a perception of a three-dimensional thing, our perception of causation would be non-existent, or at least considerably impoverished. For instance, we could not have sensations of exercising our strength to move a heavy object, or our body being moved by such an object in spite of our exercising our strength in order to resist this movement. We perceive our bodies in this interior mode whenever we perceive anything, and everything we perceive is spatially arranged in relation to it. Bodily sensations, such as headaches, are located inside this felt threedimensional thing or solid: what is tactually felt is located on its surface, smells in its nostrils, tastes in its mouth, and visual objects and sounds are spatially arranged outside it.4 Returning to the relation between causation and intentional action, it is certainly false that action—whether or not intentional—cannot involve causation: causal non-basic action undeniably does. Such action occurs just in case you cause something to happen by means of performing another act, for instance, killing or causing the death of someone by pulling a trigger, or stabbing them. At most, the claim could be that intentional basic actions do not involve causation.5 But this would have though, that even if you take proprioception to be ‘mediated’ by sensation like other modes of perception, it does not follow that you ‘would first and before all else move it’ (2008: 261), i.e. the sensation of a limb, and then the limb itself. After all, even though O’Shaughnessy takes seeing to be sensation-mediated, he presumably would not believe, say, that when, by relying on sight, you move your unaesthesized left arm with your right arm, you first move a visual sensation of your left arm and then your arm. 4  O’Shaughnessy claims that since the ‘all-but-contemporaneous physical causes’ of e.g. a pain in the foot are in the brain, the real location of this pain ‘must be in the brain’ (2008: 213). However, these causes are not the causes of simply the pain felt, but of the state of feeling or having a sensation of a pain in the foot. So, if the location of the cause is the location of the effect, it is this state that must be located in the brain and that is ‘projected’ onto the foot, as O’Shaugnessy claims is true of the pain: ‘bodily sensation must be projected onto the limb as the [after-]image is onto the wall’ (2008: 215). But that does not make sense. For my own part, I believe that a pain has no other location than where it is felt, e.g. in the foot—nota bene, not the physical foot, but the foot as given in proprioception, as phantom limb pains bring out. 5  As Frederick Stoutland explicitly affirms in an exposition of von Wright’s view: ‘the performance of a basic act never presupposes that anything has been caused to happen’ (1976: 310).

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Thinking and Believing  23

the awkward implication that we cannot distinguish between bodily movements in a transitive and intransitive sense in the way that we distinguish between, for example, the dissolving of a sugar cube in a transitive and intransitive sense. For if it is conceded that performing an action in the wide sense, such as transitively moving some bodily part is causing this bodily part to move, it cannot be denied that intentionally moving some bodily part involves causation. If we cannot appeal to ­causation, however, I do not understand how we could distinguish between bodily movements in a transitive and intransitive sense. I conclude, then, that the concept of causation is entailed by the concept of (intentional) action, even by its core or nucleus of an (intentional) basic action. It does not follow from this, though, that there is a concept of action which boils down to causation, as bodily actions in a  wide sense does, on my view. The concept of action might still be more restrictive, incorporating a reference to intention. I need not deny that there is a such-like more restrictive concept of action, but I do insist on the existence of a broader concept which involves no reference to intention. The latter concept can enter into the definition of intentional action without compromising the ambition that this definition must not appeal to any concept which belongs specifically to the domain of action theory, since action in a wide sense is simply an instance of causality. It goes without saying that the distinction between basic and nonbasic actions can be drawn with respect to actions in a wide sense, since actions in this sense are causings, and a species of non-basic actions are causally non-basic actions. But, as already mentioned, with respect to such actions, it is harder to identify basic actions than it is in the case of intentional actions. The distinction is also of much more action-theoretical interest in the latter case; therefore, I shall only expend energy on explicating the distinction in this case (in Chapter 5). By contrast, the distinction between contactual and consequential actions can easily be made out with respect to actions in the wide sense.

1.2  Thinking and Believing As remarked, some writers take basic actions to be bodily actions, but there are purely mental act(ion)s, and some of these must be basic. For

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instance, attending to something perceived or visualizing something familiar are often basic actions which are executed intentionally and voluntarily, though our attention is frequently drawn to something perceived, and images crop up in the mind non-voluntarily, and even involuntarily. You can perform non-basic acts by performing basic mental acts: to recycle an earlier example, you can make yourself embarrassed or excited by visualizing a pornographic scenario. But, as will be explained in 5.2, it would be a mistake to carry over intact an analysis of physical actions to mental actions, for the occurrence of some of the mental events to which this analysis refers as participating in making some physical acts intentional would interfere with the execution of mental acts. Also, as I shall contend in 6.2, conscious episodes as such are not causally linked, though they must have neural correlates that are so linked to count as acts. Conscious events are instead linked by their contents, for instance, relations like entailment, resemblance, or their being contents of phenomena that have regularly accompanied each other, as in the case of cause and effect or words and their referents. To visualize something, say, a marten, may be something we do as an intentional basic action, but to make the image of a marten occur, we need to rely on its having a neural correlate since, to repeat, mental occurrences are not causally connected. Therefore, we do not have as much control over mental occurrences as over bodily occurrences: we cannot produce them, or keep them going, as reliably as we can produce or keep up, for example, the movements of our limbs. Occasionally, we may unexpectedly fail to visualize or call to mind even the most familiar things as the spelling of a common word or the face of a friend, and when we succeed in this, most of us cannot keep these images in mind as long as we want. This is a significant difference between intentional basic mental and bodily actions, and it is due to the fact that we do not have a causal grip on mental events as such. If the image of something like a marten fails to crop up ­instantaneously when we try to visualize it, we can rely on its contentual relations to images that we can conjure up more easily. For instance, if we know that martens prey on squirrels, this knowledge may lead to the more familiar image of a squirrel occurring to us, which in turn may lead to the occurrence of an image of a marten. If this strategy is successful, we have

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Thinking and Believing  25

intentionally visualized a marten as a non-basic action by intentionally visualizing a squirrel. We can facilitate the development of contentual associations by being prepared to interrupt distracting associations, and reducing the risk of having competing ideas and impressions. The latter is something that we could accomplish by performing such acts as closing our eyes, and being silent and immobile in order to minimize distracting sensory input, and the thoughts this could occasion. The need for such measures shows, again, that we cannot generally perform intentional mental actions as reliably as we can perform intentional physical actions because conscious episodes are contentually rather than causally connected. I shall revert to these matters in 5.2 and 6.2. While thinking that something is the case, for instance, that a conditional proposition is true, is not an action, thinking about whether or not a proposition is true can be an action. This, too, is something that we might do by facilitating a present representation of this proposition leading onto related propositional thoughts, by being prepared to interrupt disturbing thoughts, and minimizing the risk of their arising by means such as the ones indicated in the previous paragraph. As remarked, when we try to perform mental acts, this typically shows up in features of overt behaviour such as closed eyes and immobility, but it might instead be that certain forms of active overt behaviour buttress mental acts under way, as when high jumpers physically go through the initial phase of their planned jumps simultaneously with imagining them. As O’Shaughnessy notes, ‘we can neither choose to think nor choose to stop thinking’ (2008: 470). Yet, he insists that thinking is an activity of ours; thus, he lands in the curious view that it is a ‘compelled activity’ (2008: 471). In opposition to this, my view is that most thinking is something that happens to us: we find ourselves thinking that various things are the case because this is supported by what we perceive, or by other things that we think is the case. We find ourselves thinking just as we find ourselves perspiring, shivering from cold, or undergoing other bodily happenings. There is a marked contrast between episodes of thinking and the bodily movements that are often the results of bodily actions: we rarely find these occurring because they are similar to other bodily movements or are elicited by what we perceive, while this happens regularly with respect to thinking.

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O’Shaughnessy is correct in claiming that we can choose to think about or of something, an object, a possibility, and so on. It makes sense to ask us to think about or of something—as we can be asked to perform other actions—though this is also something that could happen to us: when visiting Elsinore, I could find myself thinking about or of Hamlet. The latter may take the form of imagining various scenes from Shakespeare’s play. This is an exemplification of an associative connection that we can utilize when we intentionally think about or of something. Thinking that something is or should the case must not be confused with saying to yourself in inner speech or in your mind that something is or should be so. Such inner soliloquy seems to me to consist in acts of imagining your saying (aloud) to yourself that this is or should be so. Notice that it consists in imagining your saying that p, not merely in a mental occurrence of something that expresses the proposition that p; this could be what thinking that p consists in. While thinking that p entails believing that p, at least momentarily, this is not true of uttering in inner speech that p. Uttering p in silent soliloquy may be part of an attempt to persuade yourself that p is true, as in the case of the pep talk of an athlete. If it is assumed that thinking that p involves thinking of the ­proposition p—or entertaining the proposition p, as it has also been called—it may be tempting to hypothesize that an act of assent to or endorsement of the truth of p is needed in addition to constitute thinking that p (is true). Thusly, we may be led to the view that thinking that p is an act, the act of making a judgement. This is a traditional view— apparently upheld by Descartes in the fourth of his Meditations (1641)— which few would embrace today. But although thinking that p is not an act, it might be the outcome of various acts or activities, such as looking around for evidence bearing on the truth of p. This is the reason why you can be held responsible for thinking that p: for example, you can be responsible for this because you can be responsible for having omitted or refrained from considering evidence supporting the falsity of p, and attending exclusively to evidence supporting its truth. Thinking that p entails believing that p, but the reverse is obviously not true. Believing that p is rather a disposition which generally manifests itself in thinking that p when we are aware of circumstances to which

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Thinking and Believing  27

the truth of p is relevant. The forthcoming account of the antecedents of intentional action in Chapter 5 refers to thinking rather than believing. The reason for this is that a disposition to believe that p might occasionally fail to manifest itself in occurrent thinking that p, though we are aware of a situation to which its manifestation is relevant, and then the action that would have resulted had the disposition manifested itself in thought might not occur. This is a phenomenon that we try to deal with, for instance, by making shopping lists before we go shopping. We know that we could easily fail to think that we need some item while we are in the shop, though we have not ceased to believe that we need it (for instance, if someone were to ask us whether we need it, we would answer ‘yes’ without hesitation). Such slips are likely to result in our failing to buy the item. Therefore, I maintain that when we act for a reason, for instance, to buy something, we have to have the (occurrent) thought that if we perform this action of buying something, we bring about ­certain consequences specified by the reason. However, although we can believe that p at a time without thinking that p then, I am inclined to hold that we cannot truly be said to believe (dispositionally) that p at a time without having thought that p or something explicitly entailing it at some earlier time. We could have the belief, say, that birds do not wear boots, even though we have not ever had the thought that birds do not wear boots. It is enough if we have thought something explicitly entailing it, like that no other animals than human beings use any kind of clothes or footwear and that birds are (nonhuman) animals, truths with the help of which the truth that birds do not wear boots is readily deducible. p explicitly entails q if we cannot be said to understand p and q without understanding that the former entails the latter, or could not possibly be true unless the latter is true. Needless to say, not all entailments are explicit in this sense; if that had been the case, philosophy would have been more trivial than it in fact is. There are, however, countless propositions that are explicitly entailed by propositions each of us has thought (true), and it may seem strange to say that we believe all of them. But it seems to me even stranger to say that we do not believe them, or that we neither believe them nor do not believe them. Also, when for the first time a proposition explicitly entailed by what we admittingly believe, such as the proposition that

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28  Acting and Thinking

birds do not wear boots, becomes the object of our occurrent thought, it is not like starting to believe it. Suppose that for the first time you form a long conjunction of propositions very familiar to you, but unrelated to each other, such as that you have ten fingers, Paris is the capital of France, 3 + 3 = 6, and so on. Thinking this conjunction is true is not like your beginning to believe something that you have not hitherto believed. On the other hand, if somebody were to produce solid evidence against something explicitly entailed by what you believe, e.g. evidence that some birds do wear boots, you would be as astonished as if you had thought with conviction that birds do not wear boots. In itself, the present claim about the relation between the concepts of belief and (occurrent) thinking (that something is the case) is not particularly important in the context of this book. Its importance stems from the contrast between the kinds of dispositions a belief and a desire are. To have the disposition to believe that p is to be in a state which (a) must have been created by thinking (something explicitly entailing) that p, and which (b) tends to manifest itself in occurrently thinking that p in situations in which it is relevant whether or not p is true. In this respect, the disposition to believe something is like the disposition of remembering having done or undergone something: this is being in a state—presumably of a neural sort—which has been created by an experience of having done or undergone this thing and which makes possible a current ‘revival’ of the experience. But, as observed above, a belief—like a memory— might occasionally fail to manifest itself in occurrent thought without it following that we have lost it and have to acquire it anew. Now, although I shall contend in 3.4 that to desire to cause p is a disposition that consists in being in an internal state, this is not a state that could be created by the proposition p occurring in the mind in a peculiar ‘conative framing’, or as the object of a conative episode or attitude. There is no such conative framing, no content such that a desire—or decision or intention—consists in the taking up of an attitude to this content. Thus, classifying both beliefs and desires as mental dispositions must not lead to overlooking the differences between them. The noted difference between believing and desiring is a part of what I have in mind when I declare that my account of intentional action is reductionist and leaves no action-theoretical residue.

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Thinking and Believing  29

A propositional thought must be expressed or represented in some medium, but this medium need not be linguistic. As regards the thinking pertinent to the topic of present concern, it cannot be linguistic because in the case of many actions our knowledge of how to perform them cannot be formulated in words. This is true, for instance, of most of the bodily actions that we go through on an everyday basis. I think that this knowledge is rather represented by detailed ‘images’ derived from perception, in particular proprioception, perception of our own bodies from inside. Since ‘images’ suggests something visual, it is better to talk about sensuous representations that resemble or are isomorphic with the various sense impressions from which they are derived. It is often objected that images and other sensuous representations cannot be used to represent anything because it cannot be determined what they represent. For instance, a representation of a hand movement must have certain specific features: it must have a certain speed and direction, involve the movement of some fingers in this or that way, and so on. So, the question arises: does it represent a hand movement in general, or a hand movement with some of the specific features it includes and, if so, which? But even if a particular representation of a hand movement could be interpreted differently by different subjects and, thus, would be useless as a representative device in a public medium, it might have only a single interpretation for the subject in whose mind it occurs, and this is the only thing that matters for the question what it represents for this subject. Moreover, it is only representations of the most specific hand movements that are relevant for the purpose of acting. But if non-human beings and human beings before they acquire language are to be capable of acting intentionally for reasons—as is surely the case—the theory here proposed implies that a medium of sensuous representations must possess enough of a ‘syntax’ to express reasonconditionals, and this could be doubted even if it is conceded that it can represent the results of possible actions. I am, however, prepared to commit myself to the idea that such a medium could have enough of a syntax to perform the job of expressing simple conditionals. For ­example, I believe that imagining a hand movement that you perceive that you are not currently engaged in could have the function of expressing the possibility of this movement occurring, which could compose the antecedent

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30  Acting and Thinking

of a conditional. Again, I am not claiming that this is the only feasible interpretation of such a sensuous representation in the given circumstances, only that this is a feasible interpretation that the subject producing it could be focusing on. But, needless to say, the issue of propositional thinking in a medium of sensuous representations is too complex and controversial to be adequately treated here.

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2 The Purport of Reason-Conditionals 2.1  The Conditional Form of Reasons As intimated, I am proceeding on the basis of the view that a reason for action can be phrased as a conditional in which the antecedent is constituted by a description of the action that the reason is a reason for performing, and the consequent specifies a state of affairs that for the agent supports or counts in favour of performing this action and, thus, supplies an end of this action. It goes without saying that reasons for action are often formulated in other ways in everyday life. But it seems to me inescapable that when a reason for doing an action is made fully explicit, it must contain both a reference to the action for which it is a reason, or which the reason is about, and a mention of a consideration which counts in favour of doing this action—tasks that in my rendition the antecedent and consequent, respectively, take care of. For instance, I might be said to be stepping on your toes for the reason that you have insulted me (cf. Anscombe’s ‘backward-looking motives’, 1957: 20–1). But then I must think that if I am stepping on your toes, I shall be taking revenge on you, paying you back for your insult, or some such. So far as I can see, such a rephrasing of reasons for action is always feasible. Let us now turn to the question how such reason-conditionals should be understood. The relations between what could be expressed in the antecedent and consequent of conditionals are multifarious. This makes conditionals suitable for my purpose, but also in need of clarification. It is important for the analysis of intentional action that reason-conditionals are not understood as material implications. By contrast to a material implication, a reason-conditional is not made true by the falsity of its antecedent. The falsity of the antecedent pure and simple would merely make us reformulate the conditional ‘If I scratch my head, the itch will disappear’ as a counterfactual: ‘If I had scratched

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32  The Purport of Reason-Conditionals

my head, the itch would have disappeared’. And the truth-value of the latter counterfactual remains as unsettled as that of the original conditional. Reason-conditionals for which we can act are conditionals of the first sort, with antecedents whose truth-value is not settled. I shall take it that such conditionals presuppose that it is possible that the antecedent turns out to be true. More precisely, that it is merely possible that the antecedent turns out to be true, that is, certain neither that it will be true nor that it will be false. When we believe the antecedent to be certain, we would substitute ‘since’ (or ‘when’) for ‘if ’. It should be stressed that this possibility is presupposed rather than asserted. This is brought out by the fact that if the conditional is negated, the possibility is not negated. The conditional ‘It is not the case that if I scratch my head, the itch will disappear’ does not negate the possibility of my scratching my head; its truth requires this possibility as much as the conditional which is not negated. This claim about the possibilitypresupposition could be regarded as a stipulation, but I think that it is largely in line with the everyday use of the conditionals in question. Except in cases in which the truth of the consequent is deducible from the truth of the antecedent by itself—and such cases rarely, if ever, constitute reason-conditionals—when we assert the relevant sort of conditionals, we rely on a background body of assumptions that we make about the state of the world. We take it for granted that the truth of the antecedent is possible relative to this background, or compatible with it, but not implied by it. Thus, the possibility in question is e­ pistemic, relative to what we assume to be true of the world. When we assert a conditional, we make an assertion about the possible world that consists of our background assumptions about the actual world plus the truth of antecedent: an assertion to the effect that this conjunction (virtually) ensures or makes certain the truth of the consequent. The trickiest bit of the analysis of conditionals lies in spelling out what this (practically) ‘ensuring’ or ‘making certain’ amounts to, but this is not anything that needs to be done in the present context. It is enough to have on hand some examples of what it could amount to, for example, that it could be tantamount to a causal connection between what the antecedent and the consequent express, as in the case of a scratching of one’s head and the disappearance of the itch. The conditionals under consideration do not imply, however, that in the possible situation in which the antecedent comes out as false, the

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The Conditional Form of Reasons  33

consequent will also be false. This is what we would assert if we were to say ‘The itch will disappear only if I scratch my head’—or, in other words, ‘The itch will not disappear if I do not scratch my head’—rather than ‘The itch will disappear if I scratch my head’. The former does not provide me with a reason to scratch my head, unless the latter is also true, or there is something that I can do along with scratching my head that will make the itch go away. Therefore, it is conditionals of the latter sort that constitute my prime examples of reason-conditionals. However, although the conditional claim that if I scratch my head, the itch will disappear does not imply that if I do not scratch my head, the itch will not disappear, it does imply that its disappearance is then uncertain, a mere possibility. It is this possibility that I rule out if I add that the itch will disappear only if I scratch my head. The disappearance of the itch provides a reason for, or counts in favour of my scratching my head to the extent that the latter raises the probability of the disappearance of the itch from a bare possibility to what is (approximately) a certainty. It might, however, be objected that the possibility of the itch’s ­disappearance is an implication only in a looser sense, the sense of a conversational or ‘Gricean’ implication which is cancellable, since we can intelligibly say ‘If I scratch my head, the itch will disappear, but it will also disappear if I do not; either way, it will go away’. In other words, we can intelligibly affirm a conditional when our background assumptions by themselves ensure the truth of the consequent, and addition of the truth of the antecedent is redundant. To my mind, however, this does not sound right. As I understand reason-conditionals, if I assert ‘If I scratch my head, the itch will disappear’, I can only regard it as ­epistemically possible that the itch will go away even if I do not scratch my head, that is, that its going away is consistent with my background assumptions, just like my scratching of my head. To repeat, the effect of adding the truth of the antecedent to these assumptions is to boost the probability of the consequent from a mere possibility to (more or less) a certainty.1 It has to boost it to (close to) certainty if the consequent does not feature a qualification like ‘probably’ because it is reasonable to take

1  It should be noted that if we were to hold ‘if p then q’ and ‘if not-p then q’ to be compatible, we could hardly endorse the validity of contraposition, since ‘if not-q then not-p’ and ‘if not-q then p’ seem evidently incompatible.

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34  The Purport of Reason-Conditionals

‘If I scratch my head, the itch will disappear’ as stronger than ‘If I scratch my head, the itch will (very) probably disappear’. If so, the former is tantamount to something like ‘If I scratch my head, the itch will certainly disappear’. It is useful to bear this in mind when considering the ­negation ‘It is not the case that if I scratch my head, the itch will disappear’. I take this sentence to deny that my scratching my head ensures or makes certain the disappearance of the itch and not to deny its disappearance, that is, as being equivalent to ‘If I scratch my head, the itch will not disappear’. Surely, if we deny a superstitious claim like ‘If a black cat crosses someone’s path, that person will suffer some misfortune’, we do not thereby assert ‘If a black cat crosses someone’s path, that person will not suffer any misfortune’, for that would be another piece of superstition. We are rather saying that that person might still not suffer any misfortune, despite the encounter with a black cat. It has to be admitted that there are conditionals that my analysis does not fit. Consider for instance J.  L.  Austin’s famous example ‘There are biscuits on the sideboard if you want’ (1970: 210). Obviously, this sentence does not state that the actualization of the possibility of your wanting biscuits is a condition that helps ensuring that there are biscuits on the sideboard. Rather than being a condition for this fact, it is a condition for its being asserted that there are biscuits on the sideboard. It is like saying: ‘In case you want biscuits, I tell you that there are some on the sideboard’. J. L. Mackie has proposed an interpretation that is well suited to cater for this sort of conditional. According to him, ‘to say “If P, Q” is to assert Q within the scope of the supposition that P’ (1973: 93). The speaker of Austin’s conditional does indeed assert that there are biscuits on the sideboard within the scope of the supposition that you want them. Mackie ‘abandons the claim that conditionals are in the strict sense statements . . . that they are in general true or false’ (1973: 93). For this reason, his analysis sits ill with the fact that conditionals can be embedded in contexts such as ‘Someone believes that . . . ’, ‘It is true that . . .’ or ‘It is not the case that . . . ’. It sounds strange to say, for example, that Austin believed that there were biscuits on the sideboard if you wanted them. But embedding in belief or thought contexts is essential when someone acts for a reason, say, having the thought that if they scratch their head,

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Varieties of ‘ Can ’   35

the itch will go away. Therefore, Mackie’s type of proposal is not useful for my purposes. My analysis is also poorly designed to take care of conditionals whose consequents lack truth-value, like conditional imperatives ‘If you don’t want to go to sleep, do some exercise!’, or declarations of conditional intentions ‘If I lose, I shall take revenge’. In such cases, an adaptation of Mackie’s analysis would appear to do the job: an imperative is issued, or an intention declared, within the scope of a supposition. But reasonconditionals are not conditionals whose consequents lack truth-value. The present analysis is intended to explicate only conditionals that can function as reason-conditionals—not counterfactuals, Austin-style conditionals, or conditionals whose consequents lack truth-value.

2.2  Varieties of ‘Can’ It is now time to try to clarify the relevant possibility of the actions described in the antecedents of reason-conditionals, such as my action of scratching my head. When we consider reasons for or against doing actions, we normally assume that we can do them as well as can avoid doing them. ‘Can’ is then used in what Austin once (1970: 229) called the ‘all-in’ sense, which covers that we have both the ability (or capacity) and the opportunity to do something. I take possession of an ‘ability’ (etc.) to act to being in a state which rules out, roughly speaking, various internal factors that would block the relevant action, factors such as paralysis, blindness, physical or mental weakness. An ‘opportunity’ to act excludes external blockers of the action, such as wearing a straitjacket, being locked up in a dark room, etc., and affirms the presence of necessary equipment, such as books in the case of reading or a pole in the case of pole vaulting. Some factors might straddle this distinction, for instance, spectacles and hearing aids: they seem to enhance our ability to see and hear, though they are external to our bodies. It might be replied that these devices do not endow us with an ability to see or hear something without qualification, but strictly speaking with an ability to see and hear it with spectacles or hearing aids. It does not matter, however, whether there

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36  The Purport of Reason-Conditionals

are factors blurring the distinction between abilities and opportunities, since an all-in ‘can’ will encompass them, alongside factors that fall unequivocally on either the ability or opportunity side. A much discussed analysis has it that we can do something in the all-in sense—or, as I shall also phrase it, have an all-in power to do something—such as scratching our heads just in case we shall scratch our heads if we want, intend, decide, try, or choose to do it. This type of conditional analysis is commonly put forward with an eye to what it means that we can perform an action intentionally, or at will. But the fact that, say, we blink on reflex also demonstrates that we can blink. Therefore, if we want to capture an all-in power to act in a wider sense, we must allow for an expansion of the factors mentioned in the ­antecedent of the conditional analysis.2 As remarked in the Introduction, it is advisable to understand reason-conditionals as being concerned with actions in a broad sense. The distinction between acts which are and are not intentional is fuzzy. Consider an action such as hitting the bull’s eye. If a worse than mediocre dart player, such as myself, succeeds in hitting the bull’s eye on a particular occasion, it follows that on that particular occasion I could in an all-in sense perform that action. To be sure, I cannot perform this action whenever I want to, or even generally when I want to. So, I do not have a general all-in power to hit the bull’s eye, for I cannot reliably hit the bull’s eye in a wider range of circumstances. Nevertheless, on a particular occasion, such as this one, it might be true that I have the power to hit the bull’s eye, which I luckily actualize by hitting it. That I luckily hit the bull’s eye is in tension with saying that I intentionally hit it. Granted, I intentionally threw a dart in the direction of the dartboard and intentionally hit it—this is something over which I was exercising control—but I did not intentionally hit one particular spot rather than any other within some vaguely delimited area of the dartboard. Of course, I am rarely, if ever, in a position to have a reasonable belief that I am in possession of a momentary all-in power to hit the bull’s eye. That is a reason why such a momentary power is seldom what we have in mind when we affirm that we can do something. Normally, we can only reasonably believe that we are in possession of an all-in power to perform 2  I discuss the conditional analysis more fully in 2005: chs 32 and 33.

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Varieties of ‘ Can ’   37

an act at a particular time if we have established that we are in possession of a general all-in power to perform this act—or an approximation to such a power, for of course there is a whole spectrum of cases in between what we can always do and what we can do once in a lifetime. All the same, I might be in a position to believe reasonably that it is epistemically possible—though quite unlikely—that I momentarily have the all-in power to hit the bull’s eye. This is so because I know that even worse than mediocre dart players sometimes are lucky enough to hit the bull’s eye, and this proves that they momentarily have the all-in power to do so. Such an epistemic possibility is, I think, enough for me to consider, not reasons for hitting the bull’s eye, but reasons for trying to do so. These classes of reasons are to a large extent, but not entirely, the same: for instance, to find out whether I can do something can be a reason for trying to do it, but not for doing it, whereas such facts as that hitting the bull’s eye will inflict a crushing defeat on a cocky opponent can be a reason for either. To insert ‘trying’ signals an uncertainty of success. This uncertainty—due to the fact that the success of my action depends on minuscule movements beyond my control—also means that it is doubtful at least that my hitting the bull’s eye is intentional, even though I have a desire to hit the bull’s eye when I do. Rather, I accidentally and luckily hit it, and this appears to be at odds with it being intentional. If so, for us to perform an action intentionally at a time, we need to have a reasonable belief that it is at least more probable than not that we have an all-in power to perform it at that time. How high the probability reasonably believed in must be cannot be precisely determined; as a consequence, vagueness surrounds the concept of an intentional action (as will be further discussed in Chapter 5). The same goes for having an intention to perform the action, but it is notable that in order to have the intention of doing something, the belief that we probably have an all-in power to do it need not be reasonable. Thus, it is conceivable that there be lousy dart players who intend to hit the bull’s eye because they are unreasonably convinced that they have at least a momentary all-in power to do so, but it does not follow that they intentionally hit it if they succeed in their attempts. Their successes are still accidental and fortunate. Let us, however, take it that agents have a reasonable belief amounting to more or less a conviction in their relevant all-in powers when they

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38  The Purport of Reason-Conditionals

ponder reason-conditionals. To exemplify, when I am endorsing the conditional ‘If I scratch my head, this will cause the itch to disappear’ as a reason for scratching my head, a reasonable belief in my current all-in power to scratch my head is present as a part of my background assumptions. What I add to these assumptions when I am endorsing the reason-conditional is the (mere) epistemic possibility of a factor that will actualize this all-in power. This means that the reason-conditional in question is tantamount to ‘If—as is epistemically possible—my all-in power to cause bodily movements that constitute a head-scratching is actualized, these movements will cause the itch to disappear’. As will be explained in Chapter 3, if this conditional is to qualify as a reasonconditional for me, I must desire that the itch disappears; otherwise, its ­disappearance will not count in favour of my scratching my head. But in the event that it satisfies this conative condition, the outcome of the itch disappearing will supply such an actualizing factor because—as will be seen in 4.1—the conditional will direct this desire onto what I conceive to be the action of scratching. Therefore, it remains to be explored whether it can be confidently assumed that the occurrence of a factor that could actualize my all-in power is (merely) epistemically possible for me whenever I am deliberating or reviewing reasons for and against available actions. For if this epistemic possibility is not present, I cannot endorse reason-conditionals. Now it is not an epistemic possibility for me that I form a desire to do something so long as I do not have the conceptual resources to conceive of this action. On the other hand, if I realize that a spasm or an irresistible urge—perhaps like a kleptomaniac’s urge to steal—that will actualize my all-in power to do some action is coming on, its actualization is not merely epistemically possible for me, but a matter of necessity. These are then circumstances that could preclude my contemplation of reasons for and against doing an action in order to decide whether to do it: the lack of cognitive resources to frame reasons, and the presence of other actiontriggers than reason-sensitive desires. However, such factors aside, there is an argument to the effect that the occurrence of an actualizing factor must be a (mere) epistemic possibility for me in every situation in which my contemplation of reasons for and against an action is called for and, thus, it is not immediately obvious what I have decisive reason to do. This is an argument about the impossibility in principle of predicting our own thoughts even though they may in fact be causally determined.

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Varieties of ‘ Can ’   39

In a nutshell, the argument is this (see Persson, 2005: ch. 31, for further elaboration). Whatever the content of a thought that p, in thinking that p you logically cannot think that you are currently thinking that p. It follows that, for at least some of your current thoughts, you cannot think that you are thinking them, or be conscious of having them. For suppose that the content of all your present thoughts is that p; then, if you think that the content of all your present thoughts is that p, it will no longer be just p, but p plus the proposition that the content of all your present thoughts is p. Since there is some present thought of yours such that it is necessarily true that you cannot concurrently think that you are having it, you cannot think that the effects of your having it may be this or that. Consequently, if you were to ransack the contents of your mind and were to base on the upshot of this inventory (among other things) a forecast of your future thinking and its behavioural embodiments, there would be things that you would necessarily have to leave out of the inventory, namely the making of this inventory, the prediction based on the content of the inventory, and the possible effects of these mental operations. But since you know that some of your thoughts have effects on your future thoughts and behaviour, you cannot a priori exclude the possibility that your making the inventory and the prediction will have such an impact. Therefore, you would be irrational were you to trust fully the accuracy of any prediction you might make; a prediction cannot be regarded as completely reliable if it leaves out of consideration some factor that may be of relevance to the event predicted. The conclusion of this reasoning is, then, that we are logically debarred from ­reliably predicting our own future to the extent that it could be influenced by our present thoughts; as regards this portion of the future, we have to put up with different epistemic possibilities. To sum up, deliberation, or consideration of reasons for or against actions, presupposes that we believe that we have a dual all-in power— which is actualized if we are appropriately motivated—both to perform actions and to refrain from performing them. It also presupposes that it is epistemically possible for us to find sufficient reasons both for and against doing the actions, and deciding on the basis of these reasons. Finding such reasons is epistemically possible for us, since it is in p ­ rinciple impossible for us to predict reliably what reasons we shall discover because this depends on what we are currently thinking, which we can

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40  The Purport of Reason-Conditionals

never exhaustively survey. Thus, to the extent that our decisions are sensitive to our reasons, it is in principle impossible for us to predict them reliably. To find out what these decisions are, we have to make them. This means that even if determinism reigns in the realm of mind and action, we are guaranteed a deliberative freedom which allows us to line up reason-conditionals for and against alternative actions in circumstances in which we are not aware of any reason-independent factor which compels us to act in some way. Even if the actualization of some alternative epistemic possibility is in fact causally impossible, we can contemplate what it would mean were it actualized, contemplate that if we decide to perform an action, we would succeed in doing it, since we would then have the requisite all-in power, and that we would not perform it were we not deciding to perform it. True, if determinism reigns, this alternative is only apparently open; causally it is closed. Suppose that we make decisions that we ought not to make; then, despite the deliberative freedom that we experienced, it was causally impossible that we would instead have made the decisions that we ought to have made. It might be asked whether this does not rule out that we could be held responsible and justifiably be blamed and punished for deciding and acting as we ought not. A fuller discussion of responsibility is beyond the scope of this book, but a few remarks need to be made, since we could not act intentionally for reasons if we were not responsible in some sense. My view is that a part of our commonsensical idea of the justifiability of blaming and punishing those who are responsible for wrongful behaviour is forward-looking: we believe that this treatment is justified because it is likely to have good consequences—in the form of making these people (and others) behave better in the future—which outweigh the bad consequences in the form of the suffering that the blaming and punishing inflict on those who receive it. It could have such beneficial consequences on the future behaviour of these people if what they are blamed and punished for is behaviour resulting from their exercise of deliberative freedom and the reason-sensitivity of their will or capacity for having (decisive) desires. Forward-looking justification and a sense of responsibility sufficient for it do not require that more than one alternative of action is causally open to us; it requires only a conditional all-in power where it is epistemically possible that the antecedent is actualized as the result of deliberation.

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This is, however, only one component of our everyday notion of the justifiability of blaming and punishing—and praising and rewarding for that matter—those who are responsible. It also comprises a backwardlooking understanding of this justification in terms of this treatment being deserved and just, which is incompatible with determinism (and indeterminism) because it involves ultimate responsibility. It requires not merely the direct responsibility that suffices for forward-looking justification, but responsibility also for the motivational conditions in virtue of which we are directly responsible. Roughly, the rationale of desert-thinking is that it can be just to punish or reward us for something in proportion to the (negative or positive) value of this thing only if it is in its entirety the outcome of what is within our responsibility. It being causally possible to act otherwise than we in fact do might well be part and parcel of such an ultimate responsibility. My hypothesis is, however, that the source of our belief that we could be ultimately responsible lies in a misinterpretation of our experience of the origin of our decisions to act. I shall state more fully what this experience comprises in 6.3. Thus, the everyday notion of responsibility stands in need of revision, but it should not be totally discarded. I have explored the concept of responsibility more fully elsewhere (see Persson 2005: part V, and 2013: ch. 7). But, to repeat, it is important for present purposes to stress that there is some sense in which we are responsible. Otherwise, it would not make sense to deliberate about what to do and conclude that we ought, or have most reason, to do this or that. If there is something that we ought to do, we can surely be responsible for doing it. I shall return to this issue in 6.4.

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3 The Reference to Desire in Reasons for Action 3.1  Kinds of Reasons for Action Three kinds of reasons for action or three different contexts in which we speak about such reasons can be distinguished. First, consider the reasons that there really are for, or against, doing some action. These are truths that count in favour of, or against, doing the action. Second, we can ‘appropriate’ these reasons and make them our reasons for acting. We do this by making them contents of our thoughts, or believing them to be true. Since our beliefs may be false, our reasons need not be among the reasons that there really are. I call reasons for action in so far as they are the—true or false—contents of our beliefs our apparent reasons, as opposed to real reasons, which are truths counting in favour of, or against, some action.1 Third, if we act because of our reasons for doing so, the fact that we have those (apparent) reasons is the reason—or explanation—why we act. Reasons in this third, explanatory sense are facts, for example, to the effect that we have certain thoughts, not the propositional contents of these thoughts, as our apparent reasons are. For it takes facts to explain other facts, for example, facts to the effect that we act in some ways. The contents of our thoughts can be true, and so imply facts, but in reporting them as our apparent reasons, we leave it open whether or not they are real reasons. On the other hand, a mere appeal to the action-reasons that there really are in favour of some act cannot explain its occurrence; it takes awareness of these (real) reasons for there to be material for an action-explanation.

1  This is the terminology I employ in (Persson, 2005: ch. 8) in a discussion I am now relying heavily on, whereas in (Persson, 1981) I use ‘phenomenal’ instead of ‘apparent’.

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It is our apparent reasons for actions rather than the real reasons for them that is in focus here. Our apparent reasons can, however, easily be confused with reasons in the third, explanatory sense, for although the latter sense has a much broader range of application that includes entities which cannot have any apparent reasons—for instance, there is a reason or explanation why a rock falls to the ground—there is a risk of confusion when explanatory reasons refer to an agent’s apparent reasons. The term ‘motivating reasons’ can apply to both senses because both our apparent reasons for acting and the explanatory reasons why we act can be said to describe something that motivates us. The thought-contents that in our eyes count in favour of our doing an action can be said motivate us to do it, but so can the fact that we have thoughts with those contents— that is why an explanation of our action will refer to them. Yet these two types of reason are quite different. Our reasons for doing something may be opposed by reasons against doing it. They may grow stronger as we deliberate, and they may justify our action in our eyes. None of this is true of explanatory reasons. It is important to underline that it is the contents of thoughts rather than the fact that we are thinking these thoughts that are our apparent reasons. For when we make a real reason our reason, the very same thing—a true proposition— that is a real reason becomes our apparent reason. That which in reality tells in favour of an act becomes a reason for which we can perform this act, by our having made the real reason a content of our thought. This appropriation makes it tell in favour of the act in our eyes. The content of this reason is, according to my proposal, a conditional proposition the antecedent of which is a description of an act that we think that we can execute, and the consequent of which describes a consequence of this act that counts in favour of the act. But it is the fact that we endorse this proposition in thought that figures in the reason-explanation of the fact that we perform the act. In other words, the (explanatory) reason why we are doing an action could consist in the fact that we have a certain apparent reason for doing it, which may or may not be a real reason. It follows from this that those who have maintained that reasons are not causes of our actions are doubtless correct, provided that they are talking about real and apparent reasons. For real reasons cannot causally affect us, unless they become contents of our thoughts, and then it is not they, as propositional objects of thought, that could causally affect us,

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but the fact that they are objects of our thoughts. Hence, it is compatible with this admission that real and apparent reasons for action are not causes of action to claim that the having of certain reasons, the thinking of certain thoughts, the contents of which are reasons, could be such causes. If so, we could be giving causal explanations when we claim that the reason why subjects acted in certain ways was that they had certain apparent reasons—this variety of reason-why explanations being socalled reason-explanations. So, it would be a fallacy to infer from the concession that real and apparent reasons cannot be causes of actions that reason-explanations of actions cannot be causal explanations. But, as will emerge in 6.2, my view is that these explanations are not causal, though they presuppose the existence of underlying causal explanations, by entailing a reference to desires, as will transpire. It should be emphasized, however, that detailing someone’s reasons for action is not necessarily trying to explain any action in terms of them. For, obviously, the fact that you had apparent reasons for doing something does not imply that you acted for those reasons. Specifying those reasons is just reporting what in your eyes counted in favour of, and perhaps even justified, a possible course of action. In deliberating about what to do, you are in search of real reasons for doing something, that is, truths that support or tell against doing it. This undertaking could properly be called normative as its aim is to determine whether or not some action should or ought to be done. By contrast, citing someone’s apparent reasons is a purely descriptive task in which we aim to establish what someone is thinking about some matter rather than what is true about it, whether or not this is done with a view to explaining anything. A reason-explanation of an action is a species of teleological explanation, that is, it explains the action by supplying a goal or end at which the action is directed, e.g. I scratched my head in order to attain the goal or end of removing the itch. Now Scott Sehon maintains that when we provide teleological explanations, ‘part of our aim is to produce a theory according to which the agent is as rational as possible’ (2016: 27). Another part is ‘to be consistent with observational data’. Apparently, he understands making agents out to be as rational as possible as equipping them with reasons for action which are as rational as consistency with the data allows. This leads him to assert that there is an ‘evaluative or normative component’ of the notion of being an agent of an intentional act:

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‘if you are more rational, you are more of an agent’ (2016: 39) and ‘to the extent that our behaviors are less than rational, they are to that extent less a case of intentional action’ (2016: 154). So, his view seems to be that to the extent that the data force us to diverge from the ideal of rationality, this forces us to diverge from intentionality and goal-directedness. But it strikes me as highly counter-intuitive to hold that the intentionality of our actions hinges on how close the reasons for which we do them are to being rational, or on how close either our means or ends are to being rational. Suppose that somebody smokes because they believe, falsely and irrationally, that it will promote their health on the basis of their being acquainted with a few healthy, long-lived smokers. Then their smoking, though irrational and counter-productive, can still be (fully) intentional, for their smoking is something that they intend to be doing, although it does not actually promote the end intended. Thus, I  deny that there is anything evaluative or normative about the notion of being an agent of an intentional act. It should be added that Sehon appears to understand our reasons as they figure in explanations of our actions quite differently from me. Such a reason, as he understands it, ‘will not be an antecedent state or event but the state of affairs toward which the agent’s behavior was directed’ (2016: 67). But the reasons in terms of which our actions can be explained are our apparent reasons, and entertaining such reasons is certainly being in a mental state that is an antecedent of acting. This purely factual conception of the reasons for which we act is one way in which my view of reason-explanations differs from Sehon’s. Another difference comes out in his claim that ‘common-sense reason explanation of human action is irreducibly teleological’ (2016: 26, my emphasis). The claim that such explanations are irreducible means that the teleological relation of goal-directedness cannot be analysed as ‘some sort of explanatory relation [which] connects . . . two events or states of affairs’ (2016: 67), e.g. some antecedent mental state and behaviour. He believes that if there were such an explanatory relation, it would have to involve causality, and this is something that he strenuously denies.2 It would not be correct to say that I see reason-explanations or teleological explanations couched in terms of what agents act in order to 2  Other authors who have argued that teleological explanations cannot be reduced to causal explanations include von Wright (1971), Wilson (1989), and Schueler (2003).

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achieve as reducible to causal explanations. But I do believe that a reason-explanation of an intentional action implies that there is a causal explanation of the result of the action in virtue of the fact that, as I shall presently argue, the characterization of something as a reason for action incorporates a reference to a desire of the subject, since having a desire involves being in a physical state which is a cause. Briefly and bluntly, having a desire to cause p consists in being in a state which tends to cause something to be a fact because it is taken by the subject to be p. It is an essential aspect of this causing how the effect is conceived by the subject, but this is not anything that can be analysed in causal terms. Put a little bit more precisely, I maintain that a reason-explanation of an action of yours, alongside mention of the fact that you are thinking some suitable conditional proposition, such as ‘If I scratch my head, this will cause the itch to disappear’, must include mention of a desire of yours oriented at the consequent: a desire that the itch will go away. However, although reference to such a desire must be a part of a reasonexplanation, it is not a part of your apparent reason.3 It is part and parcel of the characterization of something—a conditional proposition—as your reason, or as a reason-conditional for you, but not a part of your reason itself, which is just the conditional. Thus, a reason-explanation of why you scratch your head differs from your apparent reason for scratching your head not merely in that, whereas the former comprises the fact that you think that if you scratch your head, this will cause the itch to disappear, the latter consists merely in the conditional content of your thought, namely ‘If I scratch my head, this will cause the itch to disappear’. They differ also in that the former includes a reference to your desire that the itch disappear, while your apparent reason does not. In the latter case, this reference enters into the description of your reason as a reason for you.4 3  Cf. Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut: ‘The claim is not that a reference to desires enters the content of one’s reasons, but that desires are conditions for the presence of those reasons’ (1997: 8). The opposite view that it is part of one’s reasons is adopted by Davidson (1963) and Goldman (1970: 3.6), to mention only two early proponents. 4  Contrast Schueler’s view: ‘when I explain someone’s action in terms of her reasons for performing it, what I am doing is understanding her on the model of myself, that is of my own deliberations and actions . . . I regard her as going through the same sort of process I go through when I act for reasons’ (2003: 160). Since first-person deliberation is a normative process, it is not surprising that Schueler adopts a view similar to Sehon’s, that ‘action explanations must themselves use certain normative concepts, the ones involved in “rationality” ’ (2003: 155).

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I believe that real reasons no less than apparent reasons are ­ esire-dependent, but in the present context my claim is just that apparent d reasons for which we act are desire-dependent, that is, that a conditional could not be a reason-conditional for which we act, unless we desire the realization of its consequent. Without such a desire, I cannot understand how we could see what is described by the consequent as counting in favour of the action. Some deny this desire-dependence because they advocate what might be labelled a cognitive theory of motivation, that is, they advocate the view that cognitive thoughts or beliefs by themselves could move us to action. If someone adopts the view that endorsement of a conditional proposition, such as ‘If I scratch my head, this will cause the itch to disappear’, by itself could move you to scratch your head, without any desire of yours to make the itch disappear, it would be natural for them to hold that this conditional can be a reason for which you act, even though you have no desire that the itch disappears. Those who reject the cognitive theory of motivation, as I do, and affirm that a conative attitude of desiring in addition to cognitions is necessary to animate us to action, are liable to affirm that something cannot be a reason for which we act, unless we have some connected desire. But they could claim, in contradistinction to what I have done, that this desire is a component of our reason. However, I shall in sections 3.2 and 3.3 offer an account of the relevant concept of desire which sits ill with such a claim. With this account in hand, we can turn to the question of the truth of the cognitive theory of motivation in 3.4.

3.2  Desiring in General An occurrent desire to execute some act is, roughly, a tendency to act in that fashion. A way to bring out that the connection between desiring to act and acting is necessary rather than contingent is the following. Desires have different degrees of intensity or strength. Now consider two conflicting or competing desires—that is, two desires that cannot both be fulfilled at the same time—one of which is stronger than the other. Surely, it is not just a contingent truth that if the subject acts on any one of these desires, it is the strongest one. The desire on which a subject acts must be the strongest one because we determine the strength

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of desires by checking which ones win out and are acted on in situations of conflict. An occurrent desire to act in some way is therefore plausibly construed as a tendency or disposition to act in some way which will be actualized in certain conditions, such as when there is no opposition from stronger desires. It will surface that it also tends to affect thinking relating to the action which forms the objective of desire, such as thinking about means to achieve it. Let me now introduce a distinction between non-intelligent and intelligent desires.5 The former can be instinctive or innate, but they can also be acquired by intelligent desires becoming, through habit, non-intelligent. An example of a non-intelligent desire, which is also instinctive or innate, is the desire to flinch or withdraw from a source of pain. This desire is sparked off by a sensation of pain to which attention is paid at least momentarily (providing that we are dealing with creatures capable of attention). It consists in a tendency to act in a manner that is so to speak designed by nature to put an end to the sensation which elicits it. This sort of behaviour is not displayed because it is viewed by the agent at the time of acting as an effective means of stopping the pain. It occurs automatically or on reflex when the pain is felt (and registered in thought). Other instances of behaviour that are not guided by the agent’s thinking are emotionally motivated behaviour, like fleeing in fear and lashing out in anger. Such non-intelligent or instinctual behaviour represents a relatively minor portion of our repertoire compared to the portion that it represents of the behavioural repertoire of most non-human animals. Contrast withdrawal as a reflex with what it would be like to act on an intelligent desire in response to a sensation of pain. Suppose that, as I have recently learnt, the action that will make the pain disappear is the pushing of a certain button. Then in order for this action to be performed, it does not suffice that I am aware of the pain. I must also think that if I press the button then I shall (possibly) get rid of the pain, for no instinct of mine gears the pressing of buttons to the relief of pains. I am performing the action of pressing the button precisely because I take what I cause to be the pressing a certain button which, in my view, is an effective means

5  This distinction as well as much of the account of desiring that follows is found in (Persson 2005: ch. 4).

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of eliminating the pain currently felt. My conception of what is caused in an action thus plays an essential part in the genesis of the action. An intelligent desire to cause that some bodily change, p, becomes a fact is, then, a tendency to cause something to become a fact because the subject conceives of it as (possibly) p. If nothing goes awry, an intelligent desire manifests itself in an action that is intentional; this happens when what is caused to become a fact actually is p as the subject conceives it to be. Hence, what distinguishes intentional from unintentional actions is that the subject’s having a correct conception of what is caused in the action plays an essential role in its origin. Further analysis of intentional action is reserved for Chapter 5. Irrespective of whether it is an intelligent or non-intelligent desire that makes me withdraw my hand from a source of pain, I may be said to withdraw my hand in order to stop the pain, that is, a teleological explanation is available for my action (although in the latter case it is not a reason-explanation which refers to any apparent reason of mine). As remarked in the previous section, Sehon denies that the teleological relation of goal-directedness can be analysed as entailing ‘some sort of explanatory relation’ connecting the behaviour to some antecedent mental state. But if he cannot appeal to the fact that in one case it is a nonintelligent desire to stop the pain that makes me withdraw my hand and in another case an intelligent desire to stop it, along with my reason that a withdrawal of my hand is sufficient to stop the pain, it may be wondered how he can distinguish between my withdrawing my hand on reflex and my doing it as an intentional action for a reason I have. Instead, they seem to come out as the same sort of action in virtue of their being directed at the same goal. Sehon claims that when we give teleological explanations, ‘we consider what the agent believed and desired at the time’ (2016: 28). But in this respect, there may not be any significant difference between the two situations described: when it is a non-intelligent desire that makes me pull back my hand, I might have—at least in a dispositional form—an intelligent desire with the orientation to eliminate the pain, and a reasonbelief to the effect that pulling back my hand is sufficient to this end. The crucial difference is that it is not these that make me act when my pulling back my hand is a reflex. It is, however, precisely this bit about the presence of ‘some sort of explanatory relation’ which connects my mental states

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to my behaviour that Sehon’s account is obliged to leave out. Thus, it is unclear what on his teleological account could allow us to classify my withdrawal of my hand in one situation as a reflex and in another as an intentional action executed for a reason I am having.6 If you have an intelligent desire to cause that your hand moves, then you must have a conception or idea of what it is to cause your hand to move, while this is not necessary for you to have a non-intelligent desire to the same effect. It is likely that in our infancy we acquire such conceptions by moving our hands as the result of non-intelligent desires, that is, due to innate reflexes. Having non-intelligent desires and acting on reflex are then primary in relation to having intelligent desires and acting intentionally. But, as indicated, it is also the case that comparatively simple actions that were once executed as the upshot of intelligent desires and, hence, intentionally, by regular practice or training can be performed as the upshot of non-intelligent desires and out of habit. As opposed to ­instinctive desires, these acquired non-intelligent desires are secondary in relation to intelligent desires. Had we not been endowed with the ability to learn, by repeated practice, to do unthinkingly what we earlier could do only with detailed attention, we would never have been able to master even fairly complicated activities such as typing or driving a car. When we do something habitually, we might not be able to tell how we do it, unless we do it and observe how we do it. In these circumstances, we do not even have a dispositional belief about how to do a habitual action when we do it, so this action cannot be guided by such a belief. This is just like it is when we act on the basis of an instinctive desire. It might be interjected that an intelligent desire to perform an action is a desire to perform this action intentionally. Then, if performing an intentional action involves acting on an intelligent desire, it would follow that the content of this desire refers to the desire itself. At least with respect to intentions, it has been claimed that they are self-referential in

6  Since it is true, when I am withdrawing my hand as a reflex, that I withdraw it in order to avoid contact with the source of pain or because I am avoiding contact with it, Michael Thompson’s theory implies that I am avoiding contact with the source of pain intentionally: ‘X’s doing A is an intentional action (proper) under that description just in case the agent can be said, truly, to have done something because he or she was doing A’ (2008: 112). Furthermore, my withdrawal of my hand is also intentional because it is a part of this intentional action (2008: 7.1).

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this way. For instance, John Searle writes of an intention to raise his arm: ‘The Intentional content of my intention must be at least (that I perform the action of raising my arm by way of carrying out this intention)’ (1983: 85; cf. Harman, 1976). This idea is supposed to solve Davidson’s problem of wayward causal chains that disrupt the intentionality of actions. But it needs further elaboration to constitute such a solution since, as will be seen in Chapter 5, the fact that an action results directly from an intention that it satisfies does not guarantee that the action is intentional. It will then also be seen that there is a superior solution to the problem of waywardness. Meanwhile, it is pertinent to point out that the idea of intentions being self-referential makes it mysterious how we could acquire or learn to have intentions to act and, thus, to perform intentional actions in the first place. Since to have an intention to raise your arm, for instance, is to intend that you raise your arm by way of carrying out this intention, acquiring this intention involves having acquired a conception of your raising your arm by way of carrying out this intention, but it is unclear how this conception can be acquired, unless you are already capable of raising your arm by way of carrying out intentions to raise your arm. Plausibly, being capable of intending to act precedes being capable of having a conception of yourself as having intentions to act—as a rule, being in a mental state precedes self-consciousness of yourself being in this state—but the idea that intentions are self-referential is at odds with this claim. A related complaint is that the conception of an action being performed by way of carrying out an intention is a rather sophisticated conception which infants surely have not mastered at the time at which they have realistically learnt to perform simple intentional actions, such as raising their arms (cf. Mele, 1992: 204). It is a central idea of this book that beliefs and desires have opposite directions of fit: beliefs are designed to have contents that fit the facts, whereas desires are designed to make facts fit their contents. The idea that desires are self-referential in the fashion indicated amounts to incorporating the function that they are designed to have as a part of their contents, so that the content of a desire to cause that your arm rises is not just that your arm rises, but that this occurs through your desire (cf. a similar point by Mele, 1992: 218). In the case of beliefs, the parallel idea would be that the content of a belief that you are raising your arm would not

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just be that you are raising your arm, but that your belief fits the fact of your raising your arm. It would, however, seem absurdly implausible to maintain that the function of beliefs is incorporated into their contents in this manner, but it is hard to see why the parallel idea as regards desires should be thought to be less implausible. If you have an intention or what I shall call a decisive desire to cause that your arm rises, your intention or desire causes this effect if you raise your arm intentionally, but it is not part of its content that it causes this effect. The difference between non-intelligent and intelligent desires characterized above necessitates another difference: you cannot think that what you are causing to be a fact is or will possibly be p, unless you think or assume that you can in the all-in sense possibly cause p to become a fact. Thus, a necessary condition for your having an intelligent desire to act in some manner is that you think that it is at least epistemically possible— that is, possible relative to your present body of beliefs—that you have an all-in power to act in this manner. To have an intelligent desire is to want or desire to act in some way that you regard as actualizing some all-in power to act that you believe that you might possess. In the case of a pain felt, it is aversion to the pain that, if necessary, prods you to call to mind or discover available actions by means of which you can get rid of the pain, means such as pushing a certain button. That is, a desire to be rid of a pain could also manifest itself in your casting about for means that are acceptable to you, in other words, to which you are not more averse than the pain, for their own sakes or because of their further consequences. So, although an intelligent desire for p is, primarily, a tendency to cause something because you think that it is (possibly) p, it could also—in the case of non-basic actions—include a tendency to search for and reflect on acceptable means of achieving this. (More precisely, it tends to cause the neural correlates of such thinking, as will be argued in 6.2.) Imagine, however, that your strategy of pushing the button is erroneous, and that you become absolutely convinced that you cannot remove the pain by this means. Then you have to cease to have an intelligent desire to push the button and, consequently, cease to press it intentionally as a means of stopping the pain. Should you also become convinced that you can do nothing at all to eliminate the pain, you can no longer

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possess an intelligent desire to be rid of the pain. For such a desire presupposes that you regard it as at least epistemically possible that you can in the all-in sense get rid of it. But you can still have a non-intelligent or, more specifically, an instinctive desire to rid yourself of it, a desire that issues in more or less refined bits of behaviour designed by nature to remove pains. The state of being absolutely certain that you cannot eliminate a pain, but nevertheless having a non-intelligent desire to be rid of it, is the state of wishing to be rid of the pain, or wishing that you could rid yourself of the pain (cf. Mele, 2003: 135–6). I do not present this distinction between intelligently desiring and wishing as purely a description of everyday use. To be sure, the distinction frequently surfaces in everyday parlance. For instance, the reason that we find it more natural to speak of wishing the past to be different, say, wishing that we had not been born, or wishing that we had acted differently in the past, than to speak of wanting these things is presumably that we are absolutely convinced that we have no power to change the past. But I concede that the everyday distinction is somewhat blurred, and I am prepared to see my proposal as a trimming of ordinary usage, as encapsulating a stipulative element. In everyday language what we are described as wanting or desiring is quite often something other than to do this or that: for instance, we are said to want or desire books and breaks. I construe this—if the desire is intelligent—as wanting or desiring to cause or bring about that we obtain books and breaks. Thus, as I construe it, intelligently wanting or desiring is wanting or desiring to cause something, and I am proceeding on the assumption that what is caused is something’s becoming a fact. This construal of intelligently desiring is in accordance with viewing such desires as tendencies or dispositions to act, and their direction of fit being fact-to-content. The italicized phrase above makes explicit the direction of fit of desire, and is not to be viewed as a part of its content. When you are conscious of a sensation of pain, what happens in conative respects could be the following. This consciousness triggers off certain innate patterns of behaviour designed to remove the pain. If they fail to abolish it, it drives you to think about how the pain could be eliminated. Supposing that this thinking issues in some strategy about how this could be accomplished, consciousness of the pain tends to cause

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some bodily movements because you take them to put this strategy into effect.7 That is, you come to have an intelligent desire to eliminate the pain by certain means. If this behaviour also fails to remove the pain, you may still wish or hope that there be other means of ridding yourself of the pain. Hoping this is having an instinctive desire that there be such means while you remain uncertain whether or not there are any, whereas you could wish that there were such means even though you are certain that there are none. If you are convinced that there are no available means, this conviction, by virtue of encapsulating the idea of the pain, may still tend to cause behaviour designed by nature rather than by yourself to put an end to the pain. This is wishing to be rid of the pain, or wishing that you could rid yourself of the pain. In sum, instinctive desire is the source from which intelligent desire, wishing, and hoping flows, given different cognitive constraints. Needless to say, when you want p, you need not want it for its own sake or as an end (in itself), that is, you need not want p considered in isolation and apart from its relations to other states of affairs that it does not entail. In other words, your desire need not be an intrinsic desire. You may desire it because you see it as a means to something else. Your desire to remove your hand is such a derivative desire because you want to remove it in order to eliminate a pain, which you want to eliminate presumably for its own sake. Therefore, my claim that you want to bring about p just in case you are in a state which, in the presence of your thinking that you can bring about p, tends to cause something because you conceive it to be p—and thus is an actualization of your power to bring about p—should not be taken to imply that the state of affairs p by itself motivates you to act. Ordinarily, a state of affairs motivates you only because you view it as some sort of means to the realization of other states of affairs. That is to say, you can be said to desire the state of affairs consisting in your hand’s withdrawing, p, because you desire a situation, s, composed of other states of affairs—such as your being pain-free—beside that of p,

7  For the sake of simplicity, I frequently speak of mental episodes as causes but, as remarked and as will be explained in 6.2, my view is, strictly speaking, that it is their neural correlates that are causes.

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states of affairs that you think will probably obtain on the assumption that p will obtain (but probably not in the absence of this assumption, other things being the same). An advantage of this way of putting it is that the strength of your desire for p can then be determined as the strength of your desire for s multiplied with the probability of s given p (cf. Jackson, 1984: esp. 7–12). So, you desire that your hand is withdrawn, p, because you desire the situation s to the effect that your hand is withdrawn, that your pain ceases, and other facts that you judge probable to obtain if your hand is withdrawn; and the strength of your desire that p equals the strength of your desire that s multiplied with the probability that you assign to the obtaining of s, given that p. Your desire that your hand is withdrawn is then derived from your desire for a complex of which this state of affairs is an element, and the desire for this complex is a function of desires for all elements of it, like the state of affairs consisting in that your pain ceases. Unfortunately, this account of derivative desires can seem to generate counter-intuitive consequences. Consider a cashier who (intentionally) hands over the bank’s money to a robber because he thinks that the robber will otherwise carry out his threat to kill him. Some philosophers have claimed that such a cashier does not want to hand over the cash to the robber, but is instead forced to do so.8 If the clerk had wanted to hand over the money, why force him to do it? Nonetheless, the cashier wants (to bring about) the situation consisting in his handing over the money and staying alive, which he judges likely to obtain if he hands over the money. At any rate, he wants this situation more than—or prefers this situation to—the situation of his not handing over the money and not surviving, which he judges probable to obtain on the assumption that he does not hand over the money. I believe that a convincing case can be made out for portraying the cashier as wanting to hand over the money. Certainly, he is forced or coerced to act in this manner, but what is subjected to coercion here—in contrast to cases of purely physical coercion, such as when somebody’s hand is in the grip of a stronger hand—is his will or faculty of forming

8  See e.g. Aune (1977: 59–60) and Danto (1973: 186–7). More recently, Schueler has argued for a narrower sense of desire, ‘desires proper’, which makes it possible for us to do things intentionally without having any desire to do them (1995: 29–38; 2003: 24).

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(derived) desires. The clerk is forced to want (derivatively) to hand over the cash in order to achieve something that he could earlier achieve without committing this act, namely staying alive (which he is not forced to want). That is why we speak of his will as not being free, of him as not acting of his own free will. We do not describe the cashier as wanting to give the money to the robber without qualification, since this would suggest that he wants the scenario that is normally made likely to obtain when a cashier gives bank money to a robber. What the cashier wants is something different, namely what in these particular circumstances is made probable by him giving money to the robber. He wants to give money to the robber in the current circumstances when this, and only this, makes probable his staying alive. To be sure, the cashier wishes he had not been placed in these circumstances in which he has to choose between handing over the money and being shot; he would have preferred to remain in the earlier circumstances in which he could survive while keeping the money. Such a change for the worse is necessary if he is aptly to be said to be forced or coerced to (want to) perform the action of giving money to the hold-up man. However, not only threats but also offers can be said to ‘force’ us to want something. Suppose that somebody offers me a million dollars if (and only if) I eat a worm. Now I certainly do not desire the conjunction of states of affairs that normally is likely to obtain given that I eat a worm. But I may desire the conjunction of states of affairs that probably materializes if I eat a worm in these particular circumstances in which the offer has been announced. Normally I do not want to eat worms, but I am now forced to want to eat one in order to earn the million dollars. But there is a difference between facing a threat and an offer: a threat reduces the desirability of our options because we can no longer achieve everything desirable that we could achieve beforehand. The clerk can no longer preserve both his life and the bank’s money; he is now forced to choose between them. That is why he is portrayed as acting under duress, and not of his own free will. By contrast, an offer increases the desirability of our options. I now have the more desirable option of earning a million dollars which I did not have before. True, it comes at the cost of dropping a desired option, namely not eating any worms. But I judge this cost to be worth incurring in order to earn a million dollars—my desire for this

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sum is stronger than my aversion to eat a worm—so this ‘interference’ with my options is welcomed by me, whilst the interference with the cashier’s options is regretted by him. We are inclined to say without qualification that he is forced to hand over the money, but not that I am forced to eat a worm, since this is not necessary for me to get something— survival—that I wanted and could get before the offer was made. Eating the worm is necessary only to get the million dollars. The cashier, however, is forced to hand over the money to get something that he earlier could have got for free, namely survival. To sum up, when we are described as wanting p, this usually conveys that we want some situation, s, that is normally probable given p. Imagine that we are instead averse to, or desire the absence of, s, but that at a particular time, t, the circumstances are peculiar in so far as p brings along q that we desire more than we are averse to p. (In other words, our desire for the situation s*, which is normally probable given q is stronger than our aversion towards s, assuming equal probabilities for these situations given q and p respectively.) Then it would be misleading to say simply that, at t, we desire p, since it might suggest that we desire s. Instead we say that we are forced to (want to) bring about p in order to accomplish q, though we may not specify q if it is something that is ordinarily desired and achievable. But it is fine to depict us as wanting p and q at t (e.g. the cashier as wanting to hand over the money and save his life) for we desire the situation that normally obtains given p and q.

3.3  Decisive Desiring So far my aim has been to characterize an occurrent desire in the context of deliberation when it is in competition with other desires, and there is a search for available means to satisfy it. But consider a desire to cause that p that comes out of this process victoriously: you are more or less convinced that, at the relevant time, you have an all-in power to cause that p—and thus that there are available sufficient means to this effect in case it has to be non-basically executed—and your desire to cause this sequence is not only stronger than desires to cause alternative sequences, but so strong that further deliberation about alternatives and consequences is deemed pointless by you. Then your desire is what I call ‘decisive’

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because I see it as having taken shape by a decision, that is, on the basis of taking further deliberation or consideration of reasons to be unnecessary because there is sufficient reason to desire one particular sequence or plan of action—featuring some basic action in the all-in power of the deliberator, and its consequences—so much more than its alternatives that further deliberation is deemed unlikely to overthrow its dominance. As it is plausible to say that a decision creates an intention, I believe an intention to be the same thing as a decisive desire. You decisively desire to cause p when you are in a state which, in conjunction with its underlying thought that you can cause p, not merely tends to cause something because you think that it is p, but actually causes—or at least begins to cause—this, providing that the time for action is seen to have arrived. In order to desire decisively to cause p now, you must already have convinced yourself that there are acceptable means to it at your disposal, so you will not be wondering whether there are such means. If you form a decisive desire in advance, however, you need not be able to specify the means at the present time, as long as you are confident that you will be able to do so before the time of action, and they are available and acceptable then. As long as you are uncertain about whether you have it in your all-in power to apply sufficient means to p, you can only decisively desire to try to bring it about that p (though you could have a desire pure and simple to bring about p). Decisively desiring p, then, excludes further consideration of alternatives; in this sense, having a decisive desire is tantamount to having settled on a course or plan of action. This is how Alfred Mele describes having an intention (1992: 142 and 2003: 28; cf. Bratman, 1987: 16–20), but he holds an intention to be something over and above a desire in the sense that it has an ‘executive quality that is not reducible to desire-strength’ (1992: 72) or ‘to relative motivational strength’ (1992: 167). This commits him to what Michael Bratman also acknowledges doing, namely taking ‘seriously the idea that intentions are distinctive states of mind, on a par with desires and beliefs’ (1987: 20).9 My suggestion is to the contrary that the relation between desire and intention is rather analogous to the relation between belief and 9  By contrast, my view that intending is analysable in terms of wanting and believing is shared for instance by Audi (1973), though he takes it that the belief is a belief that you will act, not that you can act.

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conviction. A (settled) conviction that p is then conceived not just as a belief that p of maximal strength, as a belief that p is certain. You may be momentarily seized by such a belief without being convinced of its truth, for instance, if you see a car apparently heading towards you, you might for a moment be absolutely certain that you will be hit by it, but the next moment you realize that it is more likely to miss you. A (settled) conviction that p is a belief of maximal strength that p on grounds that you think or find strong enough to justify bringing to an end further doubt and consideration of whether or not p is the case; as a result, you do not mull over the matter any longer. Analogously, a decisive desire is not just a dominant or preponderant desire, or a desire which momentarily happens to be stronger than competing desires while you are still in the process of considering reasons and dominance may shift. It is a dominant desire formed on the basis of reasons that you find sufficient for the formation of such a desire and for ceasing to contemplate further reasons.10 Such a desire need not be based on the best reasons that you have had in mind. A decisive desire with this sounder basis may be overpowered by a stronger desire which arises from some forceful sensations or feelings of pain or fear, for instance, that momentarily monopolize attention and suppress consideration of other reasons. If you do not remind yourself that there are further reasons to keep in mind, a preponderant desire based on this sub-class of reasons might qualify as decisive, though it is at odds with a preponderant desire based on your most comprehensive reasons. If you act accordingly, you act akratically, or out of weakness of will, but this does not exclude that your action might be intentional.11 In so far as Mele interprets the executive quality or function that he takes intention to possess in terms of its being settled (1992: 159), and he concedes that this settlement may be understood in a ‘thin’ (1992: 167) sense akin to the sense that I have just outlined, I am ready to accept it, though I would still doubt his claim that the executive quality or function ‘is not reducible to desire-strength’. I do not see how settlement could 10  Another difference between a decisive and a dominant desire is that the former demands more of certainty about the all-in power to perform the relevant act and—in the case of nonbasic actions—about the availability of sufficient means to it. This difference makes the analogy between decisive desire and conviction imperfect, but it also makes decisive desires more suitable than dominant desires for the purpose of defining intentional action in Chapter 5. 11  I discuss weakness of will in more detail in (Persson 2005: chs 12 and 13).

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create an executive attitude with anything like this sort of irreducibility. It might be, however, that the disagreement between us on this score is to a large extent due to the fact that he believes evaluations to be more independent of motivation than I do, and this is an issue that has to be shelved here (but see Persson, 2005: part II). The simplest view of the matter is that, just as there is only one basic attitude which has the function of having contents that fit the facts— belief or thinking-true—so there is only one basic attitude which has the opposite direction of fit of having the function of making facts fit their contents, namely desire. Just as convictions and conjectures can be construed as forms of belief that vary in respect of probability or certainty, so wishes, hopes, longings, and intentions can be construed as variations of a single conative attitude, desire (or whatever you choose to call it).12 The latter attitudes differ in such respects as whether or not their subjects think that they can effect the realization of their objects, the degree of probability that they assign to this thought, and their strength, which is often due to the reasons backing them up. This is clearly the simplest view, and I have not seen good enough grounds to surrender it because intentions cannot be understood as a kind of desire. Mele writes that the executive function of intentions ‘is to initiate, sustain, and guide intentional action’ (1992: 77), but it seems to me that this is a function that decisive desires on the present conception can carry out, as I shall try to show in Chapter 5. In the case of non-basic actions, having a decisive desire to bring about p is desiring a sequence of events including p—starting from some basic action that in the circumstances is sufficient is to bring about p—so much more than you desire any alternative sequence that further deliberation or consideration of means or reasons is deemed unnecessary by you. Such a decisive desire will be based on consequences of p that you desire—in the end for their own sake—but they need not be decisively desired because p is decisively desired, as will be seen in Chapter 4. Your assumption that you can in the all-in sense bring about p must be strong to the point of approximating to certainty; an assumption that you can possibly do this is not enough, as it is with respect to desire plain and 12  At this juncture, it should be noted that Mele accepts that ‘one might define a broad sense of “desire” that includes intentions as desires of a special kind’ (2003: 28).

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simple.13 But if your assumption concerning your all-in power is weaker, you are still in a position to have a decisive desire to try to bring about p. As will emerge in Chapter 5, the latter kind of decisive desire is arguably all you need by way of desire to satisfy the conditions of bringing about p intentionally. In response to Mele, who has made the last suggestion in terms of ‘intending’ (1992: 132–5), Hugh McCann objects that the ‘assumption that it is possible for a person to intend to try to A without intending to A’ is ‘difficult to defend, for the fact is that trying is not a name for a kind of action’ (1998: 203). McCann is right that ‘trying is not a name for a kind of action’, but this is not implied by the present proposal, as I construe it. The difference between intending to A and intending to try to A is simply the difference between doing what you think is certainly or most probably A and doing what you think is possibly A, since the difference between these intentions boils down to the fact that the former conceptually requires a stronger belief that you have an all-in power to A. What you actually cause, that is, what actions you in fact perform, may be the same in both cases, for instance, A. Trying to A is as little a name for a kind of action as is possibly A-ing. As remarked, the term ‘decisive desire’ is meant to reflect my view that to form such a desire is to decide. It might be thought that to decide is to perform an act, since we speak of making decisions (this is the view of McCann,  1998: 135; Mele, 1992: 141, and 2003: 210–13; and Pink, 2016: chs 5 and 11). But we also speak of making discoveries, despite the fact that this is surely something that happens to us. Of course, it may be that we perform actions that place us in a position to make discoveries, but when we succeed in discovering what we have been looking for, this is something that happens to us, something that we passively undergo. Even when we ‘stumble’ on discoveries—that is, have not made any efforts to make them—we can be described as having made them. 13  I agree with Mele’s rejection of the familiar claim that your intending to do something entails your believing that you will do it (1992: 147). Nonetheless, we should take on board his observation that ‘there is something very odd about such assertions as “I intend to A but I believe that I probably will not A” ’ (1992: 148). This suggests that, in contrast to merely having an intention, believing that you have an intention is a sufficient condition for having the belief that you will act accordingly. This will be so if, as I have claimed, intending implies a belief in an all-in power to do the intended action which together with an intention to do it is sufficient for doing the action.

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Likewise, deliberating could be an activity, or series of actions, which we could execute with the aim of putting ourselves in a position to make a decision; nevertheless, our deciding—whether it is to do something or (to believe) that something is the case—is something that happens to us.14 However, it seems to me that we can be said to decide or make decisions, even though we do not actively deliberate, but suddenly find ourselves facing reasons so convincing that we do not bother to consider further reasons, for example, if we get a fantastic offer, we can decide on the spot to take it. So, when I speak of finding reasons sufficient for a decision or decisive desire, this should be understood as something that could happen to us in a flash without any indecision and deliberation.15 It is noteworthy that we speak of decisions not only in the practical case of action, but also in the theoretical case of belief, deciding whether to believe something no less than deciding whether to do something. In the practical case an intention is formed by the decision, whereas in the theoretical case a belief or conviction is formed. This difference as regards what comes into existence stems from the fact that deciding in the former case deals with reasons for desire and action, and desires, while in the latter case the subject matter is reasons for belief and beliefs. The common denominator is that in both cases deciding consists in judging or thinking the reasons surveyed so compelling that consideration of further reasons is unlikely to affect significantly the dominance of the currently dominant attitude. Some have observed that deciding cannot be unintentional, but it is an error to infer from this observation that it is essentially or intrinsically intentional (as does McCann, 1998: 141–2, 163–6, and 168–9). It is mysterious how anything can be intrinsically intentional, but if an intention to decide were to be required as a separate phenomenon, a plunge into a 14  Cf. O’Shaughnessy, who maintains that the ‘activity status of deciding-to-do is the same as that of deciding-that’ (2008: 545) and that this status is that of being ‘essentially inactive’ (2008: 545). I put ‘to believe’ in a parenthesis as a warning that deciding here is not a ‘comingto-intend’, in O’Shaughnessy’s jargon (2008: 543), to do an action, since believing is not an action. It is a ‘coming-to-believe-that’ in his terms (2008: 545). Yet it might be misleading simply to omit ‘to believe’, as O’Shaughnessy does, since the outcome of deciding-that is of course not a fact, but a belief that something is a fact. 15 Cf. a caveat Mele makes about ‘being settled’ (1992: 161–2), but contrast e.g. O’Shaughnessy’s (2008: 543), Pink’s (2016: 203–4), and Randolph Clarke’s view that, in the words of the latter, a ‘decision resolves uncertainty about what to do’ (2014: 14). However, I could afford to acknowledge a fuller sense of ‘decision’ which necessarily involves some measure of (active) deliberation.

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vicious regress would threaten. There is also the problem that it is doubtful that deciding is anything that we can intend and, thus, do intentionally; we have to content ourselves with intending and intentionally making ourselves decide.16 Like making a judgment that something is the case, deciding cannot be properly characterized as either intentional or unintentional. Deciding, whether practical or theoretical, is in fact making a judgement about the sufficiency of reasons, and this judgement can be made instantaneously, without deliberation. In opposition to McCann, who affirms that ‘deciding belongs to the conative side of the mind’ (1998: 136), I would say that it rather belongs to the cognitive side. (O’Shaughnessy agrees to the extent that he writes that ‘most decidingsto-do depend upon decidings-that’ (2008: 543).) As mentioned, having an intention is a state that we enter into when we have made a decision about what to do; thus, it can be equated with a decisive desire. Mele maintains that ‘not all intentions are arrived at via decisions’ (1992: 141). But, as indicated, he takes decisions to be ‘acts’ or ‘deeds’—or, in another sense, the products of such acts—so what he denies is that ‘all intentions are the products of acts of intention formation’ (1992: 141). If this is taken to mean that they are not all products of active deliberation, I concur, but hold this to be true of both decisions and intentions. Since decisions and intentions to bring it about that p can be expressed by sentences of the form ‘I shall bring it about that p’, the same goes for decisive desires. But it should be stressed that such sentences do not express the content of decisively desiring, deciding, or intending, as ‘I will bring it about that p’ can express the content of a predictive belief about our future behaviour. Believing or thinking-true is an attitude to a (propositional) content: the attitude of taking that content to be a fact. Decisively desiring is not such a content-oriented attitude; it is an attitude of causing something to be a fact because it will fit a certain content. This is an attitude which presupposes an assumption about the possession of 16  Pink criticizes McCann along similar lines (2016: 65–7), but he still clings to the idea that decisions ‘are goal-directed actions which are deliberate or performed intentionally, and essentially so’ (2016: 173). In Pink’s view, the vindication of this idea requires another model of action than ‘the voluntariness-based model’ here employed, which appeals to desires and suchlike motivational attitudes to explain actions. According to Pink’s ‘practical reason-based model’, decisions do not occur as the result of such motivational attitudes. This model will be scrutinized in 5.2.

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a relevant all-in power. In virtue of its incorporation of the ‘shall’-operator, ‘I shall bring it about that p’ expresses the taking up or having of such an attitude of decisive desiring to p as the imperative ‘Bring it about that p!’ does in circumstances in which the object of desire is that someone else who is believed to have the relevant all-in power bring it about that p.17 It does not express the content of this attitude as ‘I will bring it about that p’ expresses the content of a predictive belief rather than the fact of having this attitude to the content. I think that this difference shows up in the fact that, while it is proper to say that I believe that I will bring it about that p, it is not proper to say that I decisively desire, decide, or intend that I shall bring it about that p: the object here should simply be ‘to bring it about that p’. It is not part of the content of these attitudes ‘that I bring it about that p’—this is the path that leads to the erroneous conclusion that intentions are selfreferential, for surely what I would then intend would have to be that I bring about that p intentionally. On my view of desiring, then, it does not have any distinctive conative content in the way that a belief has a distinctive propositional or true-orfalse content. As a tendency to bring about something because we think it is (or might be) p, a desire that p presupposes that we think that we can (possibly) bring it about that p, but of course this is not a propositional content distinctive of desiring. Desiring is not an attitude to a content, since it has the fact-to-content fit, and not the content-to-fact fit of belief. What ‘I shall now cause it to be a fact that p’ expresses is that I am now in a state of causing something to be a fact because it fits my thinking of it as p. Such an expression of the state is of course not necessary for being in the state. It follows that desires cannot enter into the content of our apparent reasons in the way that (conditional) thoughts or beliefs do: they do not possess a specific content which is a prerequisite for doing so. As will be elaborated in 4.1, this is something that prevents reasoning from a reason for acting or desiring to a desire to act from being an inference as reasoning from a reason for belief to a belief can be, because an inference is an operation with contents figuring in premises and a conclusion.

17  Or as the old-fashioned ‘Thou shalt bring about p’ does. In my use, ‘shall’ in ‘I shall bring about p’ is meant to be a first-person counterpart to this ‘shalt’.

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This discussion of the content of desire is also of relevance for the conceptions of volitions or acts of will that will crop up in the discussion of the analysis of intentional action in Chapter  5. For instance, as conceived by Bruce Aune (1977: 2.4), volitions are acts of thought whose contents are best expressed by ‘I will do . . . here and now’, whereas Wilfrid Sellars (1966) prefers ‘I shall do . . .’ . This kind of idea has been worked out by Hector-Neri Castañeda as a theory that there is a common structure underlying the contents of volitions, decisions, intentions, and imperatives alike (1975: 169–72). According to him, this structure is captured by the infinitival construction ‘I/you to do . . .’ , which he sees as employing a distinctive kind of copula different from ‘is’. To have a volition is to endorse or accept such a ‘practition’ in the first-person singular, just as to have a belief is to endorse or accept a proposition. This is reminiscent of William James’s account of a type of volition, namely consent to ideas ‘to which our attention is not quite complete’: When an idea stings us in a certain way, makes as it were a certain electric connection with our self, we believe that it is a reality. When it stings us in another way, makes another connection with our Self, we say let it be a reality. To the word ‘is’ and to the words ‘let it be’ there correspond peculiar attitudes of consciousness which it is vain to seek to explain. The indicative and imperative moods are as much ultimate categories of thinking as they are of grammar.  (1890: vol. II, 568–9)

Against the background of what has just been argued, it is not surprising that James is at a loss to explicate the difference between what the words ‘is’ and ‘let it be’ express by pinpointing any ‘peculiar attitudes of consciousness’ to which it corresponds. For the difference is a difference in directions of fit which does not show up in consciousness. More generally, I reject James’s belief that there is an ‘active element in all consciousness’—whether it is concerned with deciding what to do or believe—which constitutes the ‘self of all the other selves’ (1890: vol. I, 297) and which is also causally undetermined (1890: vol. II, 570–2). In 5.2 and 6.2 I shall contend that we are capable of a much greater variety of bodily than mental actions and that the latter depend on causality in the physical domain; so, although mental events appear causally undetermined, they are in reality causally constrained. While, as will transpire in 5.1, volitions are not necessary to move us to intentional action on James’s ‘ideo-motor theory’, practitions are

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necessary, according to Castañeda, though, in my opinion, he fails to make it intelligible how they move us (1975: ch. 10). This, too, is not surprising for a practition, being the common denominator of declarations of decisions, intentions, volitions, and imperatives, cannot express the content to which such conative attitudes are directed, since there is no such content. These attitudes are directed at causing something to be a fact, and it is the taking up or having of these attitudes themselves that practitions would have to express if they are to express anything. But the attitudes themselves are what moves us to action, whether or not they are expressed in thought or speech. As will appear in the next section, we have such attitudes because, in virtue of certain features of our brains, we are attracted, or repelled, by some states of affairs that we think that it is possible for us to cause to be facts. There is no need or space for any thoughts with a practical or executive content to propel us to action; nor is it comprehensible how such thoughts could accomplish this. Likewise, if an idea occurs because it fits what is perceived, this is enough for belief, without anything expressing the fit. When we express our intentions to others by means of the construction ‘I shall do . . .’ (rather than reporting them by ‘I intend to do . . .’), we commit ourselves, promise, or place ourselves under an obligation, to do what fills the blank. We cannot sensibly do this when we think or say ‘I shall do . . .’ to ourselves, for we cannot have obligations to ourselves to do anything, although we do say that we have promised ourselves to do various things, such as to quit smoking or lose weight. What we manage to bring across, then, is that the intentions we have are firm or serious. This might create the illusion that such occurrences of ‘I shall do . . .’ express something with a special executive function.

3.4  Motivational Cognitivism or Conativism I would now like to highlight a feature of my conception of a decisive desire which has hitherto received passing attention. It is that, in addition to propositional thinking, desiring involves causation by an internal state which is not represented in consciousness, in the form of a thought, feeling, or whatever. The definition of decisively desiring (or intending) something that I am proposing runs like this:

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(D)  You have an occurrent decisive desire to cause p now just in case you are in an internal state which, along with its underlying thought that you can now cause p (and thereby cause consequences specified by reasons that you may have for causing p), causes something to become a fact because you think that it is that p (and thereby will have the specified consequences).18 To begin with, notice that (D) is a definition of an occurrent decisive desire, that is, a decisive desire that is ‘in operation’. It will soon be supplemented with a definition of a dormant decisive desire (cf. the similar definitions in Persson, 2005: 53 and 57). This supplement is indispensable to cater, for instance, for cases of having decisive desires for future times because, obviously, they need not remain occurrent until it is time to act. But the chief point at issue now is that, according to (D), what moves you to action, in addition to propositional thinking, is an internal state that is not represented in consciousness. It is true, as O’Shaughnessy writes, that ‘desire is object-taking, and acts upon one because that object attracts’ (2008: 584)—or repels in the case of aversion—but that is so because one is in an internal state which in the case of many objects is not shared by all subjects who have the objects in mind (though if the object is e.g. pleasure, many subjects will be in the requisite state and, thus, will desire the object). The inclusion of such a state is rejected by motivational cognitivists— like Thomas Nagel (1970), Don Locke (1974), John McDowell (1978, 1981), T. M. Scanlon (1998: ch. 1), and Derek Parfit (2011: II, 381)—who maintain that the factors motivating an intentional action can be purely cognitive. These cognitivists could concur with motivational conativists— who insist on the inclusion of something conative or non-cognitive among the motivating factors—that intentionally bringing it about that p entails (decisively) desiring to bring it about that p. But, if so, they are committed to denying that the ascription of a desire incorporates the attribution of a separate motivational factor alongside cognitive factors. That is, they have to reject (D)’s reference to an ‘internal state’ as 18  Since you could be said to have an occurrent decisive desire to cause p now, even though the time for action has not quite arrived, it would be more accurate to say ‘causes, or is about to cause, something to become a fact because you think, or will soon think, that it will be p’. For you could have such a desire slightly before you start trying to cause p.

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unnecessary, by interpreting a desire as a tendency of purely cognitive factors to influence behaviour. This is the position that, for instance, Don Locke adopts when he writes that it is an error to think that the cause of an action will include wants as well as beliefs, analogous to thinking that any cause must include causation, or a power to bring about effects, as well as the particular fact which is the cause.  (1974: 176)

In my defence of motivational conativism, I am going to distinguish between a conceptual and an empirical issue. The conceptual issue concerns whether the commonsensical concept of desire contains a reference to some non-cognitive factor which, in the presence of cognitive factors, causally influences behaviour. The empirical issue concerns whether there is in fact such a non-cognitive factor, that is, whether a concept featuring such reference applies to reality. If the reply to the first question is ‘yes’, but the reply to the second question ‘no’, our commonsensical attributions of desire are erroneous, and the concept of desire must be revised for it to be applicable to reality. I shall argue for a positive answer to the conceptual question and suggest that there is no reason to withhold the same answer to the empirical question. As suggested in 1.2, a belief that p, being a disposition to think that p in situations in which the question of the truth of p arises, cannot have any effect on behaviour unless it manifests itself in occurrent thought. Suppose that I go shopping and that parsley is among the many items I  believe I need to buy. As I am walking around in the shop, it momentarily slips my mind that I need to buy parsley; so I do not buy it. It would not be correct to depict me as having lost the belief that I need parsley, and later having to acquire it anew. Rather, the possession of a belief is compatible with its content occasionally failing to show up in episodic thinking at relevant moments. But, and this is one thing the example is designed to illustrate, when a belief fails to surface in occurrent thinking, the subject will not act on it.19 This is why the definiens of (D) is framed in terms of (occurrent) thinking rather than believing. 19  It should be noticed that this does not imply that you cannot act on ‘unconscious’ thoughts in every sense. For although a thought is conscious in the sense that it is episodically represented, this representation may be so brief that you may not notice or be conscious of having it. Such ‘unconscious’ episodes could influence your behaviour.

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In (D), then, I have sought to characterize what it is to have an occurrent desire. But we are also said to possess desires, although our minds are occupied with other matters. I can be said to have a desire to continue working on this manuscript at times when all thoughts of it are far from my mind, and even when I am asleep or unconscious. Such desires are dormant as opposed to occurrent. In my view, this distinction is just a reflection of the distinction between occurrently thinking that something is the case and dispositionally believing it to be the case. That is to say, to have an intelligent desire for p which is dormant involves dispositionally believing that you can bring about p instead of having an occurrent thought to this effect. Since our occurrent desires and actions are a function of what we occurrently think of, or attend to, the outcome of competitions for attention is crucial. As what we are capable of attending to at any moment is just a tiny fraction of what we dispositionally believe and what is perceptually present to us, this competition is quite stiff. This brings us to another point of the parsley example—than displaying the indispensable role of occurrent thought—which is the major one in the context of the present section. The example allows us to infer something about the strength of my desire to get parsley, namely that it is rather weak. If it had been strong as, say, an addicted smoker’s desire for tobacco, the thought of parsley would certainly not have slipped my mind. Should it momentarily have left my mind because I was distracted by, say, the sight of a beautiful woman walking by, it would be bound to recur soon. In other words, an effect of desiring parsley, if you cannot get it straightaway, could be to keep you occurrently thinking of parsley, for instance, to cause that your belief that you need to buy it is regularly manifested in occurrent thought. But then, contrary to motivational cognitivism, a desire for parsley cannot boil down to the motivational power of occurrent thoughts of parsley, for once they have disappeared, these thoughts cannot bring into existence subsequent instances of the same thoughts. Rather, the desire must be a state that can persist in the absence of any thought of its objective in order to facilitate associations away from distracting thoughts back to its objective. Dispositional belief-states cannot themselves cause their manifestations in occurrent thought, just as they cannot cause manifestations in action. At any time we are in countless such states, and only very few of them

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are represented in occurrent thought. Something other than these states themselves must then determine this selection. What is currently perceived and thought are presumably among the factors contributing to this selection. But we are now considering a case in which current perceptions and thoughts are distracting me from the thought of parsley. What could lead me back to it? My conjecture is that a desire is cut out to be something that facilitates associations away from such distractions back to the thought of parsley. The stronger the desire, the easier it is to make associations to parsley, that is, the more tenuous and far-fetched the link between the episode which sparks off the association and parsley can be. But for a desire to do this work, it must obviously be something over and above such cognitive and sensory episodes. A neural state which can be causally operative without being manifested in consciousness fits this bill. A desire is thus such a state that, among other things, tends to facilitate the appearance of its objective in occurrent thought, if it is not already there. This is a further effect of it on thought processes, alongside the effect of making us indulge in the means-end reasoning mentioned earlier. In this case, too, if the desire is intense, we find it hard to think about anything else, whereas if it is weak, it may easily slip our mind. If we have a strong desire for something like sex or delicious food which cannot be gratified straightaway, we may find hard to prevent ourselves from daydreaming or fantasizing with pleasure or excitement about the gratification of the desire. On the other hand, if the desire is weak and banal, it may slip our minds almost immediately, as happens sometimes when we want to walk into another room to fetch something, but find that we have forgotten what we wanted a few second later when we have entered the room. This goes to show that it cannot be a definitional characteristic of desires that we keep thinking about their objects with feelings of satisfaction or frustration. My argument has been to the effect that to understand how a desire could tend to keep its objective manifest in conscious episodes, it must be construed as something over and above what is manifest in such episodes, since it is at work in the absence of any suitable conscious episodes, precisely in order to promote their reappearance. Now if a desire is a state below the surface of consciousness that is prone to cause itself to be so to speak regularly afloat on the stream of consciousness,

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by causally affecting the neural correlates of conscious episodes, it is reasonable to think that once it is afloat, in the shape of suitable occurrent thoughts, the state will in conjunction with these thoughts tend to produce appropriate behaviour. For it seems reasonable to surmise that the state is designed to produce these thoughts because they are necessary to produce the behaviour.20 When you form a decisive desire to do something at a time beyond the imminent future, like tomorrow, you must believe that it will survive until the time of action. Of course, you need not believe that it will be constantly occurrent, since you might believe, for example, that you will sleep for several hours before it is time to act. But then you must assume that there is something, presumably about the desire itself, that tends to make it occurrent when the time for action is ripe, since this is necessary for the production of the relevant behaviour. This implies that in order to form decisive desires for the more distant future, you need to possess the concept of such a desire, which is not necessary for having decisive desires for the imminent future. It is, however, important not to confuse the point that in order to form decisive desires or intentions for the more distant future, you need to assume that they will persist until the time of action with the claim that you need to intend that they persist until this time and make the resulting action intentional.21 Such an intention-supporting intention is necessary only in the less common cases in which you believe that you have to make an effort or take steps in order to keep the intention in existence. We may summarize the upshot of this discussion in a definition as follows:

20  Compare Scanlon’s claim: ‘A person has a desire in the directed-attention sense that P if the thought of P keeps occurring to him or her in a favorable light’ (1998: 39). As I have argued, a salient difference between this account and mine is that, whereas Scanlon, consistently with motivational cognitivism, identifies a desire with the tendency of certain thoughts to occur, I  take it to be a distinct state that tends to cause the occurrence of these thoughts (and the appropriate behaviour). What more plausible cause of the insistent occurrence of these thoughts than a desire could there be? Scanlon’s account has also been rightly criticized by Mele as being ‘overly intellectualized’ (2003: 78) because it involves taking the subject as seeing the considerations that keep cropping up ‘as reasons for acting in a certain way’ (1998: 40). Surely, subjects can have desires, even intelligent ones, despite the fact that they lack the concept of a reason. 21  Consider George Wilson’s claim that ‘an intention for the future is always an intention to perform an intentional act of some kind’ (1989: 270).

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(D*) At t, you have a dormant decisive desire to cause p at a future time t+ just in case: at t, you are in an internal state which, provided that the state persists until t+, tends to cause its underlying belief at t that you can cause p at t+ (and thereby cause consequences specified by reasons that you may have for causing p) to manifest itself in occurrent thought at t+, and along with this thought cause something to be a fact at t+ because you think that it is p. Suppose that you believe that you need to resort to some means in order to cause p. Then, in order to have a decisive desire to cause p, you have to believe that it is highly likely that there will be such means at your disposal. But, as already remarked, you need not have fully specified these means in advance, provided that you believe that you will be able to do so no later than at the time of action. In these circumstances, the state that you must be in to have a decisive desire to cause p may also tend at suitable times to make you do things designed to enable you to discover these means. Notice that you may also have an occurrent decisive desire, although you know that it is not yet time to act on it. It is, then, a state that will or would cause something if the time were right. In this respect, an occurrent decisive desire differs from trying. When you register that the time for action has arrived, a decisive desire to cause p is transformed into trying to cause p, that is, into causing something to be a fact because you think that it is that p (contrast O’Shaughnessy’s view that intending now and trying are distinct existences and that the former causes the latter, 2008: ch. 18). Over and above the consideration that there must be something about desires that makes them occurrent at relevant times, the conativist conception of a desire is also supported by the consideration that, in view of the great differences between human individuals, it appears natural to suppose that not all subjects who embrace the truth of the same thoughts would behave in the same way in the same circumstances (though no two individuals in the same circumstances are in fact likely to embrace exactly the same thoughts and, if this were to occur, it is bound to pass unnoticed). According to a conativist conception, desires gesture towards something that can account for this behavioural difference: some individuals are, and some are not, in internal states, which in conjunction with the contents

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of their consciousnesses, are causes of their behaviour. Don Locke acknowledges that his cognitivist account faces ‘the problem of why certain beliefs move some people but not others, or move some people in one way and others in another’ (1974: 179). But he offers no solution to the problem of what this differentiating factor might be if it is not desires, which he explicitly denies. It might be wondered why he denies this because it seems clear that common sense takes it to be desires, and that it regards explanations of intentional action in terms of beliefs and desires as complete. We can support this commonsensical position by adopting what David Armstrong has called a realist instead of a phenomenalist conception of dispositions (1968: ch. 6). According to a realist conception, to say that something has a disposition like being brittle is to say that it is in an internal state—which in fact consists in a certain bonding of its molecules—such that it will break if it is struck, even lightly (given that it is not surrounded by protective material, etc.). It is not simply to say that it will break in these circumstances, as the phenomenalist conception has it. The quotation from Locke indicates that he construes desires rather as the phenomenalist conception interprets dispositions. The concept of a decisive desire, then, refers to an internal state of agents—presumably neural in character—which, alongside cognitive states, moves them to act. Our being in such a state could be expressed by a construction of the form ‘I shall cause . . .’ . But, as remarked in 3.3, it should not be thought that this construction expresses the content of this state as a proposition expresses the content of a state of believing. Belief is a content-oriented state because it has a content-to-fact fit. (Decisive) desire is not, because it has a fact-to-content direction of fit that I have proposed should be understood in terms of it being an internal state which causes something because it is thought to fit the content of a thought about what will be caused.22 Consequently, if talk of the contrasting fits of beliefs and desires is pressed so far as to imply that these attitudes are conceived as having 22  So far I can see, this causal interpretation supplies what Schueler claims cannot be supplied: ‘an account of the psychological state with what is called world-to-word direction of fit (that is, proper desires), which can be used to explain goal directedness in a way that does not itself make use of notions that already involve goal directedness’ (2003: 37).

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contents with opposite directions of fit, it becomes untenable. But the distinction between these directions of fit can be construed in a less contentious way, as may be gleaned from the fact that it applies to artefacts: we design some artefacts to have the function of registering, recording, etc. aspects of the world—e.g. thermometers to measure the temperature of things—and others to change aspects of the world, e.g. heaters to change temperatures. These functions are combined in thermostats that might provide a close artificial parallel to desires. Analogously, evolution has equipped us with some states featuring contents whose function it is to fit the facts, and other states that, in the presence of appropriate powers of action, have the function of causing facts that fit the contents of thoughts about what will be caused. This interpretation of the idea of the opposite directions of fit of beliefs and desires does not appeal to any ‘practical thoughts’ with a fit opposite to that of beliefs, however this practical fit is to be construed.23 It might be that some sort of allegiance to determinism in the domain of mind and action underlies the commonsensical postulation of an intrinsically unknown explanatory state that its concept of a desire encapsulates. It is conceivable that this postulate is untenable, that there is in fact nothing that causes the recurrence of thoughts of desired objects, or subjects to behave differently in the same external circumstances and in light of the same thoughts. There is, however, as yet no reason to adopt this skeptical attitude rather than the attitude that neurophysiological research will bear out the truth of the commonsensical postulate. This confirmation would not only underwrite the legitimacy of talk of desires as separate explanatory factors; it also promises to supersede this talk, since explanations couched in neurophysiological terms would specify what the postulated factors are intrinsically like, whereas talk of desires identifies them in a less informative, extrinsic, or relational fashion, as ‘something which along with some underlying thoughts tends to cause behaviour that is thought to fit them’.

23  It should be noted that my account is not a direction of fit theory of the sort that is singled out as the target of Kim Frost’s detailed criticism (2014). For, as should be clear, I believe neither that ‘fit’ denotes the same kind of relation, nor the same kind of relata in both the theoretical and practical case, and that the difference is merely the direction of this one and the same relation (2014: 444–5). This is because, in the case of desire, there is not a distinctive content which is one of the relata.

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When explaining actions, there are, then, three levels that we must keep apart. First, there are the agents’ (apparent) reasons for acting, which are supplied by contents of their thoughts. Second, there are their attitudes, their thoughts and desires, which provide the material for reasonsexplanations of their actions. Finally, there are the neurophysiological phenomena whose causal connections underpin reasons-explanations and to which the concept of desire refers.

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4 Reasoning about Means 4.1  Deriving Desires for Means from Desires for Ends An advantage of employing conditionals as the standard formula for reasons for action is that the conditional form can also be used to bring out the structure of reasons for belief—thus making possible a close comparison between these kinds of reasons. For conditionals figure in classic forms of reasoning, like modus ponens, which are designed to be truth-preserving. It is plain that if we have an apparent reason for thinking that q, we cannot just be thinking that if p then q. Clearly, we must also think that p. The conditional provides a mere link between the propositions p and q. If there is no endorsement of the truth of p, there is no endorsement of truth that so to speak can be channelled along this link. Thinking that q for this reason consists precisely in deriving an endorsement of the truth of q, or letting it flow from an endorsement of the truth of p, via the link of an endorsement of the truth of if p then q. It follows from this account that the truth of the thoughts that if p then q and p can be a reason for which you think that q only if you are in a position to acquire a belief in the truth of if p then q and p prior to, and thus independently of, acquiring belief in the truth of q. For otherwise your endorsement of the truth of q cannot result from your endorsement of the truth of if p then q and p, and this is essential for it to be the case that you think q because of a reason in your mind which consists in if p then q and p. We might say that your reason is an epistemic means for you to establish that q. It follows that p & q cannot be a reason for which either of its conjuncts, p or q, is thought, or an epistemic means to this effect, though these propositions are both deducible from this conjunction, for you could not have established the truth of the conjunction prior to the truth of its conjuncts.

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Turning now to reasons for action, I have advocated the view that for it to be true that you have an apparent reason for causing p (to become a fact) you must have a thought that could be expressed by the canonical formula ‘If I cause p, q will be caused’, where q is desired. In the case of reasons for action, it is a desire for what is specified in the antecedent— to cause p—that is derived in the process of reasoning, a desire that, if strong enough, will issue in action. Thus, reasons for belief and action are similar in that in both cases reasons are something from which you can reason, but what you reason your way to differs: it is beliefs and desires, respectively. This leads to other differences which are now discernible. As I contended in Chapter 3, a desire has no distinctive conceptual content that could be a part of an apparent reason. Therefore, desiring p for the reason that if you cause p then q will be caused and desiring q cannot be a matter of inferring some conceptual content from the contents of other attitudes of yours,1 as it is when you think that q because you think that if p then q and p. Inferences require contents that could function as premises and conclusions. But in the practical case, it is motivational power—a species of causal power—that is derived or transmitted from q to p in virtue of the conditional connection between them that you think true. In terms of my analysis of desire, this derivation consists in your being in a state which along with the underlying thought that you can in the all-in sense cause p tends to cause something because you think it is that p, since you are in a state which along with the underlying thought that you can in the all-in sense cause q tends to cause something because you think that it is that q, and you think that by causing p q will be caused. The tendency to cause p is weakened in proportion to how much the probability that it leads to q sinks below certainty. In order for this derivation or transmission of motivational power to occur, you must regard the causing of p as a sufficient means in the circumstances for the materialization of q, a means that you take yourself to have an all-in power to apply because your desiring q presupposes your thinking that you have an all-in power to cause q. It is a means to bring it about that something becomes a fact—a manipulative means—not 1  Contrast e.g. Robert Audi who claims that ‘practical reasoning, like any reasoning, requires an inferential passage from one or more premises to a conclusion’ (1989: 110).

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(just) an epistemic means to ascertain that something is or will be a fact. Now there are different kinds of manipulative means. The most common and important are presumably causal means consisting in that the causing of p causes q, as in the case in which scratching causes an itch to disappear. Another kind of connection between manipulative means and ends is conventional, as when kicking a ball into something cage-like counts as scoring a goal when it satisfies certain conventions. Further kinds of connection are contributory and constitutive, as when the acquisitions of individual books first contribute to the completion of a certain series of books, and the acquisition of the final book constitutes the completion. The acquisitions of these books cannot cause the completion of the series, since they are proper parts of it. All these kinds of manipulative means share one feature: it must be possible to ascertain that we have applied them prior to, and thus independently of, establishing that we have attained the end. In other words, manipulative means must also be capable of functioning as epistemic means of telling that we are in the process of attaining the end. A manipulative means to an end must so to speak be a ‘landmark’ or ‘signpost’ with the help of which we can orient ourselves toward the end, something that for us can be a mark or sign that the end is in the making. If an alleged manipulative means cannot fill this orienting function, the thought that we can apply it will not motivate us to apply it as a result of the end motivating us. As will be seen below, while we cause finger movements by causing certain neuromuscular processes, the latter do not normally serve as epistemic means by which we can tell that the finger movements will occur—it is in fact rather the other way around. Therefore, these neuromuscular processes cannot function as manipulative means that we are motivated to apply to attain the end of causing finger movements. Notice that, while in the case of reasons for belief, the derivation of the relevant propositional attitude—thought or belief—runs from the epistemically prior to the epistemically posterior, in the case of reasons for action, the derivation of the relevant attitude—desire—runs in the reverse direction, from the epistemically posterior to the epistemically prior. In order for the thought if p then q and p to be a reason for me because of which I think q, I must be in a position to ascertain p prior to and independently of q. But in the event I think that if I bring about p

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then q is brought about and desire to bring about p, I have no reason to desire to bring about q, or be motivated by the thought that I can bring about q, if p is epistemically prior. For example, if I think that eating sweets will make me put on weight, and I desire to eat sweets, it is not the case that I thereby have a reason to want to put on weight, or be motivated to do so by the thought that I can do so. I could consistently be entirely averse to the idea of putting on weight, and may be relieved if, per impossibile, it subsequently turns out that my eating sweets does not make me put on weight. In Chapter 5, when the concept of intentional action is dissected, this point should not be forgotten, since it underwrites the possibility of there being actions which we perform knowingly, consciously or wittingly, but not intentionally, because we foresee that they will follow in the wake of what we decisively desire or intend to do. For it does not follow that we desire to do them, let alone intend or decisively desire to do them. This reversal of derivability reflects the opposite direction of fit of beliefs and desires, that beliefs are states whose function it is to have contents that fit the facts of the world, whereas desires are states whose function it is to make their subjects so act that the world fit their content. Since it appears advantageous for our reproductive fitness to be in states with each of these functions, it is not surprising that evolution has designed some states of ours to have each of these functions. The direction of fit of desires is captured by the analysis presented in Chapter 3 by its construal of a desire as a state which tends to cause something to become a fact because this will fit how it is thought to be. This analysis also implies that, by contrast to beliefs, the derivation of desires cannot constitute inferences, properly speaking, since desires are not attitudes which have contents that could figure in premises and conclusions. If it is the case that if p then q and p fit the facts, so will q; thus naturally, an attitude whose function it is to fit the facts will be transmitted from the former to the latter. On the other hand, an attitude whose function it is to make the world fit its content will be transmitted to the epistemically prior p from being directed at the epistemically posterior q when it is taken to be true that if p is brought about then q, since to make it true that p could then be a means both to make it true that q and to tell that it is in the process of becoming true. Therefore, it is not a matter of contingent fact that our derivations follow these patterns, but

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a matter of necessity and constitutive of the notions of believing and desiring: if we were not constrained to follow these patterns, the attitudes that we possessed could not possibly have these directions of fit. It would be problematic to view these derivations as contingent, for then it may reasonably be asked for a justification of why we go through them. Clearly, we cannot have reasons for conducting them, i.e. have reasons for reasoning in accordance with reasons, since that would evidently start an infinite regress. But, on the other hand, it seems paradoxical to claim that we could intelligibly be challenged to justify why we conduct them—as we could were they a contingent matter—though we cannot have reasons for so doing. The lack of reasons would then seem to suggest that reasoning in accordance with reasons is beyond reason, an arational or non-rational process. To see that manipulative means must satisfy the condition of being epistemically prior, consider an earlier example in greater detail: when I move my finger, a cause of the finger movement is certain neuromuscular happenings. Notwithstanding this, I do not, and cannot, intentionally move my finger by means of intentionally causing those happenings, that is, by employing the occurrence of the neuromuscular events as causal means of moving my finger. The reason is that, as a rule, I ascertain that I am moving my finger prior to establishing that I am causing those neuromuscular happenings. I perceive that I am moving the finger as soon as I am moving it, but if I know at all that the neuromuscular events are occurring, I normally have to infer it from the fact that I have moved my finger and scientific knowledge according to which there is a correlation between this movement and the occurrence of these micro-events. Thus, my moving my finger is epistemically prior to the occurrence of the neuromuscular events, and could function as an epistemic means of telling that they occur. Therefore, although the neuromuscular events are causes of the finger movement, causing these events could not be a causal means for me to bring about the finger movement. Things would stand differently if I could directly monitor these microprocesses as they occur in the interior of my body. Then they could be, for me, epistemically prior to the finger movement, and this could enable me to use the causing of them as a manipulative means to effect the finger movement. If, in these circumstances, I wanted to move my finger, I would have reason to want to cause those events, and to feel

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frustrated if I notice that I fail to do so, since this would be a sign that I shall fail to attain my end of moving the finger. In actual circumstances, however, I have no reason for frustration if, after having moved my finger, I am informed that, miraculously, I did this without the occurrence of the neuromuscular events. Reason-conditionals should be understood as stating that the action that is described in the antecedent is a sufficient manipulative means for what is described in the consequent. Since the antecedent of a reasonconditional describes an action that is a sufficient manipulative means for what is described in the consequent, a reason-conditional is not subject to contraposition. For if making it a fact that p is a sufficient means in the circumstances for making it a fact that q, making it a fact that not-q cannot be a sufficient means in the circumstances for making it a fact that not-p, for example, making it a fact that you do not put on weight cannot be a means of making it a fact that you do not eat sweets. Nonetheless, observing it being a fact that not-q, for example, that you have not put on weight, could be a sufficient epistemic means of telling that not-p is a fact, that you have not been eating sweets. Epistemic means need not be acts performed by the subject. My claim that when you have an apparent reason to the effect that making it a fact that p is a sufficient (manipulative) means for making it a fact that q, your desire to make it a fact that q can be transferred to making it a fact that p should not be taken to mean that you will then desire to make it a fact that p decisively, or all things considered. For you may have an intrinsic aversion to p, or to some other state of affairs than q, for which making it a fact that p is a sufficient means, which is stronger than your desire for q. In order to desire p decisively, you have to weigh or balance the desire for q in conjunction with desires for other states of affairs for which p might be sufficient against contrary desires, in order to establish what combination of desires is the strongest. You must also weigh in the probability with which p would satisfy these desires. But, clearly, to arrive at a decisive desire for p through such a weighing or balancing is not a matter of simply deriving it, as we have seen a desire to apply sufficient means could be derived from a desire for an end. It should also be borne in mind that there are likely to be alternative sufficient means for causing q at your disposal. Consequently, you will have to compare the outcome of the weighing mentioned with a c­ orresponding

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weighing with respect to the alternative means, to establish which means are the best. To give a simple illustration of how you might form a decisive desire to apply some means, suppose that you have a decisive desire to eat at this particular restaurant now: you are very hungry, and there is no other place in the neighbourhood where you can get food soon enough. To satiate your hunger soon, it is then necessary that you eat at this restaurant, but it offers a number of different dishes from which you have to make a choice. When you make this choice, you could compare different aspects of the dishes that are relevant to your desires, for instance, the hedonic aspect of how they taste, their nutritional aspects, and the economic aspect of their prices. Then you form a decisive desire to have now the dish that you believe will provide the greatest satisfaction of your desires. Obviously, forming this decisive desire is not a matter of simply deriving it from your decisive desire to eat something now at the restaurant and the other desires in play. The process of forming a decisive desire does not become a matter of derivation even if the situation is simplified as follows. Imagine that it turns out that the restaurant has only one dish on its menu. So, eating this dish is not only a sufficient, but a necessary means as well to satiate your hunger now. Nonetheless, you could not simply derive a decisive desire to eat this dish now from this fact along with your decisive desire to satiate your hunger now. For it may be that when you realize that the dish in question is the only one that the restaurant is serving, your ­decisive desire to satiate your hunger now loses its decisiveness. You still desire to satiate your hunger now, but it is no longer decisive, since you cannot form a decisive desire to do what is necessary to satisfy it: perhaps the single dish is simply too disgusting, or it will be morally compromising to eat it (it is meat, and you are a vegetarian), or too expensive. Instead, you form a decisive desire to go hungry for another couple of hours to find another place to eat. In this connection, it might be worth repeating that in order for there to be a reason to desire to apply a means, it is not enough that it be a necessary means for the end. It must be sufficient in the circumstances, or it must be possible for the agent to make it so. For it is useless to apply a necessary means which is part of no available sufficient means for the

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attainment of some end desired: this will not lead to making the world fit the content of the agent’s desires. I conclude that forming a decisive desire is never a matter of simply deriving it, as a desire to apply means can be derived from a desire for an end. The latter process, though a derivation, is not inferential because, as was claimed in 3.3, unlike beliefs, desires are not content-oriented attitudes, with distinctive contents that could be inferred from the contents of other desires and beliefs. The fact that the formation of decisive desires, unlike the formation of desires pure and simple, cannot be a process of derivation is linked up with the fact that reasons for deciding and acting can never be conclusive, but are always defeasible. By contrast, the truth of if p then q and p is a conclusive reason that could justify a conviction that q is true. In this situation, there cannot be any real reason for believing not-q. But in the case of reasons for action, there is always a possibility of discovering further means and desired consequences that—without undermining the truth of reasons already accepted—will upset the balance of reasons. Additionally, there is of course the possibility, which has a counterpart in the case of reasons for belief, that you might discover that some of your beliefs about the objects of desire are mistaken and, thus, that it is a mistake to desire those objects. Nevertheless, eventually, apparent reasons for action must—rightly or wrongly—be considered sufficient or good enough for making a decision, and rendering further deliberation redundant; ­otherwise, there will never be decision and action. The fact that reasons for action can never be conclusive but are always defeasible is a factor which makes the deliberative freedom that we experience when we decide what to do stronger and more pervasive than it is when we decide what to believe. For we can never reach a point at which we are constrained by our reasons to form a decisive desire, whereas we can be constrained by conclusive reasons to form a conviction, though in fact this might only happen with respect to modest facts, e.g. about what follows from what we currently perceive. It might be pointed out that I have been discussing sufficient reasons for decisively desiring to act instead of reasons for acting. But reasons for performing an action—in the sense that they are reasons about the consequences of performing this action—are reasons for which you can

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perform this action only in virtue of being reasons for which you can desire to perform it. So, when I have been discussing how we could arrive at sufficient reasons for which we could form decisive desires to perform actions, I have ipso facto discussed how we could arrive at sufficient reasons for which we could perform these actions. What completes the clause ‘the reason for which we . . .’ must at bottom be the formation of an attitude whose object is or contains propositions, since it must be something which we could arrive at by reasoning. It can be an action only in virtue of the fact that such an attitude manifests itself in the action.2 It is, however, important to stress that, although these reasons are ­reasons for which we could form desires, they are not reasons about (the consequences of) having these desires; they are instead reasons about doing some actions. In this sense, they are for reasons for action, and not reasons for desiring.3 There can indeed be reasons for having desires in the sense that they are reasons whose contents are about the consequences of having these desires, for instance, reasons to the effect that we shall be rewarded if we have these desires. These are reasons for which we can form second-order desires to cause it to be a fact that we have the desires that the reasons are about and, thus, reasons for which we could perform actions to this effect (cf. Persson, 2013: 12.4). Performing an action for a sufficient reason involves trying—­ successfully—to perform it. Therefore, if you have a sufficient apparent reason for which you could perform an action, you have a sufficient apparent reason for which you could try to perform it, but not vice versa. For, as was noted in 2.2, there are apparent reasons for trying to perform an action—in the sense that they are about such trying—which are not apparent reasons for performing the action, for instance, reasons having to do with finding out whether you can perform the action. These are reasons for which you could decisively desire to try to perform the action, but for which you could not decisively desire to perform it.

2  McCann claims that the explanation of why reasons to perform an action are also reasons for deciding to perform it is that ‘deciding is itself purposive behavior’ (1998: 150). But this cannot explain why these reasons are also reasons for desiring to perform this action: desiring is surely not ‘purposive behavior’. 3  This is what I elsewhere (Persson, 2013: 167) call the ‘content’ sense of ‘reason for’, as opposed to the ‘result’ sense of ‘reason for which’.

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Means and Morality  85

This is because in order to have a decisive desire to try to perform an action—and, hence, to try to perform it—you need only believe that it is ­epistemically possible that you can in the all-in sense perform it, whilst in order to have a decisive desire to perform it, you need to believe that this is at least more probable than not. But if there is a reason for which you can decisively desire to cause p now, this is also a reason for which you can try to cause p now and—if in fact you possess the requisite all-in power—for which you can cause p now.

4.2  Means and Morality The notion of (manipulative) means crops up not merely in the theory of action and practical reasoning, but in moral philosophy as well, for instance in the well-known doctrine of the double effect declaring, roughly, that it is morally worse to harm someone as a means to a good end than as a side-effect of it. In light of the discussion in the previous section, we must ask first how this doctrine fares in relation to the distinction between manipulative and epistemic means. Notice that side-effects can be epistemic means to tell that the end has been attained, though they cannot of course be manipulative means to attain it. To illustrate, consider the much-discussed runaway trolley which is heading towards five people. It can be prevented from hitting and killing them only by your directing it onto a sidetrack where it will hit and kill Vic. Suppose, however, that you can tell that you have succeeded in directing it away from the five only by observing that it hits Vic. Hence, doing what enables you to observe this provides you with an (epistemic) means to tell that you have achieved the end of saving the five, though causing Vic to be hit is of course not a (manipulative) means by which you bring about the saving of the five, in contrast to redirecting the trolley onto the sidetrack. This case appears to be located somewhere in between the case in which Vic is killed as a manipulative means—which, as mentioned, involves this event being an epistemic means—and the case in which the killing of Vic is merely a side-effect of saving the five without being used even as an epistemic means. Therefore, it may seem to be both as bad as the former and no worse than the latter, but this would imply that these

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two cases are morally on a par, that is, that harming as a manipulative means is not morally worse than harming as a side-effect. This would refute the doctrine of the double effect. So, drawing the distinction between manipulative and epistemic means complicates matters for adherents of this doctrine. Concentrating now on manipulative means, a distinction must be drawn between doing something harmful to somebody as a means and using them as a means in a way that harms them. An example of the first would be running Vic over just as a means of being in time to save five other people. Suppose, however, that you realize that running over Vic serves not just to eliminate an obstacle to your being in time to save the five but that, after being run over, Vic’s body will also fill a pothole in the road that would otherwise have brought your vehicle to a halt. Then, in running over Vic, you are not merely doing something harmful to him as a means, but using him as a means—to fill a pothole—in a manner that harms him. In these circumstances, Vic becomes a ‘utensil’ that facilitates your attaining the end of saving the five, which makes it easier to attain than it would have been had he been absent (the opposite of what is true in the first example). It should be asked whether there is a moral difference between these treatments of Vic to the effect that using him harmfully as a means is worse than merely doing something equally harmful to him as a means, which is entailed by the former. To my mind, it does not seem so. In replying to this question, it is important to compare like with like. Intuitively, it may seem worse, for example, to kill Vic by taking his organs to save the lives of five people— a clear instance of using him as a means in a harmful way—than to run over him just in order to be in time to save five people. But it would be a mistake to conclude that it is therefore morally worse to use somebody harmfully as a means than to do something to them that is equally harmful to them as a means. For the transplant case differs from the case of running over in that there are two separable (sets of) acts: the taking out of organs, which kills Vic, and the transplantation of them into the five recipients, which saves their lives. Intuitively, the fact that there are two separable acts seems to make matters morally worse: for instance, using Vic as an organ donor may seem worse than using him to fill a pothole (in the fashion described). However, the involvement of two acts seems to make matters worse even in the case in which something harmful is merely done to somebody

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Reasons for Emotions  87

as a means. Consider a corresponding two-act variation of running Vic over just in order to be in time: you run over Vic in order to be able to have the five taken on board your vehicle and then driving them to the hospital. This also seems to me worse than the original one-act case. If this two-act case is compared to the transplantation case, it is not clear to me that there is any moral difference. Thus, I am inclined to conclude that once we realize that the fact that two separable acts are involved seems to make a moral difference prima facie, and take pains to eliminate this feature, it becomes doubtful whether there is any moral difference between doing harm to somebody as a means and harmfully using them as means. On reflection, however, it seems implausible that it could make any moral difference whether one act or two separable acts are involved. The distinction between there being one or two acts appears too vague to bear any moral weight. After all, the activity of driving a vehicle consists of a series of connected acts. This is true of activities in general, even the simplest ones like walking or waving our hands. Thus, in all of the e­ xamples considered, there are innumerable separable acts. A suggestion to talk about separable activities instead does not help because it seems pretty arbitrary what counts as a single activity. It is not, however, an objective of the present book to sort out these moral issues (I discuss them further in Persson, 2013: ch. 6, and 2017: 7.4 and 9.2); the aim has just been to call attention to the pertinence of distinctions drawn to these moral issues.

4.3  Reasons for Emotions There are reasons for having emotions just as there are reasons for desires. This is because they have propositional content just like desires: we can fear, be glad, angry, or surprised that something is the case. Consequently, it may be wondered whether the direction of derivation of emotions is the same as that of desires: from the epistemically ­posterior to the prior. It will be seen that the answer to this question is not the same for all kinds of emotions. Desires are active states in the sense that, as emerged in Chapter  3, they are states which, by definition, tend to be causes. By contrast, emotions are passive states (hence, the term ‘passions’) in the sense that

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they are effects, effects of propositional thoughts whose contents form their contents. These effects consist in sets of innate bodily reactions some of which are felt in proprioception. Although emotions generically are passive, it is possible to divide them into active and passive emotions. The basis of this division is whether or not the reactions caused include desires: in the case of active emotions they do, while in the case of passive emotions they do not. Examples of active emotions are fear and anger which, roughly speaking, include desires to flee and fight, r­ espectively. Examples of passive emotions are gladness, sadness, and surprise.4 Whereas intelligent desires are directed at states of affairs in so far as we believe it to be in our power to affect them, this is not true of the states of affairs at which emotions are directed. For instance, when we fear or hope that p will be a fact, we do so to the extent that we believe it to be beyond our powers to see to it that p will not or will be a fact, respectively; it makes no sense to fear or hope that something will be a fact if we are certain that we can see to it whether or not it will be a fact. It follows that the desires that these emotions essentially encompass must be non-intelligent, more precisely, instinctive. It is characteristic of fear and hope that they are oriented at states of affairs about which we are not certain. This is why fear and hope can complement each other and be felt simultaneously; for instance, when we are uncertain whether we shall succeed or fail in attaining our end, we can both fear that we shall fail and hope that we shall succeed.5 With respect to these emotions, the direction of derivation is from the ­epistemically posterior to the prior. Thus, suppose that you fear that you have contracted a lethal disease and hope that you have not, and you know that the appearance of certain spots on your skin is a sure sign that you have contracted it. Then you have reason to fear that the spots will turn up and hope that they will not, and can derive a fear and a hope with these contents. Since these emotions involve uncertainty, it is easy to understand why they support the direction to the epistemically prior: this provides epistemic means to settle uncertainty.

4 The claims of this paragraph recapitulate what I say elsewhere (Persson, 2005: 72–3). Chapters 5 and 6 of this book discuss emotions at length. 5  There is another sort of fear which does not presuppose uncertainty and which is opposed not to hope but longing (see Persson, 2005: 81–2).

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Consider now emotions that are based on certainty instead of uncertainty. This is true, for example, of gladness and sadness. These emotions are even ‘factive’: just as your knowing that p, your being glad or sad that p implies that p is true. If p is not true, we would have to say that you are glad or sad because you are convinced that p (cf. Persson, 2005: 80). Emotions of this kind—which, as remarked, do not essentially incorporate desires—can be transmitted to sufficient means, but not because of their epistemic priority. Discovering that your causing p was a sufficient means in the circumstances for q, which makes you glad (or sad) when you have become convinced that q, could post factum make you glad (sad) that you caused p earlier: for instance, when you realize with joy that you won the lottery, you may retrospectively be glad that you bought a lottery ticket. Finally, consider the ‘neutral’ emotion of surprise. As regards this emotion, the direction of derivation is from the epistemically prior to the posterior, just like it is in the case of belief. Thus, imagine again that you are convinced that if p then q and that you discover, to your surprise, that p is true. Then you have a reason to be surprised that q, just as you have to be convinced that q. Since surprise is a function of the unexpected truth or probability of propositions, it is only to be expected that this emotion behaves rather like belief. All in all, the truth about the direction of fit and derivation of emotions is not univocal. But this is a peripheral topic in the context of this work, since by not being directed at states of affairs in so far as they are within our control, emotions are not essentially connected to intentional action and manipulative means.

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5 The Intentionality of Actions Basic and Non-Basic

5.1  The Intentionality of Basic Actions According to the analysis of apparent reasons for action advanced here, we have this type of reason—which need not be a real, justifying reason— to cause (it to be a fact that) p in case we think that if we cause p, we shall cause q, and want to cause q. Now we may cause p and q because we have such a reason without it following that our causing of them is intentional. Donald Davidson has supplied a well-known example to bring out the crux: A climber might want to rid himself of the weight and danger of holding another man on a rope, and he might know that by loosening his hold on the rope he could rid himself of the weight and danger. This belief and want might so unnerve him as to cause him to loosen his hold, and yet it might be the case that he never chose to loosen his hold, nor did he do it intentionally.  (1973: 153–4)

Davidson anticipates an attempt to get around this difficulty by taking a route which he suspects is not passable: It will not help, I think, to add that the belief and want must combine to cause him to want to loosen his hold, for there will remain the two questions how the belief and the want caused the second want, and how wanting to loosen his hold caused him to loosen his hold. (1973: 154)

I believe that the first of these two questions was answered in 4.1. The passage from the climber’s belief that if he loosens his hold on the rope, he will get rid of the weight and danger of his companion, and his desire to get rid of this weight and danger to a desire to loosen his hold on the

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rope is not a contingent matter, but a matter of necessity if the former two attitudes are to be properly ascribable to him. This is because a desire to cause q is, roughly speaking, a tendency to cause something because you think that it is q, and if you think that causing p is a sufficient means to cause q, this tendency transforms into a tendency to cause something because you think that it is p. Certainly, in order to form a decisive desire to loosen his hold, the climber must consider other consequences of this act than getting rid of his companion, and other desires of his having to do with these consequences, as well as alternative means of fulfilling these desires. This prevents the transmission from desired ends to a decisive desire for some means from being a conclusive process. In the present section I am going to investigate what the connection must be between the climber’s decisive desire to loosen his grip on the rope and his loosening the grip on it in order for this contactual action to be intentional. In 5.3 I am going to look into what further conditions must obtain in order for his non-basic action of getting rid of the weight and danger of his companion by this means to be intentional. All together this amounts, in general terms, to examining what it means for basic and non-basic actions to be intentional. When conducting this examination, we shall traverse a route which is the reverse of the one taken in 4.1, in which we traced the derivation of desires for means from desires for ends: we shall now be moving from what it is to apply intentionally the most immediate means—ultimately, from what we do without applying any means, by executing basic actions—to realizing our ends intentionally. In between sections 5.1 and 5.3, I shall in 5.2 deal with the intentionality of mental actions in their own right since, for reasons that were foreshadowed in 1.2—e.g. that conscious episodes are contentually rather than causally related—a somewhat modified account of their intentionality is necessary. Physical actions, which could be basic from the point of view of reasoning, have results which involve only your own body, or your body along with some material thing in contact with it, such as an instrument with which you act, or something on which you act. They are what I have called contactual actions. Now the salient point to notice is that Davidson’s climber does not loosen his grip on the rope because he conceives of this action of his as loosening his grip on the rope. If it is his nervousness that weakens his grip on the rope, how he conceives of his

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act does not figure essentially in the explanation of it. It might well be that he realizes that his hands are loosening their hold only after this has begun to happen, that he catches himself loosening his grip when he has already started loosening it. But a correct ‘preview’ or ‘preconception’ of what you will be doing is a necessary component in the origination of an action if a decisive desire to do it is to manifest itself in it in a way that makes it intentional. This is also necessary for your trying to perform an action, which in turn is necessary for performing the action intentionally (as many have pointed out, e.g. McCann, 1998: 95–8): trying to cause p is causing something because it is thought to be (possibly) p; and trying is successful—and an action intentional—only when what is thought to be p really is p.1 The presence of a preview of what we shall be doing when we try to do something can be seen in the following sort of experiment reported already by William James (1890: vol. II, 105). When experimental subjects, whose arms have been anaesthesized, are requested to close their eyes and then raise their arms—which, unbeknownst to them, they are prevented from doing by someone else holding them down—they are surprised, on opening their eyes, to find that their arms have not gone up. Their being surprised at this finding must be due to the fact that they assumed that their arms would be going up when they tried to raise them. This assumption cannot be an effect of what they have done—as it would have been had it been observation-based—it must rather be something that enters into the explanation of why their arms would have gone up had they not been kept down. When James’s subjects tried to raise their arms, they presumably caused something—such as flexing some muscles in their arms—that they thought would be raising their arms, but it may be doubted that it is necessary that we cause something whenever we try to move our arms. Imagine that you wake up unaware that you are now in the condition of the locked-in syndrome. Then you might try to move your arm without

1  Pink holds, however, it to be intelligible to conduct an experiment in which you are asked to raise your arm, though you know that you cannot because it has been tied down (2016: 56). But I think that what you are are asked to do here is, strictly speaking, to (try to) do what you would do were you trying to raise your arm (unless you have some uncertainty as to whether you could succeed, which may be hard to tell). You cannot sensibly be asked to try to raise your arm unsuccessfully.

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The Intentionality of Basic Actions  93

seemingly succeeding in causing anything. In reply, it might be queried whether it is strictly speaking true that you do not cause anything: do you not even succeed in causing some electric impulses to travel down your spine? In any event, all I am committed to claiming is that when you try to cause p, you must think something of the form ‘this is causing p’. I could concede that ‘this’ could occasionally fail to refer to anything because you do not cause anything, for it is the occurrence of this thought that is the essential difference between having an occurrent decisive desire to cause p now and trying to cause p now. But I would have to insist that if you to fail to cause anything, your trying cannot consist in an action. The fact that the climber’s preview or preconception of his act of loosening his grip does not play a role in the genesis of his action shows up in the fact that he does not control his action: if at the last moment he had changed his mind out of compassion for his companion, he would not have been able to tighten his grip; the nervousness would have made his hands too weak. The function of the agent’s preview of the act for control of it can be seen more clearly if we consider a contactual act of longer temporal duration than loosening the grip on a rope, for instance, handwriting. Suppose that you are writing your name. This is a contactual act which could consist in moving in a certain way your fingers that are holding a pencil to paper. The act of writing your name in a sense which includes the appearance of appropriate marks of some sort on the paper might be a contactual act which lasts only as long as your finger movements. When you are executing the action of writing your name, you are causing certain finger movements because you think that in the present circumstances of holding a pencil to paper, they will constitute writing your name. However, your preconception of what you are causing may change during the course of your action because you receive sensory feedback— in this case mostly of a visual kind, but some of it proprioceptive—of what you are causing. This feedback might modify your preconception of what the adequate finger movements should be, or stop your act if you discover that the pencil does not produce the letters of your name. But the crucial point is that, if a contactual action is protracted, your preconception of what you are in the process of causing could be

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modified under way by feedback that you are receiving from what you have actually caused, and this could lead to modifications of what you are causing. Long ago Elizabeth Anscombe claimed that we have ‘knowledge without observation’ of our intentional actions (1957: §8). She spoilt a good point, however, by apparently putting knowledge based on proprioception under this label. Thus, she ended up affirming that we can know without observation that we perform even involuntary actions such as, for example, our knowing with our eyes shut that we kick as a result of the patellar reflex. Consequently, knowledge without observation, as she conceived it, could not be anything that singles out the characteristic control that we exercise over actions that are intentional. For it might as well result from proprioceptive feedback received from bodily movements beyond our control. My thesis is then that, as long as a basic action—which need not be a purely bodily action, provided that it is a contactual action—is intentional, it is throughout its duration under the control of your conception of what you do. And if the action is to be intentional, its result must correspond to this conception and make it true.2 This is what I call the correspondence control model of intentional basic action, CORCON: You intentionally perform the basic action of causing p now if you now have an occurrent decisive desire to cause p directly—that is, without causing anything as a means to it—and this desire now causes something because you correctly think that it is that p. According to (D) in 3.4, your now having an occurrent desire to cause p implies your now being in an internal state which, in conjunction with your underlying thought that you can in the all-in sense cause p, causes something to be a fact because you think that it is that p. CORCON declares that this causing is intentional if what you think of as p is in fact p (it will later be seen that there is reason to add that this thinking must be justified). The direction of fit between thought and fact is here the opposite to what it is when, for example, you think that something is 2  Hence, there is a case for speaking of knowledge of our intentional actions. But even though in the case of most everyday intentional basic actions it might be true that we know that we perform them, our justification in some cases is too weak for this always to be true, as will soon emerge.

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true on the basis of perception: p is caused to be a fact because this is what this fact is thought to be rather than that you think that p because it is a fact that p. The thinking involved in sensory feedback from your actions is perception-based and has the content-to-fact direction of fit. CORCON does not mention the aspect of feedback, since it cannot take place simultaneously with instantaneous physical actions, like finger snapping, nor with mental actions (as will be seen in 5.2). But even when feedback can serve the function of helping to guide ongoing actions, it can only tell us whether we have succeeded in executing intentional actions. Even without this feature, CORCON states a sufficient condition which is not necessary for two reasons. First, you may perform the basic action of causing p intentionally if you have a decisive desire not to cause p by itself but something that entails this, like causing p and q. For instance, your decisive desire to raise both of your arms could make your raising your left arm intentional. Secondly, your decisive desire may perhaps be to try to cause p rather than to cause it. I shall discuss this weakening further in 5.3 in connection with the analysis of the intentionality of non-basic action because it is more called for as regards these actions, but it may also be relevant with respect to the intentionality of basic action. For imagine that your arm has been paralysed, but that you now have reason to believe that there is a probability of around 50 per cent that it has recovered, so that you now have regained an all-in power to raise it. It might then be doubtful that you are in a position to form rationally a decisive desire or intention to raise it, but you can certainly form a decisive desire or intention to try to raise it. This may be sufficient to make it true that you intentionally raise your arm if you successfully raise it. CORCON states a sufficient condition for intentionally performing a basic action for no reason, or for its own sake. Alvin Goldman apparently thinks that there are no such actions, since he suggests that we might ‘define an intentional action as one which the agent does for a reason’ (1970: 76; cf. Schueler,  2003: x). Goldman refers to Anscombe in this context, but her view seems to have been that an intentional action could be done for no reason (1957: 25). I am inclined to line up with Anscombe and regard, for instance, the whistling or humming in which we sometimes engage as an accompaniment to our main activities as possible

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instances of basic actions that are intentionally done for no reason.3 In order to obtain a sufficient condition for intentionally doing the basic action of causing p for a reason, it has to be added that you decisively desire to cause p because you think of it as a sufficient means to some other (desired) state of affairs, and that this causes something to be a fact because you correctly think that it is that p. Additionally, in view of the fact that there must be an end to the chains of reasons for which we perform basic actions, there have to be non-basic actions which we perform without having any reasons for performing them. Suppose that I stop the itch by scratching my head. Then it could be true that I have no reason for stopping the itch; it could be something I do for its own sake. In this situation, there would not be reasons for which I am doing everything that I am intentionally doing, though there is a reason for which I am doing something that I am intentionally doing (the scratching). By contrast, if a basic action like humming is intentionally executed for no reason, there might no reason for which anything is done at the time.4 In opposition to this view, it has been claimed that in both situations everything that is intentionally done is done for a reason, delivered simply by an intrinsic desire to hum and to stop the itch, respectively. This is what Mele suggests: that ‘effective intrinsic reasons’ to perform these acts are provided by my ‘want to do this—or, more precisely, by the representational content of that want’ (1992: 110). The representational content of my want to whistle is ‘to whistle’ and of my desire to stop the itch ‘to stop the itch’. But my reason for whistling cannot be that whistling is whistling; nor can my reason for stopping the itch be that it is stopping the itch. Such platitudes cannot justify or count in favour of whistling or stopping the itch. What confuses the issue might be that my desire to whistle and to stop the itch could be the explanatory reason why I am whistling and

3  It may be objected that if p is desired for no reason, the desire cannot be decisive, since such a desire must by definition rest on reasons. But the essential point is rather that a decisive desire must be dominant when it is judged that there is no need to go on considering reasons, and this does not imply that the desire that p rests on reasons. 4  So, these actions would not be within the purview of the sort of teleological ‘in order to’ explanations that Sehon favours.

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stopping the itch, respectively. But they cannot be my apparent reasons for whistling and stopping the itch, since they demand justification just as much as the corresponding actions. This is so because, as was observed in 4.1, the reason for which an intentional action is done must be a reason for having the desire as a result of which it is done, which according to the present analysis is the desire in question. However, some defend desire-independent, externalist, or objectivist accounts of reasons for desire according to which there are real reasons to want to avoid itches, pains, etc. for their own sakes and independently of their consequences, and these could turn up as our apparent reasons. I have elsewhere (see esp. Persson, 2005: chs 9 and 10; 2013: ch. 12) argued that such accounts should be rejected, and need not rehearse those arguments now, except for stressing one point which is particularly relevant in the present context. This is that it is hard to see what the content of a reason to be averse to pain for its own sake or to desire pleasure for its own sake could be. It could not be the tautologies that if you alleviate this pain, you alleviate a pain, or that if you cause this pleasure, you cause a pleasure, but it is not easy to understand what else it could be if the conative attitudes are to be directed at some sensations for their own sakes (cf. Persson, 2005: 99n, and 2017: 36). In order to be a reason for these intrinsic attitudes, it must be something from which you could reason your way to them, which there appears to be no room for. This point is worth elaborating, since Parfit has largely devoted a monumental, three-volume work (2011, 2017) to strenuously defending an objectivist account of reasons for desire according to which the existence of reasons for intrinsic desires is ‘fundamental, since we have reasons to try to fulfil our desires, or to achieve our aims, only when we also have such reasons to have these desires and aims’ (2017: 260). In other words, if there cannot be reasons for intrinsic desires, we cannot ever justify our desires, and consequent intentional actions, in terms of reasons (though we could explain them). I believe this claim to be unfounded. Suppose that you desire something for its own sake, such as to feel pleasure. Suppose also that you can fulfil this desire, that it does not involve any false beliefs, and that there cannot be any reasons for or against intrinsic desires. Then I cannot see why this desire cannot provide a justificatory reason to want to apply

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means to fulfulling it. After all, it cannot be wrong in any way. It is not like claiming that a mere belief could provide a justificatory reason for believing something else, for a mere belief could be wrong: it could be false or irrational. Therefore, I do not see why we cannot manage with the view that we do not—indeed cannot—have any reasons to have desires to perform actions simply for their own sakes. This is of course compatible with there being explanatory reasons why we want to do certain things for their own sake, but these reasons may be facts that are totally unknown to us—for instance, few of us know why we sometimes want to whistle for its own sake—and they cannot make these desires rational or irrational. When such desires are the desires for which we act, we could be performing intentional actions for which we have no reasons, but these actions raise no principal difficulties for the analyses of intentional action on offer here. It seems to me that CORCON captures what Harry Frankfurt has described as ‘the most salient differentiating characteristic of action’, namely that of agents being ‘in touch’ with or ‘guiding’ the movements of their bodies when they are executing intentional bodily actions (1978: 159). He believes that this guidance cannot be causal because causes precede their effects in time, and ‘an event cannot be guided through the course of its occurrence at a temporal distance’ (1978: 158). But for the most part the guidance that I have delineated does not precede the bodily movements that it is guiding: it is only the initial guiding preview that precedes the movements; the feedback and its possible modifications of the initial preview obviously goes on concurrently with the movements. Furthermore, Frankfurt himself concedes something along these lines, since he takes there to be causal mechanisms which stand ready to affect and adjust the course of movements should feedback indicate that they are on the wrong track (1978: 160). Notwithstanding this, it should be emphasized that CORCON comprises a non-causal element: the fact that movements must be caused because they are taken to correspond to or make true preconceptions of them in order for the causing of them to be intentional. It might clarify the purport of CORCON further if it is compared to a somewhat similar account, Kent Bach’s ‘representational theory of action’. Bach writes:

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The Intentionality of Basic Actions  99 I conceive of action as involving cycles of effective representations, bits of behavior, and receptive representations, in which there is a causal relation between each effective representation and bit of behavior, each bit of behaviour and receptive representation, and each receptive representation and the next effective representation.  (1978: 366)

This obviously resembles the process that I have just been outlining (except that I would add that, strictly speaking, receptive representations are redundant for some intentional actions, such as instantaneous actions). Bach takes representations to be sensuous rather than linguistic. I think that this must be correct, since we are as a rule incapable of verbally describing in detail how we execute the manifold of bodily actions that our agential repertoire includes. In my view, our knowledge of how to act intentionally is initially derived from our proprioceptive and outer perceptual experience of performing corresponding acts non-intentionally. This presupposes that our performing them nonintentionally—more specifically, on reflex or instinctively—is prior to our performing them intentionally (cf. James, 1890: vol. II, 487–8, 580). I hypothesize that infants learn how to execute their first bodily actions intentionally by perceiving what it is like when they engage in them instinctively. This is possible because a considerable class of human behaviour is innate. Of course, once we have acquired the ability to perform some rudimentary actions intentionally, we can extend our repertoire of intentional action by performing the intentional actions that we already know how to perform. For instance, we can extend our repertoire by making our bodies stronger, say, by lifting weights, or more supple, by stretching etc., and by practice we can learn to put together simpler actions to more complex actions, for instance, depressing various keys to typing a word, without attending to the various components of the complex actions. When we press a key habitually, we do not think of our act as pressing that particular key. I was once going to type a booking reference which included ‘3O5’. I had a decisive desire or intention to type that sequence, but again and again I typed ‘305’, without understanding why I was not allowed access to my booking. The difference between these sequences was so small that feedback did not inform me of my mistake. It was simply that I was so used to typing ‘0’ rather than ‘O’ in the context of

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other numbers that habit took over; I slipped into typing ‘0’ without thinking of what I was doing.5 The fact that our performance of non-intentional actions originally precedes our performance of intentional action poses a difficulty for Bach because he presents his representational theory as a theory of action in a wide sense, which includes acting ‘automatically, routinely, and/or unthinkingly’ (1978: 363).6 But if he means his theory to cover all kinds of action, there will not be any actions the experience of which can constitute the source of the effective sensuous representations that we apply in acting intentionally. Moreover, he cannot appeal to the correspondence between actions and effective representations to account for the non-observational knowledge that is distinctive of intentional actions: we cannot catch ourselves in the process of executing such actions, as Davidson’s nervous climber could catch himself loosening his grip, or I could catch myself typing ‘0’ instead of ‘O’. Another difference between Bach and me is that he denies that his representations are propositional (1978: 366 and 368ff.). He takes receptive representations delivered by feedback to be expressed by participial phrases, like ‘Fingers moving’, while effective representations are supposed to be captured by infinitival constructions like ‘Fingers to move’.7 However, as Bach himself concedes (1978: 371–3), it is particularly difficult to understand how effective representations, being sensuous, could have a content that is properly expressed by these infinitival constructions. Eventually, he despairs of making this comprehensible and concludes that effective representations might after all be ‘imaginings of immediate changes’ (1978: 373). But then the question arises what is the ‘fundamental difference’ (1978: 371) between effective and receptive representations which enables them to serve different functions. According to my account, these kinds of representations differ intrinsically only in respect of temporal reference. They can both be expressed 5  As already remarked (Chapter  3, n. 6), Thompson’s account implies, counterintuitively, that my typing ‘0’ is intentional, since it is a part of my intentional action of typing the booking reference (2008: 7.1). 6  Furthermore, Bach does not explicitly restrict his theory to basic actions, but I think that a restriction to basic or contactual actions makes his theory more plausible. 7  It may not matter whether we use participial phrases like ‘fingers moving’ or propositional forms like ‘fingers are moving’ to express what we take ourselves to be causing in actions, except that the latter conveniently allows us to use propositional variables.

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by indicative sentences like ‘This is my fingers moving’ (or ‘This is that my fingers are moving’) but in the case of effective representations ‘this’ refers to what is happening from now on in the area of the body in which the fingers are felt, whereas in the case of receptive representations ‘this’ rather refers to what has been happening just before the present in the same area. This difference in timing reflects their crucial difference in respect of extrinsic relations: what makes representations receptive is that they are based on perceptions of ongoing behaviour, while effective representations slightly precede the behaviour that they can produce in virtue of being linked to motivating representations, if they are not motivating in themselves. A representation being motivating consists in the subject being in a state which tends to cause something because it is thought to fit this representation. Both kinds of representation are, however, propositional because they involve applying kinaesthetic representations of movement to some parts of the body as given in proprioception. This is a precondition of their opposite directions of fit: effective representations having the function of being something that facts are caused to fit, and receptive representations having the function of being something that fits the facts. Bach worries that the possibility of the causal machinery underlying effective and receptive representations not being the normal one of efferent and afferent pathways might wreak havoc on his theory (1978: 375). Imagine, for instance, that a super-duper computer is connected by means of electrodes to my brain. As soon as I think ‘This is my fingers moving (in a certain way)’, it records my thought and sends a signal to my fingers to move in the described way, which they promptly do. At first blush, it might appear that I have not intentionally moved my fingers, though CORCON implies that I have. But it should not be assumed that if it is true that I have not intentionally moved my fingers—and perhaps that I have not even moved them—this is so simply for the reason that something that is not an organic part of my body was involved in the causation of the finger movement. This would imply, implausibly, that the assistance of any kind of prosthetic device would rule out intentional action. But, as John Bishop points out (1989: 159), it seems that even the involvement of the intentional actions of another agent does not necessarily rule out that we have acted intentionally: for instance, imagine that the wires of a prosthetic device

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are broken, but are for the time being held together by a neurophysiologist. If this enables me to move my fingers, the assistance of another human being would surely not rule out that I did so as an intentional basic action, provided that the proper function of the prosthesis would not rule it out. These actions could be intentional if I know, or justifiably believe, that this assistance enables me to move my finger reliably. Something that would rule out my moving my fingers intentionally, according to CORCON, is that the timing is not right: that my fingers do not move at the moment that I conceive as from now on, but slightly later, due to the intervention of the computer. It might be retorted that the computer could be imagined to be so super-fast that there would not be any delay noticeable to human senses. But then it seems to me that this case might be on a par with those in which there is involvement of some prosthesis which does not exclude intentionality of action. It might be suggested that something that would definitely lead us to deny that I have moved my fingers intentionally would be if we imagine that, unbeknownst to me, a scientist is operating the computer, matching signals from the motor cortex of my brain with motions of my fingers. As emerged one paragraph back, it should, however, not be thought that this would be so simply because the intentional actions of another agent are involved. No, it would rather be because the inclusion of the activity of the scientist would necessitate a temporal delay that would disrupt the correspondence between representation and movement required by CORCON. What I would in fact cause at the time when I thought that I would be causing a motion of my fingers would be the scientist (intentionally) causing my fingers to move. However, there is another relevant consideration alongside the temporal match. Remember the claim handed down to us by James, that we begin to learn how to move our bodies intentionally by observing how we move them instinctively or on reflex. The point that this brings out is that when we move our fingers intentionally, our expectation that this is what we shall do is justified by being supported by our past experience. We are applying a recipe for how to perform this type of action that we have learnt by experience. When our nervous system is no longer working in the normal fashion, it may be dubious whether our expectation that we shall perform a bodily action such as moving our fingers is justified, even though it turns out to be true. This doubt does not need to rest on the false supposition that we have to know anything about

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what goes on at the neurophysiological level when we move our fingers in everyday circumstances. The point is instead that our expectation is justified only as long as the underlying causality is roughly what it ordinarily has been when we have moved our fingers on reflex or intentionally whatever that form of causality may be. What this amounts to is—as hinted at earlier—that CORCON should be understood to state that in order for our moving our fingers to be intentional, we must be causing our fingers to move because we justifiably—as well as truly— think that it will be causing our fingers to move. This should be born in mind when cases of our moving our fingers with the help of prosthetic aids are under consideration. Perhaps some such aids involve so slight deviation from the normal causal underpinning that our preview of what we shall do could still be classified as justified. But even when this is not so, these previews can be justified in cases in which we are informed about the working of the reliable prosthetic aids that assist us. In order for the bodily actions to remain basic, however, these aids must not extend the causal chains too much, since this would disturb the temporal match, as mentioned above. By hypothesis, both of these conditions were violated in the case of the scientist operating the computer. If we are informed that we shall be moving our fingers by means of such an arrangement, we are not intentionally moving them as basic actions. We might be intentionally making the scientist move them, but not even the scientist moves them as a basic action. All in all, it seems to me that the ‘external intervention’ objections reviewed can be laid to rest in one way or another: either the circumstances are such—there is both temporal coincidence and justifiability of the beliefs about what is caused—that they are consistent with the actions in question being intentional basic actions, according to CORCON, or, intuitively, they fail to be either intentional or basic.8

8  Bishop suggests that external intervention cases can be dealt with by a combination of what he terms sensitivity and sustaining causation (1989: 171–2). He is aware, though, that some actions—e.g. a snap of the fingers—take so little time that sustaining causation is not brought into play. But he believes that in such cases of instantaneous action, ‘the sensitivity of the causal chain from intention to matching behavior will be enough to guarantee nondeviance’ (1989: 171). However, it seems obvious that sensitivity—in one of the shapes Bishop recognizes, namely counterfactual dependence between intention and behaviour—will allow that instantaneous behaviour due to a scientist-cum-computer intervention behind a veil of ignorance could be intentional.

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James—whose ideo-motor theory Bach regards as a predecessor to his own representational theory—claims that ‘every representation of a movement awakens in some degree the actual movement which is its object’; we do not ‘have to add something dynamic to it to get a movement’, an ‘express fiat, or act of mental consent to the movement’ (1890: vol. II, 526). But I see no reason to believe that consciousness is ‘in its very nature impulsive’ (1890: vol. II, 526). Although I do not think that any ‘fiat’ or ‘consent’ is necessary to set our bodies in motion (as already intimated, but as will be argued further in 5.2), I do think that only a subset of all our sensations and thoughts are capable of doing so. Something that could happen is that when we are already motivated to act, the idea of an irrelevant act may slip into the planned act-sequence and produce an unintentional act. For instance, if the idea of typing an irrelevant word happens to pop up in our minds when we are typing, we may unintentionally type it. But here it is not the thought of typing the irrelevant word that by itself moves us to type it; we are already motivated to type what is on our mind. And the act of typing that particular word is unintentional because it is not seen as contributing to the typing of the sentence (or whatever) that is our end. It does, however, happen that imagining or having ideas of bodily movements elicits corresponding movements. Often these are just slight or incipient movements, but not always. This may happen in situations in which we are in states such that it would be true that our having these thoughts would tend to actualize our all-in power to produce these bodily movements, and yet it is not true that we are in possession of an intelligent desire to act and act intentionally. Thus, when I am feeling queasy, I might cause myself to vomit by sensuously representing myself vomiting, without it following that I have an intelligent desire to vomit that makes my vomiting intentional. This is because it is not essential for the occurrence of my vomiting that I take it to be vomiting. Related to this is the fact that the representation of myself vomiting is likely to precede the whole of the vomiting. I am unlikely to have in mind a detailed ‘recipe’ for vomiting which is concurrent with the vomiting and which could be modified by sensory feedback from it, with the result that the vomiting is correspondingly modified. (But to the extent that this is so, my vomiting would indeed be intentional.) For these reasons it is not true that I have an intelligent desire which could make my vomiting

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intentional, though it could be true that I have a non-intelligent or instinctive desire to vomit. Thus, I think that it would be misleading to characterize CORCON as a version of the ideo-motor theory in spite of certain similarities. This theory does not comprise the claim that the idea of a bodily movement must be taken to be true of a resulting movement in order for the movement to be intentional. Nor does this theory recognize that most ideas of bodily movements must be linked to motivating states, like pleasure and pain, say, in order to motivate, that is, that the ideo-motor theory must be fitted into a theory of reasons. I have relied on conditional propositions to do the job of expressing reasons which specify states of affairs that motivate or count in favour of actions. This means that CORCON relies on the controversial assumption that a medium of sensuous representations could express propositions, including conditional propositions, on the assumption that creatures without language can act for reasons. I am prepared to accept this assumption, but cannot undertake the far-reaching task of defending it here. It should, however, be emphasized that the representations of bodily movements must be so detailed and specific that they could not possibly be verbally coded. Also, I surmise that something serving the function of the antecedent of requisite conditionals might be expressed by simple means, such as having a sensuous representation of doing something which is incompatible with what you perceive yourself as currently doing; and its consequent might be expressed by an immediately succeeding sensuous representation of an event which has been experienced to have frequently followed the sort of act imagined.

5.2  The Intentionality of Mental Acts Anette Baier has asserted that it does not seem ‘unreasonable to test a philosophy of action by applying its analysis to mental acts’ (1971: 22). I am willing to submit CORCON to this test, with some caveats. To begin with, CORCON implies that the mental occurrences involved in making an act intentional—in particular, thinking that something is the case— cannot be intentional because then they would self-defeatingly need prior mental occurrences in order to occur intentionally. Moreover, the

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idea of monitoring ongoing acts—which is essential with respect to some but not all intentional bodily acts—has to be scrapped: if you try to monitor ongoing mental acts of visualizing, attending, thinking about something, etc., you will inevitably be distracted from them. But this absence is not much of a loss, since mental acts cannot have any longer duration. As James points out with respect to voluntary attention: it cannot be ‘sustained for more than a few seconds at a time. What is called sustained voluntary attention is a repetition of successive efforts which bring back the topic to mind’ (1890: vol. I, 420). This is at least true of people who are not very well practised in the art of meditation. There are other circumstances which reduce the importance of the fact that monitoring of ongoing basic mental acts is impossible. In contradistinction to the body, consciousness does not have parts with which we can simultaneously perform different actions, as we can simultaneously shake our heads, clap hands, and tap feet to the beat of music. Consequently, there is no need for monitoring to coordinate simultaneous mental acts. Additionally, the need for coordination with respect to physical acts is much increased by the fact that bodily parts can be joined to instruments which greatly extend our agential capacities, whereas there is no mental counterpart to such contactual acts. These are circumstances that account for the fact that our repertoire of basic mental acts is much more jejune than that of basic physical acts. Finally, as will be contended in 6.2, there are no causal mechanisms between the contents of consciousness to be monitored, so a further principal difference between mental and physical acts is that the results of mental acts cannot be observed to be effects as the results of physical actions can be. It is only the neural correlates of these episodes that can be causally linked.9 We are, however, not aware of these causal links and, as suggested in 1.1, awareness of causation seems to be a necessary condition for the description of ourselves as agents, or as acting, when intentionality is not involved. Hence, we do not describe ourselves as having acted in cases such as the one discussed in 3.4: when a state of 9  This view was anticipated by James: ‘We ought to talk of the association of objects, not of the association of ideas. And so far as association stands for a cause, it is between processes in the brain’ (1890: vol. I, 554). But, as was seen in 3.3 and 5.1, James differs from me in thinking that conscious occurrences can still be ‘active’.

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desire makes thoughts about its object crop up in the mind, including the thought that we now possess an all-in power to bring this object into existence, which is requisite for an intentional act to this effect. Due to the fact that we are not aware of the causal activity of the state of desire, what it causes does not come across as a—non-intentional—action of ours, but simply as an event that happens to us. I think we speak of mental acts only when we do something intentionally and, thus, that what I in 1.1 rejected for action in general is true of mental action. It seems that we regard intentional connections as making up for the lack of awareness of causal connections. Now, if we do execute intentional mental acts, some of them must be basic, for instance, acts of attending to something in our perceptual field, and recalling or visualizing familiar objects. In the latter case, our being in the state of decisively desiring to have images of these objects, along with the thought that we can do so, causes what we correctly conceive of as having images of these objects. But when we decisively desire to visualize, say, a marten, we cannot be thinking that we have an all-in capacity to visualize this in a way that entails that we already have an image of a marten in mind; we must be thinking something like that we have such a capacity to visualize what is called a ‘marten’, or the sort of animal we saw there and then. That is, we must conceive of a marten in a fashion that could make the occurrence of an image of a marten a contingent result. This is a constraint that restricts the class of mental acts that can be performed intentionally. For instance, although we can intentionally think about whether or not p is the case—i.e. do things that facilitate our having thoughts bearing on the truth of p—we cannot intentionally think that p, since we cannot think that something now occurring is thinking that p without already be thinking that p. With respect to visualizing more unfamiliar objects, we may have to rely on contentual relations that images of them bear to items that we can call up as basic acts. As remarked in 1.2, we can facilitate the unfolding of longer associative sequences by being prepared to interrupt distracting associations, and minimizing the input from our senses by closing our eyes and being silent and still because sensory input stimulates distracting thoughts. In other words, facilitating the appearance of a desired image consists in so to speak clearing the stage for the unfolding

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of an associative chain from some item that is present, or can directly be made present, to the mind to the desired image, by cutting down on competition to this chain. As remarked, the links in the associative chains employed consist in contentual relations; the requisite causal connections run between the neural correlates of the links in the chain. Examples of such contentual relations with respect to images are similarity—if the shape of a cloud is similar to that of a squirrel, it may make you picture a squirrel—cooccurrence or contiguity—if you have often seen Simmias and Kebes together, seeing one of them is probably immediately followed by your picturing the other—and with respect to propositional thoughts, logical relations. By contrast to logical relations, similarity and co-occurrence are not by themselves sufficiently strong relations to ensure any associations. As will be seen in 6.2, it takes such factors as that particular exemplifications of these relations have been frequently or recently utilized in associations to boost the probability that they will be utilized again. This underlines the noted fact that our control over conscious events is more shaky than our control over our bodies often is and, therefore, cannot be extended as widely. It should be stressed that the conditionals that we need to have in mind when trying to imagine something non-basically by means of an associative chain need not defeat their purpose, since we can formulate them without using the sensuous representations that we are trying to call to mind. As already implied, in the event that we have to imagine a marten as a non-basic act, the consequent of our conditional could be something like ‘then a sensuous representation of what is called a “marten” will probably occur to me’ rather than featuring a sensuous representation of a marten itself. Since the operative relations here are contentual relations, the antecedent will be something of the form ‘If sensuous representations of things content-related to what is called a “marten” occur to me’. But fulfilling this antecedent—e.g. by the occurrence of an image of a squirrel—will only make the occurrence of a sensuous representation of what is called a ‘marten’ more or less probable. Before we perform a bodily action, we sometimes imagine performing it. For instance, high jumpers appear to imagine making their jumps before actually making them. Likewise, we sometimes imagine ourselves saying something before actually saying it. Such inner speech could

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replace saying it out loud if the addressee is ourselves, since messages to ourselves obviously need not be spoken out loud for us to receive them. Just as we learn how to perform basic bodily acts intentionally by observing how we execute them reflexively, we learn how to perform mental acts such as visualizing intentionally by observing what makes images crop up in our minds. We learn by experience what sort of contentual relations have to hold between images and other sensuous representations in order to enable us to associate them with one another, for instance that such contentual relations as similarity and co-occurrence will do the trick. Likewise, we learn by experience that closing our eyes and keep quiet and immobile will help get associations under way. All the same, we have far from as much control over the results of mental actions as over the results of bodily actions. This is something that is revealed, for instance, when we try to keep an imagine before our mind for a longer period: we are able to do so only if we are skilled in the art of meditation, while we can easily keep many bodily movements going on for a long time. I suppose that this dissimilarity is a further circumstance that puts us in a position to acquire a richer repertoire of bodily actions. McCann believes that at least some mental acts differ from bodily actions by not encompassing results: ‘no act of thinking ever consists in bringing about a result’ (1998: 86). His view is that acts of thinking have contents, but that these ‘are not separate events’ (1998: 89), as the results of bodily actions are separate from their causes. He attempts to show that acts of thinking cannot consist in bringing about results by appealing to the case of thinking of the number one. But I believe that cases in which you think of, or imagine, something more concrete, such as a squirrel, are more perspicuous. It seems to me quite easy to isolate something that could be a result of an act of imagining, or calling to mind an image of a squirrel, namely the event of an image of a squirrel cropping up in the mind. According to the account given above, the occurrence of this image could be an event separate from the intention to have it occur, just as in the case of an intentional act of moving a finger the occurrence of the finger movement is an event separate from the intention to cause it. Having an image of a squirrel turning up in our minds is something which could happen to us non-voluntarily—indeed, even involuntarily—due either

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to associations from contentually related items already present, or to purely neural events unknown to us. By contrast, McCann suggests that what is ‘fully actional’ here is something that occurs after the image has come to mind, namely ‘attending to or dwelling on’ it (1998: 86). It strikes me as plain as anything, however, that the act of attending to or dwelling on an image already in the mind is something quite different from the act of calling it to mind, or conjuring it up. McCann’s suggestion is reminiscent of James’s view: The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most ‘voluntary’, is to ATTEND to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind. The so-doing is the fiat.  (1890: vol. II, 561)10

For James, ‘volition is a psychic or moral fact pure and simple, and is absolutely completed when the stable state of the idea is there’ (1890: vol. II, 560). However, as implied by James’s ideo-motor theory alluded to in 5.1, he differs from McCann in holding volitions or acts of will not to be necessary for intentional action; they are only necessary when it is ‘difficult’ for us to make up our mind to act. The conclusion that mental acts have results, just like bodily actions, is disastrous for McCann’s project to analyse actions with results by reference to volitions. According to him, ‘volition is itself to be considered action’ (1998: 91). But it is a ‘thought and hence not possessed of a result’ (1998: 87). Instead, it has ‘the content that exertion intended to produce the appropriate result occur’ (1998: 91). If this were right, volitions could without circularity figure in an analysis—not of ‘action in general’ (1998: 91), since they are actions—but of actions with results, as causes of these results. As McCann concedes (1998: 110), this analysis would be an example of an analysis of intentional action which is not reductionist (in my sense) because it would leave us with a residue of unanalysed agency in the shape of ‘the intentional act of willing’ (1998: 108). However, McCann’s project of analysing actions with results collapses into circularity if volitions are indeed actions, and I am right that as such they have results. On the other hand, if it is held that they have 10  Another, subsidiary, type of volition, according to James (1890: vol. II, 568), is the consent mentioned in 3.3.

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contents instead of results, it is unclear in what sense they could be actions. In general, mental events with contents, like thinking that something is the case, are not actions. Like McCann, Carl Ginet takes a volition to be a mental act that is ‘simple’ in the sense that it is an act ‘without internal causal structure’ and thus ‘is an exception to the claim that acting consists in causing something’ (1990: 11; cf. 30). Instead, it has a certain kind of content which, according to Ginet, is concerned with the ‘exertion of directed force at the moment’ (1990: 33). While lacking internal causal structure, volitions are ‘the means by which I cause my body’s exertion when I voluntarily exert it’ (1990: 30). Ginet criticizes James for regarding the content of volitions to make bodily movements as being ‘constituted by kinesthetic images, derived from previous kinesthetic perceptions, of the movements willed’ (1990: 37, Ginet’s italics). He claims: There is no need to think of volition as containing any representation of its content . . . in order to explain how volition can have the intrinsic content it does. This can be explained instead in terms of a dispositional feature of volitions . . . Willing exertion of sort W entails being disposed to regard perception of that sort of exertion as perception of what one is willing . . . and to regard contrary perception in the contrary way, as perception of something incompatible with what one is trying to do.  (1990: 37–8)

However, a volition—were it to exist—must surely be something over and above such a disposition since, according to Ginet, it is an ‘occurrent mental process’ (1990: 32, my italics) by means of which, say, bodily exertions are caused. For instance, ‘being disposed to be surprised by kinesthetic perception of exertion contrary to sort W’ (1990: 38) is surely not an occurrent mental episode which could be a cause of any exertion perceived. By contrast, a kinaesthetic representation of a (bodily) exertion is an occurrent mental episode which could conceivably cause such an exertion and which could make the agent disposed to be surprised if the exertion caused does not concord with the representation.11 So, Ginet is closer to the mark when he writes: ‘Volitional content is, in a 11  But, as remarked and will be argued in 6.2, my view is that it is strictly speaking the neural correlates of such episodes that stand in causal relations.

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way, anticipation of kinesthetic perception’ (1990: 44), provided that this anticipation is assumed to be occurrent. But anticipations are not actions, as he takes volitions to be. Ginet maintains that whereas, according to James, ‘what one can will at any given time is limited to what one has kinesthetically perceived at some prior time’, on his view it ‘is limited to what one is currently able to perceive kinesthetically’ (1990: 38). But this cannot be right since, as he concedes, we can evidently will to make bodily exertions in spite of the fact that ‘kinesthetic perception fails to function’ (1990: 38), so that we are not (any longer) able to perceive them kinaesthetically. Plausibly, we can will to make these exertions because in the past we were able to perceive them when we made them and could derive kinaesthetic representations from these perceptions. Suppose that, on the basis of these objections, it is admitted that the content of volitions to execute bodily movements must feature kinaesthetic and/or other sensuous representations of these movements. Then Ginet’s account of this content still faces the difficulty that it is selfreferential in the manner criticized in 3.2: it allegedly ‘refers to the volition of which it is the content and says that this volition should cause the body to exert in a certain way’ (1990: 35). This is something that McCann is cautious to avoid (1998: 88). But when this self-referential element is deleted, Ginet is left with the same problem as McCann of understanding what it could mean that the occurrence of the remaining representation is a ‘simple’ mental act without an internal causal structure which includes a result. Ginet characterizes this act as having ‘an actish phenomenal quality’ (1990: 13). In attempting to explain this idea further, he flirts with the notion of agent-causation: when a volition to exert myself occurs in my mind it is ‘as if I directly make it occur, as if I directly determine it’ (1990: 13). He is aware that mental representations could occur ‘unbidden’, but asserts that a ‘mental act does not consist of an event just like the unbidden occurrence plus its having a certain extrinsic relation to the subject’ (1990: 113). But since, like the present author, he thinks that the notion of agentcausation in its ‘literal interpretation is not really coherent’ (1990: 14), this simile cannot be accepted as illuminating. Furthermore, it is hard to believe that, say, an image of a squirrel that occurs unbidden could not

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be qualitatively identical in intrinsic respects to an image of a squirrel that is intentionally called to mind, and differ from it merely in extrinsic respects or relations. As in the case of McCann, the actional character of volitions remains a mystery. It is, however, understandable if Ginet and McCann feel that intentional mental acts do not have the same causal structure as intentional bodily acts. For as I have proposed, there are no causal relations between mental events for us to introspect as we can perceive causal relations between our bodies and external things. Nonetheless, intentional mental acts have results that are separable from decisive desires to have them occur. Thomas Pink joins McCann and Ginet in proposing a model of action which appeals to mental actions of a special sort. According to Pink’s ‘practical reason-based model’, a decision is ‘a goal-directed action’ in virtue of being ‘an exercise of rationality with a goal, namely ensuring the doing of the decision’s object, what has been decided’ (2016: 200). By contrast, desires ‘are not formed as means to attaining what is desired’, so ‘they are not goal-directed events’ (2016: 199) as actions are. But I do not see why exercising reason in order to form a desire to do something as a means to a desired end cannot be regarded as doing something as a means to the act of applying these means if deciding to act is regarded as doing something as a means to ensure the action decided on. A means desire cannot plausibly be viewed as an ‘idle’ hope or wish, as some of the attitudes that Pink counts as desires can be (2016: 201). But, actually, making a decision is not a means to ensuring a corresponding act in the sense expounded in 4.1. To apply means in this sense is indeed to act intentionally; so employing this terminology to describe decisions is apt to suggest misleadingly that they are intentional actions. Although Pink is anxious to distance his practical reason-based model of action from volition theories (2016: 168–9), it boils down to something quite similar. He writes, for instance: ‘In causing the outcomes required for A to be done, the action of deciding to do A now could also be the doing of A, or at least its initial stage’ (2016: 227). This is in line with volitionist accounts of intentional actions with results that we have already come across—accounts which portray volitions as the causes of these results. These accounts could view volitions as the ‘initial stage’ of actions with results—if they do not go to the extreme of identifying the actions with volitions (that some do, as will be seen in 5.3). Notice that

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the intentionality of these actions with results can be (partly) understood in terms of these results corresponding to the objects of the causing volitions (or decisions). This natural way of making sense of the intentionality of action is not applicable to the alleged intentionality of decisions, and this difficulty of making sense of their intentionality suggests that they are not actions.

5.3  The Intentionality of Non-Basic Actions Let us now turn to the intentionality of non-basic physical actions, which of course are executed by means of basic bodily actions. Nonbasic actions are consequential actions, so once agents have performed the basic contactual actions by means of which they perform them, they are no longer ‘in touch’ with their actions and may be unable to control and correct them if they go awry. What we are now looking for are conditions that ensure that the sequence of events from the completion of the basic action to the completion of the non-basic physical action unfolds in a way that makes the non-basic action intentional if the basic action by which it is executed is. In the terminology of Myles Brand (1984: 17–18), we are dealing with the problem of ‘consequential waywardness’ as opposed to the problem of ‘antecedential waywardness’ that CORCON is designed to address. Its solution should be such that an intentional non-basic physical action could be completed well after the agent has stopped being engaged in the basic action that generated it. As explained in 1.1, I am proceeding on the assumption that a nonbasic action such as killing Vic is a causal process which includes the fact that Vic dies. This approach is opposed to approaches that identify such an action with a basic action which causes this fact. On one version of this approach, these basic actions are always bodily actions. For instance, Davidson asserts: ‘We never do more than move our bodies’ (1971: 23). On another version, conceived by H.  A.  Prichard (1949), actions are identical to willings. This version has been resurrected by Bruce Aune (1977: ch. 1), Lawrence Davis (1979: 41), and Jennifer Hornsby (1980: chs 1 and 2), who substitutes tryings (or attemptings) for willings/volitions (1980: ch. 3). In 5.2 I criticized McCann’s and Ginet’s attempts to construe volitions (willings or acts of will) as some kind of act(ion)s. But in connection

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with Aune’s view (1977: 2.4) that volitions are acts of thinking whose contents are best expressed by ‘I will do . . . here and now’, it is pertinent to rehearse the difficulties that surround the putative content of volitions reviewed in 3.3. This sort of construction expresses an attitude that is directed at causing to be a fact what fills the blank. It is the attitude itself that moves us to action whether or not it is expressed in thought or speech. We have this sort of attitude because, in virtue of certain features of our brains, we are attracted, or repelled, by some states of affairs that we think it is possible that we can cause to be facts. There is no need for any thoughts with a practical or executive content to propel us to action; nor is it comprehensible how they could accomplish this. As remarked, Hornsby identifies actions with tryings to act, which are portrayed as the causes of bodily movements and their effects (1980: ch. 3). Likewise, O’Shaughnessy’s ‘dual aspect’ theory (2008: pt. III) identifies tryings (strivings, attemptings, etc.) with actions, but differs by portraying these actions as ‘encompassing’ (2008: 438) bodily movements and other results rather than causing them. His view is that, in virtue of this encompassing, tryings are ‘on occasion of success the same event as the act itself ’ (2008: 511). This is in line with my view, according to which trying to perform an action, such as causing your finger to move, cannot be a cause of your finger movement, since this trying is the event of causing something because you think that it (possibly) is a finger movement, and this something is the finger movement if the attempt is successful. If so, this event encompasses the finger movement. On my view, there is not anything mysterious about the ‘dual aspect’ character of trying: a successful trying to move a finger comprises both a physical component of a finger movement and a mental component of thinking it is such a movement.12 On this view, it is easy to explain ‘the privileged knowledge’ that we have of what we are trying to do: we have unique, privileged access to what we think that we shall be doing. This knowledge does not extend to what we intentionally do, since we could fail to know whether our attempt is successful. It is a mistake to think that trying must ‘consist 12  I believe that O’Shaughnessy would reject such a view, according to which the psychological and the physical are separable components of trying. For him, trying is a ‘strangely simple psychological phenomenon’ (2008: 520), ‘a primitive constituent of animal consciousness’ (2008: 604), which is ‘essentially active’ (2008: 382). Thus, his dual aspect theory qualifies as a non-reductionist account of action in my sense.

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in action that is fully intentional on the part of the agent’ (McCann, 1998: 105). It rather consists in what makes it true that an action is intentional if the attempt is successful, namely the fact that you cause something because of your preconception of what it will be. If the attempt is successful, if what you cause is in fact a finger movement, your trying to move your finger is your action of moving the finger and, so, cannot be a cause of the movement of your finger if, as I have proposed, an action is a process that encompasses its result.13 In 1.1 it was observed that it will have curious corollaries if the last claim is denied, as it must be if non-basic actions are identified with the basic actions that are causes of their results. One curious corollary is that an action such as killing Vic could be a cause of her death because the basic action with which it is identified is a cause of this event. Another curious corollary is that the killing of Vic can be completed before Vic dies. Admittedly, there are also facts about our action vocabulary that support this restrictive view, in particular, the fact that we do not report ourselves as being in the process of killing after we have completed the contactual actions by which the killing is performed, but these actions have not yet killed. Then we would rather disambiguate what is going on by saying more precisely that, though we have performed the actions that will kill or cause death, they have not yet killed or caused death, so we have not yet killed. But when we have performed these actions and they have taken effect, we readily attribute to ourselves killings, and other non-basic, consequential actions, in a sense that incorporates their results, just like in the case of basic actions. We never hold ourselves to have killed when our contactual actions have not yet caused death. What we are looking for is an account that could make non-basic actions come out as intentional, even though they may be consequential actions of such duration that their agents may be otherwise engaged, or even dead, when they reach their completion. Without appealing to states in which agents are only so long as they have their minds set on

13  McCann objects to this kind of account that it licenses inferences from ‘it is not certain whether your attempt will succeed’ to ‘it is not certain what your attempt will consist in’, but ‘no such inferences are ever drawn’ (1998: 66). Granted, such inferences are unusual, but I see no reason to doubt their validity. It is also noteworthy that it follows from the fact that trying to do an action can be identical to doing it that, pace McCann (1998: 73), trying to do an action is not a means of doing it.

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the actions in question, such an account must exclude what Davidson has called ‘quaint external causal chains’ (1973: 153). His mountaineering anecdote can be adapted to illustrate such a chain. Suppose that the climber lets go of the rope intentionally, intending to rid himself of his companion by this means because his companion is believed to be clinging to the rope. What is hanging in the rope, however, is in fact a piece of packing, which falls on the companion who is standing on a ledge below, causing him to lose his balance and fall. Thus, by letting go of the rope the climber succeeds in realizing his intention to rid himself of his companion by making him fall. Yet, it does not seem right to say that he intentionally made his companion fall because the fall did not occur as planned but as an unforeseen coincidence. At the very least, this is not a paradigmatic intentional action. So what is missing? The remedy that Goldman proposes, putting it somewhat crudely, is that a non-basic action is intentional only if it is ‘performed in the way conceived in the action-plan’ (1970: 57). But this could be too demanding (cf. Thomson,  1977: 257), for imagine a poisoner who thinks that if he administers a certain drug to his victims, it will cause their blood to coagulate and thereby cause their death. Imagine further that the drug does cause their death, but by blocking transmissions in their neuromuscular synapses, thus making them suffocate. Intuitively, it seems that this poisoner has intentionally killed his victims by poisoning them, albeit the poisoning did not occur in the way that he anticipated. In other words, if an agent’s action plan is quite detailed, it is too strict to demand that the actual course of events must exactly correspond to it. On the other hand, it looks as though an action plan can be so unspecific that it is not sufficient to require that events actually unfold in concord with it. Suppose that an absurdly self-confident golfer is convinced that if she swings her club in a certain way, she will hole in one and that, through a stroke of extremely good luck, she does in fact hole in one, by swinging her club in the intended way. Then, although she has holed in one in the manner conceived in her very sketchy action plan, she has surely not holed in one intentionally. There is, however, a passage in between these reefs of over- and under-specification, a passage which was used in the treatment of the intentionality of bodily basic action in 5.1. The poisoner could have a

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true, justified belief that if a human being swallows a certain amount of a drug, this will cause her death, without having any more precise information about how this drug causes death. For instance, he might know of countless cases in which the swallowing of this drug has been followed by death. This may be enough for him to have a true, justified belief that if he makes his victims swallow a certain dose of the drug, this will cause their death. It does not matter whether he entertains a mistaken hypothesis about the mechanism by which the drug brings about death. His having a true, justified belief about the lethal effectiveness of the drug suffices to make his killing of his victims intentional. Now his belief that the victims’ swallowing the drug in the present situation will cause their death counts as justified only if the causal mechanism in this situation is roughly of the same type as in the situations that constitute his evidence, whatever that mechanism is.14 This requirement is of course not precise, so there will be borderline cases in which it is indeterminate whether or not an action is intentional. The problem with the golfer’s belief, then, is not that it is not specific enough; it is that it is not justified. If the golfer were aware of many cases in which swinging the club in the fashion that she intends had produced a hole in one at the present hole, and virtually none in which it had failed to do so, her hole in one produced by this kind of swing might be intentional. She does not need to possess any specific information about why this regularity holds in order to rule out that her hole in one was accidental as long as it occurs in roughly the same way as in the cases that constitute her evidence. It is, however, quite unlikely that she is in possession of such evidence. The upshot of this discussion is that you intentionally perform a nonbasic physical action of causing q just in case you intentionally perform a basic bodily action of causing p—as defined by CORCON—and have a true, justified belief that if you cause p, you will cause q. I think, however, that a further condition must be added. As noted in 4.1, from your belief that if you cause p, you will cause q, and your (decisive) desire to cause p, it does not follow that, on pain of being inconsistent, you

14  I think that this suggestion amounts to much the same as Ginet’s requirement that the justification possessed by the agent ‘was not, at the same time, justification for believing a proposition too far from the truth’ (1990: 86).

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must desire to cause q. For when desires are concerned, the direction of derivation is not from the epistemically prior antecedent to the epistemically posterior consequent. Thus, if your desiring to cause q is a necessary condition for causing q intentionally, it must be separately attached to a definition. In my view, it is a necessary condition. We do have a distinction between doing something intentionally and doing it knowingly, consciously, or wittingly, and a plausible ground for the distinction is that a desire is necessary in the former case. Notice, however, that it seems too strong to require that you decisively desire or intend q. One reason for this is that there might be other desired consequences of p, r, which contribute to making your desire for p decisive. Thus, it may be that you have a decisive desire with respect to the conjunction of q and r (and the situation that they normally make probable), but not with respect to any of the conjuncts individually. Another reason for it being too strong to demand that your desire for q be decisive is that the probability that you assign to the conditional that if you cause p, you will cause q might not be high enough for you properly to take up this attitude to q. Suppose that you believe that this conditional is barely more probable than not. I think that this might suffice for it to be true that you cause q intentionally if you succeed in causing it, but not for it to be true that you decisively desire or intend it (even if the first reason is ignored). It might, however, suffice for it to be true that you decisively desire or intend to try to cause q, and this seems to me to suffice for it to be true that you cause q intentionally if the probability you assign to the conditional is in the neighbourhood of 50 per cent or more. It seems like needlessly sticking one’s neck out to maintain that the probability must be the same for decisive desiring/ intending as for intentional action, especially in view of the fact that the object of the desire in the former case could instead be trying to act.15 This problem is circumvented by citing a desire pure and simple in

15  Cf. Mele (1992: 132–5). As mentioned in 3.3, McCann doubts that there is a distinction between intending to A and intending to try to A. So, it is not surprising that he affirms that ‘it is self-contradictory to say anything of the form “He is trying to do A, but he is not acting with the intention of A-ing”’ (1998: 101). Since, as just remarked, he also believes that trying to do A is necessary for doing A intentionally (1998: 95–8), he is committed to holding that the latter involves having the intention to do A (1998: ch. 10).

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condition (3) below, for this attitude does not require more than that you think it possible to bring about q by means of p. Thus, we land in this definition: you intentionally perform a non-basic physical action of bringing about q just in case (1) there is a basic action of causing p that you intentionally perform (in the sense explicated by CORCON), (2) you think, truly and justifiably, that if you cause p, you will probably cause q, (3) you desire to cause q, and (4) you cause q by causing p. The condition (2) is quite vague because it is vague both what counts as adequate justification and what degree of probability is enough. I add (4) because I am not sure that it is implied by (1) and (2); they may be compatible with another cause of q preempting your causing p. My overarching aim in this book is to clarify what it means to act for a reason in such a way that you intentionally do the—possibly basic— action that you have a reason for doing, as well as intentionally realize the end for which you are doing this action, as specified by the reason. This necessitates the inclusion of (3), since a reference to a desire directed at the consequent of a conditional which formulates a reason is involved in the characterization of it as a reason for action. It should, however, be observed that (2) and (3) need only be true at the time at which you are performing the action of causing p if it is contactual. The reason for this is that, as noted, a non-basic action, being a consequential action, may take a long time to unravel, so long that you could change your mind about the action, and even die, before it is completed. It might, however, be doubted that the distinction that I have drawn between acting intentionally, on the one hand, and acting knowingly, consciously, or wittingly, on the other hand, is consistently adhered to in everyday discourse. Joshua Knobe (2008) has called attention to the fact that we are more inclined to say that agents intentionally bring about merely foreseen and not also intended (or desired) consequences when these consequences are harmful rather than beneficial. I think that the explanation of this fact might be that we regard a distinction between what is done intentionally and what is done knowingly as less worth insisting on when the effects are harmful than when they are beneficial. This is because it makes no difference to whether or not agents are blameworthy—though it does make a difference to the degree of their blameworthiness—while it could make a difference to whether or not they are praiseworthy: they could be praiseworthy only if the effects are

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intentionally brought about in a sense that requires intention or desire. But the fact that we do not bother to draw attention to a distinction does not mean that it is not there. The fact that we do not need to intend or desire to harm others—by causing them suffering or excluding them from benefits—but may be just indifferent about the harm done is then a respect in which being blameworthy differs from being praiseworthy. Now it is noteworthy that there is a difference as regards our desire to benefit individuals and harm them: we sometimes desire to benefit individuals—ourselves and others— for its own sake, but I am inclined to believe that we never desire to harm others—or ourselves, even if we are masochists—for its own sake, though this is an empirical claim whose truth is admittedly hard to establish. When we desire to harm others, say, by causing them pain, it seems that there is always something that we see as justifying this, e.g. that their suffering this pain is deserved, or will serve some selfish end, such as enriching ourselves or simply enjoying having someone else in our power. This justification might be quite absurd or immoral, but we always appear to have something that we regard as justification in mind. It seems that wanting that others, or ourselves in the future, undergo something to which they are averse is so perverse that it calls out for some justification. By contrast, we do desire to benefit some other individuals along with ourselves for its own sake. This does not demand any justification, though it could be partly justified as being just or an effective means to some end. Benevolence is a desire to benefit others for its own sake, whereas malevolence is scarcely ever a desire to harm others for its own sake, though it could conceivably be so; it is rather desiring to harm others for some reason, which may be exceedingly bad. But malevolence may still be so strong that we are prepared to harm ourselves in order to be able to harm others.

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6 Refraining Its Nature and Normative Role

6.1  Letting Be by Refraining from Action In the present section, I shall explicate the idea of letting something happen or be the case, or allowing it to happen or be the case, by refraining from acting. This is of interest not least because refraining from an action apparently implies a dual power both to do and not to do the action. Thus, it puts an idea which has been thought central for responsibility on the table. Discussing refraining will also promote a better grasp of the role of causation in cases of acting intentionally and knowingly and letting be the case, as will be explored in 6.2. Traditionally, philosophers have talked more about omissions to act than about refraining from acting, and I have in other work followed this practice when the discussion has been conducted in the framework of the act-omission doctrine (see Persson, 2013: chs 3 and 4). But since refraining from acting is something that we necessarily do intentionally, or rather knowingly, it is a phenomenon of greater relevance to present concerns. By contrast, omissions can occur negligently and inadvertently, though they can also occur intentionally or knowingly. What is central to omissions is rather that what we omit doing is something that could reasonably be expected of us. Michael Zimmerman (2011) discusses a case in which you intend to leave your young daughter in your car only for a couple of minutes in order to do some shopping, but in the shop you get caught up in a fight with your neighbour, the police are called, etc. Hours have passed before ‘it occurred to you that your daughter was still locked inside your car’ (2011: 108), and then she has already died of hyperthermia. He claims that ‘it’s clear that, at the time at which you acted, you didn’t know that you were in the process of killing her and so, of course, didn’t know

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that you were doing wrong in doing so’ (2011: 110). But you certainly did know that your daughter was locked inside your car; otherwise this could not eventually ‘occur’ to you, as he puts it. You could also be assumed to know that if you leave a small child in a hot car for a longer period of time, there is a great risk that she will die of hyperthermia, and you knew that by lingering in the shop, you were doing precisely that. The truth is rather that these facts did not occur to you at the time of action, that these pieces of knowledge did not then manifest themselves in occurrent thought because your mind was preoccupied by other matters. But it could be expected of a caring parent—a role that you have knowingly taken on—that they would occur to you before it was too late, for the well-being of their children is at the forefront of the minds of caring parents. This is why you are responsible for your daughter’s death by your omission to return in time to your car. It is not necessary that it occurred to you that she was dying of hyperthermia while this was happening. Nor that sometime in advance it occurred to you that this would fail to occur to you unless you took steps that you decided not to take. It need not have occurred to you at any point prior to your action that you would be doing something that was morally wrong. Zimmerman thinks, however, that in order for you to be culpable for your daughter’s death, ‘your culpability for it must stem from your culpability for something else, something for which you are directly culpable in part because it was something over which you had direct control’ (2011: 111). But, as was observed in 1.2 and 5.2, we do not possess as much direct control over mental occurrences as bodily movements. True, in some simple cases our mental control might be approximately as good as bodily control, e.g. in the case of calling images of familiar objects to mind. But even here the deficiency of our control is revealed if we try to keep the image before our mind for a longer period: this is something that we are able to do only if we are well versed in meditation. Now the making of decisions about what to do is something over which our control is less than visualizing, for here we have to rely on what reasons happen to occur to us, and this is something over which our control is incomplete. Consequently, even when we act intentionally, the formation of the intentions on the basis of which we act is far from fully under our direct control, let alone their occurrence to us at the time of action in situations in which we form intentions for the future. For such

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reasons, I would be disinclined to appeal to the notion of direct control in an account of our responsibility. As mentioned at the end of 2.2, however, a fuller treatment of responsibility is beyond the scope of this book. Nonetheless, building on what is said in that section, I shall in 6.4 outline a compatibilist sense of responsibility in which we can plausibly be said to be responsible. It is important that there be such a sense, since otherwise we could hardly be said to be acting for reasons. In 6.3 I shall bring together some of implications of the preceding discussion for the notions of freedom and self-determination, though these are also matters at the periphery of the objectives of this book. Some claim that we can let something happen not only by refraining from acting, but also by acting. They claim, for instance, that if I remove life support which is mine so that I have a right to remove it, with the result that you die from a cause which this life support held in check, I have let you die. I agree that in this situation it can indeed be true that I let you die, but if is so, I do not merely let you die. The truth would instead be that I remove the life support and then let you die—given the fulfilment of conditions such that I am aware of having an all-in power to replace the life support so that it resumes its earlier function (these conditions of letting happen will be set out below). But I do not merely let you die if I do not replace the life support: I perform an action as well, an action of removing life support which enables a cause of death to produce its effect. However, I have elsewhere (Persson, 2013: 3.2) argued at length against the view that these are cases of merely letting happen, so I take myself to be excused from doing so now. It is not important in the present context, but I do believe that all cases of merely letting happen are cases of letting happen by refraining from acting. An analysis of refraining is of interest in itself, but it will also throw further light on the account of intentional action presented in Chapter 5 because, as remarked, refraining from acting is something that we necessarily do intentionally or knowingly. It will be illuminating by leading up to a more precise statement of the role of causation in this account for, as will be argued in 6.2, an explanation of the occurrence of an event in terms of somebody’s letting it occur by refraining from action is a clear example of an explanation that is not causal.

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When you let something be the case by refraining, what you refrain from is performing some action that would have prevented it from being the case. What you let be the case by refraining from acting may be just the absence of the result of this action. For instance, if what you refrain from is moving your hand, what you let be the case may be just that your hand remains motionless, which will be the case if it is not moved by anything else at the time. This qualification implies that you could refrain from moving your hand without it being true that you let it be the case that your hand remains still; it need only be true that you do not cause it to move. However, to refrain from doing an action is not simply not to do it (contrast Haji’s use, to be discussed in 6.4). It could happen, for example, that you do not do an action because you cannot do it: you try to do it, but fail. Evidently, this is not refraining from doing the act. An act that you refrain from doing must be an act that you can do in the all-in sense introduced in 2.2, though you can refrain from trying to do an action that you cannot do. It goes without saying that what you refrain from doing must also be an act that you can make it true that you do not do. Randolph Clarke considers an experiment in which a doctor has severed the nerves connecting the motor centers of my brain to the muscles in my right arm. Should I attempt to raise the arm, the doctor would quickly reconnect the nerves, and I’d succeed. (2014: 93)

The hypothetical analysis offered of the all-in ‘can’ in 2.2 implies that in this case I can raise my arm. It might be doubtful whether it is in accordance with an everyday understanding of abilities—which is an ingredient of the all-in ‘can’—to say, without qualification, that I am able to raise my arm in the present case. As indicated there, this understanding seems to entail that claims about my abilities must be true in virtue of the internal state of my organism, without any reliance on assistance from external factors, like the deft doctor. On the other hand, we might not be comfortable with saying that the doctor provides me with an opportunity to raise my arm. But, as I conceded, there might be factors that straddle the distinction between ability and opportunity. This unclarity is no problem for an employment of an all-in ‘can’ because it covers both, along with

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factors that fall squarely on either the ability or the opportunity side. In this sense, it is true in Clarke’s case that I can raise my arm (with the help of the doctor); so, it could be true that I refrain from raising my arm, albeit the truth of this claim presupposes that I can raise it. Suppose instead that the efferent pathways linking the motor centres of my brain to the muscles in my right arm are intact but that, unbeknownst to me, the doctor would cut them were I to decide to raise my arm. Then, if, after deliberation, I do not make this decision for some reason, I cannot be said to have refrained from raising my arm because this is not anything that I can do, at least not intentionally, though it could still be true that I have refrained from deciding and trying to raise it. Consider a third scenario in which, unbeknownst to me, there is a device in my brain that prevents me from deciding to raise my arm, or trying to do so, but my efferent pathways are invariably intact. Because this device is unknown to me, I can deliberate, find the reasons for raising my arm insufficient, and, as a consequence, not make a decision to raise it since, as argued in 2.2, this requires only that I take it to be epistemically possible for me to make this decision, not that this is possible in view of all the facts. My hypothetical analysis of the all-in ‘can’ implies that I cannot intentionally raise my arm in this scenario, since I cannot intend to raise it, or try to raise it, though I erroneously think that I can do so. Like the scenario in the paragraph before, the third scenario does not rule out that I can raise my arm non-intentionally, say, as the result of a spasm. But I believe that refraining from an action implies not simply that we can do the action in a wide sense, but that we can do it intentionally (or at least that the action can result from an intention even if it be in a deviant fashion). For this reason, it seems to me that in neither of the two last scenarios can it be true that I refrained from raising my arm (pace Clarke,  2014: 93–4), but in the third scenario it cannot be true even that I refrained from deciding and intending to raise my arm, since this is not anything that I can do due to the device in my brain. On the other hand, notice that refraining from an action implies not merely that we can avoid doing the action intentionally, but that we can avoid doing it altogether, say, even as the outcome of a spasm. As long as we are unaware of the presence of spasm that will make us act in a broad sense, it is possible for us to decide to perform the action in question. The occurrence of this action will then be overdetermined, but that

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would not exclude its being intentional, since a decision to perform it is one of the conditions determining it. In these circumstances, however, we clearly cannot refrain from raising the arm; the involuntary armraising that would occur if we do not decide to raise it is incompatible with this. Another necessary condition for refraining from doing an action is that you both believe that you can do it and believe that you can avoid doing it, that you do not have to do it.1 As implied, this belief must be true—if you believe falsely that you can execute an action, you can only believe falsely that you refrain from doing it when you do not do the action because you do not make a decision to this effect for some reason. Suppose that you believe truly that you have an all-in dual power with respect to causing p and that if you cause p, you will cause q not to be the case, that is, you will cause something that is incompatible with q being the case. Then, in order to obtain a sufficient condition for your refraining from causing p, and thereby perhaps letting q be the case, should we add a condition parallel to a condition concerning intentional action, namely that you do not cause p because you form a decisive desire not to cause p?2 No, because a desire is always a desire to cause something (see 3.2); so, a desire not to cause p is a desire to cause that p is not caused by you, that is, a desire to prevent by some action of yours that p is caused by you to be a fact. Thus, if I am feeling that the chair that I am sitting in is beginning to crack, I might form a desire to get up to prevent the weight of my body from causing it to crack. If this desire prods me to get up from the chair, I do not let the chair remain unbroken by refraining from acting. Rather, I actively prevent it from breaking by removing a condition having to do with me that would cause this to happen. I cause myself not to cause the chair to break. 1 In this respect, refraining from doing something differs from avoiding doing it. For instance, you can avoid bumping into an obstacle by taking a step aside, though you were unaware of this obstacle. Also, it may be that you could not have noticed the obstacle until it was too late for you to avoid it intentionally. In this situation, it may then be that you could neither have bumped into the obstacle intentionally nor avoided it intentionally. Thus, it could not be true that you have refrained from bumping into it, but you could avoid it, and did. However, avoiding bumping into something implies that you can bump into it, at least unintentionally: you could not be said to avoid bumping into an object on the other side of the earth that you could not have bumped into, though according to my use of the stilted phrase ‘making it true or the case that you do not bump into something’, you could have made this true or the case. 2  As I have done earlier (Persson, 2013: 3.2), or rather I spoke of a decision not to act.

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By contrast, I would let something happen—namely, the weight of my body breaking the chair—were I to refrain from getting up and let this weight remain in the chair. I am refraining from getting up if I do not form a decisive desire to get up in light of finding my apparent reasons for getting up insufficient. Of course, the negative fact that I do not form this decisive desire is not by itself enough, since this might be a fact because I lose consciousness, and then I do not refrain from getting up. Nor do I then let myself, or the weight of my body, break the chair, although this does indeed happen. Refraining from acting, then, should not be identified with preventing yourself from acting (cf. Clarke,  2014: 14). Preventing yourself from, for instance, moving your hand, implies that there is something in the process of making you move it, like a spasm that you interfere with, or counteract. Thus, it takes a decisive desire to cause yourself not to move your hand by causing something that blocks this process. This is refraining from moving your hand by acting; so, it is not a case of letting your hand be unmoved by you, or letting it remain immobile. Imagine instead that you refrain from moving your hand, which is at rest on a horizontal plane. Then there is no need to form a positive desire (to cause) that it does not move; for it to remain unmoved by you, it is enough if you do not form a decisive desire to move it, and then it will also remain at rest, provided that nothing else than you moves it. This is a case of letting your hand remain unmoved by you and motionless by refraining from moving it. Such cases of simply letting something be the case by refraining from acting is the present topic, not the cases of actively refraining from acting which imply that you cause something. Confusingly, there are also cases of simply letting something happen by refraining from acting in which we speak of ourselves making things happen. For instance, by simply standing immobile in some ridiculous posture, I may make you laugh, or make you shoot and score a goal if I  am goalie whom you perceive as inattentive (cf. Clarke,  2014: 185). I believe that these are cases of me passively enabling you to act and react in certain ways, to score a goal by spotting an opportunity to do so, or to laugh by noticing something funny. By simply letting something be the case, I can passively enable something to happen—or ‘make’ its happening probable or possible—not only in the sense of not interfering with an ongoing process, but also in the sense of not disrupting a state which is conducive to initiating a process. So, the proper contrast to

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simply letting something be the case by refraining from acting is making something be the case by acting or being active. As indicated, in order to exhibit this sort of refraining, it must be that your not forming a decisive desire to act has a certain kind of explanation, namely that you find or judge that there is not sufficient reason to form this desire. Strictly speaking, this is however somewhat too strong, for suppose that—finding no sufficient reason to form some decisive desire— you continue deliberating in full awareness of the fact that the time at which you have the all-in power to execute the relevant action slips by (cf. Clarke, 2014: 70). Then it might seem that you have refrained from executing this action, though you have not judged or concluded that there is not sufficient reason to form a decisive desire to execute it. Consequently, I think it advisable to understand the clause about your finding or judging that there are not sufficient reasons so broadly that it covers this situation. These considerations lead up to a definition like the following: You let it be the case that q by refraining from causing p if and only if:

(a) you correctly believe that if you cause p, q will not be the case, (b) you correctly believe that you have an all-in dual power concerning causing p (and, thereby, whether q will be the case), (c) you do not decisively desire to cause p because you do not find sufficient reasons for forming such a desire, and (d) q becomes the case because you do not cause p due to (c). This definition is meant to characterize the more usual case when you refrain from causing something, p, realizing that you will thereby let something else, q, be the case. But on the basis of it, it should be easy to understand the simpler case of only letting not-p (your hand not moving) be the case by refraining from causing it to be a fact that p (your hand moving), or refraining from causing p when something else steps in and causes it (you refrain from moving your hand, but I move it). Some further comments on this definition. (1) The ‘because’ in ‘you do not cause p because you do not decisively desire to cause p’ is not causal. The fact that you do not decisively desire to cause p, being a negative fact to the effect that something does not begin to exist, cannot be a cause of anything. Nor does the negative fact that your action of causing p does not occur require a cause. Likewise, the non-occurrence of your action cannot be a cause of q’s being the case.

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(2) The fact that you do not decisively desire to cause p explains that you do not cause p intentionally by ruling out your decisively desiring to cause p which in the circumstances would have caused p. Since, as remarked, your refraining from causing p implies that you could have avoided causing it non-intentionally as well as intentionally, had you so desired, your not decisively desiring to cause p also implies that you did not cause p. And your not causing p explains q’s being the case by ruling out your causing p which would have prevented q’s being the case, given the absence of other obstacles to q. (3) When you let q be the case by refraining from causing p, you knowingly let not-p and q be the case rather than intentionally let them be the case because you do not intend that not-p and q be the case. You simply anticipate that this will be the outcome of your not forming an intention to this effect. (4) To say that you knowingly let q be the case by refraining from causing p is not to make a claim about what causes not-p and q’s being the case; it is to say that what occurred is in accordance with what you anticipated to be the case when you did not form a decisive desire to cause p. But although the absence of your decisive desire to cause p is not a causally necessary condition, it is logically necessary for it to be true that you refrained from causing p and let q be the case. To illustrate these claims, reconsider a simple example from above: you refrain from moving your hand, letting it remain where it is, resting on a horizontal plane. This involves—see (c) and (d)—that you do not decisively desire to move your hand in light of finding no sufficient reasons for such a desire and that, consequently, you do not move it. The outcome of your not moving your hand is the same as it could have been had you formed no decisive desire to move it because you lost consciousness or were distracted, but then you could not have been characterized as refraining from moving your hand and letting it remain where it is. When you refrain from moving your hand, you must be in a state in which you are alive to the reasons there are for or against moving your hand. As (b) implies, you must also be capable of moving your hand should sufficient reasons to do so crop up. Imagine that you have had a micro-chip implanted in your brain which prevents you from acting on any decisive desire that you form on this occasion, except the decisive desire to move your hand (see Clarke, 2014: 75–6). These circumstances are compatible with your refraining from

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moving your hand (pace Clarke), for it can be true in the pertinent non-causal sense that you did not move your hand because you formed no decisive desire to move it. This sense is that the fact that you did not move it is incompatible with your forming a decisive desire to move it which would have manifested itself in your moving it. The fact that you cannot act on any other decisive desire that you might then form is irrelevant. As remarked, when you refrain from acting, this must be something that you do knowingly or intentionally. The term ‘knowingly’ seems more apt, since there is no positive intention or decisive desire not to cause p and, hence, not-q, when you simply refrain from causing it and, thereby, let q be the case. You just anticipate (correctly) that not-p and, hence, q will be the case as a result of your forming no decisive desire to cause p on the basis of finding no sufficient reasons for forming such a desire. You might be glad or pleased that not-p and/or q will be the case, or indifferent about whether or not they will. By contrast to the situations in which you refrain from acting, when you act, say, move your hand, there is a fact about you which causes the movement of your hand. When your act of moving a hand is intentional, this fact must have to do with your decisive desire to move your hand because of which your act occurs. I suggested in 3.4 that the attribution of such a desire to you refers to an internal state of you—probably of a neural kind—which is not manifested in consciousness, though it requires the presence of your thinking that you can in the all-in sense move your hand, in conjunction with which it causes something because you see it as certain movements of your hand. As will be seen in 6.2, it is, strictly speaking, not your thinking but the neural facts with which it is correlated that causally interact with the internal state. When you move your hand for a reason—such as that it is a means to eliminate an itch—your action is justified in your eyes by your reason. So, you cause something because you see it as certain hand movements and, thus, as justified, and if it is in fact those movements, what you cause is justified in your eyes (and intentional). You could not move your hand for a reason unless there were some facts about you which caused your hand’s moving. But, I hypothesize, these facts are neurophysiological: they consist in activities in certain areas of your brain sending electric impulses down your efferent pathways to your hand, and so on. However, an explanation in terms of your engaging in

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something intentionally or knowingly need not be undergirded by a causal explanation. This is shown by the fact that you can simply let something be the case by refraining from acting. Then the fact that you do not form a decisive desire to execute an act explains why you did not execute it intentionally by ruling out a necessary condition for this, namely your forming a decisive desire to execute it. And, as remarked, refraining from an action is incompatible with the presence of factors, such as a spasm, that are sufficient for the occurrence of the action in a broad sense. As has been seen, the fact that you refrain from causing p implies that you have a dual all-in power both to cause and not to cause p. If we take it that this dual power implies that it is causally possible both that you cause and that you do not cause p, it follows that refraining is not anything that we can do in a deterministic world. Even so, this may be how common sense understands refraining. I have suggested that thinking in terms of desert, which is deeply ingrained in us, involves the untenable idea of ultimate responsibility. If we hold ourselves to be ultimately responsible, it is natural to think that we also hold that it is causally possible for us both to do and not to do something at a time.3 In 2.2, however, I delineated a weaker, conditional interpretation of our all-in power, according to which it is a matter of epistemic possibility whether or not its antecedent is actualized, whether or not we shall decide to cause p and, thus, cause p. We could contemplate what would happen if an epistemic possibility were actualized even if this actualization is not causally possible. I suggested that this interpretation is sufficient for our being responsible in a sense which is adequate for a forward-looking justification of the practice of blaming and punishing. I suggest that the same conditional interpretation of the dual all-in power is written into the concept of refraining, with the caveat that this may well be a revision of the commonsensical understanding of the concept which may be incompatibilist.

6.2  Causal and Contentual Relations The picture just painted implies a property-dualist account of the mind– body relation, according to which mental properties—and thus mental 3  Pink is a spokesman of something along these lines, as will appear in 6.3.

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facts which consist in instantiations of mental properties—are distinct in kind and irreducible to physical properties.4 I believe that this is the natural, intuitively most plausible view that we would be inclined to accept did it not seem to give rise to troubles. The most serious of these putative troubles has to do with what we have been discussing, namely that our mental states apparently influence and explain our physical behaviour. With respect to the causal role of our irreducibly mental states, the alternatives that we face are: either that (1) they are all causally ineffective as regards the physical world, or (2) at least some of them have physical effects. If we opt for alternative (2), we either (2a) contradict the causal closure of the physical world, that is, the principle that if physical events have sufficient causes, they have sufficient physical causes, or (2b) have to countenance an overdetermination of all physical events that have mental causes along with sufficient physical causes.5 If we opt for (1), it seems that we are committed to a counter-intuitive epiphenomenalism, that, contrary to common sense, maintains that our behaviour cannot be explained by reference to our psychological states. In reply, we have seen that there are explanations of our behaviour in terms of our consideration of reasons that are not essentially causal. This is shown by the fact that we can provide such explanations of our simply letting things be the case by refraining from acting. True, reasonexplanations of our actions refer to internal states of us—in the guise of desires—that are causes, but these states are not in themselves mental; they are physical states that are identified in terms of their interaction with mental phenomena like thoughts. My endorsement of (1) enables me to evade an objection that Sehon hurls at ‘the causal theory of action’ (2016: ch. 7). This objection consists of the following three premises (2016: 109–10): (P1)  If the causal theory of action is true, then it is necessarily true that if mental states exist at all, they are causes of behaviour. (P2)  It is necessarily true that if mental states cause behaviour, then they are identifiable with physical states. 4  For a recent defence of property-dualism, see Fumerton (2013). I defended it in (Persson, 1985). 5  See Persson (2013: 5.1) for a fuller discussion of this matter.

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(P3)  It is possible that mental states exist but are not identifiable with physical states. These three premises entail that the causal theory is false. But, as already indicated, I reject (P1). Sehon believes that this premise has to be true because: We have no grip on what it would mean for mental states to exist at all if they have absolutely no role to play in the explanation of behavior. If the causal theory is true, then that explanatory role is causal. (2016: 113)

My reply is that I see no reason to think that mental states could not conceivably exist without having any role to play in the explanation of behaviour, especially not if the behaviour has to be overt. It seems to me incontestable that we have introspective knowledge of their existence (see Fumerton, 2013: esp. ch. 3). Moreover, to the extent that they are explanatory, I contend that they are so in virtue of their contents (cf. Persson, 2013: 5.3). To be sure, as regards the occurrence—as opposed to the non-occurrence—of events, these explanations presuppose physical causation, but this does not imply that the explanations in mental terms are themselves causal, since it is not true that mental states are identifiable with physical states. When Sehon tries to buttress the plausibility of the claim that the explanatory relation has to be causal, he refers to the case of desires (2016: 113). I have contended, however, that what makes desires suited to function as causes is that they are physical states. The description of these physical states as desires qualifies as mental because these states are identified by reference to mental items, thoughts, but these items do not function as causes of behaviour. I shall argue, then, that mental events are explanatory in virtue of their ‘contentual’ relations, relations in which they stand to each other and to behaviour in virtue of their contents. Thus, suppose that you decisively desire to move your hand for the apparent reason that it will cause you pleasure, by eliminating an itch. Then the thought-content that it will have a result that will give you pleasure justifies by your lights your desire to move your hand, that is, your causing something because you think that it is moving your hand. And if what you in fact cause corresponds to the content of your thought about it, it also justifies your actually causing your hand to move, and makes it intentional.

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So, when you move your hand for the reason that it will have a result that will give you pleasure, you do it because it is justified by the content of your thought that it is or will be moving your hand which is pleasure-promoting. The thought-content that actualizing your all-in power of moving your hand will give you pleasure cannot cause your hand to move. If anything mental were to cause this, it would rather be the fact that you are thinking a thought with this content. But there is no reason to believe that episodes of thinking can be causes. When we are aware of ourselves thinking thoughts, we do not experience them as being causally related. This can be seen more clearly in the case of theoretical reasoning, so I  shall argue for this claim in terms of this case. Moreover, as I have already contended, we cannot oppose this claim on the general ground that there being a reason-explanation for some aspect of our behaviour entails that there is a causal explanation for it, since this is not true when we simply refrain from acting and let something be a fact. Certainly, the ascription of a desire refers to a state which is a cause, but this state is not in itself anything that is manifested in consciousness. This is a further reason why the point that reason-explanations are not essentially causal comes out more perspicuously in the case of theoretical reasoning where desires have no role to play. Imagine that you think that q for the apparent reason that if p then q and p. Then you think that q for the reason that it logically follows from the content of your thought that if p then q and p. This explanation refers to the content of your thought with respect to which there can be no causal connections. In this case, these contentual connections are logical or deductive, providing the strongest form of justification. If anything is causally operative, it must rather be your having thoughts with the content that if p then q and p. But when you reason your way to q, or infer it, you need not be conscious of having the thoughts that if p then q and p, that is, you need not think that you have these thoughts. Suppose, however, that you are conscious of having these thoughts and the thought that q; then, I claim, you do not experience your having the former thoughts causing you to have the latter thought. Many might be tempted to object that you do not experience these episodes as being causally related because we never experience or observe causal relations anywhere, as Hume famously claimed (1739–40: book I, part iii). But as explained in 1.1, I reject this claim

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(see also Persson, 2013: 3.2). I think that we experience causal connections when we have proprioceptive sensations of how our bodies move and are moved by exterior things, change the shape of such things, are warmed or chilled by them, and so on. Therefore, I do not think that it can be maintained that we do not experience some of our thoughts causing other thoughts on the ground that we never experience or observe any causal connections; rather, the absence of such causal experiences in the case of thoughts is evidence that there are no causal connections between them. Granted, there are most probably causal connections between the neural correlates of our thoughts, and if there were not, it is hard to see how we could think that q because we have just before thought that if p then q and p. But if facts about our thoughts are distinct in kind from facts about the occurrence of neural processes, we cannot infer that the former are causally related because the latter are. In earlier chapters I have referred to images and other isomorphic sensuous representations which do not have propositional structure. Since they do not have propositional structure, the contentual relations that hold between them cannot be logical or truth-supporting. As already mentioned, they are instead related by resemblance and repeated ­co-occurrences between the things of which they are representations. An endless variety of factors can lie behind such co-occurrences. One particularly important factor is causation between the objects represented, but the connection can be more accidental, such as in the case of individuals who have happened to appear together on a number of occasions. Since countless things or events occur together, or are similar to each other in various ways, there must be factors that make us prone to pick out some specimen rather than others on particular occasions. These factors include: (a) how striking the similarity between observed things or events is; (b) how frequently we have experienced them together, and how frequently we have used instances of co-occurrence or similarity for the purpose of association; (c) how recently they have been used; (d) how emotionally charged the co-occurrent or similar objects are (e.g. if they make us scared, repetition need not be necessary to make them readily available); and (e) how much desired something called to mind is

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(as when a Rorschach inkblot makes us visualize something sexual out of innumerable possible motifs).6 I conclude, then, that a causal epiphenomenalism with respect to our thoughts and other representations does not fly in the face of our experience, since we do not introspectively experience these conscious episodes as standing in causal relations, though contentually mediated associations have to be underpinned by causal connections at the neural level. But an explanatory epiphenomenalism with respect to our conscious episodes would be counter-intuitive, since we do take these episodes to be explanatory factors of other conscious episodes and behaviour. As regards the truth of reason-explanations, for instance, that we think that q for the reason that we think that if p then q and p, this requires that the thoughts that if p then q and p be correlated with some neural states which do cause the neural correlates of the thought that q. Otherwise, we would have explained only that it was justifiable to think that q, not that what it was justifiable to think was actually thought. But it is not necessary that there be causal connections between mental occurrences themselves when there is a reason-explanation for them, since there are no such connections, for example, when we avoid thinking not-q for the reason that if p then q and p. Therefore, it is not counterintuitive to uphold a causal epiphenomenalism with respect to our mental states, though an explanatory epiphenomenalism with respect to them should be rejected. It might be objected that the present claim that in order for our thinking that if p then q and p to explain our thinking that q, the neural correlate of the former thought must cause the neural correlate of the latter thought contradicts a claim advanced in 4.1, namely that it is not a matter of contingent fact that we infer q from if p then q and p, but a condition of the latter thought being ascribable to us that we conduct this inference rather than inferring not-q or nothing. For if this is not a contingent fact, it would seem that the occurrence of the thought that q 6  These are factors that James also lists in his discussion (1890: vol. I, 574–7), but he also mentions ‘congruity in emotional tone between the reproduced idea and our mood’ (576). However, it may be questioned whether it is not similarity that is at work here, for instance, that makes us visualize gloomy scenes when we are gloomy. Co-occurrence may also be at work in this connection, e.g. when hunger makes us think of food.

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cannot be a distinct event from the occurrence of the thought that if p then q and p, as it must be if the neural correlate of the latter is to be a cause of the former. This objection is fair, but it can be answered by a more precise statement of my view. There are two ways of reporting what people say: oratio recta or direct speech, which consists in reporting the very words that they used within quotation marks, and oratio obliqua or indirect speech, which consists in reporting the meaning of what they said. Thus, I can report you either as having said ‘I am fed up with this book’ or as having said that you are fed up with this book. In the former case I should repeat the very words that you used, whereas in the latter case I am reporting that you uttered some (unspecified) sentence whose meaning is that you are fed up with this book. Now when we report people’s thoughts, we normally use oratio obliqua. Presumably, this is because we do not know what sentences or other representations occurred in their minds. But if it is a necessary condition of their having used some sentences with standard meaning that they are prone to employ them in certain inferences, we need to report their thoughts in the oratio recta form in order to express what they intrinsically are. Only by this means do we obtain something that is contingently related to other thoughts, and whose neural correlates can be contingently or causally related to the neural correlates of other thoughts also reported in the oratio recta form. So, strictly speaking, it is the neural correlate of our thinking ‘if p then q and p’ that could be a cause of our thinking ‘q’. If we are described as having thought that if p then q and p, it is implied that we are thinking something that has the standard meaning of ‘if then’, and it is part of this meaning to function in modus ponens inferences. Therefore, it is not a contingent matter of fact that people who have this thought are prone to infer that q, while it is a contingent matter that people who think ‘if p then q and p’ are prone to follow it up with thinking ‘q’, since it is a contingent matter that they understand these sentences to have their standard meaning. It should not be forgotten, though, that all explanations of conscious episodes by reference to their content are not reasons-explanations. Take, for instance, an explanation of why an image occurred to you by reference to its resemblance to an image that immediately preceded it. The earlier image is not your reason for having the later image: you

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cannot reason from it to the succeeding image; nor does having the earlier image justify, or contribute to justifying, in your eyes the having of the later image (cf. Persson, 2013: 133). A reference to resemblance is presumably felt to be explanatory to our minds because it is a pattern of association familiar to almost all of us. The terminology of reasons and justification is out of place here because we are not dealing with propositions. Therefore, the problem discussed in the preceding paragraphs does not arise either. It does arise in another context, I believe, when the justification of our thoughts is not a matter of our having reasons for them. This is the context in which our thoughts are justified by sense experience, for instance, when our thinking that we are feeling pain is justified by our currently feeling pain. Although our feeling pain is normally the reason or explanation of why we are thinking that we are feeling pain, it is not our reason for thinking this: we cannot reason our way from the feeling to the thought (cf. Persson, 2013: 242). But our feeling pain still justifies our thought by making it true. Arguably, it is a necessary condition for our being in possession of the concept of pain that we do not deny that we are feeling pain in the presence of what is indubitably a sensation of pain. We might be thinking ‘I am not feeling pain’ in these circumstances, but then this sentence cannot have its standard meaning; so we are not thinking that we do not feel pain. However that may be, the case of perceptually based thinking is noteworthy, since it warns us not to assume that the concepts of having reasons and being justified are inseparable. The case of perceptually based thinking is also noteworthy because it is involved in the sensory feedback that we regularly receive from our contactual actions. The direction of fit here is that we think something because it is designed to fit a sensory fact. This is the opposite of what it is when we cause p to become a fact because we (correctly) think that it will fit the content of the thought that p. Both of these explanations are contentual in virtue of referring to the content of thought and its fit with facts, but the truth of these explanations presupposes underlying causal explanations in terms of causal links between the neural correlates of the thoughts and afferent and efferent mechanisms, respectively.7 7 The claim that states of consciousness—whether sensory/perceptual or cognitive/­ conceptual—are related in virtue of their contents dovetails with my view that intrinsically they consist in their contents. The description of the existence of these contents as mental is relational, to the effect that theirs is a form of existence which is definitionally dependent on physical

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6.3  The Experience of Self-Determination and Freedom In 2.2. I argued that the possibility presupposed by the antecedents of reason-conditionals is an epistemic possibility, which is due to there being an obstacle in principle to reliable predictions of our own decisions. This obstacle is present even if determinism rules in the realm of mind and action, and it is not causally possible for us to decide and act otherwise than we in fact do. The epistemic possibility of doing so is then a mere appearance, but we can still consider what would happen were it actualized, contra-causally. This is a part of the ordinary experience of self-determination and freedom that we have when we deliberate and decide, but only a part. Another part of it derives from what was discussed in the previous section, namely that we do not experience our thoughts as being causally related, but as related in virtue of their contents. Thus, we never experience ourselves as being causally necessitated or determined to think a particular thought, as we often experience ourselves as being causally necessitated or determined to move our bodies because we are pulled and pushed by stronger external forces. However, we were in the same section reminded that, as emerged in 4.1, there is a difference between theoretical and practical thinking which stems from the opposite directions of fit of beliefs and desires. As a result of the direction of fit of beliefs, we can be constrained to think that something is true in so far as it logically follows from other propositions that we think true, or corresponds to what we perceive. Such content-related constraints are ruled out when we deliberate about what to do. We are never constrained by the contents of our practical reasons to make one decision rather than another because these reasons can never be conclusive. Even if these reasons are real, it is always possible that they be defeated by consideration of further reasons. What causally determines our decisions—the strength of our desires—can tempt us to existence. This dependency rules out that conscious states can be causes. I originally advanced this view of the mind in (Persson, 1985) and summarized it e.g. in (Persson, 2017: 5.2). Then I classified this position as a version of neutral monism, but I now find this classification misleading because it is likely to suggest that what is ontologically basic is neutral between the mental and the physical, which is not my view. My view is that what is ontologically basic is physical existence, whilst the content of perception is neutral in the sense that it can be described in a way that implies neither that it exists nor that it does not exist independently of being perceived.

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see them as being in some special way determined by us or up to us, since the causal power of our desires is a factor of which we are not introspectively aware. That is, we can be tempted to fill the gap in respect of experiential determination with something imaginary. Thus, our decisions to act can more easily be mistaken for being in some intriguing fashion determined by us than our decisions to believe on account of their being experientially unconstrained both causally and contentually, and determined by states that are not manifest in consciousness, whereas decisions to believe can be contentually constrained. This experience of our decisions to act being neither causally nor contentually constrained, then, provides an essential component of an explanation of why we have a powerful impression to the effect that they are up to us or determined by us. It is a debunking explanation of this impression because it does not imply that our decisions are determined by ourselves in any literal sense—nor that there is any such intelligible sense. In reality, our decisions are determined by states that we are in, not by ourselves, in a sense that implies irreducible self-determination or agent-causation. Although this experience of making an unconstrained decision to act occurs most conspicuously when a decision is the culmination of a process of deliberation—whose upshot is in principle unpredictable—it can occur even when there has been little or no space for deliberation, when we make a decision straightaway, and it might appear impossible to us to decide in any other way than we in fact do. Imagine that you find yourself in a situation in which you could easily save yourself from a painful death. You might then find yourself unable to refrain from doing so— the reasons for saving are overpowering—and yet you are liable to have the impression that the decision to make the save is up to you. So, even such an instantaneous decision is experienced as causally and contentually unconstrained, which I have proposed leaves room for an erroneous attribution of it to yourself. Contrast, for example, Pink who has recently put forward an interpretation of our commonsensical notion of up-to-usness or self-determination as a ‘multi-way’ power both to do and refrain and, thus, as implying freedom in this sense: Our conception of our power of self-determination is as up-to-usness— a conception of self-determination that immediately characterizes it as

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142  Refraining: Its Nature and Normative Role a power over more than [one] option. Freedom is a power that leaves it up to us whether we do A or refrain.  (2016: 114)

According to his proposal, freedom is ‘a power over alternatives distinct from ordinary causation’ (2016: 124). Now I have claimed that the connections between mental events, as such, are contentual and not causal, but I believe that these connections must be underpinned by causal connections. I cannot conceive of any through-and-through noncausal way of initiating an act. If I could conceive of this, I might have been able to comprehend how such a non-causal power could be a dual power, since letting something be by refraining from action is indeed a non-causal phenomenon, as was contended in 6.1. Pink’s interpretation implies that the exercise of this multi-way power is literally self-determined, that it is strictly the agent who determines how it is exercised: ‘Self-determination involves the operation of a power being determined by the self—by the bearer’ (2016: 160). This is an idea that I have confessed I cannot make literal sense of and of which I have put forward a debunking explanation. I have claimed that we have an experience of some mental events—such as a thought or judgement that there are or are not sufficient practical reasons for something—as being neither causally nor contentually constrained by any other events. This lack of determination might be misconstrued as these mental events being somehow determined by ourselves rather than by any events or states. If this debunking explanation is correct, we can have an impression of self-determination or up-to-usness, even when we feel as though we cannot act otherwise, because—as in the life-saving case above—we are presented with overwhelming reasons and, thus, would not take ourselves to be free in Pink’s sense. Although it is not anything that I need to insist on in the present context, I would suggest that you could decide and act freely or of your own free will in case you do something intentionally, even if there is no alternative action that you can do, provided that you do not miss having an alternative. According to this proposal, you could decide and act freely if you intentionally save your own life on the basis of reasons so strong that you feel as though you could not have decided and acted otherwise. You would decide and act freely in John Locke’s famous case (1689: book II, ch. xxi, §10) in which you stay in a locked room when, not realizing that

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it is locked, you deliberate about whether to stay or leave, and decide to stay, because in this situation you do not miss the opportunity to leave. By contrast, the cashier in 3.2, who hands over the bank’s money to a robber at gunpoint, does not decide and act freely, since he misses having the all-in power to keep both the money and his life, which he had prior to the appearance of the robber. But if you have been offered a million dollars on condition that you eat a worm, you would not naturally miss any all-in power to act otherwise. True, you could wish that an offer of a million dollars (or more) came to you with no strings attached, and then you might consider yourself forced to eat a worm and as not doing so freely. But if you do not consider the scenario in which you are presented with this offer as a realistic possibility, this offer is not anything that you are likely to miss and, so, you are not likely to say that you are not deciding and acting freely when you choose to eat the worm. This indicates that our regarding ourselves as free is a subjective matter, which is not settled merely by what in fact we have an all-in power to do, but also by our expectations. Freedom in the present sense is not a necessary condition for responsibility, as the case of the cashier brings out. He makes a responsible choice between alternatives that he thinks leave something to be desired. But, conversely, it seems that we cannot act freely without being responsible for our action. Neither freedom nor responsibility requires an all-in power to act otherwise: for instance, if we stay in a locked room because we think it is best for us, we stay both freely and responsibly, even though we cannot leave. On the other hand, there are conditions which remove our all-in power to act otherwise and also rule out that we decide and act freely and responsibly, but it seems that if they rule out one, they rule out the other. Suppose, for example, that you have an irresistible desire to cry out because you are feeling excruciating pain, and that this desire makes you cry out. In this situation in which you cannot help crying out, you are neither responsible for crying out, nor do you do so freely. When you act on an irresistible desire, as opposed to a reason-based desire, the fact that you do not miss the opportunity to act otherwise—for instance, because you notice that it brings you great relief to cry when you do so—is not enough to make you free. But I shall not discuss action on the basis of such desires any further, since the focus is here on acting intentionally for reasons.

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Returning to Pink, it is worth adding that it is not obvious how a non-causal power whose exercise is determined by the agents themselves squares with his account of intentional actions as exercises of a capacity of practical reason, mentioned in 5.2. According to this account: ‘the capacity to reason how to act does not itself provide us with freedom’ (2016: 132), for in exercising our capacity to respond to reasons, we are passive rather than active: this exercise should be understood ‘in terms, not of a determination of beliefs and desires by us, but in terms of the operation of a power . . . on us’ (2016: 131). When he tackles this compatibility problem (2016: 230–3), he concentrates on cases in which our reasons for and against an action are rather evenly balanced, and we can decide more or less on a whim, but the harder cases for him are those, exemplified above, in which we have overwhelming reasons in favour of a particular alternative, for instance, when we can easily save our own life. Here it seems that our life-saving decision could be determined by the thrust of our desire-based reasons to the extent that no space is left for any non-causal agential power to creep in, whatever that might mean. Yet, I believe that it is a decision that we see ourselves as making, that is self-determined if anything deserves that name. The biggest problem is, however, that it is obscure what our operation of a non-causal power of freedom would amount to, and how we can tell whether a decision is due to such an operation rather than occurring uncaused or randomly. Pink maintains that among ‘what experience represents as actually and often happening’ (2016: 284) we find operations of this power. He contrasts this experience with what he describes as an experience that we can have of ourselves as being causally determined to act in some way by strong emotions, for instance. Concerning an example of his anger rising, he writes that it could happen that ‘I feel it is increasingly my anger which is determining how I act, not I’ (2016: 279). But granting, contrary to what I have been contending, that the experience of our actions being determined by our emotions is an experience of causal determination, and that we do not experience ourselves as being subjected to any such determination in circumstances in which we deliberate calmly and coolly until we reach a decision, it still does not follow that in the latter circumstances we have an experience of our decision being non-causally determined by ourselves, by a non-causal power that we possess and exercise rather than our decision

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being undetermined. I am at a loss to understand what such a power and its operation could be, and what it would be like to experience this.

6.4  Refraining and ‘Ought’ It was seen in 6.1 that the fact that you can refrain from causing p implies that you can (intentionally) cause p, as well as can make it true that you do not cause it. Assuming, as the well-known dictum goes, that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, then, if you ought to refrain from causing p, it follows that you both can cause p and can make it true that you do not cause it. The meaning of ‘refrain’ and ‘ought’ is such that it is implied that you must have this dual power to do and not to do. Consequently, if the fact that you ought to cause p implies that you can refrain from causing it, it follows that you must have this dual power. Likewise, it might be thought that the fact that you ought not, or are not permitted, to cause p and the fact that you are permitted to cause p imply that you have the same dual power, so that you can cause p as well as can refrain from doing so. I shall, however, argue that these normative facts do not entail that you have this dual power, though there is a good enough sense—indicated at the end of 6.1—in which you often have it. It will emerge, however, if you ought not to cause p, it follows that, if you cannot refrain from causing p, you can at least by causing p make it true that this normative claim does not apply to you and that you are not blameworthy. Let us begin by looking at the dictum that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. I  believe that in some senses of ‘ought’ and ‘can’, this dictum is true. I share the view of those who believe that we can distinguish between something like an evidential and a factual sense of ‘ought’ (see Persson, 2013: 10.1). Briefly and bluntly, the evidential sense is based on all relevant information to which you have access (perhaps without spending too much time and effort), while the factual sense is based on all relevant information that there is, regardless of whether you (or anyone) have access to it. The evidential sense recommends what you can expect to have the best outcome, whereas the factual sense recommends what actually has the best outcome. As will be illustrated below, there are situations in which there is a conflict between what you ought in the

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evidential and factual sense. It is then controversial which ‘ought’ gives you what you ought. I have elsewhere (Persson, 2013: 10.1) proposed that what you ought to decide, intend, choose, and try to do is what the evidential sense lays down, whereas what you ought to do is given by the factual sense. Michael Zimmerman has taken this proposal to mean that these ‘oughts’ ‘cannot be predicated of the same sort of thing’ (2014: 50). But that is not what I mean. Rather, I think that both senses can be predicated both of deciding, etc. and doing but, like him, I add that we need to pick out which sense is of ‘ultimate concern’ as he puts it (2014: 50), or most important. As opposed to him, however, I do not think that one sense— in his case, the evidential one—is most important: instead I believe that the evidential sense is most important with respect to deciding etc., and the factual sense with respect to action. The evidential sense is most important with respect to deciding, etc. because there is no point in deliberating on the basis of as much relevant information as is available, unless you follow the result of this deliberation, and the most immediate way of following it is by deciding, intending, and trying; action occurs subsequently if you have the requisite all-in power. But as regards action what is most important is that its (actual) outcome be as good as possible. So here the factual sense is most significant because it is better if the upshot of the action is in accordance with it than with the evidential ‘ought’.8 If you claim, as does Zimmerman, that what you ought in the most important evidential sense is to do something rather than to decide (etc.) to do it, and you embrace the dictum that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, what you ought in this sense is subject to different sorts of constraints— what is best is determined by your evidence—while what you can do is determined by the actual facts of the case. This may leave it unclear what, if anything, you ought to do when what is expectedly best, or best according to your evidence, is something that you cannot in fact do. Not so, if what you ought, given that the evidential sense is the most important, is to decide, since what you can decide is determined by the evidence as is what is expectedly best. By contrast, what you ought to do in the most important factual sense is entirely determined by the facts of the case: it is what is actually best of what you can actually do. 8  This is my reply to Haji’s point that he sees no reason why what is expectedly best is at issue with respect to deciding, etc. and what is actually best with respect to doing (2016: 182).

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My account commits me to the existence of a sort of moral dilemma, namely situations in which we normally cannot avoid defying at least one of the most important ‘oughts’ that we are up against. For when what we ought in the evidential sense to decide and try to do—for instance, give patients a drug B that will with certainty cure them less than completely— is something other than what we know that we ought in the factual sense to do—giving them either drug A or C, one of which will completely cure them and the other which will kill them, but we do not know which is which—we shall normally contravene the latter ‘ought’ if we heed the former. Normally, but not necessarily, because with a bit of luck we could comply with both of the important ‘oughts’ confronting us. I have elsewhere (Persson, 2013: 233) presented such a case of ‘lucky failure’ when deciding and trying to give patients B luckily results in actually giving them A, which cures them completely. This is, therefore, a moral dilemma of a more benign sort than the ones in which it is strictly impossible for us to comply with all of the important ‘oughts’ facing us. If such lucky failures occur, we have reason to be altogether pleased, but this would not be so if what we ought to do in the evidential sense is more important than what we ought to do in the factual sense, as Zimmerman asserts, since we would then have failed to do what we thought that we ought to do in the more important sense, without having succeeded in doing what we actually ought to do in this sense. Zimmerman denies this, maintaining that we do not do ‘anything wrong when, by way of prescribing drug B’, we luckily manage to give the patients A and cure them completely (2014: 49). But then he must understand ‘prescribing drug B’ as something like the contactual action of writing down this prescription rather than as the consequential action of bringing it about that the patients receive this prescription. For if his view is that we ought to perform the latter action in the more important evidential sense, we would be failing to do what we ought if, through some unexpected series of events, our prescription of B would make the patients receive a prescription of A. There would then be a reason for being displeased. But it seems that we must intend and try to write down the prescription of B as a means of bringing it about that the patients receive the same prescription. Imagine, on the other hand, that such lucky failures do not occur, and we fail to do what we ought to do in the most important factual sense, on my view. Then we are not blameworthy; lack of such good luck

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cannot make us blameworthy. We are not blameworthy if we decided and tried to do what we ought in the most important evidential sense, to bring it about that the patients receive the prescription of B. (This is of course also something we could fail to do, in a blameworthy or blameless way.) However, my acceptance of such benign moral dilemmas means that I am committed to the view that the factual ‘ought (to do)’ does not imply ‘can (do)’ in anything like the sense of ‘can (do) reliably in such a way that the act is (fully) responsible’. This sense goes with the evidential sense because it is desirable that we can reliably and intentionally do what we have accessible reasons to decide to do. It seems to me plausible to claim that the factual ‘ought (to do)’ only implies ‘can (do)’ in something like the weaker sense of ‘can (do) at least with luck’, which implies at most reduced intentionality and responsibility for what is accomplished. With luck, we can sometimes bring about more of what we desire than what we were expecting to bring about and, thereby, occasionally comply with both of the important ‘oughts’ facing us in situations of conflict. My present reason for entering into this discussion of different senses of ‘ought (to do)’ is the dictum that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. It has now surfaced that what sort of ‘can’ could arguably be implied depends on whether the ‘ought’ is evidential or factual: if it is evidential, the ‘can’ should be ‘can (do) reliably’, while if it is factual, it should rather be ‘can (do) at least with luck’. Henceforth, I shall however assume that what we evidentially and factually ought to do coincide and that, therefore, the stronger sense of ‘can’ is implied. So, if you ought to cause p at t, and the dictum as understood holds, you can reliably cause p at t. Then you are in a position to know, or at least to have a true, justified belief that you can cause p at t, that you will succeed if you decide and try to cause p at t, and that your action will be intentional. It might have been the case, however, that your evidence was misleading and your justified belief false. Suppose that justifiably believing that you can cause p at t, you try hard to cause it then, but fail. The fact is that you cannot cause p at t. Then it follows from the dictum that causing p at t was not what you ought to do. But it might still be what evidentially you ought to have decided and tried to do, and then you will not be blameworthy, even if what you have done is impermissible. Consequently, it is possible that you are not blameworthy, though

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what you have in fact done is impermissible. In what follows, however, the possibility of false or unjustifiable beliefs about what we ought to do will generally be put aside. Imagine that it is true that you ought to cause p at t, and this implies that you can refrain from causing p at t. Then, as remarked, you must possess a dual power as regards causing this (and have a true, justified belief to this effect). However, in the previous section, we came across cases which show that this is not so: it may be that you ought to stay in Locke’s locked room, and are responsible for doing so, though you cannot leave it. But it might be countered that in this case you can at least decide and try to leave. Harry Frankfurt (1969) has, however, presented some much-discussed examples that purport to show that your being responsible does not even entail a dual power to decide. These examples involve someone monitoring your deliberation and efficiently intervening in case it is about to issue in your not deciding to cause p in order to prevent this, but not intervening in case it is about to issue in a decision of yours to this effect. Then you cannot refrain even from deciding to cause p, let alone causing it, but it can still be claimed with plausibility that you are responsible for deciding and causing p in the event that you did it without any intervention. It has been objected against these examples that predicting the outcome of your deliberation presupposes determinism and, so, that they cut no ice with libertarians about free will and responsibility. But Mele, for one, has modified these examples to counter this objection (2006: 4.2). He imagines that, unbeknownst to you, a deterministic mechanism has been implanted in your brain which kicks in and makes you decide to cause p only if your deliberation—which may be assumed to be indeterministic—is about to issue in your not deciding to cause p. Suppose that the mechanism is not activated because the outcome of your free deliberation is a decision to cause p. Then your deliberative process is the same as it would have been if the mechanism had not been embedded in your brain. Since you would then have been responsible for your decision, it would seem that you must be responsible also when the mechanism is present, but inactive, though you cannot then refrain from (or make it the case that you are not) deciding to cause p. As regards this modification, it could however be pointed out that, although you cannot refrain from deciding to cause p (and act

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accordingly), you can refrain from—or at least make it true that you are not—being responsible for making this decision by deliberating in a way which activates the deterministic device. For if your decision can be put down to the operation of this device, it would appear that you are not responsible for your decision. If there are not any modifications of Frankfurt-style examples that close this loophole, it follows that your being responsible for causing p, which you ought to do, could imply, not that you can make it true that you are not deciding or causing this, but at least that you can make it true that you are not doing these things in a way that makes you responsible for them. Thereby, you would make it true that your deciding and causing p is not anything that you ought to do, for what you are not responsible for cannot be something that you ought to do. Accordingly, if you ought to decide and cause p then, if you cannot make it true that you are not deciding and causing p, you can at least make it true that by deciding and causing p you do not do something that you ought to do. This qualification is more significant if deciding and causing p is something that you ought not to do, or are not permitted to do. Then the fact that a modicum of dual power is left to the effect that you can at least make it true that your deciding and causing p do not occur in such a way that you are doing something that you are not permitted to do is important, for this means that you cannot be responsible and blameworthy for deciding and causing p.9 If deciding and causing p is something that you ought to do, it is less important that you could do it in a way such that you are not responsible for it, since even if you had been responsible, you might not be praiseworthy. Often doing what we ought is so easy that doing it is a matter of course. For instance, if you ought to swallow an antidote, this is unlikely to be something that you are praiseworthy for doing. But it may still be something that you ought to do, and you could act on your decisive reasons to do it, although there is a swallowing mechanism that makes this act overdetermined and alternatives unavailable. If you do not act on your 9  Contrast Haji, who argues (2016: 67–8 and 206–7) that impermissibility, but not blameworthiness, is undercut. Thus, he believes that such cases demonstrate the falsity of the principle that blameworthiness requires impermissibility. I concur that this principle is false, though not that this case shows its falsity, since impermissibility is not undercut if you decide to cause p without activating the mechanism.

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reasons, and the swallowing mechanism takes over, you have not acted responsibly and in obedience to a norm. If you ought to cause p, you are not permitted not to cause it. Now Ishtiyaque Haji argues (2016: 2.2) that your not being permitted not to cause p implies that you can make it true that you do not cause it. That is, we must have the power to contravene prohibitions, or to refrain from complying with them. In conjunction with the dictum that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, this claim implies a requirement of dual power or, in his terminology, ‘alternative possibilities’ to the effect that you can both cause p and make it true that you do not cause it. He argues for such a requirement also with respect to being permitted to do something. To begin with the latter claim, it is not plausible to maintain that your being permitted to cause p at t entails that causing p then is anything that you can reliably do. For instance, you may be permitted to hit the bull’s eye now, even though your doing so could not be anything but a fluke. Likewise, it seems that you may not be permitted to do something, even though it is most improbable that you will succeed in doing it, a matter of extraordinary (good or bad) luck. For example, you may not be permitted to do something if it endangers people’s lives, even though the risk that it will cause damage is minuscule. Consequently, (im)permissibility implies at most the weaker ‘can with luck’, which is enough for ‘ought’ in one sense, the factual one. However, even a weaker ‘can’ seems too strong for (im)permissibility. It appears paradoxical to say ‘You can’t cause p, but if, per impossibile, you were to do so, you would have done what you ought to do’. By contrast, it does not appear paradoxical to say ‘You can’t cause p, but if, per impossibile, you were to do it, it wouldn’t (would) be wrong’. If so, it being (im)permissible for you to cause something cannot imply that you can cause it. It is plausible to understand ‘ought’ and (im)permissibility in terms of reasons for action, which are at the focal point of this book. Let us see whether this could help explain such intuitions. The causing of p being what you ought to do then comes down to implying that there are decisive reasons for you to do this. As already remarked, you could not plausibly have reasons—whether or not decisive—to do something unless you can do it, for then you could not act on those reasons. In contrast, the causing of p being something that is permissible for you implies that you

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do not have decisive reasons not to cause p, because this is equivalent to that it is not the case that you ought not to cause p.10 Since this is a negative claim to the effect that you do not have (decisive) reasons not to cause p, it is not clear why it should imply that you can make it true that you do not cause it, even if your having reasons for something does. If your having reasons to cause p implies that you can cause it, it would seem natural to think that the fact that you cannot make it true that you do not cause it implies that you cannot have reasons to make this true and, thus, do not have any such reasons. In line with this, we would say, for instance, that athletes are permitted to win contests, even if we believe them to be so bad that they cannot possibly win them. We do not divide competing athletes into those who can win and are permitted to do so, and those who cannot and for whom winning is not permissible (or impermissible). Those competitors who cannot win cannot make it true that they do not lose, but losing is also something that they are permitted to do. Haji calls the view that one is permitted to do ‘whatever acts, heinous or otherwise, that one cannot avoid doing’ ‘dubious’ (2016: 27). Granted, losing a contest is not heinous, but crushing a baby to death by the weight of your body is, though you may end up unavoidably doing precisely this if an earth tremor throws you on a baby with your legs fractured, so that you cannot rise. Yet, it appears to be permissible for you to crush the baby in these circumstances. This means that you may be doing something permissible, though you are not responsible for it. By contrast, if you do what you ought, or do not do what you ought not, you must be responsible. Impermissibility, on the other hand, implies that you do have reasons, but reasons not to do something rather than to do it: your not being permitted to cause p implies that you have decisive reasons against causing p, or in favour of making it true that you do not cause it. Suppose that you have decisive reasons not to cause p because you have decisive reasons to cause q, which would be ruled out by your causing p at the relevant time. Then you have decisive reasons not merely against causing p, but against every other fact that is incompatible with your causing 10  Contrast Haji’s claim: ‘If it is morally . . . permissible for one to do something, then one has a (defeasible) reason to do it’ (2016: 22). If this is granted, it follows that the action in question is something that you can do. But one need not have reasons to do everything that one is permitted to do even if one can do it.

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q, simply because it is incompatible with q. Should this be understood to be restricted to incompatible facts that you can cause at times at which causing them would rule out your causing q, or should it include also the causing of incompatible facts that you cannot cause? It is hard to see why the latter should not be included, since you can comply with decisive reasons against causing something, or in favour of making it true that you do not cause it, even if you cannot cause it. If you act on the decisive reasons that you have to cause q (e.g. return a precious book that you have borrowed), and cause it, you have acted in accordance with reasons to make it true that you do not cause p irrespective of whether or not you can cause p (e.g. whether it is burning the book or throwing it to the moon). To be sure, if you cannot cause p, you have not refrained from (or even avoided) causing it if you do not cause it because this presupposes that you can cause it. But it is not plausible to claim that your having decisive reasons to cause q implies that you have decisive reasons to refrain from all those actions that are incompatible with your doing this, since this implies also that you consider doing them. All that is required of you in order to enable you to act in accordance with your decisive reasons to cause q is that you do not cause any incompatible facts, and this implies neither that you can cause these facts, nor that you consider causing them. Haji, however, uses ‘refrains’ in a weaker way: ‘You can refrain from performing some action, A, if you bring about its negation, or if you bring about something else, B, that precludes your bringing about A’ (2016: 2). If we call this ‘rhefraining’ to distinguish it from refraining, we could claim that you rhefrain from causing all facts that are incompatible with q if you cause q because you thereby make it true that you do not cause them. But, as opposed to refraining from, your rhefraining from doing an action does not entail that you have the dual power of doing and not doing it. To sum up, when we have decisive reasons to act in some ways, we have decisive reasons not to act in incompatible ways. Whilst it must be true that we can act in the ways in which we have decisive reasons to act, it need not be true of everything that we have decisive reasons not to do—i.e. are not permitted to do—that we can do it. For it need not be true that we can do something in order for it to be true that we do not

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do it and, thus, act in line with reasons not to do it. Similarly, it is true of some, but not all, actions that we do not have decisive reasons not to perform—i.e. are permitted to perform—that we can perform them. Thus, alternative possibilities need not be present whenever something is (im)permissible. It might, however, be objected that judgements to the effect that acts that we cannot do are (im)permissible would be ‘empty or trivial’ (Haji,  2016: 21). But their being empty or trivial would merely mean that we need not bother to make them, not that they are not true. It may be that we need not bother to make these judgements, since they are derivative from other judgements that we should bother to make. And since it is often quite hard to determine whether or not we can in some sense perform an action, it is a relief not to have sort out this matter in order to tell what actions are—derivatively—(im)permissible. Moreover, it can have a point to predicate (im)permissibility of actions that are most probably beyond our power. Imagine that an action would have much better consequences than its alternatives, but that it is almost certain that you cannot do it. Then it could still be useful to be allowed to declare this act to be permissible for you. Similarly, if the consequences of an action were much worse than the consequences of its alternatives, but it is almost certain that you cannot do it, it could still be useful to be allowed it to declare it to be impermissible for you. For these declarations could have the effect of encouraging or discouraging, respectively, attempts to do these actions which, in the unlikely event that they succeed, would have very good or bad effects. However, if it were always the case that no alternative but one was open to us—say, because our brains permanently featured the kind of mechanism imagined in the Frankfurt-style case above—and if, as is likely should this always be the case, we got to know that it was the case, we would rightly regard it as pointless to consider reasons for or against actions. We would then no longer be responsible for any decisions or actions, and forward-looking justification of blaming and praising would be undercut because it is always predetermined what we shall decide and do. But if the mechanism is present only now and then, it might realistically escape our notice, and then we could sensibly deliberate, even if the mechanism turns out to be present, and deliberation is in fact redundant (cf. Persson, 2005: 389–90).

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The—false—claim that it is necessarily true that you can do what it is impermissible for you to do figures in an argument of Haji’s for the conclusion that impermissibility requires alternative possibilities (2016: 26–7). The same claim crops up in an argument to the effect that ‘ought’ implies alternative possibilities, but this argument also states truly: ‘if one ought to refrain from doing something, one can do it. But it is also true that if one ought to refrain from doing something, one can refrain from doing it’ (2016: 27). However, in addition to the dictum that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, the truth of the first of these assertions turns on the everyday meaning of ‘refrain’, explicated in 6.1. It is not true if Haji’s ‘rhefrain’ is substituted for it. Thus, although it is true that when we ought to refrain from doing something, alternative possibilities must be present, this is due to the everyday meaning of ‘refrain’. Therefore, as it has been seen that the fact that we ought to do something does not imply that we can refrain from it, the requirement of alternative possibilities cannot be generalized to cover such normative facts. Accordingly, it might be that the decisive reasons implied by ‘ought’ are quite overwhelming, as your reasons, say, not to take a step forward when you are standing in front of a precipice might be. It would be paradoxical to affirm that those decisive reasons that make it true that you ought not to do this could grow so strong that it ceases to be true that you ought not to do this (contrast Haji, 2016: 11 and 237–40). Yet, it seems that they can be so strong that you feel as though you cannot act otherwise than in accordance with them, cannot take a step forward. This might be what Martin Luther had in mind when he famously declared that he could not recant at Worms. If so, the fact that we ought (not) to do something does not entail that we can refrain from (not) doing it, though we are responsible—and perhaps praiseworthy—for (not) doing it. We are responsible, since we decide and act in accordance with the thrust of our reasons. Also, we do not miss the alternative of refraining and, thus, do not regard ourselves as unfree. By contrast, in many cases in which our reasons for doing something are decisive, we can refrain from acting accordingly (in the sense that I have proposed). This may be true because there are real reasons which, when brought to our careful attention, would make us refrain. Blaming and punishing us for what we have done might have this effect of tipping the balance of our apparent reasons in favour of refraining. Personal

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experience of these undesirable consequences of some wrongful behaviour might make them more vivid to us, so that the next time we deliberate about what to do in a similar situation the thrust of the whole set of our apparent reasons will be in favour of refraining. In the case of taking a step forward at the abyss, however, there are unlikely to be real reasons that would have made you take the step forward. But it is relevant that your decisive desire here is sensitive to the force of reasons, so that if the force of your reasons had been different, your decisive desire would have been correspondingly different. This feature distinguishes this case in which you are responsible from the above Frankfurt-style case in which you might not be responsible (cf. Persson, 2005: ch. 33 and 2013: 7.2). This reason-sensitivity of our will or capacity to form (decisive) desires ensures that blaming and punishing could have an impact on behaviour that provides the ground for a forward-looking justification for applying them and for characterizing us as responsible in a sense sufficient for this justification. As mentioned in 2.2, I do not think that we are responsible in a sense which provides a basis for a backwardlooking justification in terms of our being deserving of praise or blame. We are responsible for something only in a direct sense in virtue of the reason-sensitive control that we exercise over it. It is impossible for temporally finite beings like us to have such control over all the conditions in virtue of which we possess this control—in other words, it is impossible for us to be ultimately responsible. In my view (see e.g. Persson, 2017: ch. 7), ultimate responsibility is a sine qua non for our being deserving of praise and blame because this implies that we can justly be praised or blamed; direct responsibility does not harbour this implication. Such a ‘double-faced’ account of responsibility has the virtue that it can make it comprehensible how it can seem equally obvious to some philosophers that responsibility is incompatible with determinism as it does to other philosophers that they are compatible. In a situation in which you do something that you ought not to do, it may be just a matter of bad luck—e.g. stress that you happen to be under—that the decisive real reasons consciousness of which would have prevented your executing this act did not present themselves with sufficient vividness to you, as in Zimmerman’s case of the man who forgets his child in the car. Then even though you do not deserve to be

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blamed and punished, and it would be unjust to do so, it might be justified from a forward-looking perspective to blame and punish you, as explained. In order for blaming and punishing you to be justified, it is not necessary that it will bring you to do what you ought in the future, or even that it significantly increases the probability that you will act thus, but you have to understand the connection between what you have done and blame and punishment, and the unpleasantness of these sanctions. In this sense, you can also be responsible for omissions that occur due to your negligence. If you understand these matters, there is a chance that blaming and punishing you for your negligence will make the reasons that you have ignored more available to your mind in the future and, thus, making you less likely to overlook them. There might be only a marginal difference between cases in which you totally overlook reasons and cases in which you pay only fleeting attention to them, overlooking their full significance. My proposal is in brief outline that, although our commonsensical intuitions about when people deserve to punished and rewarded cannot be retained in virtue of being true, they can—with more or less modification—be retained as guides to punishing and rewarding because following them overall has good consequences, i.e. these sanctions can be pragmatically justified. Our desert intuitions can provide us with rough guides to the degree to which people should be punished and rewarded for various deeds, though these intuitions are far from clear-cut and precise. It seems to me that, even though our everyday desert-thinking is backward-looking, we also assume that it is a practice which is beneficial for human communities—and it has in fact survived for millennia because it has been thus beneficial by and large. I suggest that we stick to this practice for such pragmatic reasons, while realizing that it is contaminated by fallacious backward-looking notions. It might be objected that once we recognize that our thinking and feeling in terms of desert is factually groundless, it will appear to us insincere and hollow to keep them up for pragmatic reasons. In reply, note first, that only a tiny minority of all people will ever realize that desert-attitudes are unfounded and, secondly, that these attitudes are so deep-seated that even those who fully realize this will only momentarily escape their grip. They will almost always spontaneously act and react in accordance with these attitudes, like everybody else.

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As observed, a forward-looking justification of blame and punishment presupposes that those subjected to them are capable of understanding the connection between these treatments and their behaviour to the extent that these treatments could set up or amplify deterrent reasons for them, i.e. that they are responsible in a sense. There are other types of treatment applicable to those who have misbehaved that could also be given forward-looking justifications, but which do not presuppose this understanding. They are analogous to treatments given those who have been afflicted by some disease. This is treatment that aims to cure wrongdoers by turning them into responsible agents capable of understanding the practice of blame and punishment (and praise and rewards). Although the justification of this treatment is forward-looking, its point is not to deter those subjected to it from behaving as they have done in the past; it is to put them within the scope of responsibility and forwardlooking justification of sanctions. There is also a kind of treatment of responsible wrongdoers which is analogous to the quarantining of those who have infectious diseases, namely detention in order to prevent future misbehaviour. The threat of detention can of course function as a deterrent, but it can also be combined with treatment aimed at curing those detained. This double function is convenient in cases in which it is unclear to what extent wrongdoers are responsible and, thus, to what extent detention can function to deter them or just is a means of keeping them within the reach of curative treatment. But this unclarity does not mean that advocates of a forward-looking justification of blame and punishment cannot conceptually distinguish this justification from the justification of preventative measures, which does not imply responsibility, though it does mean that the distinction is less deep than it would be if the former justification instead of being forward-looking had involved desert. This is, however, not the place to recapitulate—and revise—the more detailed exploration of the topic of responsibility that I have carried out elsewhere (Persson, 2005: part V, and 2013: esp. ch. 7). Let me instead summarize the main points of this section and chapter. Refraining from doing an act implies a dual all-in power both to do the act and not to do it. It might be that, according to a commonsensical understanding, this dual power implies that it is both causally possible that the act be done and causally possible that it not be done. Commonsensical

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thinking features elements which are in tune with such an incompatibilist implication, in particular its commitment to desert which presupposes ultimate responsibility. I have, however, suggested a debunking explanation of the idea of ultimate responsibility to the effect that it is a misconstrual of our ordinary experience of a deliberative freedom, which is based partly on an impossibility in principle of predicting our decisions, and partly on the facts that mental events are not causally but contentually connected and that practical reasons cannot be conclusive for deciding. I have also suggested a compatibilist interpretation of the dual power implied by refraining which is framed in terms of epistemic in place of causal possibilities of both deciding and not deciding to act. We can suppose, contrary to what is causally possible, with respect to each of these epistemic possibilities that they are actualized, which in one case issues in decision and action and in the other case neither in decision nor action. Although ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, norms about what we ought do not imply that we can refrain and, hence, that we have a dual power not to do the relevant acts as well as to do them. Nor do norms to the effect that something is (im)permissible for us imply a dual power in virtue of implying that we can do what is (im)permissible, as well as refrain from it. However, when, as illustrated by some Frankfurt-style examples, we cannot refrain from—or, less specifically, cannot make it true that we do not do—actions that we ought not to do, it is implied that we can make it true that our doing these actions is not anything for which we are responsible and, hence, not anything that we ought not to do. But if this impossibility of refraining was customarily the case and if, as seems inevitable then, we realized this, it would undercut deliberation, and the only kind of responsibility that we could realistically hope for, which goes with a forward-looking justification of the practice of punishing and rewarding. Since this impossibility is on the contrary very rarely present, and we possess deliberative freedom and a reason-sensitive will, there is a sense in which we can be responsible for our actions that suffices for our acting on reasons.

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Conclusion

The overarching aim of this book is to provide a reductionist analysis of what it is to act for a reason in such a way that we intentionally perform the action that we have a reason for performing—an action that will in the end be a basic action—and intentionally achieve the end or goal for which we do this action, as specified by the reason. This analysis of intentional action is reductionist in the sense that it does not appeal to any irreducibly action-theoretical concepts. It does not refer to anything that is unanalysably an action in virtue of involving either a unique type of agent-causation, or anything like a volition, trying, or decision that is assumed to be an act(ion) in a primitive sense. Nor does it refer to any unanalysable states or attitudes that are essentially directed at actions, like intentions and desires (to act). It does refer to a kind of desire— decisive desire—but it is in turn analysed as the causal power of some physical states in conjunction with propositional thinking. The direction of fit between thought and fact here is not that something is thought to fit the facts, but that something is caused to be fact because of how it is thought of. It should perhaps be added that reductionism about reasons for action is not a part of the package. I have contended that the apparent reasons for which agents act are desire-dependent, but not that real, ­justificatory reasons should also be construed as desire-dependent. But even if the latter reasons are also taken to be desire-dependent, this is not sufficient for a naturalistic reductionism about reasons, since this does not imply that there do not exist any irreducibly normative rules of reasoning in the practical sphere—let alone in the theoretical sphere— which do not boil down empirical generalizations about how people in fact reason (cf. Persson, 2013: 273–4). It only excludes the existence of ‘categorial’ reasons for action, which are reasons for everyone, ­irrespective of their attitudes. In 4.1 I implicitly reject such a reductionism about rules of reasoning.

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A concept of desire plays a central role in the present analysis of intentional action. In 3.1 an account is given of how desires connect with apparent reasons for action. 2.1 presents the idea that the content of these reasons could be expressed in a conditional form in which the antecedent describes the action that the reason is a reason for performing, or the action it is about, and the consequent an end to which this action is a sufficient means in the circumstances. In order for such a conditional to be a reason for which we could perform the action described in the antecedent, the consequent must describe a state of affairs that we desire to bring about. As explained in 1.1, the concept of action figuring in this conditional and, thus, in the desired objective is a broad concept that does not involve anything intentional, or any reference to desire. Thereby, a risk of circularity is eliminated. Chapter 3 provides a reductionist analysis of the notion of a decisive desire: to have an occurrent decisive desire to cause it now to be a fact that p is to be in an internal state of a sort which requires your thinking that you can in the all-in sense cause p now, and which in conjunction with this thought—and most often thoughts about consequences of p—causes something to be a fact because you think that it is that p (and, thus, has the consequences alluded to). Apart from causing behaviour that is thought to satisfy it, a desire could also manifest itself in thinking about means to satisfy it and in keeping its objective in mind. But when a desire has become decisive, satisfactory sufficient means must be thought to be available, means such that a sequence of actions, from some basic action onwards, is more strongly desired than all alternatives. By presupposing that deliberation is settled in this decision-like manner, decisive desires can plausibly be identified with intentions and their formation with decisions. In light of this analysis of the concept of a desire, 4.1 explains how desires for antecedent means are derivable from desires for consequent ends. It shows that the direction of derivation here is the reverse of what it is in the case of the derivation of belief: desires for epistemically prior means that are sufficient for their ends are derived from desires for these ends, whereas beliefs in the truth of propositions are derived from beliefs in epistemically prior propositions whose truth is sufficient to guarantee the truth of the former propositions. These directions of ­derivation reflect the opposite directions of fit of belief and desire. The derivation of a desire cannot, however, be a matter of inference, since

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desires, not being content-to-fact attitudes, do not have distinctive ­contents like beliefs, contents which could figure in premises and ­conclusions. Moreover, in the case of decisive reasons, forming them can never be a matter of simply deriving them because our reasons for such desires could never be conclusive, but could always be defeated by ­consideration of further reasons. Since the reasons for which we can decisively desire to act are ipso facto reasons for which we can try to perform the action in question, and actually perform it if, in fact, we possess the requisite all-in power, explaining how we can have reasons for decisive desires amounts to explaining how we can have reasons for which we can act. In 5.1 the fact that your decisive desire to cause it to be a fact that p now consists in an internal state of yours that causes something to be a fact now because you think that it is that p (and thereby will realize your end) is utilized in a model of the control of movements of your body and what it is in concrete contact with that ensures that these movements are intentionally performed. This is the correspondence control model, CORCON, according to which the intentionality of a basic, contactual action of causing p now consists in the fact that your being in a state of decisively desiring to cause p now directly causes something now because you correctly think that it is that p. The observational feedback that you may receive from what you are causing then confirms your preview or preconception of what it will be, namely p. These thoughts have contrasting directions of fit: the mode of the confirming feedback is content-to-fact fitting, whereas the mode of the preview is fact-tocontent fitting in virtue of its involvement in a desire. In 5.3 this is developed into an account of the intentionality of the non-basic, consequential actions that you execute by means of intentional basic actions, which runs as follows: you intentionally perform a non-basic action of causing q just in case (1) there is a basic action of causing p that you perform intentionally, according to CORCON, (2) you have a true, justified belief that if you cause p, you will probably cause q, (3) you desire to cause q, and (4) you cause q by causing p. If (3) is deleted, a definition of what it is to cause q knowingly, consciously, or wittingly is obtained. 5.2 modifies this analysis to cover intentional mental acts, for instance of visualizing something and, thereby, bringing further events about. Basic mental acts differ from basic bodily acts in that they can never be

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monitored while they are in process. However, this is of less importance, since basic mental acts cannot be protracted and, in contrast to the body, consciousness does not have parts with which we can perform different basic acts at the same time, these being acts that could need to be coordinated. This coordination needs to be quite extensive because our bodily parts can be in contact with instruments that greatly increase our agential power. Also, as expounded in 6.2, mental events are contentually rather than causally related. Thus, when a decisive desire to call e.g. a sensuous representation to mind does not directly cause it to crop up in the mind, as it is likely to do in the case of familiar objects, what we have to do is to facilitate some item that is present or could directly be made present to our mind, leading to an occurrence of the representation because of some relation—such as resemblance—with respect to their contents. We can facilitate this occurrence by being prepared to interrupt distracting associations and minimizing the risk of them arising by reducing sensory input through such means as closing our eyes and keeping silent and still. But mental acts, whether basic or non-basic, cannot be as reliably executed as physical acts. According to 6.1, when you simply let q be the case by refraining from causing p, you do not cause p—something which the notion of refraining requires you to believe, truly, that you could cause—which would have prevented q from being the case. Instead of forming a decisive desire not to cause p—which you might do when you act to prevent yourself from causing p—you do not form a decisive desire to cause p owing to your finding no sufficient reasons for the formation of such a desire. And, as opposed to forming a decisive desire not to cause something, your not forming a decisive desire, being a negative fact to the effect that something does not begin to exist, cannot be a cause. Nor does the negative fact of your not performing an action require a cause to obtain. It follows that, since letting something be the case by refraining is knowingly letting it be the case, the characterization of something as occurring knowingly does not entail anything about its causation. Letting something be the case is not intentional, since there is no intention that what is allowed to be the case be the case; there is ­simply an anticipation that it will be the case. Of course, in the case of acting knowingly or intentionally, that is, causing something to be a fact, there has to be a cause. This is supplied by the internal state which constitutes a (decisive) desire. This state is

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164 Conclusion

not anything that is manifested or represented in consciousness, however. Instead of being related to each other and to behaviour as cause and effect, conscious events are related in virtue of their contents, such as resemblance, co-occurrence, and logical relations. Another content relation features in the requirement of a correspondence between how agents acting intentionally conceive of what they do and what they actually do, which is an element of CORCON. An explanation in terms of our apparent reasons for doing something cites what in our eyes justifies doing it. It would be counter-intuitive if such explanations were untenable but, although their tenability presupposes the presence of causal connections somewhere, it does not imply that they hold between the phenomena described in these explanations. So, we cannot be introspectively aware of any causal connections between the states of our minds, though we are capable of observing causal connections when they are present in the physical world. On the basis of this reasoning, 6.2 concludes that embracing a causal epiphenomenalism with respect to our psychological states is not counter-intuitive, though an explanatory epiphenomenalism with respect to them should be firmly rejected. The two final sections, 6.3 and 6.4, deal with issues of responsibility and obligation connected with the notion of refraining. The fact that we do not experience our thoughts as being causally linked together with the fact that it is in principle impossible for us to predict them could nurture the impression that we have when deliberating about what to believe or do of it being up to us, or determined by our selves, what we decide to believe or do. In the practical case, however, the sense of up-to-usness or self-determination is fuller or richer because our decisions cannot be contentually constrained as beliefs can be by conclusive reasons. Since, in addition, we have a conditional all-in power both to act and not to act whose antecedent presupposes only an epistemic possibility that it be fulfilled, there is a compatibilist sense in which we have a dual power which is sufficient for a conception of responsibility that supports a forward-looking justification of punishments and rewards. It is ­plausible to hold that we usually have such a dual power, and this is important, because it could not be true that we act for reasons were we not responsible in some sense, and we do not have the ultimate responsibility required by a backward-looking justification in terms of desert.

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References Anscombe, G. E. M. (1957) Intention, Oxford: Blackwell. Armstrong, D.  M. (1968) A Materialist Theory of the Mind, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Audi, Robert (1973) ‘Intending’, Journal of Philosophy, 70, 387–403. Audi, Robert (1989) Practical Reasoning, London & New York: Routledge. Aune, Bruce (1977) Reason and Action, Dordrecht: Reidel. Austin, J. L. (1970) ‘Ifs and Cans’, in his Philosophical Papers, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bach, Kent (1978) ‘A Representational Theory of Action’, Philosophical Studies, 34, 361–79. Baier, Annette (1971) ‘The Search for Basic Actions’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 8, 161–70. Bishop, John (1989) Natural Agency, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brand, Myles (1984) Acting and Intending, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bratman, Michael (1987) Intentions, Plans, and Practical Reason, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Castañeda, Hector-Neri (1975) Thinking and Doing, Dordrecht: Reidel. Chisholm, Roderick (1966) ‘Freedom and Action’, in Lehrer, K. (ed.) Freedom and Determinism, New York: Random House. Clarke, Randolph (2014) Omissions, New York: Oxford University Press. Cullity, Garrett & Gaut, Berys (1997) ‘Introduction’, in Cullity, G. & Gaut, B. (eds.) Ethics and Practical Reason, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Danto, Arthur (1963) ‘What We Can Do’, Journal of Philosophy, 60, 435–45. Danto, Arthur (1965) ‘Basic Actions’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 2, 141–8. Danto, Arthur (1973) Analytical Philosophy of Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davidson, Donald (1963) ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’, Journal of Philosophy, 60, 685–700. Reprinted in Davidson (1980). Davidson, Donald (1971) ‘Agency’, in Binkley, R., Bronaugh, R., & Marras, A. (eds.) Agent, Action, and Reason, Oxford: Blackwell. Reprinted in Davidson (1980). Davidson, Donald (1973) ‘Freedom to Act’, in Honderich, T. (ed.) Essays on Freedom of Action, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Reprinted in Davidson (1980). Davidson, Donald (1980) Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Davis, Lawrence (1979) Theory of Action, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Descartes, René (1641) Discourse on Method and Other Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Frankfurt, Harry (1969) ‘Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility’, Journal of Philosophy, 66, 829–39. Frankfurt, Harry (1978) ‘The Problem of Action’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 15, 157–62.

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166 References Frost, Kim (2014) ‘On the Very Idea of Direction of Fit’, Philosophical Review, 123, 429–84. Fumerton, Richard (2013) Knowledge, Thought, and the Case for Dualism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ginet, Carl (1990) On Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldman, Alvin (1970) A Theory of Human Action, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Haji, Ishtiyaque (2016) Luck’s Mischief, New York: Oxford University Press. Harman, Gilbert (1976) ‘Practical Reasoning’, Review of Metaphysics, 29, 431–63. Hornsby, Jennifer (1980) Actions, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hume, David (1739–40) A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Jackson, Frank (1984) ‘Weakness of Will’, Mind, 93, 1–18. Jackson, Frank (1998) From Metaphysics to Ethics, Oxford: Clarendon Press. James, William (1890) Principles of Psychology, 2 vols, New York: Dover Publications, 1950. Knobe, Joshua (2008) ‘The Concept of Intentional Action’, in Knobe, J. & Nichols, S. (eds.) Experimental Philosophy, New York: Oxford University Press. Locke, Don (1974) ‘Reasons, Wants, and Causes’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 11, 169–79. Locke, John (1689) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Lowe, E. J. (2008) Personal Agency, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCann, Hugh (1998) The Works of Agency, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. McDowell, John (1978) ‘Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. vol. 52. McDowell, John (1981) ‘Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following’, in Holtzman, S. H. & Leich, C. M. (eds.) Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mackie, J. L. (1973) Truth, Probability, and Paradox, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mele, Alfred (1992) Springs of Action, New York: Oxford University Press. Mele, Alfred (2003) Motivation and Agency, New York: Oxford University Press. Mele, Alfred (2006) Free Will and Luck, New York: Oxford University Press. Nagel, Thomas (1970) The Possibility of Altruism, Oxford: Clarendon Press. O’Shaughnessy, Brian (2008) The Will, 2 vols, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parfit, Derek (2011) On What Matters, 2 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parfit, Derek (2017) On What Matters, vol. 3, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Persson, Ingmar (1981) Reasons and Reason-Governed Actions, Lund: Studentlitteratur. Persson, Ingmar (1985) The Primacy of Perception, Lund: Gleerup. Persson, Ingmar (2005) The Retreat of Reason, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Persson, Ingmar (2013) From Morality to the End of Reason, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Persson, Ingmar (2017) Inclusive Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pink, Thomas (2016) Self-Determination, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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References  167 Prichard, H. A. (1949) ‘Acting, Willing, Desiring’, reprinted in White, A. R. (ed.) The Philosophy of Action, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. Reid, Thomas (1788) Essays on the Active Powers of Man, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969. Scanlon, T.  M. (1998) What We Owe to Each Other, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schueler, G. F. (1995) Desire, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schueler, G. F. (2003) Reasons and Purposes, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Searle, John (1983) Intentionality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sehon, Scott (2016) Free Will and Action Explanation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sellars, Wilfrid (1966) ‘Thought and Action’, in Lehrer, K. (ed.) Freedom and Determinism, New York: Random House. Stoutland, Frederick (1976) ‘The Causation of Behaviour’, in Hintikka, J. (ed.) Essays on Wittgenstein in Honour of G. H. von Wright, Amsterdam: North-Holland. Taylor, Richard (1966) Action and Purpose, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Thalberg, Irving (1977) Perception, Emotion, and Action, Oxford: Blackwell. Thompson, Michael (2008) Life and Action, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thomson, Judith Jarvis (1977) Acts and Other Events, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. von Wright, G. H. (1963) Norm and Action, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. von Wright, G. H. (1971) Explanation and Understanding, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wilson, George (1989) The Intentionality of Human Action, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zimmerman, Michael J. (2011) The Immorality of Punishment, Peterborough: Broadview Press. Zimmerman, Michael  J. (2014) Ignorance and Moral Obligation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Index Act(ion) (see also Intentional action) broad/wide concept of  2–3, 13–15, 23 basic and non-basic  7–8, 17, 23 contactual and consequential  8, 16–19 result of  16, 109–11 Agent-causation  14, 112–13 Anscombe, Elizabeth  16, 31, 94–6 Armstrong, David 73 Audi, Robert  58n.9, 77n.1 Aune, Bruce  55n.8, 65, 114 Austin, J. L. 34–5 Bach, Kent  98–101, 100n.6, 104 Baier, Anette 105–6 Basic action (see Action and Intentional action) Benevolence and malevolence 121 Bishop, John  101–2, 103n.8 Brand, Myles 114 Bratman, Michael 58 ‘Can’ 35–41 ability and opportunity  35–6, 125–6 ‘all-in’ sense of  35–40, 125–6 and (im)permissibility 151–5 conditional analysis of 36 Castaneda, Hector-Neri 65–6 Causation conceptually independent of agency  20–3 experience of  20–1, 135–6 relata of 14–15 Chisholm, Roderick 14 Clarke, Randolph  62n.15, 125–6, 128–31 Coercion 55–7 offers and threats 56–7 Cognitive theory of motivation (see Motivational cognitivism) Correspondence control model of intentional action, CORCON (see Intentional action) Cullity, Garrett 46n.3

Danto, Arthur  7n.1, 55n.8 Davidson, Donald  13, 16–17, 18n.2, 46n.3, 50–1, 90–2, 100, 114, 116–17 Davis, Lawrence 114 Decision  5, 57–8, 61–4, 113–14 (see also decisive desire) impossibility of predicting 39–40 Descartes 26 Desert  41, 132, 156–9 Desire  5, 28, 47–57 content of 63–6 decisive  5, 57–67, 71–3, 81–3, 161 derivation of  77–83, 161–2 derivative 54–5 dormant  67, 69, 92 intelligent 48–53 and possibility of action 52–3 intrinsic  54, 96 non-intelligent 48–54 acquired and innate  50, 99–100 occurrent  47–8, 67 Direction of fit  1–2, 11, 60, 73–4, 79–80, 94–5, 161–2 Dispositions, phenomenalist and realist conceptions of 73 Doctrine of the double effect 85–6 Emotions (see Reasons for emotions) Epiphenomenalism, causal and explanatory  125, 133, 137 Frankfurt, Harry  98, 149, 154, 156, 159 Freedom  141–5 (see also Self-determination) Frost, Kim 74n.23 Fumerton, Richard  133n.4, 134 Gaut, Berys 46n.3 Ginet, Carl  16, 111–15, 118n.14 Goldman, Alvin  19, 46n.3, 95–6, 117 Haji, Ishtiyaque  125, 146n.8, 150n.9, 151–5, 152n.10 Harman, Gilbert 50–1

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170  Index Hornsby, Jennifer 114–15 Hope 54 and fear 88 Hume, David  14, 20–1, 135–6 Intention  5, 58–60, 63–4 (see also decisive desire) self-reference of 50–2 Intentional action (see also Mental act(ion)s) and acting for reasons  1, 95–7, 120 and acting knowingly, consciously, wittingly  5–6, 119–21, 130 and luck 36–7 and acting non-intentionally  48, 99–100 and rationality 44–5 and wayward/deviant causation 6–7, 50–1, 101–3, 114, 116–18 basic  90–105, 161–2 control of  93–4, 123–4 correspondence control model of, CORCON  7, 94–6, 98, 101–5, 162–4 knowledge of  94, 102–3 non-basic  114, 116–20, 162 reason-explanation of  44–6, 137 reductionist and non-reductionist accounts of  1–2, 110–11, 115, 160 Jackson, Frank  15n.1, 54–5 James, William  65–6, 92–3, 99, 104–6, 106n.9, 110–12, 110n.10, 136–7, 137n.6 ideo-motor theory  65–6, 104–5, 110 Knobe, Joshua 120–1 Letting be the case/happen (see Refraining) Locke, Don  67–8, 72–3 Locke, John  142–3, 149–50 Lowe, E.J. 20 Luther, Martin 155 Mackie, J.L. 34–5 McCann, Hugh  61–3, 63n.16, 84n.2, 92, 109–16, 116n.13, 119n.15 McDowell, John 67–8 Means epistemic  6, 76–8, 85–6 epistemic priority of  6, 76, 78–81 manipulative  6, 77–8, 85–7 Means-end reasoning  6, 77–83

Mele, Alfred  51–3, 58–61, 60n.12, 61n.13, 62n.15, 63, 71n.20, 96, 119n.15, 149 Mental act(ion)s  8–9, 23–9, 105–14, 162–3 Mental events, contentually not causally related  9, 11, 24–5, 107–8, 134–41 Motivational cognitivism (cognitive theory of motivation) vs. motivational conativism  47, 66–75 Motivational conativism (see Motivational cognitivism) Nagel, Thomas 67–8 Non-basic action (see Action and Intentional action) Omission  122–3 (see also Refraining) O’Shaughnessy, Brian  13–14, 21n.3, 22n.4, 25–6, 62–3, 62nn.14–15, 67, 72, 115, 115n.12 ‘Ought’ evidential and factual sense of 145–9 implies ‘can’  145–6, 148–9 to decide, intend, and try vs. to do 146–9 Parfit, Derek  15n.1, 67–8, 97 Permissibility (see ‘Can’) Pink, Thomas  61–3, 62n.15, 63n.16, 92n.1, 113–14, 132n.3, 141–2, 144–5 Prichard, H. A. 114 Property-dualism 132–3 Property-identity 15 Proprioception 21–2 Reasons for action and possibility of action  3–4, 31–2, 37–40 apparent  4–5, 42–4, 46–7 conditional form of  2, 31–5 defeasibility of 83 desire-dependence of  4–5, 46–7 explanatory  42–4, 96–7 real  4–5, 42–4 Reasons for belief 76 Reasons for desire  76–85, 97–8 second-order 84 Reasons for emotions 87–9 Reasons for trying  37, 84–5 Refraining  122, 124–32 and letting be the case/happen  9–10, 122, 124–5, 127–30, 163 Reid, Thomas 20

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Index   171 Responsibility  40–1, 124, 143, 149–51, 156–9, 164 backward- and forward-looking 40–1, 156–8 direct and ultimate  41, 132, 156, 158–9 Scanlon, T. M.  67–8, 71n.20 Schueler, G.F.  45n.2, 46n.4, 73n.22, 95–6 Searle, John 50–1 Sehon, Scott  44–5, 46n.4, 49–50, 96n.4, 133–4 Self-Determination  11–12, 141–2 experience of  140–1, 164 Sellars, Wilfred 65 Stoutland, Frederick 22n.5 Taylor, Richard 14 Teleological explanation  44–6, 49–50 Thalberg, Irving 16

Thinking and believing  26–8, 68–9 failure of occurrence  68–71, 122–4 forms of  3, 25–6 in sensuous representations 29–30, 99–101, 105 Thompson, Michael  50n.6, 100n.5 Thomson, Judith  13–14, 117 Trying  61, 92–3, 115–16, 119–20 Visualizing  24–5, 107–10 Volition (act of will)  65–6, 110–15 von Wright, G. H.  16, 20, 45n.2 Wilson, George  45n.2, 71n.21 Wishing 53–4 Zimmerman, Michael J.  122–4, 146–7, 156–7