Activity,Passivity, and Normative Avowal

The idea that agents can be active with respect to some of their actions, and passive with respect to others, is a widely held assumption within moral philosophy. But exactly how to characterize these notions is controversial. I argue that an agent is active just in case (A) her action is one whose motive she can truly avow as reason‐giving, or (B) her action is one whose motive she can disavow, provided her disavowal effects appropriate modifications in her future motives. This view maintains a link between activity, reason‐responsiveness, and answerability, while avoiding commitments to an implausible theory of motivation.     

Dignity in Context,and Out: Discussion of Lynne Jacobs’ “On Dignity,a Sense of Dignity,and Inspirational Shame”

ABSTRACT

Dr. Lynne Jacobs’ “On Dignity, a Sense of Dignity, and Inspirational Shame” is an interdisciplinary integration of a priori ethics and a phenomenology of dignity. She contends that the human person’s engagement with other people—writ large in the therapeutic encounter—is inherently ethically situated. Moreover, she avers an inherent content to this ethics, namely, mutual respect for distinctively human value—dignity—between and among people. Her ethics of dignity informs her psychoanalytic exploration of experiences of dignity, indignity, and her notion of inspirational shame, among others. I join in Jacobs’ advocacy for therapeutic facilitation of a person’s sense of inherent worth, as well as her opposition to relational contexts of devaluation and degradation. However, the primordiality Jacobs grants to her ethics of dignity often obscures the constitutively cultural, familial, and personal contextuality of, first, her—and in my view, any—ethical conviction; second, what she describes as the experience of being human; third, the alleged indignity of human vulnerability; and finally, the claim that shame is the natural reaction to one’s failure to live up to personal ideals. In the end, and subject to certain clinical concerns, Jacobs’ article integrates into psychoanalysis primordial ethical duties that she and others claim inhere in us as human beings.     

Levi on Causal Decision Theory and the Possibility of Predicting One's Own Actions

Isaac Levi has long criticized causal decisiontheory on the grounds that it requiresdeliberating agents to make predictions abouttheir own actions. A rational agent cannot, heclaims, see herself as free to choose an actwhile simultaneously making a prediction abouther likelihood of performing it. Levi is wrongon both points. First, nothing in causaldecision theory forces agents to makepredictions about their own acts. Second,Levi's arguments for the ``deliberation crowdsout prediction thesis' rely on a flawed modelof the measurement of belief. Moreover, theability of agents to adopt beliefs about theirown acts during deliberation is essentialto any plausible account of human agency andfreedom. Though these beliefs play no part inthe rationalization of actions, they arerequired to account for the causalgenesis of behavior. To explain the causes ofactions we must recognize that (a) an agentcannot see herself as entirely free in thematter of A unless she believes herdecision to perform A will cause A,and (b) she cannot come to a deliberatedecision about A unless she adoptsbeliefs about her decisions. FollowingElizabeth Anscombe and David Velleman, I arguethat an agent's beliefs about her own decisionsare self-fulfilling, and that this can beused to explain away the seeming paradoxicalfeatures of act probabilities.     

The role of all things considered judgements in practical deliberation

Suppose an agent has made a judgement of the form, ‘all things considered, it would be better for me to do a rather than b (or any range of alternatives to doing a)’ where a and b stand for particular actions. If she does not act upon her judgement in these circumstances would that be a failure of rationality on her part? In this paper I consider two different interpretations of all things considered judgements which give different answers to this question, one suggested by Donald Davidson, the other by Paul Grice and Judith Baker. I argue that neither interpretation is adequate. However, a third interpretation that combines features of the Grice/Baker view with the Davidsonian view is possible. In the final section of the paper I defend this interpretation against two objections.     

Heidegger,Sociality, and Human Agency

According to Heidegger's Being and Time, social relations are constitutive of the core features of human agency. On this view, which I call a ‘strong conception’ of sociality, the core features of human agency cannot obtain in an individual subject independently of social relations to others. I explain the strong conception of sociality captured by Heidegger's underdeveloped notion of ‘being‐with’ by reconstructing Heidegger's critique of the ‘weak conception’ of sociality characteristic of Kant's theory of agency. According to a weak conception, sociality is a mere aggregation of individual subjects and the core features of human agency are built into each individual mind. The weak conception of sociality remains today widely taken for granted. I show that Christine Korsgaard, one of the most creative contemporary appropriators of Kant, operates with a weak conception of sociality and that this produces a problematic explanatory deficiency in her view: she is unable to explain the peculiar motivational efficacy of shared social norms. Heidegger's view is tailor made to explain this phenomenon. I end by sketching how Heidegger provides a social explanation of a major systematic concern animating Korsgaard, the concern with the importance of individual autonomy and answerability in human life.     

Magical agents,global induction,and the internalism/externalism debate

Externalism is the view that facts about one's history or past in the external world that bear on the acquisition of one's responsibility-grounding psychological elements are pertinent to whether one's actions are free and, hence, pertinent to whether one can be morally responsible for them. Internalism is the thesis that the conditions of moral responsibility can be specified independently of facts about how the person acquired her responsibility-grounding psychological elements. In this paper we defend a position that navigates between externalism and internalism: moral responsibility does not require that one have a past but it does require that one not have certain kinds of past.     

SUBJECTIVITY, JUDGMENT, AND THE BASING RELATIONSHIP

Moral and legal judgments sometimes depend on personal traits in this sense: the subject offers good reasons for her judgment, but if she had a different social or ideological background, her judgment would be different. If you would judge the constitutionality of restrictions on abortion differently if you were not a secular liberal, is your judgment really based on the arguments you find convincing, or do you find them so only because you are a secular liberal? I argue that a judgment can be based on the considerations the subject claims as justification even when it depends on personal traits.     

Action,Control and Sensations of Acting

Sensations of acting and control have been neglected in theory of action. I argue that they form the core of action and are integral and indispensible parts of our actions, participating as they do in feedback loops consisting of our intentions in acting, the bodily movements required for acting and the sensations of acting. These feedback loops underlie all activities in which we engage when we act and generate our control over our movements.The events required for action according to the causal theory, or Searle’s theory, do not add up to agency. I find the agent at work, her engagement in her action, in her sensation of acting.It is often thought that bodily movements are either mere events or actions. I suggest that there is a third possibility: that they are activities which are not actions. Activities, whether they are actions or not, differ from mere events in that they are controlled from within the brain. They are actions only if this control forms agent control, that is, control in which the conscious mind, the agents’ intentions in acting and her sensations of acting, participates.Internally wayward actions are characterized by the fact that the person involved does not have a sensation of action and therefore does not control her movements. In the absence of such a sensation she does not act.     

Self-Trust,Autonomy, and Self-Esteem

Self-trust is a necessary condition of personal autonomy and self-respect. Self-trust involves a positive sense of the motivations and competence of the trusted person; a willingness to depend on him or her; and an acceptance of vulnerability. It does not preclude trust in others. A person may be rightly said to have too much self-trust; however core self-trust is essential for functioning as an autonomous human being.     

Permissive Situations and Direct Doxastic Control

According to what I will call ‘the disanalogy thesis,’ beliefs differ from actions in at least the following important way: while cognitively healthy people often exhibit direct control over their actions, there is no possible scenario where a cognitively healthy person exhibits direct control over her beliefs. Recent arguments against the disanalogy thesis maintain that, if you find yourself in what I will call a ‘permissive situation’ with respect to p, then you can have direct control over whether you believe p, and you can do so without manifesting any cognitive defect. These arguments focus primarily on the idea that we can have direct doxastic control in permissive situations, but they provide insufficient reason for thinking that permissive situations are actually possible, since they pay inadequate attention to the following worries: permissive situations seem inconsistent with the uniqueness thesis, permissive situations seem inconsistent with natural thoughts about epistemic akrasia, and vagueness threatens even if we push these worries aside. In this paper I argue that, on the understanding of permissive situations that is most useful for evaluating the disanalogy thesis, permissive situations clearly are possible.     

Discernibility by Symmetries

In this paper I introduce a novel strategy to deal with the indiscernibility problem for ante rem structuralism. The ante rem structuralist takes the ontology of mathematics to consist of abstract systems of pure relata. Many of such systems are totally symmetrical, in the sense that all of their elements are relationally indiscernible, so the ante rem structuralist seems committed to positing indiscernible yet distinct relata. If she decides to identify them, she falls into mathematical inconsistency while, accepting their distinctness, she finds herself unable to account for it. I show that the ante rem structuralist has in fact the resources to account for the distinctness of indiscernibles and that these resources come from the very symmetry properties of the mathematical objects that seem to pose problems for her.     

Hannah Arendt,Feminism, and the Politics of Alterity: “What Will We Lose If We Win?”

Hannah Arendt's early biography of Rahel Varnhagen, an eighteenth-century German-Jew, provides a revolutionary feminist component to her political theory. In it, Arendt grapples with the theoretical constitution of a female subject and relates Jewish alterity, identity, and history to feminist politics. Because she understood the “female condition” of difference as belonging to the political subject rather than an autonomous self, her theory entails a “politics of alterity” with applications for feminist practice.     

Dissociative identity disorder and ambivalence

While many theorists have argued that dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a case of multiple selves or persons in a single body, I maintain that DID instead should be understood as involving a single self who suffers from significant disruptions to self-consciousness. Evidence of overlapping abilities and memories, as well as the very logic of dissociation, supports the claim that DID results from internal conflict endured by a single self. Along these lines, I will maintain that alter-formation should be understood as the result of extreme emotional ambivalence. While it is true that subjects with DID exhibit volitional conflict, as Frankfurt [1988. The Importance of What We Care About. New York: Cambridge University Press; 1999. Necessity, Volition, and Love. New York: Cambridge University Press] maintains, I argue that these incompatible volitions have a deeper source: conflicting desires and affective stances concerning basic emotional needs that are not easily abandoned. A single subject turns to different alter-personalities as a way to cope with pervasive inner conflict while at the same time hiding contradictory impulses from herself.     

Negative and affirmative precepts

Summary That negative precepts play the critical role in the generalization principle is a consequence of the relationship of negative to affirmative precepts, i.e. that the negative give the essential negative condition for observing the affirmative precept. This relationship in turn is based on the nature of: 1) the negative precept which obliges to inaction and consequently demands action in order to violate it; 2) the affirmative precept which obliges to action and can be violated by inaction. Since action requires agency, and agency involves more responsibility than does the non-agency present in violating affirmative percepts, we conclude that violating negative precepts demands more responsibility and consequently that they oblige more than do affirmative precepts. To emphasize this critical role of agency I shall conclude with an example proposed by Michael Tooley: Imagine a machine which contains two children, John and Mary. If one pushes a button, John will be killed, but Mary will emerge unharmed. If one does not push the button, John will emerge unharmed, but Mary will be killed. In the first case one kills John, while in the second case one merely lets Mary die. Does one seriously wish to say that the action of intentionally refraining from pushing the button is morally preferable to the action of pushing it, even though exactly one person will perish in either case?²⁰ Tooley's judgment on this example indicates that the outcome - in either case one person will perish - is the sole moral determinant (intentions do not enter this case) and that agency of pushing the button is of no moral significance. Yet, if you, the reader, stood before this machine and tried to decide what you should do, the fact of your agency in pushing the button would control your decision. Consider pushing the button. What reason could you have for that action? That otherwise Mary would die. But who can say that Mary's life is more valuable than John's? That Mary will die is no valid reason for pushing the button. But what of saving Mary's life? You can't do that without yourself actively killing John. But if you don't, Mary will die. This is true, but she will not die from your agency, and this is critical to your choice. What a machine may or may not do may or may not be under your control. What you do is under your control, and you may not do evil, not even that good may come of it. Consequently, you would be forced to say: the decision of intentionally refraining from pushing the button is morally preferable to the action of pushing it even though exactly one person perishes in either case.     

The Misguided Marriage of Responsibility and Autonomy

Much of the literature devoted to the topics of agent autonomy and agent responsibility suggests strong conceptual overlaps between the two, although few explore these overlaps explicitly. Beliefs of this sort are commonplace, but they mistakenly conflate the global state of being autonomous with the local condition of acting autonomously or exhibiting autonomy in respect to some act or decision. Because the latter, local phenomenon of autonomy seems closely tied to the condition of being responsible for an act, we tend to think of the former, global phenomenon as a condition of responsibility as well. But one can act autonomously, or manifest autonomy with respect to some occurrent state, without satisfying the conditions for autonomous agency. Autonomous agency and responsible agency are logically distinct in part due to the varient conceptions of rationality each calls for. Both agent responsibility and holding a person responsible imply a fairly ``thick' form of rationality, where rationality embodies a normative component and is a matter of satisfying criteria that are objective in the sense that they are independent of what a person happens to want or to value. But autonomous agency calls for a quite different, ``thin' conception of instrumental rationality.     

Reply to Nadler: Spinoza and the metaphysics of suicide

Steven Nadler has argued that Spinoza can, should, and does allow for the possibility of suicide committed as a free and rational action. Given that the conatus is a striving for perfection, Nadler argues, there are cases in which reason guides a person to end her life based on the principle of preferring the lesser evil. If so, Spinoza’s disparaging statements about suicide are intended to apply only to some cases, whereas in others (such as the case of Seneca) he would grant that suicide is dictated by reason. Here, I object to Nadler’s interpretation by showing that it conflicts with Spinoza’s metaphysical psychology. Even given Nadler’s interpretation of the conatus doctrine, the possibility that reason could guide a person to commit suicide is incompatible with the conatus of the mind. Spinoza holds that the mind cannot contain an adequate idea ‘that excludes the existence of our body’ (E3p10). Yet, as I argue, in order for reason to guide a person voluntarily to end her life, she would need to have an adequate idea representing her death – an idea that excludes the existence of her body. For this reason, Spinoza's system rules out the possibility of rational suicide.     

Not as a Means: Killing as a Side Effect in Self‐defense

A person drives her well‐maintained car cautiously and alertly to the movies. Freak circumstances send the car out of control. It veers in the direction of a pedestrian whom it will kill unless she, or a third party, blows it up with a grenade. Whether the driver is liable to be thusly killed polarizes debates about the ethics of self‐defense. But debaters frequently conflate the questions of whether and by what means the driver is liable to be killed. The paper separates these questions: it argues the driver's liability to lethal harm need not entail her liability to the grenade.     

THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE: RACHEL CARSON'S VIEWS OF ANIMALS

Abstract The publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, a compelling blend of stories, natural history, human values, and biological facts, in 1962 was instrumental in launching the modern environmental movement. We consider Carson's attitude toward animals in Silent Spring and in her other writings. Carson favored responsible stewardship and was more of an animal welfarist and environmentalist/conservation biologist who privileged ecosystems and species than an animal activist who privileged individuals, and she did not advocate an animal‐rights agenda. There is clear tension in Carson's writings. Often she seems troubled by attempting to come across as a moderate and practical scientist, and some of her words, when considered out of context, could lead one to label her as an animal‐rightist. While some of Carson's writing favors human‐centered interests, she did not believe that only humans counted. Her warnings about silent springs must be taken seriously, perhaps even more seriously than when they were penned more than four decades ago. Carson was a passionate and extremely influential activist and if a world of persons like her were in charge of our global environmental policies, we and our fellow animals would be in much better shape than we currently are.