Neil Roughley

Autonomy and valuing are two significant practical phenomena that have been analysed in terms of higher-order wanting. I argue that reference to higher-order capacities is indeed required to make sense of both concepts, but also that such analyses need a more differentiated understanding of "wanting to want" than has hitherto been proposed. Central for autonomy is the instantiation of four types of optative relationship by an accountable agent under conditions of rationality. Valuing requires the disposition to instantiate only one of the relevant structures. Clarity on this allows an analysis of the precise relationships between the two phenomena.

The three-factor conception of motivational states opens the way for a move that severs any necessary connection that may be thought to exist between the “modal” and representational features of motivational states, on the one hand, and the physiological mechanisms brought together under the functional concept of motivational force on the other. It also allows us to see that other attitudinal features, specifically beliefs, are generally involved when we say someone is “motivated” to do something. Factoring out both “energising‘ and doxastic components allows us to abstract a “purified“ concept I label wanting*. This is the attitudinal core also present in those compound states generally referred to by everyday terms such as “want”, “desire”, “concern” and “interest”. Chapter 3 argues, firstly, that wants* are not merely motivational states, as they are also responsible for a whole syndrome of characteristic effects, “the optative syndrome”, and secondly, that they don’t necessarily motivate. Against functionalist positions in the philosophy of mind I argue that any attempt to define wanting* in terms of motivational or other effects distorts the primarily first-person and irreducibly practical character of desire’s attitudinal core. These points of criticism prepare the ground for a formulation of the requirements on a constructive theory of wanting*. The following two chapters attempt to meet them.

The last three chapters of the book contain my systematic proposal as to how intentions can be reductively understood whilst accounting for the specificity of the intentional syndrome, in particular whilst allowing us to understand the force of the requirements of intention rationality. The proposal is disjunctive and genetic: I claim that intentions are optative attitudes on which a contextually unique practical status has been conferred, a status that can be conferred by one of two aetiological mechanisms.The first of those mechanisms is decision, the most salient form of intention acquisition. This chapter aims to clarify what it is about deciding that enables it to confer that status. I begin by looking at cases in which deciding goes beyond motivational and evaluative phenomena, cases for which decision theory leaves no room and which are metaphysically overdramatised by Existentialism. In order to get a handle on the feature at work in these cases, I compare the different ways judging and deciding depend on at least minimal forms of theoretical inquiry and practical deliberation respectively. The decisive difference concerns the relationship between the motivations for the relevant form of reflection: whereas it is an essential, internal feature of inquiry that it be powered by a want* which specifies the conditions under which some belief content can count as an answer to the question that inaugurated that inquisitive episode, no such criterial specification of the motivation internal to minimal deliberation can be given. Instead, all that is required here is that the answer to the question that inaugurated deliberation be the deliberator’s own answer. An extended discussion of conceptions of the strong ownership of attitudes (Frankfurt, Korsgaard, Velleman) and of the relationship between conclusives reasons judgements and decisions supports this conclusion. After rejecting the claim that decisions might be actions, I conclude with a constructive proposal, according to which a decision is a conscious optative occurrence seen by its bearer as his own answer to the optative uncertainty that triggered an episode of minimal deliberation and which for that reason causes him to desist from further deliberation on the matter.

It is often claimed that humans are rational, linguistic, cultural, or moral creatures. What these characterizations may all have in common is the more fundamental claim that humans are normative animals, in the sense that they are creatures whose lives are structured at a fundamental level by their relationships to norms. The various capacities singled out by discussion of rational, linguistic, cultural, or moral animals might then all essentially involve an orientation to obligations, permissions and prohibitions. And, if this is so, then perhaps it is a basic susceptibility, or proclivity to normative or deontic regulation of thought and behavior that enables humans to develop the various specific features of their life form. This volume of new essays investigates the claim that humans are essentially normative animals in this sense. The contributors do so by looking at the nature and relations of three types of norms, or putative norms-social, moral, and linguistic-and asking whether they might all be different expressions of one basic structure unique to humankind. These questions are posed by philosophers, primatologists, behavioral biologists, psychologists, linguists, and cultural anthropologists, who have collaborated on this topic for many years. The contributors are committed to the idea that understanding normativity is a two-way process, involving a close interaction between conceptual clarification and empirical research.