Neil Roughley

Anger is frequently social, in the sense of being directed at other agents. It is, moreover, characteristically expressed by demands addressed to those agents. One prominent species of social anger, moral resentment, has been influentially claimed to itself have imperative structure. The article examines the thesis that all social anger has imperatival intentionality. Two objections seem to speak against the thesis: first, the claim that only speech acts, not attitudes, can be addressed, and second, the claim that demands constitutive of social anger and moral resentment would, for three distinct reasons, be incoherent. The objections are disarmed by the development of a new analysis of generic social anger as addressed aggressive aversion – the AAA account. According to the account, generic social anger is a negative desire (aversion) qualified both by a further desire concerning interaction with the aversion’s target (address) and by triggered bodily dispositions to aggression. The analysis lays the ground for an explanation of the specificity of moral resentment as a species of anger. Its core, backward-looking aversion to an action on moral grounds, naturally generates an additional, forward-looking desire, whose object is an enduring feature of the primary aversion’s object: the reason-responsive and executive mechanisms expressed in the impermissible action. The account of anger as addressed aggressive aversion grounds a rebuttal of all four reasons taken to speak against the thesis that social anger is imperatival. In the process, the AAA account emerges as a strong contender to be our best way of understanding human anger.

Everyday understanding takes empathy to be not just emotional mirroring with a specific etiology, but also a form of feeling for, or on behalf of, another. This article proposes an analysis of that for-relation. The analysis begins with the phenomenon of acting on behalf, which is then used as a template for an analysis of generic on behalfness, applicable to both action and emotion. The key to the relation turns out to be an agent’s espousal of a target’s goal, in light of which the agent acquires reasons for acting or feeling.

Chapter 4 develops the idea of an expressive explication of the attitudes, which grounds in the claim that there is an essential structural analogy between mental states and linguistic utterances. The strengths of the conception are first demonstrated by showing how it explains the phenomenon of Moore-paradoxical sentences for beliefs. Applied to wants*, it reveals them as essentially optative attitudes, that is, as mental states articulated by utterances of the form “Let it be the case that p”. The optative analysis is then confronted with two competing proposals stemming from the field of moral psychology. According to the first, axiological theory, “desires” entertain the same relation to the good as beliefs do to truth. The main argument for the view, Anscombe’s hermeneutic vertigo argument, is shown to conflate the putative incoherence of a non-axiological concept of wanting with the incomprehensibility of an agent’s reasons for wanting. According to the second proposal, the pure entailment view, which revives the main premise of the Logical Connection Argument, talk of “desires” is, in at least certain important cases, simply a way of characterising an action as intentional, a characterisation that makes no substantial contribution to its explanation. I distinguish three reasons for this view and show why none of them justify the claim that wants* are mere ascriptions.In an appendix to the chapter, the optative analysis is related to the metaphor of “direction of fit”. I argue against reductive attempts to rid us of the metaphor, claiming instead that it marks an irreducibly normative feature of attitudinising. At the close, the chapter returns to the suggestion at the end of Chap. 2, that there may be creatures that play host to motivational states without being believers. This possibility turns out to be entailed by the conception of wanting* as the setting of subjective standards, which, unlike the objective standard required by belief, don’t require the capacities for full Davidsonian triangulation.

Chapter 2 develops a first sketch of a systematic answer to Aristotle’s question as to what it is in “the soul” that originates movement. As I take it that this is the founding question not only of a philosophy of practical mind, but also of empirical motivational psychology, I approach the topic with an eye to how motivational psychologists circumscribe their discipline. The chapter proposes a skeletal understanding of motivated behaviour, the type of “movements” with which Aristotle’s question is plausibly concerned. On the basis of a non-standard understanding of “behaviour”, I propose a three-factor analysis of the kind of state to which creatures must be playing host when behaving in a manner that can count as motivated. According to the proposal, which urges recognition of the importance of “the Frege point”, motivational states require a representational component, including a form of primitive self-reference, alongside a marker of attitudinal mode and the functional feature of motivational force. On this basis, I argue that James’ ideo-motor theory, which has gained considerable popularity in psychology, cannot be a theory of motivated behaviour. I also examine the relationship between motivational force and arousal and offer arguments as to why, pace the Logical Connection Argument, the conceptual relation between motivational states and motivated behaviour does not exclude the relation also being explanatory.The chapter closes with a discussion of whether there are non-linguistic animals whose behaviour we should classify as motivated. Various empirical phenomena that are best explained by flexibility in the animals’ adaptation of means to ends suggest that the answer is affirmative. Moreover, a case of what I call “one-way triangulation” provides an indication that, in contrast to what Davidson thought, motivational states may be possessed by a creature in the absence, not only of language, but also of doxastic states.

Chapter 9 takes us from the analysis of decision to an analysis of intention. I begin by arguing for conditions which ensure that the products of certain decisions persist as decisional intentions. I then turn to nondecisional intentions, distinguishing five distinct kinds. Nondecisional intentions, it turns out, don’t only differ from their decisional conspecifics in the question of their non-subjection to a persistence requirement, but also in the matter of their non-subjection to belief constraints. This difference supports the claim that the word “intention” doesn’t always pick out the same constellation of features. I go on to develop the claim that the contextually unique practical status of nondecisional intentions (“being set”) grounds in a combination of motivational strength, conscious wanting* and not seeing the question of one’s realisation of the want’s* content as an “open question”. My defence of this claim involves arguing for the necessity of the each of these three components.First, of the five types of nondecisional intentions, those nondeliberatively generated from conclusive reasons judgements raise the farthest-reaching questions for a motivational analysis. I argue that they are covered by a broad principle relating various kinds of action-controlling states to conclusive reasons judgements.Second, the claim that nondecisional intending requires conscious wanting* is defended against the suspicion that there are whole clusters of cases in which intention needs nothing of the sort. Here I look at empirical literature on cases in which action control is “delegated to the environment”, concluding that neither “implementation intentions” nor habitual intentions get by without conscious optative thoughts. These cases are to be distinguished from routine components of composite actions, which may be goal-directed, but not intended.Third, the metaphor of not leaving a question open is interpreted as either the non-triggering, or unresponsiveness to the triggering, of the dispositional want* to deliberate that is in the background of full intentional agency.At the end of the chapter, the results of the discussion are brought together in a disjunctive definition of intending, which is defended against scepticism about the status of disjunctive definitions and supported by empirical psychological data concerning intention’s ontogenesis.

The natural first step on the road to an adequate systematic understanding of intending, taken in Chap. 6, is a discussion of intention’s relation to belief. This is natural for two reasons. First, the linguistic means of intention expression have a grammatically assertoric form and second, belief may appear to be precisely what needs adding to optative attitudinising in order to generate intention. After discussing forms of intention’s expression, and noting that the English language provides different means of expressing intention’s formation and its possession, I discuss and reject attempts to understand intention’s “supra-optative” commitment component in doxastic terms, which take the assertoric form of typical intention expressions literally. I also reject the positions of Anscombe and Velleman, for whom intention can be identified with either an epistemic or doxastic attitude. Rather, intention, I claim, in agreement with Bratman and Mele, has only an extremely weak negative doxastic condition. What is decisive is, however, the explanation of this condition. Here I follow Aristotle, for whom the doxastic condition on prohairesis derives from the identical doxastic condition on the practical deliberation through which the attitude is generated. The key here is the practical character of practical deliberation, that is, its performance in order to generate an action-controlling attitude. This, I claim, accounts for closely related conceptual and rational doxastic conditions on deliberative intending. These are then distinguished from intending’s typical doxastic symptoms, which, according to social psychological studies, may be at least in part caused subpersonally by our decisions or by our planning to implement decisions. I conclude that the discussion of belief, rather than uncovering the completing conditions that transform an optative into an executive attitude, on the contrary, indicates that the step into commitment will have to be explained by different means.

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 ‘doctrine of double effect’ claims that it is in some sense morally less problematic to bring about a negatively evaluated state of affairs as a ‘side effect’ of one’s pursuit of another, morally unobjectionable aim than it is to bring it about in order to achieve that aim. In a first step, this chapter discusses the descriptive difference on which the claim is built. That difference is shown to derive from the attitudinal distinction between intention and ‘acceptance’, a distinction that is in turn claimed to ground in a feature of the decisions that generate the attitudes in question. The resulting analysis is then plugged into two different normative principles that may each be thought to specify the intuitions behind the doctrine of double effect, but which have frequently been conflated. The first concerns the permissibility of bringing about the merely accepted state of affairs, the second its reduced attributability. It is argued that examination of the intuitions behind the two principles supports neither version of the doctrine. Rather, the intuitions are best captured in an attribution principle based on subjective probabilities and a principle of attitude evaluation, neither of which make explicit reference to the attitude of intending.

What is the basis of our capacity to act morally? This is a question that has been discussed for millennia, with philosophical debate typically distinguishing two sources of morality: reason and sentiment. This collection aims to shed light on whether the human capacity to feel for others really is central for morality and, if so, in what way. To tackle these questions, the authors discuss how fellow feeling is to be understood: its structure, content and empirical conditions. Also discussed are the exact roles that relevant psychological features - specifically: empathy, sympathy and concern - may play within morality. The collection is unique in bringing together the key participants in the various discussions of the relation of fellow feeling to moral norms, moral concepts and moral agency. By integrating conceptually sophisticated and empirically informed perspectives, Forms of Fellow Feeling will appeal to readers from philosophy, psychology, sociology and cultural studies.

In the book’s first chapter, the topic of practical mind is approached via a brief survey of a number of important positions in the history of philosophy. The founding question for a philosophy of practical mind is raised by Aristotle when he asks what it is in the soul that originates movement. I discuss the answers to this question proposed by Plato, Aristotle himself, Hobbes and Hume, before rounding off the historical survey with a look at the introduction of the notion of “pro-attitude” in the last century. The key question put to the various proposals concerns their capacity to give a unitary account of what it is that “moves” agents. Put in terms of the last of the suggestions discussed: is there a single pro-component that unites the diverse ways of being for something under one genus? And if so, is that pro-component the feature that moves us?

The final chapter of the study argues that the disjunctive analysis of intention provides a distinctively plausible explanation of the intention-consequential (IC) requirements of practical rationality. Consistent with an analysis that sees intentions as optative attitudes accompanied by only minimal, negative doxastic conditions, I reject cognitive explanations of the IC requirements, arguing instead that they represent constraints on an agent’s project of self-forging, a project that is in an important sense orthogonal to her responses to everyday reasons. The chapter discusses the most prominent noncognitivist model, Michael Bratman’s grounding of the norms in the demands of self governance. The model, I argue, is vitiated by its normative functionalist framework, which, because it cannot, on pain of circularity, ground its explanation in features of intending, has to postulate a specific reason behind intention’s subjection to the requirements. However, because the norms are in place for all intentional agency, they cannot depend on specific aims or reasons, even reasons most of us have, but need to be grounded in intentional agency itself.According to my constructive proposal, to postdeliberatively opt to perform certain actions is to “take personal responsibility” for them, thus providing an anchor for their attributability. It is a concern to provide such an anchor, I claim, that has conferred on intention the shape it has. The reason for intending’s subjection to the IC requirements is that their contravention renders responsibility-taking unintelligible: an agent who intends in violation of the IC requirements becomes opaque to himself, thus necessarily losing his hold on his own agency. This fact provides agents with a distinct kind of reason, one that is both stringent and, under certain circumstances strikingly weak, a conjunction of features which suffices as an answer to the scepticism expressed by Broome as to whether rationality can be shown to generate reasons. I then show how the notion of taking personal responsibility extends to cover cases of nondecisional intending. The explanation of this extension is, crucially, in part normative. It grounds in the deeply entrenched demand that persons deliberate on whether they are willing to see themselves as the realisers of their motivationally unrivalled wants*.

Recent philosophical work on the concept of human nature disagrees on how to respond to the Darwinian challenge, according to which biological species do not have traditional essences. Three broad kinds of reactions can be distinguished: conservative intrinsic essentialism, which defends essences in the traditional sense, eliminativism, which suggests dropping the concept of human nature altogether, and constructive approaches, which argue that revisions can generate sensible concepts of human nature beyond traditional essences. The different constructive approaches pick out one or two of the three epistemic roles that are fused in traditional essentialist conceptions of human nature: descriptive, explanatory, definitional, or explanatory and definitional. These turns towards diverging epistemic roles are best interpreted pluralistically: there is a plurality of concepts of human nature that have to be clearly distinguished, each with a legitimate role in respective scientific contexts.

Gewohnheitshandlungen stellen für die kausale Handlungstheorie eine Herausforderung dar: Einerseits werden sie offenkundig auf weite Strecken nicht durch vorgängige bewusste Wünsche gesteuert. Andererseits glauben wir, dass dabei der Akteur in der Regel über sie diejenige Form von Kontrolle ausübt, die sie als seine absichtlichen Handlungen qualifiziert. Somit kann es den Anschein haben, dass Gewohnheitshandlungen entscheidende Gegenbeispiele für eine Theorie liefern, die die für Absichtlichkeit entscheidende Handlungskontrolle an die Verursachung durch bewusste Wünsche bindet. Der Artikel untersucht drei einschlägige Typen von routinemäßig ausgeführten Handlungen: erstens komplexe Alltagshandlungen wie Autofahren oder Ins-Bett-Gehen, die häufig 'geistesabwesend' vollzogen werden; zweitens Routinen, die, wie die Vorführung eines Akrobaten, aus eingeschliffenen körperlichen Sequenzen bestehen, deren erfolgreiche Ausführung die Abwesenheit bewusster Interventionen geradezu erfordert; und drittens 'gedankenlos' ausgeübte Mikrohandlungssequenzen wie das Herumprobieren mit einem Schlüssel im Schlüsselloch. Es zeigt sich nicht nur, dass alle drei Handlungstypen einer kausalen Analyse zugänglich sind, sondern auch dass ihre Analyse wichtige Dimensionen des Phänomens der Handlungskontrolle zutage fördert

The last chapter of Part I discusses the relations between optative attitudinising, consciousness and affect. The explication of wanting* in terms of its linguistic expression suggests that conscious thoughts of the appropriate form are sufficient for their bearer to be the bearer of the corresponding attitude. I argue that this is indeed so, although no such thought is necessary for a want’s* correct ascription. Cases of what I call “subintentional action”, of an agent’s motivated inaccessibility to her own motivation as well as experimental evidence from goal priming all demonstrate the lack of any such necessity. Nevertheless, although features of the optative syndrome that we would otherwise be at a loss to explain can warrant the ascription of unconscious wants*, there can be no strict criteria for their correct ascription.Only with conscious wanting* do we have such a criterion. For this reason, it remains the phenomenon that allows us to get a conceptual grip on our optative attitudes. This is the case, even though agents may sometimes be mistaken as to whether they “really want” something, a mistake whose possibility depends on the fact that the latter phrase generally picks out wanting* in conjunction with further features. One such further feature that has frequently been seen as decisive for wanting in one way or another is that of pleasure or displeasure. The chapter closes with a survey of the various relationships between wanting* and affect. I offer arguments as to why, in spite of a long philosophical tradition to the contrary and its revival at the hands of Galen Strawson, none of these relationships qualify as constitutive of the generic concept a theory of wanting should be trying to reconstruct.