Bennett W. Helm

My central philosophical concern for many years has been with what it is to be a person. Of course, we persons are agents, indeed agents of a special sort, so understanding personhood has of course led me to think about that special sort of agency. Yet my background in the philosophy of mind leads me to think that any account of this special sort of agency must appeal to psychological capacities that are themselves grounded in an account of the relation between the mind and the body. Here I have in mind not the thought that we must provide a compatibilist account of free will (though I do think that is true) but rather the thought that it is all to easy for philosophers of action to make what turn out to be false presuppositions about the nature of psychological capacities like belief and desire and the role they play in motivation. Conversely, I think, philosophers of mind, focused too narrowly on worries about intentionality and consciousness, have offered accounts of various psychological capacities that are inadequate to understanding the sort of agency characteristic of us persons. Before I begin, I need to acknowledge my general orientation in philosophy of mind. Mental states and capacities are to be understood in terms of their place within an explanatory framework. Psychological explanation, however, I take to be fundamentally normative, a matter of locating particular phenomena within a broader pattern of rationality. This is a broadly Davidsonian or Dennettian orientation to the mind, according to which, as Davidson says, rationality is the constitutive ideal of the mental.1 In..

The motivational problem is the problem of understanding how we can have rational control over what we do. In the face of phenomena like weakness of the will, it is commonly thought that evaluation and reason can always remain intact even as we sever their connection with motivation; consequently, solving the motivational problem is thought to be a matter of figuring out how to bridge this inevitable gap between evaluation and motivation. I argue that this is fundamentally mistaken and results in a conception of practical reason that is motivationally impotent. Instead, I argue, a proper understanding of evaluation and practical reason must include not only evaluative judgments but emotions as well. By analyzing the role of emotions in evaluation and the rational interconnections among emotions, desires, and evaluative judgments, I articulate a new conception of evaluation and motivation according to which there is a conceptual connection between them, albeit one that allows for the possibility of weakness of the will.

How can we motivate ourselves to do what we think we ought? How can we deliberate about personal values and priorities? Bennett Helm argues that standard philosophical answers to these questions presuppose a sharp distinction between cognition and conation that undermines an adequate understanding of values and their connection to motivation and deliberation. Rejecting this distinction, Helm argues that emotions are fundamental to any account of value and motivation, and he develops a detailed alternative theory both of emotions, desires and evaluative judgements and of their rational interconnections. The result is an innovative theory of practical rationality and of how we can control not only what we do but also what we value and who we are as persons.