Alfred Mele

ALTHOUGH Aristotle's work on akrasia has prompted numerous competing interpretations, at least one point seems clear: incontinent action is, for him, dependent upon some deficiency in the agent's cognitive condition at the time of action. But why, exactly, did he take this view? This question, my central concern in the present paper, is not just a query about Aristotle's understanding of incontinent action. It leads us at once into a tangled web of questions about his conception of human action and its psychological antecedents, questions which careful attention to the issue at hand promises to illuminate.

My topic lies on conceptual terrain that is quite familiar to philosophers. For others, a bit of background may be in order. In light of what has filtered down from quantum mechanics, few philosophers today believe that the universe is causally deterministic. That is, to use Peter van Inwagen's succinct definition of “determinism,” few philosophers believe that “there is at any instant exactly one physically possible future.” Even so, partly for obvious historical reasons, philosophers continue to argue about whether free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism. Compatibilists argue for compatibility, and incompatibilists argue against it. Some incompatibilists maintain that free will and moral responsibility are illusions. But most are libertarians, libertarianism being the conjunction of incompatibilism and the thesis that at least some human beings are possessed of free will and moral responsibility.

Practical conflicts include conflicts in agents who judge, from the perspective of their own values, desires, beliefs, and the like, that one prospective course of action is superior to another but are tempted by what they judge to be the inferior course of action. A man who wants a late-night snack, even though he judges it best, from the identified perspective, to abide by his recent New Year's resolution against eating such snacks until he has lost ten pounds, is the locus of a practical conflict. So is a woman who judges it best (in the same way) to run a mile this morning but is tempted to spend the entire morning working in her office instead. The topic of this essay is practical outcomes of conflicts of this kind. My concern, more specifically, is with outcomes of two general kinds: akratic (from the classical Greek term akrasia: want of self-control) and enkratic (from enkrateia: self-control) actions.

One popular style of argument for the thesis that determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility features manipulation. Its thrust is that regarding moral responsibility, there is no important difference between various cases of manipulation in which agents who A are not morally responsible for A-ing and ordinary cases of A-ing in deterministic worlds. There is a detailed argument of this kind in Derk Pereboom’s recent book (2001: 112–26). His strategy in what he calls his ‘four-case argument’ (117) is to describe three cases of progressively weaker manipulation in which, he contends, the agent, Plum, is not morally responsible for killing his victim and to compare them to a related deterministic case that involves no manipulation. Pereboom argues that what blocks Plum’s moral responsibility for the killing in the first three cases is the fact that ‘his action results from a deterministic causal process that traces back to factors beyond his control’ and that, because this fact also obtains in the fourth case, Plum is not morally responsible for that killing either (116). My thesis is that Pereboom’s argument fails.

In garden-variety instances of intentional action, according to a popular account, agents intend to perform actions of particular kinds, their intentions are based on reasons so to act, and the intentions issue in appropriate behaviour. On this account, the reasons that give rise to our intentions are reasons for action. Interesting questions for this view are raised by cases in which an agent seemingly has a reason to intend to do something while having no reason to do it. Can such reasons to intend issue in appropriate intentions? If so, can these intentions issue in corresponding intentional actions -- even though the agent has no reason to perform those actions? If these questions are properly given an affirmative answer, at least one popular thesis in the philosophy of action is false. One could not properly "define an intentional act as one which the agent does for a reason." A popular thesis about the explanation of intentional actions would be false as well -- namely, that explaining an intentional action (qua intentional) requires reference to reasons for action. My point of departure in this paper is a puzzle—Gregory Kavka's toxin puzzle(1983) -- in which agents seem to have an excellent reason to intend to A while having no reason at all to A. Generally, commentators on the puzzle have set their sights on questions about rational intentions. However, the puzzle raises difficult questions about intending itself and about the nature of intentional action. Showing that this is so is easy. Answering the question is more challenging.

Intention, intentional action, and the connections between them are central topics of the philosophy of action, a branch of the philosophy of mind. One who regards the subject matter of the philosophy of mind as having at its core some aspect of what lies between environmental input to beings with minds and behavioural output may be inclined to see the philosophy of action as concerned only with the output end of things. That would be a mistake. Many intentional actions depend for their development on the processing of input — both from the environment and from the body.

I start, in Section I, with the case for skepticism about the possibility of self-deception. In Sections II and III, I review attempts to explain how self-deception, conceived on a strict interpersonal model, is possible. Section IV addresses a variety of analyses of self-deception that involve modest departures from these strict models and canvasses associated attacks on the standard paradoxes. The emphasis there is on the static paradoxes, discussion of their dynamic coun terparts being reserved largely for Section V. Section VI takes up Herbert Fingarette's apparently radical departure from the interpersonal models of deception, while Section VII distinguishes among three approaches to the philosophical investigation of self-deception. I conclude, in Section VIII, with a comment on a promising direction for future work on the topic.

Ordinary usage supports both a relatively strong belief requirement on intention and a tight conceptual connection between intention and intentional action. More specifically, it speaks in favor both of the view that "S intends to A" entails "S believes that he (probably) will A" and of the thesis that "S intentionally A-ed" entails "S intended to A." So, at least, proponents of these ideas often claim or assume, and with appreciable justification. The conjunction of these two ideas, however, has some highly counterintuitive implications. This suggests that a certain skepticism about the coherence of ordinary usage of "intention" may be salutary. Fortunately, the skeptic need not abandon the quest for understanding. Much can be gleaned from a careful investigation of the functions attributed to intention in the literature. In this paper, I argue that the capacity of intention to do the work that the literature assigns it does not depend upon intentional A-ing's entailing intending to A, nor upon there being a strong belief constraint on intention, nor even a certain relatively weak belief constraint. I also develop an account of the features of intention in virtue of which it is capable of doing this work. This account provides the core of an adequate conception of intention. Toward the end of the paper, I briefly motivate acceptance of a modest belief requirement on non-functional grounds.

In this commentary, I discuss the three main articles in this volume that present survey data relevant to a search for something that might merit the label “the folk concept of intentional action” – the articles by Joshua Knobe and Arudra Burra, Bertram Malle, and Thomas Nadelhoffer. My guiding question is this: What shape might we find in an analysis of intentional action that takes at face value the results of all of the relevant surveys about vignettes discussed in these three articles?1 To simplify exposition, I assume that there is something that merits the label I mentioned.

Pristine belief/desire psychology has its limitations. Recognizing this, some have attempted to fill various gaps by adding more of the same, but at higher levels. Thus, for example, second-order desires have been imported into a more stream- lined view to explicate such important notions as freedom of the will, personhood, and valuing. I believe that we need to branch out as well as up, augmenting a familiar 'philosophical psychology' with psychological items that are irreducible to beliefs and desires (for support, see Mele 1987 and 1992). That theme will be left largely in the background here, however. The issue to be explored is a narrower one: the place of higher-order desires in a proper conception of continent and incontinent behavior. My guiding question is whether an action's counting as continent or incontinent depends upon the agent's having at the time a pertinent higher-order desire. The answer that I shall defend is, in a word, 'No.'.

Whereas some philosophers view all reasons for action as psychological states of agents, others—objective favourers theorists—locate the overwhelming majority of reasons for action outside the agent, in items that objectively favour courses of action. (The latter may count such psychological states as a person's belief that demons dance in his kitchen as a reason for him to seek psychiatric help.) This article explores options that objective favourers theorists have regarding cases in which, owing significantly to a false belief, an agent performs an action for which there is no objective favourer. Topics addressed include whether such theorists, including Jonathan Dancy himself, should accept Dancy's thesis that 'intentional, deliberate, purposeful action is always done for a reason' and whether there are two different concepts of reasons for action, one geared to action-evaluation and the other to action-explanation.