Alfred Mele

Philosophical discussion of emotional responses to fiction has been dominated by work on the paradox of fiction, which is often construed as asking whether and how we can experience genuine emotions in reaction to fiction. One may also ask more generally how we ought to respond to fictional works, a question that has to do both with what we should do when reacting to fiction and with what we should and should not let happen to us. It is possible to delineate any principles regarding the rationality, and more generally, the appropriateness of emotional responses to fiction?

Research in psychology indicates that situations powerfully impact human behavior. Often, it seems, features of situations drive our behavior even when we remain unaware of these features or their influence. One response to this research is pessimism about human agency: human agents have little conscious control over their own behavior, and little insight into why they do what they do. In this paper we review classic and more recent studies indicating “the power of the situation,” and argue for a more optimistic response. In our view, though psychological research indicates situational influence, it also indicates that knowledge about the impact of situations on behavior can boost agents’ power to counteract harmful situational effects.

This article reviews some recent empirical work on lay judgments about what agents do intentionally and what they intend in various stories and explores its bearing on the philosophical project of providing a conceptual analysis of intentional action. The article is a case study of the potential bearing of empirical studies of a variety of folk concepts on philosophical efforts to analyze those concepts and vice versa. Topics examined include double effect; the influence of moral considerations on judgments about what is done intentionally and about what is intended; the influence of considerations of luck, skill, and causal deviance on judgments about what agents do intentionally; what interesting properties all cases of intentional action might share; and the debate between proponents of, respectively, "the Simple View" of the connection between intentional action and intention and "the Single Phenomenon View" of that connection. A substantial body of literature is devoted to the project of analyzing intentional action [1] . In this article, I explore the bearing on that project of some recent empirical work on lay judgments about what is done intentionally and about what is intended. This article may reasonably be regarded as a case study of the potential bearing of empirical studies of a range of folk concepts on philosophical efforts to analyze those concepts and, likewise, of the potential bearing of attempted philosophical analyses of folk concepts on empirical studies of those concepts.

In instances of "twisted" self-deception, people deceive themselves into believing things that they do not want to be true. In this, twisted self-deception differs markedly from the "straight" variety that has dominated the philosophical and psychological literature on self-deception. Drawing partly upon empirical literature, I develop a trio of approaches to explaining twisted self-deception: a motivation-centered approach; an emotion-centered approach; and a hybrid approach featuring both motivation and emotion. My aim is to display our resources for exploring and explaining twisted self-deception and to show that promising approaches are consistent with a plausible position on straight self-deception

As this passage from a recent book on the psychology of decision-making indicates, deciding seems to be part of our daily lives. But what is it to decide to do something? It may be true, as some philosophers have claimed, that to decide to A is to perform a mental action of a certain kind – specifically, an action of forming an intention to A. (Henceforth, the verb ‘form’ in this context is to be understood as an action verb.) Even if this is so, we are faced with pressing questions. Do we form all of our intentions? If not, how does forming an intention differ from other ways of acquiring one? Do we ever, in fact, form intentions, or do we rather merely acquire them in something like the way we acquire beliefs or desires? These are some of the questions that will occupy me here. My aim is to clarify the nature of deciding to act and to make a case for the occurrence of genuine acts of intention formation.

Central to the philosophy of action is a concern to understand intentional action. Two pertinent questions may be distinguished. What is it to do something intentionally? How is intentional behavior to be explained? Although, ideally, a review of recent work in the philosophy of action would attend equally to both questions, space does not permit my doing justice to both here. I shall focus on the definitional or conceptual issue and examine work on the explanatory issue only insofar as it sheds light on what it is to do something intentionally.

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.

This article describes a neo-Aristotelian conception of self-control, a concept that seems essential to what it means to be a mature human person. It discusses the moral condition known as akrasia and the conception of self that underpins it. While Aristotle regarded the human self to be primarily rational where reason is taken in a strong sense, this article suggests a more holistic conception of the self, where to act out of passion may not mean that one is acting without self-control. This means that the kind of inner conflict associated with akrasia should not be explained purely in terms of rational versus irrational forces.

John Christman, in 'Autonomy and Personal History,' advances a novel genetic or historical account of individual autonomy.1 He formulates 'the conditions of the [i.e., his] new model of autonomy' as follows: (i) A person Pis autonomous relative to some desireD if it is the case that P did not resist the development of D when attending to this process of development, or P would not have resisted that development had P attended to the process; (ii) The lack of resistance to the development of D did not take place (or would not have) under the influence of factors that inhibit self-reflection; and (iii) The self-reflection involved in condition (i) [sic] is (minimally) rational and involves no self-deception. (11) Although Christman makes a telling case for the relevance of personal history to personal autonomy, I shall argue that he has gone too far in that direction.

Addicts often are portrayed as agents driven by irresistible desires in the philosophical literature on free will. Although this portrayal is faithful to a popular conception of addiction, that conception has encountered opposition from a variety of quarters (e.g., Bakalar & Grinspoon, 1984; Becker & Murphy, 1988; Peele, 1985 and 1989; Szasz, 1974). My concern here is some theoretical issues surrounding a strategy for self-control of potential use to addicts on the assumption that their pertinent desires fall short of irresistibility. I offer no defense of this assumption; rather, I treat it as a point of departure for one approach to understanding addiction in action. I begin by sketching some conceptual and theoretical background and then turn to a proposal of George Ainslie's (1992) about temptation and self-control and to some reservations that Michael Bratman (1966) has expressed about it. I will argue that in some scenarios typical of addicts, Ainslie's proposal survives Bratman's objections. My guiding question is this: How can behavior exhibiting self-control or its contrary in addicts who are concerned to resist relevant temptations be accommodated in a general theory of human action that features a broad array of so-called "intentional attitudes" as important explanatory items? The attitudes that primarily concern me here are desire, intention, belief, and a species of evaluative judgment.

Tackling some central problems in the philosophy of action, Mele constructs an explanatory model for intentional behavior, locating the place and significance of such mental phenomena as beliefs, desires, reason, and intentions in the etiology of intentional action. Part One comprises a comprehensive examination of the standard treatments of the relations between desires, beliefs, and actions. In Part Two, Mele goes on to develop a subtle and well-defended view that the motivational role of intentions is of a different sort from that of beliefs and desires. Mele, also offers a provocative explanation of how we come to have intentions and elaborates on his earlier work concerning akratic failures of will.

If, as much recent work in the philosophy of action suggests, intention plays a crucial role in the production of intentional action, a complete theory of explanation of intentional action should provide an account of the production of intentions themselves. I shall not offer a perfectly general account in this paper. Rather, I shall limit my investigation to intentions formed or acquired on the basis of practical evaluative inference and to the role of some important kinds of evaluative judgment in the etiology of these intentions.

This chapter defends the thesis that Benjamin Libet’s data do not justify his claim that “the brain ‘decides’ to initiate or, at least, to prepare to initiate [certain actions] before there is any reportable subjective awareness that such a decision has taken place” and do not justify associated worries about free will. The data are examined in light of familiar distinctions in action theory: for example, the distinction between deciding and wanting and the distinction between intending and wanting.

This paper criticizes the conjunction of two theses: 1) cognitivism about first-person moral ought-beliefs, the thesis (roughly) that such beliefs are attitudes with truth-valued contents; 2) robust internalism about these beliefs, the thesis that, necessarily, agents' beliefs that they ought, morally, to A constitute motivation to A. It is argued that the conjunction of these two theses places our moral agency at serious risk. The argument, which centrally involves attention to clinical depression, is extended to a less demanding, recent brand of internalist moral cognitivism. Philosophers discussed include Dancy, McDowell, McNaughton, and Nagel

Mele's ultimate purpose in this book is to help readers think more clearly about free will. He identifies and makes vivid the most important conceptual obstacles to justified belief in the existence of free will and meets them head on. Mele clarifies the central issues in the philosophical debate about free will and moral responsibility, criticizes various influential contemporary theories about free will, and develops two overlapping conceptions of free will--one for readers who are convinced that free will is incompatible with determinism (incompatibilists), and the other for readers who are convinced of the opposite (compatibilists). Luck poses problems for all believers in free will, and Mele offers novel solutions to those problems--one for incompatibilist believers in free will and the other for compatibilists. An early chapter of this empirically well-informed book clearly explains influential neuroscientific studies of free will and debunks some extravagant interpretations of the data. Other featured topics include abilities and alternative possibilities, control and decision-making, the bearing of manipulation on free will, and the development of human infants into free agents. Mele's theory offers an original perspective on an important problem and will garner the attention of anyone interested in the debate on free will

Strict akratic actions, by definition, are performed freely. However, agents may seem not to be selfgoverned with respect to such actions and therefore not to perform them autonomously. If appearance matches reality here, freedom and autonomy part company in this sphere. Do they? That is this article's guiding question. To make things manageable, it is assumed that there are free actions, including strict akratic actions. Two theses are defended. First, the combination of (i) an intentional action's being uncompelled and (ii) its being - or executing - in appropriate informational circumstances, a sane decision that, as the agent recognizes, is for a course of action that she believes to be inferior to an alternative course of action open to her is sufficient for the action's being freely performed. (Condition (i) provides elbow room allegedly needed for free action, and (ii) encompasses freedom-level psychological sophistication.) Second, the same combination is sufficient for an intentional action's being autonomously performed.