Alfred Mele

This volume is aimed at readers who wish to move beyond debates about the existence of free will and the efficacy of consciousness and closer to appreciating how free will and consciousness might operate. It draws from philosophy and psychology, the two fields that have grappled most fundamentally with these issues. In this wide-ranging volume, the contributors explore such issues as how free will is connected to rational choice, planning, and self-control; roles for consciousness in decision making; the nature and power of conscious deciding; connections among free will, consciousness, and quantum mechanics; why free will and consciousness might have evolved; how consciousness develops in individuals; the experience of free will; effects on behavior of the belief that free will is an illusion; and connections between free will and moral responsibility in lay thinking. Collectively, these state-of-the-art chapters by accomplished psychologists and philosophers provide a glimpse into the future of research on free will and consciousness.

Brian McLaughlin, in “Incontinent Belief” (Journal of Philosophical Research 15 [1989-90], pp. 115-26), takes issue with my investigation, in lrrationality (Oxford University Press, 1987), of a doxastic analogue of akratic action. He deems what I term “strict akratic belief” philosophically uninteresting. In the present paper, I explain that this assessment rests on a serious confusion about the sort of possibility that is at issue in my chapter on the topic, correct a variety of misimpressions, and rebut McLaughlin’s arguments as they apply to the psychological possibility of strict akratic belief and to the etiology of beliefs generally.

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.

How are our actions sorted into those that are intentional and those that are not? The philosophical and psychological literature on this topic is livelier now than ever, and we seek to make a contribution to it here. Our guiding question in this article is easy to state and hard to answer: How do various factors— specifically, features of vignettes—that contribute to majority folk judgments that an action is or is not intentional interact in producing the judgment? In pursuing this question we draw on a number of empirical studies, including some of our own, and we sketch some future studies that would shed light on our topic. We emphasize that the factors that concern us here are limited to features of stories to which subject respond: examples include the value of the action asked about, the agent’s being indifferent to performing that action, and the agent’s seeking to perform it. We do not discuss underlying cognitive or emotional processes here, nor do we discuss whether respondents are making errors of any kind. (Both of these issues are discussed in Cushman and Mele [forthcoming].) 1. THREE KINDS OF ACTION In the present section we draw some distinctions that set the stage for our discussion of empirical results. Our actions have effects, and an agent’s bringing about such an effect is itself an action. For example, unbeknownst to Ann, her unlocking the door to her house frightened an intruder. That is, at least one effect of Ann’s unlocking her door was the intruder’s fright. Her bringing about this effect—that is, her frightening the intruder—is an action. Side-effect actions, as we understand this..

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.

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?

In this paper I shall attempt to locate and articulate Aristotle's answer to a foundational question in the theory of action—viz., 'what is the proximate (efficient) cause of action?' This task is certainly of historical importance, since one cannot hope to understand Aristotle's interesting and influential theory of action without understanding his views on the proximate efficient cause of action. But the present project is not, I should think, of historical interest alone; for it has recently been argued by a leading figure in the study of action, Myles Brand, that "What [proximately] initiates action?' is the fundamental question in action theory, and we shall see that Aristotle has the makings of a very plausible answer.

Traditional libertarians about freedom of choice and action and about moral responsibility are hard-line incompatibilists. They claim that these freedoms (which they believe to be possessed by at least some human beings) are incompatible with determinism, and they take the same view of moral responsibility. I call them hard libertarians. A softer line is available to theorists who have libertarian sympathies. A theorist may leave it open that freedom of choice and action and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism but may maintain that the falsity of determinism is required for more desirable species of these freedoms and for a more desirable brand of moral responsibility. This is a soft=-libertarian line. Soft libertarians would be disappointed to discover that determinism is true, but they would not conclude that no one has ever acted or chosen freely and that no one has ever been morally responsible for anything.1 In principle, a soft libertarian may or may not treat the desirability at issue in a way that relativizes it to individuals. The brand of soft libertarianism to be explored here is relativistic: it maintains that at least some human agents are possessed of kinds of freedom and moral responsibility that are incompatible with determinism and are reasonably preferred by at least some of these agents to any kind of freedom or moral responsibility that is consistent with the truth of determinism.

What may cause individuals to act contrarily to their better judgment is that although they have a good reason (or reasons) not to perform an action, they have an insignificant reason to do it. Supposing that the decision to act one way or the other is made by a free agent, un- derstood in the libertarian sense that the person had alternative possi- bilities of action, how does one account for the the actual choice of one alternative? In other words, what accounts for the difference between the fact that one of two alternative possibilities is chosen and the fact that, in another possible world, the other one is chosen? “Event-causal libertarians” who are committed to the view that the situation up until the very moment of choice is identical in both cases, so that the only difference consists in the choice itself, would have to hold that there is nothing that accounts for this difference and that the difference is a matter of luck. A choice contrary to the person’s conscious belief of what is best to do would then be a matter of bad luck, not of weakness of will. Alfred Mele investigates how an event-causal libertarian view that admits these premises can account for the fact that an akratic agent acts freely and responsibly. In addition, he discusses how such a view explains the difference between akratic actions and radical breakdowns of agency. He also gives an account of how the capacity to form free actions for which one is responsible is developed in childhood.

Al is nearly finished sweeping his kitchen floor when he notices, on a counter, a corkscrew that should be put in a drawer. He intends to put the corkscrew away as soon as he is finished with the floor; but by the time he returns the broom and dustpan to the closet, he has forgotten what he intended to do. Al knows (or has a true belief) that there is something he intended to do now in the kitchen. He gazes around the room and tries to recall what it was. Within a minute or so, without seeing the corkscrew, Al recalls. He puts the corkscrew away. Did Al have an intention to put the corkscrew away that persisted from the time he acquired the intention until he put the corkscrew away? That is one of my guiding questions in this article.

Libertarians hold that free action and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism and that some human beings occasionally act freely and are morally responsible for some of what they do. Can libertarians who know both that they are right and that they are free make sincere promises? Peter van Inwagen, a libertarian, contends that they cannot—at least when they assume that should they do what they promise to do, they would do it freely. Probably, this strikes many readers as a surprising thesis for a libertarian to hold. In light of van Inwagen's holding it, the title of his essay—‘Free Will Remains a Mystery’—may seem unsurprising.