Alfred Mele

Self-deception and akratic action (roughly, uncompelled intentional action that is contrary to the agent's better judgment) are the leading dramatis personae in philosophical work on motivated irrational behavior. David Pears's Motivated Irrationality advances our understanding of both phenomena and of their causal and conceptual interrelationships. Irrationality, as Pears understands it, is "incorrect processing of information in the mind" (p. 14). In instances of motivated irrationality, the faulty processing is due to the influence of desires or wishes, broadly construed. There is no "clear-cut distinction," Pears maintains, between "hot" and "cold" (i.e., motivated and unmotivated) cases, "but there are some indubitable cases of each type at each end of the spectrum" (p. 14). At the hot end are central species of self-deception and akratic action. Pears's primary concern is with motivated irrationality of these two sorts. He also comments at some length on other species of motivated irrationality, on cold irrational belief, and on practical reasoning (Chapter 7) and practical truth (Chapter 8).

Must a rational ass equidistant from two equally attractive bales of hay starve for lack of a reason to prefer one bale to the other? Must a human being faced with a comparable, explicitly motivational, tie fail to pursue either option? Surely, one suspects, some practical resolution is possible. Surely, ties of either sort need not result in death or paralysis. But why? Donald Davidson has suggested that, in the human case, resolution depends upon the tie’s being broken---upon the agent’s coming to want to perform some action more than she wants to perform any genuine alternative. However, practical resolution is possible, I argue, even while the tie remains intact. This has significant implications for the theory of motivation. Most importantly, not all states that move us to action need be understood as moving us to A in virtue of their incorporating preponderant motivation to A.

This volume is a welcome contribution to the philosophy of action. Audi employs a host of subtle distinctions and carefully crafted arguments in defending a unified position on the major issues in action theory. In his characteristically lucid prose, he makes vivid the location of those issues at the intersection of ethics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind. Given the tight organization and the unifying introduction, this volume is an exceptionally cohesive collection of essays. It will make a lasting contribution to the literature in action theory.

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.

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.

The present book is a collection of essays exploring some classical dimensions of mind both from the perspective of an empirically-informed philosophy and from the point of view of a philosophically-informed psychology. In the last three decades, the level of interaction between philosophy and psychology has increased dramatically. As a contribution to this trend, this book explores some areas in which this interaction has been very productive – or, at least, highly provocative. The interaction between philosophy and psychology can be of different kinds. For example, psychology can be the subject for philosophy of science. In such a case, the philosopher of science pursues the usual set of issues (explanation, reduction, etc.) within the special case of psychology. Or, philosophy can be the source of proposals for improving psychology. Vice versa, the findings of psychology can be used to criticize philosophical theories and suggest ways to resolve some traditional philosophical questions about the mind, such as the nature of mental representation, perception, emotion, memory, consciousness and free will. The chapters in this book reflect these different forms of interaction in an effort to clarify issues and debates concerning some traditional cognitive capacities. The result is a philosophically and scientifically up-to-date collection of "cartographies of the mind."

Although much human action serves as proof that irrational behavior is remarkably common, certain forms of irrationality--most notably, incontinent action and self-deception--pose such difficult theoretical problems that philosophers have rejected them as logically or psychologically impossible. Here, Mele shows that, and how, incontinent action and self-deception are indeed possible. Drawing upon recent experimental work in the psychology of action and inference, he advances naturalized explanations of akratic action and self-deception while resolving the paradoxes around which the philosophical literature revolves. In addition, he defends an account of self-control, argues that "strict" akratic action is an insurmountable obstacle for traditional belief-desire models of action-explanation, and explains how a considerably modified model accommodates action of this sort.