Alfred Mele

Rationality has long been a central topic in philosophy, crossing standard divisions and categories. It continues to attract much attention in published research and teaching by philosophers as well as scholars in other disciplines, including economics, psychology, and law. The Oxford Handbook of Rationality is an indispensable reference to the current state of play in this vital and interdisciplinary area of study. Twenty-two newly commissioned chapters by a roster of distinguished philosophers provide an overview of the prominent views on rationality, with each author also developing a unique and distinctive argument.

Humean compatibilism is the combination of a Humean position on laws of nature and the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism. This article's aim is to situate Humean compatibilism in the current debate among libertarians, traditional compatibilists, and semicompatibilists about free will. We argue that a Humean about laws can hold that there is a sense in which the laws of nature are 'up to us' and hence that the leading style of argument for incompatibilism?the consequence argument?has a false premiss. We also display some striking similarities between Humean compatibilism and libertarianism, an incompatibilist view. For example, standard libertarians face a problem about luck, and we show that Humean compatibilists face a very similar problem.

Compatibilists about determinism and moral responsibility disagree with one another about the bearing of agents’ histories on whether or not they are morally responsible for some of their actions. Some stories about manipulated agents prompt such disagreements. In this article, I call attention to some of the main features of my own “history-sensitive” compatibilist proposal about moral responsibility, and I argue that arguments advanced by Michael McKenna and Manuel Vargas leave that proposal unscathed.

In his recent book, Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes, Fred Dretske develops at length a conception of behavior as part of an ingenious attempt to display the causal relevance of intentional states, qua intentional, to behavior. So-called folk-psychological explanations of intentional human behavior accord central explanatory roles to beliefs, desires, reasons, intentions, and the like. But how, Dretske asks, do the distinctively psychological features of such items figure in the etiology of behavior - how, for example, do reasons qua reasons contribute to human behavior? My primary concern here, however, is with a significant portion of the ground work that Dretske lays for the answer -specifically, his conception of behavior.

It is sometimes suggested that if, whenever we act intentionally, we do, or try to do, what we are most strongly motivated to do at the time, then we are at the mercy of whatever desire happens to be strongest at the time. I have argued elsewhere that this is false (Mele 1987, ch. 5; 1992, ch. 4; 1995, ch. 3; 1996). This essay provides another route to that conclusion, but that is not my primary aim. The goal of this paper is to display the bearing of some well-known experiments by physiologist Benjamin Libet on this issue. Philosophical discussion of these experiments has focused on Libet's claims about consciousness. The significance of these experiments for the topics of motivation and agential control also merits serious attention.

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.

Gregory Kavka’s toxin puzzle has spawned a lively literature about the nature of intention and of rational intention in particular. This paper is largely a critique of a pair of recent responses to the puzzle that focus on the connection between rationally forming an intention to A and rationally A-ing, one by David Gauthier and the other by Edward McClennen. It also critically assesses the two main morals Kavka takes reflection on the puzzle to support, morals about the nature of intention and the consequences of a divergence between “reasons for intending and reasons for acting.”

This article answers a question about luck, control, and free will that Bernard Berofsky raises in Nature’s Challenge to Free Will. The article focuses on a positive element of a typical libertarian view: namely, the thesis that there are indeterministic agents who sometimes act freely when their actions—and decisions in particular—are not deterministically caused by proximal causes. LFT is the target of what I call “the problem of present luck”—indeterministic luck at the time of decision. The bearing of such luck on LFT is explored

Child’s aim is to defend a pair of ideas in the philosophy of mind—"interpretationism" and "causalism"—and, especially, to establish their compatibility. "What is essential for interpretationism is the claim that thought is, in its nature, interpretable" ; "interpretability is a necessary condition for thought". Regarding belief, "the interpretationist thought is that we can give an account of the circumstances under which it is true that S believes that p by considering the circumstances under which S could be interpreted as believing that p, on the basis of what she says and does". Causalism is the idea that causation is central both to psychological explanation and to mental content. Thus, causalists hold, for example, that proper explanations of agents’ actions in terms of the reasons for which they acted are causal explanations, that perception is a causal process, and that the contents of our thoughts hinge on our causal histories. Both ideas are prominent in Donald Davidson’s work, which receives substantial attention in this book.

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.

Scientific arguments for the nonexistence of free will use data to support empirical propositions that are then conjoined with a proposition about the meaning of “free will” to yield the conclusion that free will is an illusion. In Effective Intentions, the chapter argued that various empirical propositions put forward for this purpose are not warranted by the evidence offered to support them. It might be replied that the only empirical proposition needed in this connection is that substance dualism is false, because free will depends on the existence of immaterial minds or souls. This theoretical proposition about free will seems to have more adherents among present-day neuroscientists and biologists than among present-day philosophers. But the fact that one is a neuroscientist or biologist (or both) does not give one any special insight into what the expression “free will” means. Some may say that the same is true when one is a philosopher—or, more specifically, a philosopher who has written a lot about free will. So, using techniques of experimental philosophy, the chapter looks for evidence about whether mainstream use of “free will” makes substance dualism a necessary condition for having it.

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.

David Pears's recent essay, "How Easy is Akrasia?, '' is, in significant part, a refutation of an argument against the possibility of a certain sort of incontinent action. The kind of incontinent action in question is, in Pears's words, "underivative brazen akrasia, which is commonly taken to be akrasia with the fault located between the last line of an agent's reasoning and his action" (p. 40). The argument which he attacks is attributed to Donald Davidson. The purpose of this note is, not to quarrel with Pears, but rather to supplement his interesting essay. In Section I, drawing upon some of Davidson's views on intending and unconditional practical judgments, I construct a stronger argument for the impossibility of the type of akratic action at issue than the one which Pears refutes. In Section II, I explain why even the stronger argument fails and sketch out some implications of its failure for a causal theory of action.

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.

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.

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.

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.'.