Mikayla Kelley

In this paper, I raise two challenges to Wayne Wu's proposal that intentions are practical memories. The first questions whether practical memories possess the functional roles that Michael Bratman's influential planning theory identifies for intention. The second suggests that a conception of intention as practical memory obscures the logic of intention in our ordinary ethical thought and talk. Both challenges are grounded in methodological reflections on the sources of disagreement in the philosophy of action.

Rapid advances in virtual reality technology raise a host of questions about the moral and legal status of virtual actions. This essay offers a foundation for addressing these questions by providing a metaphysics of virtual action. According to the proposed metaphysics, the actions of one’s avatar can literally be one’s own actions. We argue for this conclusion by arguing for the following: (i) in sophisticated forms of virtual reality, one’s avatar can come to constitute a part of one’s self and (ii) the sphere of one’s agency is precisely the sphere of one’s self. Thus, there is a distinctive form of agency made possible by sophisticated virtual realities: *avatarial action*, an action of a real-world agent performed through their avatar in a virtual world. In defending our metaphysics of virtual action, we also illustrate how coming to a clear understanding of the nature of virtual action—and thus a clear understanding of the moral and legal status of virtual actions—requires attending to the nature of self and action and their capacity to be transformed through technological engagement.

Intentional action is often accompanied by knowledge of what one is doing—knowledge which appears non-observational and non-inferential. G.E.M. Anscombe defends the stronger claim that intentional action always comes with such knowledge. Among those who follow Anscombe, some have altered the features, content, or species of the knowledge claimed to necessarily accompany intentional action. In this paper, I argue that there is no knowledge condition on intentional action, no matter the assumed features, content, or species of the knowledge. Further, rather than follow the usual methodology in this debate of arguing by counterexample, I present an argument that explains why we continue to find counterexamples: intentional action and knowledge are regulated by thresholds under distinct pressures; in particular, the threshold of control regulating intentional action is disparately influenced by the role of intentional action in practical normativity.

Intentional action is often accompanied by knowledge of what one is doing—knowledge that appears non-observational and non-inferential. G.E.M. Anscombe defends the stronger claim that intentional action always comes with such knowledge. Among those who follow Anscombe, some have altered the features, content, or species of the knowledge claimed to necessarily accompany intentional action. In this paper, I argue that there is no knowledge condition on intentional action, no matter the assumed features, content, or species of the knowledge. Further, rather than follow the usual methodology in this debate of arguing by counterexample, I present an argument that explains why we continue to find counterexamples: intentional action and knowledge are regulated by thresholds under distinct pressures; in particular, the threshold of control regulating intentional action is disparately influenced by the role of intentional action in practical normativity.

A central motivation for Probabilism—the principle of rationality that requires one to have credences that satisfy the axioms of probability—is the accuracy dominance argument: one should not have accuracy dominated credences, and one avoids accuracy dominance just in case one satisfies Probabilism. Until recently, the accuracy dominance argument for Probabilism has been restricted to finite credal states. One reason for this is that there are several impossibility results that apply when defining the accuracy of infinite credal states. In this paper, I offer a fully general accuracy dominance argument for Probabilism that allows for the possibility that not all sets of credences can be measured for accuracy. The normative core of the argument is the principle that one should not have credences that are accuracy dominated in some "scorable" epistemic context by alternative credences that do not have this defect. Beyond this novel rationality principle, the argument offers two important theoretical tools to accuracy-first epistemology: the idea of an epistemic context being scorable and a general contextualizing strategy for extending the arguments of accuracy-first epistemology to the infinite setting.

This essay identifies a normative function of the concept of intentional action. Specifically, I argue that the concept of intentional action functions to focus our evaluative concern on some doings rather than others. It acts as a proxy for evaluative priority. Two arguments are offered for this thesis. First, we need a concept that functions to focus evaluative concern, and the concept of intentional action exhibits features we'd expect from a concept with this prioritizing function. Second, the thesis is explanatorily powerful: it explains in a unified manner a number of puzzling features of intentional action, including the Knobe effect, the threshold of sufficient control governing intentional action, disagreement over whether knowledge is required for intentional action, cultural variation in ascription of intentionality, and the radical pluralism of ways that intentional action manifests. This second argument also shows what can be gained by attending to the functions of our concepts of agency.

One of the central problems in the philosophy of action is to spell out the distinction between action and what merely happens, e.g., a wink versus an eye twitch. This essay proposes a theory of action offering an account of this distinction. The central claim of the theory is that action is movement that is controlled by the mover, where movement is understood capaciously and control is characterized by a trio of conditions consisting of an aim condition, a modal condition, and an explanatory condition. Importantly, being controlled is shown to be a determinable property of movements, and its determination dimensions are isolated. Paired with the claim that action is movement that is controlled by the mover, this account of control as a determinable illuminates the diversity within the category of action.

Robust metanormative realists think that there are irreducibly normative, metaphysically heavy normative facts. One might wonder how we could be epistemically justified in believing that such facts exist. In this paper, I offer an answer to this question: one’s belief in the existence of robustly real normative facts is epistemically justified because so believing is indispensable to being a successful inquirer for creatures like us. The argument builds on Enoch's (2007, 2011) deliberative indispensability argument for Robust Realism but avoids relying on an overly pragmatic account of the sources of basic epistemic justification. Instead, I suggest that the sources of basic epistemic justification are those belief-forming methods which are indispensable for zetetically indispensable projects, that is, projects which are constitutive of being a successful inquirer for embodied, agential creatures like ourselves.

Some actions we perform “just like that” without taking a means, e.g., raising your arm or wiggling your finger. Other actions—the nonbasic actions—we perform by taking a means, e.g., voting by raising your arm or illuminating a room by flipping a switch. A nearly ubiquitous view about nonbasic action is that one's means to a nonbasic action constitutes the nonbasic action, as raising your arm constitutes voting or flipping a switch constitutes illuminating a room. In this paper, I challenge this view. I argue that one's means to a nonbasic action can cause rather than constitute it. In the process, we gain a clearer understanding of the scope of our agency—one that includes mental actions such as judgment and decision—and the pluralistic nature of basic features of action including control, purposefulness, and agent participation.

There is an extensive literature in social choice theory studying the consequences of weakening the assumptions of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. Much of this literature suggests that there is no escape from Arrow-style impossibility theorems, while remaining in an ordinal preference setting, unless one drastically violates the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA). In this paper, we present a more positive outlook. We propose a model of comparing candidates in elections, which we call the Advantage-Standard (AS) model. The requirement that a collective choice rule (CCR) be representable by the AS model captures a key insight of IIA but is weaker than IIA; yet it is stronger than what is known in the literature as weak IIA (two profiles alike on x, y cannot have opposite strict social preferences on x and y). In addition to motivating violations of IIA, the AS model makes intelligible violations of another Arrovian assumption: the negative transitivity of the strict social preference relation P. While previous literature shows that only weakening IIA to weak IIA or only weakening negative transitivity of P to acyclicity still leads to impossibility theorems, we show that jointly weakening IIA to AS representability and weakening negative transitivity of P leads to no such impossibility theorems. Indeed, we show that several appealing CCRs are AS representable, including even transitive CCRs.

There is a well-known equivalence between avoiding accuracy dominance and having probabilistically coherent credences (see, e.g., de Finetti 1974, Joyce 2009, Predd et al. 2009, Pettigrew 2016). However, this equivalence has been established only when the set of propositions on which credence functions are defined is finite. In this paper, I establish connections between accuracy dominance and coherence when credence functions are defined on an infinite set of propositions. In particular, I establish the necessary results to extend the classic accuracy argument for probabilism to certain classes of infinite sets of propositions including countably infinite partitions.

In Arrovian social choice theory assuming the independence of irrelevant alternatives, Murakami (1968) proved two theorems about complete and transitive collective choice rules that satisfy strict non-imposition (citizens’ sovereignty), one being a dichotomy theorem about Paretian or anti-Paretian rules and the other a dictator-or-inverse-dictator impossibility theorem without the Pareto principle. It has been claimed in the later literature that a theorem of Malawski and Zhou (1994) is a generalization of Murakami’s dichotomy theorem and that Wilson’s (1972) impossibility theorem is stronger than Murakami’s impossibility theorem, both by virtue of replacing Murakami’s assumption of strict non-imposition with the assumptions of non-imposition and non-nullness. In this note, we first point out that these claims are incorrect: non-imposition and non-nullness are together equivalent to strict non-imposition for all transitive collective choice rules. We then generalize Murakami’s dichotomy and impossibility theorems to the setting of incomplete social preference. We prove that if one drops completeness from Murakami’s assumptions, his remaining assumptions imply (i) that a collective choice rule is either Paretian, anti-Paretian, or dis-Paretian (unanimous individual preference implies noncomparability) and (ii) that adding proposed constraints on noncomparability, such as the regularity axiom of Eliaz and Ok (2006), restores Murakami’s dictator-or-inverse-dictator result.