Renee Rushing

Can one perform an intentional action without successfully performing it? On the face of it, this seems like a silly question. One can’t intentionally do A without actually doing A. An underlying assumption that many philosophers of action would share would be that if we have an intentional action, we have an action. Thus, many philosophers of action engaged in experimental work compose vignettes that feature a certain action, and then directly ask the participants to rate their agreement with a statement classifying the action as intentional. Due to the common assumption above, this method is seen as unproblematic. However, if faced with evidence that ordinary English users are comfortable with saying that an agent ‘intentionally’ performed an action despite the agent’s failure to successfully perform it, what lesson should philosophers of action take? We designed a study to investigate whether there are instances in which participants would agree that an agent has intentionally performed an action, even though the agent’s performance was unsuccessful. The results of our study indicate that English users are comfortable with saying that an agent intentionally performed an action despite the fact that the action did not occur. We posit two possible conclusions: either non-specialists are in vast error about the conception of intentional action, or the results garnered from experimental methods that ask directly for intentionality ascriptions are unreliable due to the flexible nature of ordinary language. We argue that the latter is the more reasonable conclusion, and suggest that a popular methodology in experimental philosophy of action should be re-evaluated.

There has been recent discussion of a puzzle posed by emotions that are backward looking. Though our emotions commonly diminish over time, how can they diminish fittingly if they are an accurate appraisal of an event that is situated in the past? Agnes Callard (2017) has offered a solution by providing an account of anger in which anger is both backwards looking and resolvable, yet her account depends upon contrition to explain anger’s fitting diminishment. My aim is to explain how anger can fittingly diminish even when there is lack of contrition. I propose a permissivism about fittingness by showing that both anger and compassion are fitting responses to blameworthy behaviour. I argue that anger is rendered fitting because it accurately appraises the behaviour, whereas compassion becomes fitting as a valuational response to what the behaviour reveals about the lived experience of the offender. I then respond to some worries my account raises, and I clarify details of my account to show that it is not unrealistic to the way some of our anger actually does diminish. I end with a proposal that our anger can fittingly diminish through the act of forgiveness when compassion is not a forthcoming affective response.