R. Jay Wallace

Three Conceptions of Rational Agency

Rational agency may be thought of as intentional activity that is guided by the agents conception of what they have reason to do. The paper identifies and assesses three approaches to this phenomenon, which I call internalism, meta-internalism, and volitionalism. Internalism accounts for rational motivation by appeal to substantive desires of the agents that are conceived as merely given; I argue that it fails to do full justice to the phenomenon of guidance by ones conception of ones reasons. Meta-internalism explains this phenomenon by postulating higher-order dispositions, consitutive of (rational) agency itself, which causally interact with the agents normative beliefs to produce corresponding motivations to action. I show that meta-internalism comes to grief over cases of akrasia, insofar as it leaves no room for the capacity for rational guidance when agents voluntarily act at variance with their judgments about what they have reason to do. Volitionalism, I contend, improves on both internalism and meta-internalism. Its distinctive feature is the postulation of a kind of motivation that is directly subject to the agents control, and independent of the dispositions and desires to which the agent is passively subject.

Scanlon’s Contractualism*

T. M. Scanlon’s magisterial book What We Owe to Each Other is surely one of the most sophisticated and important works of moral philosophy to have appeared for many years. It raises fundamental questions about all the main aspects of the subject, and I hope and expect that it will have a decisive influence on the shape and direction of moral philosophy in the years to come. In this essay I shall focus on four sets of issues raised by Scanlon’s systematic argument, with the aim of clarifying some of Scanlon’s central assumptions and presenting alternatives at several key points. The perspective from which I offer these comments is that of a reader who is sympathetic to Scanlon’s general approach but not yet convinced on various points of detail. Before taking up particular issues, however, it will be well to say a few words about the basic thrust of Scanlon’s book. Scanlon characterizes his theory as a form of contractualism, one whose roots can be traced to the social contract approach of Rousseau (p. 5). Contractualism in this form is an account of the “subject matter” of morality (p. 1), or at least of one central strand in moral thinking, which Scanlon identifies as the

Reasons, Relations, and Commands: Reflections on Darwall*

Stephen Darwall describes the second-person standpoint as “the perspective you and I take up when we make and acknowledge claims on one another’s conduct and will” (3). Claims are apparently understood by Darwall to be sources of a distinctive kind of reason for action, which Darwall likewise refers to as second personal. “What makes a reason second-personal is that it is grounded in (de jure) authority relations that an addresser takes to hold between him and his addressee” (4). These distinctive, authority-based reasons are created by second-personal address, whereby a person with the relevant authority issues a demand to a specific addressee. Second-personal address purports to direct the addressee practically rather than merely epistemically; it generates immediate claims on the addressee’s will, rather than reporting epistemically on normative facts or relations that obtain independently of the issuance of the demand or claim (6–7). Darwall returns repeatedly in The Second-Person Standpoint to two paradigm examples that are meant to illustrate the distinctive features of second-personal address and second-personal reasons. The first is the example of a platoon sergeant ordering her troops to fall in (12). The command in this example, I take it, is meant to be a form of address to the troops, which gives rise to a reason for the troops to comply. This new reason does not derive from the sergeant’s epistemic authority in matters involving the conduct of the troops. It is not that they have reason to comply with the sergeant’s command because the sergeant is in a privileged position to identify their interests or to discern what it

Moral Responsibility and the Practical Point of View

Moral responsibility, on the approach I favor, is a matter of normative competence. To be a morally accountable agent is to possess certain general capacities for moral reasoning, which we might refer to as powers of reflective self-control. These general powers include above all the capacity to grasp and apply moral principles, and the capacity to control one’s behavior by the light of such principles.1 Indeed, I would hope that proponents of many different views might agree with these abstract pronouncements. Disagreements, I believe, center not so much on the importance of the powers of reflective self-control as on their interpretation, in particular, whether and in what forms those powers presuppose freedom of the will.

Book ReviewsSarah Buss, , and Lee Overton, , eds.Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt.Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. Pp. xx+361.

Harry Frankfurt’s writings have figured prominently in philosophical discussions of personhood and agency over the past thirty years or so. In working on these problems Frankfurt has followed a very personal sense of where the issues lead, paying little attention to whether and how his discussions relate to the conventional philosophical wisdom (as reflected, e.g., in the contemporary literature, which he almost completely ignores). Thus his seminal early investigations of freedom, autonomy, and identification led gradually to reflection on the themes that are at the forefront of his more recent work: ambivalence and wholeheartedness, caring, love, and volitional necessity. Many of these themes would hardly have been recognized as fruitful topics of philosophical investigation before Frankfurt began thinking about them, but in the wake of his writings they have become central to contemporary work on agency. The present volume is a fitting tribute to Frankfurt’s accomplishments in this broad area of philosophy. It collects twelve new essays by a distinguished and diverse group of philosophers. It also includes—and this is a particular delight—brief responses by Frankfurt to each of the articles in the collection. Frankfurt’s replies exhibit many of the qualities that make his original work on agency so elegant and memorable. They are pithy, at times a little curmudgeonly perhaps, but also honest and direct. Frankfurt comes across as allergic to the moralistic high-mindedness of much contemporary writing on autonomy and commitment, and also as disinclined to become entangled in the theoretical elaborations that his writings have provoked in the work of others. He offers a few qualifications and clarifications of his earlier published statements, but by and large he sticks to his guns in the face of the arguments and objections of his commentators. There is one consistent tendency in Frankfurt’s thinking that is crucial to the trajectory of his work, and that emerges with great clarity in his contributions to the present volume: his antirationalism. The rationalism that Frankfurt opposes starts from the assumption that there are independent facts or truths of the matter about reasons for action and value; its central claim is that human agency involves essentially rational capacities for understanding and responding to these normative and evaluative facts and truths. This approach is increasingly influential in contemporary philosophy, and many contributors to the present volume press broadly rationalist criticisms of Frankfurt’s views. But the criticisms only provoke Frankfurt to be more forthright about his own, decidedly antirationalist instincts. A characteristic pronouncement is the following: “In philosophical accounts of our psychic lives, the role of reasons tends to be considerably exaggerated. People do not necessarily have reasons for what they want, or for accepting or even approving of their desires” (p. 28).

45.00 (cloth).

Aimed specifically at advanced students of moral philosophy, this volume provides a treatise on the subject of pleasure, and describes the clash between the moral demand to treat others as being as important as ourselves, and our natural bent for our own self-fulfilment.