## 1. The Calculative View of Action



The most prominent advocates of the calculative view of action are
Candace Vogler and Michael Thompson. We will start with Vogler's
version of the view, and proceed to Thompson's.



Call *psychologism* the claim that the right way to do logic
and theory of rationality more generally is first to figure out how
the mind works. Since the early seventies, almost all mainstream work
on practical reasoning has been psychologistic in this sense; a
representative example might be Michael Smith's argument for the
'Humean theory of motivation', which turns on what desires
- a psychological state - are, and how they work (Smith
1987). Vogler's treatment of practical rationality (Vogler 2002) is a
sharp departure from the common approach, and an attempt to replicate
in that field the anti-psychologistic turn which Frege and Husserl
imparted to work on theoretical rationality in, respectively, the
analytic and Continental traditions. She takes herself to be following
G. E. M. Anscombe (Anscombe 1985, Vogler 2001), who was in turn
following Aquinas. (We won't take up the historical background to the
body of work under discussion here, but see the entry on
 medieval theories of practical reason.)



Vogler notices that instrumentalism - the view that all reasons
for action are means-end reasons - is the default view in
contemporary philosophy. There must, she infers, be a compelling
insight at the bottom of it; but instrumentalism has been much-refuted
over the past few decades. What the many refutations of
instrumentalism really show, Vogler believes, is that formulating the
underlying insight psychologistically (as a thesis about mental
operations and the mental states involved in them) results in weak and
unsustainable renditions of it. She concludes that in order to
articulate what instrumentalism is getting right, you have to strip
away the psychologism. The point being emphasized just now is that the
motivation for this instance of the turn to action theory is
anti-psychologism about practical rationality.



On one familiar reading of Frege (not the only reading, and we'll see
an alternative to it shortly), the proper way to do logic is not to
look inward, as it were to the gears of the mind, but outward, to the
logical relations that hold between suitable abstract objects, and to
read the correct inference patterns off of these. In the practical
analog of this move, when you look outward, away from the beliefs and
desires that preoccupy psychologistic theorists, what you find are
actions, the external products of any successful deployment of
practical reasons. So the logic of practical reasons is to be read off
the structure of actions in something like the way that, say,
truth-functional logic is to be read off the truth-functional
relations between propositions. This form of anti-psychologism
preempts a worry one might have had about what was described at the
outset as the organizing argument of the action-oriented approach. The
proposal, recall, was to read the inference patterns off the structure
of actions; if one were to construe this as reconstructing the process
of practical reasoning from its product, how far would the
reconstruction be likely to get? (Compare: there are many ways to make
a chair; you would not learn much about how chairs are fabricated by
thinking about what chairs look like, or even about their conceptually
necessary features.) But Vogler's anti-psychologism insists that
questions about rationality are not questions about what
*processes* of thought lead up to a decision.



Intentional actions are picked out and segmented into their parts by
applications of Anscombe's 'Why?'-questions. ('Why
are you chopping the nuts?' 'I'm making a salad.')
The internal structure of actions is consequently a series of steps
towards a termination point (or 'end'), a place where the
action *stops*. When you make Deborah Madison's persimmon and
hazelnut salad, you first coarsely chop the nuts; then you thinly
slice three Fuyu persimmons crosswise and put them in a bowl along
with the nuts; then you add in three handfuls of trimmed watercress;
then you toss with the dressing - and you're done. A step can be
shown to be rational by showing it to be a step on the way to the
termination point of the action that you are in the course of
performing. A step can be shown to be *ir*rational by showing
that it's not: for instance, if you've finished making the salad, but
you obsessively keep chopping nuts. Vogler allows that there may be
atomic actions, actions that do not have further actions as their
parts; perhaps blinking is such an action. But just about any action
we care about will be a complex action (i.e., an action that has
further actions as parts); and since we don't usually notice what we
don't care about, atomic actions, if there are any, are hard to come
up with.



Vogler's 'calculative view' is accordingly that whenever
(or perhaps, *almost* whenever) you have a reason to do
something, you have a calculative reason, that is, a reason whose
force is: this is a step toward the termination point of my action.
Vogler distinguishes two subclasses: means-end reasons, and part-whole
reasons; buying the cress is best thought of as a means to making the
salad, whereas chopping the nuts is properly part of making the salad.
It is not that she is insisting that there are no other sorts of
practical consideration. In fact, she provides what she takes to be an
exhaustive list of the logical forms the remaining sorts of
considerations can have. (See Millgram 2006 for a brief overview.)
Rather, the claim is that when you have a reason of one of these
further sorts, you must *also* have a calculative reason.



The connection only runs one way, however. Since considerations of
other sorts organize, modulate and generally control actions, they
presuppose calculative reasons. But calculative structures (and the
reasons they give you) do not presuppose these other sorts of
consideration: you can *just* tie your shoes, and Vogler
regards theories on which such actions must be informed by, for
example, a large-scale conception of the good as modeling rationality
on a psychopathology akin to paranoia. This asymmetry is what Vogler
takes to be the deep insight underlying instrumentalism. Because any
action large enough to be something we care about must, if it is to
*work*, be calculatively well-formed, the means-end/part-whole
articulation of actions is nonoptional, and consequently, we have to
pay due attention to calculative reasons. We cannot shrug off others'
criticism of our calculative reasons, as we can shrug off their
criticism of, say, our pleasures. Calculative reasons are thus
nonoptional, or binding.



This appeal to the structure of action as the foundation for practical
rationality has dramatic consequences for substantive moral theory,
and an easy way to see how is to consider a terminological puzzle
raised by Vogler's presentation. She argues that her view is
internalist; Bernard Williams introduced the contrast between internal
and external reasons via the connection, on the one hand, or lack of
it, on the other, between reasons and an agent's motivational states
(Williams 1981a); motivational states are part of an agent's
psychology; so how can an anti-psychologistic position like Vogler's
be avowedly internalist? The answer to the terminological question has
to do with Williams's own philosophical development. Following
Korsgaard's attack on his view (Korsgaard 1996, ch. 11), Williams
began (albeit without announcing the changeover) to use
'internalism' for the claim that reasons for action can
differ from person to person; there's no level, however deep, at which
they must be the same. (Williams 1995, which gives a
still-psychologistic example: the alcoholic has a reason to lock up
his liquor cabinet and throw away the key; the virtuous person does
not; the explanation is that their characters rather than their
desires differ.) So Vogler is claiming her view to be internalist in
this newer sense: there are no reasons that have to be the same for
everybody. Different people have different ends at different times;
and since other sorts of reasons, she has argued, are optional, they
vary from person to person as well. But if internalism is correct (and
this was what had interested Williams in the thesis in the first
place), then you can be, as the title of Vogler's book has it,
reasonably vicious; immorality of even the most extreme kind need not
entail irrationality.



Michael Thompson's equally anti-psychologistic account of calculative
rationality (Thompson 2008, Part II) reverses the direction of
argument we have observed in Vogler. In the alternative reading of
Frege which it uses as a template, what comes first is our grasp of
inference; the inferences in the relevant part of the - as
Thompson occasionally puts it - "practical
*Begriffsschrift*" have actions as their subject matter.
So it is an account of action that is being read off the inference
patterns (rather than the other way around), in something like the way
that Fregeans of this stripe take us to read the logical form of
propositions off our command of truth-functional and quantificational
inference. The direction of argument notwithstanding, Thompson belongs
to the group of theorists we are considering, in that the objective of
the argument is to exploit an account of action in order to establish
a thesis about calculative practical reasons, namely, that those
reasons are not psychological states such as desires or intentions.




The argumentative strategy is adapted from Sellars (1997, pp.
37-41; it bears comparison to related arguments in Nagel, 1970,
pp. 29-31, and Brandom, 2001). A core practice, in this case of
reason-giving, is identified, one that adduces only actions (and not
psychological states); Thompson then exhibits the point of introducing
apparently psychological locutions (such as "because I want
to...") into such a practice. The explanation is supposed
to demonstrate that these locutions do not really *name*
anything on the order of desires or intentions, but are rather a
roundabout way of conveying information about the progress of an
ongoing course of action. We will first describe the way Thompson sets
up the core practice, and then briefly reconstruct his argument for
non-psychologistic renderings of apparently psychologically oriented
reason locutions. 



Like Vogler, Thompson uses Anscombian 'Why?'-questions to
pick out intentional actions. He then draws our attention to the way
that grammatical aspect figures into their answers. Action
descriptions can be either perfective ("I made the salad")
or progressive ("I'm making the salad," "I was
making the salad"). Notice that these grammatical forms are not
merely ornamental; they carry different implications. From the
perfective "I made a salad," it follows that at some point
there *was* a salad. From the progressive "I was making a
salad," it doesn't follow: perhaps I was interrupted by a phone
call, and never got back to chopping. Thompson demarcates 'naive
rationalizations' as those which deploy the progressive in
placing one action as part of another. ("Why are you chopping
the nuts?" "I'm making a salad.") The contrast is
with 'sophisticated rationalizations', which seem to
invoke psychological states like desires ("I *want* to
make a salad"). 



We can imagine a society (call it the *action-theoretic state of
nature*) getting by with only naive rationalization. But there is
room for improvement in their practice of calculative reason-giving,
and here's a short way to see how. Agents restricted to naive
rationalizations will say "I'm *B*ing because I'm
*A*ing," when *B*ing is an action that is a part
of *A*ing, and they are *A*ing. But such parts of
actions often come in sequence, one after another. So such an agent
can, at a particular time, be executing a containing action, i.e.,
*A*ing, but not executing a subsidiary action, *B*ing,
if *B*ing is an action that is a part of *A*ing, but one
which comes earlier or later on in the sequence. Now, if, at a
particular time, an agent is not executing an action (again,
*B*ing), then when someone asks if he's *B*ing, he'll
say he's not. So it's easy to put agents restricted to naive
rationalizations in the position of saying both that they're
*B*ing, and that they're not *B*ing. (E.g., "I'm
*B*ing because I'm *A*ing, but I'm not
*B*ing.") That's potentially confusing. 



We can suppose that such agents will adopt devices to obviate the
confusion. For instance, they'll learn to say (as we do), "I'm
*B*ing tomorrow." Against that background, however,
"I'm going to *B*," "I want to
*A*," and so on are evidently similar devices, and of a
piece with "I'm *B*ing tomorrow." Each such
locution carries a different sort of additional information. For
instance, "I'm going to *B*" positions one as being
in the very preliminary run-up phases of an action; when one says,
"I'm going to *B* because I'm *A*ing," one
is giving a naive rationalization, but one which registers that the
*B*ing phase of *A*ing has not yet arrived, even though
the reason for the former is that it is part of the latter. Likewise,
"I intend to *A*" places one merely at the planning
phase of *A*ing; "I want to *A*," allows
that one may be at a pre-planning phase. Briefly, the function of
these locutions is to preempt confusion by placing the actions that
make up a naive rationalization in their temporal sequence. But once
we see that that *is* their function, the temptation to
construe them as invoking psychological states (intentions, desires
and so on) is evidently misguided. Desires, in Thompson's Sellarsian
view, are a mistake on a par with sense-data; just as the sense-datum
theorist treats a linguistic device for hedging one's commitments
("It appears to be...") as naming a psychological
state (a mere appearance), so the belief-desire theorist of practical
rationality is treating a linguistic device for sorting out the order
of subsidiary actions ("...because I want
to...") as naming a motivating psychological state (a
desire). 



Like Vogler's calculative view, Thompson's account of calculative
practical reasons is motivated by anti-psychologism. Unlike Vogler,
however, he is not arguing for restricting the mandatory part of
practical rationality to calculative reasons; other parts of *Life
and Action* discuss very different but evidently nonoptional forms
of practical inference. Vogler, we saw, was concessive about the
possibility of atomic actions; Thompson gives a surprising argument to
the effect that all actions have further actions as their proper
parts. (See Millgram 2009, sec. 9.4, for a brief reconstruction.) So
although the two views are closely related, they also differ on many
points. 


## 2. The Authorship View of Action



A second approach takes the essential feature of action to be, not its
stepwise structure, but that it is *authored*; there is no such
thing as an action without an owner, in something like the way that
there is no such thing as a belief without an owner. The two most
developed positions of this kind are due to Christine M. Korsgaard and
J. David Velleman.



On Korsgaard's view, what gives an action an owner is that it is
attributable to the person as a whole (rather than to a subpersonal
part, such as a drive or an especially strong desire). Whole-person
attributions require a *constitution*, a form of psychic
organization and regulation that is the smaller-scale analog of the
political constitution of a state. Constitutions are made up of the
procedures by which actions are to be produced; actions are owned, and
so are full-fledged actions, only when they are so produced (Korsgaard
2008, ch. 3, Korsgaard 2009).



The principles of practical rationality are the procedures, at a
suitably abstract level of description, of a satisfactory
constitution. So, and in contrast to Vogler's view, Korsgaard's theory
of practical rationality is psychologistic. Actions have explanatory
priority, but actions are the starting point of an argument used to
determine the proper structure of an agent's psychology: that is, we
ask what psychological structure an agent must have in place for him
to be able to author actions. And that psychology in turn determines
what the correct forms of practical inference must be. The
philosophical motivations of Korsgaard's position are in part
forensic: the connection between actions and agents must be such that
we can hold agents responsible for what they do. More importantly,
however, the account is meant to explain why your reasons are binding:
what their 'normative force' is. 



Here is a first-pass thumbnail sketch of that explanation: We have to
act, because anything we do will be an action. Chairs are to sit on,
and so a chair you can't sit on is defective; being something you can
sit on is a constitutive standard for chairs. Likewise, there are
constitutive standards for actions, in just that way; a would-be
action that did not conform to them would also be defective. In
Korsgaard's view, the question of why an item should conform to the
constitutive standards for its type 'answers itself'
(Korsgaard 2008, p. 61). So if she can show that deploying reasons
satisfying one or another requirement is a constitutive standard for
action - and the requirements she is going to argue for are
Kantian - that will amount to showing why you should act on
reasons that satisfy those Kantian requirements. Before we proceed to
that argument, notice that we are starting to see how the
philosophical motivations of the work we are surveying differ from
program to program; the contrast between psychologistic and
anti-psychologistic agendas is not the only, or even the most
important, dimension of variation.



Korsgaard contrasts acts (such as setting the table) with actions
(such as setting the table to be ready before the guests arrive). Her
view is that acts and the ends for which they are performed make up an
action when they are bound together by a principle, which must be
formally universal (e.g., always set the table before the guests
arrive). We have already noted that actions must be attributable to
agents, and an action is properly an agent's only when it is produced
by the agent as a whole. For attribution to be contentful, there must
be a real distinction between *your* actions, on the one hand,
and events that resemble actions but are produced by your psychic
parts, on the other; we can make out such a distinction only if you
identify with a principle of choice, where that is universal in form.
(We won't reconstruct her arguments for that last claim here; Millgram
2011 gives a summary.) Consequently, reasons for action must be
universal in form, and this entails, or so Korsgaard argues, the
substantive correctness of Kantian moral theory, at any rate that part
of it which imposes a universalizability requirement on practical
reasons: very roughly, it must be possible for you and everyone else
jointly to act on the basis of that universal-in-form principle,
without assuring the frustration of the end it mentions. (For further
description of Kant's account, see the section on the universal law of
nature formula in the entry on
 Kant's moral philosophy.)
 



While it's no part of the present task to defend or resist the
competing views about action and practical reason under review, in
this case the easiest way to get Korsgaard's position into focus is by
considering how it can address a handful of worries, and the first of
these has already given rise to a small literature. Allow for the
moment that actions, understood as Korsgaard proposes, involve
constitutive standards. Still, why must we produce *actions*?
The point that anything you do will be an action is likely to be
granted only on the thinnest and most minimal reading of what an
action is; but we have just seen Korsgaard distinguishing between more
minimal 'acts' and more ambitiously structured
'actions'. Actions are constituted by acts together with
their ends; why can't you instead act aimlessly, like the characters
in Richard Linklater's *Slacker*? If the penalty is that you
will thereby be a defective agent, why can't the slacker shrug off
that complaint, perhaps with the remark that agents and actions come
with one set of constitutive standards, and slackers and their
less-than-actions come with others? Why should the slacker be held to
the standards for agency as opposed to those of slackerhood?
Korsgaard's argument appears to involve the sleight-of-hand
substitution of an ambitious and optional notion of action for a
minimal and more plausibly nonoptional one. (For the back and forth,
see Enoch 2006, Ferrero 2009, Tubert 2010, Katsafanas 2013, ch. 2.)




Korsgaard's response comes in three laps. First, she inherits from
Wittgenstein the thought that normativity involves the possibility of
correction, and she infers that if there is to be any normativity, it
must be possible to be in violation of a standard. Now, you can be
counted as in violation of a standard only if you can't simply shrug
the correction off. But if you can switch the kind an item counts as
belonging to, at will, then you *can* shrug off any standard
and any correction; as Korsgaard puts it, nothing will be defective,
'everything will just be different.' (E.g., 'I've
decided I'm not an agent but a slacker, so the standards for agents
don't apply to me.') Thus we must take there to be kinds such
that you *can't* just shrug and say that you don't see why the
constitutive standards of the kind apply. This first lap of the
argument has the look and feel of an existence proof, and of softening
up; in particular, it doesn't purport to show that the twin concepts,
'action' and 'agent,' are among these
privileged kinds (Korsgaard 2009, sec. 2.1.8).



Before turning to the second lap of Korsgaard's response, let's
introduce a second worry: that the argument's attempt to exploit the
wholeness of the agent, allegedly the essential feature of agency, is
taking a wrong turn. Recall Korsgaard's artifactual analogy: a chair
is something you sit on, and so a chair is defective when you can't
sit on it - and of course it's defective as a whole, because its
job, as a whole chair, is to be a seat. For *any* constitutive
standard, it's the thing as a whole that's supposed to live up to the
standard; so what's distinctive about one standard or another is what
the thing does or is, and not that it does it, or is it, as a whole.
If, when it came to understanding chairs, you devoted your theoretical
attention to that 'as a whole,' as opposed to the seating,
something would clearly have gone wrong. (Imagine a theorist of chairs
arguing that the constitutive standards for being a chair must be met
by the chair as a whole, and thus the essential feature of chairs, and
the key to understanding them, is that they hold themselves together.)
Why isn't Korsgaard's focus on the shared unity condition some sort of
red herring? 



But people, Korsgaard claims, are not just like chairs. (Actually,
there's a subplot in which she argues that chairs are more like people
than you'd think, but here I'm going to leave it to one side.) Chairs
don't dissolve into their parts when they're not seating anyone,
whereas an agent constitutes itself *by* acting, or ceases to
be an agent entirely. Imagine that *Invasion of the Body
Snatchers* had it almost right: as in the film, pod creatures from
outer space are eliminating us one by one, and replacing us with
pod-grown impersonators; it is just that the films have gotten the
size of the pods wrong. Instead of being as large as a person, each
pod is roughly the size of a peapod, and so it takes a great many pod
creatures working together to impersonate a single Earthling. (The
illustration adapts the argument of Korsgaard 1996, ch. 13, to fit her
later use of group agency as a model for individual agency.) If a
colony of pod creatures is going to succeed in fooling the remaining
Earthlings, it will have to behave as a single person, and to do that,
the activities of the different pod creatures must be closely
coordinated; after all, if the pod creatures making up the feet go off
in one direction, and the pod creatures making up the torso go off in
a different direction, no one will be fooled. When the pod creatures
act together, and pull off the deception, they *make themselves
into* a collective agent. (One mark of this is the first-person
indexical, as when they whisper to each other, '*We're*
now going to go off to the left'; their coordination induces a
point of view which is not that of any particular one of them.) That's
why action has to be generated by you-as-a-whole, rather than your
psychic parts. 



At this point we can see why you're not supposed to be able to opt for
slackerdom. There are things we *have* to get done, in
something like the way that the pod creatures *have* to fool
Aunt Millie into thinking they're her husband Melvin; acting is our
'*plight*, the simple inexorable fact of the human
condition' (Korsgaard 2009, sec. 1.1.1). And that means
producing actions, not mere acts; you act because there are things you
have to get done, and so when you act, you normally have an end in
view; to act with an end in view is to perform an action. Acting is
constituting yourself as an agent out of your desires and other
psychological elements, in much the way that the pod creatures
constitute themselves as a group agent. The necessity of agency is not
metaphysical but practical. (This amounts to a reply to the objection
that the argument for the ineluctability of action involved a sleight
of hand: that a series of interlocking definitions, purporting to show
that you have no alternative to acting because nothing will
*count* as an alternative to action, could not amount to a
reason not to live like a slacker. The objection is misconstruing
Korsgaard's argument as turning on definitional rather than practical
necessities.)



Now we can further see - although this is a shortcut rather than
the argument - why constituting oneself as an agent involves
endorsing a principle. Suppose one of the pod creatures whispers to
its nearby fellows, 'Off to the left!' If enough of them
follow to tilt the ersatz Uncle Melvin leftwards, was that an action,
attributable to the group agent, or just that one pod creature
momentarily getting its way? Suppose a moment later a different pod
creature whispers 'Off to the right!' and ersatz Melvin
teeters back; Aunt Millie will notice that something is amiss. To
avoid this sort of back and forth, the pod creatures collectively have
to adopt a general principle of action - perhaps, 'When
mimicking Earthlings, coordinate the movements of individual pods in
such and such a way.' And in acting on that principle, they
thereby constitute themselves into a (in this case, collective) agent.




Let's pause to mark some of the contrasts between two of the theories
of practical inference we have on the table. First of all, Kantian
maxims - the structured intentions on which the
universalizability requirement is imposed - have means-end or
calculative structure: a maxim typically specifies not just what you
are proposing to achieve, but how you propose to proceed. So Vogler's
requirement, that one come up with actions that are calculatively
well-formed, is compatible with Korsgaard's view. But because Vogler
regards noncalculative reasons as optional, Korsgaard and Vogler
differ over whether the universalizability of maxims is mandatory. Now
because the universalizability test (the so-called CI-procedure) is to
be applied to one's maxims as they arise, and because you may at any
point consider an unprecedented maxim, it is still an open question
just what the substantive moral theory generated by this theory of
practical reasoning is. However, a handful of canonical dicta are
usually thought of as constituting its core: not to lie; to adopt the
end of helping others; to adopt the end of developing one's talents.
So, second, we are seeing differing conceptions of action give rise to
starkly differing views of the moral demands of rationality; on
Vogler's view, the solely calculative conception of action allows for
rational agents who lie, cynically exploit others, and don't bother to
improve themselves. So Korsgaard's account is morally more demanding,
and it is morally more demanding because it is more demanding about
what it takes to be an action, as opposed to mere bodily or mental
goings on.



An important contrast between these views has to do with how the
attributability of action is understood. Anscombian accounts construe
the attribution of action as having to do with the special way in
which you know what you're doing - that is, without looking to
see, the way other people have to (Rodl 2007, ch. 2, Small 2012).
Since you *just* know what you're doing, its being
*your* action takes care of itself; whereas we've seen that in
Korsgaard's picture, action attribution is a task each agent has to
take care of *for himself*, and arises out of meeting the
exigencies of agency. If Kantian moral theory is to be nonoptional
- something we can't just turn our backs on - the
noncalculative Kantian reasons must be nonoptional. If the
noncalculative reasons are what it takes to have action that is
authored, then the ownership of actions must be demonstrably
nonoptional. That necessity, we have seen, is practical; that is, it's
the necessity of 'gotta go, right now!' But if that is the
right way to reconstruct Korsgaard's position, there is a final worry
to register, one that we are not yet able to meet, but to which we
will return briefly when the time comes to assess the state of play of
the field we are surveying. 



We generally take arguments built around practical necessity to be
responsible to and modulated by the urgency and force of the
necessity. The point is once again easier to see when we are
considering collective agents, so let us take up Korsgaard's political
analogy once more. A state that aspires to having all activity within
its jurisdiction be its own actions is totalitarian. Democratic states
as we are familiar with them sometimes do mobilize themselves in a way
that approximates this extreme: usually, in times of all-out war. (For
instance, during WWII, the American government imposed rationing,
managed a great deal of industrial production directly, and so on.)
But when there is no such occasion, liberals regard totalitarianism as
an unreasonable and immoral mode of political organization, and prefer
a state in which most activity within the state is not attributable to
it. Markets are a familiar instance of an alternative form of
coordination: in a market economy, market outcomes are less than
choices on the part of the government, and are not directly
attributable to the state. Recall that the argument for action
attribution turned on the need to avoid mutually frustrating
activities, as when the pod creatures pull in different directions. A
market economy, however, pits competitors against each other; in this
approach, coordination of activities does not consist in forestalling
competition, but in creating a regulatory framework for it. If the
analogy goes through, action in Korsgaard's sense is inevitable only
to the extent that practical pressures on human agency are such as to
make totalitarian rather than, say, market-like approaches to the
organization of individual activity mandatory. So the final worry is
that we do not yet understand the ongoing practical demands warranting
forms of coordination that underwrite the full attributability of
action, making the latter a demand *always* to be met. 



Korsgaard's response to this worry, which is also the final lap of her
response to the initial worry, is an argument that you cannot choose
to have a character with fault lines in it, one whose unity is
'contingent and unstable' (2009, 8.5.2). That argument is
too opaque to permit an uncontroversial reconstruction, and instead I
will conclude the exposition of her position by describing the
challenge the argument is meant to meet. On Korsgaard's view, the
practical necessity of reconstituting one's agency, from moment to
moment, must be a formal feature of any human personality. However, in
our ordinary ways of thinking, practical necessities are substantive
and contingent pressures (in our earlier example, the demands of
wartime, as experienced by a state). When ersatz Uncle Milton is out
of sight, it looks like the pod creatures get to relax; but
*you* are never allowed to take breaks from being an agent. The
formal feature of agency that replaces those substantive pressures is
the commitment to sustain one's agency in any circumstances
whatsoever: 'our principles, moral principles, are supposed to
hold us together in any environment, any circumstance, come what
may' (Korsgaard 2009, sec. 5.5.3). That commitment is supposed
to be what makes action, rather than a more loosely organized
alternative to it, always our plight. 



We turn now to the second of the positions that takes authorship to be
the essential feature of action. Like Korsgaard, Velleman takes action
- "human action *par excellence*," as
contrasted with mere activity - to be owned (Velleman 2015, 101
and ch. 5, *passim*). Like Korsgaard, he takes ownership to
require a definite structure in an agent, and again like her, he takes
the forms of practical reasoning (and what practical reasons
substantively will turn out to be) to be determined by the agent's
structure. However, he disagrees with Korsgaard as to what the
structure of an agent is, as to what its practical reasons are, and
incidentally with Korsgaard's insistence that being authored by the
agent as a whole means not being authored by a proper part of the
agent. Velleman's position will make more sense if we bear in mind
that it has more than one agenda; accordingly we will juxtapose two
complementary entry points, and subsequently suggest that what looks
like a third and independent motivation for the view is reachable from
those.



The sense of ownership in play in Velleman's view is inherited
from an older debate about freedom of the will and autonomy, and it
has to do with whether the agent can honestly dissociate himself from
his action or motivation (e.g., "It wasn't really me
speaking; it was just the alcohol"). One might think that this
sort of dissociation could be overcome by a further endorsement
("It really
*was* me speaking"), but a familiar difficulty is that
many forms of endorsement merely raise the problem anew: ownership
cannot be identified with an endorsement when the agent can dissociate
himself from that endorsement as well (Velleman 2015, 295-296). There
is by now an extensive literature on agency built up of rounds of this
back-and-forth, and here is a very quick taste of it. Harry Frankfurt
had suggested that a desire is full-fledgedly yours when you have a
suitable second-order desire (a desire that the initial desire
motivate you to act; Frankfurt 1971); Gary Watson pointed out that
Frankfurt's proposal merely pushed the question back to whether that
second-order desire was full-fledgedly yours, and he proposed fit with
your values as an alternative account (Watson 1975). But the rejoinder
was of course to ask what makes a set of values full-fledgedly your
own (Benson 1987), and the problem seemed to take on the shape of a
hard-to-halt regress. (For more on this debate, see Section 2 of the
entry on
 free will.)



Velleman's way of terminating the regress is to locate a
psychological element from which an agent cannot dissociate himself
(2015, chs. 5, 7). Because to act is to act for reasons, an agent
cannot dissociate himself from a desire to act for reasons -
not, that is, without ceasing to be an agent. (Treat the content of
that desire as a temporary placeholder; we'll return to it
shortly.) When such a desire contributes in the canonical manner to
producing an action (say, by weighing in on the side of other desires
that it endorses, and so tipping the decision toward that action), we
say that the agent produces the action (in something like the way that
when your intestines digest food, we say that you are digesting the
food). So, to recapitulate, actions are in the first
place *owned*; an action is owned, in the relevant sense, when
it cannot be disowned; the only anchor for an action that an agent
cannot disown in turn, without ceasing to be an agent, is (roughly)
the desire to act for reasons. So what it takes to be an action is to
be (appropriately) produced by such a desire.



An action is what is produced by the operation of this desire, and so
this desire amounts to the constitutive aim of action (in something
like the way, Velleman thinks, that truth is the constitutive aim of
belief [2015, ch. 10]). It will thus serve to determine what putative
reasons for action *are* (good) practical reasons (in something
like the way that truth determines what reasons for belief are good
reasons). But then its content cannot quite be: to act for reasons.
For that would amount to a viciously circular and vacuous
specification of the constitutive aim of action.



Velleman's alternative specification of the content is (roughly
again, because there is some room for variation) to know what one is
doing when one acts, or to make sense to oneself when one acts
(Velleman 1989). So what counts as a (good) practical reason is that
which will make one's actions intelligible to one, when one
performs them. Velleman seems originally to have had something like
the following schema in mind: desires motivate, and so explain
actions; so when you act on the basis of a desire, your action makes
sense to you; so when your desire to make sense to yourself, together
with more occasion-specific desires, produces an action serving the
occasion-specific desires, that is a full-fledged action on your own
part, and not mere activity. 



That default schema looks to be a version of the authorship view of
action supporting an instrumentalist or means-end (rather than, as in
Korsgaard's development of it, a Kantian) account of practical
reasons. However, as Velleman's position has evolved, he has
suggested further patterns. Often one emotion naturally gives rise to
a sequel, as when in one familiar pop-psychology meme, denial of a
loss is supposed to be followed by anger, which is in turn succeeded
by bargaining, which is followed by, ultimately, acceptance. Such
emotion cascades are the spines of narratives, and an action is
rendered narratively intelligible as following on a step of such a
cascade (Velleman 2009, 191, 194-197). Thus, when supported by a
desire to be intelligible to oneself, narratives give rise to
actions. So instrumental reasons have been supplemented by what
Velleman construes as narrative reasons, and in later work, Velleman
has further proposed character for the explanatory role (2009, ch. 1):
if you stay in character (in rather the way that actors on stage aim
at), what you do will make sense to you, and if you are motivated by
the desire to make sense to yourself, what you then do will count as
an action. (A bit of nuance: in his earlier work, Velleman took the
relevant desire to be a substantive motivation, on a par with other
desires in the cognitive mix, but he has since relaxed the
characterization; we can perhaps more properly think of it as a drive,
implemented as a structural feature of a cognitive system, rather than
one of the items moved around inside that system; compare Velleman
2015, pp. 169, 246.) 



Now, notice what one's reasons for action will turn out to be,
formally. Once again, because reasons for action are picked out as
what would explain one's actions, we cannot, on pain of circularity,
gloss what it is to be a satisfactory explanation of an action as
being a practical reason (cf. Velleman 2009, 40). So we will instead
rely on an already available notion of explanation and, Velleman
concludes, it must be *theoretical*, i.e., logically the same
sort of explanation that would account for any matter of fact.
Returning to the default schema for an illustration, desires are
reasons because they (potentially) explain action, and they explain
action in the first place because they *causally* explain it.




There is a second and equally important motivation for the position.
It is almost unquestioned common ground in this field that there are
two deeply different but parallel modes of rationality: theoretical
and practical. Of these, philosophers tend to see inference about
matters of fact as relatively unproblematic; to a first approximation,
it is in order when you reliably derive truths from truths. Practical
reasoning is seen as an analogous enterprise, one which is, however,
much more opaque: because it determines what to do, as opposed to what
to believe, it is much less clear when it is being executed correctly.
Velleman's move is to eliminate the commonly accepted distinction by
reducing practical to theoretical rationality, and thereby reduce the
problem of the correctness of practical inference to problems in the
philosophy of explanation. 



We have already seen how reasons for action are understood as
explanations of fact; facts explain facts; so the move further
requires construing decisions as factual conclusions of some kind, and
the live candidate is that they are predictions of one's own
actions (Velleman 2015, ch. 3). They differ from other predictions in
being self-fulfilling. (Though obviously not just any self-fulfilling
prediction will serve: as Anscombe observed, 'I'm going to
be sick' does not normally express an intention - and it
doesn't even if the thought of being sick is what brings on the
nausea, and even if you can predict the nausea on the basis of what
you have just eaten.) Thus, and returning to our theme, an action
proper will be the process of such a prediction fulfilling itself. And
so practical reasoning will be the explanation of future behavior that
underwrites the self-fulfilling prediction of that behavior. 



A third motivation, which is at first glance independent, is that of
accounting for a thesis that has received a great deal of airplay
recently, namely, that when you act, you know what you're doing.
When you do things in order to make sense to yourself, you end up by
and large knowing what you're doing; thus the pervasiveness of
practical self-knowledge is explained by invoking a desire for it. The
desire is claimed both to be constitutive of agency, and announced to
be empirically present in a normal human psychology. Now, a common
response to Velleman's insistence (2009, 136-138, 2015, 325)
that people want to understand what they're doing -
moreover, that this is part and parcel of their desire to understand
the universe of which they are a part - is incredulity. A quick
reminder or two of where those responses are coming from: academics
teaching large introductory courses look out on seas of apathetic
faces that don't seem to care about understanding much at all;
outside the classroom, those same academics are committed to research
- which, as the saying has it, is what you're doing when
you don't know what you're doing. And nonacademics rub
shoulders with New Age aficionados of mystery, with defeated
individuals who have made compromises in life they would rather not
think about... briefly, with people who quite visibly would prefer not
to understand what they are doing, even as they do it. Now, Velleman
adduces the cognitive dissonance and attribution literatures as
further confirming evidence (Velleman 2009, 37f; Cooper 2007 is an
overview of the former), but his readers balk here also: after all,
the striking feature of cognitive dissonance reduction is that
subjects are unaware that they exhibit it, and are perturbed when it
is pointed out to them. And indeed Velleman notices that what he
'regard[s] as the height of rationality' others
'tend to regard... as irrational' (2009, 92 n. 4).
Because what Velleman takes as practical rationality in operation
seems irrational to the agents themselves, it requires, precisely, not
understanding what one is doing. 



However, the thesis that one desires practical self-knowledge was
reached from the entry points we have already introduced, and if our
reading of the pressures on the view is correct, the inalienable drive
toward self-knowledge is best construed as a cognitive
*requirement*, one derived from, first, the need to anchor
action attribution and, second, the demand that practical rationality
be reduced to theoretical rationality. 



Let's briefly turn to a handful of apparent difficulties, as a
way of bringing the view into clearer focus and indicating some of its
resources. First, the question of what counts as a practical reason
gets deferred, in Velleman's position, to a philosophical account of
theoretical explanation. We noticed in passing that not every
predictive technique will deliver reasons for action. (Another
instance: one can often predict one's choices as the mistakes one is
prone to make, but to treat what you understand to be a mistake as a
reason is next door to a Moore's Paradox.)
So Velleman must in some
way restrict the scope of the considerations that can figure into
one's self-fulfilling predictions. There is not just one type of
privileged explanation that will serve; recall that Velleman allows
both narrative and desire-driven folk-psychological explanations,
perhaps along with others. The reader is directed to remarks which are
evidently meant to address the issue of the required scope restriction
(Velleman 2009, 31f, 42f; cf. also 2006, 7f, 14); the move doesn't
lend itself to a terse reconstruction or assessment, and here we will
leave the intended resolution open. 



Next, the picture of action and agency in question, on which you
(always, exceptionlessly) decide what to do by asking yourself what
someone like you *would* do, might sound both implausible and
unattractive. (Implausible: it assimilates many substantively
different forms of decision to one of them; unattractive: agents are
turned inward, in the manner iconized by the tradition of absorption
painting [Fried 1988] - and it is perhaps no accident that Velleman
2006 appropriates an image from this tradition as its cover art.) But
Velleman has a response. True enough, if you were constantly busied
with and focused on understanding yourself, something would have gone
wrong; but practical reasoning is itself a sporadic activity.
Practical rationality is, as he puts it in a vivid metaphor, in the
passenger rather than the driver's seat (Velleman 2015, ch. 13). Most
of the time, you're on autopilot; on his supervisory conception of
practical reasoning, as long as you know what's going on, the
supervisor does not need to intervene. Evidently, this solution has a
cost, that of attenuating the connection between action and its
constitutive motivation; Velleman's response to the problem is recent,
and it's unclear what we should expect in the way of downstream
adjustments to the earlier position. Nonetheless, this is a dramatic
move, on a par with the decision to assimilate practical to
theoretical reasoning, and it merits careful attention. (He has two
secondary responses to the problem, which the interested reader can
find at Velleman 2009, 23f and 27f.) 



Third, there might look to be a pair of related circularities hidden
in Velleman's account. The presumption that desires or more generally
motivations explain action is plausibly a legacy of a theory of
practical rationality on which desires are *reasons* for action
- and therefore, it is concluded, their causes. (As Quinn 1994,
236-239, points out, if desires are thought of as brute causes,
desire-driven behavior looks like Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder,
rather than rational action.) Similarly, the idea that a given emotion
naturally generates a particular successor emotion has often been
taken to be the result of training in narrative forms, patterns that
must be *already* culturally available. (For something like
this latter view, see Nussbaum 1992, ch. 12; Velleman responds at
2009, 199 n. 15.) So theories of practical or narrative rationality
would come first, because they are presupposed by causal explanations
appealing to desires or narratives (2009, 26f). Such theories would
render the account viciously circular, and (the objection concludes)
are off-limits to Velleman's project. 



Velleman has an answer waiting in the wings, however. (Bear in mind that here
we are connecting a few of the dots in a way that hasn't been
spelled out before.) Velleman, like other theorists we have surveyed,
has a finish line in moral theory, a position he calls 'kinda
Kantian': because our lives are pervaded by the motivation to
understand ourselves, over time that motivation, even if it is not
very strong, is likely to have deep effects; specifically, by way of
making ourselves easier to understand, we will simplify our typology
of persons, removing asymmetries in the social roles that we occupy,
and gradually *come to be* agents for whom Kantian moral theory
is a pretty decent fit. That treatment can serve as a model for
understanding the psychological processes to which Velleman appeals,
and render the circularities we were floating no longer vicious:
perhaps we have gradually come to be agents of whom belief-desire
psychology is true, and in whom one particular emotion naturally
follows on another, because conforming to these simple-minded theories
simplified our personal and social lives, making it easier for us to
understand ourselves. In that case, the causal factors these views
invoke are now elements of straightforwardly causal explanations; it
no longer matters how they got that way. 



Recapping, on one authorship view of action, an action is a prediction
being enacted in part on the basis of a designated motivation, and
practical reasons are the explanatory support for such predictions.
And a second such view is held to support a theory on which only
universalizable maxims count as practical reasons. We are also seeing
that authorship views of action may have strikingly different
philosophical motivations: in one case, to account for the bindingness
or normativity of reasons; in the other case, to assimilate practical
to theoretical reasoning, as well as a need to make room for a certain
sort of first-person authority about one's will.



We mentioned at the outset that the work of theorists in this area
does not usually speak to other work of the same kind. Paul Katsafanas
is a recent exception to this generalization. Some types of
explanation may produce more in the way of self-knowledge than others;
some principles may unify an agent more deeply or robustly. But
Katsafanas 2013, chs. 3 and 4, argues that neither Velleman nor
Korsgaard is in a position to show that having more rather than less
of, respectively, the former or the latter feature is a constitutive
end of action; consequently, neither has the resources to reconstruct
the comparative notion we need, that of one's having *more*
reason to pursue one course of action than another.



We now turn to Katsafanas's positive view. 


## 3. The Challenge-Seeking View of Action



Actions, Katsafanas holds, are generated by drives. (Katsafanas 2013,
ch. 6; he attributes most of the elements of his view to Nietzsche,
this among them, but here we won't be concerned with whether the
historical claim is correct.) So if there is a characteristic that
actions must have insofar as they are generated by drives, then all
actions have it. 



Drives are characterized by their aims - for instance, the aim of the
shopping drive is having lots of stuff - and they generate objects
(typically, objects of desire), which are formally a very different
matter. When an object is attained (continuing the illustration, when
you bring home that gewgaw from the craft fair), the desire for it
evaporates, and you are satiated; but after a while, the drive
generates a new object (now a garment, which seems to you a steal at
30% off). Drives working this way, that is, generating one object of
desire after another, can be characterized more deeply as directed
toward encountering and overcoming resistance. 



Now actions are the products of choice, and often enough of
deliberation; when you deliberate, you take the outcome of
deliberation to settle what you are going to do. (If you did not, you
would merely be attempting to predict what you are going to do, in
just the way you might attempt to predict the actions of other
people.) Even when deliberation is absent, choice involves assessment,
and the assessment, whether deliberative or not, determines you to act
only if you approve of the action; therefore, actions aspire to be
*active*, where that means that you approve of what you do, and
further, that if you understood what the motivational inputs to that
deliberative runup to the action really were, you
would continue to approve (Katsafanas 2013, ch. 5). That last demand
covers all of those inputs, and not just the official ones (as when you claim to be weighing the pros and cons of a request, but are also responsive to the attractiveness, social class, or gender of the one making it). 



Because actions are produced by drives, you can only be fully active
if you approve of your drives' role; that in turn requires approving
of the drives' primary structural feature, namely, their ongoing
production of challenging goals. It follows that whenever we do
something, we have (or aspire to have, if we are less than fully
active) a further aim (which, borrowing Nietzsche's vocabulary,
Katsafanas dubs 'will to power'): that of selecting and structuring
our activities so that they involve challenges we will exert ourselves
in meeting. 



As in Velleman's view, the upshot is that your various reasons are
invariably accompanied by a further reason: not, as in Velleman's
case, wanting to know what you are doing and to understand yourself,
but rather an interest in choosing more rather than less challenging
- but nonetheless attainable - objectives. Katsafanas takes this
interest to answer the complaint he directed at authorship views of
action. If you approve of an aim, you want to achieve it to the
greatest extent possible; therefore, if you are active, you are
committed to more rather than to less challenging activities.
(Although this underwrites the contrast between having more and having
less reason to do something, Katsafanas does not regard it as inducing
the commensurability of reasons across the board.) He also takes it to
have consequences for substantive moral theory; just for instance,
because the struggle to overcome resistance involves suffering, that
sort of suffering counts as a good thing. 


## 4. The Practice View of Action



In an early, influential, and Wittgenstein-influenced paper, John
Rawls introduced the notion of a *practice* as a generalization
or extension of the notion of a game (Rawls 1955). The important
feature of a practice for our purposes is that it introduces statuses
which are internal to it. For instance, in baseball, such statuses
might include being a 'foul', a 'strike', and
so on; whatever what you're doing looks like, it can't be a (baseball)
foul if you're not playing baseball. A practice thereby introduces
standards; since something is a 'home run' only by virtue
of the fact that what is being played is baseball, there are
standards, given by the rules of baseball, to which a home run has to
live up. A practice also introduces reasons which are internal to it;
these reasons may be means-end or calculative reasons (as when the
rules specify the object of the game: in baseball, as Yogi Berra
famously put it, to win, by scoring more points than the opposing
team), or reasons of other kinds. (In squash, that the other player's
head is between your racquet and the ball is a reason to call a
'let', but not because it is the best way to win; if you
were to exercise your option of hitting your opponent in the head, you
would win the point. In squash, calculative reasons are modulated by
gentlemanly reasons.)



Tamar Schapiro has extended Rawls's treatment, developing it into a
theory of action (Schapiro 2001; she attributes the view to Kant, but
again the historical question will not be taken up). On her view,
'actions' are just moves in the completely generic
practice; that is, 'action' is a status within the generic
practice in something like the way that 'move' is a status
within chess. Schapiro does not name the generic practice, but because
it will be convenient to have a short way of referring to it, let's
call it 'Intendo'. Intendo is the game you are playing
whenever you do anything at all; 'agent' is thus the
generic role in the generic game (the analog of 'player,'
in chess or baseball). Practices specify standards and reasons, and so
'practical reason' turns out to be a practice status as
well. Intendo consequently determines what forms practical reasons can
take, and so patterns of practical inference are to be read off of
what turns out to be the theory of action.



Practical reasons are *practical* only if they could be brought
to bear on some decision resulting in action; being an action is a
status (the generic move) within Intendo; so there could be no
practical reasons coming from outside the practice of Intendo. (Other,
more local practices have to accommodate reasons that come from
outside the practice; for instance, in chess, the object of the game
is to win, but I may have personal reasons for not playing to win.)
Therefore, if you can show that Intendo imposes some standard on its
reasons (for instance, and to anticipate, that they have to be
universalizable), then you will have shown that all reasons have to
meet it.



An important metaethical question about practical reasoning has to do
with the modality (roughly, the force) of the family of operators that
includes 'may', 'must', 'should',
and so on, when what is at issue is what you have reason to do. (Call
this the 'modality of freedom'.) Schapiro's approach
provides a surprising answer to this question: the modality of freedom
is that of the 'can' in 'Can he *do*
that?' - said of someone who has just run the bases
backwards. Freedom of the will ranges over the allowable moves in the
game of Intendo.



In extending Rawls's view, Schapiro has departed from it in some ways.
Rawls thought that 'relatively few actions of the moral life are
defined by practices' (op. cit., 32n), and worried about the
conservatism implicit in taking 'the social practices of [each
person's] society to provide the standard of justification for his
actions' (32). On Schapiro's view, being an action *tout
court* is a status in Intendo, and being a reason is a status in
Intendo. Rawls objected to the 'summary' conception of
rules characteristic of utilitarianism, that it allowed only
'one office and so no offices at all' (28). But in
Intendo, the sole office or role is that of 'agent'. Rawls took it
to be 'essential to the notion of a practice that the rules are
publicly known and understood as definitive' (24). This cannot
be true of Intendo; if what reasons for action could be was public
knowledge, and understood as definitive, there would not be a cottage
industry of philosophers arguing about the forms of practical
reasoning. And finally, the Wittgensteinian roots of Rawls's treatment
suggest that he would have been skeptical of a strategy that turned on
finding the deepest common features of all practices. The notion of a
practice, again, is an extension of the notion of a game, and
Wittgenstein famously pointed out that there is no nontrivial feature
common to all games (see Section 3.4, on language games, in the entry
on
 Ludwig Wittgenstein).
 However, to point out that Schapiro's position differs from Rawls's
is of course not thereby to criticize it; rather, it is to warn
against too quickly assuming her position to inherit all of the
structural features of the older and more familiar one.



Schapiro's article eyes a finish line that is some version of Kantian
morality. She writes that 'if it is right to think of universal
laws on the model of practice rules, then the law of freedom can be
thought of as an indeterminate practice rule, one which simply
requires us to make every movement as if it were to count as a move in
some possible global practice' (108); this is a paraphrase, in
the vocabulary of this theory, of the Kantian demand that one act only
on maxims of which one could will that they be universal laws. The
patterns of practical reasoning are to be those acknowledged by
Kantian theory of practical rationality, and the substantive moral
consequences, those endorsed by Kantian moral theory.



Schapiro's position is motivated in the first place by the history of
action theory. She identifies two older conceptions of action, a
consequence-oriented view, on which actions are simply ways of
producing effects in a given, natural world, and an expressivist view,
on which actions function more or less as evaluative pronouncements.
The practice view of action is meant to capture the truth in each of
these, while avoiding their defects; it is, as it were, their Hegelian
synthesis. But Schapiro is also motivated by an appreciation of the
importance and value to us of a world enriched by practice statuses.
It is not just that the predecessor theories are wrong about what an
action is; it is that forgoing the textured world created by our
practices would be a terrible mistake. Korsgaard, we saw, developed
her action-theoretic account of practical rationality
psychologistically, and one might have jumped to the conclusion that
psychologism was a deep feature of the Kantian position. However,
while Schapiro's position is not *motivated* by
anti-psychologism, it is nonetheless non-psychologistic. When you
assess the reasons a practice generates, you can leave the psychology
of the players out of it. For instance, when the king is in check,
then the chess player has a reason to move it out of check; you don't
look inside anyone's head, as it were, to determine that, but rather,
at the constitutive rules of chess.



As before, if the Kantian moral conclusions are to be binding, then
not only must the practice conception entail the Kantian conclusions,
but the practice conception of action must be shown to be nonoptional.
The game of baseball gives its players reasons, but you can always
choose not to play in the first place, and you can choose to stop
playing; what's more, the rules of baseball themselves bring baseball
games to a close. In either case, the reasons of baseball do not
- or cease to - apply to you. Intendo must therefore be a
game that you cannot walk away from. But why can't you simply stop
playing Intendo, and start producing - not perhaps
'actions', but activity of some other kind - that is
not practice-governed? We have already gestured at one answer: the
importance of living in a practice-informed world. One further answer
Schapiro might give is that you *can't* do that - where
the modality of the 'can't' is the modality of freedom.
(Since reasons are a practice status, questions having to do with
practical reason do not arise for the alternative forms of activity.)




The question is especially pressing in view of a further philosophical
motivation for Schapiro's project. Non-ideal theory is concerned with
guidelines for action and moral thinking in a world that is not very
moral at all, and Schapiro 2006 takes up a traditional Kantian test
case, that of the murderer at the door. Kantian moral theory prohibits
lying, and in a world in which there were no murderers, perhaps that
would be fine; but here he is, asking if his intended victim, to whom
you have just served a cup of tea, is at home. The casuistical
exercise is that of providing an explanation, consistent with the
moral theory, of the legitimacy of lying to him, and Schapiro's
solution draws on the idea that moral reasons, like all reasons for
action, are statuses in the game of Intendo. If the murderer at the
door is refusing to play the game, then your own moves cannot be
responses to his moves in the game. In this case, honesty meant as a
contribution to the 'co-legislation game' (the game that
properly played Intendo turns out to be) is simply not an option. And
if proper honesty is not an available move, perhaps other moves are
available to you.



The tension is this: On the one hand, you must act out of the moral
law because you cannot opt out of the game of Intendo; that is why
morality is binding. On the other hand, however, you may lie to the
murderer at the door, because he *has* opted out of the game of
Intendo. Schapiro provides a label for what she intends as a way of
splitting the difference: the murderer is *betraying* the
generic practice without *opting out* of it. But the
distinction marked by the label is as yet unexplained. The further
development of the practice view will be shaped by the need to
accommodate these apparently conflicting theoretical constraints.


## 5. Evaluation as Essential to Action



We will review two variants of the thesis that evaluation is
an essential feature of action, or of a privileged kind of action,
due, respectively, to Sarah Buss and Talbot Brewer.



Buss distinguishes between mere "movements of the human
body" and full fledged intentional action by requiring, for the
latter, that agents endorse their actions at the time they are
initiated; the content of the endorsement must in one way or another
come to allowing the agent's reasons to be sufficient for performing
the action (Buss 1999). Anything short of that, she argues, amounts to
adopting a spectatorial stance towards your own actions: if you
identify a number of desires, notice that you could satisfy them by
performing an action, but then don't arrive at an evaluative belief
with roughly the content that that's good enough to go ahead, you will
be doing no more than sitting back to see what happens - to see
whether the desires actuate your body. 



Buss then considers a Humean moral psychology on which reasons for
action are drawn from two mutually exclusive classes of psychological
states, desires and beliefs, where beliefs are understood to have no
properly evaluative content (e.g., Smith, 1987). Since such a moral
psychology has no room for evaluative beliefs, and since intentional
action requires one particular sort of evaluative belief, Humean moral
psychology is, she concludes, incompatible with there being
intentional actions. It evidently follows that a theory of practical
reasoning which presupposes Humean moral psychology cannot allow for
intentional action, either. (There is a little bit of slippage here:
one might allow for the evaluations, but then insist that these could
not figure into practical reasoning. But this would be an awkward way
of resisting the conclusion.) Theories of practical reasoning which
identify reasons for action solely with desires and beliefs so
characterized - so-called Humean theories - are directed
towards choosing actions, yet incompatible with actions being chosen.
The conclusion we are invited to draw is that Humean theories of
practical reasoning are incoherent. A dramatic way of putting it might
be: if your will is to be free, instrumentalism must be false.



There is evident overlap between Buss's view and Velleman's: both
pivot on the concern that one act for one's (sufficient or good enough
or best) reasons. (In Velleman, that concern appears as a desire,
where in Buss, it appears as an evaluation.) But the concern is
differently motivated: where Velleman is trying to halt a regress in
the structural analysis of agency, Buss is trying to express the
philosophical thought that action is active rather than passive. Once
past the conclusion that a theory of practical rationality had better
not presuppose a Humean theory of motivation, Buss is open-minded both
about what one's practical reasons might turn out to be like, and thus
about the consequences for moral theory. And worries about
psychologism do not seem to figure into her view.



Turning now to Brewer, we encounter a shift of key. In the contrasts
between full-fledged and lower-grade doings that we have reviewed so
far, "action " was used to designate the first-class
version, and often "activity " labeled its lesser
relative. In Brewer's terminology,
*dialectical activity* is the privileged category, and actions
make up the inferior contrasting class. Actions are merely structured
to produce a "pre-envisioned state of affairs". But
dialectical activity is marked out by two features. First, coming to
understand better what the activity is counts as an essential aspect
of the activity itself. And second, continually arriving at a deeper
understanding of the good of the activity also is an essential aspect
of such an activity (Brewer 2009, 55 and *passim*). For
instance, one might well think that part of what it is to be in a
healthy and satisfactory friendship is to be developing a
progressively deeper sense of what this particular friendship is
about, of why and how it is rewarding, and of what challenges it poses
and how to navigate them. Moreover, it is also to be developing a
gradually improving understanding of the demands, rewards, promise and
significance of friendship generally. (The view is positioned as
recovering insights from older ethics, with pride of place to
Aristotle, but as before, here we will not take up the historical
question.) 



As we will shortly see, the anchor for the view is not that of our
previously surveyed positions, that to do is thereby to act, period.
(And so Brewer's view is perhaps a penumbral member of this family of
positions.) Rather, firstly, mere actions typically will not make
sense outside the context of a dialectical activity, and secondly,
Brewer advances but does not quite directly argue for the suggestion
that dialectical activities make up everything that could count as
intrinsically valuable for human beings. Anything that is worthwhile
on its own - anyway, worthwhile enough to be taken seriously as
something one would try to fold into one's life, from
conversation to friendship to philosophy - belongs in this
category.




Because the proposal is likely to bring to mind specificationist
claims about practical reasoning, some compare and contrast is in
order. Specificationism is built around the observation that,
frequently enough, one's ends are not concrete or definite
enough to launch questions about how to attain them; first, the
content of one's goals must be filled in and firmed up enough
for that to be possible. For instance, and borrowing a low-key
example from Bernard Williams (1981a, 104), if our objective is to be
entertained this evening, and so far that's all we have settled,
we have to decide what sort of entertainment it will be, before we can
consider steps we might take. Therefore, there must be a mode of
practical thinking that does that job. (For an overview of the
specificationist back and forth, see Millgram, 2008.) But where the
aim of specificationist deliberation is to arrive at a sufficiently
concrete rendering of an objective, at which point it ceases, and
calculatively structured action, more or less as we saw it rendered by
Vogler, resumes, in dialectical activity, the clarification of the
activity and of how it is desirable is ongoing, rather than a
preliminary. You find out what the rewards of this friendship are by
participating in it, and the longer you are someone's friend,
the more nuanced and the deeper your appreciation of what it brings to
your life becomes. When it's just an evening's
entertainment, figuring out what we want it to be doesn't
usually turn up as part of entertaining ourselves; in the activities
that constitute friendship, however, it is grounds for complaint when
one of the participants ceases paying attention to the emerging shape
of the friendship itself. The deliberative baton is not simply handed
over to means-end reasoning; rather, although one is moved to one
after another after another goal-directed action, those actions are
themselves part and parcel of further comprehending just what the
dialectical activity in which they arise *is*.



Adapting one of Brewer's illustrations, two friends may be on a
motorcycle on their way to Vegas, for blackjack and wild times; when
we check back, a few years later, we find them in the gardening aisle
at Home Depot; a few years after that, doing something very different
from either of those things. There's an observation we can
extract, about the relation between activities and actions as other
views we have surveyed conceive them: on the one hand, the activity of
friendship produces an endless stream of subsidiary goals and actions
(those roadtrips, gardening projects and so on); on the other, because
the participants' conception of the friendship will continue to
deepen and shift, the actions in that stream cannot be concretely
characterized up front. The versions of high-grade and low-grade
action being contrasted with each other here are interdependent.
Dialectical activity normally emits merely end-directed action on an
ongoing basis. (And the intelligibility of those ends normally
depends on their embedding within dialectical activity, if only the
activity of living one's life; it makes sense that they'd
be biking to Vegas, given how, at that stage of the friendship, they
understand what their friendship is about, and without that context,
it wouldn't make much sense.) Conversely, the improving grasp
of what one is doing, central to the activity, depends on the friction
with the surrounding circumstances produced by the end-directed
actions; it was, perhaps, the way the Vegas trip didn't work
out, and the subsequent quarrel, that made the two of them rethink
what they were doing with each other, and start in on the
gardening.



On the views against which Brewer is positioning his own, actions are
motivated by desires, which are propositional attitudes: that is,
centrally, descriptions of states of affairs that might be realized in
the future, and in light of which you effect and adjust what you can
and are willing to, so as to make the description true. (Brewer
attempts to reappropriate the concept of desire for his own purposes,
but I won't spell that move out here.) However, what you
are *moved* - as opposed to 'motivated'
- by, in the course of a dialectical activity, cannot be
captured by a proposition. For one thing, a proposition has a
definite, stable content; propositions are sometimes thought of as
partitioning all the possible worlds - the ways things might be
or might have been - into those that are, intuitively,
compatible with it, and those that are not; the proposition effects
its partition *once and for all*. But the content of what
moves you, in the course of dialectical activity, is deepening and
evolving, and there is no point at which apprehending it is properly
over. So no proposition could successfully demarcate what it is the
activity is after and about.



Moreover, desires as nowadays standardly conceived set a proposition
as to be made true at some point in the future. But the object of
dialectical activity does not lie in the future: living your life is a
dialectical activity, and you are *already* living; your life
does not wait to be lived until it is over. If you are
somebody's friend, you are *already* participating, you
hope successfully, in the friendship. If you are philosophizing in an
appropriately philosophical frame of mind (and so, always striving
better to understand what philosophy *is*), you are
*already* philosophizing. So although the many simpler
subsidiary actions that are constantly being spun off by dialectical
activities can often be thought of as controlled by this sort of
propositional attitude, dialectical activity cannot itself be
construed as desire-driven, in this standard sense of
'desire'.



What is at stake in the disagreement over how to conceptualize these
ongoing courses of action? In the example we're using, the
friends' goals change dramatically from time to time; seen
through the lens of rationalization-by-desires, as standardly
conceived, the segments of the friendship are only collected into a
developing trajectory retrospectively. The cost is not just that one
misses seeing what unifies the activity while it is in progress; often
enough, the inability to understand the activity as unified, despite
the very different appearances of its segments, undercuts its unity.
(Not always: Brewer adduces Augustine as an example of someone who did
not understand his life as a search for God until late on, even though
that is what it was and had been all along.) But then, one does not
have *that* dialectical activity - here, a friendship,
whose parties are jointly pressing towards a more truthful, more
workable, or otherwise better understanding of what that friendship
is. That means that operating only on the basis of
rationalization-by-desires condemns one to life largely empty of the
goods that really matter - for instance, friendships. To be
sure, whether this is the cost of surrendering dialectical activities
as Brewer describes them will depend on whether he is substantively
characterizing those central human goods correctly; an opponent will
presumably contest the view on those grounds.



Returning to the point of convergence with older specificationism, if
the evolving conception of a dialectical activity and what makes it
desirable is deliberative rather than arational, there must be
reasons, and reasoning, that can modify not only one's decisions
about how to attain what one already straightforwardly wants, but also
one's view of what one is after. That is, in the jargon, over
and above instrumental rationality, deliberation of ends must be
possible. And that returns us to the question of the conception of
reasons tied to this contrast between dialectical activity and mere
actions. Per the spirit of Brewer's view, it shouldn't be
possible simply to spell out what practical reasoning correctly
performed must amount to; since practical reasoning is an aspect of
most or all dialectical activity, our grasp of what practical
reasoning is will continue to develop alongside our grasp of such
activities. Nonetheless, a number of upshots for practical
rationality stand out in Brewer's discussion.



First, against the often implicitly accepted model of practical
reasoning as a matter of first surveying surrounding circumstances,
then assessing them, and then deciding what new action to initiate
next, one largely attends to what one is already in the middle of
doing, clarifying how it has gone hitherto, with an eye to a
continuation. The action does not commence only after the survey and
assessment, and consequently the primary object of attention turns out
to be the action already in progress. Here the model is an author
rereading his half-written book or paper, wondering how to complete
his not-fully-formed train of thought - the train of thought he
is in the middle of, rather than about to kick off - or perhaps
that author reviewing his rough drafts. Because understanding of what
one is doing does not come all at once but gradually, as one proceeds
with one's course of action, the ability to survey and assess
all the considerations relevant to a decision up front, as presupposed
by the competing model, will not normally be in place when anything
that is itself significant is at stake.



Second, the question one finds oneself asking amounts to,
'*What* have I been doing?,' and those
characterizations of what one is doing that drive further choice will
be largely framed using thick ethical concepts. That is, rather than
applying concepts like 'good' or 'right' to
evaluatively neutral descriptions of one's circumstances or
activity, they will deploy descriptions whose very application depends
on mobilizing one's evaluative capacities. (E.g., in the
elaborate case study which led Bernard Williams to identify this class
of concepts, there isn't any way to mark out what counts as
obscene, if one occupies only the evaluatively neutral view of a
Martian exobiologist; Williams 1981b, and for background, see the
entry on
thick ethical concepts.)
Williams controversially claimed that thick ethical concepts could not
be factored into strictly factual and strictly evaluative components
(for an overview, see Millgram 1995). Brewer argues that the unity
over time of dialectical activities supports Williams's view on
this point, and in addition, that our need to rely on thick ethical
concepts undercuts the distinction we have used in framing this very
survey, between theoretical and practical reasons - that is,
respectively, reasons that figure into argument as to how the facts
stand, and those that figure into arguments for doing one thing or
another.



And third and finally for now, certain of our qualms about delegating
our practical reasoning to others are accounted for. If practical
thought is, as Brewer puts it, 'a seamless part of the
activity' of, say, friendship, or conducting a conversation, or
making one's way through philosophy, or just living one's
life, then to contract out one's deliberation and decisions to
third parties - even expert third parties - is to forego
the valuable activity itself.



Although both Buss and Brewer highlight the role of evaluation in
action, for Buss, the evaluation that matters is the settled output of
one's evaluating; for Brewer, the evaluation that matters is the
evaluat*ing*.


## 6. Prospects and Outstanding Issues



The turn to action theory is producing some of the most interesting
recent work on practical reasoning. As we have seen, however, their
shared methodology notwithstanding, these theorists disagree on just
about everything else: on their philosophical reasons for adopting the
approach in the first place, on what the correct theory of practical
reasoning is, on why one form or another of practical inference is
nonoptional or binding, and on what the upshots are for morality or
ethics. However, as awareness of the shared agenda grows, we are
starting to see positions that attempt to take on board elements from
more than one of the theories currently in play and, in addition, take
up the task of explaining why competitors are misguided.



The primary source of the disagreements just mentioned is a further
disagreement, as to what it takes to count as an *action*. On
one view, intentional actions are centrally characterized by their
stepwise or nested internal structure; on another, by their being
authored or owned; on the third, by their location in a practice; on a
fourth, by entailing an evaluation of one's reasons. (In one
variant, we saw, those evaluations are entailed by 'dialectical
activity', contrasted with mere action, and characterized by
ongoing reconsideration of its point and nature.) As we have seen,
some of these characterizations come with supporting arguments, and
this is a dramatic advance on the state of play as of about two
decades back; however, the norm in this subfield is still to omit
explanations of why arguments for competing conceptions of action are
incorrect. In a famous essay that kicked off discussion of a different
topic in practical reasoning, Robert Nozick observed that advocates of
the alternative responses to Newcomb's Problem were prepared to
explain why they thought their own position correct, but not what was
wrong with arguments for the other alternative; such a posture is
unsatisfactory, and Nozick emphasized that in such debates 'it
will not do to rest content with one's belief ... nor will it do
to just repeat one of the arguments, loudly and slowly' (Nozick
1997, p. 48).



It follows that the most important item on the agenda of this research
program is to produce arguments that will decide between the competing
conceptions of action in play. One can't very well hang one's theory
of practical reasoning, and one's moral theory to boot, off an account
of action that is treated as obviously false by other researchers in
one's discipline, when one has no story to tell about why one's own
account is correct, and theirs is not. We may conclude by observing
that there are two modes of argument one must choose between. One
might try to establish that, as a matter of metaphysical fact, actions
*are* as this or that theory says; alternatively, one might
argue that one *is to* (ought to, had better) produce actions
which are as the theory says; that is, the top-level argumentation
might be either theoretical or practical. 



The choice between the two modes of argument is tied to a further
strategic choice. On the approach we are examining, theories of
practical inference inherit their bindingness from the non-optionality
of the associated conception of action. That entails that any such
theory needs an answer to the question, 'Given what is meant by
"action", why not produce activity of some *other*
kind?' To quickly canvass the forms this question takes for the
theories we have on the table: Why shouldn't I look for noncalculative
control structures, and manage my activity by using *them*?
What's wrong with answering the question, 'Did you really
*do* (i.e., author) that?' with, 'Well, no, it just
kind of happened?' What's wrong with engaging in activities that
compete with each other or frustrate themselves - that is, with
behaving as though you were a market on the inside, rather than a
totalitarian state? Why shouldn't I opt out of the game of Intendo, in
something like the way I might decline a round of pinochle? (And if
it's simply not possible, how is it that I have to cope with people
who seem to have opted out themselves?) Why bother with evaluating the
reasons for my action? Isn't the fact that I am responsive to them
enough? Why *not* detour around activities with the structure
of friendship, philosophizing, and conversation? Isn't, say, harvesting
an ongoing stream of sensual pleasures quite enough?
Notice that we should not assume without argument that one or
another mode of action must be nonoptional; if the pressures toward
one or another form of action amount to less than practical necessity,
pluralism about action might be the appropriate conclusion (Millgram
2010). 



A theoretical answer would involve showing that there is nothing else
that you *can* - metaphysically - do: that whatever
you do (in the thinnest possible sense) is action (in the theory's
thicker and more substantive sense). A practical answer would involve
showing that, given the alternatives, the suggestion that you produce
actions (in the substantive sense of one's favored theory) is, as they
used to say, an offer you can't refuse. The type of force or
bindingness that one's theory of practical reason will inherit from
one's theory of action will be determined by the choice between these
two modes of argument.