A Non-Instrumentalist Approach to Collective Intentionality, Practical Reason, and the Self 9783737002271, 9783847102274, 9783847002277

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Juliette Gloor

A Non-Instrumentalist Approach to Collective Intentionality, Practical Reason, and the Self

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Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de ISBN 978-3-8471-0227-4 ISBN 978-3-8470-0227-7 (E-Book) Ó Copyright 2014 by V& R unipress GmbH, D-37079 Goettingen All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printing and binding: a Hubert & Co, Göttingen Printed in Germany

Contents

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 1: A Problematic Dichotomy – Setting the Methodological Frame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Two Fundamental Problems of Instrumental Rationality with Collective Intentionality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 A Problematic Dichotomy : Two Separate Realms of Behaviour . . 1.4 Korsgaard’s Two Conceptions of the Final Good . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.1 The Function of Rational Animals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.2 Normative Goodness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.3 The Relation between the Good Human Life and the Human Good . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 Feeling Respect: “The Feeling of Us” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.6 The Relation between Language and Self-Consciousness . . . . . 1.6.1 Schmid’s Criticism of Searle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.6.2 We-Intentions and Sharing Intentions . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.7 Can Collective Intentionality Consist of Purely Cognitive Relations? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.8 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 2: Collective Intentionality and Animal Consciousness . 2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Collective Intentionality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.1 Shareability and Actual Sharedness . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 The First Person Perspective, Sharing Mental Attitudes, and Reasons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Contents

2.3.1 The Age-Old Division between Perception or Affect and Thinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Animal Mentality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.1 The Peculiar Nature of Animal Consciousness . . . . . . . . . 2.4.2 The Structural Openness of Animal Consciousness . . . . . . 2.5 Defending a Non-Instrumentalist Approach to Collective Intentionality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 Self-Consciousness Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6.1 The Non-Epistemological Knowledge-Relationship of the Self with Itself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6.2 Self-Consciousness and Reasons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 3: Practical Reasons and Other-Regardingness . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Epistemic Norms Are (not) of the Same Kind as Practical Norms 3.2.1 Epistemic Norms Are Constitutive Norms of Thought . . . . 3.3 Practical Norms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Practical Identities and the Moral Identity We Share . . . . . . . 3.4.1 A Crucial Ambiguity in Korsgaard’s Account of Normativity 3.5 Two Objections and Two Replies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6 Korsgaard’s “Public Conception of Reasons” . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6.1 Two Final Objections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 4: Self-Relation and Relation to Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Shareability and Communicability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1 Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.2 Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument and Korsgaard’s Notion of Publicity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Sharing Evaluative Perspectives and Plural Agency . . . . . . . . 4.4 Meeting the Challenge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 The Normative Structure of the Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5.1 Richardson’s Objection from “Reflective Sovereignty” . . . 4.5.2 Larmore’s Objection from Self-Commitment . . . . . . . . . 4.5.3 First Person Authority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 5: Why Human Self-Relation Cannot Be Instrumentally Normative – Results and Some Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Can Instrumentalism Be Saved? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.1 The Normativity of the Will . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.2 The Form of Rational Animals . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.3 The Instrumentalist’s Worry and a Reply . . . . . . . . 5.3 Two Ways of Understanding Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Human Desires Are Reason-Responsive . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5 Subjectively Normative Reasons and Objectively Normative Reasons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.6 The Milgram Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Preface

In his Autobiography John Stuart Mill ([1873]1989, 115 – 116) makes a distressing discovery while subjecting himself to the following thought experiment: “‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, ‘No!’ At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.”

It is noteworthy that the foundation on which Mill’s life was constructed, and which Mill felt falling down at the force of his thought experiment makes a considerable part of the foundation of Western Analytical Philosophy. I am thinking of the still widely held view among philosophers that all rationality is means-end rationality, or that practical reason is reducible to instrumental reason. One central aim of this dissertation project is to take some of this view’s charm away. This certainly will not have as profound an effect on the foundations of philosophy as Mill’s thoughts had on the foundation of his happiness. But I do hope to show that our understanding of human rationality and agency is considerably enhanced by recognizing that rational action is more than taking the suitable means to one’s ends – irrespective of whether these ends or goals are shared with others or not. Specifically, I will suggest that our philosophical interest in action and agency had better turn to the concept of an end of action not primarily in its role as condition of satisfaction of intentions but rather to its role as a good.1 It is this role that sets the end in its proper context, namely as part 1 As we shall see, this does not mean that the goal or end in its role as good has to be intrinsically valuable in order for it to be valued for its own sake. I will treat the notions “end” and “goal” as synonyms being aware that the notion of an “end” is often reserved for goals that are ends in themselves. I will talk in the latter fashion only with regard to human beings or other animals

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of the constitutive norm of action, that is, of acting well. Mill’s dread at the prospect of all ends being effectively realized loses some of its enormity if we think that effectively producing good states of affairs is not the end in the double sense of the word. It seems that to a large extent (self-)contentment not so much requires the realization of our individual or shared goals but depends more on our recognition of our continued (mutual) commitment to the goodness of the (joint) activity. This, as I will try to show, is not independent of our recognizing others under a certain basic description, namely as under the description of a sentient self-conscious moral being that is potentially capable of acting well and with whom we share a certain form of life. Accordingly, I also think that the selfrelation and the relation of the self to other selves that are both constitutive of human agency, not only share the same fundamental evaluative structure but are mutually interdependent. The concept of purely private action turns out to be a myth: Human action is action potentially shareable with others. A considerable part of this dissertation project is concerned with showing what exactly this means and why instrumentalism about practical reason cannot but fail in telling us what lies at the heart of human action. Here is the occasion to emphasize that in writing this dissertation, I have immensely profited from the thoughts and arguments laid out in the philosophical works of both Christine Korsgaard and Hans Bernhard Schmid. Each of these philosophers approaches the hard questions of collective intentionality and human action in his or her own original and philosophically inspiring way. My own work in many ways proofs a vigorous and critical engagement with their views. This book is dedicated to my mother without whom I would never have aspired to writing this book. Juliette Gloor

Berne, December 2013

but not with regard to things. We can value things partly for their own sakes without having to grant that they are intrinsically valuable or good in themselves (for this idea cf. Korsgaard [1996]2000a, 249 – 274).

Overview

The main thread of this dissertation project is best illustrated by showing how the three strands or elements figuring in the title are connected. One of the core claims is that instrumentalism about practical reason, the widely held philosophical view that practical reason just is (or can be reduced to) instrumental reason, is inconsistent with the idea of shared ends (if these are also understood in their role as goods) or shared activity. As a result, I will argue, instrumentalism about practical reason is also incompatible with a fundamental assumption philosophers operate with in collective intentionality analysis. For one thing, the instrumentalist about practical reason denies that one can deliberate rationally about ends – practical reason is only fit for helping one find the necessary means to one’s given ends (more will be said shortly about what is meant by speaking of ends as “given”). On such a view, practical reasoning is regarded exclusively as a matter of means/end reasoning, i.e. reasoning about what the necessary means are to one’s given ends, but not as a matter of reasoning about (the goodness of) ends themselves. However, I will argue that the very concept of sharing ends – which is sometimes interpreted along the lines of sharing a common rational point of view (held by the members of a community or group) and which is to be distinguished from merely pursuing the same token end2 – entails that one can jointly deliberate about ends and that one can choose ends together. To argue for a shared rational point of view while at the same time arguing that one cannot (individually or jointly) deliberate about ends looks like a philosophical nonstarter. Instrumentalism about practical reason is therefore at odds with one of the most important claims in contemporary debates of collective intentionality analysis. The claim is that we must assume, contrary to what the traditional instrumentalist accounts of rationality suggest, something like what Korsgaard (2009, 191 – 192) calls “the public conception of reasons” in order to theoretically 2 Cf. e. g. Schmid (2009b), Postema (1995), Helm (2010), Korsgaard (2009) and Pettit (1996), to name just a few.

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Overview

account for the face value of everyday phenomena of joint action and joint deliberation.3 Instrumentalism about practical reason in its purest form is not a theory of practical rationality at all, as I will argue with Korsgaard in chapter 1, since it does not (or indeed cannot) instruct the individual agent, which ends to choose. Thus it is unclear how it could instruct agents to jointly choose some end. This key insight is prone to go missing, I think, because the question of what it means to rationally pursue an end has received little attention, if any. This is not surprising if one assumes, as the instrumentalist does, that the ends an individual agent pursues are somehow just given to her. What do philosophers mean when they speak of ends as “given” to an agent? I suggest that the answer to this question must have something to do with how the instrumentalist views the psychological make-up of individual agents or selves, which establishes the connection between the second and third notions in the title of my dissertation project, namely that between practical reason and the self. Here it is important to note that the instrumentalist about practical reason does not deny that if one intends to do A one has to take oneself to have a reason to do A. What she denies is that the respective reasons are sometimes grounded in practical reason itself, understood as the human agent’s will. According to the instrumentalist all reasons are grounded in one’s desires. The ambiguous nature of this claim is reflected in the garden variety of interpretations it has given rise to. At least three ways of reading this claim are available. First, it could mean that one’s desires just are one’s reasons for action. This Humean view cannot be right because, as Korsgaard (2008, 55) has pointed out, it makes it impossible to distinguish between what one desires to do and what one actually does. As a result, the concept of practical rationality becomes meaningless since whatever one does just is what one desires to do. Second, it could mean that one regards something as a reason because one desires it. This cannot be right either because desires themselves do not normally provide us with reasons for action. We desire to pursue many things of which we do not think that we have good reason to pursue them (this point has forcefully been made by Millgram 1997 and Schueler 2003). Third, it could mean that practical reason only sets obligatory or moral ends – while all our other ends cannot be rationally determined. While scepticism concerning the claim that all reasons derive from the will is advisable, I think it should also allow for the fact that many of the reasons we act on in our everyday lives are not moral (i.e. morally evaluative) reasons. Schmid’s claim (2009b, 242) that the real problem of instrumentalism is not instrumentalism itself but its individualism about ends is helpful starting point from where to defend part of the case of the considered instrumentalist. Schmid 3 For a similar claim see also Schmid (2003).

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convincingly argues that the problem of instrumental accounts of rationality is that they are based on a highly implausible individualist assumption. The individualist assumption understood as a psychological claim, should be distinguished from the individualist assumption understood as an ethical claim. According to the former it is a matter of psychological fact that persons only desire what contributes to their own good. The latter claim holds: persons ought to rationally desire only what contributes to their own good. Consequently they ought to treat considerations of other people’s goods merely as constrains on their own good. Psychological egoism flies in the face of our everyday experience that people often do care about the good of others and act accordingly. They do not merely out of self-interested motivations. Rational or ethical egoism is selfdefeating on the plausible Aristotelian assumption that human beings are creatures that are not self-sufficient. Schmid (2009b) argues against psychological egoism by taking our everyday experience of shared goals, alongside individual goals, at face value. But Schmid also thinks that instrumental reasoning is capable of integrating other people’s perspectives without treating these as mere means. In other words, Schmid tries to make the conceptual point that in sharing a goal with you, I need not treat you as a mere tool to my interests, because my interests, just like yours, are part of our interests. By sharing ends with you, I do not treat you and your deliberations as mere constraints on my own ends and deliberations since your deliberations and ends are part of what enables us to achieve the shared end in the first place, or so Schmid argues. Schmid’s important point as I understand it, is that you are not used by me as a mere means to an end that you share with me for the same reason that you do not treat yourself as a mere means by pursuing your own end. I am very sympathetic to this particular line of reasoning. What I consider problematic is that Schmid goes on to argue that it remains nevertheless true that I am interested in your reasons – we are members of the same group or community sharing an intention or desire – merely as instrumental reasons, i.e., in their role as a means to realise our shared end. Schmid (2009b, 243) assumes that when agents pursue shared ends they are concerned with each other’s instrumental rationality just as they are concerned with their own instrumental rationality when they pursue their individual ends. In the interpersonal or social case you and I are normatively connected to each other in virtue of our sharing an end, while in the intrapersonal case I and my future self are normatively connected to the individual goal. Although (Schmid 2011a, 50) emphasises that in the latter case, one must take one’s own will as normative for oneself, he also contends that the normative expectations either towards oneself or towards others are first and foremost instrumentally nor-

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mative (ibid., 51).4 It is this claim that I want to challenge here, and I will do this on the following two grounds: 1) I will try to show with Korsgaard that it makes little sense to ascribe to an animal instrumental or efficacious rationality as the primary relation in which it stands to itself and others without being clear about what the underlying ascription of non-instrumental normativity is in the animal’s self-relation. The ascription of failures in an agent’s efficacy depends for its intelligibility on what one thinks counts as the animal’s own behaviour in the first place.5 2) I do not think that the normative expectations of human beings, which they entertain of themselves or others, are primarily instrumentally normative. Human agents typically think about what they should do alone or together with others not just (if at all) in terms of the most effective means to some given end, but in terms of whether the action description including the means and the ends depicts the action as worth while doing as a whole.6 What I think is problematic about how the instrumentalist views the psychological make-up of human beings, is their contention that the description of a paradigmatically human action type is best formulated as “do x (in order to y), where y is given” instead of as “do (x in order to y) where y is not given.”7 Since as I assume with Kant and others that for human animals not all their ends are given by their instinctual desires, I think that a unifying principle of reason or selfgoverning law is required: it reliably guides the human agent in pursuing her individual or shared ends. On my anti-instrumentalist view of agency, human agents do choose and must choose whole actions (or more precisely, action 4 Schmid’s view seems to be that while instrumentalism’s individualism about ends is indeed a problem, instrumentalism as such isn’t. 5 My argument here is based on Korsgaard’s thinking about autonomy and efficacy in her book Self-Constitution, pp. 81 – 108. 6 I have first come across this idea that the description of an action should be taken to include both means and ends in Korsgaard’s books The Constitution of Agency and her Self-Constitution. In both books she develops and defends this idea convincingly. 7 Schmid (2011a, 46) seems to grant this when he agrees with Korsgaard (1996; 2008; 2009) that human beings create their individual or shared practical identities (by choosing or willing certain things or states of affairs), which entails that not all of their ends can be given to them. At the same time, however, Schmid explicitly depicts the notion of a shared goal in terms of the rational end to coordinate one’s actions as good as one can. Thus one gets the impression that Schmid, while arguing that the sources of social normativity are to be found in coordination, actually claims that the normativity that relates the parties to one another in coordinating activities is merely instrumental normativity. What I find somewhat puzzling about this, as I will argue in chapter 1 and 5, is not only that the concept of sociality in sharedness understood as coordination is rather underdeveloped, but also that the binding force of the kind of normativity involved seems rather empty. After all, one can hardly imagine someone desiring to deviate from her end to coordinate. Schmid’s emphasis on instrumental normativity seems reversely proportional to his interest in the social element of sharedness. This leaves one puzzled about the nature of the sharedness entailed in collective intentionality.

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descriptions). Agents of this kind, I will argue with Korsgaard, must be capable of recognising that they can choose ends as part of a good action or activity. Korsgaard (2009, 159 – 176) compellingly argues that desires lack the power to unify. Thus I think that we need to go beyond the concept of desires in order to account for the notion of sharing an end (or sharing an activity) where sharing an end is understood with Korsgaard (2009, 159 – 176), namely to imply that it must be good for the whole agent, or the whole collective agent in some way.8 As far as I can see, instrumentalism about practical reason cannot account for this important agential feature of rational creatures because it lacks the notion of a unifying principle of reason or self-governing law that reliably guides the agent in pursuing her individual or shared ends. Action description provided by such a principle includes both ends and means. This, I will argue, is required for human agents to be able not only to view their own actions as more or less coherent parts of their ongoing personal history, but also as (potential) meaningful contributions to shared activities with others. I contend with Korsgaard that to rationally pursue an end is not primarily a matter of showing that the means effectively realise the end (or that, on the realist’s view, of contributing to an intrinsically good end). Rather it is found to be a matter of rationally determining one’s choice by considering whether one could will this means to that end as a principle that jointly relates means to ends. What such a principle might look like is, among other things, the topic of chapter 3 and 4. I think it advisable at this point to anticipate a powerful objection to the idea of reason as unifying power (I will return to this objection in more detail later). The objection is (often put forth by the pragmatist) that anyone who takes the notion of unifying power of reason seriously, tacitly confirms the age-old but, as the objector thinks, useless if not harmful division between reason and desire or, for that matter, between enlightened rationality and morality or solidarity. It is useless, as for example Richard Rorty ([1989]2009, 59 – 60) argues, because morality is just a language or vocabulary like any other with no privileged status. It is subject to both individual narratives and historical/societal contingencies. He contends that there is no moral “we” or community called “humanity” with an intrinsic nature over and above the myriad kinds of communities that make up free pluralist societies. Closely related to the spirit of this type of criticism are 8 Bratman (1999, 197 – 206) seems to express a similar idea when he argues that taking a desire as a reason for action must entail some form of unification of mind, i. e. satisfaction “with one’s decision of setting the end”. (Bratman ibid., 200) To be satisfied with one’s decision means that one must not have reached a conflicting decision. The problem with Bratman’s proposal, I think, is that a lack of conflict can be achieved in a way that seem at odds with doing something for a reason. For example, one could simply give up an end one previously had in order to avoid the conflict one would face if one willed an end but found it hard to take the means to the end.

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the widely held reservations of philosophers against collective intentionality as viewed from a Kantian perspective. More precisely, they think it problematic to bring together what they take to be two independent strands of philosophical issues, namely that of common intelligibility of human behaviour and normativity based on common but contingent rule-following practices on the one hand, and the specific, supposedly non-contingent universality of morality or moral principles on the other hand. One important follow-up of this criticism is that a Kantian perspective on collective intentionality misses the very point about collective intentionality analysis: Surely, universal or impersonal principles are not the stuff out of which particular shared activities among individual human agents are made. Thus, they argue, the nature and structure of collective intentionality cannot be illuminated by way of universal principles.9 As a consequence we should to abandon the vocabulary of universality altogether, they urge us, and instead talk of communities or societies and of what Sellars (1968, 225) calls a “we-intention.” A “we-intention” is the intersubjective intention of a group or community whose “individuals…intend sub specie such an intention, the scope of ‘we’ being the members of the community”, that is, “one of us.” (ibid., 222) My tentative response for the time being is that although the experience of particular shared activities is essential for developing something like a moral weintention, i.e. a shared conception of something that we as a group or community do, such experience itself would neither be possible (for all that we know), nor indeed required in the first place, if human beings could not recognise what they share with one another. What they recognise is, as Korsgaard (2007b; 2011b) has argued, that they share a final good and that they as bearers of a good will can confer value on what they are and do. Such recognition is a necessary condition for human agency. Moreover, I have no intention to defend the admittedly implausible claim that humanity has a nature over and above the historically and evolutionary contingent life forms that we know. The claim I rather want to defend is that humanity is itself a life form and that an essential part of the nature of this life form’s exemplars is a need and desire for shared activities10. Shared activities, however, are not to be understood merely as a means to satisfy one’s common desire for self-knowledge but an indispensable component of leading a meaningful human life. That is, shared activities are not merely valued for the im-

9 I am grateful to Prof. M. Quante who pressed me to be clearer on this issue. 10 By “shared activities” I do not mean merely activities of coordination but rather, as will become soon clearer, joint activities in which the participants affirm to each other the activity’s (moral, intellectual, practical, etc.) goodness or worth.

Overview

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portant role they play in our human lives but they are valued also for their own sakes given their role in our lives.11 This is why I think that an account of agency must rely on an evaluative selfconception in the sense Korsgaard (1996, 101) defines it, that is, as “a description under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking.” So unlike Velleman (2009, 16) I do not think that it is selfknowledge or a self-conception that is “a description under which your actions and reactions make sense to you in causal-explanatory terms” which is inescapable in agency ; what is inescapable is finding, or perhaps rather trying to find one’s life worth living and one’s actions to be worth undertaking, which of course will include, besides other things, trying to make explanatory sense of one’s life. Creating (moral, aesthetic, scientific, narrative etc.) value lies at the heart of trying to lead a meaningful life. That something like a unifying principle of reason is needed will not be seen by those who have taken it for granted that it is clear what it means to speak of sharing desires (or intentions), i.e. that the desires shared are not merely mine nor merely yours but ours. That it is not so clear becomes evident once it is realised that it is not clear in what sense desires as such could function as principles of guidance for the members of a group or community or for an individual agent, for that matter. It is all but clear how the mere fact that we happen to share a desire to realise a certain end could so much as give each of us members a reason to take the means to realise the shared end that underlies our shared desire or intention. Schmid (2009b, 43) and others conclude from this that a shared intention may only give us an instrumental reason. The problem I have in mind here may sound more familiar when discussed in the context of the individual agent instead of that of the collective agent. The problem has to do with how desires or intentions by themselves could be substantive reasons for action or how they alone could provide us with practical reasons. Note that this can be understood as a possible reading of the instrumentalist’s claim that practical reason does not have the resources to tell us what we should do. The mere fact that I have a certain desire or will a certain end does not seem to give me a substantive reason to realise it. After all, the desire or intention may be silly, dangerous or even destructive. This has led some philosophers to think, perhaps most prominently John Broome (1999), that since we 11 Just because their value is conditional on our human nature, i. e. on the role they play in our lives, this does not mean that shared activities cannot also be valued for their own sakes under this condition. Korsgaard ([1996]2000a, 262 – 265) calls such a value a “mixed value”, something that is neither merely instrumentally valuable nor merely valued for its own sake. Korsgaard argues that something is of a mixed value if it is extrinsically or conditionally good (i. e. if it does not carry its value in itself) but can nevertheless be valued as an end, that is, for its own sake.

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can desire or intend anything we like, our intentions or desires cannot provide us with substantive reasons for action but only with instrumental ones that instruct us to either take the necessary means to the end we will or to give up the end. Strictly speaking this is not much of an instruction at all, since it only takes effect once one has decided to pursue the end or to give it up. Here the sense of the phrase “the desires one just has” seems to refer to the problematic fact that we can desire or intend anything we like. It is acknowledged, however, that intentions unlike desires are subject to at least some constraints of rationality insofar one can only intend something if one believes that it is not impossible that it lies in one’s power to realise the end. While this worry is surely not without its grounds, I think it goes too far. From the fact that not all our intentions are good, i.e. sufficient reasons for action, it does not follow that practical reason cannot give us any advice in what we should do. In fact, to take seriously the claim that practical reason cannot give us any such advice would be to deny the possibility of practical rationality altogether, and with it the possibility of practical irrationality. Hume can be read along such lines (although this reading is not uncontroversial) since according to him practical reason influences human behaviour only in its theoretical aspect. Hume (2000, 2.3.3: 7) seems to have thought that even though we cannot argue rationally about ends since they spring from our ultimately unmotivated desires (note that desires so understood must be by definition understood as a-rational – like urges or whims), “our passions yield to our reason without any opposition” “the moment we perceive the falsehood of any supposition, or the insufficiency of any means.” In other words, once I have figured out that correcting three essays a day will not be sufficient to realise my end to give the essays back the following week, I will automatically, as it were, pursue the means that are sufficient to realise the end. I will now correct six essays a day. If I go on correcting only three essays a day then I don’t will the end. If whatever I do counts as what I actually desire or will to do, then practical mistakes such as instances of weakness of will are impossible.12 What might not be immediately obvious is an even more far-reaching consequence. The agents under consideration whose behaviour is fully determined by their local desires 12 Moreover, it is somewhat curious that the passions, which for Hume are derived from ultimately unmotivated desires that are a-rational, could themselves respond to anything rational, such as theoretical reason. This is also a problem for the less extreme versions of instrumentalism to the extent that they seem to drive a wedge between desires and practical reason arguing that reasons are grounded in desires. I will try to show that this gives rise not only to a misconceived picture of desires but also to a misconceived picture of the relation between desires and practical reason. Unless desires are potentially reason-responsive and thus already related to practical reason one would have to wonder how desires could ever be perceived as grounds for reasons.

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or intentions cannot be said to have a will, that is, they cannot be said to be practically unified in any interesting sense at all. As I will argue in chapter 2, for an animal to be able to intelligently interact with its environment and possibly with others of its kind – namely to perceive types of things in a world inhabited by particulars, i.e. to perceive the universal in the particular – its own mind must be (and must be conceived as) a type of thing as well. In other words, something with the power to unify must be potentially unified itself. Since higher or intelligent animals’ will is expressed in their instincts, they do not have to choose which ends or actions to pursue.13 Even for higher animals, as Korsgaard (Korsgaard 2009, 102) has convincingly shown, it is not the case that their purposes14 are grounded in merely local desires. Rather, as Korsgaard points out, they are grounded in their instincts that are organized such that they provide the animal with the ‘right’ ends, the ends that allow her to lead a life constitutive of the animal she is, provided the animal’s natural environment does not change too radically or too fast since thereby the animal’s instincts would be rendered ineffective. So there is a sense in which speaking of “merely local desires” already implies that animals that have such desires will not be primarily guided by their instincts. If they were they probably wouldn’t have local desires in the first place (since they would not need them). Along these lines I assume with Korsgaard ([1996]2000a, 112 – 113) who draws on Kant, that with the spontaneous advent of reason and self-consciousness also came the ability to set oneself many new ends through comparison and foresight. The new ends were considered valuable not merely as means or contributions to the satisfaction of the instinctual desires but as partly valuable for their own sake. In order to distinguish this new type of desire from instinctual desires the former are sometimes called ‘local’. Human animals received guidance from practical reason in its role as determining their interests in these new objects of desires. But such humanity is not yet personality, as Korsgaard ([1996]2000a, 113) argues: personality requires of practical reason that it also be active in its role as good will determining which of these new objects are worthy of choice of every rational being, i.e. which of the objects are objectively good. Human beings can be attributed the status of persons once the guidance of practical reason is complete, that is, once rational agents are capable of responding to moral incentives. Ends chosen in this way are objectively good, 13 This doesn’t mean that they’re not unified. By “higher” or “intelligent” animals I mean animals that are endowed with intelligence such that they can cognize the world, make experiences in the world and can learn from them. Such an animal can put together cause and effect, generalize from particulars and it can pursue the means that she has learned or instinctively knows will bring about the desired end (most reliably). 14 I explain in chapter 2 how it may or may not be sensible to speak of ‘reasons’ instead of ‘purposes’ with regard to non-human animals.

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i.e. they provide reasons for action that apply to every rational being.15 But this does not mean, as Korsgaard ([1996]2000a, 268) points out, that everything we value as an end must be self-justifying (i.e. intrinsically valuable) for there to be a sufficient reason to bring it about. That is, something that is valuable on some condition is sufficiently justified if the unconditioned condition of its goodness is satisfied. For example, the mere existence of a desire to realise happiness is not by itself a sufficient condition of the goodness of the desire’s object, i.e. of happiness. It is justified only if the condition under which it is good is satisfied. This is the case if happiness is desired by someone with a good will, since according to Kant, only a good will is unconditionally good. It is the unconditioned condition of the goodness of everything else. What I think is clear is that since an agent’s local desires compel the agent to satisfy each one of them, they are more “for [their] own good”, as Korsgaard (2009, 163; 146) puts it, than “for the good of the whole”, or for the singular or plural agent. I go along with Korsgaard in thinking that since desires work toward their own good, they tend to provoke internal conflicts rather than undermine them and therefore lack unifying powers. To the extent that the instrumentalist grants this, for which we find some indication in Broome’s worry that the end of our desires and intentions may not be worth pursuing, let alone good for the whole, she must contend that in order for desires to be able to guide an agent’s behaviour they must be treated as potentially sufficient reasons, i.e. they must stand in some relation to reasons. Reasons are sufficient if the action can be willed for its own sake, that is, because it is good. But since for the instrumentalist reasons are ultimately grounded in telic desires (and certainly not such mysterious a thing as the good will), she must hold that the agent’s awareness of the action being worth doing for its own sake is just a recognition of it as the object of a telic or non-cognitive desire. Two objections can be levelled against this suggestion: first, it is not clear how such a recognition that is reason-responsive can be the object of a non-cognitive or telic desire. Korsgaard’s ([1996]2000a, 122) or indeed Kant’s answer that the good end is the object of a rational choice is much more plausible. Second, the instrumentalist cannot account for the way in which human beings value goodness (be it moral, aesthetic, or yet of another kind): for the instrumentalist the reason that certain things are good (for us) just is a matter of us having certain basic desires and needs. But this does not explain why we think of certain ends as (more or less) valuable depending on certain grounds on which we can justify them.

15 This whole analysis is a reproduction of Korsgaard’s ([1996]2000a, 112 – 113) line of reasoning.

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Accordingly, I will argue with Barbara Herman (Herman 1996) that desires should not be understood as unmediated internal passions or psychological states one just has (and that are more or less rational depending on the kind of motivation it is) but as potentially open to evaluative regulation and transformation by practical reason. I agree with Herman that from the fact that pure practical reason understood as a good will must be unconditional, it does not follow that the agent’s motives for action must themselves be entirely “extramaterial” and “in complete separation from the empirical life of the human agent” (Herman 1996, 43). In other words, even though the authority of our will is unconditional this does not mean, as Herman (1996, 43) puts it, that our effective motives have to be morally unconditional or good, as well. If we think of characteristically human desires (and emotions) more in the sense of calm passions that are potentially open to regulation by practical reason, the instrumentalist’s opposition between motivation grounded in desires and motivation grounded in reason itself is undercut.16 The principle of charity requires us to understand instrumentalism not in its extreme Humean version that leaves neither room for practical normativity nor for the concept of a self with a practical identity and a will, but as an account about practical reason that acknowledges the importance of preserving the possibility of practical irrationality and with it practical normativity. In chapter 1 I will discuss one such possibility, namely the view of enlightened-self-interest, which asks the agent to rationally pursue those ends that maximize her overall good. Although such a view can be seen as an improvement over the Humean instrumentalist position there is still something problematic about it. Philosophers have usually argued that what is problematic about it is its (enlightened) egoism, or in Schmid’s words, “its individualism about ends.” However, I try to show in chapter 1 that its individualism is only a consequence of a deeper problem, which can be illustrated by the thought that the supposedly revised requirement to pursue ends that maximize our shared ends fares not much better than the individualistic requirement. Not only is it still egoistic, even though relative to the group, but it also fails to make the relevant connection between the group and its good being good for the group. Again, this problem is already present in the individual case: just as the individual agent can ask why maximising her overall good is the rational thing to do for her, the members of the group may wonder why maximising the group’s overall good is the rational thing to do for the group. As Korsgaard (2011b) highlights, such a view may have its source in the 16 Of course this is not to say that all desires that we human beings have are of this pro-rational kind, it only means that what supposedly distinguishes human animals from other animals is, among other things, this special type of desire.

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assumption that we know what the content of our final good is (some think its happiness, others think it is some form of pleasure) which then only needs to be maximized, or on some views, “satisficed.”17 I will argue with Korsgaard (2007b; 2011b) against such a substantive idea of a final good and consider Korsgaard’s (2011b) suggestion of a formal concept of the good whose emphasis does not lie in the furthering of some supposedly intrinsically good entity whose relation to the subject is difficult to comprehend (how exactly does the subject succeed in partaking in this intrinsic goodness, and what is good about it for her?), but which lies in the subject’s well-functioning as the animal that she is. Unlike conception of the good, that Korsgaard (ibid.) proposes, the instrumentalist’s conception of the agent’s or the group’s good, if the instrumentalist has such a conception, is not related to the evaluative good or well-functioning of the agent. If I understand Korsgaard (ibid.) correctly, then this is probably most obvious in case of the utilitarian version of instrumentalism according to which a person’s final good is an entity that can be added between persons.18 The possible motivation behind this, as Korsgaard thinks (ibid.), may be the coming to terms with the widely held hedonist view that an animal’s final good is something like pleasure or an agreeable state of affairs made possible by the animal’s consciousness. Being worried by the irreducibly subjective and thus merely relative character of the animal’s final good, the utilitarian then tries to render it objective by driving a wedge between the goodness of the pleasant experience as such, what Korsgaard calls “the final good”, and the goodness for the animal who has the experience by virtue of being conscious, what Korsgaard calls the “evaluative good.” (Korsgaard [1996] 2000a, 271; 2007b, 6) I think that Broome’s worry mentioned above springs essentially from the 17 cf. Slote 2001. 18 I will follow Korsgaard (2007b, 13 – 18, 30; 2011b) in arguing that something is evaluatively good for an animal if it enables it to function well (or, more precisely, to perform its function well) and that something is finally good for the animal if it contributes to or constitutes its well-functioning in circumstances that are beneficial to her overall well-functioning. Artefacts, by contrast, are clearly not taken to have their own good since their well-functioning is wholly relative to the purposes or needs of those who constructed them. It simply makes no sense to say of the coffee machine that the coffee machine’s well-functioning is good for it independent of our human desire for its providing us with coffee. The coffee machine is just a means to our ends. Things are a little more complicated, however, when it comes to other ‘artificial things’, such as social practices, institutions and market relations that unlike artefacts share an essential property with living organisms. They function as self-maintaining things even though they are not independently working of the human beings who build or constitute them. This is why I think that we should not conceive of institutions as mere means or instruments to achieve certain ends or ideals external to them. Institutions that are good or effective for everyone (and not just for some privileged few) will be selfcontrolling and self-maintaining for their own good.

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same source but leads him to a different conclusion than me, namely that the human animal’s ends cannot provide it with objective grounds for action. As a solution I will suggest that we should not understand subjectivity (partiality) and objectivity (impartiality) as opposites played off against one another but as complementary parts or two aspects of the same thing, namely of a “universal partiality.”19 In the first chapter I will develop this point along Korsgaard’s (2007b; 2011b) argument that something can be good for animals in the evaluative, or if you like, partial sense because animals are creatures with a final good, which has normative implications for animals that can recognise that they have this essential feature of their animal nature in common with the other intelligent animals. At this point it is fair to say that there is a pervasive philosophical tradition that denies that mere rationality carries with it any morally normative implications on the grounds that there is no necessary relation between morality and (instrumental) rationality. Or more specifically, from the existence of the human power to justify ends and means we cannot infer morality. We do not thereby arrive at an argument that says that by virtue of this capacity to value things, human beings have inner worth and therefore must treat one another as the bearers of such worth. In chapter 3 I will address a familiar version of this kind of objection, namely as it is formulated by Dieter Henrich. Henrich (2007, 109 – 110) argues that a courageous person who is under no illusions, strong and prepared to take risks simply has no reason not to suspend all moral obligations towards others of her kind. I think the protagonist in this argument bears a certain resemblance to Hume’s sensible knave by being described as honestly self-sufficient. Yet, I think the argument can challenged on the following ground: one can doubt the actual self-sufficiency of such a supposedly self-sufficient agent on two levels, material and metaphysical. Here I am interested mostly in the second. How self-sufficient can a person be who lacks the concept of the right with regard to others? Doesn’t she at least have to have some respect for others and what they do as beings with a final good in order to value as good what she herself is and does? How can someone have self-respect, which Henrich in his description of the knave obviously takes for granted, who does not respect others? The objection from the dishonest sensible knave can be contested, too. I will argue that behaving like a sensible knave behaves or would behave cannot be rational in the only sense ‘rational’ or ‘normative’ is to be understood, namely as rational not just for me or for us (i.e. as members of our group) but as rational tout court, i.e. rational for everyone. I will argue in chapter 3 and 4 that the sensible knave’s 19 This phrase is from Brummer (1993, 212) in Post (2002, 57) and its meaning as it was understood by Brummer was, I think, theological.

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deviating behaviour by making an exception of himself is parasitic on the collectively rational behaviour of others actually sharing social and moral norms with her.20 Therefore (the behaviour of) the inconsistent sensible knave cannot be called rational in any interesting sense at all. Note that it is just as inconceivable that the sensible knave’s behaviour could be parasitic all the way down, so to speak. To understand the sensible knave as entirely self-sufficient who takes all participation in shared norms to be optional, I think, undermines both the metaphysical and the material condition of the possibility for agency. As far as the metaphysical condition is concerned, the idea is that unless the individual agent has a non-instrumentally normative relation to herself which entails a certain responsibility towards herself, it is difficult to see how such an agent could develop a relation of a similar sort to others. On the material level it can be argued that human agents can only thrive in a culture of giving and taking reasons for action.21 It is only by having been raised in a community where people teach each other to become “independent practical reasoners”, to use MacIntyre’s ([1999]2009) phrase, by exchanging reasons for action and by treating each other as potential addressees of normative claims that the sensible knave can deny that she is bound by other people’s normative expectations. To be consistent, the sensible knave would have to acknowledge that in fact neither she nor the others are bound by each other’s normative expectations. She thereby would effectively deny that they have so much as a shared notion of rationality in common. But since the objector defines the sensible knave as a rational agent, albeit merely instrumentally rational, it follows that the sensible knave and the rest of the community follow different notions of rationality, apparently neither of which can be said to be the correct one. This is problematic for two reasons. First, rationality without any standard of correctness can hardly be called ‘rationality’ at all. Second, insofar one’s status as a rational agent, an agent who is considered a reliable and trustworthy addressee of normative expectations by others in the community seems to be the condition of acting as one thinks best (as a rational agent), sensible knaves undermine the very grounds that would allow them to be or behave like knaves and thus would indeed be rather foolish. Interestingly, most philosophers working in collective intentionality analysis would grant these two points but they would nevertheless insist that the rationality at work in collective intentionality is primarily instrumentally normative and only derivatively socially and morally normative.22 20 For a similar point that I take to have its origins in Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument see Korsgaard ([1996]2000a, 92 – 93; 97 – 101). 21 Of course, such a culture may be realized in many different ways, which has consequences for what people count as (intelligible) reasons for action. 22 One of the clearest and most straightforward renderings of this view is Schmid’s (2009b, 53) on which my discussion in chapter 1 and chapter 5 draws. By claiming that collective

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I will argue against such a view in chapter 1 by challenging Schmid’s (2009b, 41) proposal that collective intentionality can be purely cognitive, i.e. that collective intentionality can be reduced to its cognitive aspects. I will argue in chapter 3 and 4 that to regard conforming behaviour as dispositional patterns, i.e. as selfreinforced reactions (e.g. learning through trial and error) of single exemplars of the species resulting from how these exemplars have been doing things over a certain period of time may, be a legitimate way to describe non-human animal behaviour that is instrumentally rational. But I will deny that it is a legitimate way to describe the general behaviour of self-conscious human beings who are able to have attitudes towards their own actions and thoughts, who can act and think on the basis of considerations which they take as normative grounds for action, and whose self-understanding cannot be reduced to their perception of their position in a social order.23 This leads me to what I take to be the core difference between non-human animal thought and human animal thought, namely that human beings by virtue of being self-conscious cannot only have beliefs and desires, which non-human animals can have too (in a certain sense), but also self-ascribe them24. That is, they can develop attitudes towards their own mental states. The potential for such self-ascription, however, can only be realised under the condition that human beings are ascribed mental attitudes by others in the linguistic community in the first place and that they have the potential to become interested in the correctness of thinking processes themselves. To argue, as philosophers (see e.g. Pettit 1996) sometimes do, that human beings could follow their own subjective epistemic norms or that human thought might be normative without being social is to undermine the very distinction between human thought and intelligent animal thought.25 Intelligent animals can rightly be said to follow norms of perception and memory since they can form proto-beliefs under influence of perceptual evidence and they can memorize such evidence. But they cannot ask themselves whether they are really justified in taking the evidence as intentionality is not intrinsically socially or morally normative he tries to avoid the charge of circularity ; agreements, for example, seem unfit as explaining collective intentionality because they are themselves a form of collective intentionality. 23 This can be granted without having to deny a certain kind of pre-reflectivity of the thinking of such agents. In the spirit of Henrich (2007), we could say that they do not have to have read Kant in order to be able to question the grounds on which they act. 24 For this point see also Cash (2008, 101). 25 A self-consciously thinking subject necessarily recognizes her way of being in the world as essentially a ‘being with’ by virtue of recognizing the world as a whole or unit, as something to think about (and move around in). To know that one is related to the world in this way entails that one conceives of one’s place in the world as occupying one position among possible others. For a similar point see Korsgaard (2007a, 14) and Henrich (2007, 148). From this I think it follows that such a creature must also view herself as a whole or unit, for how then could she view herself as capable of changing positions in the world?

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grounds for their belief (for this point see Korsgaard 2007c, 21 – 22). The same goes for practical norms: while intelligent animals can be said to take the suitable means to satisfy the ends of their instinctual desires they cannot be said to question their grounds for action or the pursuit of the ends themselves. Therefore I find it hard to see how they could be said to take their own will as normative for themselves.26 Moreover, there is no intelligible way in which non-human animals could be said to violate practical norms. For illustration take the practical norm to take the means to one’s ends. Of course intelligent non-human animals could be hindered by others of their kind or by natural external forces from achieving their end such as a radical change of the environment as a result of which even the instincts themselves that are relative to the animal’s environment may no longer function as reliable guides. They may lead the animal to take ineffective or dangerous means or they may lose their guiding role altogether.27 But for such behaviour it is essential that the animal acts as it is inclined to act (after all, the animal’s instincts are its guiding forces), which means that what such an animal is inclined to do just is, under normal circumstances, what it is the rational thing to do for the animal. Our concept of practical rationality employed with respect to human beings, however, must leave room for the Kantian notion of internal authority, that is, for the idea that human beings are able to take their own will, and by implication a will shared with others, as normative for themselves. Such normativity I will argue in the final chapter cannot be merely instrumental. To argue that it is, would render the guiding role of human self-consciousness utterly mysterious. For if it were merely instrumental, we would not need to be self-conscious since we would not need to choose ends and actions rationally. In other words, we would not need to act for reasons. But precisely because our ends are not simply given to us we must be able to deliberate about ends and about what we should do, both individually and collectively. If this is correct, we must understand both the individual agent and the plural agent as caring for or being interested in the (shared) end in a not merely instrumentally normative sense. Moreover, those instrumentalists who seem to grant that we can value things under a condition the latter of which need not be its usefulness (otherwise they could not grant that we can desire something for its own sake), carry the burden to show what it is that we value in these cases and how we justify such valuing. I think Bennett Helm (2010, 263 – 264) has made this admiringly clear with 26 Non-instrumental normativity is introduced when agents can decide that doing something would be good independently of the fact that they desire it. 27 This point that an animal’s instincts can lose their guiding role when the environment relative to which the animals acts changes too quickly is made by Korsgaard (2009, 102).

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respect to the collective case. He argues that since most accounts of collective intentionality focus on mere goal-directedness they are more concerned with what he calls “plural intentional systems” than with “plural robust agents.” Only in the latter case, Helm argues, can we speak of a plural agent who cares about some of its shared ends, “things that have import to the group as such – to us – and these things will motivate group activity because of that import.” In contrast, “a purely intentional system will simply have ends that it pursues, without there being for that system anything other than instrumental reasons to have these ends.” (ibid., 263 – 264) I will argue in chapter 3 and 4 that a collective that shares ends in a stronger sense than that its members merely aim at the same token end, must share some reasons for having or pursuing the shared end that cannot be reduced to instrumental reasons. So for practical reason to have a real role to play in guiding an agent’s behaviour we must be able to make sense of ends neither in a merely subjective manner (that gives rise to the Broomian type of worry and which is often echoed through the widely held conviction to be discussed in chapter 3 that conforming to practical norms is entirely up to the agent) nor in a merely objective manner that makes it difficult to understand why the animal pursues those ends in the first place. Both conceptions of an end undermine the very idea of sharing ends since they either seem to render it utterly contingent (subjective position) or to merely stipulate it (objective position). The candidate normativity for practical reason in order to avoid these two implausibly extreme positions must preserve the subjective element that what an animal has reason to do must be good for her which includes the particular circumstances or conditions that a particular animal finds herself in (alone or together with others). And it must at the same time account for the objective element that shows that even though what is good for the animal is not independent of the animal’s awareness of it being good for it, what is good finally or objectively is not whatever the animal takes it to be but good only if certain conditions are met. Or, as Korsgaard (2011b) renders it, what is good objectively is what actually contributes to the animal’s well-functioning as the kind of animal it is. While I will focus on the subjective element in chapter 2 by looking at higher animal consciousness in general and rational animal self-consciousness in particular, I will carve out the objective element in chapter 1 along Korsgaard’s (2007b; 2011b) Aristotelian-Kantian conception of a final good that tries to capture not so much the content but the nature of the final good for animals in general and for human beings in particular. Korsgaard’s (2007b; 2011b) point roughly is that an animal’s final good is intimately connected with the animal’s nature understood as its function to

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(self-)consciously maintain itself as the kind of animal it is.28 Korsgaad further argues that while something is evaluatively good for an animal by virtue of its properties to contribute to the animal’s conscious well-functioning, something is also finally or objectively good for the animal when it contributes to or constitutes the animal’s conscious well-functioning in circumstances that allow for the animal’s functioning well. Or, as Korsgaard (2007b, 30) also puts it: “[A] final good is what constitutes or contributes to the good condition of something [the animal] that stands in an evaluative relationship to its own condition” (my emphasis).29

However, things can be good or bad in different ways for animals depending on how they function, depending on the kind of evaluative self-relation they have, which may be either reflexive or reflective, that is, self-consciously reflexive. I will discuss this difference between reflexion and reflection as two realisations of an animal’s basic self-relation in chapter 2. Korsgaard ([1996]2000a, 106 – 132; 2007b, 18; 2011b, 18) draws the distinction between reflexion and reflection as follows: the affective attitudes, especially desire, pleasure and pain, that higher animals have towards the things that affect their (well-)functioning, are largely grounded in the animal’s natural instincts and natural desire for self-preservation. So the way in which something is good or bad for higher animals is naturally good or bad for them whereas for self-conscious or rational animals things can also be normatively good or bad since human beings can have a normative conception of the good and themselves. Korsgaard (2009) has made it sufficiently clear that for human beings their self-consciousness in a sense destroys the natural unity between what one desires to do and what one actually does because the self-conscious human being can always ask whether she has good grounds to do what she desires to do. Whatever it is that someone has objectively good grounds or reason to do is good for the human animal because, as Korsgaard (1996; 2009) argues, it engages the human animal’s capacity to value things and take interest in them partly for their own sakes. Solving philosophical problems, doing science or writing poetry, engaging in friendship, or defending one’s rightful claims against abuse by 28 So while the function is the same for different kinds of higher sentient beings in the sense that it is a function of all sentient beings for organising self-maintenance, it is differently realized in beings that function in a reflective or self-consciously reflexive way. 29 I take Korsgaard’s qualification that the final good is achieved not just when the animal functions well in any circumstances but when it functions well in those circumstances or conditions that are beneficial to its well-functioning to account for the sense in which one does not achieve one’s final good in circumstances that are unfavourable to one’s wellfunctioning despite one’s exercising the capacities that make for well-functioning, such as e.g. acting virtuously. I will discuss this point of the relation between the evaluative good and the final good with respect to human beings in 1.4.3.

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others, are all manifestations of the human capacity of human animals, namely to confer value on themselves and what they do. If this is correct, then human beings, by virtue of being evaluatively related to themselves, probably need positive normative self-conceptions. Such normative self-conceptions, as Korsgaard (1996; 2007a, 17 – 19; 2007b; 2009) suggests, can be understood as conceptions under which one can value oneself and one’s actions. In chapter one I will argue that the fact that we value to be regarded as trustworthy, responsible and reliable singular and plural agents by others and ourselves is good evidence of our need for normative self-conceptions. But this is not to say that trust and trustworthiness is valued merely instrumentally. Although to trust and to be trusted is both socially and personally beneficial, this is not the primary reason why we value them. If it were the primary reason, it would not matter how we achieved to become a trusting and trustworthy person, as long as these properties secured us the social and personal benefits of freedom and mutual trust. If it were the primary reason, then we wouldn’t be discouraged from exercising less demanding and less abiding ways to achieve the social benefits, e.g. through taking a pill that induces a desire for being trustworthy or through feigning trustworthiness; indeed, it would be rational to do so. But surely, thereby the very non-instrumental normative demands that we recognise these properties to place on ourselves and others would be undermined and with them the social and personal benefits. Trustworthiness is partly valued as an end for human beings and not merely as a means.30 By this I mean that trustworthiness would not be considered (a) good if it wasn’t justifiable or good for its own sake. To be trustworthy merely for the sake of reaping the benefits of trust would be a perversion of both trust and trustworthiness.31 As we shall see in chapter 3 and 4, the claim that ends must be justifiable has a strong and a weak interpretation, the latter of which has usually been preferred by philosophers because of its less demanding universalizability requirement. On the less demanding requirement the reasons for one’s pursuing the end or action must be universalizable or shareable in the sense that if consideration C is a reason for some agent in certain circumstances to do X, then it must also be a reason for me to do X provided that I am in relevantly similar circumstances. Unlike the strong interpretation of universalizability or shareability, this weak 30 Here it is important to distinguish between ends that are good for human beings, i.e. extrinsic and ends that are intrinsically good or good in themselves. If values are not understood as being intrinsically good, i.e. independently of their goodness for human beings, it does not follow that they are merely means. They will be understood as mere means only, as Korsgaard ([1996]2000a, 250 – 253) has shown, if extrinsic goods are identified with instrumental goods and intrinsic goods with final ends. 31 Again, this does not mean that trustworthiness is an intrinsic good. It is good for human beings.

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Overview

interpretation does not require that I have to take other’s reasons as normative for me; it only requires that the other takes it as normative for her and that I take it as normative for me were I in similar circumstances. In chapters 3 and 4 I will argue in favour of the strong interpretation by showing that a) only the strong interpretation can account for the important idea of sharing a rational perspective that forbids making an exception of oneself and that b) the strong interpretation is not as demanding as philosophers have usually taken it to be. I will argue in chapter 3 that there is no reason to identify the claim that we must treat someone else’s reasons as normative for ourselves with the claim that we must treat everyone in exactly the same way, which would require making no difference between one’s concern for oneself or for one’s personal relations and one’s concern for some unrelated third party. To treat others as ends in themselves does not require that one have exactly the same concern for their due which one has for one’s own good or for that of one’s family and friends. To treat people as ends in themselves is to treat them as worthy of respect but this allows for very different forms of realisation depending on one’s cultural and social environment and on the social and personal relations in which one stands.

Chapter 1: A Problematic Dichotomy – Setting the Methodological Frame

1.1

Introduction

Instrumental rationality or means/end rationality is still widely held to be the basic form of rationality that is constitutive of human agency, also in collective intentionality analysis. Here an interesting claim has been recently made by Schmid (2009b, 242) who argues that instrumentalism about practical reason, the claim that practical reason just is, or reduces to instrumental reason, is not the problem. The problem rather is its “individualism about goals”. Schmid’s idea is that once we have stripped instrumentalism off its individualism about ends by introducing the concept of shared ends, instrumentalism about practical reason is rehabilitated. In this chapter I will argue that this will not do since the problem of instrumentalism about practical reason runs deeper. It cannot account for the idea that individual agents can share ends with themselves, and as a consequence it cannot account for the idea that ends can be shared between agents. This is because accounts of instrumental rationality either define a substantive final end or good (like maximum satisfaction of all of one’s desires) that determines what it is rational for the agent to take as a means to the final end (i.e. what her ends should be). That is, the justification of her ends and means is derived from the stipulated substantive ultimate end. Or it is assumed that “reason takes the ends of our activities as given” (Gauthier [1975]1990, 211) and that therefore we cannot rationally deliberate about ends. But if we cannot rationally deliberate about our ends with others, then it is impossible to have genuine conflicts and disagreements about ends with others of our kind. One problem with the first type of accounts of instrumental rationality is that these accounts do not allow practical deliberation about the final good or final end itself. After all, one can always ask why, for example, a state of maximum satisfaction of prudent desires should be desirable or good for oneself. The missing justification of the ultimate end leaves the individual agent wondering what reasons she has to pursue this supposedly intrinsically valuable and ulti-

32

Chapter 1: A Problematic Dichotomy – Setting the Methodological Frame

mate end. This violates what one could argue is essential about the final good, namely that it be good for us, or, in Korsgaard’s (1986, 505) words, that “we must be the source of value”. But this, I will argue, has essentially to do with the idea of how we should be related both to ourselves and to others. The problem with the second type of accounts is perhaps more obvious. By taking our individual (or shared) ends as given they cannot be justified and we are faced with the worry that practical reason cannot tell us anything about what we should do (either as individual or member of a group). But then it is not clear how the individual agent, let alone the collective, could be said to share ends. If each of us is related to her ends merely instrumentally, we are left with the question how the individual agent can act as one, i.e. the question what holds her together as an agent over time. The way out of these difficulties, I will suggest with Korsgaard (2007b; 2011b), is to conceive of the final good as a relational or formal concept that makes reference to the structure or nature of the pursuit of ends32 as expressive of the animal’s well-functioning. Ends of self-conscious animals like human beings are then understood as parts of action maxims or action principles, which function as reasons for action. I think instrumentalism about practical reason is a problematic assumption both with regard to individual and collective intentionality. It cannot highlight the internal relations between the final good and the evaluative good or, as Korsgaard ([1996]2000a, 271) puts it, “why we care about something and the reason why it is good”.

1.2

Two Fundamental Problems of Instrumental Rationality with Collective Intentionality

Many philosophers have noted and commented on the problematic conceptual implications of instrumental rationality as it has been understood by the social sciences, especially theories of rational choice, for collective intentionality analysis. Schmid (2003; 2009b) for example criticizes Max Weber’s concept of instrumental rationality on the grounds that it suffers from an “individualism about goals”. What is typical of instrumentalist theories of rationality, according to this criticism, is that they depict someone else’s deliberations, ends, and actions merely as external constraints on one’s own ends, deliberations and actions. In other words, the agent has direct preferences only over the outcomes or consequences of her choice.33 32 For a similar suggestion see Richardson ([1994]1997, 204 – 205). 33 Unlike the instrumentalist who thinks that this problem can be met by introducing the notion of shared ends by thinking of the agents as having direct preferences over the

Two Fundamental Problems of Instrumental Rationality with Collective Intentionality

33

This view of rationality, as philosophers have noted, causes two major difficulties for the idea that intentionality and rationality can be collective.34 First, in situations of coordination, instrumentally rational individuals who assume that the other agent exhibits instrumental rationality just like herself cannot decide what to do on instrumentally rational grounds unless she knows what the other agent is going to do. This is because the other’s intentions function as restrictions on her own intentions. Her intentions are conditional on the intentions of the other and vice versa. Take the case of the two of us trying to avoid bumping into each other in the street. This can be achieved by two alternative strategies, either by ‘I walk right/you walk left’ or by ‘I walk left/you walk right’. While we both want to avoid bumping into each other and each of us knows that the other wants this too, neither you nor I know what particular action the other is going to perform, i.e. which side she is going to walk. I can only decide to walk right if I know that you walk left or decide to walk left if I know that you walk right. My individual decision whether to walk right or left is conditional on your individual decision to walk left or right respectively. So what is rational for me to do is conditional on what I expect you to do, i.e. on what is rational for you to do. But what is rational for you to do is equally conditional on what you expect me to do, i.e. on what is rational for me to do. So we get the not very helpful result that I am going to walk right if I expect you to walk left but since your decision to walk left depends on your expectation of me walking right my expectation that you will walk left includes your expectation that I will walk right. Since I have no rational grounds on which to calculate my expectation that you will in fact walk left because what you are going to do depends on what you expect me to do and vice versa, we will be faced with an endless regress that leaves us impotent with regard to our deciding whether to walk left or right.35 The major obstacle in the way of solving coordination problems of the type just discussed, it has been argued, lies in the individualistic conception of raoutcomes of their choice, I am concerned more with the instrumentalist’s consequentialist conception of choice and action. In other words, my concern lies with the suggestion that the agent has direct preferences only over the outcomes or consequences of her choice instead of the chosen action itself. For a similar worry see Heath (1998, 425) and Schmid (2009b, fn 7, 96 – 97). I will argue in the last chapter that the view of one’s choices as (inner) causes of (outer) outcomes (actions) may well express a deep seated conception of action as mere (outer) product – such a conception of action draws a wedge between mind and action since it depicts the mental activities as the inner, temporarily prior causes of outer action. However, if we understand action more in an Aristotelian fashion as a whole with parts we can better see why actions must be valued not just for the outcomes they produce but also for their own sake. 34 Cf. e.g. Schmid (2003) and Velleman (2009, 47). 35 Velleman mentions this problem in his article How to Share an Intention and suggests that it can be solved in the spirit of Margret Gilbert by making the decision or action not conditional on the other’s decision or action but on her conditional commitment to act.

34

Chapter 1: A Problematic Dichotomy – Setting the Methodological Frame

tionality that treats deliberations and actions of other individuals as mere external (empirical) constraints or expected consequences of one’s own actions and deliberations instead as parts of the expected consequences of one’s joint actions and deliberations. Besides the problem of indeterminacy in contexts of coordination that Schmid (2003; 2009b; 2011a) is mainly interested in, the individualistic conception of rationality gives rise to a second, perhaps more (in)famous problem in contexts where the participants’ individual self-interests, i.e. the satisfaction of their individual goals, stand in conflict. Since individual rational self-interest instructs one to act unilaterally on that which self-interest dictates, an outcome that would be better for both participants is thereby foreclosed. Prisoner’s Dilemmas are probably the best known formal descriptions of the problem.36 Here the difficulty is not so much that the standard of instrumental rationality cannot tell us what to do as in the coordination setting discussed above – for in the idiom of the dilemma it tells us to defect – but that we are motivated to actually apply the standard only as we see fit. In other words, when your interests and my interests stand in conflict to each other, I will treat and interpret your actions and deliberations as mere constraints on my own deliberation assuming that you will do the same with regard to me. At the same time, however, I treat my own deliberations quite differently, namely as normative for me. Yet, I must think that you will use me as a means just as I will use you as a means and you must think likewise. Note that if we both accept such an interpretation of each other the problem is that joint action will be a very rare phenomenon indeed since each of us would have to assume that she is being treated as a mere means by the other while having preferences of not being treated in this way herself. But since joint action, at least in certain situations, might well be useful if not indispensable for the maximization of our individual self-interest, each of us will be tempted to apply the standard of interpretation only to the other while making an exception of herself in the following sense. Velleman (2009, 47) nicely illustrates this by showing what might actually be going on in our minds in such a situation: I will think that you will not actually succeed in treating me as a means if only I am clever and quick enough to use you as a means to further my own concerns first while carefully avoiding to give you a chance to use me as means. Again, you think likewise. Each of us then thinks that it makes sense to try not to be used as a means by the other while at the same time trying to use the other as a means by treating her goals as mere tools to further our own ends. But thereby the general application of the standard of rational interpretation is being undermined.37 36 For a good overview of the technical intricacies of Prisoner’s Dilemmas see Kuhn (2009). 37 I will later argue that intelligent higher animals are interested in others as ‘tools’ because their self-relation is so tight that it practically leaves no room, as it were, to think of others, and

Two Fundamental Problems of Instrumental Rationality with Collective Intentionality

35

The most straightforward solution to the two problem described above would seem to be to widen the practical perspective of the individual, i.e. the singular perspective, so that it is no longer just about its own ends but also includes the ends of others. So to solve the first problem one could argue that since the parties involved in the coordination problem share the rational end to coordinate their individual actions as good as they can, they each have the respective instrumental reasons to take their means to this shared end of coordination. So here the shared end is given in the sense that, by definition, the individual interests do not stand in conflict in situations of coordination. But precisely for this reason the sense in which individual agents can be said to share an end in cooperation or coordination seems somewhat vacuous. I think this impression is supported by the fact that even though it is widely accepted that non-human intelligent animals are capable of coordinating or cooperative behaviour, it is sometimes also acknowledged that the sharedness involved in such behaviour seems to be of a very different kind compared to the one human animals display in their joint activities. This is why I suggest that our focus in collective intentionality analysis should be directed at the second problem that has to deal with conflicting individual interests. My assumption is that what is special about phenomena of collective intentionality in human behaviour, if anything, is the way in which the underlying plural perspective is integrating individual perspectives, and the sense in which this integrative power is unique to human rationality in its going beyond mere strategic rationality. The plausibility of such an approach must be assessed in terms of its ability to explain the sense in which the sharing of an end really is a matter of us sharing an end. Below I will look at two such proposals, that of Postema (1995) and that of Schmid (2009b). Both suggestions are promising to the extent that they focus on a concept of shared rationality in one way or another. But each of them turns out to have difficulties to account for the nature of sharedness that is supposed to underlie their views because of the consequentialist nature of their approach. Early on in his discussion, Gerald Postema (1995, 48; 52) warns us, that the singular perspective should not be confused with any version of egoism or strategic rationality since it does not assume that an individual’s ends cannot be shared with others. He emphasizes that the difference between the plural and the singular perspective does not consist in the fact that the singular perspective unlike the plural perspective is only concerned with an agent’s own ends. This is rather puzzling since the motivation for most philosophers to introduce the concept of a plural perspective, i.e. a perspective with a different unit of agency,

indeed of themselves as animals that have to stand in certain relations to themselves and others.

36

Chapter 1: A Problematic Dichotomy – Setting the Methodological Frame

namely the collective or group, just arises from the problem that the individual perspective does not seem to take the ends of others into account in the right way. So unlike Schmid (2009b; 2011a) and others, such as Parsons ([1937]1949) and Sen (1977; 2002), Postema does not think that the singular perspective suffers from the problem of individualism about ends. Unfortunately Postema does not say anything in defence of this claim, which makes it hard to see what he thinks is the difference between the two perspectives. In fact, there is good evidence for the hypothesis that Postema (ibid., 48) equivocates on the notion of ‘sharing an end’ when he assumes on the one hand that according to the singular perspective ends can be shared with others and on the other hand grants that it is only in the plural perspective where another agent’s ends and deliberations are internally related to one’s own deliberations. (Postema 1995, 49) Perhaps what he means is that the singular perspective can accommodate other people’s ends in the following sense (which is compatible with the enlightened self-interest account of rationality to be discussed below). For example, it might be the case that through some especially radical form of identification with you I can make your ends my own on which I then act. But note that this does not necessarily require that I give you any deliberative stance in my own practical reasoning or that we pursue an irreducibly shared end together. There is a second possibility. Perhaps Postema means that the singular perspective is not individualist with regard to motivation. However, it is a central tenet of the traditional concept of instrumental rationality that agents are in the last instance motivated by their own ends conceived as non-cognitive desires for which no rational justification can be given. This means that I can be motivated by your desires but only insofar as this motivation is ultimately grounded in my own desires. This seems like an attractive proposal since it is compatible with my desires being other-regarding, a point made by Gauthier (1986) who has tried to wed rational choice theory with enlightened morality via constrained maximization.38 However, to assume that an agent has a second order or background desire to satisfy the desires of others when he acts on someone else’s desires requires, on the grounds of considerations of analogy, that one must equally presuppose the existence of a background desire for one’s own desires, i.e. that one desires that one’s desires be satisfied. Such a background or second order desire, however, explains nothing but rather leads to an endless regress. Thus it is not clear why

38 It is unclear whether Postema would agree with Gauthier that what rationally speaks in favour of adopting the plural perspective, or moral perspective in Gauthier’s terms, is our individual self-interest.

Two Fundamental Problems of Instrumental Rationality with Collective Intentionality

37

the explanation of my acting on my friend’s desires should require a background desire while the explanation of my own desires does not.39 Postema (ibid., 48) further claims that instrumental rationality is not a special mark of the singular perspective, which seems to bring him close to Schmid’s point that individualism about ends is the actual problem of instrumentalism – for if instrumentality is not essential to the singular perspective it certainly cannot be what makes the singular perspective problematic compared to the plural perspective. Rather the difference consists in, as Postema (ibid., 48) claims, “the respective conceptions of the deliberative unit of agency”. To deliberate from the plural perspective is to deliberate from an integrated whole of which both one’s own deliberations and those of the other agent(s) are internally related parts. While it is not apparent with Postema in what sense exactly he rejects the solitary stance taken by the private or individualist reasoner, no such ambiguity is found in Schmid’s treatment of the topic. Schmid thinks that introducing the concept of shared ends or an integrated form of practical reasoning where the other agent is not treated as mere means rehabilitates instrumentalism. And, as we shall later see in this chapter, there is good evidence that he tacitly takes this to apply not to situations of coordination alone. Towards the end of this chapter I will formulate some fundamental objections against such a prospect. They revolve around the hypothesis that Schmid’s proposal faces the risk of saving instrumentalism and with it consequentialism at the cost of leaving the notion of sharedness that we think is essential for collective intentionality in the dark. Although these objections will be taken up in one way or another in the ensuing chapters, they will receive their full force only in the last chapter. In what immediately follows, however, I will develop what I think is the fundamental insight behind Schmid’s proposal to introduce the concept of shared ends, namely that for collective intentionality to be so much as possible, we must overcome the dichotomy between merely self-regarding ends on the one hand, and merely other-regarding ends on the other hand. Yet, I will argue that Schmid (2003) does not take this important idea far enough, which is why the notion of sharedness entailed in his account of “rationality-in-relations” remains somewhat unsatisfactory.

39 For a similar argument see Schmid (2009b, 131 – 151) and Millgram (1997, 155).

38

1.3

Chapter 1: A Problematic Dichotomy – Setting the Methodological Frame

A Problematic Dichotomy: Two Separate Realms of Behaviour

Some philosophers have tried to rehabilitate the concept of instrumental rationality by arguing that its underlying concept of self-interest must not be narrowly but widely construed while its consequentialist essentials should be kept. Rationality should be regarded as enlightened self-interest according to which it would be crudely irrational to orientate one’s thinking merely on one’s present and short-term interests. The future must not be discounted too heavily because this would violate the agent’s real good, namely the maximization of the satisfaction of all her prudent desires taken together. Along such lines Adam Smith ([1776]1904) and more recently David Gauthier (1986) have argued that maximization of self-interest must be understood as constrained by considerations about future benefits that should take prevalence over short-term maximization of one’s present desires and interests. On such an understanding, interpersonal cooperation is possible and indeed desirable because the agent is capable of intrapersonal self-constraint. The agent capable of intrapersonal self-constraint constrains her present desires and interests in order to secure the pursuit of her long term and well informed rational selfinterests. In other words, individual agents cooperate with others on the grounds that mutual cooperation secures them possible benefits in the future, for example the prospective realization of a project that they couldn’t realize on their own. Such cooperative behaviour is instrumentally rational for individual agents, as Tuck (2008) argues, since one’s individual contribution will cause the benefit that one expects to get from the collective activity. But why is it rational to contribute to the collective activity? For as long as the others contribute one can expect to receive one’s benefit without contributing oneself. The problem of free riding has not been overcome. I will argue that only if the members also do their part in order to further the group’s interests, can the problem be solved. Note moreover that the underlying assumption of mutuality here is also important in its aspect as entry condition for participation in the practices of mutually beneficial cooperation insofar participation is confined to those agents who are capable of reciprocating and thereby securing the expected mutual benefits from joint interaction.40 Such cooperative relationships among equal and rational agents, however, are considered as clearly separate from relationships that are based on non-calculative or non-instrumental foundations such as sympathy and empathy. As a

40 Cf. MacIntyre ([1999]2009, 114 – 118).

A Problematic Dichotomy: Two Separate Realms of Behaviour

39

result we get two neatly separated realms of human behaviour according to Gauthier, one that is motivated by enlightened self-regarding attitudes and the other that is motivated by other-regarding attitudes. Accordingly, Gauthier (1986, 286) makes it very clear that “morality by agreements” among self-interested rational individuals must not be confused with non-calculative forms of morality such as those informed by sympathy and empathy : “The demands of sympathy are quite distinct from those of rational choice, and only confusion results from treating them together.” By “rational choice” Gauthier (1986, 268) means enlightened rational choice, i.e. “the morality tied to mutuality” that concerns all those relations that are informed by enlightened but nevertheless calculated self-interest, such as market relations. Similar aspirations to divide human conduct into behaviour based on enlightened self-interest on the one hand and into behaviour based on sympathy, empathy or even full-blown altruism on the other hand, can be found in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Here Smith famously develops his idea of the invisible hand that ultimately secures mutual benefits on the grounds that everyone pursues the means to satisfy his or her own enlightened self-interests: It is the butcher’s, the baker’s and the candle stick maker’s self-interest and not their benevolence towards us that rationally justifies our normative expectations towards them in satisfying our desires and self-interests. (Smith [1776]1904, I.82) David Velleman’s (1997) account of shared intention bears a striking resemblance to Smith’s and Gauthier’s contractualist account of rationality. In his article “How to Share an Intention” (1997), Velleman defends an account of shared intention or commitment that is construed out of conditional individual commitments that are reciprocally uttered in public space. He thereby gives expression to the contractualist assumption that social normativity or commitment is a special mark of explicit agreements expressed in contracts, promises or the signaling of a conditional willingness with regard to the joint activity or intention. The shared intention therefore is not a primitive phenomenon, according to Velleman, but something like an aggregation out of individual psychological commitments to oneself to speak the truth. At the same time, Velleman insists that he provides an account of shared intention that is unconditional. Here is how I interpret Velleman’s (1997, 46) idea of how an unconditional shared intention is construed out of conditional willingness41: First speaker (‘You’): Second speaker (‘I’): First speaker (‘You’):

“I will if “I will

you will.” if you will “Then I will.”

41 Velleman locates the origin of the idea of conditional willingness in Margaret Gilbert (1990, 7).

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Chapter 1: A Problematic Dichotomy – Setting the Methodological Frame

Why does each statement prompt the speaker to do what he says he will do (in Velleman’s example it is the intention to take a walk)? Since each statement describes itself as an effective conditional willingness or intention to take a walk and each statement thereby ascribes to itself a conditional causal power to make the speaker actually take a walk, each speaker will do what he says he will on the condition that the other announces his conditional willingness (we could just as well render the example in terms of the language of cooperation: “I will cooperate if you will cooperate etc.”). It is presupposed that the speakers are both lovers of truth and therefore reluctant to speak falsely (again, to translate the point into the language of cooperation, one could say that speaking the truth will cause the benefit one hopes to get from the cooperative intention assuming that the other speaks the truth as well). Velleman (ibid.) further argues that the conditional causal power of the speakers’ statements won’t be activated unless the other recognizes that it was issued; so it is not enough just to utter the relevant intention in order to activate the causal power of the other’s intention – the statement must be recognized by the other as what it is, namely as an act of communicative intention. (Velleman 1997, 46) In other words, the listener must exercise some sort of up-take. So Velleman’s story is this: As soon as I (second speaker) say “I will if you will” the condition in your statement (first speaker) is satisfied and prompts you to start walking, which you describe by saying “then I will”. This in turn will satisfy the condition in my statement and thus prompts me to start walking in turn. Since each statement describes itself as an effective intention to take a walk it thereby credits itself with a conditional causal power of inducing the speaker to actually take a walk if the other is found to have willed likewise. I will briefly mention what I think are the most obvious two problems with Velleman’s approach to shared intention. First, it is not clear why making one’s intention to walk jointly conditional on the other’s willingness or commitment to walk jointly avoids the regress problem mentioned in section 2 (that resulted from making one’s intention conditional on the other’s action). And even if it could be avoided, it is not clear in what sense Velleman’s construction really is that of a “we” and not just that of two “I’s”. It seems that Velleman’s proposal would be more convincingly collective if his construction of a “we” did not comprise three steps but one single step. Accordingly, my statement “I will if you will” could be understood as to entail that “If you accept my invitation to the shared intention I will go along with it”. So you could meet the condition of my proposal “I will if you will” simply by replying “So we shall”. Second, I think it makes little sense to treat commitments, as Velleman seems to do, merely as causal-explanatory states because from this purely cognitivist perspective it is irrelevant that one commits oneself to that which one’s com-

A Problematic Dichotomy: Two Separate Realms of Behaviour

41

mitments prescribe.42 It is irrelevant, unless perhaps, an intellectual or cognitivist desire for self-understanding is assumed. I think this is exactly what Velleman (2009), at least elsewhere, does. There he assumes something like a universal desire for self-knowledge, and since he also thinks that speaking the truth furthers one’s self-knowledge or self-understanding, he can say that it is instrumentally rational for an agent to speak the truth.43 An agent’s love of truth thus seems to be based in her more basic love for self-understanding. What this shows, I think, is that the agent who proclaims her individual conditional willingness to sharing an intention does not really have any commitment to the other participant. Rather she is primarily committed to herself. As a consequence, participants of the Vellemanian shared intention must each hope that the other is as much a lover of truth or self-understanding as they are themselves, and thus committed to himself or herself as they are committed to themselves. This point can also be formulated in terms of the concept of trust. Velleman seems to argue that I have to trust that the other trusts himself as much as I trust myself. So there is no real sense in which you and I relate to each other directly. Rather, you relate to yourself and I relate to myself. But the very idea of sharing an intention as a whole seems to require a more immediate relation between the parties. Such a relation, it seems, cannot be given in an aggregative account of shared intention. What is needed is something like a direct and simultaneous exchange between the parties. Korsgaard thinks that Kant in his Metaphysics of Morals ([1797]1977) and in his Lecture on Ethics (2004) provides a possible model for such an exchange where Kant interprets the concept of a contract as a kind of interaction that is categorical from the very beginning.44 Korsgaard (2009, 188) discusses Kant’s (2004) example of the unification of the wills of two agents who think of each other as friends: each of a pair undertakes to care for the other’s happiness giving away his own happiness to the other. If I pursue your happiness then thereby I also pursue my own happiness since your happiness includes my happiness. And if you pursue my happiness, which includes yours, then thereby you come back to yourself again. So by simultaneously pursuing each other’s happiness we come to have a shared object, our happiness, the 42 Cf. Larmore (2010, 88) for a similar point made in a different context. 43 What I think is at odds with postulating such an intellectual desire is that it construes the normativity at hand only as applying to the agent as long as she desires to follow theoretical and practical norms. But our concept of normativity should be taken to apply to us whether or not we desire to follow the respective norms. Velleman tries to meet this objection by arguing that the desire for explanatory self-understanding is constitutive of agency. This assumption, however, can and will be questioned. 44 For Korsgaard’s discussion of Kant’s account of interaction see her book Self-Constitution, pp.188 – 189.

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Chapter 1: A Problematic Dichotomy – Setting the Methodological Frame

reciprocal intertwining of each of our happiness into one single happiness simultaneously. What is both difficult and interesting about this suggestion, as Korsgaard (ibid., 190) highlights, is that strictly speaking the unification of the will so conceived “cannot take place under the conditions of space and time” but must take place in the noumenal world. Arnheim ([1969]1997, 247) provides a helpful way in which one might understand this peculiar Kantian point when he argues that perhaps because simultaneous interaction cannot be described by language directly we tend to treat the concept of interaction as linear in describing interaction – for how else could we describe it? For support of this idea Arnheim ([1969]1997, 234) cites Albrecht Haller, an eighteenth century physiologist, and poet working on a Latin Treatise on the plants of Switzerland: “Natura in reticulum sua genera connexit, non in catenam: hominess non possunt nisi catenam sequi, cum non plura simul possint sermon exponere. [Nature connects its genera in a network, not in a chain; whereas men can only follow chains, as they cannot present several things at once in their speech].”

This may explain Velleman’s and other philosophers’ attempt to construct collective intentionality or shared intention as construed out of successive strands of individual (conditional) intentions. I am very sympathetic to Arnheim’s and Haller’s suggestion since it provides grounds for scepticism towards attempts to either deduce collective intentionality from individuality (as in the case of Gauthier and Velleman45) considered as its foundation or to deduce individuality from collective intentionality, for example by taking the linguistic community as given or by presupposing some sort of undifferentiated stream of consciousness.46 Instead of constructing collective intentionality from the interactions between individuals or from an irreducible foundation of linguistic community, or still, from some irreducible form of being-with, I think we should follow Henrich’s (2007, 209) suggestion that it makes more sense to try to explain collective intentionality as a way of acting that spontaneously arises in and between individual agents under conditions of interacting. In this dissertation project I will mainly focus on what Henrich (2007, 234 – 247) calls “wesentliches Mitsein” (probably in the spirit of Heidegger) that is jointly realized and that he distinguishes from a being-with that is individually realized under conditions of 45 From Velleman’s latest book How we get along and from personal communication (Lecture at the University of Berne in June 28 – 29, 2012), I get the strong impression that he has changed his view and now holds that human beings are essentially social. Yet it is not clear to me what exactly he means by “social”. 46 For an interesting critical discussion of these two strategies see Henrich (2007, 153ff). I will discuss the second strategy in my own terms in section 1.6.2.

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interacting. Only the former integrates two or more selves in such a way that their respective subjectivity is jointly realized. I think that the Kantian-Aristotelian notion of friendship figures as the most famous illustration of this. More specifically, I will argue that even business relationships rely on an attitude of well-wishing towards the other that does not seek a particular return for the services rendered and thereby undermines one of the core assumptions of contractualist rationality. The important point of the Kantian model of interaction that makes it preferable to that of Velleman’s is that it can illustrate what can be genuinely shared about interaction or joint intention. Again, to put it in terms of trust, this means that the agent has to trust that her friend loves her as much as the friend loves himself whereas on Velleman’s account the agent has merely to hope (which, unlike trust, is a cognitive mental attitude) that the other loves himself as much as the agent loves herself under the relevant conditions of interacting. So it seems that in Velleman’s case my expectation towards the other is merely cognitive, i.e. treats the other as an object of knowledge while my expectation towards myself cannot be purely cognitive but must be primarily normative.47 I will try to show that Schmid (2009b, 243) is faced with similar difficulties when he argues that what is essential about sharing ends is that the members of the group are concerned with each other’s instrumental rationality. Even though the other is not treated as a mere means to one’s own ends – after all one shares ends together – it is not clear in what sense this sort of concern with the other’s rationality is not purely cognitive. In chapter 4 I will argue against such a cognitivist view of practical reason on the grounds that what distinguishes the first person perspective and the third person perspective is not, as Velleman seems to think, the special kind of object of knowledge, namely the self, but the form of thought we employ when we think about what to do and what to think.48 I think that this kind of thought, or as it is sometimes called, “first person thought”, marks the condition of possibility of the epistemic stance that rational animals can take towards themselves, towards the world, and towards others. That is, to understand oneself as an object of knowledge presupposes an irreducibly normative relation to oneself that is expressed, by rational animals, through deliberating and thinking in the first person and through valuing things, actions, animals and persons, including 47 For my defence of the claim that our self-relation must be primarily normative instead of cognitive see chapter 2. For my defence of the claim that our relation to others must be likewise primarily normative instead of cognitive see chapter 4. For the claim that our selfrelation cannot be purely cognitive see also Schmid (2011a). 48 Velleman (2009, 17) argues that we acquire a conception of ourselves as “a cognizable object, a thing to be understood” and this thing is special insofar as it cannot be understood independently of how it understands itself.

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themselves. First person thought is also what is sometimes referred to as “the first person standpoint” from which action receives its intelligibility. (Cf. Tollefsen 2006, 442) Third, it is not clear how Velleman can construct a shared intention out of intrinsically individual psychological commitments without presupposing at least some form of collective intentionality.49 This point can be illustrated by introducing Bratman’s (1999, chapter 8) solution to the problem of shared intention since it is very similar to that of Velleman. Like Velleman, Bratman thinks that the problem of shared intention boils down to the problem of discretion: I cannot intend that we J since my intending already entails that I have settled on doing what I intend to do. In other words, one can directly only intend to do something oneself. Both Bratman and Velleman try to come to terms with this problem by way of showing that what one settles by one’s intention, i.e. what is under one’s control is merely conditional and therefore allows others as yet to cancel or affirm their contribution. To illustrate his approach to the structure of shared intention Bratman (1999, 153) introduces the by now famous example of two people sharing an intention to paint the house together that is analysed in terms of the interdependent individual intentions plus the common knowledge thereof between the two persons: “(1a) I intend that we paint. (1b) You intend that we paint. (2) My intention is known to you, and yours is known to me. (3a) The persistence of (1a) depends on my continued knowledge of (1b): if I did not know that (1b) I would not intend that we paint. (3b) The persistence of (1b) depends on your continued knowledge of (1a): if you did not know that (1a) you would not intend that we paint. (4) We will paint if but only if (1a) and (1b). (5) (1)-(4) are common knowledge between us.”

Bratman notes that the problem is that until we have arrived at a shared intention of painting the house jointly (that is, at step (4)) neither of us will be able to intend that we paint the house since the other’s participation is yet to be secured and hence not already a fixed part of a shared intention. Bratman’s solution is to suggest that for an intention to be shared the nexus between the two (or more) intentions must be one of subjectively justified but reliable prediction. I must reliably predict that you will form an intention that we paint once you recognize my intention that we paint. To signal my intention I may simply start painting or 49 In his later work Velleman (2009) seems to have recognized this problem for there he allows that shared intention can be seen as an joint process of sense-making where the individual participants do not first have to figure out each other’s conditional intentions.

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I might openly express my conditional intention that we paint on the assumption that you will paint upon recognizing my intention. The same of course is true for you. By way of predicting that you will intend that we J upon your recognizing that I intend that we J, however, I do not in any way foreclose your intentional agency for you still have to concur, that is, you still have to decide whether to intend that we J.50 The crucial point seems to be that my prediction of what you are going to do does not determine what you are actually going to do. Thereby the claim that one can only directly intend to do something oneself is reconciled with the claim that one can intend something jointly, or so Bratman and Velleman seem to argue. The obvious problem with Bratman’s proposal (and by implication, with Velleman’s) is that in order to correctly predict how the other will respond to one’s own intention with a collective content (“that we paint”) one must presuppose something like a collective intention that we paint unless one assumes that a shared intention can rest on a mere prediction on how someone regularly acts. Such an assumption is problematic, I think, insofar as it is not clear how a correct prediction of regular behaviour need have anything to do with sharing an intention. Since predicting regular behaviour does not necessarily entail the sharing of an intention, to base an account of shared intention on prediction is at risk of over-generalizing. The first objection, namely that of circularity, receives further support by one of Bratman’s (1999, 155, my emphasis) own claims that seems to entail that knowing the other fairly well is a precondition for sharing an intention: “Or I might simply start painting, given that I expect that you will see this and thereby, knowing me fairly well, recognize my intention that we paint and so arrive as well at such an intention and just jump in.”

But thereby Bratman goes against that which he and also Velleman think is a major advantage of their approach to shared intention or shared commitment, namely that it has very undemanding entry conditions; it is supposed to allow even strangers to share an intention without sharing reasons, i.e. merely “by way of bargaining and compromise”, as Bratman (2004, 10) elsewhere puts it. But if we assume, as seems to be plausible, that by definition strangers do not know each other fairly well, it is not clear how strangers – contrary to what both Velleman and Bratman want their account of shared intention to show – can share an intention in any philosophically interesting sense. Their accounts of shared intention thus seem to either presuppose what needs explaining or to over-generalize the phenomenon of shared intention. 50 Note that this reads like Velleman’s proposoal for how to construct an unconditional shared intention from conditional intentions of the respective individuals.

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Although I agree that sharing intention does not require that one has to have exactly the same reasons for the intention, I also think, unlike Bratman, that the participants must share some reasons for their shared practical stance to be a stable one. For example, if James’ reason for the shared intention to organize a conference together with Kevin is to boost his self-esteem and compete with Kevin while Kevin’s reason consists in advancing his research project, they must somehow integrate these potentially conflicting reasons into an intelligible whole of which either party can regard her own actions as a constitutive part. Otherwise their shared intention does not grant that they share a practical stance or rational perspective instead of merely sharing the same end. Sharing the same end in this weak sense is perfectly compatible with the respective individuals deliberating from solitary practical stances or individual considerations of selfinterest, namely, “by way of bargaining and compromise”. Velleman’s and Bratman’s implicit account of rationality share two important features with the account of rationality understood as individual but enlightened self-interest from which our discussion has departed. First, they do not consider it necessary for sharing intentions that reasons are shared. This might be due to the fact that, as I will suggest in more detail below, they adhere to a conception of the final or overall good of a human being as the satisfaction of a particular allembracing end or rational desire. A human being’s overall good, as Velleman seems to think, is self-understanding, i.e. the satisfaction of one’s desire for selfunderstanding. Since speaking the truth furthers one’s self-knowledge it is instrumentally rational for an agent to speak the truth in an exchange of individual statements of conditional willingness. I take it that on Velleman’s (2009, 115 – 158) view, other-regarding desires are just an epiphenomenon of the interaction between individuals with individual desires for self-understanding. Velleman wants to have them distinguished from the more basic self-regarding desire for self-understanding. Gauthier similarly assumes that the agent’s final good is the maximization of her well-informed self-interests and desires, something like the agent’s overall happiness.51 The individual good for Gauthier must be analysed as construed out of a counterfactual self, i.e. a self whose desires are well-informed or those which a rational agent would have. This is an agent who would be motivated to pursue his maximum good.52 Although perhaps not immediately evident, such accounts of rationality tend to identify the final good with what are taken to be normative facts or facts about what there is reason to do for generic individual agents – such as maximum satisfaction of informed desires, pleasure, or self-understanding. Throughout, 51 For a critical discussion of the conceptual difficulties to think of “happiness as a maximum of good things” see Korsgaard (2009, 54 – 56). 52 I will say what I think is problematic about such a view in chapter 3.

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choices are evaluated with regard to their outcomes, i.e. whether they contribute to or help realize the final good, be it self-understanding, some sort of pleasure or happiness. With her direct preferences over outcomes (instead of actions) the instrumentalist has to establish a relation between the agent’s final good (the outcome) and why she should care about it. Thus, it is not clear, as Korsgaard ([1996]2000a, 271; 2008, 55) convincingly argues, why the agent should be motivated to pursue her final good by being told that this is the rational thing to do unless some connection is established between the agent’s will (or why she cares about a certain end) and the standards of reason (or why the end under consideration is good). What may obscure this difficulty is that the rational egoist is not always clearly a rational or ethical egoist. Sometimes she seems to be more like a psychological egoist who tacitly assumes that agents actually want to do what is good for them anyway.53 The rational egoist, however, must claim that to maximize one’s overall good is the rational thing to do for an agent who is not rational by default and who has to orientate her conduct in accordance with rationality. But again, to say as the enlightened rational egoist does that someone is rational if he or she does what a rational agent would do, i.e. pursue those ends that contribute to her final good, is not very informative since it does not really tell us what it means to be rational. Note that such a view of the substantive good is incompatible with the claim that all practical reason is, or reduces to instrumental reason since the latter claim says nothing about what our ends should be. Since it does not tell the agent what ends she should pursue, it is not an account of substantive rationality at all. Unless one knows which ends to pursue it is not clear how one could take the means to those ends in the first place. So, as Korsgaard (2003) has argued, instrumental rationality seems to presuppose some more fundamental form of rationality about ends. This finally brings me to Schmid’s claim that the real problem of instrumentalism about practical reason is not its instrumentalism but its individualism about ends. This could be read as an attack against the psychological egoist view that our good is finally only about our own interests. Human beings not only have individual desires but also something like we-desires. What this suggestion shares with psychological egoism, however, is that it does not provide an account of rationality at all, which is why it is all but clear what sharing an end according to such an account actually means. Perhaps the utilitarian aspect of instrumental rationality may be seen as removing the sting of individualism about ends as it stresses the point that it is not only the case that human beings should pursue their own enlightened self53 For this claim see also Korsgaard (2008, 43).

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interest as this does the most good for each of them but that they should also pursue their self-interest because it does the most good for the whole society (think of Smith’s invisible hand). So people should attend to their self-interest as far as calculative relations with others are concerned because this realizes economic welfare from which, by assumption, everyone profits most efficiently. Likewise one should attend to the welfare and interests of one’s friends and family because this provides the overall good of all most efficiently.54 Against this suggestion it can be objected with Korsgaard (2011b, 386) that it makes no sense to speak of an aggregate plural agent for whom an aggregate good is good since “aggregating goods across the boundaries between persons is not really an intelligible way of ‘doing the most good’”. It is not intelligible because a person’s final good does not seem like a countable object that can be added to other such objects of essentially the same kind. Adding your good to mine and to the good of Peter, say, is not really a good for anyone.55 Korsgaard (ibid.) further illustrates this by suggesting that we think of what happens with a whole, such as a group of friends like you, Peter, and me when some ‘element’ of our group is taken away from or added to the group. The whole of such a group cannot be thought of as a sum in which each element can take the place of the other or which changes merely in terms of quantity when some element is added or taken away. When Peter dies it is not the case that I can take his place in the group while someone else joins the group and takes my place. This is because, as Arnheim ([1969]1997, 209) convincingly argues, numerical changes alter the whole structure of the group’s network and therefore cannot be reduced to the numerical changes in the group as if the group were an equation whose variables can be exchanged, added and subtracted as long as the terms on each side of the equation remain equal. Note moreover that just as it is not clear why it should be good for me to give up my good in order for the good of the whole society to be maximized, it is 54 In Velleman’s latest book How We Get Along we find a similarly spirited claim, namely that individually rational behaviour in interaction with others will subject individual rational agents to a rational pressure to generality, e.g. to share values, insofar and because such generality makes interactions between individuals more efficient and more intelligible, which lies in the individual’s self-interest as it contributes to its self-understanding. To understand others and to understand how they understand one’s own self, are means to satisfy one’s own ultimate desire of self-understanding. 55 This relates to the view that collective intentionality does not refer to something like a collective mind that exists over and above the individual minds as a separate entity. I fully agree with Schmid (2009b) when he argues that it is the relational attitudes themselves that constitute collective intentionality where this just is collectivity and not some third thing over and above the individuals involved. However, unlike Schmid I do not think that shared intentionality is fundamentally different from individual intentionality insofar as I think that individual intentionality is relational, too. I will say more about this in chapter 2 and chapter 4.

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equally unclear why I should give up a local good in favour of my overall final good. The individual agent on such a view turns out to be estranged both from herself and from the society in which she lives. It is not conceivable how such an agent can be said to share desires or reasons either with herself or with others. I think that some such estrangement is reflected in the dichotomy under discussion. Although intimate relationships are typically pursued for their own sake, what makes them rational when they are rational according to the instrumentalist (utilitarian) is that they contribute to the individual (collective) agent’s final good. The primary normative relation we have here is that between the generic rational agent and her final good from which the evaluative status of both her relations to other human beings and of her own actions is derived. Such an agent should ultimately keep her promises and help strangers in need because such behaviour is conducive, at least in the long run, to her own interests (or in case of the utilitarian variant, the interests of society as a whole). As a consequence, whatever it is an agent does, it must be based on one of two kinds of reasons: On rational and mutual self-interest or on affective, but not necessarily mutual, other-regardingness. Since these motives are strictly separate, the agent herself is being divided into two parts, her self-interest part and her affective or other-regarding part. Moreover, it seems that it is the former part that holds the agent together since the agent’s final good is identified with her prudent or rational self-interest. Thus Gauthier (1986, 268) can claim that “[a]nimals, the unborn, the congenitally handicapped and defective, fall beyond the pale of morality tied to mutuality”. Since these creatures have no place in a realm of enlightened self-interest, they must be taken care of in the realm of affection or other-regardingness. “Morality tied to mutuality” thus excludes all those people (and non-human animals) who are, for different reasons, not in the position to benefit us in return for us benefiting them. Unless we can expect to be benefited by them we have no reason to enter into a (contract) relationship or an agreement with them in the first place. However, putting it this way is misleading in an important respect since some of those that are not in the position to benefit us cannot even be considered potential partners of a contract or agreement. This is the case, for example, when others can’t benefit us in return because they are not (fully) rational. On this view, lacking rational agency necessarily forecloses the very participation in bargaining relationships, contracts and agreements. Accordingly, philosophers of the contractarian tradition like Gauthier believe that only rational animals can be potential participants of agreements and contracts. Morality conceived as enlightened self-interest tied to mutuality or reciprocity cannot accommodate a central tenet about our conception of morality, namely that it should be an inclusive or integrative concept whose scope includes all persons (and possibly non-human animals as well), not just those from whom

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we can expect mutual benefits. What is missing here, as Korsgaard (2011b) has pointed out, is an idea of unconditional normativity that defines the relations of right and wrong between all human beings and between a human being and herself.56 I concur with Korsgaard (2011b) that it is this important thought that cannot be captured by accounts of rationality that consider the primary normative relation to be that between the individual rational agent and her individual or shared ends. This brings nicely to the fore what I consider is egoistic about the accounts of rationality under consideration, namely that they have no space to argue why another’s good should be of my/our concern in the absence of a self- or otherregarding reason. I agree with Kraut (1998) who criticizes that: “[T]he mere fact that I am myself and not you is not by itself a morally relevant difference between us. That my good is mine does not explain why ultimately it alone should concern me.”

I think this applies to the group level as well. That our good is ours does not explain why ultimately it alone should concern us and not also those outside the group. Separateness of personhood/grouphood should not be taken to imply that one’s good is only reason providing for oneself/the group but for nobody else. There is a tendency to regard separateness of personhood as a blocking device against sharing with others in the sense that one needs a reason for sharing. I think this may well have to do with the widely held belief that human beings stand in a special relationship to their personhood, i.e. that they somehow possess it. Surely, the fact that I possess (and pay for) a house of my own provides some initial justification for my thinking that its sharing with someone else will come at a price and that I should think about why I should share it with her. However, as we shall see in the next section, no such thinking in terms of possession makes sense with regard to the final good understood as good for the animal. Note that I am not saying that an account of shared rationality and intentionality must show that we only ever must do what is right as opposed to doing what we think is good for us (individually or as a group), i.e. what satisfies our interests and desires. I rather try to overcome the dichotomy between typically modern accounts of rationality that are mainly concerned with the individual’s (group’s or society’s) interests and those accounts of the broadly Kantian tradition whose focus lies on doing what is right in interacting with others.

56 And, again, possibly between humans and non-human animals.

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On my view the human good57 and the right (how one is evaluatively related to oneself and others as such, how one must treat oneself and others in accordance with our status as ends in themselves) although conceptually distinguishable, are interdependent. On the assumption that one has the right or reason-responsive desires, what is right will usually also be good for oneself, i.e. that which lies in one’s interests. On the view I’m defending here, the dependency relation between the good and the right is such that we promote our own good and that of others because this is right, as Korsgaard (1996, fn26, 114; 2011b, 388 – 389) has so forcefully argued. It is what we should do considering the kind of animal we are, namely being capable of treating animals with a final good as ends in themselves.

1.4

Korsgaard’s Two Conceptions of the Final Good

We have seen that despite first appearances, theories of instrumental rationality depict the relation between an agent and her final good in an essentially impersonal way. Just because a good is hers, or rather, because it is stipulated to be hers, this does not show in what sense it is a good for her (and the same can be said with regard to the group). The importance of the final good, somewhat paradoxically, is thereby emphasized at the expense of the individual person, that is, at the expense of the one for whom it should be a good. The final good, understood as an intrinsically valuable state of affair to be realized, thereby receives something like a life of its own. This becomes especially evident, as we have seen, by focusing on the utilitarian treatment of the good that assumes that a person’s good can be added and subtracted between persons. Here numbers count in the most straightforward sense of the word: The good of a single person may have to be sacrificed in favour of promoting the good of five other persons. The final good so conceived has a price, to put it in Kantian terms, whose purpose is to establish comparative value that in turn allows for exchange and replacement by such comparable value, which is aptly illustrated by the metaphor of equation.58 Kant’s idea that human beings have no price rests on the 57 I understand this in Korsgaard’s (2011b) sense of how one is evaluatively related to one’s individual and shared interests and desires. 58 I am well aware that this is a delicate topic that would require a book of its own, not least because we sometimes do act and argue as if lives did have a price, as when we say that it is better to save five lives than only one (or in the extreme case, none). My hypothesis is that what actually happens when we are forced to choose in this way is that we apply commonly accepted criteria of selection, such as age or health, and not mere numbers (except perhaps in extreme cases where we would have to choose between saving a child and saving all the people living in a village). In most cases, however, the comparative value is provided by wellestablished and justifiable criteria of selection.

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thought that a human being’s final good cannot and should not be compared, exchanged or added up in any way.59 This is just another way of saying that human beings as they are ends in themselves must not be treated as mere means, i.e. as entities with a price. In order to show that a person’s final good is not alienable we must show that an individual agent’s final good must be defined in terms of her evaluative good or what is good for her as the animal she is, and not the other way around. This newly conceived self-relation will provide the basis for showing how a person’s final good can be a good for her, and as a consequence I think, how it can be shared with herself and with others. I follow here Christine Korsgaard’s (2011b, 382) argument who conceives of the conceptual relation between final goodness and evaluative goodness in an order of logical dependence that is in turn inspired by Aristotle’s function argument that he develops at various places, such as in his Nicomachean Ethics, his Metaphysics or his Eudemian Ethics.60 For our discussion the following considerations with regard to a thing’s function are important. As far as self-maintaining living things such as animals are concerned, their function coincides with their purpose, or as Aristotle also calls it, their “final cause” or form, i.e. living (well). Nevertheless, the notion of purpose and the notion of a function do not mean the same thing: A thing’s purpose, more generally speaking (i.e. not restricted to self-maintaining living animals), can be many things as the thing may serve various purposes. A bicycle can take me from place A to place B, it can be a representative of a strong feeling of independence or it can carry my shopping bags. But a bicycle can do all these other things only if its functional arrangement is such that it allows the bicycle to do what it does as a bicycle. To ask how a bicycle with only one wheel can do what it does reveals that the notion of function refers to how the paradigmatic bicycle must be built or formed such that it is able to do what is characteristic of it, i.e. to serve its various purposes as bicycle, like being a vehicle of transportation. This also illustrates the essential difference between the bicycle mechanic and me. While I am aware of the bicycle’s purposes I do not know how its various material parts must be arranged such that it serves its various purposes well. The mechanic understands besides the bicycle’s purpose(s) also how the functional arrangement of its parts enables the thing to do what it does. This is possible only if the thing’s function is intrinsically related to some of its purposes. While the 59 This does not mean that in non-ideal conditions there is no requirement for comparing. 60 For a detailed discussion of this argument see Korsgaard (2008, 137 – 150). My discussion of the function argument here is largely drawn from this source. Therefore I am not primarily interested in Korsgaard’s interpretation of Aristotle’s function argument but rather in the usefulness of the idea she develops when it comes to illuminating what is problematic about an instrumentalist approach not only towards individual intentionality but also towards collective intentionality.

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mechanic probably cannot say anything as to the purpose of the bicycle as an object of art – which is a purpose external to the function of a bicycle – she must be able to say a lot about the purposes or what a bicycle can do in virtue of the structural arrangements of its material parts, that is, the purposes that are internal to the function of a bicycle. The important difference between a self-maintaining or self-constituting living animal compared to a non-living entity or artifact is the sense in which the former’s “good ‘resides’ in its function”. (Korsgaard 2008, 144) Note that whether an artifact or non-living thing serves its function well – i.e. the sense in which its good resides in its function – depends on how its purposes are defined or ascribed by others. Some of these purposes may be external to the function of the object as when a toilet is used as an object of art. As an object of art, the toilet does not serve its function well as toilet. With respect to artifacts, human beings design or produce the artifact so that it serves them a certain end. The bicycle is designed so as to function as a vehicle of transportation. While this just means what it is to be a bicycle, the bicycle may be used for other purposes, as I have illustrated before. But there is nothing of which we can say that it is good for the artifact to be or do itself but only good as tool or object of art for self-maintaining animals like human beings. But how does the final good of self-maintaining animals rest in their function? If a thing’s function (how it can do what it does) and its purpose (what it does) coincide, the animal’s final good must be intrinsically related to how the animal does what it does (i.e. to its functioning), which is her making herself into and trying to remain the animal she is. The way non-human higher animals serve their function or purpose of living is through their related powers of perception, sensation, self-movement, appetite and instrumental reasoning.61 Perception and sensation, in my view, receive a pivotal role in this endeavor since they make it possible that an animal has a final good in the first place. This is how I understand Korsgaard (2011b, 382) when she writes that something can be said to have a final good “(…) when it functions by being aware of its own evaluative goodness – that is, by being aware of its own well- or ill-functioning, or, more strictly, of states that signal its ill- or well-functioning.”

In other words, sentient animals, including ourselves, “(…) function by being aware of their own functioning”; [they] “function by developing evaluative attitudes – desire and aversion, pleasure and pain – toward things that affect [their] own functioning.” 61 By “higher animals” I mean those animals that behave by responding intelligently to their own perceptions of their environment.

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Animals normally develop negative evaluative attitudes towards things that cause them pain since the experience of pain signals the animal that it is not functioning well. This illustrates in what important sense an animal’s final good is a good for her and therefore inalienable. An animal that functions by being aware of its own functioning is intimately related to her final good. Sentient animals can feel pleasure and pain that ‘tell’ them how (well) they are functioning, i.e. how (well) they are doing in what they are doing. So pleasure and pain and desires are valuable as indicators to the animal of how well she is doing as the whole animal that she is. (Millgram 2005, 33 – 55) If this is correct then neither the desires themselves nor the satisfaction of them are valuable as philosophers like Gauthier sometimes seem to suggest when they emphasize the importance of the satisfaction of prudent desires for the achievement of the animal’s the final good or well-being. The Aristotelian or relational conception of the final good under consideration is not one that determines evaluative goodness, as Korsgaard (2011b, 382) emphasizes, but is itself informed by evaluative goodness for the animal, by the animal’s own standards that allow it to live the life of the animal it is. So what is good for the animal must have something to do with what kind of animal it is. This contrasts with the view of instrumentalist philosophers like Gauthier who seem to argue that an animal functions well, i.e. has evaluative goodness if the outcome of its actions contributes to the thing’s final substantive good that is independently defined of the thing’s evaluative goodness or well-functioning.62 This is why I said that such a conception of the final good is impersonal and lends itself well to the idea of aggregation. It does not depict the animal’s final good as good for her since it either just assumes that the animal really wants what is good for her, which means that there is no practical rationality or irrationality, and then it is not clear what it means to say that the animal has a will. Or it does not provide any connection between the animal’s will and what it has reason to do by leaving it open in what sense the animal’s final good is really good for her.

1.4.1 The Function of Rational Animals The instrumentalist’s conception of the final good may be motivated by what she thinks is the characteristic activity or function of all animals, human animals included, namely action guided by means/end reasoning, i.e. reasoning about taking the means to the animal’s given ends whose satisfaction somehow contributes to the animal’s final good. 62 Note that such a view of the animal’s final good has considerably paternalistic insinuations as it does not take into account what is good for the animal by the animal’s own standards.

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However, I think that we cannot understand an animal’s will as identical with practical reason understood as mere instrumental reason. In other words, an animal’s ‘practical irrationality’63 does not reduce to failures in efficacy. Consider the non-human intelligent animal first. As Korsgaard (2009, 104) illustrates, the higher animal may not just fail in achieving the means to its ends but in the ends themselves in the sense that its instincts “fail to constitute the animal that he is” through “los[ing] their self-maintaining function”. This can happen when the environment changes so radically that the animal’s instincts, which are relative to the environment, no longer function so as to preserve the animal’s well-being, thereby threatening its existence. One example would be whales that lose their way as a result of human signalling technology that distorts the frequencies they need for their orientation under water. This is the sense in which instrumental behaviour of higher non-human animals presupposes what I call a mattering-relation that relates the animal and her actions to those ends that serve to constitute the animal as the animal it is. It is this mattering relation that picks out what counts as the animal’s own behaviour as the kind of animal it is. If this is correct, then instrumental or efficacious rationality cannot establish the primary relation in which the animal stands to itself (and others).64 A higher animal’s will, and by implications its ends, is largely determined by its instincts, appetite or training. They do not have to learn that physical and psychic sensations of pleasure and pain are good or bad sorts of things for them. I think Millgram (2005, 41) is right in pointing out that part of learning what it means for things to go well for sentient animals, i.e. what matters to them, is to care that they are going well. For this to be possible there has to be something for sentient creatures that they do not first have to learn to care about, namely themselves and their staying alive. This is why pleasure and pain must appear to us animals as intrinsically good or bad, as Millgram (ibid.) has pointed out. But this doesn’t show that they are intrinsically good or bad, that is, independent of what they are for the sentient animal. A rational animal’s ends, however, are not simply given to her by her instincts. Rather it seems that one sense in which human animals can be said to function is by being aware of the evaluative goodness of their actions where the latter is understood to contain both means and ends in Korsgaard’s (2008, 147 – 149) sense. In other words, the human animal whose ends are not all given to her by her instincts must choose her end along with the means that the end regulates. 63 The quotation marks are to indicate that the notion of practical irrationality when used with respect to non-human animals is not used in a morally normative sense. Non-human animals are not responsible for what they (don’t) do. 64 On these grounds I will argue in chapter 5 that an animal’s primary self-relation cannot be instrumentally normative.

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The rational animal is therefore not just concerned with taking the means to her given ends but with the question whether some end of hers justifies taking the means to it, that is, with the way in which her end regulates the pursuit of its means. An end such as this need not itself be a final end, i.e. good for its own sake. What is important is that the whole action of which the end is a part can be willed as good, or at least as permissible. So even a conditionally valuable end can be justified if there are sufficient reasons that support its goodness. The activity typical of rational animals is characterized by the fact that the animal deliberates not merely about means to ends but about the whole action that consists of both means and ends. This implies that the notion of justification at issue cannot merely involve considerations about means but must also involve considerations about the manner of how ends regulate means. In other words, unlike higher intelligent animals, rational or self-conscious animals also have to learn to act for reasons, that is, to learn to care for considerations concerning whether some end justifies taking the means to it, considerations that go well beyond instrumental deliberation. Learning to care for such considerations is a way of learning to care for oneself and one’s actions. Recall that the problem of instrumentalist accounts of rationality, according to my view, is not primarily their individualism about ends but their inability to show how human beings can share ends with themselves and with others.65 According to the instrumentalist one should pursue certain ends because they are the means to achieving a per definitionem valuable state of affair or because they are the means to something one wants, or finally, because one desires them for their own sake. The first view is problematic, as we have seen with Korsgaard, because it cannot show why one should accept such a final good as good for oneself. The second view is problematic, too. We do not find something good, 65 Suppose that I think that it is a good thing that a city is friendly to cyclists, i.e. that it provides a sufficient amount of safe cyclist routes (all else equal). This is my reason for supporting a referendum that tries to achieve this aim. It seems that the instrumentalist would have to describe what happens here in the following way (the example is in the spirit of Schueler (2003, 59 – 60)). 1) “I want that my city becomes friendly to cyclists. 2) Therefore, as a means to this end, I will support the referendum.” Assuming that my desire just is my reason to support the referendum, the instrumentalist would have to say that the fact that I want my city to become cyclist friendly gives me a reason to support the referendum. This, however, seems a wrong description of my reason. Describing the agent as taking the fact that she wants something as a reason for supporting the referendum depicts her not only as rather self-centered but also as somewhat scattered. Since desires pull in different directions, they are not in the position to unify the agent. To give oneself a law according to which desires rule is not really a self-governing law and therefore cannot be unifying. However, the problem is not a problem that results from ends being merely individual or based on the agent’s selfinterest. For the same holds for shared desires if one assumes that practical reason just is instrumental reason. In that case the fact that we want our city to become cyclist friendly is our reason to support the referendum.

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when we do find it good, merely because we desire it – after all, we desire many things that we acknowledge are not good – but we desire something because we think it good or important (for us). The third view, finally, does not tell us why it is that we care for something in this way and how this relates to the reasons we think of something as good or valuable. In order to say something about what it means to share ends with oneself and others more has to be said about the special nature of the self-relation of rational animals and how it connects with the animal’s (well-)functioning. In other words, we must understand what it means to say about the rational animal that “it functions by being aware of its own wellor ill-functioning”, as Korsgaard (2011b, 382) puts it. To this purpose I will introduce in the next section Korsgaard’s Kantian thought that rational or autonomous agency is expressive of a fundamental evaluative self-conception.

1.4.2 Normative Goodness In the spirit of Kant, Korsgaard (2007a, 2001b) argues that the human animal stands in what I called a mattering-relation to herself (and others) which is not only naturally or descriptively good but normatively good, that is, conferred by the animal on herself. In other words, our life is good for us in the normative sense when we decide that identifying with or acting on a certain desire is good for us. “[I]n deciding that” as Korsgaard (2007a, 29) formulates it, “we assign ourselves a certain standing, the status of end-in-itself” under the description of ‘human being.’ By employing her power to justify her ends and actions, that is, by valuing her chosen ends and actions, a human being thereby cannot but view herself as having inner value. If this is correct then to value ourselves as human beings must include valuing our human nature or (social, rational, moral, etc.) capacities that allow for such valuing. Unlike the instrumentalist (or for that matter, the realist), Korsgaard ([1996]2000b, 290) does not claim that we share ends with others because we share some desires (or because of the objective value of the ends) but out of respect for the other as a human being, a being with the capacity to take interest in things for its own sake. Korsgaard ([1996]2000b, 275) sometimes calls such sharing of ends “the reasons we can share”, which she explicitly wants to have distinguished from agent-neutral reasons in the sense discussed by Nagel (1970) in his Possibility of Altruism.66 For unlike Nagel’s conception of agent-neutral 66 Here Nagel characterizes the distinct normative force of agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons in terms of whether they include a reference to the agent or not. An agent-relative reason is a reason whose normative force is specific to an individual agent. For example, to

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reasons, Korsgaard’s conception of the reasons we can share is meant to show how agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons are connected. I will employ Korsgaard’s conception of the reasons we can share to defend my claim that the instrumentalist’s introduction of the idea of sharing ends only pushes the problem of egoism to another level, that is, the group level. The instrumentalist’s introduction of the concept of shared ends and group membership, although it allows for some impartiality within the group or community, it does not address the crucial question why one should (not) take the reasons of those outside the group or community into consideration. In contrast, what Korsgaard’s conception of the reasons we can share illustrates, as we shall see shortly, is that you do not need to share particular ends with others to have a reason to support or try to support (some of) them in pursuing their own ends. Consider Monique who is a talented young dancer at the Royal Ballet. For several months she has been practicing twelve hours a day for the upcoming performance of the Swan Lake in which she dances the main woman’s part. After another strenuous day of work she is lying awake in bed thinking about her reasons for why she was leading such a suffering life. Here is an excerpt of the direction that her thinking might take: “Am I doing what I am doing simply because I want to do it? Surely, I have always wanted to dance and become a ballet dancer partly because of the intense feeling of both freedom and control that I experience while dancing; this experience is deeply pleasing. But I have wanted to dance all my life also because I think that it is a valuable form of art through which human feelings, both good and bad, can be authentically expressed. Last but not least ballet dancing is dancing to some of the finest music ever composed. Ballet dancing is literally an active engagement with the music as it unfolds in time. Therefore my strong desire to be successful in the upcoming Swan Lake cannot be a mere expression of my vanity, or so it seems. My desire and ambition to excel at the Swan Lake may be partly an expression of my desire to partake in something that I value far beyond the fact that I am the one dancing the leading part in it. It rather seems to be the other way around. I want to be the one dancing the leading part of the Swan Lake to be part of something that is considered an objective good for human beings, including myself.” help his friend Tom with his exam preparations is an agent-relative reason for Jack since considerations constituting the reason to help Tom make necessary reference to the fact that Tom is Jack’s friend. The consideration that Tom needs help with his exam preparations is not likewise a reason to help for a stranger, as it is a reason for Tom’s friend Jack. In case of agent-neutral reasons the scope of agents for whom the consideration in question counts as a reason, is not restricted in this way. For example, the consideration that a child is drowning is a reason for anyone who walks by and who can swim. It is not just a reason for the child’s family members. Thus there is no reference to a particular agent in the expression of an agent-neutral reason. For a detailed discussion of agent-neutral reasons and agent-relative reasons see Cholbi (1999) and Ridge (2011).

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Monique recognizes that ballet dancing is a good thing for us human beings. People in general acknowledge that, even if they personally don’t like ballet very much, there is reason for having and supporting ballet dancing because it is an expression of our well-functioning as human beings, namely an engagement of one of our specific human capacities to take interest in things for their own sake.67 Through her personal or agent-relative end or ambition to be dancing the leading part in Swan Lake, Monique affirms that she wants to stand in a special relation to, i.e. participate in what she thinks is acknowledged by human beings to be truly valuable for them. Or, to employ Korsgaard’s ([1996]2000a, 288) diction, we can say that Monique wants herself to stand in a special relationship to something of which she thinks is good independently of herself in the sense that she can acknowledge its goodness irrespective of whether it is a good for her particularly. Her agent-relative ambition to dance in the Swan Lake is parasitic on her recognizing good dancing as a thing without which human beings would miss something important, something objectively good. In Korsgaard’s words, Monique “[s] to stand in a special relationship to what [she] think[s] is good objectively” (ibid.) and which others can acknowledge to be valuable without having to have a particular or agent-relative interest in it.68 Of course Monique could share her end with others in a deeper sense than this. If dancing for her is a shared activity, then she shares the recognition of and commitment to the goodness of dancing with the others of the ballet ensemble with whom she dances. If it is an end in itself to engage in and take interest in things we consider good for us, as I have claimed with Korsgaard, then the following claim that Cooper (1999b, 348 – 349) thinks is in the spirit of Aristotle needs special attention. To participate in a shared activity in that one constantly experiences the other participants’ evaluations as a confirmation of what oneself thinks is valuable, provides an invaluable way of sustaining one’s own interests. Thus, if it is an end in itself to engage in and take interest in things we consider good (for us), shared activities in which one jointly acts under the guise of the good that enable one to maintain one’s interests must themselves be valued. And this seems to fit well with our thinking of shared activities of this sort. It also shows how important the reasons we can share are for the well-functioning of human beings, beings who are able to confer value on things. Coming back to our example, this means that valuing dancing for its own sake would not be compatible with Monique trying to realize her end to dance the main part in the ballet no matter what, for example by completely ruining her health, by killing her rival or by bribing the art director. Monique’s end is to do a 67 To repeat, this does not mean that these things have to be intrinsically valuable. Dancing, according to this view is valuable for human beings and has no value independently of them. 68 For Korsgaard’s own example see Korsgaard (2009, 210 – 211).

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good job as a dancer, which forbids her to want to be chosen for the part regardless of whether she is a good dancer or regardless of the means that take her there. This illustrates the sense in which sufficient reasons for action must involve the thought of a principle (or the sense in which they are desire-independent). Only insofar Monique considers her end to dance the main part of the Swan Lake as justifiably regulating the means, is her reason to dance the main part good and thus shareable with herself and others. Therefore, if Monique’s reason depicts a mattering relation, she has not simply determined herself to satisfy her desire to dance the main part whatever it takes to satisfy it. This is the way in which reasons are desire-independent and depict a justificatory relation expressed in a principle of action that can be willed for its own sake or at least as permissible. The action that this relation or principle describes is desirable or valuable not because I or we desire it but because its parts, i.e. the means (or act) and end (or purpose) are related in the right way, i.e. as good for its own sake or as justifiable in some way.69 This is another illustration of how something can be objectively good even though it is extrinsically good, that is, good for us human beings instead of good in itself. Even though the end of dancing may not be good in itself we can confer objective value on it by willing it as a good described in the sense above.70 So dancing is not taken to have intrinsic worth independently of the agent who thinks it good. Monique would have no reasons for dancing if she lacked the capacity to desire things and take interest in things. This is the other sense in which reasons are desire-dependent. Reasons can matter only for sentient beings with desires and for whom things can matter, that is, who can take interest in things. But again, this does not mean that desires themselves or the things that are desired are intrinsically valuable, i.e. independently of the interest that the animals take in them.71 69 For this argument in terms of how means and act are connected in action, see Korsgaard (2008, 227 – 228). 70 See Korsgaard’s ([1996]2000a, 249 – 274) distinction between intrinsic goodness and objective goodness the latter of which can be extrinsic. 71 Thus, Wallace (2009, 472) misrepresents Korsgaard’s notion of a reason when he criticizes her on the grounds that it is not the case that you should be nice to your friend because being nice to your friend promotes an intrinsically valuable state of affair but simply because she is your friend. Korsgaard does not say that objective reasons ‘ground’ agent-relative reasons in this reductive sense. We rather should understand her saying that our agent-relative reasons that spring from our contingent practical identities or self-conceptions, projects and relationships can be what they are for us because we can value persons, projects and actions for their own sake, i.e. as something that deserves from us objective valuing. This is the sense in which what we think is good for us individually nevertheless extends beyond the individual. On this line of reasoning one cares for the well-being of one’s friend as a good thing (for one’s friend) independently of whether one is the person who contributes to it. But of course, as a friend, one wants to be the person who contributes to one’s friend’s well-being.

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This twofold character of the reasons we can share is what I think lies at the heart of Korsgaard’s more general conception of practical reasons. Korsgaard (2009, 105; 122 – 124) argues that while a practical reason is never just an incentive alone it is a conjunction of an incentive and a principle of choice in the following way. A reason has two aspects: It is an incentive because the material of a reason must respond to our sentient nature as animals with desires and interests. It is under the aspect of incentive – or, if you like, the agent-relative aspect of the reason – that the agent is presented with an action that she might perform since her desires or inclinations reach out for incentives, so to speak, or features that make an object attractive and desirable for her. But the aspect under which the agent eventually chooses to do the action – when she chooses it – is a principle of choice.72 More precisely, it is a description of action expressed by the form ‘I will do act A for the sake of end E as worth doing for its own sake’. Korsgaard (2008, 217) further describes this normative principle constitutive of good action in terms of the Aristotelian idea of the “orthos logos”: “A good action is one that embodies the orthos logos or right principle: it is done at the right time, in the right way, to the right object, and (…) with the right aim.”

Yet, I think this formulation is somewhat misleading since it seems to suggest that the right principle determines what must be the case for some action to be right. But the “orthos logos”, strictly speaking, only determines what actions are justifiable or permissible. For even an action that is justifiable for its own sake in the sense of being done at the right time, in the right way and to the right object, and with the right aim, need not be right objectively. I will later argue with Heath , importantly,. In any case, what we can say is that to endorse a desire as a reason is to consider the desire’s end or object as justifiably regulating how (when, why and with what aim) the means are pursued. If this description of a normative reason as springing from our capacity for justification and valuing things for their own sake is basically correct, then Korsgaard (1996, 120 – 166) is right to argue that such value grounds the value that springs from our more contingent practical identities as something like a condition of possibility. Our contingent practical identities or self-conceptions, projects and relationships can be what they are for us because we can value ourselves and each other as things with a final good. The same point can be put in the following way : The agent-neutral aspect of the reasons we can share with all other human beings is what we share with others qua our basic human identity as (self-)valuers. The agent-relative aspect of the reasons we can share, on the other hand, refers to our contingent lives, pleasures, desires, and our particular 72 For this to be possible, desires must be potentially open to rational evaluation. Cf. Herman (1996).

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individual or shared practical identities. Thus, when we speak of reasons that we can share with all human beings qua human beings we emphasize the agentneutral aspect of reasons.73 When we speak of the reasons we can share with our friends or with the other dancers of our group we emphasize the agent-relative aspect of the reasons we can share, i.e. the particular perspective or identity that we share as friends or as dancers. To stand in some such relationship that partly constitutes the reasons the parties share to promote what they jointly think is good is also to value one another as the particular human beings one is, that is, as a particular instance of humanity. These considerations show that the two aspects of the reasons we can share are intimately related. The concern we have for each other, and ourselves, both as particular instances of humanity and as human beings more generally is a concern and respect for one another always also as ends with a final good. This is why as human beings our reasons are normative for each other, which includes respecting each other’s more local and contingent realizations of our shared human identity.74 It is in this sense, I think, that we have to understand the moral law of right and wrong as defining the relation to ourselves and the relation to other selves.75 To avoid confusion, we should bear in mind with Korsgaard (2009, 200 – 202) that it is not the case that we decide to treat ourselves and others as ends in themselves. We simply treat ourselves and others as ends in themselves when we respect ourselves and others as the kind of self-valuing rational and sentient animals we are. So the way in which rational animals pursue their own good, i.e. by conferring value on what they choose, differs from how intelligent animals pursue their good. The latter pursue their own good mainly by following their instincts, which, as I will argue in the next chapter, does not mean that a higher animal’s good is nothing for her. Neither does it mean that human animals do not also act from instinct. But this changes nothing about the fact that rational agency is characterized by reasons and acting for reasons is considered as one of the differentia specifica of human beings. 73 My friend and a stranger who does not share any contingent practical identity with my friend must in virtue of their shared humanity or moral identity at least respect each other’s agentrelative reasons. I here follow Korsgaard (1996, 129) in what I think it is to have a moral identity, namely to treat one’s human identity, one’s being an end in itself, as the source of treating each other’s and one’s own reasons as normative. I will come back to this controversial claim later. 74 For this point see also Van Willigenburg (2002, 184 – 189). 75 If this is correct, it would explain why we tend to think of the moral law as good for the whole; such a law is most likely to function as a principle of integration both for oneself and between oneself and others. Desires, on the other hand, since they compel the agent to take the means to their satisfaction are more for their own good than for the good of the whole. (Korsgaard 2009, 146;163)

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If this is a correct description of our human nature then it explains why we must establish rules of right and wrong and why we must recognize rights even of non-human animals. As Korsgaard (2007a, 31 – 33) explains, non-human sentient animals fall under the moral laws that we as both rational and sentient animals legislate since they share a property with us, their sentience, in virtue of which we ourselves deserve, as a right, to be treated by others in a non-harmful way. Thus, it is not the case that we enter into this moral community of the Kingdom of Ends, as it were, because it serves our enlightened self-interest as Gauthier and others think, but, as Korsgaard (2011b, 384) explains, “in order to be properly related to each other”, and, I would add, to ourselves. This view differs starkly from that of the instrumentalist’s according to which our relations with others are judged in terms of their contribution to the individual’s or collective’s final substantive good. From what I have said so far, it should have become clear that I reject the instrumentalist view in favour of Korsgaard’s suggestion that the way we are related to others and to ourselves is primarily a normative relation and not an instrumental relation. Reasons play an important unifying role for the well-functioning of rational animals because such animals have to act from reasons; this is because their ends are not given to them by instinct alone. The reasons we can share in sharing activities with one another, as I have argued, are especially important for the well-functioning of the kind of animals human beings are. However, it might not have become clear why objectively good reasons or moral reasons should play such a fundamental role for a human being’s well-functioning. After all, morality is only part of the final good. So what is the relation between the good human life (in the moral sense) and the human good?

1.4.3 The Relation between the Good Human Life and the Human Good Korsgaard (2007b; 2011b) argues that if it is true that an animal can have a final good when it functions through conscious functioning, then final goods exist because sentient animals, animals that function in the way necessary for having a final good, namely through self-valuation, exist. Such self-valuation becomes normative in self-conscious sentient animals, as we have seen, granted that the mind of animals functions by perceiving or being conscious of its own activities. Thus, Korsgaard (1996, 151) argues, respect for the moral law can be regarded as the awareness of the activity of the moral law in our own minds and possibly, in that of others. But if it is correct that the mind of animals functions by perceiving or being conscious of its own activities, then the awareness of the activity of the moral law in the rational animal’s own mind is a fundamental

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indicator of how the animal functions. Thus, for self-conscious animals with normative self-conceptions, conceptions under which the animal can value herself and her actions, it is crucial for their well-functioning that they take themselves to be worthy of trust and respect, i.e. that they have positive selfconceptions (Korsgaard 2007a, 17 – 19). In other words, lacking self-respect and respect from others has detrimental consequences on one’s more contingent non-moral self-conceptions. This is just another way of saying that the human animal stands in a mattering-relation to herself and others which is not naturally good but normatively good, that is, conferred by the animal on herself. After all, the moral law is one that the self-conscious animal gives to herself. To put it more carefully with Kant, it is pure reason that is practical of itself alone that gives to the human being a universal law. This is called the moral law. The fact of pure practical reason, however, we cannot give to ourselves. Therefore it would be perhaps better to say with Henrich (2007, 123) that human beings determine themselves under the moral law. Moreover, if we suppose with Korsgaard (2007a, 17 – 19) that a sentient rational animal’s final good just is to be a well-functioning member of its kind then it is not implausible to assume that for moral beings with normative self-conceptions, acting virtuously is an important part of their well-functioning. To know what is the appropriate action to be done in the circumstances, i.e. what is worth doing for the sake of what, which being virtuous or acting virtuously in the most basic sense means, enables rational animals to perform one of the functions that is essential of their kind, namely acting well.76 But is a human being who performs worthwhile actions and thus leads a good human life necessarily achieving its final good? Probably not, for one can easily imagine beings living under such adverse circumstances – take as an example the dictatorial regime that represses truth and acting well – in which doing or trying to do worthwhile actions is to actually risk one’s life and with it, at least in some sense, one’s final good. Perhaps what one can say is that in benign circumstances acting well is at least reliably but not necessarily connected with achieving one’s final good.77 In the next section I will employ some of the considerations made in the previous sections to illuminate what might be the possible pre-conditions for entering collective activities before any agreement or the like has been made.

76 Cf. Korsgaard (2008, 147; 2011b). 77 I avoid using the notion ‘happiness’ here because I think it is too broad a notion to be helpful. Perhaps one could say more helpfully that a well-functioning animal of its kind is aware of her life going well.

Feeling Respect: “The Feeling of Us”

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John Searle (1990) explicitly raised the issue about the pre-intentional conditions for entering collective activities. How do we come to enter a cooperative or collective activity before any kind of agreement has taken place? Searle (1990, 414) argues that “[c]ollective intentionality presupposes a Background sense of the other as actual or potential member of a cooperative activity”, something like a “communal awareness.”

Unfortunately he has not taken up this interesting point any further. I think the first philosophical treatment of what it takes to enter a cooperative relation is given by Aristotle. In his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle (1985, bookVIII) discusses use-friendship, the kind of friendship one enters in order to secure certain self-interests. This discussion is especially helpful since it takes as starting point the kind of relation that aims at satisfying the individuals’ respective selfinterests. If it could be shown that even a relationship of use-friendship cannot be fully reduced to the individuals’ motives of self-interest, much would have been done to support the assumption that we need a conception of reasons that overcomes the self-/other-divide. Aristotle can be interpreted as to argue that the common end in a usefriendship – the mutual benefits among commercial exchangers for example – although informed by self-interest, cannot be reduced to it. This is because cooperation as such wouldn’t be possible if the participants didn’t bring with them a minimal amount of trust and concern for fairness, trust to enter the relationship and fairness to sustain it even in situations of conflict or opportunity to free-ride on the other’s trust.78 After all, it is the very idea of the cooperative relation itself that accommodates a solution to the problem how to manage possible conflicts arising from within the cooperative partnership, namely “from within the terms of their relation” as partners, as Frank (2005, 155) puts it. But this requires, once the relationship is established, a minimal degree of virtue and good judgment on both sides, not because it pays but because it is the thing one should do as partners in cooperative relations.79 Thereby the narrow bounds of mutuality that I have previously criticized are broken up. Although returning one’s ‘debt’ is vital to the practice of reciprocity, giving freely – doing good to others for their own sake, without the merely instrumental aim of doing good in order to receive good in return – is at least equally important. With respect to use-friendship Aristotle could be interpreted as arguing that even in 78 Cf. Frank’s (2005, 155) interpretation of Aristotle’s discussion of use-friendship. 79 The normativity entailed in this relation is not merely instrumental normativity as I will argue in chapter 5.

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such a relationship the parties wish each other well and do one another good not just as a means to their own profit but partly for the other’s sake.80 MacIntyre ([1999]2009, 116 – 117) seems to argue for a similar point when he claims that both relations based on motives of self-interest and relations based on motives of sympathy and empathy presuppose “norms of giving and receiving” freely. But how are we to understand the metaphysics of such norms? How are they possible? More recently Schmid (2011c) has argued in a somewhat similar manner like Aristotle that the background of collective intentionality is a special sort of affective attitude of trust that consists of both epistemic and normative elements (contrary to the received views that give precedence over either the normative or the cognitive component). This proposal seems to stand in some contrast to Schmid’s (2003, 82) earlier suggestion that is closer to Searle’s own, where Schmid argues that the background of collective intentionality is “a preintentional sense for possible co-operators”. I will critically discuss this earlier suggestion below and now focus on Schmid’s more recent suggestions that the background of collective intentionality is a special sort of affective attitude of trust. The upshot of Schmid’s (2011c) interesting thought here is that in a shared intention one has a cooperative attitude towards the others on the grounds that one implicitly assumes that representing the other as doing her part of the shared intention (i.e. as representing her as one to be trusted to do her part) provides the other with both a motivating and a normative reason to do her part. The justifying or normative reason to do one’s part consists in, according to Schmid, “the psychologically weak factor” of simply doing what one thinks should be done, namely to ‘meet’ the other’s trust, to behave as ‘partners in trust’ should behave. The motivating reason is thought to be psychologically stronger since it consists in the psychological reward of being trusted. It is a pleasant feeling or experience to be considered trustworthy by others, or so Schmid argues. I think this point is somewhat reminiscent of the infamous “warm-glow”approach in the social sciences to the question why people benefit others, when they do. It is still widely held among social scientists, especially among economists, that everything human beings do is motivated by their ultimate desire for pleasure. The criticism against this latter argument works likewise for the reward approach as applied to the question why people live up to each other’s expectations to be trustworthy. Although it may well be a nice feeling to be trusted, nothing has been done to show that the trustee lives up to the truster’s 80 For a similar reading of Aristotle on use-friendship as involving both self-regarding desires and well-wishing and well-doing for the other’s sake, see Cooper (1999a, 328).

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expectation because he wants to attain this feeling. It could just as well be a welcome side effect of meeting the other’s normative expectations. The merit of this criticism is that it shows that there is simply no way to prove that the feeling of warm glow or reward actually is the reason for doing one’s part – just as there is no proof against it, of course. But at least the following consideration speaks in favour of thinking that people do not behave trustworthy as a means to an end, i.e. in order to get the reward of a good feeling. Being trustworthy only really feels good if it is done for its own sake, i.e. because one thinks it is what one should do or because the other deserves to be treated in this way. Schmid (2011c, 12) is aware of this snag, for he is quick to add that perhaps the deeper ground of the motivating reason for the trustee to meet the truster’s trust is, among other things, that by meeting the other’s trust one understands oneself as “one of us”, as a being that is “susceptible to justifying reasons”, and thus a proper addressee of normative expectations. But why would one desire to be one of us in this sense, an addressee of normative reasons? Before suggesting an answer to this question I would like to emphasize the importance of Schmid’s move as it avoids re-introducing another version of the divide under consideration, namely that between merely normative reasons (“because it is the right thing”) and merely motivational reasons (“because it brings a reward in the form of a pleasant feeling”) for being trustworthy. Being trustworthy, in my view, is like sharing a reason whose motivational component is not restricted to agent-relative considerations since the reason shared has also an agent-neutral aspect. I am motivated to be trustworthy, when I am so motivated, not only because I desire not to disappoint your trust in me but also because I think to be trustworthy towards others is a good thing for the kind of animal that we are and it matters to me that I am a good exemplar of this animal kind. Why should it matter to me that I am addressed as someone capable of giving and taking normative reasons? As we have already seen, it matters to me because I am an animal with a normative self-conception under which I value myself and my actions. For such an animal it is important that she takes herself to be worthy of trust and respect, i.e. that she has positive self-conceptions (Korsgaard 2007a, 17 – 19). So far little has been said about the truster’s reason to trust, except that, according to Schmid, the truster’s trust is based on his assumption that his representation of the other as trustworthy is likely to influence the other to be trustworthy on both normative and motivational grounds. Even if such an assumption may play some role in the truster’s considerations, I do not think that it is fundamental. Rather, the truster, qua trusting, thereby simply shows the trustee that he treats him the way he thinks he deserves to be treated, that is, as a subject of respect. Thus the attitude of trust is not an attitude whose primary aim is to influence the trustee to be trustworthy in return, upon his recognizing the

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motivational and normative forces entailed in the truster’s representing him as trustworthy. I will now suggest that we consider the Kantian feeling of respect as the fundamental element of a “feeling of us” working in the background of collective intentionality. We can start by noting that the binding character of social practices such as promises, contracts and shared intention is based on a notion of a norm that is logically prior to the binding force of these institutions. Such a notion of a norm elucidates the norm, as Rödl (2010, 77), puts it, as “taking effect on its own” that is, taking effect even in the absence of enforcing institutions or practices, such as sanctions. This is what I take to be Kant’s ([1788]2003, [31] p. 42, transl. J.G.) insight that “pure reason is practical of itself alone and gives to the human being a universal law which we call the moral law”.81 Although this may seem a viable antidote to the ‘received’ understanding of practical reason as grounded in self-interest (or the interest of society), philosophers have argued against this idea on the grounds that it unwittingly derives an ought from an is.82 But this charge is based on a false understanding of what Kant called the “fact of pure practical reason” (“Faktum der reinen praktischen Vernunft”). By “fact” Kant did neither mean an empirically given fact nor a justification of the moral law itself but the consciousness or awareness of the moral law that is an a priori fact: “The moral law is given, as it were, as a fact of pure reason of which we are a priori conscious”.83 (Kant [1788]2003, [47] p. 64, transl. J.G.) Such moral self-awareness is a fact in the original sense of fact, as Höffe (2002, 14 – 16) points out, namely in the sense of being made (lat. facere, facti) by the free and rational subject himself who sees moral norms as real in her own actions as she acts according to them. How exactly are we aware of the moral law?84 The awareness we have of ourselves when we make the moral law our own law, that is, when we see moral norms as real and act according to them, is a feeling of reverential respect for the moral law, which seems the only way in which we can be aware of the moral law. Moreover, this feeling or awareness we experience in making the moral law our own law contains two feelings pulling in opposite directions. One is the feeling of subordination of our will to the moral law’s absolute authority, which is naturally painful for sentient beings whose will is not unconditionally good. At the 81 The original reads: “Reine Vernunft ist für sich allein praktisch und gibt (dem Menschen) ein allgemeines Gesetz, welches wir das Sittengesetz nennen.” 82 For such a view see Martin Hollis (1998, 88). 83 The original reads: “Auch ist das moralische Gesetz gleichsam als ein Faktum der reinen Vernunft, dessen wir uns a priori bewusst sind, und welches apodiktisch gewiss ist, gesetzt (…).” 84 My discussion of the connection between the respect for the moral law and the respect for persons has benefited from Dillon (2010).

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same time, however, by recognizing that it is our own reason that is the moral law’s source, the moral law is no longer experienced merely as an unconditional authoritative and painful external constraint but as an unconditional authoritative internal constraint that is freely self-imposed, which is a positive and somewhat elevating feeling. But how does the feeling of respect for the moral law connect with the feeling of respect for other persons, the latter of which seems central for a feeling of us? It seems not unreasonable to suggest that the respect for the moral law is identical with respect for oneself as author of the moral law qua rational being. Respect for the moral law thus is self-respect of the most fundamental kind. Such self-respect is necessary in order to have respect for others. The feeling of selfrespect is, as Dillon (2010) interprets Kant “part of the subjective basis of morality, the predispositions to feeling that make it possible for beings like us to acknowledge that we have binding moral duties” towards each other. In his Religion, Kant ([1797]1977, 672) speaks of an “original predisposition” (“ursprüngliche Anlage”) in human nature that makes morality possible. Moreover, in his Groundwork, Kant ([1948]1991, [401]) writes that we feel respect for morally good persons just as we feel respect for the moral law. However, the respect we inevitably feel for morally good persons is not the same kind of respect that we must, as a matter of obligation, have for all persons qua beings that legislate their own laws. I have not made a distinction between these two kinds of respect so far. Although I think that they are distinct forms of respect I think that the feeling of respect we have for morally good persons, i.e. the respect for the moral law is more fundamental than the respect we have as a matter of obligation. An obligation or duty to respect all persons simply for what they are is not as it should be if it doesn’t involve, at least partly, the kind of feeling we experience in the presence of good persons. Here an important objection must be taken into account. The objection is that young children that can be shown to share attention or to cooperate with one another certainly are not yet able to have such a demanding “feeling of us”. But if this is true then this feeling cannot be working at the background of collective intentionality. My reply is that while children may not have the fully realized awareness of the moral law, there is growing empirical evidence that young children are capable of distinguishing between moral or absolute norms and merely conventional norms.85

85 See e.g. Nichols (2004, 1 – 29) and Nunner-Winkler (2005).

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1.6

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The Relation between Language and Self-Consciousness

In this section I will discuss Schmid’s other, earlier suggestion of how we should understand the pre-intentional background of collective intentionality. Schmid (2003) in his thought-provoking article “Rationality-in-Relations” tries to overcome the sort of dichotomy I have criticized in this chapter by showing that pace Searle one cannot bridge the gap between purely self-regarding reasons (that can account for the good of others only because and insofar their good is one’s own or part of one’s own) to purely other-regarding or altruistic reasons that are entirely disinterested. Schmid emphasizes that we need another category of reasons that falls between the two extremes of desire-based reasons on the one hand and desireindependent or altruistic reasons on the other hand. We need shared reasons, or as Schmid’s calls them, “we-desires”. According to Schmid (2003, 91) these are neither purely self-interested nor purely altruistic. They are not purely selfinterested because they do not bottom out in the agent’s own desires or interests but in our desires, and they are not purely altruistic because they are nevertheless desires, i.e. we-desires. One difficulty with Schmid’s view is that it does not overcome the instrumentalist’s dichotomy between reasons that are based in desires and reasons that are based in reason itself. So there is some unexplained arbitrariness at play in challenging the dichotomy at the level of desires but in keeping it intact between reasons and desires. Moreover, what speaks against keeping the latter divide is the consideration that desires must be potentially reason-responsive – otherwise they could not be treated as reasons. Finally, but most importantly it is not clear what sharing desires actually means, especially if one agrees with Korsgaard that desires are more for their own good than for the good of the whole. This is not likewise a problem with regard to reasons, as Korsgaard (1996, 135 – 136) has convincingly argued: Reasons have to be inherently shareable instead of inherently private for otherwise they could not be shared with others or with oneself. By the capacity to share a reason with oneself I mean the capacity to be able to explain to others why the ends one pursues are good or part of an action description (that includes both means and ends) that one can will as justifiable. Therefore, the divide between self-regarding desires or, for that matter, we-desires on the one hand and other-regarding reasons on the other hand can be overcome only on the assumption that reasons are essentially shareable and that many of our desires are reason-responsive. I will illustrate what I think is the unclear meaning and status of we-desires by examining Schmid’s (2003, 82 – 91) claim that, contrary to what Searle thinks, we-desires do not presuppose any linguistic capacity. The examination will reveal that Schmid’s argument suffers from a dilemma. Either it is not clear what

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kind of attitude “we-desires” are, and whether they are a philosophically helpful concept (1) or – if they denote a helpful concept – it s not clear how the supposed we-attitudes of non-linguistic animals, animals that lack self-consciousness, could be illuminated by such a concept. In other words, it is not clear how such animals could have we-desires (2).

1.6.1 Schmid’s Criticism of Searle In his article “Rationality-in-Relations” Schmid critically discusses Searle’s (2001) suggestion of how we get from “desire-dependent reasons” for action to “desire-independent reasons” or other-regarding reasons. Like Gauthier, Searle also works with a dichotomy, namely that between desire-based reasons and impartial or desire-independent reasons. Searle (2001, 159), however, tries to bridge this gap by way of introducing a “semantic categorical imperative” that is supposed to show how we get from (enlightened) self-interest to desire-independent reasons or morality. The imperative reads: “When you make an assertion of the form a is F, rationality requires that you be able to will that everyone in a similar situation should assert that a is F.”86 Here Schmid (2003, 84) convincingly questions whether such a requirement of rationality or consistency could really lead us from self-interest to full-fledged altruism. Although Schmid does not explicitly make this point, I think we can understand him to say that consistency does not take us all the way to otherregardingness. I fully agree on the grounds that what Searle’s “semantic categorical imperative” merely seems to require is the following: If one grants that something is a normative reason for oneself, that a is F, then one also has to grant that it is a normative reason for anyone else who finds herself in a similar situation. But this does not entail, as Korsgaard (1996, 134) has forcefully shown, that I have to take your reasons as normative for me. It only shows that I have to take them as normative for you.87 But as we shall see in chapters 3 and 4, reasons so understood are not inherently shareable. To my mind there is one further problem to be found in Searle’s view, which Schmid does not discuss. If reasons understood as desire-independent are something totally different from desires or reasons based on desires, which Searle’s dichotomy seems to imply, then it is not clear how we could ever get from desire-dependent reasons to desire-independent reasons. The way Searle draws 86 I will come back to this formulation in chapter 3 when discussing Korsgaard’s “public conception of reasons”. 87 Note the resemblance to Velleman’s account of shared intention according to which agents should rationally expect others to behave in the same way as they themselves do without assuming any normative relations between agents.

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the relation between desire and reason, desires seem like unruly pressures that have to be held in check by reason so as not to let them erupt.88 Thus Searle seems vulnerable to objections against the external reasons view, the view that reasons have nothing to do with the agent’s own motivations. This relates to the instrumentalist’s difficulty to show how the agent’s final good connects with the agent’s will. Note that if one thinks that reasons must be external to the agent’s motivation (as Searle seems to suggest) then it is natural to think that they must be of a very different kind than desires or desire-dependent reasons. But why should we think, as Barbara Herman (1996, 43) has rightly objected, that from the purity of the foundations of morality i.e. from the fact that practical reason must be pure it should follow that the agent’s motives for action must themselves be entirely “extramaterial” and “in complete separation from the empirical life of the human agent”? It rather seems that human beings have desires with a special structure, namely desires that can be influenced by reason, desires that are reason-responsive.89 This means that normally desires do not concern merely the ‘subjective inner world’ of the individual’s mind. Saying that desires are reason-responsive is to say, as we have seen, that reasons for desiring something cannot consist in that thing’s desirability alone or in one’s desiring it. It is to say that to experience something as desirable consists in one’s awareness of there being certain responses to the object of desire that are fitting to the object (and thus are better than others). I find it plausible to assume with Jennifer Hawkins (2008, 259) that such an evaluative response of fit to the object of desire is first experienced by children as an immediate “sense of ‘fit’” or “feeling right”. Only on a more mature level do we learn also to judge our own responses and attitudes towards ends and objects as reason-giving, thereby learning to abstract the idea of a reason from the immediate evaluative impressions that our desires confront us with. (Hawkins ibid., 262) In any case, Schmid’s (2003, 84) main target of criticism against Searle is that Searle “restricts ‘non-selfish behaviour’, ‘commitment’, and ‘action based on desire-independent reasons’ to linguistic practitioners” and makes it seem as if “the bridge from egocentrism to non-selfish behaviour is an exclusively linguistic one”. This is problematic on the following grounds, as Schmid seems to 88 For criticism of such a view see also Herman (1996). 89 This renders Searle’s talk of “desire-dependent reasons” and “desire-independent-reasons” increasingly difficult to understand, not least because it disregards both that self-regarding reasons can be desire-independent (if based on moral motives) and that other-regarding reasons can be desire-dependent (if based on inclinations). Note that there is still a venerable philosophical tradition according to which desires and reasons are necessarily opposing concepts with the result that either reason’s motivating force is inexplicable (for the Kantian) or its normative or binding force is inexplicable (for the Humean).

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think. It implies that the intentional behaviour of non-linguistic animals cannot be non-selfish. In other words, it implies that non-selfish behaviour is necessarily linked with language competency whereas Schmid (2003, 84) thinks that “non-selfish behaviour has roots that reach far deeper than language, right into pre-linguistic intentionality of a special sort: we-intentions”. However, it is not clear, as I will show below what Schmid means by ‘pre’ in “pre-linguistic”. Second, I am not sure what Schmid’s criticism exactly drives at for I think it is misleading to use the term ‘selfishness’ with respect to higher but non-linguistic animals in the first place. Non-human animals act from instinct or training and certainly from something that we might call affection towards others of their kind and even towards others of other kinds. To categorize such behaviour as potentially selfish or calculating is just as much a category mistake as it is a category mistake to call a gene selfish.90 In my view, only self-conscious creatures that are capable of acting from reasons can be bearers of the attribute ‘selfish’.91 I think that selfishness is a concept that can only be applied to creatures that have a concept of right and wrong, creatures that can will self-consciously.92 And this makes all the difference. If that weren’t so we would have to seriously ask ourselves why we haven’t so far blamed our intelligent but non-rational animal fellow creatures for their ‘selfish’ behaviour. No doubt, intelligent animals do (try to) acquire good things for themselves at the cost of others. But unlike human beings they are not self-conscious and thus do not have a conception of right and wrong. Only human beings can acquire good things for themselves at the cost of their fellow creatures while being aware that they shouldn’t acquire good things for themselves at the cost of others.93 Since non-human animals lack normative self-conceptions, their behaviour is oriented towards the animal’s own good in a natural way. Her final good is a good for the animal in a way that has no role to give to the concepts of right and wrong because this would require self-consciousness.94 90 Cf. Dawkins (1976). 91 If ‘selfish’ is to be understood merely, as Korsgaard (2007a, 17) suggests, in the sense of an “acquisitive motive”, “a desire to acquire good things for oneself” then of course non-human animals can be described as selfish. 92 Or, as Schopenhauer (1948, 127) puts it: “Nicht im Wollen, sondern im Wollen mit Erkenntnis liegt die Schuld.” 93 Of course not every instance of intentionally acquiring a good at the cost of another is a wrong. 94 We shall see in chapter 2 and 3 that in a sense the term ‘self-consciousness’ is misleading insofar as it seems to suggest that being self-conscious necessarily means that one is concerned with oneself in a second order manner instead of in a first order manner. That selfconscious awareness may be seen as fundamentally first order is suggested by the term ‘conscience’, a kind of first order knowledge with oneself instead of knowledge of oneself as

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I will argue in the ensuing chapters that this also explains why intelligent but non-rational animals cannot include other animals of their kind in their reasoning in the sense of a “we” or why they cannot share ends with others of their kind. While animal behaviour is certainly oriented towards others in that it is often protective, affectionate, competitive and playful, it does not seem to be oriented towards a “we”.95 If Searle wants to say that only beings that have an innate capacity for language, which requires a self-relation that under certain conditions of being-with or interactions with others gives rise to self-consciousness, can be partners in shared behaviour, I agree. But I also agree with Schmid that such an original self-relation is not yet linguistic. Only under conditions of being-with will it be realized, gradually and through various stages of pre-linguistic forms of collective intentionality into linguistic awareness of self and others.96 This brings me to the concern first mentioned as it leaves us with two questions concerning Schmid’s notion of “pre-linguistic intentionality” as “weintentions”. 1. What does ‘pre’ in pre-linguistic signify? Does pre-linguistic intentionality fully lack the content that is expressed predicatively in linguistic judgments? If yes, in what sense then does Schmid think that non-linguistic animals (but not animals that are born with a capacity for language which on these grounds could be called ‘pre-linguistic’) can be oriented towards a “we”? 2. What does Schmid mean by “we-intending”?

1.6.2 We-Intentions and Sharing Intentions What does Schmid (2003, 85) mean when he writes that “the elementary form of commitment” entailed in collective intentionality is non-linguistic? This is somewhat ambiguous since creatures with a capacity for language are developing creatures that are not born into language from scratch. This suggests that there might be an essential difference with respect to the capacity to orientate oneself towards a “we” between potential speakers of a language and animals that will not be able to speak under any conditions. It is not clear why we should assume that non-linguistic animals, not pre-linguistic animals, have a capacity for we-intending. To make progress here it will be helpful to learn what Schmid means by “we-intending”. epistemic object. This is why I would say that self-consciousness is the way in which rational animals are conscious. 95 I am not sure that this is really Searle’s view since he also holds that wolves hunting in packs exhibit collective intentionality. 96 Infants typically interact with adults, that is, with people who are already competent linguistic practitioners. Even though they are not yet active participants in the language game themselves, they are passive contributors to the game.

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To jointly intend to do something, Schmid (2009b, 43) makes clear, entails that the rational thing to do for the individual agent in this situation is to do her part as part of an intention shared with others. A we-intention, as Schmid (2003, 86) understands it, seems to be roughly the same as a we-desire on part of the individual agent that is derived from sharing an intention. If an agent shares an intention then she has a we-derivative non-selfish we-desire, i.e. a merely instrumental reason to do her part as her part. Such elementary instrumental commitments or we-desires Schmid claims, do not presuppose any linguistic capacities “but are common to all agents capable of we-intentionality”. Is the sharing of the intention to be understood as an undifferentiated experience of sharedness from which the subjective we-intention is derived? I think this cannot be what Schmid means for it is not clear how subjectivity can be derived from some fundamental form of undifferentiated sharedness.97 No form of being with, however basic, can be made sense of without presupposing at least a basic subjective self-relation. Schmid also (2003, 82) writes of we-intentions, not unlike Searle, as expressions of “a pre-intentional sense for possible cooperators”. The difficulty with this suggestion, I think, is that it is not clear what is genuinely shared or collective about animals sharing a sense for possible cooperators. But perhaps Schmid thinks of a pre-intentional sense for possible cooperators in terms of an undifferentiated sense of sharedness as I have called it above. Some psychologists have recently argued in favour of the existence of such an undifferentiated sense of sharedness in human infants. Contrary to the received view about the mental reading incapacity of infants, Bosco et al. (1998, 4) argue that infant behaviour suggests that infants really are “incapable of not sharing their mental states” (my emphasis). The ‘egocentrism’ usually referred to in the orthodox approaches of theory of mind to infant cognition has been commonly interpreted as an infant’s inability to view her fellow human beings as endowed with mental states. Bosco et al. (ibid., 4), however, argue that such ‘egocentrism’ should rather be interpreted as “the inability to understand that they [conspecifics] do not necessarily share her own mental states”. The further ability to understand that both oneself and others have private mental states, beside the more primitive shared ones, and thus the ability to differentiate one’s own mental states from those of others must be considered to take place later in the child’s development. This should be no surprise if one thinks that infants although exhibiting a basic self-relation, are not yet self-conscious in the actual sense of the term. I do not think that Schmid can invoke such an undifferentiated sense of sharedness. The reason is this: An undifferentiated sense of possible co-operators 97 Cf. also Henrich (2007, 161).

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is a contradiction in terms. Avague and undifferentiated extension of the infant’s own sense of subjectivity cannot identify something or someone as potential cooperator. This presupposes a minimal capacity to differentiate. Much less could someone with such an undifferentiated sense understand that she has a reason to contribute to the shared intention. This would likewise presuppose that the individual is already capable of differentiating between herself or her contribution and the shared intention to which she contributes. If this is correct, then Schmid must start out from a differentiated notion of shared intentionality that can accommodate the idea of an elementary form of commitment or ‘with-ness’. But at the same time he must also avoid rendering this notion of commitment philosophically too demanding. After all, the normative force of the we-intentions or commitments derived from the shared commitment, as Schmid (2009b, 53 – 54) claims, is purely instrumental. If this is correct, then it is not apparent why we should not simply describe the animal’s behaviour of seemingly sharing an intention as a form of causal or reactive behaviour instead of as normative behaviour at all. However, such a notion of commitment as a philosophical concept of normativity is difficult to grasp. Thus, Schmid can neither invoke the concept of undifferentiated sharedness (because this stands in conflict with the idea of an elementary form of commitment) nor can he make the notion of a normative reason plausible in this context. More evidence for this is given in the next section where I will try yet another interpretation of what Schmid could mean by ‘purely instrumentally normative we-attitudes’. The difficulty seems to centre around the fact that Schmid’s concept of elementary commitment is unable to account for the sharedness that we are interested in, or as Schmid (2009b, 179) nicely puts it, the sharedness that “marks us out as social beings”, beings capable of sharing mental attitudes and interacting with one another that does not reduce to coordination behaviour or instrumental reasoning of which higher non-human animals are also capable.

1.7

Can Collective Intentionality Consist of Purely Cognitive Relations?

Schmid (2009b, 43) emphasizes that he thinks that although collective intentionality has socially normative consequences they “stem from a pre-socially normative (or, in Tuomela’s words, from an “instrumentally normative”) implication of any kind of shared intention”. Schmid (2009b, 41; 53) clarifies that “social norms arise out of merely habitual social practices such as customs”, which may consist of purely cognitive relations between the individual agents. The first difficulty that we are faced with is that it is not clear what the

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difference in terms of normativity is supposed to be between ‘mere’ habitual social practices such as customs, which Schmid thinks are purely instrumentally normative (i.e. relating the agents to each other merely cognitively), and social norms or moral obligations, a difference that Schmid seems to take for granted. Consider the custom of Western mourners to dress in black for attending funerals. Do we not expect of the mourners to dress in black?98 Our indignation at perceiving someone violating the custom is not directed at ourselves as in the case where we expect (or hope!) that the weather will be fine but get disappointed, as a result of which we may loathe ourselves for our not having been able to read the weather signs properly. It is rather directed at the person violating the social practice, which makes it clearly a normative expectation and not just a cognitive or habitual one.99 So it is not clear on what grounds one should think that the expectations we have in habitual practices such as customs are merely cognitive. Moreover, as Hollis (1998, 133) nicely points out with regard to the example of wearing black at Western funerals, the rationality inherent in customs is not a simple matter of instrumental rationality. Dressing according to our custom (solemn and in black) is not simply a means to satisfy the customary practice because dressing in this way also has an important symbolic meaning, something that is by definition non-instrumentally normative, such as “to celebrate a life and mourn a death”. (Hollis, ibid., 132) This is because to follow a custom is not just about pursuing the ends that are defined by the custom alone but to pursue ends that are not defined by the custom alone but by considerations that have to do with what we think is important doing for its own sake. The second difficulty concerns the example that Schmid (2009b, 41) discusses in support of the claim that the relations constitutive of collective intentionality can be purely cognitive (i.e. instrumentally normative). Schmid’s example is this: Ann and Beth both love visiting the museum on Sunday afternoons. As it happens, they both find each other over time visiting the museum regularly together on Sunday afternoons and, as a result, they come to regard their individual visits to the museum as part of a shared habitual practice; however, there is no explicit agreement between them to visit the museum together and therefore any one of them may walk away from the common enterprise any time 98 The example of the funeral as a form of custom is taken from Hollis (1998, 133). 99 Schmid (2009b, 228) himself helpfully distinguishes between normative expectations and cognitive expectations (or predictions) by pointing out that first, persons (and not state of affairs or objects) are the addressees of our normative expectations and second that normative expectations unlike cognitive ones are counterfactually stable. If P didn’t do A as one had normatively expected him to do, this does not mean that one is wrong to have (had) this normative expectation towards P. One’s concern in this case is not with oneself but with the other person P.

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without thereby violating any shared commitment or obligation since there is no such commitment. Or so Schmid argues. He further points out that even though the one who arrives first usually waits for the other at the entrance, she does not feel being treated wrongly if the other – as it sometimes happens – does not show up. Their shared intentionality is purely cognitive. I think that Schmid’s claim that Ann and Beth entertain a purely cognitively shared intention is based on a problematic assumption. The assumption is that non-instrumental or social normativity is a special mark of explicit agreements (contracts, promises) or in Velleman’s and Gilbert’s case, the signaling of a conditional willingness for the joint activity or intention. For then it seems only consistent to conclude that where no such agreements, promises or intentions of conditional willingness are in place, which is assumed to be the case in the example of Ann and Beth jointly visiting the museum, shared intentionality is merely cognitive or instrumentally normative. In my view, however, we can make proper sense of the example of Ann and Beth only if we understand their behaviour to be based on reasons that are not merely instrumentally normative even though no explicit agreements or promises exist between them. Talbot Brewer (2003) can be interpreted as making a good point in case for such a claim when he argues that what he calls “internalist commitments” – which are not explicit agreements or promises – must nevertheless be viewed as proper obligations. Such internalist commitments, for example an attitude one has towards the one of whom one has come to think as a friend, often cannot be adopted at will (in contrast to contractualist agreements); but they are no less normative for that matter. Their normativity does not arise from the fact that one has explicitly expressed them sometime in the past but from the fact that one has come to be internally committed to them over time. Such commitment therefore is rather revealed (for example by deed) than intentionally brought into existence at a certain point in time. So Ann and Beth must have some grounds to think that they share an intention. These normative grounds have come into existence not by some agreement between Ann and Beth but by their continuous interaction of visiting the museum together on Sunday afternoons. Moreover, if one of them doubted that there was such a shared intention in place – perhaps because Beth or Ann has been visiting the museum only very irregularly of late – the most natural thing to do would be to ask the other whether she (still) shares their intention to visit the museum together or not. If it turns out that she doesn’t, some form of indignation seems justified and might be expressed by the question: “Why haven’t you told me that you no longer share our intention to visit the museum together at Sunday afternoons?” To reply that “We have only shared the intention cognitively” would be sheer cynicism. So it is hard not to think that some form of non-instrumental normativity is at play here even though no agreements have

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been made. As I have tried to argue, the fact that no agreement has been made does not show that there is no genuinely social or even moral normativity involved.

1.8

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have suggested that instrumentalist accounts of rationality in some way or another beg the question with regard to the possibility of collective intentionality by driving a wedge between mere self-regardingness and mere other-regardingness. Introducing the concept of we-desires does not help to overcome the dichotomy since it keeps it in place between desires, that is, wedesires on the one hand and reasons on the other hand. In other words, although now desires are taken to be shareable somehow within the group (even though it is not clear exactly how to understand such sharedness), those outside the group need not be taken into account by those inside the group. This can be expressed thus: “Our end should be our good and the ends of others should be their good.” This may seem an improvement over Gauthier’s individualist account or over the utilitarian one, the latter of which sacrifices agent-relativity for the sake of wholesale impartiality or agent-neutrality whereas Schmid, just like Gauthier, grants a minimal conception of impartiality (“their good is theirs, ours is ours”). But since the divide between reasons and desires is left intact, it is not clear in what sense the good of the group is really good for the group as a whole or in what sense this good, understood in terms of desire, can be shared. It seems that for a group as a whole to be well-functioning (in analogy to an individual to be well-functioning) more is needed than concern for the instrumental rationality of the other members of the group; what is needed is some relation of right and wrong between the members.

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2.1

Introduction

In chapter 1 I have suggested, among other things, that unless we assume with Korsgaard (1996, 132 – 145; [1996]2000b) that reasons are inherently shareable, any attempt to overcome the gap between self-regarding reasons and otherregarding reasons remains futile. That is, unless we assume that there is no real gap to bridge, the individual agent (or group) will always require further reasons why she should benefit others or take other’s reasons into account (or the reasons of those outside the group). Yet, there is no gap to bridge because, as I have already indicated, as self-valuing animals we stand to ourselves and to one another in normative relations that are not merely instrumentally normative. Another fundamental consideration that I think supports the idea that reasons are inherently shareable is that otherwise it would not be clear how a rational or self-conscious animal could share reasons with herself, which she must be able to do in order to act as one, i.e. in order to have a practical identity over time. Acting for a self-conscious animal involves more than merely satisfying the desires she has or comes to have. It involves accepting or rejecting those contingent desires as reasons for action. Sharing reasons with oneself, I will suggest, is to continuously return to oneself through overcoming the distance100 that self-consciousness presents one with by choosing actions described by maxims. Such actions I will understand with Korsgaard (2008, 2009) in the sense of doing-A-for-the-sake-of-B. To regularly return to oneself also means, I think, that one could explain to others why the ends one pursues are good or part of an action description (that includes both means and ends) that one can will as justifiable. If this is correct, then there is no real difference between such returning to oneself and returning 100 I think that this idea of the deliberating human subject opening and overcoming a distance between herself and the object of such deliberation can also be found in Sartre’s ([1976]1994) philosophical treatment of nothing (“n¦ant”).

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to other selves with whom one shares at least one’s moral identity. Just like the distance characteristic for the self-relation of self-conscious agents must be inherently bridgeable, or indeed shareable, in order for the individual agent to be able to act, so must the distance between individual agents or selves be inherently bridgeable in order for agents to act together or share a practical identity. This is what I think must be understood by Korsgaard’s idea that in neither the individual case nor the collective case can there be a real gap to bridge – unless the possibility of practical reason is denied altogether.101 Interestingly, however, there seems to be a strong intuition against the idea of sharing reasons between selves, which starts from the consideration that the relation of the self to itself is a practical or normative relation. A practical selfrelation, some philosophers102 argue, is unlike any relation one can have with other selves since no one can take one’s place when one must decide what one should do. I think the objection is valid if it is addressed against the more specific claim that one is for oneself no more than any other human being is for oneself. Such a claim about transferability must be false on the grounds that “no human being”, as Aristotle (1985, 1166a, transl. J.G.) in his Nicomachean Ethics aptly put it, “would want to become someone else in order that the being one becomes should have everything good”. Aristotle’s point here seems to be that wanting “to become someone else in order that the being one becomes should have everything good” makes sense only on the assumption that one can become someone else but still remains oneself. Yet, it makes no sense to “want to become someone else in order that the being one becomes should have everything good” since the good will be the good of the being one becomes and not one’s own.103 Consciousness cannot be shared in the sense of being transformed from one to another subject. Thus we cannot make good sense of the claim that one can become fully someone else but still remain oneself. Therefore, I have no intention to disagree with the objector concerning this claim about non-transferability of subjectivity that surely entails necessary partiality with regard to one’s own self. Even more importantly, we should note that non-transferability of subjectivity makes sharing possible in the first place. Without distinct selves no ‘with-ness’ or togetherness with other selves would be 101 Note that throughout the text the notion of the ‘self ’ does not refer to some metaphysically obscure entity over and above the particular subject of experience. The thought that the self is something over and above the individual subject may well have its origin in the linguistic upheavals of Nineteenth Century England where the word ‘self ’ in the pronoun ‘myself ’ was nominalised and used as a proper noun. Cf. Hacker (2007, 261 – 263) for an insightful overview of the common philosophical blunders with the term ‘self ’. 102 For such intuitions see e.g. Larmore (2007; 2008; 2010) and Mc Geer (2007). 103 For a similar interpretation see Kosman (2004, 139 – 140) from which my discussion has much benefited.

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possible. Unless subjects are distinct substances with a non-transferable subject consciousness they cannot enter any sort of relationship with others, or indeed with themselves. But then the objection from normative self-relation could be read as an objection against the only apparent immediacy with which we are aware of other selves that contrasts with the actual immediacy of self-awareness.104 To see whether this objection is valid we first have to understand the kind of selfawareness at issue and in what sense it can be said to be immediate. So before taking up the objection headlong in chapter 4, I will in this chapter look at the notion of self-awareness or subjective consciousness with respect to both rational and intelligent animals. My hope is that a better understanding of the structure of consciousness and its inherent self-relation will illuminate at least some of the condition(s) of possibility for sharing consciousness. My hypothesis is that sharing like any intelligent activity entails a certain degree of abstraction or perceiving the general in the particular, as Aristotle put it. The abstraction exercised in sharing intentionality, I think, consists in viewing oneself and others as always more than just the self one is now, namely that which continuously goes on constituting oneself alone or together with others.105 Non-rational but intelligent higher animals are capable of abstraction in the sense of perceiving the general in both the particular objects and subjects that their intentionality takes.106 But I will try to show that they are to a lesser degree capable of further differentiating, or perhaps one should say, capable of being interested in further differentiating the original abstraction, which I think is due to their lacking self-consciousness and with it the capacity to confer value on themselves and others. By introducing a distance not only within oneself and between oneself and others, but also between oneself and the world and its objects, self-consciousness not only makes morality possible (as the pure form of practical reason) but also science.107 Thus human reason differs in one fundamental respect from animal 104 This point was illustrated in the previous chapter with respect to the problem of coordination for instrumentalist accounts of rationality. If people accessed each other’s minds exclusively through inferences, the phenomenon of coordination could not be given any theoretical explanation. 105 In the latter case we jointly realize our subjectivity. 106 The ability of such abstraction is the essence of animal intelligence in general, in contrast to artificial intelligence. Velleman (2009, 63) argues that generalization is the fundamental form of understanding: “To com-prehend something is literally to ‘grasp together’ its particulars under synoptic patterns or principles.” This, however, obscures that, as Arnheim ([1969]1997, 161) has convincingly shown, generalization presupposes abstraction for the grouping of particulars since an activity of generalization needs criteria for the selection of the particulars to begin with. 107 On these grounds it could perhaps be argued that the phenomenon of joint attention which

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intelligence: It differs in its capacity of viewing both the world and its objects, itself and others, as subject to (natural and moral) laws. In this dissertation project I am interested in the latter, i.e. practical norms, which I take to be different from natural laws since one conceives of oneself as a subject and not as an object under practical norms. One thereby conceives of oneself and others as particulars that must, in order to act and think, participate in universals, that is, think and act for reasons. As far as practical reason in its full perfection is concerned, i.e. pure practical reason, this allows and requires rational animals to confer value on themselves and their actions as ends in themselves, and to recognize others in their particularity and at the same time to recognize them as having to act under the same practical norms instead of as mere social cognizers.108 Before starting with my own investigation of the sharing of intentionality by looking at consciousness and the self-relation entailed in consciousness, I will provide a brief overview of what I think are the most important recent findings in the philosophical literature with regard to a) the supposedly sui generis character of collective intentionality and b) its underlying notion of sharedness. My own Kantian approach to collective intentionality will be better assessable when seen in the broader context of these other positions.

2.2

Collective Intentionality

In collective intentionality analysis the claim that intentionality or mental phenomena can be shared has found encouragement through the idea that “mental” need not be understood as a property of entities that is necessarily confined to an individual’s mind. Put differently, even though minds belong to individuals, the assumption is that mental states may be shared between minds. This point is important because if one thinks of mental entities as per definitionem in the minds of individuals, any interesting notion of sharedness is thereby ruled out from the start. As far as I can see, there have been broadly two ways to challenge the individualist assumption that shared intentionality is a matter of individual minds. The first challenge is leveled by Schmid (2009b, 29 – 45) who labels the abovementioned individualist assumption that intentionality must be in the minds of single individuals or subjects, “subjective individualism”. He contrasts this form of individualism with what he calls “formal individualism”, the claim that inis usually taken to show, among other things, that already infants are cooperatively orientated is only possible since infants are to some extent already capable of taking an interest in the world for its own sake. 108 I will discuss intelligent animals understood as social cognizers in chapters 2 and 3.

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tentionality is a matter of the form ‘I think’ or ‘I intend’. The merits Schmid identifies with accepting formal individualism over subjective individualism is that doing so allows one to recognize that shared intentionality cannot be structurally independent of external relations (something which subjective individualism denies). The downside of formal individualism, as Schmid convincingly argues, is that it nevertheless stresses that the shared intentionality at issue is reducible to a special form of I-intentions, namely those of the Bratmanian sort we came across in chapter 1, “I intend that we J”. Schmid demonstrates that the problem with this account of shared intention is that any individual I-intention of the form “I intend that we J” presupposes a shared intention, that is, “we intend J”: Only if we already intend J can I form the individual we-intention “I intend that we J” that is derived from the shared intention. Thus unlike subjective individualism, formal individualism cannot account for the apparently sui generis character of collective intentions. Schmid (2009b, 43; 116) compellingly concludes that we should reject the respective downsides of both formal and subjective individualism and instead accept what each view gets right: We should think of collective intentionality as relational – this is what formal individualism gets right – and irreducible to individual intentionality which is what subjective individualism gets right. I am very sympathetic with Schmid’s idea that shared intentionality must be both a primitive phenomenon (irreducible to individual intentionality) and relational (not confined to individual minds but existing between minds). Schmid’s (2005; 2009b) underlying point as I understand it, is that unless we always already stand in relations to one another, that is, unless there already are some fundamental commonalities between human beings, no form of community or more complex forms of collective intentionality would be possible.109 However, it is not always clear whether this point is supposed to show that collective intentionality is a uniquely human phenomenon or not. For there is abundant evidence that non-human intelligent animals clearly engage in cooperative behaviour, as for example wolves hunting in packs or honey bees building a honey comb together. In biology, animals are called social animals if the members of a colony or community live and work together by serving different functions so that the community or colony can function as a whole. This probably presupposes that the members of the community or colony share what Schmid calls a “sense for possible co-operators”. But it does not presuppose, as I will argue later, that the cooperative animal can consciously share a common perspective with the other animals of its kind. It is for this reason that I 109 This point seems somewhat reminiscent of Heidegger’s (2001) idea of the world as always already disclosed for human beings as jointly disclosed.

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think intelligent non-human animals are in an important sense less social than human animals. Social animals or insects are organized in such a way that they fulfil their social function by default. Human self-conscious animals that have to act for reasons, however, can and have to make their social nature (i.e. that they cannot but share reasons) itself the object of deliberation since they are aware of what they have in common with others of their kind. This, I think radically changes for human animals the nature of sharedness involved in collective intentionality. So this is one sense in which I think my project clearly departs from Schmid’s own, namely in that it is explicitly interested in collective intentionality with respect to self-conscious human animals that have the ability to view others of their species not only as particulars belonging to the same general kind as oneself (intelligent animals are capable of something similar, too) but as animals that recognize to have certain fundamental capacities in common, or in Brandom’s (2005, 436, my emphasis) words, animals that recognize each other as “particulars whose exhibition of, characterization by, or participation in universals is essential to them”.110 I also think that the kind of sharedness involved in collective intentionality with respect to human beings must be of a special kind insofar human selfconsciousness can only be realized in more complex forms of being-with or collective intentionality, such as language and exchanging reasons for acting and believing. For this reason, my methodological approach to collective intentionality analysis is not so much, like Schmid’s, to depart from some fundamental form of being-with about which itself nothing much can be said, but to focus more on those higher forms of being-with, such as exchanging reasons, that serve as the conditions for the realization of human subjectivity. However, this is in no way to deny that without some fundamental form of self-relation or subjectivity no form of interaction or being-with could be made intelligible. This is also why I think that a closer investigation into the nature of subjective consciousness will illuminate some of the conditions of possibility for collective intentionality even though the basic (and as we shall see, normative) subjective self-relation resists any further analysis because it cannot be known in the same way as objects of epistemic knowledge can be known. So unlike Schmid I do not think that collective intentionality is fundamentally different in terms of its ontology from individual intentionality, namely relational instead of subjectivist. Or, to put it more carefully, I think that to be a subject just means to have a self-relation. Consequently, I will try to show that individual intentionality is relational, too, that is, self-relational. The second challenge to the individualist assumption, or what Schmid calls 110 We shall see below that non-human animals can also be said to be self-conscious albeit in a somewhat different sense.

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subjective individualism, that mental states must be in the minds of individuals, is based on the thought that the attribution of mind to something or someone depends on whether they can be interpreted as having intentional states and not the other way around. This means that whether we think that there is something like a collective mind with mental states that are not reducible to mental states of individual minds depends on whether we are prepared to say that there are collective intentional states.111 Since thereby the very concept of mind is stretched to an extent one might feel uncomfortable with, some philosophers have suggested that not all mental states are essentially mental, such as intentions that may be conceived of as oral or written commitments (for such a view see Velleman (1997, 37)). I will go a considerable step further and argue that no mental states are essentially mental if by ‘mental’ one means ‘purely representational’. That is, no mental states are merely representational. Rather, I concur with Larmore (2008, 131) that the representational role of mental states serves the normative function of mental attitudes to guide our thinking, feeling and acting towards correctly thinking, feeling and acting, i.e. doing these things for reasons.112 Therefore I understand mental attitudes not so much as passive states of representation that have their place in the mind (like entities stored in a box) but rather as active perceptions that tell us to do something, or that tell us to believe something, etc. Mental attitudes so understood are intimately connected to action. Here we must distinguish between rationally motivated action and non-rationally or naturally motivated action. An example of the latter sort would be some urge that disposes the organism to ‘re-act’ in a similar sense of how salt is disposed to dissolve when brought in contact with water. Things are quite different with regard to rationally motivated action. For instance, something counts as an intention only if it stands in a self-consciously normative relation to the thing that actualises it. In other words, for something to count as an intention, the agent must think that she has good grounds or reasons to do of what she intends to do.113 The major advantage 111 For such a view see Velleman (1997) and Tollefsen ([2002]2009). Hacker (2007, 252) defends the same view with regard to the individual case: We can be said to have a mind because “a fairly specific subset of psychological predicates apply to us”. 112 Korsgaard (2011a) defends a similar view of mental attitudes when she stresses the aspect of activity of mental attitudes. Note that when we have reasons for feeling this is not quite the same sense in which we have reasons for action, since emotions and feelings are not in the same sense under our control as actions are. Emotions could perhaps be considered as reason-responsive (like desires) but not active in the same sense as actions. After all, as Korsgaard (2009, 112) puts it: “We do not undertake to have our emotions or decide to have them on the basis of our reasons”. 113 For an insightful rendering of this point, specifically with regard to beliefs, see Larmore (2008, 130); it may be less obvious with regard to desires. However, since I believe that desires are reason-responsive, i.e. that they are connected with what one considers good under some description, one cannot desire to do just anything. This is more obvious with

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of such a view of mental attitudes, I think, is that it re-establishes the fundamental connection between mind and action that otherwise remains obscured.114 Such obscuring occurs when mental attitudes are considered to be mere representations of things that exist outside the mind. Such a view furthers individualistic notions of the mind as a compartment in which representations from things existing outside, i.e. in the world, are collected, the representations being only accessible by the subject whose mind it is. According to such a concept of mind, action is basically viewed as an external effect of inner and essentially private causes. But according to the revised relation between mind and action that accentuates the not merely contingent relation between mind and action, mental attitudes will no longer be considered the (separate) causal antecedents of bodily movements. It rather depicts an agent’s action as expression of her mental attitudes in the light of which she acts (i.e. the attitudes that guide her action).115 Action so understood is action under the control of the agent. We shall shortly see that things are a little more complicated since it is not always clear what counts as ‘being under the control of the agent’. For the time being we can say that with respect to collective intentionality the advantage of such a view of the relation between action and mind is evident. If mentality is not conceived as something essentially undisclosed in the minds of individuals, the idea that collective intentionality is a matter between minds receives stronger support. In the philosophical literature three main arguments have been given for drawing a not merely contingent causal relation between mind and action, at least one of which I will explicitly come back to in more detail later.116 First, the causal relation between intention and action cannot be made intelligible by describing the intention without already saying which action is intended. Seregard to intentions since they are subject to stronger constraints of rationality than desires are, as Bratman (1987) has shown. As unified rational agent one cannot intend to do something of which one is sure that one cannot do it or which conflicts with the realization of other intentions. While it is possible that I desire two things that are incompatible with one another, simply by letting the world or others decide which of them will be satisfied, when I intend to do A, I cannot at the same time rationally intend to do E knowing that intending to do E undermines my intending to do A. To intend to do something, unlike merely desiring to do something, requires that I intend to take the means to the end I intend. To intend to do something is to be ready to (continue) doing it on the grounds that it will promote an object whose realization is judged to be valuable or good for its own sake or at least permissible. 114 Rundle (1997) forcefully argues for an intimate conceptual relation between mind and action. 115 I will defend such a view of action in more detail in chapter 5. According to my picture of the relation between mind and action what it is to have an intention cannot be reduced to a contingent causal relation between the intention and its seemingly causal effect, the action. 116 For a brief but insightful discussion of these arguments see Hennig (2008, 169 – 171).

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cond, neither can it be made intelligible by describing the action without already referring to an intention that is expressed in it. Thirdly, even on the assumption that the first two problems can somehow be solved, we will still have difficulties understanding the relation between the attitude or intention as a mental or inner cause and the action as its result. This problem was poignantly illustrated by Davidson (1963) when he asked us to put ourselves in the shoes of a mountain climber who intends to let go of the rope that secures his colleague. As a result of his imagining to let go of his friend, he becomes so unnerved that he actually lets go of the rope. But should we call this behaviour intentional? I think not. For some action to be intentionally done it is not sufficient that it was caused by an intention. The intention must have caused the action in the right way that rules out uncontrolled causation by bodily urges or nervous fits. It is not clear (pace Davidson) how the bare concept of causation can account for this condition.

2.2.1 Shareability and Actual Sharedness I have said that we should conceive of reasons as intrinsically shareable. Now I have to be more precise for there are two different meanings of the pair ‘shareability’/‘actual sharedness’. According to one meaning it makes sense to keep the distinction between individual reasons and shared reasons even if all reasons are intrinsically shareable in the sense of communicable since they need not in fact be shared. Shareability here is understood as intelligibility or communicability. The other meaning of the pair ‘shareability’/‘actual sharedness’ does not focus on the communicative aspect of reasons but on their normative aspect that runs deeper than the normativity inherent in language.117 The idea is that even if reasons are communicated or intelligible they need not be actually shared, as I have indicated in the first chapter : I don’t have to take your reasons as normative for me, it suffices if I take them to be normative for you. Thus shareability understood in this weak sense (i.e. as intelligibility) only requires that I have to take your reasons as normative for you but not necessarily also as normative for me. Shareability understood as intelligibility is what philosophers have commonly taken to be the universal character of reasons.118 I think that such an understanding of the notion of shareability is purely conceptual and can be compared to the sharing of semantic knowledge. Purely conceptual sharing,

117 Cf. Korsgaard (1996; 2009) and Van Willigenburg (2002). 118 This view of the universalizability of reasons is based on what I have referred to as the minimal conception of impartiality (“your good is yours, mine/ours is mine/ours”).

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as we shall see in more detail later, is not sharing from a first person perspective but rather sharing from a generic third person perspective.

2.3

The First Person Perspective, Sharing Mental Attitudes, and Reasons

The type of mental phenomenon that has been traditionally linked with the first person singular perspective is sensational experience, including both bodily and perceptual states, or conscious states more generally. Something like a hierarchy has been established as to the supposed shareability of such mental phenomena. Bodily sensation has been generally regarded as idiosyncratic and therefore not shareable in any interesting sense. Perceptual sensation on the other hand has been thought to be shareable, perhaps because perceptual sensation unlike bodily sensation takes intentional objects as independent objects (although this will have to be qualified later). In this respect bodily sensation, unlike perception that is considered potentially inter-subjective, resembles first person practical thought. It resembles first person practical thought insofar as intending in the latter case does not take its object as independent; rather it is productive of its own object. Likewise, the sensation of pain does not take its object as independent. The sensation of pain is not independent of pain. Intentionality so conceived is a first person phenomenon and philosophers have been sceptical as to how intentionality so understood can be shared. This is reflected in the objection mentioned above that practical thought, by being practical, cannot be considered shareable. However, intentionality has also been regarded as a property ascribed thirdpersonally in order to explain or predict someone’s observable behaviour that is understood as the outside effect of the animal’s inner mental cause.119 This is a view taken especially by those philosophers who dissociate intentionality from consciousness and related notions of sensory qualities or feelings. Propositional attitudes such as belief and desire are the paradigms of intentionality so understood. The supposed difference between the two forms of intentionality is thought to be the following: While self-ascriptions (for example of sense experience) are taken to be direct or non-inferential, third-person ascriptions of mental attitudes such as beliefs, desires or reasons are typically taken to be inferential, i.e. inferable from the behaviour observed, and thus non-immediate. The problem with this understanding of intentionality is related to what might be referred to as the causal account of action according to which observable

119 Cf. Davidson (1963) and Dennett (1987).

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actions are causally related as effects to their unobservable mental causes. As long as intentions (and other mental attitudes) are depicted as undisclosed inner mental causes that have to be inferred from observable behaviour it is indeed difficult to see how they could be shared. This obstacle against shareability, however, is removed once the behaviour itself is understood as intentional without it having to be caused by further hidden intentions. If this is correct, then the claim that one can be immediately aware only of one’s own mental attitudes or feelings but not of those of others will have to be questioned. It may turn out that just as self-awareness is not primarily introspective, so awareness of others is not third-personal or epistemic either. Accordingly, it may not be the case that the only way in which intentionality can be thought of as shared is conceptual sharing from a third person perspective from which others are merely viewed as theoretical and social cognizers, and which does not require an evaluative conception of what one shares with those others. However, the latter is exactly what seems to be required in order to share a first person plural perspective. If this is correct then there is no reason to reserve what is sometimes called “phenomenal intentionality” for the first person singular perspective. Moreover, while I will argue in this chapter in favour of the claim that an animal’s basic self-relation is non-epistemic, I will argue in chapter 4 against the claim that our relation to others is essentially epistemic or third-personal. This is a consequence of the view that reasons must be inherently shareable. Sharing reasons with oneself and sharing reasons with others are two species of the same genus. If this is correct, then our relation to others cannot be fundamentally distinct in kind from the basic normative relation we have to ourselves. Much of what I am saying in this chapter about intentionality, the reader will realize, concerns intentionality understood as phenomenal intentionality whose subject matter is what it is like from the first person perspective to have (or share) a certain experience, including acting on a reason. In contrast, philosophers interested in the third person ascription of intentional states in the tradition of Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett have emphasized that the assumed causal mechanism between the mental states ascribed to the animal whose behaviour is observed warrants the ascription of intentional behaviour from the observer’s point of view even if the animal’s (or indeed, the system’s) behaviour is merely functional. My criticism of this line of reasoning suggests that in ascribing intentional behaviour (instead of mere reactive behaviour to stimuli) to animals we must not proceed from a merely physiological or functional description of the behaviour but instead assume that there is something what it is like for the animal to behave in the way attributed to her. Similarly, with regard to human animals, I will argue in the last chapter that the distinction between explanatory reasons

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(which are the paradigm of ascribing intentionality in the Davidsonian sense) and justificatory reasons makes little sense insofar as explanation of other’s behaviour must proceed from what one thinks is the agent’s first person normative view of what she should do or what it is reasonable for her to do, and not from her physiological states that cause her to act. Action explanation is a normative business and therefore a species of the justification of action. I think Korsgaard (1996, 153 – 154) gives us a first and straightforward idea of how we can understand the claim that ascribing intentional behaviour to nonrational animals requires that the behaviour is experienced by the animal herself in a certain way, namely as potentially normative. This normativity is natural normativity (not conferred by the animal on herself), and arises from the fact that sentient animals are reflexively related with themselves, as we have seen in chapter 1. To illustrate, Korsgaard (ibid.) argues that “pain and reasons share a reflective120 structure. A reason is an endorsement or a rejection of an impulse; a pain is a reaction to a sensation”. How are we to make sense of these metaphors? What Korsgaard wants to say, I think, is not that the endorsement or rejection of an impulse on the level of the human animal is comparable to the reaction to pain on the level of the nonhuman animal. Korsgaard (2009, 99) seems to argue elsewhere that what it is to be conscious for a non-human animal is not what it is to be conscious for a human animal. Nevertheless, the two activities seem to share the following structural element: The animal experiences the sensation of pain as essentially “recursive” or “intrinsically normative”, as something to be fought against. When an animal is experiencing pain, Korsgaard (1996, 146 – 147) writes, she is not merely describing or representing a condition she is in and about which she is inclined to say that she wants to change it. Much rather she expresses an inclination to fight it. In the case of experiencing pain, as Korsgaard (1996, 150;154) argues, such an expression is a kind of turning back to oneself in rejecting a threat to one’s sentient animal identity by objecting not only to one’s painful condition but to one’s being in this condition of pain. I understand Korsgaard to say that pain puts the creature in pain at a distance to itself121 , a distance which the animal wants to overcome by fighting the pain. 120 I would prefer the notion “reflexive” to “reflective” since the latter, strictly speaking, presupposes that the animal has self-consciousness. I understand reflectivity as a special form of conscious reflexivity, namely that of rational animals. One could say that the power of reflexivity is differently realized in rational or reflective animals, namely as reflectivity. Accordingly, self-consciousness is a special realization or form of the generic animal power of consciousness. 121 I think this is structurally similar to how self-consciousness puts human agents at a distance to themselves who by overcoming the distance return back to themselves. Cf. my introduction to chapter 2.

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An animal thereby expresses her own subjectivity. A rational animal’s reflective endorsement or rejection of an impulse as a reason, is structurally similar to experiencing pain in that to endorse something as a reason or to reject something as a reason is to experience a certain kind of necessity to do so. Since the experience of such necessity is also an expression of one’s own subjectivity, it cannot be fully captured in the language of description or representation.122 As we shall see in more detail later, to be aware of oneself in this way is not a form of regarding oneself as an object. Rational animals can reject or endorse a desire as a reason for action because they are self-conscious, that is, because they can distance themselves from their desires and commitments in a way that nonrational animals cannot do and need not do. I will later argue that much confusion about claims of this kind has arisen due to too narrow an interpretation of the idea of ‘distancing oneself from one’s desires’ as impersonal abstraction. It misleadingly depicts the reflecting agent as totally abandoning her context and particularity in favour of applying some entirely impartial principle of action. Unlike what Thomas Nagel seems to have thought, I don’t think that there is such a thing as a view from nowhere, strictly speaking. Although the reasons of reflective animals take an essentially different form, they probably nevertheless belong to the same genus, roughly that of animal perceptions of things to be done or avoided. It is therefore no coincidence that the philosophical literature about reasons orbits around such notions as ‘duty’ and ‘obligation’. Reasons are typically experienced or perceived as pressures or demands to do something or to refrain from doing something, which is perhaps most obvious with respect to moral reasons. If something like this is correct then one may assume that a similarly recursive relation exists in case of visual (or other sense) perception. We shall later see, when discussing Aristotle’s notion of apperception, that there is such a relation although with a qualification. The intentional object of perception itself exists independently from the perceiving subject, which is not to say that the perceiving subject does not influence what it perceives. Perceptual experience is often distinguished from bodily sensation in terms of phenomenal content. While it is undisputable that experiencing pain has a qualitative or phenomenal content, this is not so clear in the case of perceptual experience. What philosophers have agreed on, by contrast, is that cognitive attitudes such as beliefs do not have a distinctive phenomenology, which may explain why philosophers distinguish between phenomenal intentionality and third-person intentionality in the first place. It is often argued that

122 The animal must perceive her pain as a distortion of her standard condition without pain, which is a form of abstraction. So the recursiveness entailed in animal perception accounts for the fact that animal perception is typically dynamic. Cf. Arnheim ([1969]1997, 52).

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there is nothing what if feels like to believe something, for example to believe that it is 2pm now. But why should we characterize what it is like to consciously believe that p in terms of feeling understood as bodily sensation, that is, in analogy to the case of pain sensation? Since a belief is a cognitive attitude, it is unlikely that it will be experienced in the same way as non-cognitive bodily sensations such as pain. But this is not to say that it is not experienced at all. If one abstains from identifying the notion of feeling with non-cognitive bodily sensation, then there is no reason not to think that entertaining conscious beliefs may have a certain cognitive feel, like a certain feel of conviction or comfort, say.123 Thinking understood as an activity, i.e. theoretical or practical deliberation, may even more obviously be said to be something for the deliberating or thinking subject, i.e. something with a phenomenal quality. This would account for Hawkins’ (2008, 259) claim that I have mentioned in section 1.6.1 that we experience our evaluative responses to certain objects of desire as fitting, that is, as “feeling right” which is probably the affective pre-cursor of the later developed cognitive capacity to judge that our responses are right and that often interacts with the affective capacities in complex ways.124 Accordingly, to act and think for reasons is something human beings experience from their first person perspective. We experience thinking and acting for reasons as a special way of being conscious, or as Korsgaard (1996, 161) puts it, we experience it as a special way of “what it is like to be us”. I am very sympathetic with such a view. It supports the idea that the nature of mental attitudes is essentially normative which takes a special form in rational or self-conscious beings like us. I think Velleman (2009, 35ff) provides a good illustration of this point when he discusses the difference between guided responses that can become fully reason-responsive and mere reactive behaviour. More precisely, he contrasts crying understood “as a fit of passion” with crying understood as behaviour that is guided by one’s “conception of crying”, i.e. by one’s idea of what it means to cry for reasons (which of course is not identical with crying at will).125 Crying for reasons, or self-conscious crying if you like, expresses the subject’s self-conscious sensibility to what makes the thing cried for worth crying for. I think this is 123 For a discussion of belief as subject to a feeling of conviction see Millgram (1997, 114 – 115). Flanagan (1992) and Pitt (2004) for example defend the claim that thought has phenomenal character. 124 Thus Hawkins would probably agree with Korsgaard (2011a, 9) that there are such things as reasons because we need them in order to act, which is basically to act under the guise of the good. We first experience the ‘good’ as an affective response to certain objects of desire from which we then gradually learn to value the grounds of our responses themselves. 125 Of course there is a large area of grey between guided behaviour and fully reason-responsive behaviour and it will not always be easy to say just where on the continuum the respective behaviour is to be located.

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an essential way in which emotions guide behaviour through reason. Likewise, doing something for a reason expresses the subject’s self-conscious sensibility to what makes the thing worth doing. Although higher intelligent animals have instinctive perceptions and desires that guide their behaviour they are not aware of their guiding forces as guiding forces. That is to say, they do not know that they have reasons. But this way of putting it, namely that animals have reasons but don’t know that they have them, is rather misleading.126 It is misleading because it makes it seem as if practical reasons are basically something non-conceptual that rational animals have in common with intelligent animals but which are nevertheless potential objects of conceptual reflection in rational animals. To overcome this difficulty I think we can note two things. First, not everything that is non-conceptual need also be non-cognitive. Thus if we wish to speak of some sense in which non-human animals have reasons, these may be cognitive without having to be conceptual or linguistic. An intelligent animal’s instinctual desires seem to be of this kind. Moreover, unless certain desires are potentially open to reason, it is difficult to understand how affective and cognitive capacities could interact in the first place. However, it is likely that rational animals have desires of a sort that non-rational animals lack. These desires are potentially reason-responsive or conceptual. Only a rational animal can and needs to evaluate her desires and can and needs to be guided by them under a conception of reason. The important second point to note here is the general sense in which an animal’s reasons and desires are linked, a point I have made in chapter 1. Sentient animals qua their sentience strive at well-functioning and stand to their own condition in an evaluative relation – otherwise desires could not present their object as good or to be pursued in the first place. It is in this perhaps somewhat strained sense that non-rational animals can be said to have reasons. But these ‘natural reasons’ are quite different from reflective reasons since the latter are, in a rough characterization to be specified in the next chapter, desires or commitments that the agent self-consciously endorses as reasons. This is why I think that it is rather misleading to speak of animal reasons as reasons that the animal does not know having. For to have a reason just means that one knows that one has it. Perhaps we could say that non-human animals are aware of their ‘reasons’ in the sense that they experience desires as evaluative impressions but which are not open to reason. So if one wishes to say that animals have ‘reasons’, then one must also say that there is some sense in which the non-rational animal is aware of them but not aware of having them. Below we shall see in more detail 126 We find such formulation, i.e. that animals have reasons but don’t know that they have them in Korsgaard (1996, 150) and in MacIntyre ([1999]2009, 56).

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how the recursive nature of consciousness together with its being directed at some object may be understood to account for this. I think that what Korsgaard (1996, 150) and MacIntyre ([1999]2009, 56) actually mean when they write that animals have reasons but don’t know that they have them is a point about the condition of possibility of (conceptual) thinking. Intelligent animals can be said to perceive or experience reasons in the sense that perceptual and evaluative information could not so much as be used for conceptual thinking in rational animals if affect and perception didn’t collect and identify types of things, that is, if perception and affect weren’t minimally cognitive themselves in intelligent animals.

2.3.1 The Age-Old Division between Perception or Affect and Thinking Against this background it may seem astonishing how persistent the age-old division between active understanding or thinking and passive sense perception or affectation is. I think it cannot be emphasized enough that such a divide between active cognition and passive or non-cognitive perceiving should be rejected. It goes without saying that with it one should also reject the claim defended by sense data theorists according to which the exercise of the faculty of perception merely consists in the passively receiving of the external ‘neutral’ data which are then, in a second step, processed by the faculty of cognition. But surely such data could not be so much as perceived as unities or objects in the first place unless they were perceived intelligently, i.e. as organized or types of things. Thus perception must itself be a form of cognition.127 Note that the view of perception as passive strongly supports the idea of the mind as something essentially private. If perception just is the private or internal contemplation of representations of sensations and ideas as static entities collected in the animal’s own mind, it is indeed difficult to imagine that perceptions could be shared with others. If, on the other hand, perceptions are recognized as essentially active and intelligent, something that animals do, then the thought that perceiving may be shared, becomes less implausible. The received view about perception should recognize perception as itself cognitive in the sense that it is actively structuring and selecting its objects as types of things instead of neutrally and passively directing itself towards its given objects, leaving the work of organization to the understanding or thinking part of the mind the latter of which then seems strangely separate from the outside world. To repeat, perceptual information could not so much as be used for 127 For the sake of simplicity and brevity I only discuss the case of perception assuming that affect is a special form of perception.

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conceptual thinking if perception didn’t collect and identify types of things, that is, if perception wasn’t minimally cognitive itself.128 Rudolf Arnheim ([1969]1997, 1 – 12) traces the philosophical origins of the suspicion towards perception as unreliable – due to its supposedly idiosyncratic character perhaps ‘passed on’ by bodily sensation – to a relocation in the psyche of what was once considered an ontological split within the physical world. The ancient Greek believed, as Arnheim (ibid.) convincingly argues, the physical world to be divided into two completely separate realms of things, that of heavenly objects on the one hand, and that of earthly objects on the other hand. Although they eventually found their conviction that the physical world could really be thus divided scientifically unsupported, they also found someone to blame for the mistake, namely the senses that often provide false information of how the world really is. Thereby the formerly ontological split was re-introduced through the backdoor, i.e. into the geography of the inner world, the mind, and thus transformed into the divide between reason or thinking belonging to the faculty of cognition on the one hand, and perception belonging to the faculty of mere sensation on the other hand. As a consequence, ever since Plato the senses have experienced a considerable philosophical downgrading. Therefore I think it is no accident that it is still widely held among philosophers that one must strictly distinguish between reason as unbiased on the one hand and partial or unreasonable desire on the other hand. This reflects the received opinion that only reason is to be trusted in its unbiased representation of the realities of the world. Against this Platonic view of the superior authority of the faculty of reason over that of perception, which is still reflected in philosophers’ sometimes treating practical deliberation as a purely deductive enterprise, Aristotle argued that perception is indeed intelligent or inherently active in its structuring of particulars into types of things. Aristotle acknowledges observation and experience to have an indispensable role in practical deliberation. I will come back to this important point when discussing Korsgaard’s account of practical reasons in the next chapter. The cognitive nature of perception can be further illustrated by the intimate relation of the concepts of perception, movement and action. While not all animate creatures can move (themselves), most sentient creatures, i.e. creatures capable of perception are capable of moving from one location to another. Why should this be? Perceptual capacities seem to be most useful, or perhaps only really useful in a world like ours if one can move around in it since moving around generates invaluable information for the perceiving animal concerning its environment, information that it needs for survival. This leads us finally to 128 For a forceful psychological and partly philosophical defence of this claim see Arnheim ([1969]1997).

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acknowledge that the concept of action as a concept of mind, in contrast to action as a concept of mere reactive behaviour caused by mental states, must be defined in terms of perception and movement.129

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Animal Mentality

Korsgaard (2009, 97) defines animal action as purposive movement governed by or responsive to the animal’s perceptual representation of its environment.130 The advantage of such a broad definition of action, I think, is that it does not confine the notion of action to human or self-conscious action that is marked by an active or self-conscious knowledge of what one is doing and why one is doing it. It allows us to understand action as differently realized depending on the kind of animal under consideration. A non-rational animal’s movements are considered action if her movements are guided by the animal’s own perceptions or perspective. The ascription of intentional behaviour requires, as I have suggested, regarding the animal not merely as a functional system but as a being with a phenomenal first person perspective. So there is a sense in which we can say that the animal’s movements are under her control when she acts. Such control will increase the more reason-responsive such control is. An animal that has an idea of what she is doing will exhibit such control but the control will not be as active as the one exhibited by animals that act for reasons. Rundle (1997, 94) presses an important objection against the idea that an animal’s behaviour can be described as action under the control of the animal. He asks how one could with the help of experiments “(…) differentiate between the case where the brain as ‘computer’ is responsible for performing the requisite tasks [of the non-human animal], and where, in addition, thinking takes place.”

His point, I believe, is that in observing animal behaviour there is no way of picking out mental activity that is not behaviourally realized. There is no way of recognizing a possible inner or undisclosed mental activity of thinking performed by the animal. But why should we think that this is the right criterion for attributing mentality to non-human animals? Even if mental activity in the demanding sense of 129 It should have become clear that I do not understand the notions of ‘mind’ and ‘mental’ as confined to linguistic or propositional mentality – for in that case I could not speak of animal mentality or animal thought. Rather I want to use a broader notion of mentality that includes psychological attitudes and activity that need not be identical with propositional attitudes. 130 Grünbaum (2010) suggests a similar definition of action.

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thinking activity probably cannot be ascribed to non-linguistic animals, mainly because they cannot describe their own purposes in terms of what they do, we should not as a consequence conceive of intelligent animal behaviour as merely functional or physiological. For giving merely a physiological description of the animal’s behaviour cannot by itself establish to show that this description really is identical with the animal’s purposive action without already having established some necessary connection between the physiological description and the animal’s purpose. So perhaps we should rather think of the criterion for attributing mentality in terms of how appropriately and differentially an animal responds to some situation in contrast to responding automatically or indiscriminately to it. I think, if we assume that mental activity is expressed in an animal’s behaviour instead of hidden away in her mind, then it makes sense to individuate mentality by the degree of intelligence of her behaviour. Moreover, whether we are comfortable to say of an animal’s behaviour that it is under her control depends on the conditions under which we are prepared to describe the animal’s behaviour as purposive or intentional. Many philosophers believe that we should describe an animal’s behaviour as intentional if and only if the animal’s own perspective is integral to the description of her behaviour, that is, only if her movement is the result of her own perceptual representation of the environment.131 Only then can we say that the performance of abstraction is the animal’s own and not just that of its species or its computational brain. But how, Rundle could insist, can we tell whether an animal’s movement is the result of her perceptual representation instead of being a mere undifferentiated reaction to a stimulus? One important thing that Rundle thereby highlights, I think, is that our philosophical concept of action that is based on the distinction between first, mere reactive behaviour, second, intelligent representation, and third, acting for reasons assumes a neat distinction for conceptual purposes while there may be no such neat distinction in nature “between what action is and what it is not”, as Korsgaard (2009, 97 – 98) puts it. We simply cannot always tell whether some behaviour is an action (purposive or rational action) or mere reactive behaviour because the phenomena we try to capture with our philosophical concepts are not always as clear-cut as the concepts themselves. Fungi, for instance, are neither plant nor sentient animal. If something like this is correct, I think we should acknowledge with Korsgaard (2009, 97 – 98) a whole range of animal behaviour that lies in between merely reactive or functional behaviour (“where” in Rundel’s words “the brain as ‘computer’ is responsible for performing the requisite tasks”), intelligent or purposive animal behaviour, and full-blown rational or self-conscious behaviour. The degree of control that the animal or organism can be said to exercise 131 For such a view see Korsgaard (2009, 81 – 108), Schueler (2003) and Grünbaum (2010).

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over what it does varies with respect to the way in which her behaviour is merely functional, purposive, or fully intentional in the sense of ‘being done for reasons’. For example, holding a perceptual belief with the content “The cat is in the tree” is less active compared to the belief with the content “The butler must have killed the cat because (…) .” The latter belief can be said to be under the subject’s control in a deeper sense than the former belief since it is held for reasons or considerations on the grounds of which the agent determines (herself) to believe something, in this case, that the butler killed the cat. To the extent that we are willing to describe animal behaviour as purposive and not merely functional we should grant that the animal not only has perceptions but that they are something for the animal even though it cannot judge that it has those perceptions. To say that for perceptions and proto-thoughts to be something for the animal it must be able to use conceptual representations in judgments, is like saying that animals must be self-conscious in order to be conscious. Such a view, I think, makes the mistake of inferring from the plausible assumption that phenomenal consciousness may not be sufficient to assure the possession of concepts the implausible assumption that phenomenal consciousness has nothing to do with intentionality or the determining of mental content.132 My own view with regard to the relation between consciousness and intentionality is that, which of course needed far more defending than I have the resources and space to provide here, consciousness is essential to intentionality and that intentionality is essential to consciousness. To deny that an animal’s perceptions are anything for the animal is to deny the reflexive character of sensation and perception and with it the animal’s sentience. Such a view of animals takes animals to have the status of animate things. For animal perception and cognition to be possible, perceiving and other forms of cognizing must be unifying or synthesizing activities. But the unifying character of these activities, which in the non-rational animals are largely determined by the animal’s instincts, is not dependent on the animal’s consciousness of them as unifying activities. This is not to deny that if the animal is aware that she can (and must) act from unifying principles this will make an essential difference for how she lives and what it is like for her to live (in this manner).133 Such self-awareness that also involves the awareness of the animal’s own thought processes and of the correctness of her inferential transitions is commonly, and I think correctly, regarded as essential for the possession of mature concepts. But this does not show that non-rational animals cannot have something like proto-concepts.

132 For a similar criticism see Siewert (2011, 18 – 19). 133 For such a claim see Korsgaard (2009, 99).

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Gozzano (2007, 271 – 282), for example, convincingly argues for the claim that we can attribute to non-linguistic animals proto-thoughts or thought-like states of the kind “The cat is in the tree” if we are less restrictive in what we allow as ways through which it is possible to identify a given state or event (so-called “modes of presentation”). The restriction that must hold, he argues, is that the correctness conditions for the attribution of the state do not imply that the truth-conditions hold; otherwise these states could not be wrong in any interesting sense. For example, the dog may ‘think’ that the cat is in the tree because he saw her running up the tree. But he may be barking up the (wrong) tree if the cat went down the tree on the others side and ran away without the dog noticing it. However, once the dog no longer smells the cat – this mode of presentation provides new information – the dog will stop barking up the (wrong) tree. What is clear is that in order for animal consciousness to be about something rather than about nothing it cannot be a mere heap of unrelated intuitions and perceptions.134 In other words, consciousness is inseparable from intentionality. Along these lines we can argue against the status of animals as things. If perceiving is perceiving of something, i.e. if perception can take unified objects then consciousness must itself not only be unifying but also unified. It must be consciousness of someone. This is also to emphasize the reflexive nature of animal consciousness (a point I will come back to shortly): The animal in the activity of perceiving is somehow present with itself in perceiving an intentional object. Such perception should not be understood in a propositional sense. There are ecological studies showing that the special kind of synthesizing power to evaluate objects purposively – for example, to perceive something as to be fled (e.g. predator), to be avoided (e.g. poisonous food) or to be protected (e.g. one’s offspring) – is an essentially active cognitive capacity that cannot be reduced to the passive reception of sensible features of the object. In other words, perceptual experience cannot be exclusively accounted for in terms of the animal’s capacity of perceiving the object’s sensible features such as its distinct shape, colour or size but rather must also be accounted for in terms of the animal immediately recognizing the object’s function, which is not given by observation. But why should we think that such a capacity is indicative of purposive activity, to recall Rundle’s worry? The medieval philosopher Avicenna believed that animals have the capacity to immediately grasp the functional features of an object thereby knowing what they ought to do with respect to viewing the particular object under that aspect

134 It is another question just how the unity of the animal mind and the unity of its object must be interdependent for animal cognition of the world to be so much as possible.

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or type.135 Nevertheless he denied that such apprehension involves some act of intelligence or interpretation on the side of the animal. He argued that the functional features, just like the object’s sensible features exist outside the animal, belonging to the metaphysical make-up of the object apprehended. For example, in perceiving the wolf, the sheep focuses on the object under a certain normative or sense-making (purposive) aspect, which makes any further interpretation of the object (e.g. as ‘harmful’) from the side of the sheep superfluous. So it is no coincidence that the animal incapable of interpretation is endowed with a cognitive apparatus, which structures the animal’s perception in such a way that no interpretation of the apprehended objects by the animal herself is needed. But if this is true then the perceiving animal is essentially passive in its perceiving ability in the sense that it will necessarily avoid wolfs. Such necessity is metaphysical necessity in the sense that the animal’s nature or form determines her behaviour. Thus, Avicenna concludes, complex cognition does not eo ipso entail movement guided by the animal itself. I fully agree with the claim that an animal’s nature or form (partly) determines her behaviour, but the interesting question is in which cases we are prepared to include the animal’s own perspective as necessary to describe her behaviour, thereby denying that the animal’s representation is merely functional. Consider the kind of representation the fly has of the approaching spider. This may be largely functional in the sense that the fly reacts more or less mechanically to the spider’s approach – but for that matter its representation need be no less computationally complex. So I think that Avicenna is right that computational complexity itself is not informative as to whether we should apply a merely functional (physiological) or a purposive (psychological) description to the animal’s behaviour. Therefore, as a possible reply to Rundle, I think helpful criteria for determining whether animal behaviour is purposive instead of merely functional include animal perception and sensation. These include the animal’s capacity to flexibly and discriminately react to changes in the environment (i.e. her learning capacities) and her ability to feel pain and pleasure. This supports my previous suggestion that we should think of the criterion for attributing mentality in terms of how appropriately and differentially an animal responds to some stimuli or situation. Consider the following example: That I can teach my cat to play a simple version of ‘hide and seek’ is good evidence for the flexibility of her behaviour 135 The following presentation of Avicenna’s view is my summary of Dominik Perler’s insightful discussion of the topic in his unpublished paper “Why is the Sheep Afraid of the Wolf ?” that he presented at a workshop at the University of Basel in October 2009.

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that is not explainable in terms of evolutionary adaptation. The game consists in one of the players, my cat, not getting caught by the other player, me. The important rule of which my cat clearly is aware in some sense is that whenever I stop chasing her and intentionally hide from her eyes behind the next door or wall she must come looking for me, and as soon as she sees that I have spotted her, she must run away again and I am required to run after her anew. The cat’s looking for me behind the door through which she saw me disappear shows that the cat is somehow aware that looking behind the door is better for the purposes of finding me than looking under the bed. Of course I am not saying that the cat is capable of deliberating or reasoning about what she should do in the sense that she has reflectively worked out that looking behind the door is the correct solution. What she did is this: She produced the correct solution in terms of a flexible responsiveness to a sophisticated representation of a present situation. Even though the cat is not a member of my linguistic community she has come to learn to share with me an action type or even something like a practice.136

2.4.1 The Peculiar Nature of Animal Consciousness So far my discussion should at least have motivated the idea that animal consciousness and intentionality go hand in hand and that perception and sensation are reflexive. One implication of this is that consciousness of sensational or perceptual experience is not a contingent property of such experience. It seems conceptually impossible to have constant pain throughout one’s life without ever being conscious of it. This allows for the possibility that one temporarily does not notice the pain one has. But the very existence of pain depends on it being conscious, and the same may hold for visual and other kinds of perception. The mere presence of a mental attitude like a belief, on the other hand, seems not enough for it to be conscious. We have various beliefs of which we are hardly ever conscious and much less are we conscious of them all together at once. The same seems to be true with regard to desires. Thus it may be thought that mental attitudes such as beliefs and desires are not intrinsically or necessarily conscious in contrast to reasons; embracing something as a reason, as we have seen, entails that one is aware of doing so. However, since on my view beliefs and desires are more like something we do – we can explicitly affirm that p or treat it as a valid premise of our inferences or 136 What is also remarkable about my cat’s behaviour is that she interacts with me not in the service of some particular purpose like getting a reward (e.g. food) but just for the sake of playing, i.e. for the fun of it. It is this supposed lack of instrumentality of her playing behaviour that invokes comparison with human behaviour.

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act as if it were true (such activities are sometimes referred to as the ‘concomitants of belief ’) – rather than like mental entities that exist or don’t exist, I take it that doing one of these things just is what it means to believe. Beliefs on this view can still be unconscious if one assumes that to believe that p means that one could affirm that p or that one could treat p as a valid performance in the relevant circumstances.137 Likewise we can treat desires as valid premises of our inferences, which I agree with Millgram (1997), implies that we cannot understand desires in the instrumentalist sense of just having them. To treat one’s desire as a valid premise of one’s inferences, i.e. as a desire held for reasons means to be committed to act on it. Therefore, to insist that one desires to do D but then fails to act on D is to make a practical mistake in one’s desiring. One of the advantages of this view of understanding beliefs and desires as commitments to do what is constitutive of desiring or believing is that it can provide a more plausible explanation of what it means to make mistakes in believing and desiring than the view that beliefs and desires are static mental states that either exist or don’t exist where the mistake consists in one’s wrongly believing that one has a certain desire or belief. Take as an example the phenomenon of self-deception. According to the view I’m criticizing we can be wrong about what our actual beliefs or desires are because we might be mistaken in actually having them. So what is denied in such cases is that the belief or desire under consideration actually exists: Someone can contradict me by saying, “No, you don’t actually desire D even though you believe you do.” What I find puzzling about this description of self-deception is that it looks like a purely factual mistake of introspection: Somehow one just cannot see that one hasn’t got the desire one thinks one has. But how, on this view, could one ever come to see that one does not have the desire that one thinks one has – and where exactly would one have to look? On the view that believing and desiring is committing oneself to do what is constitutive of believing and desiring, namely to believe and act for reasons, self-deception can be made more intelligible. It can be understood with Hamilton (2008, 27), namely, as a mistake of “motivated irrationality” in one’s self-commitment in the sense that the reasons on which one’s commitment is based are not really one’s own. On this understanding, the self-commitment that is the product of manipulation, fear, depression or carelessness is not really a self-commitment at all since it lacks authoritative force. Some philosophers think that it is necessary and sufficient for a belief to be conscious that one has a second order belief about the first order belief. But if to be conscious about having a first order belief is to have a second order belief about the first order belief, then the question presses how we can be conscious of 137 For a very similar view see also Korsgaard (2011a, 16) and Wallace (2006, 92 – 120).

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the second-order belief without presupposing yet another, third-order belief, and so on ad infinitum. This problem may result from conceiving of consciousness as an epistemic sort of self-reflection, reflection of itself as object. If consciousness were identical with such epistemic self-reflection two rather implausible claims would follow, I think. First, non-rational animals could not have conscious attitudes since they wouldn’t have the capacity to reflect or have second order mental attitudes. Second, one would have to think that rational animals are aware of themselves primarily as object or from introspection. I have already argued against the first claim. The second claim will be discussed below in section 6.1. But even if we could provide necessary and sufficient conditions for when beliefs and desires are conscious we would not necessarily have made progress on the subject of explaining the nature of consciousness.138 This is because consciousness is a property that can only be grasped by direct acquaintance. In other words, consciousness seems to be a concept that can be grasped only through acquaintance with what it is a concept of, namely consciousness itself. Unless one already is conscious by virtue of being conscious one cannot know what it is to be conscious. And even the direct acquaintance with consciousness eludes us. It is only by virtue of our consciousness taking intentional objects that we are having conscious experiences. So while intentionality is characterized by a necessary difference between the subject and the intentional object of experience, consciousness itself implies some form of identity of the subject with itself, which is why it makes sense to think of consciousness as reflexive. Consciousness so understood, as primitive and reflexive, is inextricably linked with the subject whose consciousness it is. But how then could consciousness ever be shared?

2.4.2 The Structural Openness of Animal Consciousness To make progress with regard to this challenge to shareability of consciousness we have to better understand in what sense consciousness cannot be understood independently of its subject, that is, how consciousness and subjectivity are necessarily related. One such necessary relation between subjectivity and consciousness I have mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, namely that consciousness cannot be shared in the sense of being transformed to another subject. A further relation between subjectivity and consciousness is highlighted by Kosman’s (2004, 144) illuminating discussion of Aristotle’s (2011, VII.2.1244b) 138 McGinn (1990) argues for this claim.

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explanation of what it is about exercising subjective animal consciousness, or life more generally, that makes it desirable for the animal. According to Kosman’s interpretation of Aristotle, that I follow here, exercising one’s consciousness by taking intentional objects in the world, for example through perceiving something, is essentially to realize one’s own subjective consciousness whose capacity is to be open to further determination. So the mode of existence of sentient animals as Kosman (2004, 143) succinctly puts it, is of “determinate indeterminacy” that is characterized by a fundamental openness to further determination of the animal’s being. Exercising its own consciousness is desirable because by virtue of exercising it the animal fulfils its function, which as we have seen with Korsgaard (2008, 2009), is to constitute oneself well. According to Kosman’s reading of Aristotle that I follow here, the animal becomes further determined or realized by that of which it is conscious of, namely the (e.g. edible, sensible) form of the object (eaten or perceived). An animal becomes one with what it has eaten or with what it perceives, or more precisely, with the objects’ form, in that the objects are transformed through metabolization and perception respectively and thereby formally determine the animal’s being. Therefore, a desire for subjective consciousness is essentially a desire for one’s own being.139 Such transparency in subjectivity, Kosman (2004, 141) argues, is paralleled for Aristotle in the self-awareness entailed in exercising the power of one’s consciousness, such as in the activities of perceiving and thinking. In actively exercising the power of consciousness, as when one is purposefully looking at something, the subject’s perceiving is always also a perceiving of itself. Thus exercising one’s power of consciousness necessarily entails the animal’s apperceptive awareness that she perceives or that she thinks. By virtue of perceiving an object, that is, by virtue of taking an intentional object, the conscious animal not only perceives the object but in virtue of perceiving the object the animal perceives that she perceives the object. This is what is sometimes referred to as Aristotle’s ‘theory of apperception’ that expresses the idea that the animal is itself affected by its own awareness of the object perceived.140 She turns back to herself, if you like, in virtue of perceiving the external object. Such self-awareness is not thematic, i.e. the subject does not perceive or know of herself as object. The selfawareness is rather to be understood as an elementary form of the subject’s being transparent with herself that cannot be further analysed but which can 139 Accordingly, animals so understood are sentient substances that exist only through constituting themselves by virtue of an intentional engagement with the possible objects of their consciousness all the while being aware of their own well- or ill-functioning. 140 It is controversial to what extent Brentano’s own view ([1867]1976) of consciousness as both directed towards an intentional object and always also towards itself had been influenced by his intepretation ([1874]1973) of Aristotle’s view discussed above.

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only be experienced by virtue of taking an intentional object (of world or thought), i.e. by opening a potential distance between oneself and the intentional objects one takes.141 Accordingly, an animal’s power of consciousness is a capacity to be affected by the object of perception in a way that always already entails transparent consciousness of being thus affected. By virtue of perceiving, the animal is not only acquainted with the object of perception but she is at the same time necessarily acquainted with her own awareness of it – and thus, in a sense – with herself. In other words, if every act of perception contains an act of apperception, the subject’s act of perceiving or consciously looking at some object cannot be separate from her awareness that she perceives.142 Such self-awareness is reflexive in non-human animals and self-consciously reflexive (i.e. reflective) in rational animals. Here it is worth noticing that such self-conscious reflexivity in rational animals must be understood as the condition of possibility of cognitive self-objectification or objective self-reflection, which in turn must be clearly distinguished from practical deliberation. In deliberating about what to do one does not have to take oneself as epistemic object. One does not have to reflect about oneself when one reflects about what to do. So practical deliberation (for the rational being) and perceiving the world purposively (for the intelligent being) are probably expressions of the animal’s basic self-relation and have nothing to do with self-objectification or reflection about one’s own self. Indeed, I think we can make sense of the Aristotelian idea of apperception in terms of the practical or normative character of the intelligent animal’s basic self-awareness discussed above. The intelligent animal perceives what it perceives, as Korsgaard (2008, 19, my emphasis) puts it, “through the lens of her own concerns and interests, or, as we might say, her values.” By this I take Korsgaard to mean that intelligent animals experience things as practically significant or valuable for them, i.e. as to be followed or to be avoided. To me this strongly suggests that the higher animal, as Korsgaard (2007c, 19) elsewhere argues, is aware of herself as the “subject of her own experiences”. That is, she is not just aware of the smell that she is following but she is aware that she is following the smell. But this, as I see it, just is the central point of Aristotle’s theory of apperception. 141 So perception for conscious animals is never just a passive reception of the form of the object perceived. Here we should add that even though by engaging in such conscious activity the non-human animal in a sense knows what she is doing – it is a practical knowledge gained in realizing or determining her consciousness – it is not conscious of what she is doing. Only self-conscious animals can be conscious of something or about something in this sense. 142 Cf. Aristotle (1995, book II.5).

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Thus, to fully understand what consciousness is we have to think of it in a twofold way. As consciousness transparent with itself, i.e. subject consciousness that is inwardly directed and as a power of directedness towards objects other than itself that is outwardly directed. These two essential features of consciousness are interdependent. Without being able to take an intentional object in the world, the subject would not be a subject, i.e. it would not be able to realize its subjectivity, that is, it would be nothing in and of itself. On the other hand, without the apperceptive feature of consciousness the subject’s perceptual or intellectual experience would be nothing for the subject because it could not be experienced as hers. In that case the subject would have no experience at all. Intentional engagement with the world, and thus also engagement with other selves in this world, realizes subject consciousness which would be nothing in and of itself without it being active in this way. If something like this is correct then the very idea of sharing consciousness and of being-with, either with oneself or with others can be made sense of with respect to animal consciousness understood as twofold directedness, which is just another way of saying that consciousness and intentionality are inseparable. What this discussion also supports, I think, is the claim made in the first chapter, namely that the way in which human subjects are related to one another in collective intentionality is not through reciprocal epistemic knowledge but through a joint engagement with or joint directedness at the world. We can now better see in what sense the existence of living creatures is essentially one determined by form or “determinate indeterminacy”. To this end it is not necessary that we go into the intricacies of Kosman’s (2004, 143) interpretation of Aristotle’s controversial idea of sense perception as a joint realization of the interplay between the active power to perceive and the passive power to be determined by the object of perception. I think it is enough to appreciate Aristotle’s central idea that a subject’s power of consciousness must be understood at once as a passive power or potentiality (the transparent mode of consciousness) to be determined by the form of objects in the world and as an activity or exercise of that power (the intentional mode of consciousness). Thus animal substance is not mere matter but matter open to being formed in a special way depending on the kind of animal it is. The intentional mode of consciousness of rational animals in a way enlarges the animal’s openness to being formed or determined both from within and from without. This is because a reflective animal is placed at some distance to her own mental attitudes and to what she perceives such that, in order to act, she must decide whether a certain desire to do something really is a reason for doing it or whether certain perceptual evidence for a belief really supports the belief. (Cf. Korsgaard 2007c, 21) The intelligent animal, on the other hand, can choose means to ends but her ends are given to her largely by her instincts.

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This does not mean that the intelligent animal does not sometimes have to ‘decide’ between ends by practical reasoning. What it means is that the animal’s desires or preferences are associated with outcomes but never with actions (i.e. means-end maxims) themselves. The cat who feels like playing may ‘choose’ one of her kind or me, her human friend, to play with but she cannot question whether playing is a good idea or not. Assume that I usually give my cat something good to eat after playing with her. For the sake of argument let us also suppose that my cat can deliberate about which partner to ‘choose’ for playing (even in the absence of being prompted with a stimulus) by imagining which of each choice’s outcomes would be more attractive to her : playing with me and getting something to eat or being around with her own kind but not getting anything to eat? Whatever the imagined result of the cat’s practical deliberating will be, she will ‘choose’ that outcome for which she has the strongest desire. By contrast, the self-conscious animal is not in this way determined by her desires (or perceptual beliefs). The self-conscious animal’s choice in acting is not restricted in this way but includes means-end pairs as we shall later see with Korsgaard (2007c, 23). You can ask yourself whether, albeit having a strong desire to play with your cat, it is a good idea to play with your cat – considering that your students’ essays need correcting. You can be motivated in your choice by your judgment that correcting the essays is the thing to do and that your desire to play with the cat does not justify to further procrastinate the correcting of the essays even though you don’t feel like correcting the essays. Accordingly, rational animals can and sometimes have to ask themselves whether the whole action intended, doing-A-for-the-sake-of-B is justified or not. An action is justified (i.e. right) if one can will it for its own sake or can stand behind it as a whole. Action that is justifiable in this way can be said to unify agents into wholes. Similarly, joint action that is justifiable can unify distinct agents into wholes.143 However, the goodness that is constitutive of such action need not be moral goodness. To see this let us try to grasp the nature of consciousness described above in terms of the pair determinacy/indeterminacy by way of an analogy, namely by the pair power/activity. Take as an example the power to taste edible things. This power, in itself passive, is activated or exercised by the subject’s repeated activity of tasting. The power to taste is thereby further determined or formed (and refined!) by the subject’s continuous activity of tasting different sorts of food. The activity of tasting, when it is a praxis or good action in Aristotle’s sense it is also done for its own sake and not just for the purpose of some further end, like

143 For a detailed argument that the function of action is unification of oneself or with others, see Korsgaard (2009).

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becoming a famous restaurant critic, say.144 So a good action according to Aristotle is an action that includes its own end in the sense that it is done for its own good or for its own sake. Aristotle (1985, 1140b) mentions perceiving and thinking as the paradigmatic examples of activities that carry their own ends in themselves, i.e. which are done for their own sake.145 This is probably because he also thinks that perceiving what to do is a morally excellent activity, and that contemplating or thinking about mathematical problems is an intellectually excellent activity. Both being excellent activities, they must carry their ends in themselves. But this is just another way of saying that the animal that exercises the power of her consciousness through such activities as perceiving and thinking is transparent with herself. Exercising one’s power for perceiving and thinking just is perceiving and thinking. Moreover, since these activities entail pursuing a good end (an end that is willed for its own sake), they are activities one can share with others since good ends can be willed by all rational beings. I am not sure what to say of the intelligent animal in this respect, i.e. in what sense the intelligent animal’s perceiving can be understood as being an activity that is done for its own sake. What seems to be clear, however, is that if perceiving and thinking have no end separate from the activity itself, it follows that the selfconscious animal who actively exercises these powers, thereby forms or constitutes herself (which need not be the only thing she thereby does). In such activities where the activity is itself the end, i.e. where the reason for doing it is that it is good (or at least permissible), the agent of the activity is transparent with herself in the sense that she fully embraces or shares with herself the reason for her activity. The important point here is that to act for a reason in this sense is to act on a maxim that describes the whole action (doing-A-for-the-sake-of-B) as worthy of choice and not just the end one wants or has selected (I do A as a means to B – given that I want B and that A is the best means to B). To make this clearer let me now introduce Korsgaard’s (2008, 219ff) technical terminology that lies at the heart of the notion of action as described by a whole means-end maxim. Korsgaard (ibid.) distinguishes between three concepts: action, act or acttype, and end, the latter of which together with the act-type makes up the description of the action as a whole. So the object of an agent’s subjective action maxim is not merely her end but the means-end relation as a whole. To act for a reason on this understanding of action is to will a subjective maxim as a principle, that is, to will the whole action description ‘I-will-do-A-for-the-sake-of-B’ as justifiable or at least permissible. Therefore the reason itself is expressed by the whole action description and not just by the end or the desired outcome. 144 I will discuss Aristotle’s concept of praxis in contrast to poiesis in more detail in chapter 5. 145 See also Aristotle (1991, book IX.8, 1050a).

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The same point can be made in a slightly different way. Self-conscious beings conceive of themselves as a self-determining unity, a unity whose actions and inferences are not prompted automatically or by mere means-end reasoning but by what the subject takes to be good grounds.146 By choosing an end as part of an action that the subject can will as a whole, i.e. as permissible or for its own sake, the subject makes herself the author of her actions, thereby sharing the reason of her action with herself, making it her reason. To repeat, reasons that one can share with oneself are potentially shareable with other selves, too. Subjects who can self-consciously engage in doing something for its own sake and regulate the pursuit of their ends accordingly, thereby point beyond their own individuality and thus make possible the participation of other selves in shared activities described by principles. This is another way of rendering the claim that consciousness and intentionality of self-conscious or rational animals is shareable in a way that consciousness and intentionality of intelligent animals is not. My own account of practical reasons does not significantly depart from Korsgaard’s although I conceive of the subjectively normative and the objectively normative aspect of reasons in a somewhat different way, which will become clearer in the next chapters. What is more, unlike Korsgaard, I do not give ontological priority to the subjective aspect. But like Korsgaard, I do not think that reasons themselves are either physical or psychological facts. They are more like a justifying relation. Our normal way of speaking of reasons is considerably misleading here, because we speak as if certain facts just were reasons. We often say things like “The hot weather is a reason to go for a swim” or “My end to have children is a reason to stop travelling the world”. It is this way of speaking which may be responsible for the confusion over what reasons are because it makes it 146 One consequence of understanding action in this way, I think, is that distinguishing between good action and right action merely in terms of motive no longer makes sense. It is has often been argued that an action can be right without having to be good since even though the action may be as duty demands (i.e. right), it need not be done with a good motive, i.e. for its own sake. Take the following example: Kilian helped the poor in order to enhance her political career. Now one might say that Kilian did the right thing but for the wrong reason. But I think this is a rather strange way of speaking. It may only seem natural to say that Kilian did the right thing because helping someone will in most circumstances be good for that someone in the evaluative sense, no matter what the benefactor’s end is. Cf. Korsgaard (2008, 224) for a similar consideration with respect to act-types that seem wrong no matter what the end is. But it is certainly not good in a normative sense since those being helped are treated as mere (or something close to mere) means. Korsgaard’s understanding of action that I am defending here can account for this by focusing on the whole action description ‘helping the poor in order to enhance one’s career’, which is surely bad. So in my view it does not really make sense to say of an action that it is right without its aim originating from a good motive. Thus I think that the relevant distinction here is not so much that between right action and action done with the right motive but that between good or potentially right action and defective action, i.e. acting well and acting badly.

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seem as if natural facts (the hot weather) or ends (the end to have children) are themselves reasons. However, neither the hot weather nor the end to have children is itself a reason to do or believe anything. My reason to go for a swim is not the hot weather itself but the special relation that holds between the hot weather and my possible acts. One might deny that the hot weather speaks in favour of going for a swim either decisively (if I am ill) or prima facie (if I have a pile of essays to correct). So no matter whether we are dealing with all things considered reasons as in the former case or with pro tanto reasons as in the latter case, the reason in question is not identical with the fact that the weather is hot. Neither does my reason depend on me believing that the weather is hot (although it may be conditional on it). It depends on the content of what I believe, which of course may not be in rapport with reality. If in fact the weather is not hot I don’t really have a reason to go for a swim, i.e. my reason is subjectively normative instead of objectively normative.147 But this changes nothing about the fact that only insofar as I perceive the hot weather as justifying my going for a swim, it is a reason for me to go for a swim. The reason is the justifying relation taken as a whole. Similarly, the reason to stop travelling the world does not consist in the end to have children (and some belief about the necessary means to that end) – even though it may be conditional on the agent having such an end. Rather it consists in the agent’s rightly or wrongly taking the end to have children to speak in favour of stopping travelling the world against the background of her other ends. That is, it consists in the relation between means and end as good or justified and not just the end.148 From what I have said so far it should be clear that I do not make a hard and fast distinction between reasons for valuation and reasons for action because I think reasons for action are essentially evaluative, i.e. evaluative judgments. The reason or means-end relation that describes the action, as I understand it, is expressive of the reason-responsive and not merely reactive nature of human desires and emotions. Accordingly, I go along with Velleman (2009, 36) in distinguishing between liking someone and loving someone in the following way. Liking, in contrast to loving, need not even express a value sensitive response to what makes the person likeable, let alone a reason or value judgment. Likings may be immediate and non-guided affective responses to something or someone. However, likings can become guided responses, and thus generate reasons when they become sensitive or perceptive responses in the sense that they are influenced by the agent’s awareness of those responses’ own appropriateness with respect to the properties of the object that (appear to) make it likable. Velleman (2009, 36) puts this point well when he argues that liking someone 147 I will say more about this distinction in chapter 5. 148 For a similar view of reasons cf. Larmore (2008, 124ff).

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when it is a guided affective response is “a matter of liking him in a way that is sensitive to what makes him worth liking”. Although these responses are not fully cognitive in that they are not value judgments, I agree with Velleman (ibid.) that they are like value judgments in that they are “instances of valuing”. In line with this reasoning, I believe that love at its best should be understood as fully reason-responsive, that is, as an affection that is accompanied by the lover’s awareness of her response to the beloved as fitting, i.e. as both worthy of the beloved and of one’s concept of love.

2.5

Defending a Non-Instrumentalist Approach to Collective Intentionality

One central implication of what has been said in this chapter is that if individual active consciousness structurally entails a subject consciousness transparent with itself in the way described, then the challenge against the possibility of sharing consciousness no longer looks insurmountable. For now one can argue that subject consciousness can be shared between numerically distinct selves that are transparent with each other through jointly acting, perceiving, and thinking. The notion of sharing entailed in collective intentionality understood along these lines has the advantage of applying Ockham’s razor by showing that the sharing in collective intentionality is not something essentially different from the sharing entailed in individual intentionality without, however, reducing it to individual intentionality. The sharing entailed in both individual and collective intentionality is a matter of relations. In the case of individual intentionality it is a matter of self-relation while in the case of collective intentionality it is a matter of relations between (numerically distinct) selves. Moreover, if we understand consciousness as a power that is realized through actively exercising it, thereby bringing the subject back to itself (i.e. unifying the subject with itself) then we can argue with Hacker (2007, 102) that the identity of consciousness is not determined by the identity of the ‘bearer’ of consciousness but rather by what the consciousness is a power to do. That is, the identity of consciousness is not determined by the one who has the power but by the kind of power it is, by what it is a power to do, namely, as I have argued with Kosman, a power to further determine, coordinate and integrate subjectivity either individually or jointly. Consciousness is essentially shared consciousness if it jointly realizes the individual subjectivity of more than one self into a single shared subjectivity, or, which comes to the same thing, into a shared practical identity (like that of friends, say). Even though subjectivity need not of course be shared in this strong sense, strong or essentially shared subjectivity can most stra-

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ightforwardly account for the idea of taking another’s reasons as normative for oneself (instead of as merely normative for the other). As we shall see shortly, the claim that another’s reasons are normative for oneself, may not be likewise intelligible when no particular practical identity is shared with another subject. Strangers do not seem to share a particular practical identity and if they do, then it is only an ephemeral one. It may seem that where no particular practical identity is shared, one cannot be required to take another’s reasons as normative for oneself. The point, I think, comes to this: While as your friend it is clear that I share with you a common good, a good that can be mine only insofar it is also yours, there does not seem to be the same sense of a common good involved when it comes to interacting with strangers at the supermarket, say, and therefore the stranger’s reasons cannot be normative for me in the sense in which my friend’s reasons are normative for me. To argue in this way, I think, is to forget that one’s individual good, the exercise of one’s specifically human capacities to value things for their own sake and thus the very ability to act for reasons can only be realized under certain conditions of being-with, i.e. under conditions of being freely instructed and supported by others, including strangers, of being treated as someone whose reasons are taken seriously. The realization of one’s own subjectivity and therefore the realization of one’s final good is dependent on how the individual members of a community think they have to be related to each other as human beings or ends in themselves. So even if no particular practical identity is shared, one always shares with others one’s fundamental human identity.149 To respect someone as a human being is to respect her in her use of her human capacities, including her capacity to reason, to value things for their own sake, to love other persons and to confer objective value on herself and others. This means that to respect one another entails that one thinks of one another as normatively related (just as to respect oneself is to think of one’s own selfrelation as normative). This normativity is expressed by the fact that the members of a community that treat each other as ends in themselves must also take each other’s reasons seriously in their cooperative enterprise of legislating ends together, which means that an end, e.g. furthering ballet dancing, can be good for the community or everyone only if its members are in a position to choose it freely. This presupposes that they have the power and knowledge

149 The humanity of a community, the indicator of how the most vulnerable and dependent members of the community are treated, is determined by the mutual respect of the community’s members for one another as beings with a final good or as ends in themselves. Similarly to how the parts of an action must be related such that the action can be called good, so must the members of a community jointly think of each other as normatively related to each other for them to be able to share a good or goods as a whole.

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required to do so.150 But as I have argued before, ends that can be freely chosen are typically parts of actions that are good or that can be willed for their own sake, and thus can be shared between persons. Therefore they are typically the ends that can be shared between persons – which we can now see must be the central idea of Korsgaard’s notion of “the reasons we can share” discussed in chapter 1. What is probably a necessary condition for the sharing of reasons so understood, namely as a way of participating in, contributing to, and realizing what is jointly legislated as objectively good for human beings, is the free exchanging of one’s reasons and enabling each other to become “independent practical reasoners”, as MacIntyre ([1999]2009) has put it. I will try to show in the next two chapters that we should understand Korsgaard’s (1996, 135) controversial claim about the sort of normativity supposedly entailed in her notion of the publicity of reason, namely that reasons must be public in their normative force, in the following sense. What I think Korsgaard (1996, 223) means is that we must take each other’s reasons seriously and engage in common reasoning. We must take each other’s reasons seriously because of our “deep social nature” (Korsgaard 1996, 135), which I think is linked to the following three considerations. First, our human subjectivity that includes a capacity for reflection and valuing can only be realized under social conditions of giving and taking reasons without which neither one’s self-consciously being with oneself nor one’s being with others (in a strong sense) could be realized. Second, such giving and taking of reasons, i.e. meeting another’s reasons with reasons (Korsgaard 1996, 140), and regulating one’s conduct in response to reasons is what many philosophers would accept as the most general concept of human agency. This entails the plausible assumption that as selfconscious beings we cannot but act for reasons. Such acting for reasons, as I have tried to show, is typically a form of principled action, a form of acting whose reasons one can share with oneself and potential others.151 And if, as I have also argued with Aristotle and Cooper, excellent activities carry their ends in themselves and if the goodness of such activities finds on-going and direct experience of confirmation that we need in order to uphold our interests in them by others in sharing such activities with us, then shared activity is essential for the agency and final good of human beings. Third, if acting on reasons and exchanging reasons just is what we must do as human beings, then this means that just as we do not need special reasons to take our own reasons seriously, so we do not need any special reasons to take the reasons of others seriously. I believe that this is why Korsgaard (2009, 202) thinks that unless “responding to another’s reasons as normative is the default position” reasons cannot be shared. 150 For this point see Korsgaard ([1996]2000a, 140). 151 For this point see e.g. Ferrero (2009).

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It is in this sense that the moral point of view is not optional but one that we cannot but occupy. This finally brings me to reformulate what I think is the real problem of instrumentalism about practical reason. For the instrumentalist desires, including we-desires, are necessarily associated with outcomes or products but not with actions. Choice is understood as the prior cause of outcomes instead of as expressed in the action (or means-end principle) itself. But surely human agents do choose actions understood as principles. As a reaction to this blind spot in the instrumentalist account of practical reason some philosophers have suggested that human agents cannot only be motivated by desire-based reasons associated with outcomes but also by principle-based reasons that provide public recourses for choosing whole actions.152 Social norms and moral norms clearly fall into this category of normative reasons. But this way of filling in the blind spot of instrumentalism, we can now better see, makes it seem as if there was an essential difference between individual action that is supposed to be merely desire-based and plural action that is supposed to be principle-based. Establishing such a dichotomy, I maintain, should be avoided because it obscures a) the important fact that individually performed human action need not be instrumental but can, and indeed must be principle-based and b) that plural actions need not be principle-based but can be purely instrumental.153 I contend that individually performed action must be paradigmatically principle-based in order to hold the self-conscious agent together over time as a unified agent. Self-conscious agents must act for normative reasons.154 The way in which individual action is principle-based, as I have assumed with Korsgaard (1996, 101), is that self-conscious human agents must be able to choose purposes or ends as parts of whole actions in order to share ends and reasons with

152 For such a suggestion that we can be both motivated by desire-based reasons and by principle-based reasons see e.g. Heath (1997; 1998). 153 It is not clear to me how Schmid’s suggestion that we should fill in the blind spot of instrumentalism by introducing the notion of shared desires (that are not private because they are the desires of more than one subject but which are neither principle-based because they are still desires) can avoid this charge. Even though there is one place where Schmid (2009b, fn7, 97) explicitly argues for conceiving choice “not just in terms of cause and effect but in terms of parts and wholes, too” such that the choices of the individual members can be seen as intended contributions to an optimal collective choice, it seems to me that here a) choice even if collective is still a matter of outcomes and b) it is not clear how the mere notion of shared desires can account for the idea of an intelligible whole, that is, a whole whose parts are not just contingently related (e.g. as cause and effect). In contrast, the notion of action as a whole that includes its end as part of a maxim, can account for this. 154 This of course is not to deny that they can and do also act for reasons that are based on desires associated with outcomes.

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themselves.155 This is the sense in which I think there is no essential difference between individual human action and plural human action, or acting together with others. But there is also a sense in which there is a difference between ‘private’ and shared action, which I have not accounted for so far. I have claimed that subjects who can self-consciously engage in doing something for its own sake and regulate the pursuit of their ends accordingly thereby point beyond their own individuality and thus make possible the participation of other selves in shared activities described by principles. But the members who engage in a shared activity experience, as Cooper (1999b, 348) argues, “a sense of extended participation” or involvement in what they are doing that is broader and deeper than their involvement in strictly private activities. It is broader according to Cooper in the sense that in a shared activity one can occupy many more positions and types of contact than in a strictly private activity. It is broader in the further sense, Cooper (1999b, 349) explains, in that the members of the shared activity can be active even if they are not directly active or making any contribution themselves: As long as some participant of the shared activity is active somewhere, the other participants indirectly share in her work. Finally, the experience of involvement in a shared activity can be deeper than in private activity because, as we have already seen with Cooper, one receives a regular and direct confirmation of the (shared) value of what one is doing. To summarize, my reservations against goal-directed or instrumentalist approaches to collective intentionality is directed at their claim that collective intentionality does not require that the individual members together as one think of the shared end as worth pursuing for its own sake.156 This allows that two individuals have the same end but pursue it for entirely different reasons. As we have seen with Bratman in chapter 1, it is often emphasized that ends or plans can be shared by individuals without them having to share any reasons or values 155 This is not to say that we cannot be motivated merely by the end to which we then seek the necessary means. It is to say that this kind of motivation, pace the instrumentalist, is not the one constitutive of human agency. What speaks in favour of this claim, as we shall see, is that showing that the act is a sufficient means for a certain end one intends to do, does not eo ipso make the whole action described by the means-end relation intelligible or justifiable. To make an action intelligible one has to name both the action’s end and the means (or act) by which one intends to realize the end. On these grounds I will argue in chapter 5 that explaining human action is essentially a matter of normative reasons or justification even though the reasons or justification need not be objectively normative. Nevertheless what is supposed to make the action intelligible in the eyes of the agent is connected with value in some way. This is why I will suggest in chapter 5 that we should distinguish between two types of normative justification, namely subjective justification (and here between wrongbut-warranted justification and wrong-and-unwarranted justification) and objective justification. 156 For a similar criticism see Helm (2010, 263).

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on the grounds of which they pursue the plan. But this makes collective intentionality rather vulnerable due to the potentially diverging because individual reasons and values of the members of the collective. I try to avoid this problem by conceiving of the shared end as a good that members of a community, or indeed partners in any more particular practical relationship, must be able to choose or reject on the grounds of shared deliberation about the justification of the whole action of which the end is a part. The merely goal-directed or instrumentalist approach to collective intentionality leaves out a fundamental aspect of rational agency, namely that rational agents also pursue ends on the grounds that they are worth pursuing or good for their own sake or as part of a whole action description. What is more, it is not clear how the instrumentalist can accommodate the important idea that sharing ends must involve something like sharing an evaluative perspective, i.e. that the subject matter of practical deliberation concerns what one should do in a certain situation where this does not merely refer to what one thinks are the causally efficient means to the end one desires, be that an individual or shared desire. Therefore I have suggested that ends must also be regarded as individuating actions in terms of the way in which they regulate the means instead of as mere conditions of satisfaction of intentions.157 To take an extreme example, killing-your-neighbour-in-order-to-defend-the-life-of-yourchildren is not the same action as killing-your-neighbour-in-order-to-buy-hispremises even though the act-type or means (the killing of your neighbour) is the same in both actions. Unlike the end to save one’s children, the end to buy your neighbour’s premises cannot justify your intended act-type of killing him. Therefore, I understand practical deliberation about what to do as deliberation about how a certain end compared to others regulates the action’s means and not about securing the intended end no matter what it takes to do so. My understanding of deliberation underlies the thought that deliberation has something to do with what kind of person one wants to be or what kind of group one wants to belong to. Consider : You and I are both interested in organizing a small workshop together on a promising topic we are both working on, and we have enough funding to make it a small but delicate symposium. For personal and professional reasons, however, I want to have it over and done with as soon as possible and I want to organize it at rather short notice even if that means that the preparation for the workshop will be insufficient and that because of our lack of time for adequate preparation, the usual suspects in the field will be invited instead of new and perhaps younger and more inspiring researchers. Now, you as an ambitious but also devoted researcher and a person of integrity might rightly

157 For this point in a somewhat different context see also Richardson ([1994]1997, 61 – 62).

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wonder whether this is really what should be done and whether you want to be part of a group whose actions so obviously lack worth. I think this nicely shows that to say whether one really shares some end with others cannot normally be determined without reference to one another’s underlying reasons for the end, i.e. one another’s view of the end’s worth expressed by how the end is related to the means in the whole action description. Note, however, that I am not saying that in order for the members of a group to share an end all reasons and values must be shared among them as members of a ‘we’. A well integrated collective can be expected to tolerate some conflict between individual and shared reasons without thereby taking damage just as an individual agent can tolerate, up to a certain extent, conflicts among her various reasons and commitments. But to make sense of what it means to share an end, as I have tried to show, both the individual agent alone and the group must be able to deliberate about ends rationally, something which the instrumentalist about practical reason denies to be possible.

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Self-Consciousness Revisited

I have tried to show that the bi-directional openness of non-human animal consciousness although a necessary condition for sharing consciousness with others of one’s kind, is probably not sufficient for such sharing. It seems that only the form of self-consciousness that places the subject at a certain distance to herself (and others) makes sharing consciousness possible. Such sharing is realized by the subject’s overcoming that distance on her own or with others in order to act.158 I have argued that non-rational animals are in a certain sense self-aware in their perceptual and sensational experiences of taking intentional objects. Such experience is something for them. But it is clear that animals also have conscious experiences with regard to other animals by relating to them. Although there are many intricate philosophical questions in thinking about the relation between sociality and intentionality, as we shall have ample opportunity to see in the next chapter, it seems not altogether far-fetched to think that higher animal selfawareness is somehow connected with the animal being capable of being aware of other animals. Korsgaard (2007c, 17 – 18) has distinguished two senses in which animal self-awareness may be disclosed by relating to other animals. The 158 This does not mean that one cannot share reasons with oneself or with others without asking oneself whether one has reason to pursue one’s individual or shared ends. What it means is that one cannot share reasons with oneself or others unless from time to time or when the situation requires it, one asks oneself or one another whether one has reason to do this or that.

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first concerns the relation to another animal where that animal need not be of the same species but is related to the observing animal in “physical space”, as when a lion observes her prey from the distance. Self-awareness disclosed in this sense I think is similar to self-awareness disclosed by intentionally relating to physical objects in the world. Awareness of self is differently disclosed when the animal relates to other animals of her own species in “social space” as when a male chimpanzee bullies a subordinate. What is controversial, as Korsgaard (ibid., 18 – 22) rightly points out, is whether non-rational animals are capable of relating to their own experiences in “mental space” recognizing not just these experiences as their own but their mental attitudes themselves. What speaks against the fact that intelligent animals can relate to their own experiences in mental space and recognize them as their own is that they do not seem to be able to self-ascribe intentional concepts. Is this because they do not have anything like the concept of intentional states? I think not, because there is empirical evidence that non-human animals can ascribe intentional concepts to others in the sense that they are able to see others as social cognizers (cf. Tomasello 2008). How is this possible unless they can ascribe intentional concepts to themselves? Let met attempt a speculative answer. To ascribe intentional concepts to oneself necessarily entails that one can ascribe concepts to others but the reverse is not true. To be able to ascribe intentional concepts to others does not entail that one can ascribe them to oneself. I think the key insight to be gained here lies in seeing the manner in which human beings or beings capable of language and propositional thought ascribe intentional concepts such as beliefs and desires to others, namely publicly.159 While both the toddler and the chimpanzee have the ability to recognize other exemplars of their own species as social cognizers, thereby ascribing to them intentional states in a certain sense, only the human infant is openly, systematically and regularly addressed by others as a social cognizer herself. The fact that human animals socially ascribe and express that which is a defining feature of individual human subjects, namely rationality, may thus be partly responsible for actualizing our power to self-ascribe intentional concepts.160 This is not to say that self-consciousness arises from social interaction, only that its genesis requires social interaction in the sense described. This means that human beings are not born with the fully realized form of selfconsciousness under consideration. However, the subject that expresses herself

159 For a similar point see Cash (2008, 102). 160 For this point see Herman (1996, 58, fn17).

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in the use of the pronoun ‘I’ probably must always already be related to herself in a more fundamental way.161

2.6.1 The Non-Epistemological Knowledge-Relationship of the Self with Itself The remarkable feature about human self-consciousness is that the subject must be immediately aware of herself as an ‘I’. Some philosophers think that this kind of self-awareness differs from perceptual knowledge or awareness not in terms of its taking a special object, namely, an ‘I’, but in terms of its form.162 They argue that contrary to when certain concepts are applied to one’s perceptual experiences or when certain objects are identified as falling under a concept,163 no identification with a separate object is taking place in being aware of oneself as an ‘I’. In other words, one’s own self-ascription of identity is not based on any criteria. But this does not mean that ascriptions of identity by others, which are based on criteria, do not have an important influence on the reliability of who one thinks one is. Human beings experience their particular personal identities to become more reliable and true to who they really are to the extent that they generally converge with those ascriptions made by others of their kind.164 I said in chapter 1 that Velleman seems to think that self-awareness or first person knowledge is not different in form from third person or perceptual knowledge, only different with respect to the object that such knowledge takes. Perhaps this is not how Velleman should be interpreted after all. For Velleman (2009, 17, my emphasis) also argues: “[U]nderstanding this particular thing [the self as cognizable object] is quite different from understanding any of the others. Other things must be understood as they are, however they may be.”

Thereby he removes his initial focus from the self as special object and directs it at the special way in which it is known or understood, namely not independently of how it understands itself. So I think that we had better interpret Velleman as saying that the understanding of ordinary intentional or perceptual objects is very different from understanding oneself. 161 For such a view see also Henrich (2007, 157) and Larmore (2007, 499). 162 See e.g. Rödl (2007a). 163 Non-human intelligent animals are clearly capable of this in the sense that they are able to perceive the general in the particular and that they are able to apply inductive considerations to novel particulars. 164 While some philosophers, such as Sen (2004) have argued that social identities are made, few have recognized that personal identities themselves are to a large extent “a shared achievement” as they are socially mediated. For this point see MacIntyre ([1999]2009, 95). But this changes nothing about the fact that self-awareness must be immediate.

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The same point, I think, can be made with the help of Korsgaard’s Aristotelian point that living things exist through continuous self-constitution that implies a certain form of understanding oneself. What is more, the Korsgaard-Aristotelian idea of self-constitution also helps us see the solution to what has been traditionally considered a paradox. Larmore (2010, 62) for example can be seen as part of this tradition when he highlights the fact that one cannot capture a human being’s basic self-relation or self-understanding as an epistemic knowledge-relationship since this would give rise to the following paradox. To think that the self is constituted by epistemic self-reflection requires that the self takes itself as object or as other in analogy to the perceiving subject who takes an independent intentional object in the world. But this is to problematically presuppose what needs explaining. In order to be able to reflect on itself, the self would already have to exist, not only as that which executes the act of reflection, but also as object of its own reflection that exists independently of the act of reflection, which is characteristic of epistemic knowledge. Thus, if the self as object exists independently of the recognizing or reflecting self as subject then, as Larmore (2010, 62) points out, “this relation of reflection cannot itself form part of the self that is its object”. So the relation of epistemic self-reflection cannot be the basic relation, which the self has to itself. In other words, the reference to the self, which is constitutive for the self, cannot be epistemological; it cannot be a straightforward knowledge-relationship that I have as a subject about myself as object.165 The relationship constitutive of the self with itself cannot be a knowledge relationship in the epistemic sense. For if I had a special epistemic knowledge about myself I would have to be acquainted with myself in the same way I am acquainted with intentional objects in the world. But this is impossible since if the basic relationship I have with myself were intentional or receptive, I would have to think of myself in the same way as I think of any other object, namely as other, as essentially separate from myself and “however it may be”. Korsgaard explains why she thinks we are not actually dealing here with a real paradox at all. Korsgaard (2009, 20) argues that human living things constitute themselves as the authors of their actions in the act of choosing their actions.166 And in so choosing they create their own identities. The paradox only comes up if one asks how one can constitute oneself unless one is already there (in terms of Larmore’s formulation of the paradox, this means: In reflecting on onself, the self as object of reflection must already exist). But to ask this question, Korsgaard 165 The idea that self-consciousness is some kind of knowledge of oneself can already be found in Plato’s (1986) Charmides. 166 Self-determination with regard to non-rational animals amounts to their acting largely, but not exclusively, from instincts.

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points out, is to start from a false conception of what a living thing is and how it is related to itself. The paradox vanishes once we see that being a living thing is not a state or fixed object but an activity, namely an activity of self-constitution (ibid., 35). A human being understands herself by doing what she thinks she has reason to do and by believing what she thinks she has reason to believe. Let us now compare Korsgaard’s depiction of the problem with Schopenhauer’s ([1847]1957, 173 – 174) who, in a similar fashion to Larmore, think of it in terms of the problem of a subject divided into two halves, one half that recognizes and the other half that is recognized: “(…) [D]as vorstellende Ich, das Subjekt des Erkennens, kann, da es, als nothwendiges Korrelat aller Vorstellungen, Bedingung derselben ist, nie selbst Vorstellung oder Objekt werden (…). Daher also giebt es kein Erkennen des Erkennens; weil dazu erfordert würde, dass das Subjekt sich vom Erkennen trennte und nun doch das Erkennen erkennte, was unmöglich ist (…).‘Ich weiss, dass ich erkenne’, sagt nicht mehr, als ‘Ich erkenne’, und dieses, so ohne weitere Bestimmung, sagt nicht mehr als ‘Ich’.”

Schopenhauer ([1847]1957, 176 – 177) infers from this that since we cannot know ourselves epistemically as object, the way we do know ourselves in inner selfknowledge must be as willing subject. Schopenhauer further argues that the identity captured by the pronoun “I” that is immediately given (and therefore cannot be further analysed) must include both the subject as epistemically knowing subject and the practically knowing subject that is known or experienced as willing. The emptiness of the ‘I know’ results from it being known as an analytic truth (“[D]as vorstellende Ich, das Subjekt des Erkennens, kann, da es, als nothwendiges Korrelat aller Vorstellungen, Bedingung derselben ist, nie selbst Vorstellung oder Objekt warden.”) whereas the ‘I will’ or ‘I must’ is known as an a posteriori or experienced truth.167 Although Schopenhauer would probably disagree with Korsgaard in terms of the nature of the necessity involved in the “I must”, I think he shares with her the main insight that a human being understands herself by doing what she thinks she has reason to do and by believing what she thinks she has reason to believe. As I understand it, the puzzle of the intangible “I” is reminiscent of Kant’s quarrel with Descartes that concerns the way in which our own mind is or is not reflectively transparent to ourselves, or at least not more transparent than any other mind is transparent to us. What Kant has argued against Descartes is that the way in which our own mind is transparent to ourselves is not to be understood in the sense of a kind of inner epistemic translucency by which the interior of our mind is lit up whereby the objects that we bear in mind are 167 Korsgaard would perhaps argue with Kant that at least as far as the awareness of the ‘moral must’ is concerned, human beings are aware of the moral law a priori, i.e. by conceiving of moral norms as real in their own actions as they will them (cf. chapter 1).

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illuminated.168 The basic idea here is that from the fact that the subject with certainty is aware of itself as an “I” and of her desires and beliefs as hers, it does not follow that it thereby also captures or understands its constitutive selfrelation that is the condition of possibility of epistemic knowledge of the world and the self.169 It is not clear, therefore, what one could mean by saying that selfconscious subjects are aware of themselves primarily as object or from introspection. Unless I am immediately aware that some desire is my desire I could not be aware of myself as a willing subject and therefore I could not be aware of my mental attitudes as possible objects of my self-reflection.170 If this is correct then the only way in which the subject can come to know something about herself (but probably not about its constitutive and basic selfrelation) is through executing or realizing its self-consciousness. This connects with Aristotle’s idea of apperception according to which the subject is transparent with itself in actively exercising its receptive or spontaneous powers by virtue of perceiving and thinking. The difference between apperception as an apperceptive act of perception and apperception as an apperceptive act of thought is that the latter in its spontaneity can be productive of its own objects. The objects of intelligent perception, however, are given by the world, so to speak. This finally reveals the essential difference between human self-consciousness and higher animal consciousness. Higher animal intelligence is directed at the world. Animals are conscious of intentional objects in the world and self-aware in their actively exercising their power to take intentional objects in the world, which importantly includes, as we have seen with Korsgaard, positioning themselves in physical, social and some form of basic mental space. One could say that such self-awareness is the animal’s first order awareness of its own sentient and desiring nature to immediately satisfy her needs and desires. Human thinking and practical deliberating differ from animal intelligence in that it turns inwardly. How does this relate to the claim that theoretical and practical reasoning is productive of its own object? A self-conscious animal is aware of her own mental attitudes as influencing her actions (or inferences) as

168 Our way of speaking thus works somewhat contrary to the philosophical understanding of the mind that I am trying to sketch here. 169 Cf. Henrich (2007, 119 – 121). 170 When I ask about the unity of my consciousness in contrast to asking about the unity of some object like a chair, the reference to the conscious subject, i.e. me, is essential. In fact, the very question whether some perceptions or thoughts are one’s own makes sense only if one thinks, like Hume, that experiences are independent existences, or like Descartes that persons are aware of themselves through inner observation, which in its form, is analogous to perception of the outside world and its objects. But I am not saying that self-conscious human animals do not introspectively access their minds but only that this is not the fundamental way in which they are acquainted with themselves.

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grounds.171 That is, by opening up a distance between the subject and herself, a subject’s self-consciousness makes the subject recognize that her mental attitudes prompt her towards performing certain actions (or toward making certain inferences). However, in the wake of this awareness that one’s desires move one to act in a certain way (or that one’s beliefs direct one’s thinking in a certain direction), lies the necessity to decide whether one should go along with the desire or not (or whether one should draw the inferences from one’s beliefs or not). Here is where spontaneous reasoning that is productive of its own object, is born: The deliberating subject that opens up a space between herself and the object of her deliberating, must ask herself whether she is justified in accepting her desire as ground for action (and the thinking subject must ask whether she is justified in taking certain evidence as grounds for her inferences).172 So even though one cannot epistemically know oneself as an “I”, one can experience oneself as an “I”, as someone who is self-consciously necessitated to do (or to conclude) something. Human self-consciousness is a form of selfconsciousness through which the subject is not only immediately aware of herself as the subject of her perceptual and sensational experiences but also as located at a distance to her own attitudes, interests, and values (Korsgaard 2007c, 19). It is probably here that the words ‘consciousness’ and ‘conscience’ reveal their original meaning as ‘being conscious with oneself ’ and ‘being conscious with oneself as witness’ by continuously bridging the distance introduced by reflective consciousness. The transparency characteristic of human self-consciousness concerns how things are with oneself and how one does in one’s acting and thinking, rather than how things are within oneself. And to be transparent with oneself in this way suggests, as we have already seen, that one can be transparent with other selves, too, by thinking and acting together with them under the guise of the good.

171 These and the following considerations are indebted to Korsgaard (2007c, 21 – 22). 172 When rational or self-conscious beings deliberate about what to do, they do not normally focus their attention on their, in Velleman’s (2009, 22 – 23) words, “consciousness of thinking” itself or on their “own thoughts and feelings” but on the justifying relation between their mental attitudes and their actions (and beliefs). To focus one’s attention on the consciousness of one’s deliberating and thinking itself often leads to situations in which one feels that such self-reflective thinking interferes with one’s capacity of doing/thinking what one is doing/thinking to the point where one feels so awkward that the process of thought or action must be interrupted or even terminated. The English adjective ‘selfconscious’ accounts for this in its mundane or non-philosophical meaning: ‘self-conscious’ here means ‘awkward’ or ‘ill at ease’.

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2.6.2 Self-Consciousness and Reasons I have said that the difference between apperception as an apperceptive act of perception and apperception as an apperceptive act of thought is that the latter can be productive of its own objects while the objects of intelligent perception are given. How exactly is this to be understood? The difference between perceiving and thinking/deliberating, roughly, is not that the act of thinking about some object or the act of deliberating about what to do cannot be separate from the awareness that one thinks or deliberates. The same is true of perception as we have seen in our discussion of Aristotle. Rather, the difference is that only in selfconscious activities such as deliberating and thinking is the subject’s consciousness productive of its own object and in this sense just is its own object. What this means is that in a self-conscious activity like thinking or deliberating the self-conscious subject stands in an identity relationship to herself that is not quite the same as the identity relationship constitutive of non-human animal consciousness. In perceiving an object, according to Aristotle, the subject takes on the form of the object that it perceives, i.e. it becomes the object that already exists independently of the perceiving subject. However, in judging or intending, the subject is not distinct from the object of its judging or intending in the sense that it brings it into existence.173 But how can one be aware of the object that one is if not by observation? The answer is the same as before but can be given in a slightly different way with Rödl (2007a; 2007b) who has suggested that the only way in which one can be aware of the object one is, is by being it. Rödl mentions two ways in which someone can be aware of an object by being the object. I will focus on the one that is more relevant for my inquiry as an inquiry into practical reason. One can be aware of an object by being an object in that one is aware of oneself to do something by being aware of what to do.174 If I understand Rödl correctly, then the agent (the subject of awareness) who determines herself to act is identical with the agent who is known in the non-epistemic sense by the subject to be the one who is determined to act (the object of awareness). By virtue of deliberating, the agent self-consciously determines herself to act and thereby returns to herself again. In contrast to the perceiving subject that is (partly) determined by an 173 That perception takes a given object does of course not mean that perception does not contribute in some way to what is perceived. After all, perception is intelligent. If this is correct then every act of perception is at the same time also an act of interpretation or a contribution to the presence of what is observed. It is therefore not mere perception. Nevertheless, for such interpretation to be possible the object of interpretation must be somehow present in the first place. 174 The other way Rödl mentions in which someone can be aware of an object by being the object, is that one is aware of oneself to believe something by being aware of what to believe.

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intentional object distinct from herself, the self-consciously deliberating subject is being determined by herself when she decides to do what she thinks she should do. Note that this is just what I have argued for all along, namely that rational beings are aware with themselves in a self-consciously normative way, that is, as beings who have to act (and think) for reasons. But what is the normative force of these reasons? Since an agent necessarily has to make her own decisions that nobody can make for her, it cannot possibly be true that one has to take another’s reasons as normative for oneself – or can it? The normative force or universal scope of reasons has been commonly interpreted in the following sense. A reason does not only have validity for me at this very moment but it has validity for anyone, including my future self, who is in a similar situation or accepts similar premises or has a similar motivational set. So a certain consideration is a reason for anybody who is in a situation now or at some later point in time that is relevantly similar to the actual situation. If consideration C is a reason for me in circumstances X, then the consideration is a reason for anybody who is in sufficiently similar circumstances. Consider the following example.175 If I desire to be happy and if I believe that visiting my sister makes me happy then I have a reason to visit my sister (assuming that my end to visit her permissibly regulates my act and does not interfere with my sister’s ends). But then I also have to grant that anybody, whom it makes happy to visit their sister (and who desires to be happy), has likewise a reason to visit their sister everything else equal. Here the relevant aspect that the distinct situations have in common is the providing of happiness in virtue of which we are entitled to say that someone other than me, Maurice, say, has a reason to visit his sister. However, Maurice’s reason to visit his sister consists exclusively in his happiness, just as my reason to visit my sister consists exclusively in my happiness. Accordingly, there is no normative connection between my reasons and Maurice’s reasons since Maurice’s happiness concerns only Maurice while my happiness concerns only me. Maurice’s reasons therefore are not reasons for me to help Maurice advance his happiness and my reasons are not reasons for Maurice to advance my happiness. Of course, if Maurice were my friend his happiness would be part of my happiness and thus I would have a reason to advance his, i.e. our happiness. This reconsiders the point I made in section 2.5 that where no particular practical identity is shared it seems that one cannot be required to take another’s reasons as normative for oneself. And this, it is widely acknowledged, must be right for surely one cannot claim that I am somehow committed to contribute to the happiness of Maurice who is a total stranger to me! The particularity of our own agent-relative reasons must be preserved. 175 This example is in the spirit of Korsgaard (2009, 191).

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I think that most philosophers believe that this view of reasons is so attractive because it allows one to pay adequate attention to one’s own projects and loved ones for their own sake and not because that would, indirectly or in the long run, establish neutral or impartial values, as the utilitarian seems to argue. The kind of shareability involved here, shareability that entails no reference to other-regardingness or sharedness from the first person perspective is what I have called shareability as intelligibility. I think sharing semantic knowledge is very similar to this type of sharing. Consider Fr¦d¦rique de Vignemont’s (2010, 285) example for the sharing of the semantic knowledge of a certain dance step. The semantic knowledge of the skill of ballet dancing is perfectly graspable by the ballet critic despite his inability to dance. He can grasp the technical requirements of a certain dance step by reading about it or by observing professional dancers dancing, or both.176 He can thereby share the semantic representation of the respective dance steps with the professional dancer (or indeed, with any other person) from a third person perspective. The critic doesn’t have to be a dancer himself in order to understand what a dancer does. In order to share semantic or conceptual knowledge the critic does not have to share a first person perspective with the dancer. Similarly, I do not have to be Maurice’s friend or share a particular practical perspective with him in order to recognize that he has a reason, when he does have one, to visit his sister. Thus, recognizing that Maurice has a reason to visit his sister, on this view, does not require me to be able to will that he should do so. I think what these two examples show is that shareability understood as intelligibility is generic in the sense that the knowledge or reasons shared could be shared by any two or more self-conscious subjects without these subjects having to include in their own first person perspective the perspective of a particular other. Such ability to share knowledge from the third person perspective has usually been considered the defining feature of rational beings. Note that this kind of conceptual sharing presupposes self-consciousness. A self-conscious animal knows that the objects of her perception and of her knowledge are not only accessible to her here and now. She realizes that they will be accessible to her, assuming that her mind is well-functioning and that the nature of the perceptible world remains sufficiently equal, also tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and so on, possibly throughout her life. As a consequence she must think that the objects of her perceptual and intellectual knowledge are not restricted to her perception and knowledge but can be intelligible and perceived, in principle, by any other self-conscious animal with a similarly functioning mind. Thus, such a self-conscious animal recognizes something like a 176 So the critic and the dancer do not even have to communicate with each other in order to share such knowledge.

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shared order of reason under which her perception and knowledge can be shared with others of her kind. She recognizes that others use the same concepts for thinking and perceiving as she does. From what has been said it is clear that rational beings who live side by side under a shared order of reason, and who cooperate and coordinate their activities need not actually live with one another as social and moral beings. So how is it possible that we in fact do live with one another and not merely side by side? It is possible, as I will argue with Korsgaard in the next two chapters, because we not only act under a shared order of theoretical reason that helps us unify or conceptualize the world and its objects but also under a shared order of practical reason that helps us unify both ourselves and one another. Practical agents are not the sole agent’s of their world, they rather share a practical world with others of their kind just like knowers share a theoretical world that is not merely disclosed to a single subject, which would leave each subject enclosed with his or her own world inaccessible to others. If theoretical and practical solipsism were true it would be a great mystery how we could think and act together in the first place. This idea is sometimes explicated by saying that subjects must take a position in the world, which they can change.177 To understand what it means to know an object entails that one understands that possible others could know the object, too, from their position in the world as a knower. Our example above has shown that philosophers usually understand the universal form of practical reasons or inter-changeability of position with regard to practical reasons in the same or a very similar way as they understand inter-changeability of position with regard to theoretical reason. I want to argue in the next chapter that Korsgaard’s point is to show that the universalizability of practical reasons requires more than that, i.e. more than intelligibility. Korsgaard herself has prompted no little confusion about this, i.e. about the nature of the normative force of the publicity of practical reasons by comparing it to the normative force of the publicity of language or epistemic knowledge. I will try to show that, on Korsgaard’s (2007a, 32 – 35) received view, there must be a difference between sharing theoretical or semantic knowledge and sharing practical reasons on the grounds that changing places with others with regard to practical reasons requires that one recognizes from an evaluative first person perspective what one has in common with the others at the most fundamental level. Thus when Korsgaard (1996, 153) writes that “[w]e are, or should be, the most social of all the animals, since we are the ones who can form a conception of what all animals have in common”, I think what she means is that what we have in 177 Cf. Henrich (2007, 147 – 148) with respect to theoretical positioning and cf. Korsgaard with respect to both practical (1996, 143; 2009, 206) and theoretical positioning (2011a, 14 – 15).

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common with all animals is that we share with them as animals the concern for our final good or well-functioning. But the reason why we can recognize this is that we can confer value on ourselves and others, which is the most fundamental good as human beings that we share with one another.

2.7

Conclusion

In this chapter I have tried to show, among other things, the sense in which higher animal consciousness is open towards the world and its intentional objects. If animal consciousness were not directed towards the world and its objects, animal intelligence would not be possible for the latter is the ability to perceive the general in the particular and to make generalisations by correctly connecting cause and effect and to apply this knowledge flexibly and adequately to new situations in the pursuit of one’s ends. In the next two chapters we shall see that intelligent animals are capable of recognizing that objects of their interest are open to the interest of others of their kind, too, even to the extent that they can perceive of others as social cognizers, i.e. as beings with intentions. Nevertheless, the phenomena of collective intentionality observed in intelligent animal behaviour can primarily be explained by the animal’s instincts that is compatible with the idea that intelligent animal behaviour is first and foremost instrumentally intelligent behaviour. So what I think is the fundamental difference between the behaviour of intelligent and rational animals is that since the latter can and must question their motives and beliefs thereby opening up a distance towards themselves, they must recognize the normative and not merely instrumental grounds of their actions in order to act as a unified subject, as a subject with at least some practical identity. But this is also what allows them to share ends with themselves and with each other. Human beings who can engage in doing something for its own sake and who can regulate the pursuit of their ends not merely in terms of considerations of instrumental efficacy, thereby selfconsciously point beyond their own individuality and thus make potential participation of other selves in deliberation (and thought) and action possible.

Chapter 3: Practical Reasons and Other-Regardingness

3.1

Introduction

The findings of the last chapter suggest that subjects who are aware of themselves as an ‘I’ have a perspective on the world that is recognized to be open to other ‘I’s. To understand what it means to act for reasons entails that one understands that other ‘I’s can act for reasons, too. As a self-conscious subject one understands that not only oneself can have a reason to visit one’s sister but Maurice and numerous others can have a reason to visit their sister and that these reasons are constrained by requirements of universalizability in the weak sense discussed at the end of the previous chapter. As a self-conscious subject, a subject that can act for reasons, I am aware of myself as thinking and acting under a common order of reason under which other actual or possible ‘I’s can be thought to act as well. So to understand oneself as an ‘I’ that acts under a common order of reason entails that one recognizes that other actually existing or potential ‘I’s must be acting under the same order of norms of reason as oneself. This is one important sense in which the structural openness of self-consciousness can be called ‘deeper’ than the structural openness of the consciousness of non-human animals. This may come close to what Henrich (2007, 37;146) means when he writes that in a rational subject’s self-relation there is already entailed the implication of the thought of an order under which many subjects can co-exist and under which one is aware of other ‘I’s in the same way as one is aware of oneself, namely as an ‘I’ with a first person perspective (and not as an object). Rödl (2007b) renders this point by claiming that subjectivity is apprehensible only in the mode of ‘with’, which means that my subjective self-relation partly constitutes my way of apprehending of another subject.178 This means that self-conscious awareness of 178 Again, for a similar idea see Henrich (2007, 37). Recall, however, that this basic self-relation can be realized into a more developed form of self-consciousness only under conditions of being-with, i.e. under conditions of socialization.

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oneself as an ‘I’ structurally already includes the thought of a relation with possible other subjects. So a self-conscious subject can think of herself generically as one among others of its kind that are joined in their thinking and acting in accordance with shared norms. But what is the nature of these norms and what have they got to do with sharing consciousness that goes beyond perceptual sharing? After all, my knowing that you have the same capacities of perceiving, knowing and thinking that I have does not require that we share a life together or that we have to treat each other’s practical reasons as normative for ourselves. We may recognize each other as subjects to a common order of theoretical reason that makes no implications as to the practical commitments we may owe one another. Mere coexistence under the same order of theoretical reason has no implications with regard to how one should act and treat others as practical agents. Perhaps one could account for the practical nature of self-conscious animals by introducing a shared order of practical reason cashed out in terms of purely instrumental rationality. In this chapter I will develop some fundamental considerations against such a proposal. Philosophers have often been sceptical about drawing too close together what they think are matters of epistemic or theoretical rationality, such as norms of thinking or norms of logic on the one hand, and practical norms on the other hand. One reason for this, as I will try to show below, is the common assumption that only epistemic norms are constitutive norms (that is, constitutive of thinking) in contrast to socially recognized norms the latter of which are usually identified with practical norms. My hypothesis is that this provides the basis for the widely shared claim that intentionality is not necessarily social.179 While I think that this is correct with respect to intentionality of intelligent animals, I will show more fully in chapter 4 that it is false with respect to rational or human intentionality. Human intentionality is essentially social. The first step in an attempt to defend this claim, at least indirectly, is to show that practical norms are constitutive norms as well, namely constitutive norms of agency, which must not be confused with social norms understood as socially authorized or recognized norms. However, being constitutive norms, practical norms are social or shareable in a way that does not depend on social recognition. But first we have to understand why it is commonly thought that only epistemic norms are constitutive norms.

179 See e.g. Pettit (1996), Engel (2001; 2002) and Pendlebury (1998).

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3.2

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Epistemic Norms Are (not) of the Same Kind as Practical Norms

It is widely agreed among philosophers that an individual subject who believes that p but doesn’t think that p is true, violates the constitutive norm of believing. To believe that p just is to think that p is true. So what it means to believe is determined by normative constraints (i.e. the concomitants of belief) that are constitutive of the standard of belief. There are two overlapping philosophical disputes going on in the wider context of this issue. One concerns the question whether epistemic norms are necessarily social.180 The other concerns the question whether there is a practical equivalent of epistemic norms. Those who deny that there is such an equivalent of epistemic norms in the practical domain usually also think that epistemic norms are not necessarily social. Such a view is quite natural if one assumes that practical norms are social in a very specific sense, namely norms whose authority is grounded in an external force or constraint in contrast to epistemic norms whose authority is taken to be grounded in internal constraints, which gives the latter kind of norms their name, i.e. “constitutive norms”. Hence, the claim that intentionality is not necessarily social is motivated by the idea that epistemic norms are internal norms. If the authority of practical norms is conceived in contrast to internal epistemic norms, conformity to practical norms will seem optional in the same way that conformity to social norms in general seems to be optional. Consider : As long as one thinks that one will get away with non-conformity one is free to break social norms.181 If one thinks of practical norms in this way, they will necessarily look very different from epistemic norms which are thought to be constitutive norms of thought and which therefore are taken to be such that we are not free to break them. However, I do not believe that such a distinction between norms of thought and norms of action can be defended unless one confuses the authority of practical norms with merely external constraints. I will show that we must rather view practical norms as constitutive norms of agency and subject to an internal authority along roughly Kantian lines that I have argued for in chapter 1: A practical norm takes effect on its own, that is, it takes effect even in the absence of enforcing institutions such as sanctions.182 To accept 180 Gibbard (2003, 85) for example who defends a subjective account of rules of rationality imagines that it is possible, at least conceptually, that a human subject’s thought is normative without being social. 181 For such a view that we are free to break practical norms understood as social norms see Engel (2002). 182 This is the intellectual analogon to Aristotle’s idea of apperception, i.e. the subject being itself affected by its own awareness of the object perceived. The self-conscious subject is

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something as a practical norm in this sense, i.e. as a normative reason for action, is an act of self-legislation, a subscription to one’s own principle of action. Here two fundamental and well-known objections will come up: (1) The normativity or binding force of laws that one gives to oneself are no more authoritative than external laws if not less authoritative since one can break the laws that one gives to oneself. (2) How is the notion of self-legislation compatible with the idea that actual practical norms must be established with others in a society without the notion of self-legislation collapsing into external legislation? In other words, doesn’t the fact that actual practical norms must be constructed by a community require us to select some authoritative individual agents who are endowed with the power of sovereign on whose external will all other members of the community depend?183 In this chapter I will mainly focus on addressing the first question. The second issue will be addressed in chapter 4. Let me start with a qualification that I think is important to bear in mind here. Just because we can and do violate actual social norms this does not show by itself that we are free to break them or that we are not compelled to conformity. Rather, the very possibility that they can be broken speaks in favour of their being normative. In other words, non-conformity presupposes general conformity or normativity.184 The same is true for epistemic norms. We obviously can and do break epistemic norms from time to time. Theoretical thinking just as practical deliberating is not a matter of all or nothing. Sometimes our reasons for belief are unfounded or biased, sometimes we are blind to a relevant aspect that prevents us from drawing the appropriate conclusion or sometimes we are just reasoning carelessly or falsely. So there are myriad ways in which we can and often do violate epistemic norms of belief and logic without, however, seizing to be thinkers altogether. We can be better or worse at exercising our power of theoretical thinking. And this same, I think, is true for practical deliberating. I will argue that just as there are epistemic norms constitutive of thought there are practical norms that are constitutive of agency, norms that we must follow in order to be practical agents. But this does not mean that one cannot violate these practical norms. One can be better or worse at acting, i.e. at being an agent. To begin with, I will briefly elaborate on what is meant by claiming that epistemic norms are constitutive norms of thought. itself affected by his own awareness of the law it gives to himself. Cf. chapter 1, section 4.3 and 5. 183 The solution here will be to see that even though social norms influence the content of what are accepted as intelligible reasons in a given society, the authority of reasons is not an external authority that could always change its will. It is rather a metaphysical fact about practical reason of self-legislating agents. 184 For an interesting critical assessment of this widely accepted claim that for a rule to be normative it must be open to violation, see Lavin (2004).

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3.2.1 Epistemic Norms Are Constitutive Norms of Thought In virtue of believing that p we have to do a whole range of other things, which are all concomitants of belief such as confirming that p, taking p as a premise for other beliefs, or accepting the logical consequences of believing that p. It is these concomitants of belief that provide the constitutive standards of belief. In virtue of believing that p we are committed to do all these other things but we may not always be aware of all of them for different reasons. For example, we might believe that p without accepting the logical consequences of p. This need not be due to careless thinking (although it can), but may be due to the fact that believing that p requires that one understand an especially complex line of argument. Norms that are constitutive of belief are therefore like principles of logic. For them to be guiding principles of our thinking we do not necessarily have to be aware of employing them while thinking even though we must be able in principle to make them the object of our reflection. But this does not mean that we must think of our principles of logic as additional premises in our thinking without which our thinking would be incomplete. Lewis Carroll (1895) was one of the first to show that this would lead to an endless regress since for each principle we would need yet another principle to back up the previous one. To say that norms of thought are constitutive principles of thought is just another way of making Carroll’s point that we don’t apply epistemic norms in our thinking but that we think in terms of them. But this does not mean that we cannot make mistakes in thinking. What we find is that we are not perfect at thinking – if we were, our beliefs and arguments would not require reasons or justifications. There would not be such a thing as reasons or justifications for belief since we wouldn’t need them as perfect thinkers. But obviously we do need reasons for our beliefs to guide our thinking and reasoning. And because we need reasons for our beliefs to guide our thinking we cannot believe at will. Thomas Cook (1987, 441 – 446), however, has argued that there is conceptual room to show that one can bring oneself to believe something at will by intentionally changing one’s criteria for evidential warrant with regard to one’s beliefs. The criteria that he mentions are intellectual prestige, social pressure and internal dissonance. I will show below that his argument fails since even if these factors influence the premises on which one bases one’s beliefs these premises are not immune to rational criticism. The person carrying out her ‘belief inducement project’ in order to come to believe what she wants herself to come to believe, will come to believe it, if she does come to believe it, not because she wanted or willed herself to believe it (which is required for Cook’s point to go through) but because she came to grasp the reasons that speak in favour of believing it.

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Here is Cook’s example by which he tries to show that believing at will is possible. Cook’s fictional character Nick sets out on prudential grounds to induce in himself a belief in evolutionary theory that is to replace his actual belief in creationism. He wants to become a successful biologist and he thinks that he cannot do so without accepting evolutionary theory even though he thinks that evolutionary theory is false. Thus he goes to Harvard to induce in himself the belief, which he thinks is necessary to have, given his professional ambitions. Now, having spent a certain amount of time at Harvard, Nick comes to believe in evolutionary theory. How did this happen according to Cook? Cook suggests that this is because Nick rightly foresaw that certain mechanisms would influence him at Harvard – the intellectual prestige of his teachers, social pressure from his peers and the resulting internal dissonance that needs dissolving – to come to believe in evolutionary theory. But this does not show that Nick comes to believe in evolutionary theory because he has blindly followed the intellectual prestige of his teachers or because he has given in to the social pressure of his peers (who all believe in evolutionary theory) in order to avoid internal dissonance. Given the description of the sort of person Nick is, it seems highly improbable that he should blindly follow some view unless he has good grounds to think that this view is correct. It is far more plausible to assume that he comes to believe in evolutionary theory because he learns to evaluate the reasons that speak in favour of believing in evolutionary theory and those that speak against believing in creationism. The intellectual context at Harvard helped ‘induce’ the belief in evolutionary theory not because Nick blindly followed his prestigious teachers or succumbed to his pressing peers since he wanted to avoid internal conflicts at all costs, but because such a context is one that provides fertile ground for arriving at true beliefs. After all, why should Nick have chosen Harvard of all universities as his place of belief-inducement if not precisely because he thought that there he was more likely to arrive at true beliefs?

3.3

Practical Norms

Practical norms can be regarded as constitutive norms of the will or agency just as theoretical norms can be regarded as constitutive norms of belief and logic. What Carroll argued with respect to epistemic norms is true for practical norms, too. We do not apply practical norms but we deliberate and act in terms of them. Only if one identifies social norms with practical norms will one think that practical norms are optional, that is, that one can apply them or not, that one can act in accordance with them or not. As an illustration of a philosopher taking

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such a view consider Engel (2001, 27) who argues that epistemic norms, unlike practical norms, “do not depend on social recognition”: “[T]he most usual notion of normativity, according to which a norm is a rule that a subject recognizes, that he can accept, reject, or violate. In that sense “norm” means “reason” to act, or to believe. These norms are such that a subject is free to choose them or not, to accept them or not, and for which he can be sanctioned by others. But there is a further sense of norm. There are conceptual norms, pertaining to concepts and beliefs. They are not such that one is free to choose them, to acknowledge them or not, or to be sanctioned. Actually they are such that a subject cannot violate them. If he did he would not have concepts, beliefs or judgments. Such conceptual norms do not depend on social recognition.”

Engel seems to argue that practical norms are not constitutive norms since they are socially authorized and therefore not objective like epistemic norms. But this misses not only the fundamental sense in which practical reasons do not depend on social recognition but also the sense in which epistemic norms do depend on social recognition. Even though it is correct that knowledge of logical and epistemic norms does not arise from instruction or from sanctioning, norms of thought of rational animals have to be publicly or socially ascribed to them, which distinguishes these norms from the instrumental norms of intelligent animals where no such ascription by others is required. Norms of thought are social insofar as their realization in the individual subject depends on mutual public ascription and the possibility of correction by others (“Do you really believe this?”). However, Engel is certainly correct in arguing that what an epistemic norm is, that is, what it means to hold a belief, say, is not determined by public ascription or social recognition. But below I will argue pace Engel that what it means to choose an action is not determined by public recognition or public ascription either. There is an important sense in which we are not free to choose or abandon reasons, as we like. For one thing, this is because it seems that as self-conscious beings we have to act for reasons and choose ends as part of action maxims that include both means and ends. For another thing, to act for a reason is to be bound by the law that one has given oneself and that one cannot reject at will. So in what sense then are practical norms not optional, in what sense do we have to deliberate and act in terms of them instead of applying them? Korsgaard (2009, 46 – 47) has shown that one can neither explain how one is motivated by nor how one is bound by the hypothetical imperative to take the means to one’s ends by appealing to the application of the imperative or practical norm itself. This is because the hypothetical imperative is itself

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“the general principle of practical judgment – the practical application of a universal thought about what must be done or what would be good to do to a particular movement in the world.” (Korsgaard 2009, 47)

For example, if my end is to cook a tasty dinner tonight and if the Delicatessen round the corner offers lamb chops (which I love) at a special price, then I should, all things considered, take this as an opportunity to realize my end of cooking a tasty dinner. To will an end implies that one must also will the means to realize the end in the sense that willing the means to realize the end is constitutive of willing the end, which is not likewise required for one’s wishing or hoping some state of affair to become true. Just as believing is not merely to entertain a solitary mental state in one’s mind but committing oneself to direct one’s thinking in a certain direction, so willing or intending something is not just to entertain a solitary mental state but to determine oneself to doing something now or in the future in order to realize the end in a justifiable and sensible way, which is what I take Korsgaard to mean by saying that the hypothetical imperative is the “practical application of universal thought”.185 But what exactly is it that one does when one buys lamb chops in order to cook a tasty dinner? One acts on one’s conception of the whole maxim that describes the action, including both means and ends. But if this is correct, then we can see in what sense Korsgaard (2009, 68 – 72) is right in claiming that the hypothetical imperative and the categorical imperative are not really two distinct principles of rationality (i.e. principles that are constitutive of the activity of reason). Norms that are constitutive of our will must be practical norms. By this I merely want to emphasize Anscombe’s ([1957]1963) insight that the structure inherent in action is a teleological or means-end structure. Consider : If one realizes one’s end to cook a tasty dinner by way of making lamb chops one does in a certain sense two things at the same time: cooking a tasty dinner and preparing lamb chops. But since one does not perform two distinct actions but only one it seems reasonable to say that we can describe one and the same behaviour in two different ways. The behaviour can be described as ‘cooking a tasty dinner’ and as ‘buying and preparing lamb chops’. So we have two descriptions of a single action. These descriptions are related to one another as means to ends or ends to means. More generally speaking, what the action maxim ‘I will do act A for the sake of end E’ gives us is a special relation between different possible descriptions of a single intentional action, which motivates the idea that we cannot separate the action description from the description of the intention (as I have argued be185 So to follow the hypothetical imperative is constitutive of having a will, which of course does not mean that if one violates the imperative from time to time that one forfeits one’s will; the hypothetical imperative is not an analytic principle.

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fore).186 This relation consists in an instrumental order that is constitutive of intentionally performed actions (I will say more about this in chapter 5). But the instrumental order inherent in action, in my view, does in no way show that the normative scope of practical reason is limited to instrumental reason. In fact, quite the opposite seems to be the case. Although rational action is intelligible in terms of means-end relations – in the sense that there is an instrumentally rational order inherent in action – more is needed for some behaviour to go through as an action. In other words, some behaviour does not count as an action merely on the grounds that someone successfully took the means to her ends. To my mind this strongly suggests that the hypothetical imperative alone cannot provide rational animals with reasons for action. It is the maxim that, if it can be willed as justifiable (or as good for its own sake), that provides us with reasons for action. So, strictly speaking, what makes the hypothetical imperative the practical application of a universal thought, when it does, is that one acts in accordance with one’s conception of a categorical principle – or at least, as we shall see, a potentially categorical principle – i.e. one’s conception that doing-A-for-the-sake-of-B or doing this for the sake of that is worth doing, that one’s response to a certain object, end or state of affair is appropriate. I have formulated a similar thought in the previous chapter by saying that as agents we have to act as one, that is, we have to act on reasons, at least normally, that unify us with ourselves and potential others. This is a requirement only for self-conscious beings, as we have seen with Korsgaard, since self-consciousness puts the agent at a distance to herself. A unifying reason is what Korsgaard (1996, 256) calls a reason that “in the full light of reflection” you could will as a universal law. There is a problem with this suggestion, however, since its proceduralist underpinnings seem to make it vulnerable to the objection that moral and other practical reasons more generally cannot be derived from a formal procedure of correct rule alone since procedures of thought alone cannot tell us whether a particular situation is one that has a practical claim on us in the first place, i.e. whether the circumstances are such that the situation counts as falling under a certain norm or not. To the extent that this objection holds it remains unclear how the categorical imperative can provide us with reasons what to do, assuming 186 Accordingly the reason for an action cannot be conceived as separate from the action. As we shall see in chapter 5 this is a problem for Davidson’s account of action understood as causation, that is, action that is taken to be caused by primary reasons, i.e. belief-desire pairs that cause the action in the right way. The condition to “cause in the right way”, however, presupposes a not merely contingent causal relation between the action and the reason. Davidson cannot account for this because he argues that the reason serves as the separate cause of the action.

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that hypothetical norms cannot be substantively guiding principles themselves. Take for illustration Aristotle’s (1985, 1108b) practical syllogism discussed by Millgram (2005, 136): “When the hoplites attack, you’d better charge. The hoplites are attacking. Charge!”

The difficulty here is to know what counts as an attack by the hoplites and what doesn’t, i.e. what falls under the concept “the hoplites attack” and what doesn’t. The hypothetical rule that we should charge when the hoplites attack tells us nothing about this. Millgram drives this important point home well when he argues that we can go wrong here in two main ways: We may count too many situations as falling under the hypothetical norm, which results in our drawing the conclusion to attack too often, that is, even in situations where it should not be drawn. For example, we might take a certain movement by the hoplites as a sign of their attack whereas if we had looked more carefully we would have seen that it was only a yawning. This is the case when our rashness leads us to treat, as Millgram (2005, 136) writes, “too few circumstances as defeating conditions”. The second way in which we can go wrong is by doing the opposite, i.e. by treating “too many circumstances as defeating conditions”, which results in our not drawing the conclusion of the syllogism when we actually should draw it. The latter may be an expression not of rashness but of cowardice. So unless one somehow already knows what to do, the role of practical deliberation and practical judgment normally is to arrive at a well-adjusted balance in one’s practical judgment which not only requires a certain amount of flexibility and improvisation (Millgram 1997, 61 – 63) but also requires the exercise of the virtues. In the example of the hoplites, such exercise forbids to act either from cowardice or from rashness. It requires that one acts from the right or virtuous mean that lies between these two vices, that is, from courage, which of course is what the categorical imperative tells us to do. But the problem remains insofar one’s (imperfect) duty to be courageous tells us neither anything about how to adequately execute the courageous act nor about “when the situation itself is important enough to call for it”, as Larmore (1981, 279) puts it. For example, if charging an attack of the hoplites could do nothing to stop them, it is not clear whether courage would really call for a charge assuming that the hoplites attacked. So drawing the right conclusion in the circumstances requires good practical judgment, which includes the close attention to situational factors. Hence deliberating well is not, as Korsgaard sometimes seems to suggest, a matter of a purely deductive or formal enterprise, i.e. a matter of deriving practical reasons

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from a formal procedure of correct rule.187 In my view this supports Velleman’s (2004, 36 – 37) suggestion that the categorical imperative understood as a test of morality that tells us only to act on morally justifiable or universalizable maxims (i.e. to reject morally non-justifiable maxims) is less problematic than understood as belonging to a theory of practical reason since the test of morality unlike practical deliberation does not have to tell us which particular action we must choose, i.e. it must not give us substantive reasons for action. In other words, understood as a test of morality, it is not the role of the categorical imperative to tell us what would be the appropriate response to a certain situation where morally or practically better or worse responses are possible, i.e. where there are several permissible acts to perform but where we do not know which of these we should perform in the given situation.188 I will now suggest that Korsgaard’s (1996, 101) claim that practical identities are reason-providing can be seen as a reaction to the problem of the emptiness of the categorical imperative mentioned above and to account for the importance of a theory of practical reason vis-—-vis the categorical imperative that helps the agent decide what to do in a certain situation. This should come as no surprise since as we have seen with Korsgaard in chapter 1, self-consciousness by introducing a distance within the self requires that the self-conscious subjects need self-conceptions to act, that is, practical identities that are more or less contingent self-conceptions with which the self identifies and under which it can value itself. And to regard one’s practical judgments as potentially defeasible just is to pull oneself together to act as one by determining when it is not defeasible.

3.4

Practical Identities and the Moral Identity We Share

Korsgaard (1996, 243) claims that our contingent self-conceptions or practical identities – e.g. as a philosopher, as a thief, or as a father, etc. – give rise to principles of choice with which the agent identifies in choosing a certain action not just now but also in the future, provided that the circumstances are relevantly similar. A practical identity as Korsgaard (1996, 101) understands it, is “a conception of one’s identity”, “a description under which you value yourself, a description under which you find your life worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking.”

A practical identity so understood thus is also a principle of identification through which one recognizes one’s later self as equally real like one’s self now. 187 Below I shall provide some evidence that Korsgaard is aware of this. 188 Cf. Larmore (1981, 279).

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This is what I take Korsgaard to mean when she argues that to make up one’s mind requires a stable practical stance that covers past and future acts of the will and from which one can conceive of one’s reason not as a “fleeting impulse” (Korsgaard [1996]2000a, 231 – 232) that competes with other such impulses in terms of their strength but as “an instance of a general type” that refers back to past acts of one’s will and forward to future acts of one’s will.189 This is why Korsgaard also thinks that our practical identities themselves as various realizations of our most fundamental human identity arise from the choices we make or the reasons we act from, alone or together with others.190 “An instance of a general type”, as we have already seen, has the structure of a subjective maxim that includes both means and ends that one can will as good or at least as permissible. This is the sense in which the form of our practical reasons is universal.191 What is more, what is a reason from one practical identity need not be a reason from another practical identity. For example, what is a reason to do from our self-conception as a citizen, to pay one’s taxes, say, need not also be a reason from our practical identity as a philosopher. To repeat, practical identities so understood are not fixed but are constituted through our identifying with principles of choosing to act in particular ways in particular circumstances. As a good father I am focused on the well-being of my family and in situations that call forth my acting as a father I will reliably do so. This does not mean that normally one can adopt just any practical identity one likes; our practical 189 So Korsgaard (1996, 234) is right to say that “if I am to be an agent, I cannot change my law without changing my mind, and I cannot change my mind without a reason” (…) thus “we cannot change our minds about just anything”. A similar point is made by Millgram (1997, 18 – 20) when he argues that we cannot desire at will due to the “inferential demands” that desires make on us in our deliberations. To act on a desire is to think that one should act on it. If I have a desire to do something, i.e. pursue a certain object, then I take it that I have a reason to act on that desire. 190 This is why I think that Ruth Chang (2009, 261) misunderstands Korsgaard when she argues that according to Korsgaard we have the reasons we have because of our practical identities and not the other way around. As I understand Korsgaard (2009, 83), her point is that in choosing actions (that we can will as good) we thereby constitute ourselves into agents, i.e. by choosing actions or acting on potentially sufficient reasons we constitute what we essentially are, namely persons or beings that act on principles that are constitutive of the mental workings of rational beings. That is, we create our fundamental human identity through taking considerations to be reasons. Our more contingent practical identities whose importance for us comes from the value of humanity cannot for this reason be contrary in their nature to moral value. Another way of putting this point, I think, is to say that since our most fundamental practical identity provides the form of our reasons (including the non-moral ones), conflict is only possible between sufficient or substantive reasons of morality and those reasons that spring from our more contingent identities (Korsgaard 2009, 100 – 126). As I understand it, the latter reasons differ not in form from the former ones but in content. 191 Note that this universalizability requirement seems to be weak.

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identities cannot be adopted or abandoned at leeway as they are tied not only to our particular circumstances but also to our emotions and desires that cannot be adopted at will.192 But there is a second consideration that suggests that practical reasons cannot be rejected or adopted at will. Since a reason is also a principle that one has made one’s own by gaining insight into the worth of its maxim one is bound by that reason until one rejects it (perhaps one suddenly recognizes that it never has been a good reason) or until one recognizes that it needs to be further adjusted or revised in light of special circumstances. Practical identities are intimately connected with an agent’s desires, ambitions and emotions since what presents us with potential grounds for action in the first place is our sentient or affective nature that reaches out for incentives (Korsgaard 1996, 243; 2009, 22). So we must distinguish between desires as potentially reason-responsive (i.e. those that present us with potential reasons and that are capable of taking on the psychological role of reason, if you like) and mere wants or urges. For it to be possible that desires are presented to us as potential reasons, desires must be intrinsically reason-responsive. This important insight tends to get missed if desires are identified with what Barbara Herman (1996, 46) has called “original orectic states”. As Herman argues it is one thing to be in a physiological condition of deprivation, which makes no distinction between hunger and thirst but quite another thing to have an intentional state like a desire for food, say. An organism that is in an original orectic state does not have a desire in the sense of an intentional attitude with a certain object. I think that especially in the Humean tradition where chains of action explanation are terminated by way of “unmotivated desires”, i.e. desires that one just has and that therefore cannot be further explained, we find a certain tendency to understand ultimate or unmotivated desires as orectic states. But surely, our very notion of giving reasons in explaining action gets mystified if in our action explanation we adhere to the last element in a historical development of desire as something like an orectic state or physiological disposition. Action explanation rather has to do with what one thinks is the appropriate reaction or response to a certain object, end or state of affair. From what has been said, it becomes clear that according to Korsgaard (1996, 243; 2009, 22), a practical reason is never just a desire or an incentive alone but a conjunction of an incentive or affective state and a principle of choice. The reason of a chosen action has therefore two aspects. It is an incentive because the material of a reason must respond to our sentient nature as animals with desires. 192 Thereby the commonly held worry that reasons can be “bootstrapped” out of the blue as Broome (1999) thinks or that reasons can be freely accepted or rejected, as Engel argues, can be dispelled.

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It is under the aspect of incentive that the agent is presented with an action that she might perform since her desires or inclinations ‘reach out’ for incentives, so to speak. But the aspect under which the agent eventually chooses to do the action – if she chooses it – is a principle of choice.193 More precisely, the aspect under which one chooses it is the description under which one can value it. Of course, such value need not be moral value since not all practical reasons are moral reasons. So unlike mere wants or urges, desires understood as reasonresponsive are essentially evaluative. Desires must be reason-responsive for selfconscious creatures whose self-consciousness puts them at a distance to themselves (and other selves). The distance which self-consciousness opens up must be bridged in order for an agent to act. That is, in order to act she must decide whether she accepts what her desire presents to her as a reason, whether she should endorse it as reason, or not. Self-conceptions that are also constituted by professional and personal relationships, or social relationships more generally, have a fundamental function in the lives of self-conscious beings. By providing us with substantive reasons for action they help us choose and select particular actions.194 But if our reasons 193 There are passages, however, where Korsgaard renders the relation between incentive and reason rather misleadingly such that the distinction between mere want and desire is obscured. The problematic passage I have in mind is where Korsgaard (1996, 240 – 241) writes: “[A]t the moment of action these impulses [those that spring from our practical identities] are the incentives, the passively confronted material upon which the active will operates, and not the agent or active will itself.” (my emphasis) The problem with this formulation, I think, is that it makes it hard to see how a passive thing like an impulse can be endorsed by the active will as a reason unless the impulse itself is at least potentially reason-responsive and therefore not entirely passive. I suggest that we try to explain this difficult passage by what Korsgaard (2009, 122 – 124) says elsewhere in her work, distinguishing the moment just before the choice and the moment of choice itself (or right thereafter). Before we choose to do something, Korsgaard thinks, we perceive the incentive from a critical perspective and thus as potentially a mere inclination. After all, we experience our natural incentives through our inclinations or desires, or in Korsgaard’s (2009, 123) words: “[A]n inclination just is the operation of a natural incentive upon you.” At the moment of decision or shortly afterwards, however, the agent regards the incentive no longer in its aspect as inclination or desire – or more precisely, in its operation on her as effecting some inclination – but in its aspect as the feature about the object or action which she endorses as a reason for pursuing it. I think what Korsgaard means by the “passively confronted material” is the simple fact that our inclinations, worked upon by incentives, are not under our direct control. We cannot desire at will. So strictly speaking, the passage quoted above would have to read “just before the moment of action these impulses are the incentives, the passively confronted material upon which the active will operates, and not the agent or active will itself.” (my emphasis) 194 So I think that reasons are all but altruistic in the sense of ‘self-less’. They are expressive of the very self whose reasons they are. Therefore I think that it is at best misleading when philosophers sometimes distinguish reasons from desires in saying that reasons, unlike desires, prescribe an action directly without referring to the agent’s own motives or in-

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partly spring from our particular practical identities, are then not all reasons agent-relative after all and must then not the universalizability requirement be interpreted in the weak sense? Korsgaard’s (1996, 119 – 123) reply is that acting for reasons is also to change places with oneself now and with oneself later, which presupposes that one recognizes what one’s self now has in common with one’s later self, namely that she has to act for some reason, i.e. that she has to have some practical identity or normative self-conception and that without having some such self-conception her life would be without meaning because it would be without value. But to value anything at all, which we must in order to act at all, we must value ourselves to start with (cf. chapter 1). This recognition of one’s final good as a normative good does not spring from one particular practical identity but rather from the most fundamental identity that one shares with all other human beings, one’s identity as a moral being, that is, a being who confers value on himself or herself as a human being, a being who has to take some selfconception as normative for herself or himself. The latter, then, is dependent on a fundamental practical identity that forbids one to act in certain ways, i.e. that gives one sufficient reasons not to do certain things. However, it could still be objected that by saying that human agents have to act for reasons nothing has been done to show what practical principle is the most fundamental, much less that it is the moral law. That is, it could be questioned whether the most fundamental practical identity or self-conception under which we value ourselves is the moral law. For the time being I think we can at least exclude from the field of possible candidates for the most fundamental law the following law that I have mentioned in chapter 1: “I will do things I desire to do simply because I desire to do them”. Although such a law requires that one treat one’s local inclinations as reasons it cannot be a unifying law. The life of an agent who gave herself such a law would be arbitrary in the sense that it would be completely “dependent on the accidental coherence of his desires”, as Korsgaard (2009, 169) puts it. To repeat, it is characterized by the fact that it “is really for its own good rather than for the good of the whole”. (Korsgaard 2009, 163) Assuming for the moment that Korsgaard is correct that our moral identity is good for the whole and thus qualifies as the most fundamental practical identity, I think we should understand the phrase ‘most fundamental’ as the condition of possibility of all value, and not just moral value. This does not entail that one’s moral identity cannot conflict with other more contingent practical identities in particular circumstances or that it must necessarily have more normative force than one’s identities that spring from one’s relationships to particular persons. terests. This makes it seem as if reasons, in contrast to desires, are wholly disinterested and other-regarding. Cf. Searle’s view of reasons as desire-independent that I have discussed in chapter 1.

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(Korsgaard 1996, 126 – 128) The sense in which, on this assumption, the moral identity is good for the whole, I think, is that it conceptually rules out conflicts that spring from practical identities that are intrinsically contrary to moral value, such as the identity of a murderer. As Korsgaard (1996, 126) writes: “There is no coherent point of view from which it [an immoral form of identity] can be endorsed in the full light of reflection” because such reflection would lead one to question the value of this form of identity as a murderer since its own importance is supposed to derive from the value of humanity. But how does this square with Korsgaard’s (1996, 257) claim as we shall see in due course, that the murderer who endorses killing someone as justified for some end other than self-defence has a reason for killing? Here Korsgaard expresses the view that the agent by endorsing some desire as a reason for action thereby confers validity on it in the sense that she is bound by the law she makes for herself until she makes another. But if this is so, doesn’t Korsgaard’s account of normativity lack an objective foundation?195 In the next section I will show that there really is a fundamental tension to be found in Korsgaard’s work between the idea she emphasizes in her earlier work (1996, 257), namely that reflective endorsement alone carries out all the normative work (i.e. authority or autonomy is the source of obligation) and the other idea that the normativity of a reason rather depends on the evaluative status or goodness of the action that it describes (2008; 2009), i.e. on the reason being a sufficient one, which is not contingent on the agent’s practical identity or her actual motivational set.

3.4.1 A Crucial Ambiguity in Korsgaard’s Account of Normativity Before illustrating the above-mentioned tension, however, I will briefly address a more general but no less fundamental objection against the Kantian idea that a reason is an endorsement of a desire, or more precisely, of a certain subjective maxim ‘to-do-A-for-the-sake-of-B’. The objection, roughly, is that we do act for reasons all the time without every time having to stand back and ask ourselves whether we could endorse a certain maxim as a reason for action or not. Not only 195 For this common objection see Velleman (2004, 279) when he claims that we can be guided by practical reason only if our willing of the validity of our reasons does not fall together with our willing to act for these reasons. The validity of reasons is not subject to our will. For essentially the same point see Larmore (2008, 112 – 122) and Cohen (1996, 167 – 188) against Korsgaard. I think Korsgaard can meet the objection by arguing that when we endorse some consideration as a reason we do not thereby necessarily confer correctness on it. We confer subjective value on it – after all, reflective endorsement may not have reached all the way down. I will come back to this point later.

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is it not necessary to do so, but sometimes it would be even harmful, for instance when we lack the time to do so. Unfortunately there are passages in Korsgaard (2009, 162 – 163) that seem to support the objector’s complaint, for example when she writes that action is autonomous only if the agent sufficiently reflects on her own (or someone else’s) inclinations before she acts.196 However, I do not think that we should read her in this way. Elsewhere in her work Korsgaard (2008, fn25, 202) writes that we may be immediately moved to act on someone else’s reasons, for example by natural virtue such as empathy or sympathy. Moreover, Korsgaard also explicitly (2011b, 390) acknowledges that sometimes it would be simply irrational to reflect before one acts because there is no time for reflection (for example when one has to take flight). Finally, by arguing that practical identities provide the agent with reasons for action that need not be moral reasons, Korsgaard implicitly acknowledges that acting for reasons does not require constant reflection, not least because we, through acting on reasons, we acquire and internalize our practical identities and our practical reasons. Therefore, I think that the notoriously misleading metaphor of ‘standing back from one’s inclinations’ applies primarily to two specific moments in our lives as practical deliberators. The first concerns the moment where the dependent reasoner learns to become independent by distancing herself from her immediate desires and by learning with the help of others what it means to give and accept reasons for action. This is when she learns how to respond appropriately to things she considers to be good. The second moment refers to difficult and/or new practical situations where the agent does not yet or no longer know what to do. I think this can be illustrated by Korsgaard’s (1996, 101) distinguishing between obligations and reasons. While all obligations are reasons not all reasons are obligations or moral reasons. Reasons, Korsgaard (ibid.) writes, “express your identity, obligations spring from what that identity forbids”. So obligations arise from situations in which the agent perceives her potentially endorsing something as a reason as posing a threat to her identity. Obligation, as Korsgaard makes explicit, “arises from reflective rejection”, not from reflective endorsement. When we perceive the potential acceptance of a certain desire as a reason for action as a threat to our identity we must reject the desire as rational motive. As I understand it, the practical identities that provide us with reasons function like deep-seated commitments but which are not immune against revision. Although our practical identities are a bit like the intelligent animal’s lenses through which it makes sense of the world, we can question them and the reasons 196 This claim also squares badly with her other claim that the murderer does have a normative reason for killing even though her reflective performance is not successful.

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they provide. Such commitments and the reasons they give rise to can be seen as usually governing our practical deliberations by operating in the background of deliberating. Practical commitments considerably restrict our possible choices of action by determining what we count as reasonable to do in the first place. Our practical identities enable us to reliably constrain what we find worth doing. Thus, practical commitments resemble epistemic norms in that they are, at least normally, not themselves the subject of reflection. This is why with regard to practical commitments it takes time to consciously scrutinize them and bring them to the foreground of practical deliberation. A perceived threat to one’s identity is such a moment that can bring to the foreground one’s deep-seated commitments. But I think it need not necessarily be the case that one then rejects some consideration as a potential reason; it is just as possible that one comes to doubt one’s commitments themselves. This would indicate an internal conflict between two contingent practical identities or between one’s moral identity and one’s contingent identities. But in ordinary cases we treat our desires and those of others as reasons per default “so long as there is no reason why not”. (Korsgaard 1996, 140) However, I think that the phrase “so long as there is no reason why not” points to a fundamental ambiguity in Korsgaard’s treatment of the practical significance of the reflective endorsement test (whether one can will a certain maxim as a universal law), which also affects its normative significance. Let us first start with the test’s practical significance. Consider Korsgaard’s distinction between “a provisionally universal maxim” and “a universal maxim”. A maxim is provisionally universal, according to Korsgaard (2009, 75), if one is committed to revise one’s maxim “in the face of exceptions”. To say that one’s maxim is provisionally universal is to say that it is a provisionally universal reason or principle, i.e. a principle that provisionally “applies to every case of a certain sort, unless there is some good reason why not”. (Korsgaard 2009, 73) Note however, that this principle itself tells us nothing about how to recognize “exceptions”, that is, about the defeasibility conditions of a certain situation (cf. my discussion of practical syllogisms above). Korsgaard (2009, 73) indirectly admits the limited scope of the applicability of the categorical imperative to do what one can will as a universal law when she emphasizes that universal maxims “may be quite specific to the situation at hand”. Although she does not elaborate on this qualification I think that we can understand it along roughly the following lines. To judge whether some particular situation really falls under the application of a universal principle, i.e. whether it is really an instance of exactly that sort of case to which the maxim applies, may crucially depend on having further information or on having certain practical and intellectual virtues and sensibilities about which the (provisionally) universal principle itself has nothing substantive to say. It requires

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good practical judgment in the sense discussed above. Take as an example Kant’s famous dictum that one should never lie, not even in the case of a murderer standing at the front door demanding to know where she can find her victim. One’s good practical judgment rather requires that one realizes that under such non-ideal conditions as that of the murderer at the front door one is not required to be honest to someone who is not honest himself and who uses the potential victim (and oneself) merely as a means.197 I think that the ambiguity comes down to the following. Korsgaard seems to defend a view of practical judgment and practical reason that is essentially deductive. Particular cases of a certain sort are to be subsumed under a (provisionally) universal principle. At the same time, however, Korsgaard admits that since the universal principle may be very specific, practical reflection will not so much be a deductive enterprise but rather a matter of inductive deliberating that requires sensibilities for particularities and for perceiving the general in those particularities. So there is evidence that Korsgaard has considerably relaxed the connection between reflective deliberation, motivation, and the normativity of reasons when she admits that universal maxims can be very specific. Thereby she at least implicitly acknowledges the practical importance of perceiving and responding to the relevant exceptions and particularities of a certain situation in order to form a good judgment about what to do. But thereby the important role of the reflective endorsement test for practical deliberation is undermined since it seems a rather static because deductive test of application. Korsgaard seems to have become aware of this problem in her later work where she no longer speaks of the reflective endorsement test but rather of something like an Aristotelian principle that defines objectively good action, action that is good for its own sake. Korsgaard (2008, 217) agrees with Aristotle, as we have already seen, that: “A good action is one that embodies the orthos logos or right principle: it is done at the right time, in the right way, to the right object, and […] with the right aim.”

Korsgaard thereby takes seriously the practical significance of being able to adequately perceive and respond to the particularities of a certain situation, without being able, not surprisingly, to tell us how exactly one must go about such deliberating. For as Larmore (1981) rightly points out, perception of good reasons may be compared to an act of creativity about which little can be said in positive terms apart from that it requires practical wisdom and the virtues. That is, it requires experience, training, activity of reason, and the right sentiments 197 See Korsgaard ([1996]2000a, 133 – 158) for an interesting interpretation of Kant on whether there is a right to lie.

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accompanying one’s activity of reason. I will now argue that this provides Korsgaard with a reply against those who, quite understandably, accuse her of not being able to account for the objectively normative force of reasons. Since for Korsgaard the autonomous reflection or self-legislation provides the sources of normativity,198 she draws a tight connection between an agent’s reasons and her motivating states, which is why she is sometimes considered, like Bernard Williams (1981, 102), to be a reason internalist. An internalist about reasons holds that a consideration R is an internal reason, in a definitional sense, if its being a reason depends on its capacity to potentially motivate the agent to act. R is an external reason if its being a reason does not depend on the requirement of potential motivation. The fact that Korsgaard explicitly tries to avoid Kant’s failure to show how seemingly external considerations can motivate an agent to act by letting the reflective endorsement test do all the normative work supports this internalist reading of her account of practical reasons. If an agent’s normative considerations are intimately related to the agent’s practical identities, or in Williams dictum, to the elements in one’s “motivational set,” from which reflective deliberation starts, there is no mystery of how such reasons can motivate. However, this line of reasoning comes at a considerable cost, as William J. FitzPatrick (2004) has convincingly argued. For if the agent cannot successfully carry through the reflective endorsement test – perhaps she lacks the relevant information or she lacks the starting points of sensitivity to certain values that would allow the agent to perceive R as a normative reason based on these values – then a certain consideration R will not count as a normative reason for the agent according to the reasons internalist since the agent cannot be motivated by it. But then Korsgaard would have to say that unless a certain consideration is potentially motivating for the agent it is not a reason (which is in fact what she seems to be committed to saying). This, however, squares badly with the status of moral reasons since these are thought to have objective normative force irrespective of whether the agent is motivated by them or not. It is not clear whether according to Korsgaard an agent not motivated by moral reasons still has an objectively normative reason since in that agent’s deliberation the potential reason has not survived reflective endorsement even though it should have. To see the problem, consider Korsgaard’s (1996, 257) stand in discussing the normative reasons that an agent with the practical identity of a Mafioso has. She admits that “there is a real sense in which” the Mafioso is bound by the law he 198 More precisely, the process of deliberation of reflective endorsement is the one by which the agent tests her subjective action maxim whether it could be willed as a potentially universal principle. In case of correct deliberation the agent’s subjective reasons are also objective ones. (Korsgaard 2011a, 7)

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makes for himself, which by assumption is not the moral law, until he makes another. This is, as we have seen, due to the fact that we cannot change our practical identities or reasons at will. However, Korsgaard also states that the Mafioso’s law by which he binds himself is real not just in a psychological sense but in a normative sense, too, which is because, as Korsgaard (ibid.) writes, “it is the endorsement, not the explanations and arguments that provide the material for the endorsement that does the normative work”. Although such a subjective reason since it would not survive the reflective endorsement test is not an objective reason, this does not mean that it is less real, in the normative sense, for the Mafioso. Korsgaard would probably say that from the perspective of the Mafioso there simply is a reason to kill, or no reason not to kill in order to save the honour of her family, say. So is Korsgaard vulnerable to FitzPatrick’s (2004, 302) objection that any account of practical reason must accommodate the important intuition that some considerations – e.g. not to commit murder – are objectively normative reasons i.e. obligations for an agent despite her inability to be motivated by them as a consequence of her practical identity? The problem with Korsgaard’s view seems to be that she cannot account for the fact that even though it is often the case that an agent’s practical identity or psychological set-up affects the evaluative goodness of the action in question this goodness need not amount to moral goodness or rightness. Granted, whether the fact that there is a wine tasting event is a good reason for me to attend depends on whether I am sensitive to and skilled with regard to enjoying the pleasure of drinking good wine. But there are cases in which the normative force of a certain consideration, e.g. about murder, is independent of the agent’s contingent practical identities. That a certain agent has the practical identity of a Mafioso does not seem to change anything about the fact that she simply has no reason to commit murder. But of course, Korsgaard does not say that the Mafioso has an objectively normative reason to commit murder. She says that from his own practical perspective he is normatively committed to doing something that internally conflicts with his non-contingent moral identity, but which for some reason he does not see or even cannot see. On these grounds she can point to the intimate connection between evaluative goodness and reasons that she expresses in her Aristotelian principle of good action. What grounds reasons here as objective is not so much the reflective endorsement test carried through correctly but rather the evaluative status or goodness of the agent’s action which, in contrast to the agent’s reflective deliberation, is not contingent on her actual motivational set. So Korsgaard had better not make a move to an idealized reasoner as when she writes that under the full light of reflection the Mafioso would be motivated by the consideration that murder is wrong. The problem with any account of idealized or perfectly rational deliberator is that what is a reason for the phro-

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nimos or perfectly rational deliberator need not be one from the perspective of the imperfectly rational or corrupted deliberator.199 In other words, there is a gap between, in our example, the practical identity of the Mafioso and the practical identity from which the Mafioso could see that murder is wrong, or that what he is doing is not justified killing but murder. Only from the perspective of an agent already distanced from the perspective of the Mafioso could he come to have this insight. Thus it is not clear how it is that the actual agent, namely the agent with the practical identity of the Mafioso, as FitzPatrick (2004, 309) puts it, “has a reason to care about what he would care about if he were to (…) go through the idealized deliberations with corrected and improved background information – regardless of how different the resulting concerns might be from what he actually cares about.”

So there remains an undeniable ambiguity in Korsgaard’s treatment of the normativity of reasons insofar it is not clear in what sense the Mafioso must take someone else’s reason, for example the reason not to be killed, seriously or as his own. This brings us back to Korsgaard’s controversial claim about the normativity of reasons, i.e. that one has to take one another’s reasons as normative for oneself.

3.5

Two Objections and Two Replies

What we have seen so far is that as practical agents one has to act for some reasons or principles, or in Velleman’s (2009, 46) words, we have “to be responsive to recognizable kinds of things” in our actions and deliberations.200 But why should these “recognizable kinds of things” in general be good sorts of things, i.e. things that we value as good under some description? Or, more poignantly, why must such a description be one under which you can value your actions and yourself as a moral agent, as Korsgaard emphasizes? Couldn’t the self-conception that is constitutive of our agency, as Velleman (2009, fn8) thinks, be “a description under which your actions and reactions make sense to you in causal-explanatory terms”? Korsgaard’s (1996, 129ff) reply comes in the form of a transcendental argument when she claims that in order to value anything at all, that is, to have any 199 For a similar criticism see Hennig (2008). 200 Note that this way of putting it does not exclude non-human animals since they are also capable of being “responsive to recognizable kinds of things”. One way in which we can formulate the crucial difference between rational and non-rational animals, as I understand it, is that rational animals self-consciously grasp that they have to be responsive to recognizable kinds of things in order to be unified agents.

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evaluative self-conception and thus any norms of choosing actions at all, we must value ourselves, i.e. our own humanity. If we agree that we are creatures who do in fact value things we must as a consequence grant that what makes this possible is that we value ourselves (and others) as ends in themselves to begin with. Accordingly, Korsgaard (1996, 125) claims: “[W]hat makes morality special is that it springs from a form of identity which cannot be rejected unless we are prepared to reject practical normativity, or the existence of practical reasons, altogether.”

Let me try and reconstruct Korsgaard’s argument by drawing on considerations of Korsgaard’s that I have discussed in chapter 1. Something is a good sort of thing, if it is, primarily for the animal. But something can be a good sort of thing for an animal only if that animal has a final good herself, that which Korsgaard calls “conscious self-flourishing”. Thus I would say that sentient animals qua their nature are interested in or drawn to what are good or valuable sorts of things for them (although we shall see in chapter 5 that not everything that is a good sort of thing is thereby also a good thing), which is to acknowledge the claim that sentient animals qua their nature are valuing creatures. As self-conscious animals with a sentient nature, however, it seems that we do something more when we accept a certain consideration as valuable or good for us, namely as a reason for action. We thereby assign ourselves a status of a final good, something that is good for its own sake, i.e. normatively good. (Korsgaard 2007a, 29) So through acting for reasons we conceive of our final good not only as naturally good but as normatively good. However, someone who acknowledges the normative value of her own humanity as a sentient reason-giver must accept that, since she shares that humanity with others, she must be obligated by others in the same way that she is obligated by herself. What I think lies at the heart of Korsgaard’s argument is the compelling idea that to take one another’s reasons seriously or as one’s own just means to take one another’s shared human identity seriously. Talking about self-conscious animals, we can agree with Velleman that selfunderstanding will be among the things that such a creature values. The question is why we should think that a desire for self-understanding in causal-explanatory terms is more plausibly constitutive of our rational agency, as Velleman claims, than an evaluative self-conception as a moral being as Korsgaard suggests? Now, Velleman (2009, 123) is certainly right that the role of reasons is to describe behaviour as intelligible or making explanatory sense and also that the explanatory force of reasons must be intimately connected with their justificatory force. However, I think Velleman goes astray when he argues that explanatory reasons must be prior to justificatory or normative reasons since the latter are merely formal, only telling the agent to do what is justified. But, as Velleman

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(2009, 123) further notes, we are not motivated by reasons by recognizing “that they justify”. As should have become clear, I fully agree with Velleman that we need substantive reasons in order for them to guide our actions and deliberations. But I do not see why the justificatory force of reasons is merely formal (and thereby opposed to explanatory reasons) as Velleman seems to claim. I have granted that a formal principle alone, i.e. without any connection to an agent’s practical identities, desires and emotions, will be of no use for creatures like ourselves. One cannot deliberate practically about ends from “the view of nowhere”.201 But this does not show, as Velleman seems to think that the reasons constitutive of paradigmatic or proper action are explanatory reasons as opposed to justificatory reasons. On the conception of motivation and rationality that I am defending here with Korsgaard, justification and explanation are more intimately connected; whether an action is good or rational is not determined by whether the agent has effectively taken the means to the intended end. Rather, some behaviour counts as an action, i.e. a good action when it is recognized to be worth doing for its own sake and is performed for this reason.202 So on this account of agency, non-defective or paradigmatic action is that in which justifiability and intelligibility fall together. The fact that our actions often depart from this ideal does not mean that we are not acting at all in those cases, i.e. the cases in which our reasons are not good; what it means is that we act badly ; just as we can be better or worse at our thinking, we can do better or worse in our acting. Therefore I disagree with Velleman concerning his claim that sense-making and motivation must be understood in causal-explanatory terms. Moreover, one especially profound way in which things can make sense to rational beings is not primary instrumental or causal-explanatory but evaluative. If this is correct, then making sense of things involves making a moral point – and probably also an aesthetic one – and therefore making sense cannot be captured in causalexplanatory terms alone. This would explain why we place value on making sense of things itself. Moreover, valuing something aesthetically and valuing something morally seem to share the following structure. To recognize an action as good, is to recognize that its parts are related in such a way that the action as a whole can be perceived as good. Likewise, by recognizing something as truly beautiful we recognize its parts connected in such a way that is required by the whole object 201 Even though we describe action in such a way as if the agent only ever acted for a single end, it should be clear that she has several ends connected in different ways to the end mentioned in the action description. 202 I will say more about this view of action in chapter 5.

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to be considered beautiful. It is not surprising therefore, that pictures or statues that we perceive as beautiful or harmonious are those that give the impression that all the parts in them are exactly where they belong in the whole; they just seem to be related as they should be related. In any case, just because we are not always motivated by our own awareness of what would make an action worth doing for its own sake, this does not show that good action should not be considered as the default case. The most widespread objection against this line of reasoning – which is the second objection that I am discussing in this section – is to say that it – unwarrantedly – infers morality from rationality. But surely, the objector claims, rationality does not entail morality or other-regardingness, where morality is exclusively conceived as a matter of how we are related to others. Henrich (2007, 109 – 110) forcefully renders the objection as follows: “Aber diese Verbindlichkeit ist von der anderen [moralischen] Verbindlichkeit grundverschieden (…). Die Forderung der Achtsamkeit auf rationale Begründungen für Handlungen ist nämlich dann schon erfüllt, wenn das überlegte Eigeninteresse als Grund für die jeweilige Handlung und für die Strategie, die ihr zugrunde liegt, einsichtig gemacht werden kann – wenn also die Person als Subjekt Übersicht über ihre Interessen hat und sie geschickt abwägt und verfolgt. Im Eigeninteresse wird es gewiss auch liegen, die Interessen anderer nicht herauszufordern (…) und mit ihnen zu einem Verhaltensarrangement mit möglichst hoher Bindungskraft zu kommen. Aber auch darauf wäre die Person doch vor sich selbst nicht in derselben Weise festgelegt, wie sie als Subjekt an die rationale Form von Begründungen gebunden ist. Wäre ein Mensch mutig, illusionslos, lebensstark und risikobereit zugleich, so würde ihn kein rationales Argument daran hindern, sich zumindest unter der Hand von allen moralischen Pflichten zu dispensieren.”

I read Henrich to say that moral norms, unlike instrumental norms, are not constitutive of rational agency.203 Rationality and morality are separate things. Henrich’s charge may seem well placed if we recall Korsgaard writing that: “We are, or should be, the most social of all the animals, since we are the ones who can form a conception of what all animals have in common.” Korsgaard could be understood as saying that we are or should be social animals insofar we are rational animals capable of forming conceptions of what animals have in common. To form a conception of what animals have in common certainly is a capacity that requires reason. But Korsgaard qualifies her claim when she says that we should be the most social animals as a consequence of this capacity, which means that we are not necessarily social or moral. So rationality alone does not entail sociality and morality. What more is needed? I think this way of putting the question is misleading because it suggests that 203 Note the parallel to Engel’s claim that practical norms are not constitutive norms.

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there must be something in addition to rationality, such as sympathy or empathy say, in order for us to be moral creatures. Many philosophers, Henrich whom I have quoted above included, seem to think that sympathy and empathy must be added to rationality in order to talk meaningfully about the subject matter of moral philosophy. However, I think Korsgaard should not be understood in this way. Her public conception of reasons, that I will look at below, makes this clear. Korsgaard (1996, 120 – 121) argues that to get from mere instrumental rationality or what she calls the “private conception of reasons” into moral terrain – or into the realm of the “public conception of reasons” – we must value our shared identity as rational and moral beings with a final good. This provides good evidence that Korsgaard thereby suggests a fundamentally different way of understanding rationality than her opponents, namely one that is a form of valuing, most fundamentally valuing oneself and others as ends in themselves, i.e. as beings with a final good. Morality so understood, in my view, is not just a matter of how we should be related to others but also how we should be related to ourselves. More poignantly, unless we can be related to ourselves in this normative way it would be difficult to understand how we could ever be related in this way to others. Henrich’s not altogether unsympathetic version of Hume’s sensible knave makes an exception of himself that proves problematic. He binds himself to act in certain principled ways that presuppose self-regard or self-valuing while at the same time refusing such regard and valuing to others. If we apply this thought to the quote above, I think we get the following result. The conception we can form of what all animals have in common, namely a final good, must be an evaluative or first-personal one instead of a third-personal one that cannot obligate the will. This is supported by our findings from chapter 2 that a human being’s basic selfrelation is evaluative and normative. If our human self-relation were merely causal-explanatory, human beings would be related to themselves in the same way as they are related to objects in the world, a view that I have argued against in chapter 2. Moreover, assuming that we have evaluative self-conceptions suggests, as I have previously claimed with Korsgaard, that these evaluative selfconceptions must be positive ones. As self-conscious creatures we need to think of ourselves as worthy of love and respect both in the eyes of ourselves and in the eyes of others in order to be flourishing as the kind of animal we are. Even if it is true that the sensible knave being wholly self-sufficient does not need such respect, he still has a reason to treat others as ends in themselves if only because without having been treated in this way by others he could not have arrived at developing respect for himself. My reply to the objection that morality and sociality are not intrinsically related to rationality is this. Granted, if we mean by rationality instrumental rationality and a capacity to reliably recognize patterns and types of things each

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of which also intelligent animals are capable of, then rationality does not entail morality and sociality. But the sort of rationality human beings exhibit wouldn’t be what it is unless they were also social and moral creatures at the same time. Another way of making this point, I think, is to show that by accepting an additive theory of rationality one falls prey to the sort of dichotomy between reason and desire I have criticized in chapter 1. Since according to an additive theory of rationality human beings have in common with intelligent higher animals instrumental rationality, but in addition to this have a capacity of reason that is the defining feature of the human animal, it is all but clear how these two fundamentally different types of rationality that operate according to their own principles can so much as interact with each other.204 In other words, it is not clear how to overcome the dichotomy between desires that merely impel the animal to satisfy her interests, and desires being reason-responsive, that guide the human animal not merely in terms of their instrumental efficacy or affective strength but in terms of the evaluative relation between means and ends. Many philosophers argue that rationality, morality and sociality are separate things by defending some version of the additive account of rationality. Velleman (2009, 76 – 77) for example argues that moral phenomena are epiphenomena of rationality, having evolved as a consequence of rational agency because “rational agency favours participating in a shared way of life, in order to have access to the resources for self-understanding”. This makes it seem as if our rationality gives each of us reasons to participate in a shared way of life with others, e.g. because by cooperating we can realize things we each want and that we couldn’t realize on our own (a view that I have criticized in chapter 1), or because, as Velleman thinks, we thereby gain self-understanding. This cannot explain why we not merely live side by side but also with each other.205 My reply to the second objection, i.e. the objection introduced by Henrich’s quote is that even though practical reason must have come only at the end of a long developmental history to guide human behaviour by enabling human beings to conceive of ends and means separately by virtue of which they came to

204 The additive account of rationality is usually contrasted with the transformative account. According to the latter what is shared by human and non-human animals is their generic animal intentional nature, but which in each species is realized differently. According to the additive view intelligent animals and rational animals share a common form of basic rationality while the rational animals in addition have rational capacities that intelligent animals lack. 205 Granted, insofar Velleman is interested in “how we get along” (which is also the title of the book I am quoting from) he may well be more interested in the phenomenon of living side by side than living with one another.

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conceive of whole actions as objects of choice, when we speak of human rationality we refer to this fully realized form of practical reason. This is why I do not think that understanding basic instrumental rationality, which we supposedly share with intelligent higher animals, will throw considerable light on the more demanding, but supposedly less basic capacities that only rational beings are supposed to have in addition to instrumental rationality.206 I believe that such an additive account of rationality cannot accommodate the relevant point at issue, namely that rational creatures can have a noninstrumental conception of the good and of acting well, which transforms all of their mental powers and activities.207 So even if human beings act on defective reasons or even if they often act on purely instrumental reasons, in cases where they should have acted on normative ones, the important point is that they could have done otherwise. Although we share many behavioural features with our non-rational ancestors, our animal form is essentially different from theirs.208 To my mind this means that we cannot understand human rationality without assuming that human animals are social and moral beings whose desires and emotions are reason-responsive in the sense of evaluative.209 What I mean by “essentially social” is the following. Even if Velleman and others are right that we need to understand others in order to understand ourselves and vice versa, which I think is correct, this need is constitutive only of a being that is a social being in the first place, that is, a being which is capable of living together with other beings in a sense that goes beyond merely co-existing side by side. I will argue in the next chapter that intelligent higher animals do not have to understand others in the same sense as we have to understand others because intelligent animals do not have to understand themselves. But they do not have to understand themselves because they do not have to understand others in the 206 For a similar point see Joseph Raz (2005, 28). 207 This is not to deny that no little of our experience continuous to be structured by powers that are far from fully conceptual ones. For such a claim see Hawkins (2008, 256). 208 I think that willing an end receives its special character against this background and quite independently of whether the ends are individual or shared in the sense of shared with others. 209 This goes beyond conceptual sharing in the sense of sharing some knowledge in that it requires, as I have tried to show with Korsgaard, that we value ourselves (and others) qua beings with a final good. After all, mere knowledge cannot obligate the will. But of course we do not value other sentient beings and ourselves in this reflective sense from the start. Rather we first experience our own sentient nature as all sentient animals do, namely in the way discussed in chapter, that is, by experiencing what it means to have our conscious flourishing enhanced or reduced. It is only as we become independent practical reasoners that we learn with the help of others to constitute ourselves into agents with evaluative selfconceptions. However, this would not be possible if the form of our agency wasn’t reasonresponsive in the first place. For this last point see Korsgaard (2011b).

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sense self-conscious animals have to. By ‘understanding others’ I do not mean ‘recognizing others as intentional cognizers’ – intelligent animals are capable of this, too – but as selves who express their rationality socially.210 Rational animals or potentially rational animals must be addressed by others of their kind through communicative intentions or by way of normative expectations to justify their actions; they must be addressed and treated as subjects that are already able or are about to learn to critically evaluate their own actions and desires and those of others. In the next section I will argue that for Korsgaard’s public conception of reasons to be an interesting conception we have to understand it as taking sociality and morality not as something that must be explained or justified separately from or as somehow deriving from instrumental rationality but something that is inherently related to human rationality. We cannot understand human rationality without assuming that human animals are essentially social and moral beings.

3.6

Korsgaard’s “Public Conception of Reasons”

As we have already seen, a widespread objection against Korsgaard’s idea that we have to treat each other’s reasons as normative for ourselves – which is roughly what her public conception of reasons demands – is that we cannot treat each other’s reasons as normative for ourselves since this entails that I would have to treat you, a stranger, in exactly the same way as I treat myself or my loved ones. Such a view, it is argued, surely cannot be defended since it would collapse agentrelativity into agent-neutrality. I will argue that this cannot be what Korsgaard has in mind. The moral identity that we share with one another does not require that we treat every one in every respect in exactly the same way as we treat our friends and ourselves. What also supports this view is Korsgaard’s claim that I have discussed in chapter 1, namely that the reasons we can share are neither wholly agent-relative nor wholly agent-neutral. To see the force of the worry we have to put Korsgaard’s (1996, 132ff; 2009, 188ff) “public conception of reasons” into a wider context and compare it to what she calls the “private conception of reasons”. Against this background we can understand Henrich’s objection discussed above as referring to the private conception of reasons that indeed does not entail morality. Rationality so understood is compatible with enlightened self-interest. To see this, let us consider Korsgaard’s (2009, 191 – 192) discussion of a sit210 That human animals express their rationality socially is a claim made by Herman (1996, fn17, 58).

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uation in which two agents’ reasons are in conflict. Imagine that I want a certain object that you also want but which we cannot have both at the same time. On the private conception of reasons on which I think that my wanting the object is a reason for me to kill you I have to grant that you likewise have a reason to kill me since you also want the object. This is just the kind of modest universalizability that I have identified as generally accepted by philosophers interested in practical reasons. If I think that I have a reason to kill you because I want a certain object that you also want, then I have to grant on this understanding of the universalizability of reasons that you have likewise a reason to kill me in order to secure the object for you. So we end up in something like a war where you try to pre-empt my killing you by killing me first and I try to pre-empt your killing me by killing you first. What this shows is that reasons’ universalizability so conceived does not go far enough in order to solve the conflict. In other words, the private conception of reasons cannot account for the category of reasons that we can share. Being at war with you I act in such a way as to avoid you successfully treating me as a means (i.e. your killing me for questionable reasons) by being quick enough to use you as a means to further my own interests first (i.e. by killing you for questionable reasons). Thus, while I take your reasons as normative for you I don’t take them as normative for me. Again, the same goes for you. This means that each of us thinks that it makes sense to try not to be used as a means by the other while at the same time trying to use the other as a means. So although I treat myself as you treat yourself, I do not treat you as I treat myself and you do not treat me as you treat yourself. It is interesting to note the correspondence of the structure at work here to the one I have identified at work in Velleman’s account of conditional willingness. Recall that according to Velleman I have to trust that the other loves himself as much as I love myself. Likewise in the example at hand, while there is a normative relation between me and myself and the other and himself, there is no such normative relation between the other and me. While I treat myself as you treat yourself I do not treat you as I treat myself and you do not treat me as you treat yourself. I think that Velleman (2009, 47) is exactly right when he describes this behaviour as irrational in the following sense: “They take themselves to be an exception to what they otherwise regard as psychological laws.” In other words, we treat others as means but do not treat ourselves in this way nor let others treat us in this way. As I understand it, this means that although I recognize that you have a reason to kill me, I at the same time undermine this recognition by not

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treating this reason as normative for me (the same goes for you) for otherwise I would have to let you kill me.211 Let me try and put this important point in more general terms. The problem here is that the two agents do not have a shared account of rationality (irrespective of whether they share a particular end with each other). According to agent A’s account of rationality it is rational for A to use B as a means, i.e. not treat B’s reasons as normative for herself (the same goes for B). But for A’s account of rationality to be rational it should enable A to form correct expectations with regard to B’s likely behaviour in response to her own behaviour. If what A’s account of rationality tells her to do is to use B as a means since this is the rational thing to do, it seems that A would have to expect rationally that B will let herself be treated as a means! However, precisely this cannot be rationally expected because B is not bound by A’s expectations. B is not bound by A’s expectations because the behaviour that would fit these expectations would undermine B’s own account of rationality (and again the same is true for A). To put the same point in somewhat different terms: What seems to make negotiation impossible here is that each of the agent individually assigns herself or himself a special kind of value that allows her to make an exception of herself, a value that she does not ascribe to the other person, which is why she need not take the other’s reasons as normative for herself. They do not think that they have to ascribe to each other the same value because they do not conceive of themselves as subject to common laws of rationality. Would it help to tell these people to consider that they share a common identity as human beings with a final good and that they must be equally treated as worthy of respect? Not as long as they think their reasons are only normative for themselves in the sense pointed out by Korsgaard (2009, 191 – 192): You wanting the object is a reason for you to kill me, which I acknowledge, and me wanting the object is a reason for me to kill you, which you also acknowledge. So if we think that what we have essentially in common is that we must act for each of our private reasons in the way described we will not solve the problem unless one of us surrenders the object of desire to the other out of sympathy, enlightened self-interest or for some other private reason. From the perspective of the merely private reasoner the public conception of reasons is not accessible. The same problem holds for the more benign example discussed at the end of chapter 2, section 6.2. This may not be immediately evident because there is no conflict at work in that example, which is why it seems right to say that Maurice’s happiness is not normative for me and mine is not normative for Maurice. I think Korsgaard’s (2009, 191) solution to the problem lies in changing the 211 Making such an exception of oneself just is to violate the categorical imperative in its version of the formula of humanity.

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universalizability requirement such that your reasons are normative for me and mine are normative for you. Korsgaard argues that the new universalizability requirement that she thinks pays credit to the public conception of reasons “commits me to view that if I have a reason to do action-A in circumstances-C, I must be able to will that you should do action-A in circumstances-C, because your reasons are normative for me”.212

Applied to the example of conflict above this means that since I must take your reasons as my own or as normative for me “I must be able to will that you should shoot me”. (Korsgaard 2009, 192) This is a very different thing from acknowledging that we each have an equally valid private reason to kill the other but not taking the other’s reason as normative for ourselves. As Korsgaard explains, unless I will that you should kill me, which I probably can’t will, I must grant, on the public conception of reasons, that I have no reason to kill you. In contrast to the private conception of reasons, the public conception of reasons makes plausible the sense in which individual agents are not each for themselves subject to private practical norms in accordance with which each of them acts, e.g. to take the means to whatever ends they have. Although the instrumental principle that tells us to take the means to our ends is a practical norm it is not public in the sense required to make shared deliberation possible. Animals that act in accordance with it do not have to will that others take the means to their ends. Instrumental rationality is not a form of common rationality that has to be selfconsciously shared with others in the sense of legislating laws together and taking reasons of others as normative for oneself. Thus, it is no coincidence that philosophers usually appeal to evolutionary considerations to support their accounts of instrumental rationality. Both Gibbard (1996) and Dennett (1987), for instance, try to explain why we share a conception of instrumental rationality with others by way of our similar evolutionary inheritance. They conceive of conforming behaviour as dispositional patterns, i.e. as self-reinforced reactions of single exemplars of the species resulting from how these exemplars have been doing things over a certain period of time. ‘Sharing’ a concept of rationality here is not a joint matter. It merely means to be endowed with instrumental rationality that one follows and that one assumes others to follow as well so that one is in a position to predict one another’s behaviour. 212 Stephen Engstrom (2009, 5 – 6) locates this problem in its proper historical context of Kant. What Korsgaard calls the “private conception of reasons” I think Engstrom spells out in terms of “willing in accordance with a law” as opposed to “will[ing] the law”, only the latter of which captures Korsgaard’s public conception of reasons. To will the law, Engstrom notes, means that one “wills that every rational being do what it can recognize it should, as a rational being, do”.

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We shall see in the next chapter that higher animals that act instrumentally rationally can treat each other as means, in a certain sense, because they have no conception of how they should treat others or themselves. Only self-consciousness makes it possible to have an evaluative conception of what one shares with others of one’s kind, namely that one can give laws to oneself (which is another way of saying that one has in common with them a normative good) and therefore to recognize the normative implications this has for one’s own behaviour towards others and oneself. This is why I think that rationality of selfconscious human animals is fundamentally different from the sort of rationality that higher animals are capable of. Therefore I do not think that instrumental rationality should be considered as the hallmark of human rationality. It does not satisfy the following two conditions, which I call the “normativity condition” and the “sociality condition” that are defining for human rationality : 1) The normativity condition requires that agents must assign one another’s reasons a normative status for themselves irrespective of whether they share a particular end or purpose with each other. This is also what underlies the notion of rationality as justifiability. 2) The sociality condition requires that insofar rationality is a matter of justifiability that requires the shared normative practice of an exchange of giving and taking reasons more than one agent is necessary. This is compatible with the metaphysical claim that the structure of reasons must be intrinsically shareable for such exchange to be possible. The first point can be further spelled out in terms of the Kantian idea that by willing moral laws together with others we thereby are subject to these shared laws together, which means that what we owe to ourselves just is what we owe to each other, namely to treat each other with respect or as ends in themselves. When we will laws together you and I are not only answerable to ourselves but I am answerable to you and you are answerable to me insofar we both recognize to be subject to our common laws by reference to which you can demand certain things of me and I can demand certain things of you.213 Thus, we are answerable 213 For this claim that we can be said to owe each other something only if we conceive of ourselves as subject to common laws see Korsgaard (2007a, 27). But what does this mean for the mentally handicapped, children and animals that cannot legislate the laws together with us? Korsgaard (2007a, 31 – 32) explains that the laws that we will together are not only laws about the concerns that specifically relate to rational animals, but to animals with a final good more generally. Thus, Korsgaard continues, intelligent animals and “dependent reasoners” (MacIntyre [1999]2009) who share their sentient nature with rational animals fall under the same laws and therefore have claims on us even though they cannot participate in legislating the laws together with us. So even though we value in rational beings rationality (among other things) it is not because of this particular capacity that we value such beings as final ends. The reason why we value them (including ourselves) as final ends is that they

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to each other directly instead of merely indirectly by a detour through what we owe to ourselves.214

3.6.1 Two Final Objections There remain two important objections that have to be addressed here. The first concerns the idea that I haven’t considered Schmid’s suggestion as a viable alternative to the private conception of reasons. The second objection has to do with the normative scope of public reasons. Recall that Schmid suggested to solve the problematic individualism of instrumental rationality (which we have met again under Korsgaard’s notion of “the private conception of reasons”) by giving up its individualism about ends. I have previously expressed reservations against this suggestion on the grounds that it is not clear in what sense sharing desires (or ends) can unify several individual agents into a whole such that the individuals’ choices to contribute to the whole can really be conceived of as parts of the whole and not just as the causes of the outcomes they produce. I have argued that to conceive of one’s contribution as part of the whole requires that one shares at least some reasons with other members of the collective. Another way to express this point is to say that individual members must share preferences over whole actions. In other words, unless one shares some reasons with other members of the collective, that is, reasons that one takes as normative for oneself, merely sharing an end cannot rule out that all the members’ reasons for sharing the end are in fact private. This is possible if the shared end to cooperate is based on entirely private reasons of the individual agents. It is not clear how Schmid can beef up the notion of ‘sharing an end’ required to avoid the private conception of reasons, especially if it is based on sharing desires that does not require the individual members to share a stable practical stance with one another. But perhaps what Schmid wants to say is that sharing the end of a shared intention requires that reasons are shared, but that these reasons may be merely instrumental, that is, reasons to effectively achieve the shared end. However, this means that the members of the collective have to take each other’s reasons seriously only in the sense of effective have a final good – irrespective of whether they are rational or not. After all, rationality is just one element in the final good of a particular sort of animal, i.e. a rational animal. But the category of final good is not reserved for rational beings: It is open to all sentient animals capable of feeling pain and pleasure and thus capable of conscious flourishing. 214 Larmore (2008, 114) accuses Korsgaard and other Kantians of capturing what we owe to others only indirectly, i.e. by a “detour through my own good” (Larmore 2008, 122), i.e. by a detour through what we owe to ourselves. But I think this cannot be correct – for if it were correct Korsgaard’s public conception of reasons would collapse with something like the private conception of reasons.

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means to the shared end. Against this idea I have argued that to share a practical stance either with oneself or with others it is not enough to be merely concerned with the effectiveness of the means to the (shared) end because this does not by itself make the action intelligible. If this is correct then sharing an end with oneself or others must involve at least some considerations that go beyond instrumental ones, that is, considerations that concern the question how the end is achieved, which is partly expressive of the individual’s/group’s consideration of the worthiness of the end to be achieved, that is, the consideration of the shared end as a shared good (I will return to this claim in chapter 5). The second objection is that the public conception of reasons while perhaps necessary to deal with cases of conflict should not be applied to more benign cases such as the one in which Maurice and I each have a private reason to call our respective sisters. Its application would not only result in putting us under an unrealistic because far too excessive demand of morality but it would also, as Wallace (2009, 476) puts it, “(…) distort our understanding of the way in which the distinctive situation of an agent contributes to determining what that agent has reason to do. As someone who is party to a project or relationship, it seems that I have reasons grounded in the project or relationship that are different in kind from the reasons of uninvolved third parties.”

Korsgaard can reply to Wallace by pointing out that on the grounds of our shared identity as moral beings we have reasons to respect one another’s agent-relative reasons that spring from our personal engagements and projects, which we each consider as valuable or good under some description.215 I must value your particular expression of humanity as part of valuing humanity as such, which is a condition of all value. Thus I owe you respect as a particular human being with particular agent-relative reasons, a being whose final good is realized, at least partly, by pursuing personal projects and relationships and forming joint evaluative perspectives. Treating your reasons as normative for me does not entail that, to say it in Aristotle’s words, I treat you as if you were another me, only that I treat you as another self, as another human being. That is, it rather entails that I treat you as “universally partial”216 in the sense that I treat you differentially as one of us sharing an identity as human beings, not that I treat you exactly the same way as I treat everyone else (including myself). The moral identity shared by each of us does not require that we shed our more particular practical identities in order to adopt the moral point of view. After all, we have assumed with Korsgaard that unless we value humanity in ourselves and others, it is not clear how we could have evaluative self-conceptions, or value anything at 215 Cf. Korsgaard (1996, 127; 2009, 212). Of course this has its limits as when the projects and engagements are against the law or seriously impeding the autonomy of others. 216 This expression is from Brummer (1993, 212) in Post (2002, 57).

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all, which we have to do in order to act for normative reasons. So to say that your reasons are normative for me is to accept a claim about your status as an end in itself. It is not to accept the claim that I must do everything in my power to make your life go well. As an end in itself, you have certain claims on me with whom you share the source of this status. But to say that every person has equal worth and therefore that each person’s happiness or well-being is of equal worth does not entail that a particular person must be assisted in pursuing whatever it is she thinks makes her happy. This is, first, because persons are self-sufficient with respect to the pursuit of many of the things needed for their well-being (just because you want a glass of water this does not mean that I have to get one for you if you can get it yourself), and, second, because happiness is not unconditionally good or intrinsically valuable unless it is the happiness of someone with a good will. (Korsgaard [1996] 2000a) It is happiness understood in this formal way that Kant thought to be our duty to pursue and help others pursue as far as we can and as far as the circumstances allow.217 Interestingly though, few philosophers follow Kant in this respect, i.e. that regard for the shared status as human beings as ends in themselves also requires something like a positive duty of beneficence and help and not merely a negative duty of justice or non-interference with another human being’s pursuing her own happiness. Many philosophers, including Korsgaard, prefer to stand on the safe side of this delicate and far reaching issue by arguing that at least we must not interfere with someone else’s agent-relative concerns or pursuit of happiness unless it interferes in a non-justifiable way with someone else’s pursuit of happiness. Sarah Buss (1999) is a welcome exception in this respect since she argues for a more positive interpretation of what treating others respectfully entails. By placing excessive value on people’s individual autonomy considered as essential part of the final good of rational beings we are at risk of not recognizing or not paying enough attention to all those cases “when an offer of help might actually enhance someone’s ability to lead his own life” (Buss 1999, 822), that is, help someone regain or improve her self-sufficiency. To know just when minding someone’s business really is a fitting response to respecting her and when it is isn’t, Buss admits, resists a straightforward answer. But Buss’s (1999, 805) central point remains valid, namely that the manner(s) in which we conduct our “intrusions” when we decide to do so must be polite and sensitive to the specific circumstances of the addressee. This allows us to express moral respect for the particular individual and her situation. Treating someone politely has a moral import, as Buss puts it. It enables one to treat her with the respect she deserves as the end in herself that she is.218 217 Cf. Korsgaard ([1996]2000a, 118 – 119) and Engstrom (2009, 213 – 215). 218 Although Buss does not say it explicitly I think it is clear that our treatment of individual

Conclusion

3.7

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Conclusion

We have seen that there is no reason to identify the claim that we must treat someone else’s reasons as normative for ourselves with the claim that we must treat everyone exactly the same, which would require making no difference between one’s concern for oneself or for one’s personal relations and the concern for some unrelated third party. To treat others as ends in themselves does not require that one have the same concern for their due which one has for one’s own self-conscious flourishing or for that of one’s family and friends. To treat people as ends in themselves is to treat them as worthy of respect or regard (hence the notion of other-regardingness) but this allows for very different forms of realization depending on one’s cultural and social environment and on the particular relations in which one stands to these people. So Korsgaard’s public conception of reasons is not too demanding after all. Moreover, I have tried to show that practical norms are like epistemic norms which is a first step towards removing the scepticism against the claim that practical norms are in a way social that makes them unfit for going through as constitutive norms. I have also tried to show why human rationality cannot be reduced to instrumental rationality. If it is correct that human beings have to act for reasons in order to act at all, that is, if they must consider their actions (and themselves) as valuable for their own sakes, then human rationality cannot be reduced to instrumental intelligence. Moreover, to recognize that one has to act for reasons is to recognize from the first person perspective what one shares with others of one’s kind, namely one’s human identity that both allows and requires one to conceive of oneself and one another as ends in themselves, as beings who can give laws to themselves, alone and together with others. This is why sharing reasons with oneself and sharing reasons with others is not in principle different and why the notion of other-regardingness (how one treats others) and self-regardingness (how one treats oneself) must be complements.

autonomy is a consequence of the emphasis we place on a specific enlightenment value, that of negative freedom. Mill’s On Liberty ([1859]1985) is an impressive example of such a treatment of negative freedom and individual autonomy.

Chapter 4: Self-Relation and Relation to Others

4.1

Introduction

In the last chapter I have tried to show, among other things, the difference between what I called “conceptual sharing” on the one hand and “actual sharedness” that goes beyond intelligibility or common knowledge between agents who take each other’s reasons as normative for themselves on the other hand. There the point of departure was the objection that one can break the norms that one gives to oneself in a way that one cannot break conceptual norms such as epistemic norms or norms of thought. Against this I have argued that practical norms or reasons are constitutive norms like epistemic norms and that they cannot be violated at leeway without thereby threatening one’s agency. Furthermore, just as sharing a reason with oneself is not merely an epistemic matter since the basic relationship one has to oneself is normative, so sharing reasons with others is not merely conceptual or third-personal but normative as well. However, collective intentionality has more commonly been associated with conceptual sharing. I think we can interpret Heidegger (2001) as making a claim about conceptual or third-personal sharing when he argues for the world’s disclosedness as the precondition for sharing intentionality. Sharing intentions are possible only insofar as we jointly access a shared world. Rational animals exist typically, Heidegger claims, in relation to things that can be used as tools. What is more, if I understand Heidegger correctly, he thinks that the employment of these tools conceptually entails that the tool using animals understand that the employment of the tools is in an important sense open to other potential users, i.e. other users than themselves.219 Tools are in this sense a bit like reasons whose intelligibility is shared. Tools are open or shareable property. For example, to recognize an axe as

219 This resembles Henrich’s and Rödl’s point with regard to theoretical knowledge, that is, that a self-consciously knowing subject knows that there may be potential others of his kind.

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a tool is to recognize it as a potential tool for others just as to recognize something as a reason is to recognize it as a potential reason for others.220 But I do not think that the mere employment of tools entails that the tool using intelligent animals understand that the tool’s employment is in an important sense open to other potential users. After all, intelligent animals are capable of both using tools and re-identifying normative patterns in their environment without being capable of recognizing that they share with others a joint order of theoretical or practical reason. While intelligent animals certainly have the capacity for sophisticated re-identifying of objects in virtue of their similarity with other objects, that capacity is not something the animal is aware of, neither in himself nor in others. The intelligent non-human animal doesn’t conceive of herself and others as animals that (have to) participate in universals, either practically by giving laws to themselves or theoretically by forming conceptions of the world. Perhaps Heidegger can be understood to claim that the self-consciously rational animal’s awareness that oneself and (potential) others (have to) participate in universals establishes the ontological structure of collective intentionality as “being-with”. But as I have said before, such sharedness seems to be devoid of any sociality in a deeper sense and may be understood merely in terms of co-existence. In this chapter I am mainly interested in the social aspect of the sharedness of collective intentionality and in the question whether intentionality is intrinsically social.

4.2

Shareability and Communicability

I think that psychologist Ernst Pöppel (2010) takes Heidegger’s idea of disclosedness a step further when he claims that human animals are conscious (or can become conscious) of those things that are in principle communicable to others (including oneself), and thus shareable.221 Any object of consciousness is potentially shareable insofar it is a possible object of communication. For an object to be an object of consciousness, Pöppel claims, it must be communicable even if it is not actually communicated.222 I think this is another way of making the point I have defended in chapter 2, namely that animal consciousness be220 But it seems that tools are more like private reasons than public reasons on the assumption that an animal using a tool is not required to will that other animals use it, too. 221 Reason has been traditionally conceived of as intrinsically relational, i.e. as the faculty in virtue of which we are capable of communicating with ourselves. 222 Note that the notion “shareable” here is understood in the uncontroversial sense where no reference is made to some sort of other-regardingness or strong normativity discussed in the previous chapter.

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cause it is necessarily open or directed at the world, cannot be intrinsically private. This dramatically extends the range of possible objects of sharedness. It includes what were long taken to be, especially in the Cartesian tradition, objects with exclusively private epistemic access such as self-conscious feelings like pride or shame. However, it should be clear that to say that consciousness is not essentially private is not to say that it is translucent either to the agent herself or to others. For one thing, we have seen in chapter 2 that our epistemic grip on the ‘I’ is but formal. For another thing, no little part of our lives takes place in the realm of the unconscious. Recall that we may not always be aware of the countless or complex concomitants of our beliefs and our desires. We are far from being transparent in this sense either to ourselves or to others. Pöppel (2010) further argues that since we are conscious of the things that could be or should be communicated to others – i.e. the things that are potentially shareable with or communicable to others – consciousness receives a social dimension: “I am conscious of something because there are others” whom I recognize as potential communicators to whom I could in principle communicate the objects of my consciousness or intentionality. But what exactly is the meaning of the word social here? What is its bearing for the assumption I started out with that human animals are social in a deeper sense than intelligent animals? In approaching this question let us differentiate between linguistic and non-linguistic communication since non-rational animals are both capable of non-linguistic communication and of working with recognizable types of things. Not only is there good evidence that higher animals such as chimpanzees are capable of instrumental reasoning but also that they are aware of other animals as cognizers with intentions.223 That is, non-rational animals are capable of ‘reading’ minds in a restricted instrumentalist sense. They treat intentions of other animals of their kind as given informational data influencing their own behaviour. If this is correct, we can now see the sense in which non-rational animals are capable of sharing mental attitudes in the sense of conceptual sharing. They can be described to ‘know’ the other animals’ intentions without the other animal having to be aware of her intentions being ‘known’. Such ‘knowledge’ is not socially expressed in that chimpanzees do not 223 Philosophers have long thought that non-human animals cannot recognize intentions in other animals of their species. For this view see Moran/Stone (2009, fn48, 153). Michael Tomasello who previously held the same view has recently changed his mind. He now argues in his book The Origins of Human Communication (2008) that chimpanzees are indeed social cognizers and that they use this capacity in an entirely individualistic setting of instrumental reasoning. For an excellent discussion and original assessment of the main claims of this book see Schmid’s (2011a) article “The Idiocy of Strategic Reasoning”, the main claims of which I will discuss in chapter 5.

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address each other through communicative intentions or through normative expectations (even though they do communicate with each other). Neither do they ascribe, as I have argued before, mental attitudes to others publicly. In other words, a chimpanzee does not conceive of another’s intentions as being addressed to himself, i.e. as something that the other animal wants him to know. Higher animals do not conceive of other’s intentions as communicative intentions.224 Rather they are aware of these intentions like they are aware of other informational data or objects of their environment, like smells, say. Another animal’s intentions are of significance for the observing animal only insofar as they concern her own well-being, that of the group, or the survival of the species. Likewise, non-linguistic communication of information is relevant for the animal only insofar as it signals something in the (immediate) concern for herself or for others of her species. Human or linguistic communication on the other hand is primarily non-instrumental but often interested in the objects of communication themselves. Otherwise it would be difficult to understand how human beings, as I have argued, are not only interested in the consequences of their actions but in the actions themselves. So although non-rational animals probably not only have intentions but can also treat other animals as ‘intentional systems’ and ‘read’ intentions in others of their kind, they do not treat other animals as self-consciously addressing such mental attitudes to others or themselves. For this to be possible they would have to be able to ascribe mental attitudes to themselves, they would have to be self-consciously aware of themselves as beings with a first person perspective that is potentially shareable with others. This may be one reason why intelligent animals cannot form a shared or first person plural perspective with others of their kind. Now we are ready to face the widespread philosophical objection taken up in the last chapter that intentionality, pace Pöppel, does not entail sociality. Many philosophers argue that it is conceptually possible to think of a solitary intelligent or rational animal that is nevertheless capable of following epistemic norms.225 According to such an understanding of the term ‘solitary’, Robinson Crusoe would not count as solitary since he once was a member of social and linguistic practices. The possibility of conscious experience and norm-guided behaviour, it is argued, is independent of the actual existence of other exemplars of the same species. It is in this sense that intentionality is thought not to entail sociality. An immediate difficulty with such a view, I think, is that it neglects the 224 This is why intelligent animals that are capable of grasping the meaning of signs or general types of things in the sense of Bedeutung usually are not capable of grasping the meaning of signs in the sense of Meinung. Cf. Rundle (1997, 113 – 114). 225 Cf. e.g. Philip Pettit (1996), Engel (2001; 2002) and Pendlebury (1998).

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important causal fact, which I have mentioned before, that both higher intelligent animals and rational animals depend for their cognitive development on the interaction with others of their kind. The second problem is this. Recall that we have met considerable scepticism towards the view that practical norms are constitutive norms on the grounds that they are taken to be social norms. Since social norms are socially authorized they cannot be constitutive norms, or so it is argued. If one believes this, I think it is quite natural also to believe that epistemic norms are not intrinsically social. In order to show that epistemic norms are not intrinsically social, philosophers have argued that epistemic normativity can be found at a fundamental level of first order thinking where no language skills or social practices of giving and taking reasons are required. The most often cited evidence for this is animal perception and memory.226 Animal perception for example is taken to be a form of intentionality that entitles but does not justify the animal to take at face value what it perceives without there having to be any other animals to socially authorize this type of knowledge. Thus, it is argued, it can be shown that epistemic norms are not intrinsically social. From what I have said so far with regard to higher animal thought it should be clear that I agree with the claim that not all animal intentionality is intrinsically social. But I disagree with the claim that intentionality at the fullfledged level where animals are conscious of those very epistemic and practical norms that they follow, no social interaction is needed. So the disagreement is not about whether there are types of thought or intentionality, namely those of intelligent animals, whose possession conditions can be spelled out ‘merely’ in terms of entitlement relations (instead of justification relations). Granted, such intentionality does not presuppose any form of shared social practices such as communication or the exchanging of reasons. It is one thing to be able to ‘choose’ among several possible alternative actions the one with the best consequences on the grounds of one’s inductive capacities and experience; it is quite another thing, however, to critically reflect whether one’s action would be good or one’s perceptions sound. Therefore, my disagreement concerns the claim that no social interaction is required on the higher level of self-conscious thought where the animal is capable of justifying her actions, her judgments and her beliefs to herself and to others by way of reasoning.227 Thus, as I understand it, the very concept of justification is intrinsically social, which means that the conceptual possibility of self-correction entailed in this demanding type of rule following depends on shared social practices with others. So I think Wellmer (1988, 139ff) is correct when he writes that it is 226 See e.g. Engel (2001, 25). 227 Such an animal recognizes that ends and means are not necessarily related in a certain way but that she, the animal, must put them together in the right way.

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inconceivable that there could be a solitary speaker. However, I think he would be wrong if he thereby meant that it is inconceivable that there could be a solitary rule follower. After all, taking the means to one’s (given) ends surely is following a practical rule. But it is not conceivable, conceptually, that one could have with oneself alone the experience of disagreement in rule following or rule violation where such rule following involves justification and conceptual evaluation. Reactions required by justification and evaluation must therefore go beyond dispositional patterns of self-reinforced reactions that, indeed, do not require social interaction. My point here just is an elaboration of the sociality condition mentioned in chapter 3, section 6: It is not conceivable that there could be a solitary speaker or rational agent. My claim is not that there could be no intelligent solitary agent who follows instrumental norms and epistemic norms and can go wrong with regard to following these norms. Thus I am not denying that a solitary intelligent agent may well learn by trial and error and inductive reasoning how to successfully satisfy the ends that are given to her through her instincts. One could say that higher animals who are capable of instrumental reasoning and whose ends are given to them through their instincts live in a world of means whereas human animals live in a world of means and ends neither of which are simply given to them. This is why I think that the ability of self-reinforced reacting as a result of how some agent has been doing things over a certain period of time must be clearly distinguished from the ability to act for reasons – even if the selfreinforced reaction very systematically involves attention to acting in the same way in similar situations thereby counting as appropriate reaction to recognizable kinds of things. Thus unlike acting for reasons, following instrumental norms is not intrinsically social. I think this can be illustrated with the help of the core idea of Wittgenstein’s so-called “Private Language Argument” although the kind of sharing described by the latter must be carefully distinguished from the essentially practical sharing of reasons. To prepare the grounds for recognizing this distinction, it will be necessary first to present what is commonly taken to be Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument. My underlying aim is to be able to say something more about the essentially practical nature of the sharing involved in sharing reasons than merely pointing out that since reasons are expressed by language and thus are subject to a criterion of universalizable intelligibility their normative significance cannot be established by a single reasoner alone just as the normativity of meaning requires more than one speaker.

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4.2.1 Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument Wittgenstein (1999, 362 (§258)) has famously presented the thought experiment of a subject trying to construct a private language of sensation, which only she can understand, where certain of her sensations are represented by the subject by the sign “S” which enables her to think to herself “S” – or more figuratively, to make a note in her mind, “this is S” – whenever she has the respective sensation. Such determination, “this is S”, however, occurs automatically so to speak, without any view to justifying the use or application of “S” to “this sensation” instead of to “that sensation”. The consequence is that if the privacy of such a ‘sensation-language’ is taken seriously, one must give up the claim that what one is doing here has anything got to do with applying a shared standard or criterion of correctness for this would make it possible that others could understand one’s language – but this is ruled out by definition of the ‘sensation-language’ as private. If this is granted, however, one must contend that the ‘sensation-language’ under consideration cannot be a language, i.e. it cannot mean anything at all, since the subject’s determining what is “S” just is whatever she thinks it is, without any reference to a shared standard of correctness. So the main point of Wittgenstein’s private language argument as I understand it, is this: The very idea of a private language is conceptually incoherent.228 As a normative practice any language must be subject to public standards or criteria of correctness, standards that are constitutive of that very game (i.e. the language) and that provide the speakers with the possibility to recognize not so much whether something is a language instead of mere noise but whether some move inside what is recognized as the language game is a correct move or not. For example, it must be possible to decide whether a certain concept of the English language, ‘coast’, say, is correctly used or not. A private language would by definition have to be a game for which no standards of correctness exist since such standards would entail at least potential intelligibility by a competent speaker, which is ruled out by the requirement that the language must be private. In fact, this thought rules out the very possibility that the speaker herself can understand her thoughts or utterances as types or reidentifiable unities for if she can understand them in this principled way, then these thoughts must be potentially intelligible by other linguistic subjects as well. But again, this is ruled out by the very concept of a private language. Therefore the concept of a private language is incoherent. This implies that for a complex normative practice such as language, which requires justification of use through a shared normative practice that cannot be reduced to the self-reinforcing regularity of an individual agent’s psychology, there must be at least two separate 228 Cf. Wittgenstein (1999, 356, 362).

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speakers. So much for what I think is correct and uncontroversial about the private language argument.229 What is controversial, I think, is to make out an analogy between the sort of formal universalizability entailed in the private language argument and the strong universalizability required for sharing reasons. We have come across this problem before in the previous chapter with regard to my discussion of Korsgaard’s public and private conception of reasons where I have argued that were the private conception of reasons correct, it would be incomprehensible how human agents could jointly act and deliberate. So if one takes phenomena of joint action and joint deliberation at face value, i.e. if one thinks that they are possible and real, the private conception of reasons cannot be correct. But I have also tried to show that something essential is missing if one understands the sort of sharing described by sharing reasons merely as conceptual sharing because such sharing is external to the will. If this is correct then the sharing referred to by ‘sharing meaning’ (as e.g. expressed in Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument discussed above) cannot be the same sort of sharing referred to by ‘sharing practical reasons’. I have tried to show that mere conceptual sharing as a matter of theoretical cognition is not sufficient for sharing reasons in a genuinely practical sense although I have so far only hinted at the sense in which such sharing is essentially practical, namely through the individual agent recognizing herself and others as the grounds of practical laws.230 Interpreters of Kant have usually been sceptical as to whether such recognition can be shown to entail the recognition of others as representing the same grounds, and thus as to whether Kant’s move in his Groundwork (1997, 36 (G 429)) from the categorical imperative couched in terms of the formula of universal law (“act always in such a way that you can will that your maxim become a universal law”) to its other formulation, namely the formula of humanity (“never treat a person, including yourself, merely as a means but always also as an end in itself”), is warranted. This looks like another version of the kind of objection I have attributed to Henrich, namely that morality or humanity cannot be derived from rationality. But this objection, as I have argued, itself proceeds from a very specific understanding of rationality identified as enlightened self-interest according to which accepting some consideration as a reason for action does not require that one take someone else’s reasons as normative for oneself (unless perhaps, one 229 It is not always clear I think whether Korsgaard (1996, 137) uses ‘public’ in the sense of ‘more than one’ not only with regard to meaning (i.e. that it takes two speakers to make a meaning) but also with regard to reasons since she sometimes speaks of two aspects of a single self. (Korsgaard 1996, fn16, 104) 230 Cf. Kant (1997, 36 (G 428)).

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shares with the other a certain end, a possibility I have mentioned before, and which I will discuss in more detail in the last chapter). The resistance against the second part of the conditional that if there is a shared order of practical reason one must be able to bind another agent in exactly the same way that one binds oneself, namely as grounds of self-legislation, may be motivated by the idea, as we have seen, that the fundamental normative relation one has to oneself has no equivalent in one’s possible relations to others. To argue along such lines is to grant that each individual subject is its own grounds and has a good that concerns herself alone (here perhaps lies the source of the often observed reduction of autonomy to authenticity) but to deny that the individual subjects share the same grounds.231 Again, it seems as if the uniqueness of every particular subject is endangered by taking seriously the stronger version of the universalizability requirement. Now I will try to show that the distinction between the kind of sharing implicit in Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument and the kind of sharing supposedly implicit in the sharing of reasons (understood in terms of Korsgaard’s public conception of reasons) is not the same sort of sharing.

4.2.2 Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument and Korsgaard’s Notion of Publicity There remains a difficulty with regard to the notion of publicity when publicity is understood as the opposite of privacy. Many philosophers have criticized Korsgaard’s notion of publicity (or what I have called “actual sharedness” in section 2.2.1) as treading on a fundamental ambiguity.232 Recall that according to Korsgaard intelligibility or communicability of reasons alone does not establish mutually taking each other’s reasons as normative for oneself; it does not establish actual sharedness in the sense of taking one another’s reasons as normative for oneself. Another way to express this point is to say that the formulation of the categorical imperative as a universal law by itself does not rule out that a principle of egoism could be adopted by all rational beings (which would square badly with the categorical imperative in its formulation as humanity).233 231 I think Schopenhauer (1948, 91 – 94) was aware of this resistance and has located one of its possible sources in the unique way that each individual subject experiences the consciousness of his or her relation to his or her own body as an expression of what (seemingly) distinguishes his consciousness of himself from his consciousness of all others, namely its will. 232 See e.g. Wallace (2009) and Cholbi (1999). 233 It is an on-going controversy whether Kant himself thought that a second step via humanity,

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If this is correct then it seems that Korsgaard must deny that the notion of ‘publicity’ used in the sense of “public conception of rationality” or “public conception of reasons” is identical with the notion of publicity of language as it is presumably understood by Wittgenstein. The kind of sharing involved in sharing semantic knowledge seems to be normative in a different sense than the sharing of practical reasons. I think Korsgaard (2009, fn12, 196) acknowledges this difference when she replies to her objectors: “I did not intend to suggest that the publicity of reason can be inferred from the publicity of meanings. I meant rather to be making an argument for the publicity of reason that is analogous to Wittgenstein’s argument for the publicity of meaning. Wittgenstein’s argument, as I understand it, is intended to show that meaning can’t be normative at all – you can’t be wrong – unless it is public. My argument was meant to show that reasons cannot be normative at all unless they are public.”

From this we can infer, I think, that Korsgaard seems to agree with Wittgenstein on the point that meaning cannot be normative at all, in the sense that one cannot distinguish between correct and false rule-following unless it is public. That is, there can be no private language because there is no private meaning, i.e. meaning that cannot be understood at least potentially by others, which is just what I identified as the uncontroversial content of the Private Language Argument. The very idea of meaning is that it can be potentially shared with others in the sense of what I have called conceptual sharing. And there must be at least one other speaker who can correct one’s own rule following.234 What is more, the normativity of meaning and the normativity of practical reasons are similar according to Korsgaard in that just as a speaker of a certain language cannot be deaf to other people’s utterances (in the respective language), a human being cannot be insensitive to other people’s reasons. This is one sense in which I think we should understand Korsgaard’s (1996, 135) statement that our social nature is deep.235 But then Korsgaard implicitly grants that her notion of publicity of reason is not the same as Wittgenstein’s notion of publicity with regard to meaning when she admits that her argument is not meant to show that the publicity of reasons can be inferred from the publicity of meaning. She thereby admits that conceptual intelligibility alone is not sufficient when it comes to sharing practical i.e. the recognition of our common humanity as valuable, is necessary to establish the moral normativity of reasons. 234 Note that language and practical reason are intimately related at least in the following sense. Treating people politely is essentially a matter of addressing people by virtue of language. And if Sarah Buss (1999, 805) is right in arguing that treating people politely has a moral purpose, namely to enable us to treat one another with respect, then the sharing constitutive of language may not be merely conceptual after all. 235 Korsgaard (1996, 140) sometimes also makes this point by saying that another’s consciousness is not private.

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reasons. That is, it is not sufficient for establishing the normativity of reasons that one can communicate the content or value of one’s ends to others. Two things, as I understand it, are required for establishing such normativity. First, what one communicates to others as a valuable end or a valuable thing to do must be understood by them as potentially valuable to themselves in virtue of their shared humanity (as I have tried to show in chapter 1 with respect to Korsgaard’s conception of “the reasons we can share”). Second, in order to have normative claims on one another we must understand each other as legislating together what is objectively valuable. The authority of reasons springs from our shared insight into their goodness and not from their social (or indeed instrumental) recognition – even though it is true that good social norms and good reasons will, under favourable conditions, be socially recognized.236 Our merely collectively accepting certain social norms does not necessarily make them correct. Practical reasons are not normative because others think that they are. The authority of practical reasons derives from our insight into the goodness of the reasons and social norms and not from their public recognition itself.237 This is in no way to deny that practical norms and reasons arise to a large extent from practical identities which themselves are intimately connected to social roles. Surely, a reason’s intelligibility will depend on what people think the role of a philosopher, say, consists in and this in turn depends on what people think a philosopher is. But a philosopher’s torturing a cat does not become a right action just because the community in which she lives considers torturing animals as a 236 It is this important idea that philosophers who argue that instrumental rationality is all there is to human rationality cannot account for. The way in which one can be right or wrong with regard to following instrumental norms is that one can either achieve one’s ends or that one can fail to achieve one’s ends. Such success or failure need be of no concern for others apart from me. Of course it may be of others’ concern if they share an end with me the success of whose realization is partly up to me. The decisive point is that on the purely instrumental view of rationality others are committing no wrong if they decide that my contributions to the shared end are no longer sufficient and upon a carefully performed cost/benefit analysis exclude me from their community. On the public conception of rationality, however, I would have a claim not to be treated in this way even if I didn’t share a particular end with them. In chapter 5 I will argue that introducing the notion of shared ends will not help if one still adheres to instrumental rationality as the fundamental conception of rationality. It doesn’t make the notion of rationality wide enough, so to speak. That is, even if I share an end with the rest of humanity the normative claims that would arise from this – namely to do my part in taking the means to the shared end – are only contingent: If I didn’t share this particular end with them I would owe them nothing and they would owe me nothing. One may wonder why philosophers are so much pre-occupied with the idea that action is mainly about satisfying one’s ends. The more I think about how action and happiness are related the more I believe that both action and happiness have to do with how one lives, both with oneself and others. It is this idea that I am trying to articulate in emphasizing the quality of the relation between means and ends in our actions over merely effectively realizing some end. 237 For such a claim see also Van Willigenburg(2002).

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permissible or even a recommendable thing to do for philosophers. The authority of reasons is not determined by the acceptance of social norms but by the fact whether the reasons are good. One way to decide this, as we have seen, is to ask whether the reason’s parts are related in such a way that the action it describes can be (fully) justified or not.238 For example, whether some event goes through as a murder or not depends on what a community’s criteria are for an event to count as a murder, i.e. as wrong.239 These criteria are typically formulated in a justification relation: “A murder is a homicide committed for some end or other that is inadequate to justify the homicide. We don’t call execution or killing in battle or killing in self-defence ‘murder’ unless we believe that those actions are not justifiable, that punishment or war or self-defence are not ends that justify killing.” (Korsgaard 2008, 224)

We can better understand this if we recall Korsgaard’s technical distinction between act or act-type on the one hand, and action on the other hand. While whole actions can be said to be right or wrong, we cannot speak meaningfully of intrinsically right or wrong act-types; accordingly, nothing is intrinsically a murder since the act-type ‘killing’ does not refer to something that is wrong as such. The act-type’s wrongness depends on whether we think that the particular end to which it is related in a particular situation can justify the killing. However, there are certain practices and social conventions of which we tend to think that they are intrinsically wrong, as Korsgaard (2008, 223) points out. Act-types, Korsgaard explains, that are involved in social practices such as promising or writing a cheque, for example, are different from those act-types that depend for their possibility at least partly on the laws of nature, such as killing or swimming. If we think that false promising is an intrinsically false acttype, this is because, Korsgaard (2008, 223) writes, their universal abuse is “a violation of social practices that is almost sure to turn out wrong no matter what your end is”. Act-types that are involved in norms that are instituted, e.g. promises, will normally be viewed as intrinsically good or bad since the norm’s goodness or badness is not seen as depending on the particular ends that regulate the act-types since the violation of the practice seems wrong no matter what the end is. In contrast, the goodness or badness of norms that are constituted, like what must be the case such that killing counts as murder, will more readily be seen as depending on the particular ends that regulate the act-types. However, justification is not yet rightness or complete justification. Since our effective human will is all but pure we must allow for the distinction between what is justifiable for an agent to do from her perspective as practical agent on 238 In Kantian terms, this means that the authority of reasons is determined by the moral law as the formal law of the will. 239 Cf. also Cash (2008, 110).

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the one hand and what it is objectively right to do on the other hand. So we need to say under what conditions an action is not only justified but also right or objectively justified. I suggest that we go along with Joseph Heath (1997, 469) who defines rightness in terms of an “idealized version of justifiability” so that we can say under what conditions an action or a principle of choice is right and not merely justified. Heath argues that it is right only if it is justifiable now with respect to a system of shared social norms and “if it would remain justified under any improvement of this system”. The improvement of the system could then be spelled out in terms of something like a democratic procedure, as Heath suggests, that draws our attention to the rational quality of the principles of choice. This not only concerns external factors such as open and equal accessibility to shared deliberation but also intrinsic factors about the reasoning process itself, such that it must be unbiased, focused, open to criticism, well-balanced between specificity and generality, etc. It think that the relation between subjective and objective reasons so conceived has an important advantage over Korsgaard’s (2011a, 7) definition according to which a subjective maxim becomes an objective one if the process of deliberation of reflective endorsement, i.e. whether it could be willed as a potentially universal principle, is correctly carried through. Her definition cannot account for the fact that our insight into the goodness of the reasons and social norms itself depends on our insight into the goodness or badness of the system and what it recognizes as the right relations between persons. To illustrate this conception of rightness, I will in the next section discuss the structure or constitution of a collective system of which we can say that it is an improvement vis-—-vis one of its earlier states or vis-—-vis other systems.

4.3

Sharing Evaluative Perspectives and Plural Agency

To this end I will examine the hypothesis that a collective system must exhibit the constitutive features of what Bennett Helm (2010, 272 – 278) calls “a plural agent”, namely a special kind of unity constitutive of the well-functioning of the collective as a whole. A plural agent, unlike mere collective systems, Helm argues, exhibits “a single joint evaluative perspective” and not merely a “shared evaluative perspective”. On Helm’s view the condition of possibility for a shared evaluative perspective is that individual agents care about the other as an agent (and, as I would add, not just about her instrumental rationality, as Schmid (2009b, 243) sometimes seems to argue). But according to Helm to care about the other as agent and thus to take her reasons seriously does not entail that one already has a particular shared evaluative perspective with her, much less that

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one has a particular single joint evaluative perspective. In order to reach a shared evaluative perspective, Helm (2010, 273ff) thinks, the competition between particular single evaluative perspectives of the individual agents must be overcome by way of coming to perceive things as important to us. But this requires first that the agents come to care for each other as agents. What does this mean? Helm (2010, 276) explains: “This means that I exhibit a projectable pattern of rationality in my responses to the import that rationally demands that I respond in certain ways in particular situations: I ought to be pleased by your success, frustrated at setbacks to your plans, motivated to help you when appropriate, and so on. Given this, it is possible for you or anyone else to criticize me for failures to have these responses in light of these rational demands. However, my failures in these cases will largely be failures of consistency with the projectable pattern of rationality constitutive of my caring, and so the criticism (from a third party) might take the following form: “Why aren’t you happy for her? I thought you cared about her.” In this sense, I am answerable not to the agent about whom I care, nor to the critic calling me on it, but ultimately to myself: to my own evaluative perspective.”

We can reformulate Helms point in the following way : Agents who care for each other are disposed to hold themselves answerable instead of holding each other or a critic answerable. So the crucial point here, as I understand it, is that the standard of rationality to which these caring agents adhere to in evaluating their behaviour is not inherently shared. But this is exactly what I think turns out to be a problem for Helm’s account of plural agency. How is it possible to construct a shared evaluative perspective or even a single joint evaluative perspective out of what seem to be, according to Helm’s description, intrinsically single evaluative perspectives? In my view, the very competition between particular single evaluative perspectives is possible only if these single perspectives are already inherently shareable. I think that in order to form a particular “we” or plural perspective, whatever this may be, the potential partners of a particular plural perspective must regard themselves and each other as moral beings, as one of us, that is, they have to view their single evaluative perspectives as inherently shareable in order to overcome particular or local disagreement between single evaluative perspectives. To put it in the spirit of Korsgaard, they must be aware of the reasons they can share. As moral beings we are always already answerable to a pattern of rationality, which each member sees as exemplifying the shared perspective of beings who conceive of themselves and each other as subjects to the moral law. We are answerable to each other directly as we conceive of ourselves as subjects to the moral law. To share this widest plural perspective possible by regarding one another as moral beings or beings with a final good, means that we must

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treat one another as ends in themselves. But how do we get from this widest possible shared evaluative perspective to come and see one other as one of a particular us? The second problem here is the one I have introduced in section 2 of the previous chapter : How is the notion of self-legislation compatible with the idea of shared self-legislation if we think that shared self-legislation must be established socially with others? Now it seems that the notion of shared self-legislation collapses into external legislation since we must select some authoritative individual agents who are endowed with the power of sovereign on whose external will all other members of the community depend. But this would square badly with my Kantian claim that the authority of reasons does not depend on external recognition. I think solving the second problem just is to solve the first problem. Recall that the first problem was that it is not clear how we get from the community of all moral beings at large to a particular single joint evaluative perspective. For unlike in the case of a particular plural agent there is hardly a pattern of rationality constitutive of our respecting each other where the collective system refers to humanity at large. Humanity just does not seem to be a plural agent with a single joint evaluative perspective. In other words, what makes a mere conglomeration or co-existence of self-legislating individuals into a rationally structured group or a single plural agent whose shared self-legislation does not collapse into external legislation? I think Korsgaard’s ([1996]2000a, 373) comparison between nation and state is helpful here: “[A] state (…) is a moral or formal entity, defined by its constitution and deliberative procedures. A state is not merely a group of citizens living on a shared territory. We have a state only where these citizens have constituted themselves into a single agent. They have, that is, adopted a way of resolving conflicts, making decisions, interacting with other states, and planning together for an ongoing future. For a group of citizens to view themselves as a state, or for us to view them as one, we do not need to posit the state as a separately existing entity. All we need is to grant an authoritative status to certain choices and decisions made by certain citizens or bodies, as its legislative voice.”

We can compare the state as Korsgaard describes it here to an individual agent whose constitutive identity as moral agent just is the constitution with which she has to identify or take as authoritative in order to be what she is, namely an agent acting from reasons. The constitution of a state according to Korsgaard is the form through which citizens govern themselves for the good of the whole just as the individual agent identifies herself with her moral constitution or form, the

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constitution that makes it possible that she is able to value herself and others as ends in themselves.240 Moreover, as Korsgaard (2009, 157) writes elsewhere, people who are structured into a state with a moral entity “are unified not under a centralized authority” but “govern themselves directly through their constitutional forms”. The state’s sovereignty therefore literally is in the hands of everyone equally and is not externally defined as was suggested by the worry that self-legislation might collapse into external legislation when it is shared with others. To get from the community of all moral beings at large to a particular single joint evaluative perspective, then, is to jointly will to govern oneself and one another through a shared constitution that is good for everyone.241 This is highly reminiscent of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s ([1762]1968) account of the social contract as the General Will.242 According to Rousseau ([1762]1968, book1, ch.6, 60) the essential mark of an association as possible candidate for the General Will is an association “under which each individual, while uniting himself with the others, obeys no one but himself, and remains as free as before”. I think we could even say that, according to Rousseau (in the spirit of Aristotle), since the citizen who accepts the General Will, in comparison to man in the state of nature, is now able to realize his true nature as rational, social and moral creature, he is more free than before. This is because, as I understand Rousseau and Kant, agents as citizens or subjects of the common law must be able together to will not the particular empirical laws as their own General Will but the basic formal law, i.e. its constitutional form that restricts the legitimate policies of the sovereign. However, as Rauscher (2008) argues, the possibility of such rational agreement to the state is already contained by the capacity of practical reason of each human being. This leaves some room to consider the difficult relationship between political freedom, i.e. the negative freedom of justice from being constrained by someone else’s choice of action and transcendental freedom, i.e. the individual’s will to accept pure practical reason as her own law. As I see it, if it is assumed that all persons as ends in themselves are free by their very nature in the transcendental sense (i.e. by giving themselves their own law) then their choices of action must be free from external constraint, be it by other individuals (e.g. through lying or coercion) or by the laws of a state authority that is not the General Will. But the dependency relation goes in the 240 For Korsgaard’s detailed account of the constitutional state as the plural analogon to the individual agent see her Self-Constitution, especially pp. 154 – 158. 241 The shared constitutive identity, of course, need not be that of citizens of a state but can be any shared constitutive identity, such as friends in a friendship that can be willed by the members as good for them. 242 It is somewhat striking that Korsgaard never mentions Rousseau as the source of Kant’s thoughts about the social contract in his essay “Über das Verhältnis der Theorie zur Praxis”. (Kant [1794]1967)

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other direction as well: The very establishing of a state in which political freedom is guaranteed and that can be willed as authoritative by all its members enhances the exercise of transcendental freedom, man’s true nature. Nevertheless, isn’t there an important difference between the state whose basic law is determined by the General Will and the individual agent whose will is her own law? While individual agents must identify with their moral constitution in order to act, if only in the sense of conferring value on themselves, collectives of loosely related individuals surely do not have to make themselves into states. It is true that nations for instance, unlike individual agents whose most fundamental practical identity, as I assume with Korsgaard, is their moral identity, are not eo ipso states but held together by empirical historical traditions and shared territory of their people. There are two points to be made here. First, individual agents, strictly speaking, are not eo ipso fixed and rationally organized and well-unified agents either. Individuals have to continually make themselves into unified agents by acting on reasons and thereby constructing their identities (that should not stand in internal conflict to their moral identity). What may give the misleading impression that the unity of individual agents is fixed is the fact that individual agents are perceived as unified wholes in virtue of their embodiment. But this changes nothing about the fact that individual agents can become more or less unified, depending on the choices they make. So the nation is similar to the individual agent in that it has to make itself into a unified whole, namely a state, in order to be stable over the long run. The second point concerns the question whether we could not argue, along these lines, that collective intentionality while not inherently normative (in the social and moral sense), has necessarily socially and morally normative consequences. However, I think that habitual actions and historical traditions should not be identified with collective intentionality in the sense of a plural agent since nations (or smaller groups) that are held together by merely empirical traditions lack the rational structure required for a collective entity to be identified with a plural agent. A nation is a plural agent in this sense if its identity is that of a state whose formal constitution can be willed or rationally accepted by its citizens in a General Will or through shared legislation. So what establishes the constitutional form that transforms a mere agglomeration of individuals into a plural agent state is not contingent historical relations or habits but the social contract as a joint idea of reason. I think the above suggestion (that collective intentionality has morally and socially normative consequences) is misleading in that it proposes that social normativity arises from purely instrumental normativity. While it is true that organized and unified collectives (such as states) naturally evolve from disparate and fragmented agglomerations held together by habitual practices, the condition of possibility for collective intentionality understood in the sense of ra-

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tionally unified wholes is that the individual agents already must have the idea of a joint reason relating them normatively to themselves and to one another.243 Relations such as these are exemplified by small-scale plural agents, e.g. families. Even if the nation itself is not as yet a plural agent, it will already consist of smallscale plural agents with a rational organization and shared evaluative perspective, the smallest unity being the individual agent herself.

4.4

Meeting the Challenge

This enables me to now answer the challenge put forward against the idea of shared consciousness I have sketched in chapter 2. There I proposed to defend the following three claims: 1) Distinct selves that are joined in shared consciousness are in a certain sense transparent with each other through jointly acting, perceiving and thinking. 2) The identity of consciousness is not determined by the physical owner of consciousness but by what it is a power to do. 3) Individuals view themselves and each other as participating in universals. Let me start with the second claim. The power of consciousness of a rational agent, as we have seen, is to act as one or as a unified whole by identifying with principles of action whose form is essentially evaluative. So the unity of consciousness necessarily falls together with the unity of agency but not with a single psychological entity that resides in a single physical body (such as the Cartesian “ego”). The widespread assumption that consciousness is constituted by a particular psychological entity that represents, so to speak, the individual person as unique, is a persistent but misleading inheritance from Descartes. On such an understanding of consciousness an individual agent’s actions are performed not by the agent as a whole but by the key part of the agent, the ego, which has been identified by philosophers either with reason or the passions. On the conception of agency that I have been defending here with Korsgaard along Kantian lines, however, the ‘key part’ of the animal or person is constituted; it is constituted by the person as a whole, that is, by her choosing certain actions as good or for their own sakes.244 The rational animal as a whole constitutes itself through exercising the powers that are constitutive of its nature, not through exercising some part of herself, like her passions or her reason.245 Therefore it 243 If this is correct, then the relation constitutive of individual agents with themselves cannot be instrumental (cf. chapter 5). 244 Cf. Korsgaard (2009, 100). 245 While the intelligent animal constitutes herself through conscious activities, the self-

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does not identify with some of its parts but with its formal constitution, i.e. with that which defines it as the kind of thing it is. (Korsgaard 2009, 158) Rational animals are not identical with their minds, their reason, their passions or their bodies. They are organisms with distinctive powers that are constitutive of their nature. But, as I have tried to show in the previous chapters, we should not conceive of these conscious activities by which rational agents constitute themselves as theoretical objects of self-consciousness, i.e. as objects observed by the person from a distanced theoretical inner perspective. Although self-conscious animals are capable of regarding their own actions, their own thoughts and themselves in this theoretical way this is not the primary way in which rational animals are related to themselves (and indeed to others, as I will argue below). Rational animals are primarily creatures that have to act (and think) for reasons. When they try to decide what to do, in their practical reasoning, they think about the potential grounds for actions themselves and whether they could will them as principles of action. The fact that self-conscious animals can recognize their own attitudes as grounds for actions does not mean that they take a purely cognitive or theoretical stance towards their potential reasons when deciding what to do. When we decide what to do we must regard ourselves from the practical standpoint, that is, as the authors of our own actions. But our actions are not ‘ours’ in any individualistic sense. What ‘ours’ refers to is the agent’s rational unit whose boundaries are not determined by the agent’s body. This brings me to the first claim. Distinct rational selves can be joined in shared consciousness through the power of consciousness to unify the whole plural agent and integrate her thinking, acting and feeling. Transparency of selves in a plural agent I think is minimally achieved when they conceive of each other as part of humanity. The pattern of rationality of this plural agent must at least involve each part’s responsiveness to the other as a moral being who can exchange reasons for the good of the whole, the latter of which needs further determination. Two or more selves within a shared consciousness, as I have argued before, are increasingly transparent with each other when their respective subjectivity is increasingly jointly realized instead of merely individually realized under conditions of being-with, which is probably similar to what Helm means by his notion of sharing a particular single joint evaluative perspective. The idea of maximal transparency brings me to claim 3. Maximal transparency I think is established when the selves are jointly acting well in the sense discussed: Agents who jointly exercise their power to choose good actions – conscious animal constitutes herself through acting from reasons or self-conscious activities.

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instead of choosing mere acts or means – thereby unify themselves into a whole whose parts are related in a way that is not contingent. Selves that are related to each other in this way are transparent with each other by being aware of the goodness (which need not be moral goodness) and thus also of the intelligibility of their joint actions and perceptions. More generally speaking, if consciousness and agency unify plural agents into organized wholes then the individual members must choose at least some principles of actions together, principles that relate means and ends in a justifiable way. Therefore, the similarities of the individual subjects sharing consciousness are constrained by what is required of a unified agent: that she chooses meansend pairs that are related in such a way that they can be justified or even willed as good for their own sake. Differently put, the members of a plural agent must at least share some basic non-instrumental reasons for action. Merely instrumentally normative reasons do not exhibit an internal relation that the structure of agency or consciousness of rational beings picks out as necessary or universal (I will come back to this in chapter 5). The form of sharing under consideration is primarily non-instrumental or evaluative. It has been found that already children regularly invite others to join their perspective on – often make-belief – things or events.246 Note that such ‘joining in’ constitutes a form of sharedness that does not consist in the reciprocal epistemic knowledge of the intentional content of one another’s mental attitudes (like some sort of elaborated mind-reading capacity). The sharedness rather consists in the form of directedness towards an intentional object and thus is irreducible to the individuals’ intentional perspectives or their contents. Joint attention in small children, developmentally speaking, is the first evidence we have of human beings’ capacity to share evaluative perspectives. I think that the philosopher’s interest in “joint attention” can be seen as a variant of his more general interest in, especially by continental philosophers such as Heidegger and Schopenhauer, joint perception as an important phenomenon of collective intentionality. The problem is, however, that it is not always clear, how much these philosophers have really been interested in the jointness of perception. I suspect that one reason for the preference of perception as object of investigation in collective intentionality analysis over action is that perception lends itself especially well to the idea of a loss of individuality through becoming one with the object looked at.247 Schopenhauer (1948, 148 – 149), for 246 This phenomenon is usually referred to as “joint attention”, a term coined by Michael Tomasello (2003). 247 See for example Heidegger’s (2001, 86) discussion of joint perception. But also Aristotle, according to Kosman, regarded common perception or sunaisthesis – the common understanding of the particularity of a situation – as the paradigmatic example for shared subject consciousness.

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example, argued that intensely contemplating a natural thing present before one’s eyes makes one lose itself in the thing contemplated, as if the thing existed without anybody being aware of it. Thus the individual subject’s consciousness is consumed with the object of which it is conscious: “[I]ndem man, nach einer sinnvollen deutschen Redensart, sich gänzlich in diesen Gegenstand verliert, d.h. eben sein Individuum, seinen Willen, vergisst und nur noch als reines Subjekt, als klarer Spiegel des Objekts bestehen bleibt; so dass es ist, als ob der Gegenstand allein da wäre, ohne jemanden, der ihn wahrnimmt, und man also nicht mehr den Anschauenden von der Anschauung trennen kann, sondern beides Eines geworden sind, indem das ganze Bewusstsein von einem einzigen anschaulichen Bilde gänzlich gefüllt und eingenommen ist; wenn also solchermassen das Objekt aus aller Relation zu etwas ausser ihm, das Subjekt aus aller Relation zum Willen getreten ist: dann ist, was so erkannt wird, nicht mehr das einzelne Ding als solches (…).”248

From what I have said it is clear that I do not think that shared subject consciousness with oneself or others is achieved by abandoning the subject’s relation to her shared will because thereby, I think, any sense of being-with is lost. Rather, sharedness in transparency, as I have tried to show, is achieved by returning to oneself or another such that what one does alone or together with the other is done for its own sake.249 Another way to argue against the idea of the loss of individuality as a form of collective intentionality is to say that it renders unintelligible the very possibility of extended mind cognition. By extinguishing the internal/external distinction between the subject and its environment one also extinguishes the only perspective from which extended mind cognition is accessible, namely, from the unity of the subjective or personal mind.250 I want to take a somewhat different path. I think that the very idea of sharing intentionality or consciousness with others of one’s kind presupposes a plurality of particular subjects. In order for rational agents to be able to view themselves and each other as participating in universals or principles they must conceive of themselves and others as particular identities or particular instances of humanity that are each unique in their own way. That is, they must regard each other and themselves as an abstraction of humanity that represents, as Arnheim 248 Please note that such a view must not be confused with that of Aristotle discussed in chapter 2. Aristotle’s point discussed there was that in perceiving an intentional object the subject is formally determined by that object, not that the subject becomes identical or fused with the material object of her perception. That is the very idea of what Kosman discusses under the notion of “determinate indeterminacy”: The subject takes on the sensible form of the object without thereby losing its own determinate and particular (material) identity. 249 Collective intentionality is not to be had at the price of losing individuality and subjectivity by either, as we have seen, transferring subjectivity or by extinguishing it altogether (which comes to the same thing). 250 For such a criticism see Di Francesco (2007, 211 – 225).

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([1969]1997, 169) puts it, “the nature of (…) all people in important respects”, the important respect being, as I have argued with Korsgaard, their moral identity.251 To take up a helpful notion discussed in chapter 2, we can say that the moral perspective or identity of an individual is both determinate and indeterminate at the same time. It is determinate since it is the perspective of a single individual agent with contingent practical identities. It is indeterminate in that this perspective is inherently open to or shareable with other such singular, but not intrinsically private, particular perspectives. A further important sense in which acting for reasons points beyond our own individuality is our insight into the potential goodness of the reasons of others, which makes them binding for us. I think that this point is reminiscent of an idea already made by John Stuart Mill ([1859]1985) in his On Liberty, namely that there is no reason to think that one’s own reasoning and deliberating is, in principle, superior to the reasoning and deliberating of any other. Sarah Buss (2009, 14) helpfully specifies this point by arguing: “We have reason to consider the merits of these judgments [of others], and/or of the reasoning that underlies them to be open to normative verdicts that conflict with our own.”

Thus the rational pressure to give up one’s own reasons for the sake of the other is dependent on our insight into the potential goodness of each other’s reasons as an expression of our common identity as reason-givers. Unlike what Buss (2009, 14) seems to think, however, I do not think that just because the pressure to take up a stance of mutual interest in each other’s reasons arises from the recognition that “no one’s reasoning can guarantee its own reliability”, such pressure must be purely instrumental. Although the reliability of reasoning is indeed fundamentally important for our well-being and serves many of our human interests, this is not itself the reason why I take your reasons seriously. I take your reasons seriously because I respect you and take you as the person that you are seriously ; this includes apprehending you as one of us who is able to answer my (good) reasons with your (good) reasons.252 Thus, individual human beings in order so much as to be viewed as abstractions of humanity must be recognized as being sufficiently particular and distinct from one another. This means, as I understand it, that the common features that all human beings share can be perceived only against the background of their individual particularities, that is, their specific instantiations of their common nature. This supports what I interpreted as Korsgaard’s received 251 For such abstraction to be possible, Arnheim ([1969]1997, 169) argues, the particulars must be genuine particulars, that is, not just numerically different from one another but also individually different. 252 Cf. van Willigenburg (2002, 187).

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view of what it means to take each other’s reasons as normative for oneself. For if it is true that we have to value human beings due to their common features as human beings with a final good, we must also value their more contingent features as particular instances of their shared humanity ; this is just another of saying that we must treat one another as universally partial – and this is incompatible with treating everyone in exactly the same way. This is an exemplification of the extraordinary extent to which rational animals are capable of refining abstraction. I find it inconceivable that without the interest in and capacity for such differential refinement with regard to particular individuals collective intentionality could have evolved.

4.5

The Normative Structure of the Self

Now I need to discuss two important objections against the view of collective intentionality I have been defending. These objections are important because they seem to rely on an assumption that I have made myself in the previous chapters, namely that the relation the self has to itself is essentially normative. So if I share that assumption but not their objection, I have to say exactly what their objection is based on and why I think it is false. Larmore (2007, 508), for example, argues that the practical relation we have to ourselves, because of being normative, has no equivalent in the possible relations we have to others. Richardson ([1994]1997, 234 – 237) similarly expresses serious doubts as to the possibility of extending the idea of “reflective sovereignty” constitutive of individual practical deliberation to an interpersonal context.

4.5.1 Richardson’s Objection from “Reflective Sovereignty” Richardson ([1994]1997, 177) argues that “reflective sovereignty” which is constitutive of individual practical deliberation about what to do does not lend itself easily to an interpersonal context. By this he means that what counts as a reason for action depends on “no authority other than the deliberating agent”. Although a group can reflect about a question what should be done, “there are no general grounds to expect”, as Richardson ([1994]1997, 236, my emphasis) writes, “that there will be a locus of reflective sovereignty within the group”.253 Writing in this fashion Richardson gives the impression as if some psychic entity 253 Richardson’s concern is somewhat reminiscent of the seeming tension between self-legislation and self-legislation shared with others that I have discussed in the previous section.

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is required for individuating consciousness or reflective deliberation, namely that which takes up the locus of reflective sovereignty. As a consequence, consciousness or conscious states appear to be necessarily connected with a body. But since bodies are bodies of individual subjects – there is no such thing as a collective body apart from that in the sense of a metaphor – consciousness cannot be shared. This might seem especially clear when conscious states are feelings (and perhaps desires). No other conscious states seem more embodied than feelings. Richardson’s objection from sovereignty thus seems intimately linked to his claim that there can be no plural agents because plural agents can’t have bodies – but for something to be an agent, it must have a body. But only individual subjects have bodies. Therefore, we should be cautious when it comes understanding practical deliberation in an interpersonal context. Moreover, Richardson ([1994]1997, 235) sees a strong functional connection between practical deliberation, self-commitments and bodily feelings: “Human deliberation essentially relies upon such bodily signs [queasiness in the stomach, palpitations in the heart] to remind us of our practical commitments. While one might imagine an agent constructed so that all of its normative commitments are explicitly present to it, as in a set of instructions in a computer program, it is not clear what relevance this idea would have for the possibilities of our deliberation about ends.”

The worry which Richardson expresses in this intriguing passage is that our emotionally and thus physically grounded perception underlying our deliberation is essentially perception of the self as single embodied self which hence cannot be a plural self. I suspect that Richardson confuses collective intentionality with something that it is not. That is, I fully agree with Schmid (2009b, 44) that collective intentionality is not what gives rise to a collective as something separate from collective intentionality, something like a collective self or subject in its own right. Richardson’s worry turns out to be unfounded once it is clear that collective intentionality is a matter of the relations between individuals. Although I am very sympathetic with Schmid’s relational approach to collective intentionality it should have become clear that I think we must not understand the relational character of collective intentionality in contrast to the subjective character of individual intentionality. Individual intentionality is relational too, namely self-relational. Subjective intentionality is not essentially different from collective intentionality in my view since the unification of consciousness while in fact dependent on a single subject of consciousness with a body, this is not what constitutes consciousness as a unifying power. What

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constitutes consciousness as a unifying power is the unified activities when exercised by one or more ontological subjects.254 The same point can be made in a different way by recalling that it is selfconsciousness that introduces a certain plurality into the self. To acknowledge the self-conscious unity of human consciousness just is to acknowledge a certain plurality as essential to that unity. It is essential for practical agents that they can be of two or more minds.255 What further speaks against identifying consciousness with a single psychological entity that resides in the individual physical body is the following consideration. Our psychic states and activities although dependent on our body, typically cannot be identified with a specific locus of feeling somewhere inside the body, as Richardson seems to think. But if this is correct, then we should avoid individuating conscious states or activities in the same way in which we individuate bodies. While I think that Richardson is right in emphasizing the evaluative concomitants of deliberation, I do not think that they should be generally conceived as particular sensational feelings somewhere localized in the body. For this reason I rather concur with Millgram (1997, 124 – 125) that our deliberation and actions are guided by something like a “judgment of desirability”, i. e. one’s general awareness of or attention to “whether what we are doing is going well, and if we ought to be doing it”. The pleasure that we take in our activities is not understood as a sensational bodily feeling but as an evaluative indicator of whether what one is doing is desirable (cf. also chapter 5). Is there any positive evidence for the assumption that we can share feelings apart from the negative consideration that since feelings cannot normally be located inside the body, the fact that agents have a body may pose no obstacle for the assumption that feelings can be shared? Here I think Schmid’s (2009b, 72) discussion of Scheler’s account of sharing the feeling of grief proves helpful. Scheler’s example that Schmid discusses is the shared feeling of grief of the parents over their diseased child. Schmid (2009b, 72) argues with Scheler that the identity of a genuinely shared feeling, i.e. of one token feeling “is not just a

254 Cf. Korsgaard ([1996]2000a, 377). 255 This is not to say that animals that are not self-conscious do not integrate their psychic activities. It only means that non-self-conscious animals are more immediately transparent with themselves as one or a whole because they cannot be of two minds. But for the same reason they cannot be as deeply transparent with themselves as self-conscious beings can who must justify their actions to themselves and to others thereby integrating themselves. But this is not to say that intelligent animals cannot feel somehow disintegrated. In her novel “Hundeherz” Kerstin Ekman (2009) gives an impressive phenomenological narrative of what it may feel like from the perspective of a dog to have lost one’s way home in the snowwhite wilderness of Sweden.

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matter of the content of the feeling, but a matter of the identity of the feeling as an emotional impulse (Gefühlsregung)” in which both parents take part. However, Schmid seems to admit that it is not altogether clear what exactly it is by virtue of which the parents feel as a whole or as one. One necessary but probably not sufficient condition for feeling as a whole that Schmid mentions is that the feeling does not occur as a single state of consciousness but rather as an episode of conscious states embedded in a holistic structure of consciousness. This plausible requirement in turn suggests, I think, that a second necessary condition for sharing feeling as a whole is the sharing of a practical identity, e.g. the identity as parents. The intimacy generated by sharing a practical identity makes sure that the feeling shared is not just a contingent isolated state of consciousness. Contrast this with the following way of sharing an emotion. For example, when I see you smiling I perceive this immediately as a positive emotion that I can share with you where the sharing is to be understood in a weak sense. To share this emotion with you in this weak sense I don’t have to know anything about you or your other mental states or the deeper complexity of your emotion. In other words, I don’t have to understand your emotion or its underlying cause in order to go along with it, or to put it in medical terms, to catch it from you. Intimacy greatly facilitates understanding another person’s emotions and therefore sharing in a stronger sense since it makes it very unlikely that the shared feeling is just an isolated psychic state. I find this a very convincing description of the sharing of feelings albeit with two minor reservations. While Schmid (2009b, 59 – 83) expresses his doubts as to whether psychic feelings such as grief have anything got to do with action, I would like to emphasize that psychic feelings such as grief are importantly related to action. If it is correct that, as Schmid (2009b, 80) argues, genuinely shared affectivity probably requires “some form of common life and shared practices” then (shared) feelings are intimately related to doing things together. Moreover, I think that what we perceive as the physical aspect of psychic feelings typically is a metaphorical transformation of our (shared) physical movements in an active engagement with the world. Such attributes as “deep grief”, “heavy grief”, “unbearable grief” point to the physical experiences we make in our active engagement with our environment and other agents. Finally, we can note the agential quality of grief by recalling the fact that feelings are more or less reasonresponsive behaviour in contrast to mere urges or fits of passion. Perhaps one could say that the parents truly sharing the feeling of grief are guided by their shared conception of grieving, i.e. by their shared idea of what it means to grief for reasons. Grieving for reasons expresses the subjects’ sensibility to and concern with what makes the thing grieved about worth grieving for. If something along these lines is correct then it seems that a further necessary condition for a

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feeling to be shared in the strong sense here discussed is that it is reasonresponsive or normative. This brings me to the second reservation. As I have already mentioned, we do not learn what exactly it is by virtue of which the parents feel as a whole. Schmid (2009b, 81) tells us that what the individual parents are feeling just is the shared feeling “in a certain respect”, namely in the respect that “[t]he individuals’ feelings are the one shared feeling insofar as the conditions under which individuals are not mistaken in experiencing their feelings as being shared by the other participants are met.”

The decisive question is, however, what these conditions are or even whether it makes sense to ask for such (necessary and sufficient) conditions. My own view is that conscious episodes or activities are genuinely shared when the participating agents are guided by their shared evaluative conception of whatever it is that they are doing or feeling. In other words, they must be jointly guided by their shared idea of what makes the object of the feeling worth feeling for. This is just another way of saying that the members of a plural agent must have a shared evaluative self-conception of themselves as jointly constituting the plural agent. This does not mean that the parents who genuinely share their feeling of grief over their dead child must be able to spell out their shared self-conception of what it means to grief for reasons for them. More often than not such a shared conception will rather consist in the joint but spontaneous perception of a pattern that is jointly recognized as requiring a certain evaluative response. It seems to me that the nature of such spontaneous perception itself cannot be grasped by providing necessary and sufficient conditions.256 This has an important implication, which I take to be expressed in Richardson’s interesting passage quoted above. Deliberation about ends is not a matter of seeing all one’s normative commitments explicitly presented on a list “as in a set of instructions in a computer program”. Richardson’s insight here, as I understand it, is that practical deliberation and acting for reasons is much more than merely a matter of explicitly weighing particular facts or carrying out some sort of deductive exercise. Deliberation requires a creative and evaluative engagement with the universal relations between particulars, such as between means and ends. More generally speaking, Richardson seems to agree with Larmore (1981) that deliberation (and probably thinking in general) requires spontaneous grasp of patterns, something which computers are incapable of, as Arnheim ([1969]1997, 73) points out. 256 Note the similarity to the nature of practical judgment for which we cannot give necessary and sufficient conditions as I have argued in my discussion of practical syllogisms in chapter 3.

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For illustration of what I mean consider the following example that is discussed, under somewhat different considerations, by Schmid (2009b, 68). Schmid draws our attention to that part of Homer’s Iliad where Achilles who has killed Priam’s son Hector in revenge for Hector killing his friend Patroclus, is approached by Priam who is grieving for his son. Thereby Achilles is moved to grief for both his own father and for Patroclus and in his grief for them he feels himself as one with Priam who is grieving over his son Hector. Schmid convincingly argues that what makes the shared grief between Priam and Achilles possible is Achilles’ perception of a certain relation between him and Priam that requires a shift in his individualistic self-conception, i.e. in his conception of himself merely as himself, Achilles. This shift explains why Achilles can now experience his grief for his father as the grief of a son for his father and only derivatively that of the individual person Achilles. By conceiving of himself primarily in his practical identity as a son, Achilles can share Priam’s grief as father for his son. His generalized conception of Priam as father and of himself as son establishes a relation of concern between him and Priam: As son of a father for whom he is weeping he feels Priam’s grief as a father for his dead son. To this reconstruction of Schmid’s discussion I would like to add the following considerations that illustrate the sort of spontaneous pattern I called attention to above. We have seen that Achilles perceives that his relation to his father is as Priam’s relation as father is to his son. By generalizing his self-conception or practical identity from Achilles to that of a son, Achilles arrives at identifying his grief with that of Priam. Nevertheless, he does not thereby neglect the particularities or differences between his own grief and that of Priam. Their grief is shared in my view insofar they jointly consider the father-son relation (of which each of them takes a different part) as expressive of their shared fundamental practical identity as human beings. Achilles’ grief differs from that of Priam’s in its aspect as the grief of a son for his father. The appropriate response of grief to a father’s death by his son is quite different from the appropriate response of grief to a son’s death by his father.257 What I have hoped to show by this brief discussion is that unlike Scheler’s grieving parents, Achilles and Priam do not share a particular practical identity. In other words, how Achilles responds to his father’s plight is not something that Priam has anything or much to say about and vice versa. Nevertheless there is a certain restriction placed on Achilles’ response by his shared identity with Priam as human being. His response must express an evaluative or normative reason. That is, his reason for weeping for his father cannot be, for example, that his 257 See Jill Frank (2005, 96) for an interesting defence of the claim that good judgment requires the use of metaphors or figurative patterns, i.e. an intelligent engagement with the relations between particulars that pays credit to both generality and particularity.

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father will now no longer be able to provide for his financial support. Achilles is jointly guided with Priam by their shared evaluative conception of what makes the object of their feeling worth feeling for. And this must have something to do with the worth of Priam’s son and the worth of Achilles’ father as both human beings and particular persons worthy of love and respect. In case of Scheler’s grieving parents, on the other hand, the dead child’s mother has something importantly to say with regard to how her husband responds to their shared feeling of grief and vice versa. Although he does not have to share with his wife all reasons for their grief he must be sensitive such as to share with her those reasons that constitute their shared identity as grieving parents. For example, they would not partake in the same token feeling of grief if the husband accompanied his wife in her visits to the child’s grave even though these visits bring no comfort for him, neither as father nor as part of his shared identity with his wife as parent. In this case he would have to find with his wife a shared self-conception as mourning parents that allows each of them to integrate their own way of mourning as part of their shared grief.

4.5.2 Larmore’s Objection from Self-Commitment There is a second objection that bears profound similarity with Richardson’s objection in that it expresses the view that our practical authority – nobody can take my place when I take a stance on something – is expressive of a relation we have to ourselves that has no equivalent in our possible relations to others. Larmore (2007, 508, translation J.G.) puts it thus: “In such circumstances [where I commit myself to thinking or doing something] we appear before ourselves still under the aspect, which consists of the basic relation of the self to itself, namely the self whose be-ing belongs to ourselves alone. Surely, this basic self-relation is itself not an act of practical reflection. Nevertheless, the latter is a privileged expression of that self-relation since nobody can put herself in my place when it is up to me to take a stand on something. It is in practical reflection where we do not adopt the standpoint of someone else towards ourselves as epistemic self-knowledge requires, and we do not distinguish between subject and object, knowing and known as is constitutive for every knowledge relationship. The question that we answer in [practical reflection] is addressed at our will: do we will to make a certain potentiality our own? Nobody can answer this question on our behalf.”

Note first that the basic self-relation to which I think Larmore refers here is a normative relation whose basic structure we have in common with intelligent animals. They are capable of perceiving or having reasons in the sense that they perceive things to be done or to be avoided on the basis of what their instinctive desires and perceptions tell them to do. Due to lack of self-consciousness,

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however, they do not understand their desires and instincts as influencing their actions or as directing their perceptual attention. As a consequence, they do not understand their mental attitudes as potential grounds for action. Nevertheless, were it not for the basic normative self-relation of something like self-affirmation (a living animal’s basic self-relation) that we share with intelligent animals, we could not so much as recognize our mental attitudes as potential grounds for reasons in the first place.258 This is in line with what I have argued for in the third section of chapter 2. But note second that “practical reflection” here is a technical term. Larmore (2010, 71) thereby refers not to a cognitive judgment about what one should do but to an avowal of intention or commitment without prior deliberation. According to Larmore a practical judgment is a cognitive exercise, an exercise that drives at epistemic knowledge whereas ‘practical reflection’ is essentially noncognitive, not a matter of discovery or representation but a matter of commitment to or confidence in one’s self. Otherwise, he thinks, ‘practical reflection’ could not be a privileged expression of our more basic normative self-relation mentioned above. Our basic self-relation, according to Larmore (2010, 65), is a relation of self-affirmation but it is not to be identified with ‘practical reflection’ in his afore-mentioned technical sense since we are not always explicitly committing ourselves or taking an explicit stand on something. Third, Larmore makes it quite clear that the basic self-relation that grounds ‘practical reflection’ in his technical sense is closely connected with individuality and authenticity. It is only the individual herself who can commit herself – nobody else can do that in her place. However, I think Larmore (2007, 509;512) goes a considerable step further when he infers from this correct claim of non-transferability of subject consciousness the claim that the ‘practical reflection’ expressive of our normative self-relation “has no equivalent in our relations to others”: “The so-called authority of ‘the first person’ (…) has no equivalent in our relations to others. (…) We are familiar with ourselves in a special way and because of this transparent self-presence we can perform a return to ourselves in practical reflection, which has no equivalent in our relations to others.”

Here Larmore’s (2010, 89) underlying idea seems to be that whereas in ‘practical reflection’ or self-commitment the self “presents itself in an intimate and strictly individual way” and “appears as the self that the individual alone has to be”, the self in cognitive reflection “is a self that is to be made intelligible, and that means

258 For a similar argument that without perceiving reasons in this basic, i.e. affective way we could not recognize them as potential grounds for action, see MacIntyre ([1999]2009, 56).

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intelligible to all”. I think Larmore’s account of ‘practical reflection’ or commitment gives rise to at least three problems. First, from what I have said concerning the essentially public nature of meaning it is not conceivable that the self really can present itself, as Larmore claims, “in an intimate and strictly individual way”. Even if it appears strictly individual to the agent herself this does not mean that such self-presentation could not be communicated to or be recognized as intelligible by others. By reasoning practically, as I have argued, and as I will further explain below, the agent tries to find out what makes good evaluative sense for her to do in a certain situation. But this already entails a kind of self-understanding that is not strictly individual and rather agential than epistemic. Second, by his sharply distinguishing ‘practical reflection’ from cognitive reflection, Larmore makes it seem as if we cannot make any mistakes in our ‘practical reflection’ because such reflection does not represent anything – in fact, it’s not really reflection at all. It is pure avowal and not about knowledge at all. I think that such a technical rendering of practical reflection is not very attractive for several reasons. First, as I have repeatedly noted, unless we leave room for the possibility of practical mistake it is not clear how the notion of normativity can be vindicated. Since Larmore argues that our self-relation is essentially normative he must somehow account for this fact. Second, Larmore’s practical/cognitive divide seems to go too far in a way that is not only not required but also counter-intuitive. While we can certainly agree to what we might call the ‘practical/theoretical divide’, I cannot see why the category of the theoretical should be identified with the category of the cognitive. Just because intentions need not be based on explicit prior deliberation, this does not make these self-commitments essentially non-cognitive or inaccessible as potential conclusions of practical deliberation. The third reason why we should abstain from this practical/cognitive divide, I think, is that it makes it hard to see how we could ever come to reflect about something that is intrinsically non-cognitive. What is more, it could give the misleading impression that our commitments are just given and are not open to critical assessment and deliberation. In my view we do not have to conceive of practical reflection as wholly non-cognitive in order to maintain the important distinction, which Larmore might actually have in mind here, namely that between the bare act of avowal or commitment and practical reflection as process. I think we should accept an understanding of practical reflection or deliberation that preserves the cognitive aspects of deliberation. The important point here is this: Practical deliberation can be cognitive without thereby becoming entirely theoretical or epistemic. As I have pointed out before, practical reflection does not require a complete dissociation from one’s attitudes and

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commitments. In practical deliberation the agent does not distance herself from her own commitments as a disinterested impartial spectator who abstracts from all particularity of the personal and contingent aspects of the situation. Moreover, as I have argued before, in practical reflection the subject just is the object, but not the kind of object typical of an epistemic knowledge-relationship, even though the subject before performing the action, experiences a certain distance between herself and the action that she has committed herself to perform. We do not view our actions as independent objects of investigation the way we would if we regarded them as theoretical objects. But this does not make them less cognitive. Otherwise we could not deliberate about our ends and actions, rearrange or revise them in such a way as to make decision about what to do possible. In many cases such self-understanding will require the agent to specify or generalize her commitments in order to be better able to compare the apparently conflicting or unrelated commitments or practical judgments. What is more, even though the object of the agent’s reflection need not be the long-standing commitments themselves but rather what she should do in the specific situation at hand, her long-standing commitments may thereby be scrutinized indirectly, i.e. by being compared in their importance and relations to other commitments and beliefs with the aim of reaching a position that makes decision possible. Since it will not always be easy for the agent to recognize the deep seated commitments that influence the way she presents the situation to herself, it is all the more important that the agent be sensitive to her emotional self-perceptions, as we have seen with Richardson [1994]1997, 205). But we should understand these emotional self-perceptions, as I have argued in the previous section, not primarily as bodily feelings but rather as a general psychic feeling as how well things are going for us. This in turn requires that one’s emotional perceptions should be well educated or reason-responsive so that they correctly represent as (un)pleasant what is really (un)pleasant. The third problem is perhaps the most far reaching. A direct consequence of Larmore’s (2010, 88) practical/cognitive divide, I think, is that our basic relation to other subjects must be modelled on cognitive or epistemic (Larmore makes no difference between them) self-reflection or introspection where the subject figures as the epistemic object of reflection. This restriction does not hold in case of the individual agent’s relation to herself according to Larmore. We can be related to ourselves, as we have seen, both as practical subjects committing ourselves and as objects of epistemic self-reflection. But why should we think with Larmore that our relations to others must be of an essentially different kind than the basic relation we have to ourselves – the former confining the way we can know of others to epistemic knowledge? What Larmore rightly emphasizes is that to view ourselves as epistemic objects of reflection we must already be aware of ourselves as a practical subject

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(which is also why we can never view ourselves merely as objects). So while I fully agree with Larmore that we are essentially practical subjects (and are aware of ourselves as such), I do not see why we must infer from this that our relation to others must be of a fundamentally different kind from the relation we have to ourselves, i.e. non-practical or non-agential but epistemic.

4.5.3 First Person Authority Larmore’s objection as I have interpreted it so far seems to start from the assumption that self-commitment is expressive of our “so-called authority of ‘the first person’ (…)” that has no equivalent in our relations to others”. As I understand it, the authority of the first person is a matter of a person’s agential autonomy. By this I mean that for an individual to count as an agent her behaviour must be seen as constituting her own action and not that resulting from some internal or external manipulative or uncontrollable force.259 But this does not entail, as we have seen, that one cannot directly act on someone else’s reasons or that one cannot act together on the grounds of a shared reason without thereby violating one’s agential autonomy. But perhaps Larmore has something of the following in mind: Just because you think I should do X or because you believe that p, I will not go ahead and do X or believe that p. But when I think I should do X or that I should believe that p but don’t do X or don’t believe that p, then something seems to be amiss. This is because what I think I should do or believe is normative for me in a sense in which what you think I should do or believe is not.260 But I think that this is a misleading way of putting the point at issue. For note that those few people who do tell me that I should do X are probably those whose opinions and normative demands I take seriously in the same way I take my own considerations seriously, namely as effective for my actions. But this is not, strictly speaking, because these considerations are my own or those of my best friends but because they are speaking in favour of my (not) performing a certain action – that is, because I think they are good reasons. What is more, without any good reasons to the contrary, we usually treat other people’s practical and theoretical judgments as a reliable and stable basis for our own reasoning, inferences and actions. This is, recall, how anybody’s or indeed, everybody’s reasons are normative for me, which does not mean, as I have tried to show, that I 259 Schmid (2009b, 145) discusses what I call ‘agential autonomy’ under the notion of “individual intentional autonomy”. 260 Stroud (2000, 39) defends a similar claim on the grounds that an agent can effectively deliberate only about his or her own actions.

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am for myself nothing more than any other human being is for me. Similarly, somebody else’s intentions may be directly effective with regard to my own actions without me thereby losing my agential autonomy. Schmid (2009b, 137ff) has convincingly argued for the conceptual importance of a category of what he calls “low-cost other-motivated behaviour”, such as opening doors for strangers or helping elderly people carry their bags into the bus. Spontaneous othermotivated behaviour, Schmid argues, is behaviour motivated by someone else’s goals – e.g. to go through the door or to get the heavy shopping bags into the bus. It should be obvious that the benefactor’s agential autonomy is not undermined by acting in this way. Yet Schmid (2009b, 138) also thinks that such behaviour is essentially “more a matter of manners than of morals” since it is spontaneous and non-reflective. Here I disagree. For one thing, there is good empirical evidence (cf. Post 2002) that altruistic behaviour with potentially very high costs for the benefactor – which is often considered as typically moral behaviour (such as hiding Jews in the Second World War) – is just as spontaneous and non-reflective as Schmid’s everyday altruistic low cost behaviour. For another thing, I believe that there is not as big a difference between morals and manners as philosophers have used to think. An important consideration that I think supports my suggestion is that those cases of low cost altruistic behaviour that are considered as violating social norms of politeness are examples of behaviour that is in a fundamental sense immoral behaviour and thus not merely impolite or anti-social. Schmid (2009b, 148) himself discusses two important instances of behaviour that he thinks are anti-social. First, in the case of someone not finding the suitable words to finish a sentence but where it is important that she finishes it herself, it would be antisocial to finish the sentence for her. Here we should refrain from our impulse to finish this person’s sentence out of respect for that person. The second instance Schmid mentions is our conviction that the educating of our children should leave sufficient opportunity for them to learn to exercise their own agency. I think what these two cases have in common is that in both of them one should refrain from helping other people achieve their goals because it would undermine their agential autonomy. However, this is not merely a social consideration but an essentially moral one, i.e. a matter of respect. If this is correct, then Sarah Buss (1999, 805) is probably right in arguing that the essential purpose of manners, i.e. treating someone politely, is a moral purpose, namely to enable us to treat one another with respect. I think that these considerations together with the claim discussed in the fourth section of chapter 1, namely that norms of giving freely or spontaneously probably make possible all other more particular human relations, speak in favour of thinking that our epistemic relation to others, like our epistemic selfrelation, is grounded by our practical, i.e. normative relation to them.

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However, there remains an important aspect of Larmore’s claim that first person authority has no equivalent in our relations with others, which I have not yet sufficiently addressed. Perhaps Larmore’s claim is that while we know immediately our own commitments in the sense of avowals of intentions we have no such immediate access to the self-commitments of others (recall that this is the worry I presented at the beginning of chapter 2). Self-commitments are, Larmore seems to say, essentially non-cognitive in the following sense: When I avow an intention – no matter whether it is a new one or an old-standing one – I do not thereby report about the presence of an inner mental state. I rather express my commitment to that which I will do. Such immediate access to someone else’s intention is not possible. Perhaps it is in this respect that our self-relation has no equivalent in our possible relations with others. This seems to be a rather widely held view among philosophers. Victoria McGeer (2007, 86), for example, defends a very similar, if not the same sort of claim. After noting that what she calls “agential self-knowledge” is essentially commissive or normative in nature she goes on to say that the same feature of commitment is also that which marks the fundamental difference between my relation to myself and my possible relations to others. Here she approvingly quotes Richard Moran (2001, 91) for his rejecting the “essentially superficial view” of the epistemic “picture of privacy”, which leads its adherents to misjudge “the differences between my relation to myself and my possible relations to others”. What McGeer wants us to acknowledge here is that contrary to what one might first think, the real problem of the epistemic approach to authoritative self-knowledge, which I have criticized under the label of epistemic selfknowledge, is not its “‘metaphysically extravagant’ way in which it portrays first person privilege”. “[T]he deeper problem”, McGeer seems to agree with Moran is that its “picture of self-knowledge as a kind of mind-reading applied to oneself (…)” prevents us from recognizing the actually not merely superficial difference between my relation to myself and my possible relations to others. Her point is not only that the fundamental relation we have to ourselves is not one of mind-reading, with which I fully agree, but also that this constitutes the essential difference between our self-relation and our possible relations to others, namely that the relation we have to others is not fundamentally practical but epistemic.261 In other words, we cannot directly perceive or access other agents’ mental attitudes. Rather, from the third person position as observers we try to use a certain theory (e.g. simulation theory or theory of mind) to reach inferential conclusions drawn from observable behaviour about its underlying 261 Considerations such as these, I think, may have led philosophers into analyzing collective intentionality on the model of reciprocal ascriptions of mental states that I have criticized in chapter 1.

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invisible mentality or intentionality. Thus the sense in which we immediately know our own mental attitudes but not those of others is that 1) we do not take an observational stance towards our own attitudes but an essentially practical or commissive one and 2) that our own mental attitudes are not hidden from us in the way other’s mental states are hidden from us. Even if this is not true for all mental attitudes, it is certainly true for acts of avowals and judgments since one cannot, by definition, make an avowal or judgment unconsciously. I think both assumptions are problematic and I will examine them in more detail against the background of discussing what I take to be Fr¦d¦rique de Vignemont’s (2010) defence of two very similar assumptions. DeVignemont argues that one cannot have access to the mental states of others in the same way as one has access to one’s own mental states. The latter are not hidden from us but are directly accessible to us from our first person perspective. This is a conclusion he draws from the following two considerations. First, the seemingly “immediate” or first-person knowledge we can have of other people’s mental attitudes is only superficial knowledge insofar as we don’t have access to that person’s other mental attitudes or network of mental attitudes as well. An example for this is that we can feel happy with someone from merely observing that she is happy – she is smiling brightly – without however knowing anything about her other mental states and consequently about the reasons for her smiling, that is, why she is smiling. But even such seemingly immediate superficial knowledge of another’s mental state turns out to be mediated, de Vignemont rightly claims. It is mediated by the context from which we must select the relevant information needed to correctly categorize the mental state. Second, if one’s knowledge of somebody else’s mental states is not superficial but deep because “based on a common network of associated mental states” (De Vignemont 2010, 290), then such holistic deepness is to be had only at the price of even more mediation and, by implication, more reflective distance. For to understand someone’s emotion – de Vignemont restricts his discussion of sharing mental states to emotions – requires that one puts oneself in this person’s shoes and simulates for oneself what this person must feel like by integrating what else one knows about this person. Against the background of my discussion of sharing consciousness and feelings in the previous sections I reject de Vignemont’s conclusion on the following three grounds. First, de Vignemont seems to presuppose that consciousness cannot be shared immediately since for him the only two possible ways to access other people’s minds is through observation and simulation neither of which requires the conscious participation of the one whose mental states are accessed. However, my discussion of shared feeling has shown that holistic deepness need not go hand in hand with the distance that de Vignemont thinks is required for simulation. The parents that are united in the shared grief do not share their grief by

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way of simulating the other’s feelings; they are immediately united in their shared feeling. Second, I cannot see why the fact that our perceptions of another person’s mental attitudes are mediated by the context is supposed to show that these perceptions are inferential or not direct in contrast to the perceptions of our own mental states. As recent work on enactive embodiment suggests (see e.g. NoÚ 2004), a person has access even to her own mental life only through her active (physical and social) interaction with her environment. Yet we would not think that for this matter our access to ourselves is in some sense epistemic. Moreover, this finding also speaks strongly against the understanding of intentionality as an isolated characteristic of individual subjects.262 But if this is correct, then our stance or relation to others cannot be fundamentally different from the one we have to ourselves. We normally take other’s reasons just as seriously as our own. We respond to what others are doing or trying to do in direct ways, both affectively and commissively.263 This suggests that other’s mental states are, in principal, no more and no less hidden from us than our own mental states. Of course this does not rule out that we sometimes can be (intentionally) mislead or ignorant with regard to another person’s intentions, feelings or thoughts. Such erring, however, is not restricted to our interaction with others but also occurs in the relation and interaction with ourselves, as the phenomenon of self-deception makes clear. Third, de Vignemont seems to argue, like Larmore and McGeer, that we have an essentially different kind of access to our own mental states by claiming that we cannot have access to the mental states of others in the same way as we have access to our own mental states.264 In other words, although we can recognize someone’s happiness, as it is expressed in her face, we cannot feel her happiness but only our own by simulating hers. By contrast, in one’s own case, one never just observes that one is happy, rather one immediately feels one’s happiness, or so it is argued. Such an analysis, however, ignores the possibility that we can share a feeling of happiness that is neither fully yours nor fully mine but ours, as in the case of the parents sharing their grief over the diseased child or in the case of sharing reasons. I think sharing consciousness is not about reading or simulating other people’s mental states (although of course reading minds is a real and important phenomenon). Rather it is about sharing the affective, conative and cognitive directedness towards an object (the latter of which can fall together with oneself, 262 For this claim see also Shaun Gallagher (2008). 263 The assumption of that we take an essentially observational stance towards others, I think, may be just another leftover of the view that understands perception as essentially passive. 264 Soren Overgaard (2010, 266) makes the same claim.

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the subject). Sharing consciousness, as I have been arguing, is a matter of sharing a first person plural perspective of things and not a reciprocal ascription of individual mental attitudes. But perhaps I am misinterpreting de Vignemont’s claim regarding immediacy. Perhaps what de Vignemont really drives at is an infallibility requirement that is satisfied only with regard to a person’s own mental attitudes. I think that this is correct albeit in a much more restricted sense than is usually assumed. I think Schmid (2003, 89) provides a good example of what is commonly taken to be the proper scope of the infallibility claim. Schmid thinks that the infallibility claim is clearly true for intentions. He argues that whereas I can always be wrong in believing that we intend to do something such a mistake is not possible with regard to individual intentions: I cannot be wrong about my own intending. “For me to believe I have the intention to go for a walk entails that I in fact do intend to go for a walk.” By contrast it makes perfectly sense to ask: “‘Do we really intend to meet tonight or do I only believe that we intend to meet tonight?’ My belief alone that we intend x does not mean that we in fact intend x. For I might well be mistaken about our intention.” (Schmid 2003, 89)

What Schmid seems to be saying here is that while I can be wrong about our intentions, I cannot be wrong about my own intentions even though I can fail in them, that is, I can fail in fulfilling my intentions. However, I do not think that for me to believe that I have an intention to go for a walk entails that I in fact do intend to go for a walk just as my believe that I desire X does not entail that I really desire X. I can be mistaken about intending something just as I can be mistaken about desiring or believing something as I have tried to show in chapter 2 section 4.1 on the grounds that one’s reasons for intending (desiring or believing) may be flawed in a way that renders one’s motivation irrational. What I cannot be mistaken about, however – and this is what I think is the true but restricted scope of the infallibility claim – is that it is my belief that I have a certain intention even if that belief turns out to be false in the sense that my intention is not really mine. That is to say, even if I suffer from akrasia or self-deception (with regard to my forming the intention, not with regard to my realizing it) I cannot be wrong about the fact that I have been (akratically or self-deceptively) forming the intention. My point here is simply that although I usually know immediately what my own mental states are, such knowledge is not infallible. The infallibility claim rather refers to the fact that I cannot make a mistake by misidentifying such knowledge as somebody else’s knowledge when it is mine, i.e. I cannot be wrong in believing that I am (even if it’s only seemingly) committed to do something. But now the opponent could argue that while I cannot be wrong in believing that

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I have a certain intention, I indeed can be wrong in believing that we have a certain intention since I can misidentify some intention as ours. But this, I think, is a different type of mistake from the one that is possible with regard to both individual and collective intentions (and indeed any other mental attitudes). Since beliefs or commitments can be false whether they are shared or not, we may falsely believe that we have a certain intention due to some form of collective self-deception. This mistake precisely parallels the one possible in the individual case where I falsely believe that I have an intention. Thus, while selfdeception or akrasia is possible in both individual and collective intentionality alike, the infallibility claim refers to the impossibility of misidentifying our own mental states and commitments as somebody else’s.

4.6

Conclusion

I have tried to show in this chapter that there is no difference, in principle, between the relation we share with ourselves and the relation we share with others. Moreover, I have argued that unlike instrumental rationality the rationality fundamental for self-conscious animals is social in the following way : Rational animals must exchange reasons and publicly ascribe to each other and themselves mental attitudes. They express their rationality socially. Instrumental rationality of which intelligent animals are capable does not require such social expression. I will argue with Korsgaard in the next chapter that means-end rationality all by itself does not refer to a conception of rationality at all. Yet, we need a conception of rationality to identify some behaviour as action. In other words, when we say that some behaviour is instrumentally rational we are not merely saying that someone has successfully taken the means to her individual or shared ends. We are saying that her behaviour counts as an action, i.e. that the animal is the author of her action, as Korsgaard (2009, 81 – 108) puts it, by virtue of showing that the ends are the animal’s own. But if this is correct, then the normative relation an animal has to herself cannot be, pace Schmid (2011a, 51), merely instrumentally normative.

Chapter 5: Why Human Self-Relation Cannot Be Instrumentally Normative – Results and Some Applications

5.1

Introduction

It is widely agreed among philosophers of collective intentionality analysis that the concept of (shared) ends is closely linked to the concept of rational agency. However, many of these philosophers also defend what I have called in the first chapter ‘instrumentalism about practical reason’, the claim that all practical rationality can be reduced to instrumental rationality.265 As Schmid (2009b, 242) argues, the real problem with practical rationality as it has usually been conceived, especially in the social sciences, is not its instrumentalism but its “individualism about goals”. ‘Revised instrumentalism’ as we might call it, should thus still be considered the best explanation of the way we are rationally related to ourselves and to others, namely instrumentally via our own ends or those ends we share with others. In this final chapter I will recapitulate my serious doubts against this claim mainly by expanding on the Aristotelian conception of rational or good action that I have been defending in this dissertation along Korsgaard’s conception of agency, action and rationality. I contend that rational action has not so much to do with end satisfaction, i.e. with ends in their role as the condition of satisfaction of intentions. It has more to do with ends pursued as goods that can be shared either with oneself or with others. Against this background I will argue that pace Schmid (2009b, 243) we should not contrast instrumental normativity with social normativity in terms of the former’s being expressive of the merely solitary relation between the agent and her own goals. For with respect to neither of them is it clear how desires, irrespective of whether they are shared or not, can unify the agent(s) in the way required to call the actions or intentions her/their own. Finally I will discuss a few applications that further support the explanatory force of this claim.

265 See e.g. Schmid (2009b), (1995) and Tuomela (2007).

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Can Instrumentalism Be Saved?

Let me now recapitulate Schmid’s (2009b, 240 – 244; 2011a, 49 – 51) argument for why the notion of sharing ends saves instrumentalism about practical reason. He has convincingly argued that the problem of instrumental rationality is that it instructs us to treat others and their deliberations as mere means or restrictions to our own deliberations. As we have seen in chapter 1, not unlike Postema (1995), Schmid argues in favour of regarding human instrumental reasoning as capable of integrating other people’s perspectives without treating each other as mere means, which is the central problem of instrumental rationality as it has usually been conceived. Schmid’s (2011a, 51). main point is that by sharing an end with you I do not treat you as a mere tool to my interests, because my interests, just like yours, are part of our interests. By sharing ends with you I do not treat you or your deliberations as mere constraints on my own since your deliberations and actions are part of what enables us to achieve the shared end. Schmid’s point, as we recall, is that you cannot be used by me as a means to an end that you share with me for the same reason that you cannot treat yourself as a means when pursuing your own end. With the notion of ‘treating oneself as a mere means’ Schmid (2009b, 243) refers to the important idea that agents cannot normally be indifferent to achieving their own goals; that is, they cannot have a purely epistemic attitude towards them. I have defended a similar claim when I argued that an agent’s selfrelation must be primarily normative instead of epistemic. But unlike Schmid, I have argued that a human agent is not only related via action to her goals or interests but also to herself as someone who must be treated as an end not only by others but also by herself. It is this latter idea that I think Schmid has difficulties to account for because of his defence of instrumentalism about practical reason and his conceiving of acting rationally merely in terms of desire satisfaction. So what I think is problematic is that Schmid goes on to argue that it remains nevertheless true that I am interested in your reasons merely as instrumental reasons, i.e. in their role as necessary means that will help realize our shared end. Although Schmid denies that these reasons are private reasons – they are rather reasons derived from the shared intention to we-intend one’s part of the shared intention – he also thinks that these reasons are merely instrumental. When agents pursue shared ends they are concerned with each other’s instrumental rationality just as they are concerned with their own instrumental rationality when pursuing their individual ends, or so Schmid (2009b, 243) argues. Normative expectations either towards oneself or towards others are first and foremost instrumentally normative. It is this claim that I think cannot be defended.

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If I understand Schmid correctly then what makes it rational for an agent to have (instrumentally) normative expectations concerning other agents’ behaviour when there is no previous agreement between them, is instrumental normativity issued by their shared end(s). Accordingly Schmid (2011a) thinks that what distinguishes human animals from non-human but intelligent animals is not their capacity for instrumental rationality but their capacity to employ it in a genuinely social setting of sharing ends. Schmid (2009b, 243) writes: “Where agents pursue a shared goal, instrumental normativity breaks out of the cage of the solitary relation between an individual agent and his or her own goals, and takes on a social meaning. As far as agents pursue shared goals, the instrumental rationality of other agents concerns them just as directly as their own instrumental rationality does. Just as solitary rational agents cannot be indifferent as to the achievement of their own goals, and cannot take a purely cognitive stance towards their own future behaviour, they are now in normative relations to each other.”

So according to Schmid while the structure of pursuing an individual end on the one hand and pursuing a shared end on the other hand, is in both cases purely instrumental, it is the concept of the joint end that frees instrumental normativity from its individualism about ends. When agents’ ends are individual ends the agents act upon one another and treat each other as mere tools, calculating and predicting each other’s behaviour. However, when agents share an end they “count on each other” instead of acting upon each other, as Schmid (2011a, 48) puts it. I think this line of reasoning makes Schmid vulnerable to the problem of dichotomy I have discussed in chapter 1: If an individual agent’s self-relation is in principle solitary, how could she ever come to share ends with others without needing (a private) reason to do so in the first place? In any case, in drawing the parallel between the individual and the collective case Schmid illustrates that I do not treat myself as a mere means when intending an end just as you are not used by me as a mere means when we share an end. Rather, as Schmid (2011a, 50) notes, the self-relation presupposed by intending an end is such that in order to intend an end one must take one’s own will as normative for oneself: “Whoever has a goal, stands in a normative relation to him- or herself. To have a goal, and to decide to act on that goal, means to normatively expect of oneself to choose, in the future, the appropriate means.”

Just as we are in this way normatively related to ourselves when we act for the sake of our individual ends, so participants of cooperative endeavours are related to each other in a normative way too, i.e. they have normative expectations towards each other in virtue of sharing an end. In the interpersonal case you and I are normatively connected to each other in virtue of our sharing an end while in the intrapersonal case I and my future self are normatively connected to the

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individual goal. But the normativity involved in each case, the individual and the collective, is instrumental normativity, as Schmid (2011a, 51) emphasizes, that is “normativity of the sort that relates the means to the end”. Has Schmid thereby demonstrated that instrumentalism is not a problem after all? In the following sections I will look a little closer at what I take to be Schmid’s claim that the normativity entailed in having an end is purely instrumental while the normativity entailed in sharing an end is instrumental, too but also social. I will argue (1) that the assumption Schmid makes about an individual agent who must take his will as normative for herself is not as presuppositionless as he thinks (recall that Schmid thinks that in order to avoid circularity we must not presuppose that the agents under consideration are capable of communication). (2) I will show with Korsgaard that individualism about ends is not a problem for instrumental rationality because individualism about ends is a claim that can be made only in connection with a substantive account of rationality. Instrumental rationality however is not itself a substantive account of rationality but presupposes an account of rationality, either substantive or formal (cf. chapter 1). (3) Finally, based on the previous considerations I will show that the sense in which we have to take our own will as normative for ourselves cannot be purely instrumental.

5.2.1 The Normativity of the Will Instrumentalism about practical reason is the claim that practical reason has nothing to tell us about the ends that we choose but only about the means we choose to realize the end. In other words, practical rationality is concerned only with means but not with ends. How exactly are we to understand Schmid’s claim in this context that we have to take our will as instrumentally normative for ourselves? I am going to argue that it makes no sense to ascribe to an animal instrumental or efficacious rationality without being clear about what the underlying ascription of rationality is. We cannot understand failures in efficacy unless we understand what counts as the animal’s own action in the first place.266 If this is correct then we cannot say that the only sense of good relevant for rational agency is the one entailed in taking the means to one’s ends. Human rationality is not merely a matter of the satisfaction of one’s given ends. It is more a matter, I think, of the recognition of the instrumentally rational order inherent 266 My argument here is greatly indebted to Korsgaard’s writings about autonomy and efficacy in her book Self-Constitution, pp. 81 – 108.

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in action (Anscombe [1957]1963) that is subject to justification. I will say more about this below. As I have argued in chapter 2, to say that some behaviour is an animal’s own behaviour is to say that the animal’s own perspective must be integral to the description of her behaviour. While intelligent animals can be said to act intentionally in the sense that they act on purposes that are given to the animal by her instincts, rational animals act intentionally in a deeper sense. Rational animals also act for reasons. My point will be to show that unless we understand the concept of an end as tightly connected to whole actions and reasons we cannot understand how they could be shared. If this is correct then the end for a rational animal is a different thing for that animal than what an end is for the intelligent animal. Ends for human animals when they are part of the whole action description as good or worthwhile for its own sake, are shareable in a deeper sense. This deeper sense can be illustrated by saying that the reason that describes the action and of which the end is a part, is shareable in Korsgaard’s sense of the “reasons we can share” discussed in chapter 1. If this is correct, then it is not clear how the supposed solitariness of the relation between an agent and her individual end can be transformed into a socially normative one when agents share an end because the agents still view their shared ends as somehow given instead of as an essential part of a meansend relation that they can share with one another. This is why I think that the solution to overcome individualism about ends cannot consist in introducing the concept of shared ends. Rather the solution must lie in abandoning the instrumentalist conception of the human self, that is, the concept of the human self-relation as instrumentally normative.

5.2.2 The Form of Rational Animals As we shall see, by illuminating the form of rational animals, we shall also illuminate the self-relation of such animals as non-instrumentally normative. To desire something, I think many philosophers would agree, is to represent the object of one’s desire under a certain description, namely as good where good just means pleasant or agreeable for the desiring animal. Moreover, as I have argued in chapter 1, something can be good or desirable for animals only because they are self-maintaining things. But how does the animal know what is good for it? That depends on the kind of animal we are looking at. Intelligent non-human animals relate to their environment mainly through their senses and instincts that reliably tell the animal what objects of food to pursue and which to avoid, for example (under normal circumstances). An intelligent animal’s will is

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largely a matter of her instincts in the sense that they determine what the animal does in response to what.267 The difference between rational and intelligent animals is not that the latter’s will is identical with practical reason understood as instrumental reason. As I have argued in chapter 1, we cannot understand any animal’s will as identical with practical reason understood as mere instrumental reason. In other words, a higher animal’s ‘practical irrationality’ does not reduce to failures in efficacy. One way to see the essential difference between the form of the rational animal and that of the intelligent animal is to consider the difference in animal intention and human intention. The distinction can be well illustrated by following Kant ([1948]1991) in understanding human intention as a species of the faculty of desire: “[T]he faculty of desire is the faculty to be by means of one’s representations the cause of the objects of these representations.” So Kant understands the general concept of desire as a specific type of representational power, a power that drives at producing the object it represents. Within this general concept of desire Kant distinguishes two different species of desire in terms of the ways in which their representation is productive.268 According to Kant receptive desire is a power of receptivity that arises from a sensible representation of an object already existing, an object, that being sensible affects the representing subject’s perceptual senses (cf. my discussion of Aristotle and the power of perceptual receptivity in chapter 2). How can the power of desire so understood be the efficacious cause of its object? The power of desire as sensible does not actually bring about its sensible object since it already exists; after all, the object of desire is the very cause of the subject representing the object. What that power of desire does bring about effectively is the relation in which the desiring subject and the object desired stand to each other. Thus, desire so understood does not represent its object as to be produced, rather it represents it through being affected by it.269 Here we are aware of the representation’s efficacy from its effect it has on us as sentient beings. This means that we are aware of the efficacy through the sensation or feeling that accompanies the efficacy. In the spirit of my discussion of receptivity in chapter 2 we can say that the feeling or sensation in perceptual awareness is the animal’s con267 Cf. Korsgaard (2009, 104). 268 My discussion here draws from Stephen Engstrom’s (2009, 25 – 65) illuminating reconstruction of Kant’s understanding of the faculty of desire as divided into two species. 269 Both young infants and non-human animals immediately experience desires as evaluative impressions of affect but only the former learn to care for the fitting relation between their affective response and its object in abstraction of their awareness of their being affected by their desire’s object (for such a view see also Hawkins (2008, 261)). This entails that they become aware of their mental attitudes influencing their responses or actions, which in turn means that they can become aware of the efficacy of their desires as cause instead of as effect.

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sciousness of being so affected. The animal whose consciousness is thus affected experiences the desire’s efficacy as an effect of its representation of the existing object.270 In case of desire as spontaneous, on the other hand, the animal is aware of the efficacy of desire as cause instead of as effect.271 This leads us into familiar territory. Recall that I have argued in chapter 2 that the difference between perceiving and thinking is that the latter is self-conscious or spontaneous. It is productive of its own object. Intending understood as a form of practical thinking is commonly regarded as spontaneous, i.e. as self-consciously causing the existence of its own object through representing it as to be pursued. In other words, as spontaneously efficacious the intending subject’s consciousness is itself the cause of the object it represents. The efficacy distinctive of representation as it occurs in intending or willing is an efficacy of which the subject recognizes her own consciousness as cause. However, such consciousness is not only the effective cause of the object it represents, as we shall see in section 3 of this chapter, but also its formal or final cause when the maxim one intends is a good reason. What we can note so far is that in practical thinking the agent takes her own will as efficacious cause of the end she wills.272 So only a self-conscious agent is capable of willing an end in this sense. This means that only beings whose intending is spontaneously efficacious, can (and must) take their will as normative for themselves. To think of one’s will as instrumentally efficacious one must recognize that one’s own mental attitudes are in principle capable of influencing one’s actions.273 But such beings, as I have argued in the previous chapter, are essentially social and moral beings. If this is correct then Schmid’s claim that a being who normatively expects of herself to choose the means to the end she wills must take her will as normative for herself – and this is not as presuppositionless as it may seem. As Schmid (2011a, 48, my emphasis) himself rightly emphasizes, “[o]nly beings whose behaviour is understood as capable of 270 It is for the general faculty of desire exercised by a power of efficacious representation that sentient beings strive for their own consciousness of which they are aware through perceptual and bodily sensation. 271 This fits nicely with Rödl’s claim discussed in chapter 2 that in intending one is aware of an object by being an object in that one is aware of oneself to do something by being aware of what to do. 272 Note that this is another way of making the point discussed in chapter 2, namely that to intend something in the sense of willing it is to satisfy one’s desire for determination through self-determination. 273 This is not to say that such an influence must necessarily occur in each and every case of action but only that it must occur often enough. Confusion about this has led many philosophers to misunderstand Korsgaard’s constitutive concept of the will as incompatible with phenomena of weakness of will. I think Wallace’s (2006, 95) criticism of Korsgaard is a good example of such a misinterpretation.

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understanding what they should do can be the objects of normative expectations”. But such beings are self-conscious beings. By contrast, non-linguistic animals cannot be understood to deliberate about why following some rule is the rational thing to do. Here I think is where we come across an interesting ambiguity in Schmid’s defence of instrumentalism about practical reason. On the one hand the “should” in the passage just quoted must be taken as the instrumental should, i.e. that kind of normativity “that binds the means to the end”. On the other hand Schmid (2011a, 44) also argues that we follow and should follow social habits and practices, such as driving rules, simply because “this is the rational thing to do.” But the “should” referred to in this latter sense is a categorical or principled ought. What this nicely shows, I think, is that before we can appeal to instrumental reasons we must say what it is the rational thing to do, i.e. what ends it is good or rational to pursue.274 In other words, the form of rational agents requires that they represent their object of intention to be pursued under some description of the good. I think that this gets easily forgotten by philosophers who take it for granted that the self-referential nature of intentions is the only relevant feature of intention to be considered in the analysis of human action.275 Below I will argue that such a view is at risk of committing two mistakes. First, it is at risk of falsely construing the relation between intention or reason and action as inner mental state that causes an outer state of affair. Second, it is at risk of neglecting the fact that an end is related to intention not just as the intention’s condition of satisfaction caused in the right way. An end is also intended as a good, which can be expressed by the deep-seated philosophical conviction that, as Schroeder (2009, 247) puts it, “intending to do something requires taking yourself to have a reason to do it”. This is just another way of making the point above that an intention’s end is to be pursued under some description of the good where the notion of good is not reducible to its instrumental meaning. Its normative significance, in my view, cannot be instrumental because it refers to the authority of the will that works with normative reasons and thus has to be prior to any concern about in274 A substantive account of rationality would tell us, for example, that we should pursue the ends that maximize our self-interest or our shared interests, for that matter. A formal account of rationality would tell us, for example, that we should pursue ends that can be at least acceptably (if not always justifiably) achieved. As should have become clear I tend to think of human rationality more in the latter way than in the former. 275 To say that intentions are self-referential is to say that their conditions of satisfaction are not simply states of affairs that correspond with the representational contents of the intentional state (which one might think is true of desires). Rather these states of affairs, i.e. the intention’s end, must also be caused by the intention in the right way. John Searle’s book Intentionality can be seen as the locus classicus of this view. For the same view see also Schmid (2009b, 133) and Zaibert (2003).

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strumental efficacy. Under normal circumstances an adult human being follows driving rules, if she follows them, because she recognizes that to follow them is the rational thing to do, not the instrumentally rational thing to do. Moreover, she follows the rules because she wills to follow them, and not merely because someone else has socially authorized that this is the rational thing to do.276 To object that following driving rules is rational only if one also accepts as ultimately justified the institution that grounds those rules and that no such ultimate justification can be given is to miss an important point about the very nature of social norms.277 Many social norms are categorical in their form. But this is not to say that their justification must adhere to some ultimate and universal – in the sense of context-independent – principle or value as Mackie, for example, seems to think.278 On the Aristotelian understanding of practical reason that I have been defending here, the evaluation of a social norm, just like the evaluation of a particular action, rests on considerations of justifiability that are all but context-independent. And as we have seen with Korsgaard, action maxims can be very specific. I think that my argument so far allows the following preliminary conclusion. Since instrumental reason presupposes either a formal or substantial notion of practical normativity, practical reason cannot be reduced to instrumental reason.279 In Schmid’s discussion of social norms we find some evidence that he implicitly accepts this argument despite his adherence to instrumentalism about practical reason. If this is granted then our disagreement – that is, what I consider to be our disagreement – must rest on a disagreement about the nature of normativity. According to my view of practical normativity what is relevant for a reason to be subjectively normative is that the agent takes it to be good under some description. Her reason is objectively normative if she is right to take it as good. This is compatible with my claim that that the authority of the will has to do with the notion of evaluative goodness where that is not reducible either to the agreeable, to the prudentially advantageous, or to epistemically error-free deliberation. I will say more about this latter form of normativity below in section 2.3. Finally, we can answer the question why we have to take our own will as normative for ourselves where ‘normative’ does not mean ‘instrumentally normative’. We have seen that it is characteristic of human action that it is not

276 Even though of course social rules are socially constructed as I have argued in chapter 3. 277 For a similar point see Heath (1997, 467). 278 Since Mackie (1977) also believes that such ultimate values are “ontologically queer” he is convinced that social norms are only superficially categorical. He thinks that the conformity to social norms can be understood only if one assumes that ultimately an agent’s compliance rests on her prudential desire to conform. 279 Korsgaard (2008, 27 – 68) was one of the first to defend this claim.

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only voluntary but that it can be chosen.280 For one thing this implies that making up one’s mind requires something more than just acting on one’s fleeting desires. What it requires is the same that shows that the ability of making up one’s mind is an indication of one’s having a mind. The ability to make up one’s mind is the ability to change one’s mind for reasons understood as principles. Therefore it makes sense to speak of failures of efficacy with regard to human beings only against the background assumption that human animals act for reasons that are not purely instrumental (even though the structure inherent in action, as we shall see below, is instrumental). To act for reasons is the way in which rational animals constitute themselves. This does not mean that instincts play no role in our self-constitution. It only means that unless we act for reasons we fail to constitute the kind of animal we are. Rational animals act for reasons, i.e. they try to realize ends that are good under some description. This goodness, as we have seen, cannot be instrumental goodness for instrumental rationality alone does not tell us what ends we should pursue. So if it is true that we pursue ends of which we think are good under some description – i.e. if we act for reasons – then practical rationality cannot be reduced to instrumental rationality. The force of the instrumental principle all by itself cannot help an agent in deciding to take the means to some specific end rather than another. Note that the instrumentalist had better not reply that prudence would tell her what to do for thereby she would violate the very claim to which she subscribes, namely that all practical rationality is instrumental rationality. Principles of prudence unlike the instrumental principle make substantive claims, claims that tell us what ends we have good reasons to pursue.281 Note that since we can and often do act without acting well, we should only claim that acting for a reason requires that one acts on a law which need not always be the moral law. To say that when acting for a reason one must act for a law means that, as Korsgaard (2009, 72 – 76) puts it, an agent’s will cannot be “particularistic”. To say that an agent’s will is particularistic is a contradiction in terms since she would have no will at all: She could not distinguish herself or the

280 This is of course compatible with the fact that rational animals are also sensibly affected by the objects of their desires. Rational animals are animals after all. 281 For this claim see also Korsgaard (2008, 81).

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principle that she regards as expressive of her own will as distinct from her own incentives.282 As Korsgaard (2009, 75 – 76) writes: “And in order to will particularistically, you must in each case wholly identify with the incentive of your action. That incentive would be, for the moment, your law, the law that defines your agency or your will. It’s important to see that if you had a particularistic will, you would not identify with the incentive as representative of any sort of type, since if you took it as a representative of a type you would be taking it as universal. For instance, you couldn’t say that you decided to act on the inclination of the moment, because you were so inclined.”

To say that I have decided to act on the inclination of the moment because I was so inclined would be to treat my inclinations “as such as reasons”. Even if such a maxim is not for the good of the whole agent it is a principle of action (albeit defective). For the instrumental principle to have a normative grip on the agent she must think (the act of) her own will as normative for her period and not, as the instrumentalist seems to think, as normative insofar it will help her effectively take the means to her ends. Thus the normativity of one’s own will cannot be derived from or identified with instrumental normativity itself. I think we can generalize this finding for the collective case in the following way. Just as I have normative expectations towards myself not merely insofar as I pursue a certain end, I do not have normative expectations towards others only insofar as we share a particular goal. Otherwise someone else’s reasons have no normative force for me unless I share a goal with her. A standard of practical rationality must be able to account for the fact that at least to some degree another person’s reasons are normative for me whether or not she is part of my group and whether or not she shares a particular end with me. To my mind the very idea of sharing ends presupposes a conception of inclusiveness of reasons that goes well beyond that of mere group interests. In other words, introducing the concept of group ends and group interests does nothing to overcome the problem of the individualist conception of the self, it only pushes it to another level, namely that of the group. To repeat, why should I treat as normative only the reasons of those who share the end with me but not the reasons of those outside the group? The philosophical concern here exactly parallels the more familiar one as to why it should follow from the separateness of personhood that my good is only reason providing for me but for nobody else. Just as the separateness of personhood does not show why a person’s reasons and her good should only concern herself, neither does the sharing of a particular end show

282 Therefore the notion of a particularistic ‘will’ is not identical with the notion of a weak will except for the limiting case where the two fall together, namely where the will is so weak that it has become particularistic, and hence, really inexistent.

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why only the members’ reasons should be taken as normative but not the reasons of those outside the group.283 What I want to show in the next section is that, strictly speaking, my reason to take the means to some end is not normative for me because I intend to do something. It is the other way round: Intending to do something requires that I take myself to have a reason to pursue the end. I thereby want to meet a familiar worry expressed by philosophers who think that practical rationality reduces to means-end rationality. Moreover, I think a similar point can be made with regard to collective intentionality. For me to do my part of the shared intention requires that I take us to have a good reason to pursue the shared end. To put my claim differently, introducing shared ends does not solve the problem of instrumentalism because it does not tell us what a good reason is.

5.2.3 The Instrumentalist’s Worry and a Reply An obvious challenge to my line of argument above would be to say that I have done nothing to dispel the worries that drove the instrumentalist into his position in the first place. His worry is that since we can intend all sorts of stupid and dangerous ends it cannot be correct that ends give us substantive or good reasons for action. Therefore all that we can say in terms of practical rationality is that we should either take the means to our ends or give them up. I suspect that this will seem a viable reply only if a certain understanding of what it means to intend to do something is presupposed. And this understanding of what it means to intend, as I will now try to demonstrate, is itself dependent on the problematic instrumentalist account of practical reason. In fact it presupposes that practical reason reduces to instrumental normativity and thereby assumes what it sets out to prove. If one claims that all practical rationality can be identified with or reduced to instrumental rationality then there can be no conceptual relation between the rationality of one’s ends and practical rationality. According to the instrumentalist about practical reason practical reason can tell us nothing about which ends we rationally ought to choose. But why should one think of practical reason in these terms? If one believes that what one should do is to satisfy the desires of one’s actual motivational set or given desires then it may seem obvious that practical reason 283 As I have tried to show in the previous chapter this does not mean that as group member one should not give those group reasons a special weight. It only means that we must treat everybody’s reasons as normative just because they are their reasons. Cf. Korsgaard (2009, 201).

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can be of no help with regard to what we should do but only with regard to what means we should take to our ends. A central controversy is what status these desires or motives are supposed to have. Hume and some of his instrumentalist followers could be read, as we have seen, as arguing that in order to avoid an endless regress with regard to action explanation we must posit some natural psychological or physiological state as regress stopper. Such ultimate and unmotivated states are then, quite understandably, considered as typically noncognitive. The agent just has them and they cannot be further justified. But this is exactly the problem. Orectic desires do not really explain actions at all because these forces are mostly not under our control in any interesting sense.284 Here I merely wish to draw our attention to the important fact that actions done for reasons are unlike other things we do, such as digesting food or perceiving that the cat sleeps on the mat. Of course we can cite perceptual beliefs that are not really under our control in the explanation of things that we or intelligent animals do. But my point is that when we hold such a perceptual belief it is not under our control in the sense that we do not really hold it for reasons and therefore are not responsible for it in the same way we are responsible for beliefs that we do hold for reasons such as e.g. “I believe that my father cheats on my mother”. Two things are noteworthy here in order to avoid misunderstanding. First, the Humean cannot reply that her concept of desire is more sophisticated than the one I am attributing to her, for example by understanding desire in the sense of pro-attitude, which includes also principles or commitments. Thereby the Humean would give up her explicitly non-cognitive understanding of desire. Second, the criticism of arbitrariness in the assumption of desires as ultimately based on unmotivated non-cognitive states does not result from the fact that the agent does not deliberately choose her motivated desires. As we have seen with Korsgaard in chapter 3 there is an element in desires that makes them ill suited to fully deliberate choice. Rather, the criticism addresses the fact that one fully allows one’s desires to determine what one does without even treating them as reasons for action. As we have seen above, such a treatment would undermine arbitrariness because the subject would, through her identifying with an action maxim, at least count as an agent with a will.285 This is why I think the Humean agent is not really an agent at all. For a subject to be an agent she must have a will and by implication it must be possible that she 284 Unmotivated desires are not the sort of thing we should accept as natural regress stoppers since if unmotivated desires explain some behaviour at all they do not explain it in the right way, i.e. in such a way as to pick out the behaviour as an action instead of as mere reaction or the effect of an inner or outer cause. 285 Korsgaard (2009, 75 – 76) discusses the problem of such arbitrariness under the notion of “particularistic willing”.

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can violate the normativity of her own will. In other words, practical irrationality must be a real possibility for such a subject. According to the Humean understanding of practical rationality, however, such practical failure is conceptually impossible. And it is impossible because the Humean understands practical rationality as a form of causal necessity. At least Hume explicitly writes that cause and effect are to be understood as a necessary conjunction of two objects, where the conjunction is performed by the mind. Hume (2000, 1.3.14: 32) argues that: “For as our idea of efficiency is deriv’d from the constant conjunction of two objects, wherever this is observ’d, the cause is efficient, and where it is not, there can never be a cause of any kind.”

This suggests that whatever it is that someone does just is what she wants to do, which is that which caused her to act.286 But practical irrationality is only a real possibility for a subject that is able to distinguish herself from her own inclinations. Hume’s notion of causal necessity, however, makes it impossible that the agent can distinguish herself from her inclinations. Hume makes it seem as if some behaviour, by its mere occurrence, would guarantee that the agent wanted it. Not only does this have the implausible consequence that involuntary spasms would count as actions but it also prevents practical rationality from doing any genuinely practical work. From such a Humean (Hume 2000, 2.3.3: 7) perspective practical mistakes just seem to be theoretical mistakes: “The moment we perceive the falsehood of any supposition, or the insufficiency of any means our passions yield to our reason without any opposition.” So according to Hume 286 Consistently (but falsely) Hume (2000, 1.3.14: 34) further argues along these lines that the distinction that we make between power and the exercise of it is likewise without foundation. From this it follows for human action that when someone acts this is the only thing that can happen: Action is necessarily efficacious since an agent’s current desires necessarily cause her to act. Several philosophers have noted the incoherence of such a position, first of all Aristotle (1991, book IX.2 – 3) in his objection against the Megarians who held position similar to Hume’s. If it were the case that a thing only has a power (or can do something) if it actually does the thing of which it is a power (otherwise it does not have the power) then, for example, only the man while he is building the house can build the house but can no longer build it once he stops. Nor can all the other men that are not now building the house ever build houses. That this position is quite absurd is clear since the very notion of builder (or any other profession) does not entail that if one doesn’t momentarily build one cannot build. Moreover, according to the position criticized it would not be possible to develop skills or to learn how to become any kind of professional since one can only do what one is already doing. According to the position under discussion one would have to wake up just being a philosopher or carpenter or good at telling jokes, which is surely inconceivable. What is more, we should turn deaf and blind the moment we close our eyes or shut our ears (as when we are asleep) but miraculously see and hear again the moment we open our eyes and ears. Finally holding such a position would force one to reject all notions of change and movement since who does not already stand could never stand up since she wouldn’t have the power to do so.

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one behaves practically irrationally when one’s passions yield to non-existent objects or when they are based on false causal judgments. But these mistakes are like theoretical mistakes insofar as one will reliably correct them once one has come across them. Such a view cannot account for what we think is the essentially practical nature about so-called phenomena of weakness of will. To see this consider the following thought experiment.287 When someone happens to mistake a glass of water for petrol the Humean naturally and correctly describes the situation when she says that as soon as the agent learns that she is about to drink petrol she no longer desires to drink it. For what she really wants to drink is water, not petrol. The Humean thereby implicitly assumes that it is not rational to want to drink petrol and that the agent is rational insofar as she adjusts her desires to her corrected beliefs, i.e. upon learning that her glass is filled with petrol instead of water. But it seems not the case that the Humean would describe the situation correctly if she said that the procrastinator would stop procrastinating upon learning that procrastinating is detrimental to her final good. According to the Humean if the procrastinator does not stop procrastinating this is just because she doesn’t understand how bad procrastinating is for her. If she were thinking rationally she would not want to procrastinate anymore. According to Hume, the procrastinator‘s real desire is not to procrastinate as this conflicts with what she really wants, namely leading a stress-free life. The role of practical deliberation as the Humean understands it would be to reveal to the agent her true and prudent (!) desires – which she now cannot see because her mind is clouded (from excessive procrastinating?). But surely this cannot be right on three grounds. First, we do not find something good, if we do find it good, because we desire it – we desire many things that we acknowledge are not good – but we desire it because we have found it good (for us). Practical deliberation is not a special kind of telescope by means of which we learn about our actual good desires hidden away in the impenetrable depth of our psyche. Rather, as Korsgaard (2008, 74) points out, practical deliberation determines “what is good for us, what we ought to want”, and what we should do. Second, the Humean cannot argue that the procrastinator is irrational because in order to say that procrastinating is irrational she must presuppose some view about what it is rational (not) to do, which stands in conflict with the Humean claim that all reasons are or reduce to instrumental reasons. I think we can further illustrate the implausibility of the Humean view if we try to imagine what it could mean to say that some action is instrumentally virtuous. While it makes perfectly sense to speak of intellectual and moral or 287 My example is different from but in the spirit of Korsgaard’s (2008, 73).

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practical virtue, it is not clear what instrumental virtue could mean. This is because within a certain range of practicability we can simply take any means to any ends. Instrumental normativity is surely necessary for both intellectual and moral virtue and thus is valuable relative to more substantial or formal views about theoretical and practical rationality. But it has no value in itself. This is another way of making the point that instrumental rationality cannot stand on its own. This is implicitly confirmed with regard to the procrastinator when it is assumed that what the procrastinator ought to desire is a healthy stress-free life instead of a life full of sleep-less nights and annoyed bosses, students or publishers. But this is clearly a more substantial view about which ends we should pursue than mere instrumental rationality can provide. The important point here is that the instrumentalist cannot reply that, of course, in our pursuit of ends we desire what we think are good ends, because she has no standard by which she could judge which end is good and which not. To reply that our ends are just given obviously begs the question. What is more, thereby one would be prevented from making sense of the phenomenon of weak willed action or of situations in which we acknowledge that the ends we pursue are not good. But surely there are cases of weak willed behaviour and we often do pursue ends that we think are not good. This brings me to the third problem of the Humean view under consideration. From the perspective of the Humean, weakness of will looks like an illness because on her assumption, the procrastinator would stop procrastinating if only she came to her senses or were in the right mind that is now clouded by the stressful consequences of her dawdling. However, I think that the phenomenon of weakness of will is a much more common phenomenon than the instrumentalist’s illustration of it makes it seem. Even though under certain circumstances weakness of will may become the default state of the mind, it is not normally itself an illness. I am here not thinking of the notorious philosophical figure of the drug addict or the depressive internet junky for I think these are in a state of mind in which the will is not just weak but impaired by physical and/or psychic illness. They are in a state such that their evaluative judgment – it would be better not to take drugs on the assumption that one aims at living an autonomous life – has no or only very little effect on their will. In these cases the reliable (but not necessary) connection between action motivation and evaluative judgment is made impossible due to the physical and psychological effects of the addiction. I am rather thinking of ordinary people who eat too many pieces of cake or who procrastinate to the point where the workload has grown so big that they cannot meet their deadlines. Sometimes such behaviour is described as being determined by the agent’s discounting the future too heavily. Nevertheless, the

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agent takes herself to have some reason to do what she does, i.e. there is some description under which she takes to be good that which she pursues. This is why, pace the Humean, the weak willed agent actually acknowledges that she pursues an end that she had better not pursue. To have more time for a more pleasant activity than correcting essays just now or eating another piece of cake are things we value as good sorts of things. Yet, not all instances of good sorts of things are good. Eating another piece of cake after already having eaten five pieces out of boredom, for example, is not good in the sense that there seems to be no reason for which we are eating another piece of cake. By contrast, eating another piece of cake for the sake of comfort instead of out of mere boredom may not be the best of reasons but it is a reason all the same. The important point is that what all these cases have in common is that the agent could have behaved otherwise but did not do so for some better or worse reason. While the weak willed agent’s failure is truly her own it seems to me that the failure of the internet addict to stop surfing is no longer truly her own because the reasons on which action is based are not really her own (cf. chapter 2 section 4.1). I hope to have hereby provided good evidence for the assumption I started out with in this section, namely that the central obstacle for the Humean instrumentalist against believing that one can deliberate rationally about ends may be found in his understanding of desire satisfaction as the final end. Recall that giving up procrastination according to the Humean is good for the agent because she would desire it if she were sufficiently rational. But to understand desire satisfaction as a goal is misconceived, as Millgram (2005, 45) has shown, because it takes the value of what we do to rest in desires themselves. If this were true it would be unconceivable how desires could guide our action. They can only guide our actions as indicators of what is valuable. The instrumentalist gets the relation between value and desire the wrong way around. To repeat, we do not find something good because we desire it but we desire it because we find it good or value it. Now let us recapitulate the instrumentalist’s worry from which our discussion has departed to see how the assumption that desire satisfaction is a final end and the instrumentalist’s worry are related. The instrumentalist’s worry is that having an end – and I think we can generalize this to the notion of sharing an end – does not necessarily give the agent a good or normative reason to take the means to her end or to contribute her part to the shared end. After all, the (shared) end may not provide a reason for action because it may be a bad end or a stupid one. From this the instrumentalist seems to infer that our (shared) ends can only give us instrumental reasons but not substantive ones. I understand this as an argument in the spirit of John Broome (1999) according to whom the reasons-relation in question is not one of “narrow scope” but one of “wide

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scope”, which provides the individual merely with instrumental reasons but not with normative ones. These instrumental reasons are considered somehow akin to requirements of rationality that do not tell us what we should do (hence the term “wide-scope”). Rather the instrumental principle so understood is a disjunctive requirement of rationality with which the agent can comply either by realizing her (part of the shared) intention or by giving up the (shared) intention. So, all the agent must do is have the right combination of mental attitudes to satisfy this requirement of rationality.288 It does not matter with regard to her status as a rational agent whether she simply gives up the (shared) intention or whether she actually realizes her (part of the shared) intention, for which she may have no good reasons, as long as she has the right combination of mental attitudes.289 But this goes against the plausible philosophical assumption that to intend to do something requires one to take oneself to have a reason for doing it.290 What we must try, I think, is to reconcile the instrumentalist’s legitimate worry that ends are not in themselves reasons with the philosophical commonplace that one intends or does things for reasons. But then what is the problem with the instrumentalist’s worry? His worry is warranted on the assumption that our ends cannot be normative for us, for they may be all sorts of stupid or dodgy things. But from this it does not follow I think that we can intend or will just anything. Willing to do something requires that I take myself to have a reason to do it. The agent must view what she does as valuable or good in some respect in order to act at all, i.e. her practical stance must be minimally stable. By depicting practical rationality as mere rationalization of one’s mental attitudes one renders the very notion of intending an end incomprehensible, no matter whether the end is willed alone or jointly with others. In my view, the instrumentalist is wrong in his thinking about what happens when we intend to do something. He seems to think that we can adopt just any end which then, upon being adopted, turns into a normative entity that we are required to realize. But as Korsgaard (2008, 220) rightly argues, we do not and cannot just adopt any end of our fancy by enacting it into a law, which we then have to realize. Our ends themselves are not normative for us because they are not themselves intrinsically good or bad. Only the end together with the means 288 As I will show below, the fact that instrumental consistency of one’s mental attitudes can conflict with practical coherence further indicates that instrumental rationality may not be the fundamentally interesting concept for practical rationality. 289 See also Bratman (1987, 33) for a similar account of rationality in which he distinguishes between plans and values or reasons, arguing that collective intentionality is basically a matter of sharing a plan but not of sharing reasons. 290 This holds irrespective of whether we are dealing with individual or shared intention.

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that it regulates can be normative as a whole. The instrumentalist’s worry arises from the fact that she seems to confuse the action’s end understood as purpose with the action’s reason. However, an action’s reason in these I have been defending with Korsgaard, is expressed by the action maxim’s justificatory relation between means and ends. Thereby we can reconcile Broome’s correct insight that ends are not in themselves reasons with the claim that to intend something is to intend something for a reason where this is to be understood as a means-end maxim (and not just as an end). This reconciliation is thus based on the claim that ends should not be understood merely as conditions of satisfaction of intentions. To understand ends merely in terms of conditions of satisfaction, I conjecture, may result from an implicit assumption that satisfying one’s desires is what action is mainly about. Below I will argue that it may also result from a certain conception of action of which intention and reason are thought of as separate causes. On the view that I am defending here, however, we normally choose ends as parts of actions, that is, together with the means that we take to realize them. In other words, the reason for an action is not a mere end or purpose (as the instrumentalist seems to think) but the form of the whole action description that relates means to ends. If this is correct then we should not conceive of intending or willing an end as setting our minds on some (given) end, which we then try to realize under the force of some non-explicable instrumental necessitation that binds us to the end but rather as willing a provisionally universal maxim with a means-end structure that always already includes the means as part of the maxim alongside the end or purpose.291 This is also why we need to know both means and ends to say whether some agent’s action is intelligible or not. Richardson ([1994]1997, 150) illustrates this point well by giving the following example of a practical syllogism: I need something to eat. Here is caviar. Therefore I eat this caviar. However, one’s end to eat something seems not sufficient to explain one’s eating caviar as a means to satisfy this end even though eating caviar surely is a sufficient means to satisfy one’s end to eat something. Absent any special circumstances – it is assumed that I am not starving – we do not think that being hungry by itself justifies eating the luxury good caviar. We can put this point in a slightly different way by recalling our discussion of syllogisms in chapter 3. There I have argued that a good practical judgment requires resources that go beyond what is given by the syllogism itself. I think one of Anscombe’s (1963) most important claims in her book Intention, namely that practical syllogisms are first and foremost mere descriptions of the internal means-end order of intentional action, can be un291 For this claim see Korsgaard (2009, 73).

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derstood as a specification of the idea that explaining and justifying action requires resources that go beyond what is given by the practical syllogism itself. Let me try to illustrate this point by looking more closely at the syllogism introduced above and how we can describe it, with Anscombe (ibid.), in terms of an internal means-end order. What the syllogism tells us is that eating caviar is a means to satisfy one’s hunger. In other words, one can satisfy one’s hunger by eating caviar. If one satisfies one’s hunger by way of eating caviar one does in a certain sense two things at the same time. But since one does not perform two separate actions but only one, it seems reasonable to say that we can describe one and the same behaviour in two different ways. The behaviour can be described as eating caviar and as satisfying one’s hunger. So we have two descriptions of one and the same action. These descriptions are related to one another as means to ends or ends to means. So what the practical syllogism does is that it gives us a special relation between different possible descriptions of a single intentional action. This relation consists in an instrumental order that is constitutive of intentionally performed actions. So Anscombe’s (ibid.) analysis of intentional action strongly suggests that we cannot separate the action description from the description of the intention. I am very sympathetic with Anscombe’s finding since it shows that intention and action should not be conceived as contingently related to each other or as inner cause and outer effect. Rather the action is thereby shown to be expressive of the intention. The description of the intention cannot be separated from the description of the action. When it comes to justifying and explaining the instrumental relation described by the syllogism we must go beyond the resources provided by the syllogism itself. An action’s explanation or intelligibility, I think, is strictly speaking a subjectively normative matter in the sense that it refers to what the agent thinks she should do in a certain situation. For example, our agent may feel hungry and while walking by a delicatessa that offers caviar tasting — discr¦tion she decides that it is a good idea to satisfy her hunger by eating as much caviar as she needs to satisfy her hunger. However, whether the agent’s action is objectively justified depends on whether she is right in taking it to be justified. The difficult question is how a reason stands to intention (i. e. the bare meansend maxim that describes the action) and action. I have already argued with Korsgaard that an action’s end is not identical with the action’s reason and that the reason is the form of the action. If this is correct then the reason cannot be separate from the intention either : It has the same form, namely that of a maxim or what Anscombe calls the instrumental order inherent in action. What distinguishes the reason from the intention, I think, is that the reason picks out the justificatory aspect of this order while the intention picks out its instrumental or teleological aspect.

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Now I will look more closely at Aristotle’s understanding of action as praxis since his account of action as praxis supports my view of the relation between action, intention and reason.

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Two Ways of Understanding Action

The real problem of instrumentalism about practical reason, I think, is not its individualism about ends – that is the problem of egoism or some such substantial theory about what ends we have reason to pursue. To repeat, I think it is rather its underlying view of practical rationality as a task of rationalization of one’s mental attitudes (1) and its conception of how intentions and ends are related, that is, its conception of human self-relation (2). I will take up the first problem in the next section. The second problem concerns the instrumentalist’s view of ends as reduced to their role as conditions of satisfaction for intentions. Philosophers who subscribe to the concept of action as poiesis or making in the sense of creating a product have usually concurred with John Searle (1983) in conceiving of an end merely in its function as conditions of satisfaction for intention. Often this view is intimately connected with the view that intention is the separate mental cause of the bodily action. Davidson’s (1963) famous example of the nervous mountain climber illustrates that although the action of the mountain-climber satisfies the requirement that the end be the condition of satisfaction of the intention it nevertheless is not an action. It is not an action because the end is not caused in the right way.292 Both 292 According to Davidson (1963, 675ff), reasons explain actions in just the way in which they are causes for those actions. Although on this account rational explanation is a species of causal explanation, the causation works qua reasons. The problem is how we know that the causal link is of the right sort. For illustration of this point Davidson introduced the example of the nervous mountain climber who is tired and who reasons about how she could lighten her load. She realizes that in order to lighten her load she would have to let go of the rope on which her colleague is hanging. This thought so unnerves her that she lets go of the rope and thereby drops her fellow climber. Davidson thinks that this is not a fullfledged action because the climber’s movement of dropping her fellow climber was caused by an involuntary mechanism inside her body over which she had no control. So even though the climber satisfies the necessary condition for intentionally loosening her grip on the rope (she has the relevant belief-desire pair: I would like to lighten my load and to do so I must let go of the other climber), she did not act for a reason – for the movement was not caused qua reasons. Hence not all motivated behaviour necessarily constitutes an action performed for a reason. But in fact I cannot see why we should still call this an action even though not a full-blown or intentional one (a full blown action would have to be done for the sake of the end together with a belief how to achieve the end). Uncontrolled movement, it seems, is not action precisely because the movement is not under the felt control of the agent. Involuntary reactions are not actions, not even actions without an intention. Davidson’s climber example is so instructive precisely because it shows that for some be-

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my considerations above and those following are meant to be seen as an alternative to the view of the relation between intention and action as separate cause and effect. Recall that this has an important consequence for collective intentionality analysis. If intentions are not hidden away in the agent’s mind but are expressed in her actions then sharing intentions (and other mental attitudes) will not be as hopeless an undertaking as philosophers have often thought. In his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle (1985, book I.1; book VI. 2, 4, 5) points out that rational action must not only be done for the sake of something else but also for its own sake. To see what Aristotle means, I think, we only have to recall Korsgaard’s (2008, 219) technical distinction between act-type and action. While the act-type, eating caviar say, is separate from the end of satisfying one’s hunger and thus, as Aristotle says, done for the sake of something else, we can understand eating caviar as the whole action described by the maxim or intention ‘I will eat caviar in order to satisfy my hunger’. Here it is important to see that by “separate” two things can be meant. To say that the act-type is separate from the end can mean that it is not done for its own sake. With regard to our caviar example this means that I am not eating caviar for the sheer joy of it, i.e. for its own sake. This is what I call the innocent meaning of ‘separate’. This meaning of ‘separate’ is another way of expressing Anscombe’s point that one and the same action can have distinct descriptions or that the structure of action is a means-end structure. The other meaning of ‘separate’ refers to the external way in which means (act-type) and end can be related. With regard to our example of eating caviar in order to satisfy one’s hunger both meanings of ‘separate’ apply. The first meaning is this: Eating caviar and satisfying one’s hunger are two descriptions of a single action whose internal order is the relation of doing something for the sake of something else. But the second meaning of ‘separate’ applies here as well insofar means (acttype) and end of the particular action maxim ‘I will eat caviar in order to satisfy my hunger’ are related in an external way in addition to the fact that the means are separate from the act. That is to say, eating caviar when hungry is not a norm whose explanation is internal in the sense of self-justifiable. That is, it is not constitutive of satisfying one’s hunger that one eats caviar just as it is not constitutive of baking a cake that one makes it ten feet high.293 Baking a cake ten feet high is an external norm, external in the sense that there is nothing about the baking of the cake itself that would require a ten feet high cake to be made, and therefore can be questioned. For the same reason I think we can question whether eating caviar in order to satisfy one’s hunger is a good thing: Is it haviour to count as an action it is not enough that it has a psychological cause. The climber’s behaviour is an emotionally expressive response to nervousness but this doesn’t make it an action, not even one without an intention. 293 The example with the cake is from Korsgaard (2003, 249).

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constitutive of satisfying one’s hunger that one eat caviar? If the answer is no, then we are dealing with an external norm. By contrast, I think we would not question whether it is a good thing to bake a cake such that it tastes good. Baking a cake just means, that is, is constitutive of baking a good cake. Here it is the nature of the product of the activity of baking that it be good relative to our needs that dictates how a cake must be baked – namely such that it fulfils its function as a tasty cake well. Aristotle’s concept of action as praxis is a special type of such a constitutive norm. However, it is not internal to the product of the activity, like the norm of baking a cake is internal to the nature of its product, the cake, but internal to the activity itself. In other words, while making a cake has an end other than itself (the cake as product and not the baking itself) acting well is not only an internal or constitutive norm but itself the end (cf. Aristotle 1985, 1140b). As Korsgaard (2008) has pointed out, the important point here is that action understood by Aristotle as its own final end is not just a description but always also expresses a constitutive or internal norm directed at this final end. Aristotle’s conception of acting well is not an empirical account of how human beings act. It is a description of what people should do to realize action’s own final end, namely acting well. The whole means-end relation is to be evaluated according to action’s internal standard of the final end of acting well. The moral law is such an internal standard of goodness: To choose the moral law as one’s principle of action is to will the whole action for its own sake, i.e. because it is good. It can surely be doubted whether the maxim ‘I will eat caviar in order to satisfy my hunger’ can be willed for its own sake. If such doubt is possible the norm expressed by the maxim is likely to be external rather than internal and therefore not constitutive of acting well. We can now elaborate on Anscombe’s claim that action has an internal means-end structure. While this instrumental relation inherent in action marks action’s internal practical norm, there is another order inherent in action as Aristotle conceives it. This other order inherent in action is a categorical norm that requires agents to act well, that is, as the nature of action requires.294 So there are two norms constitutive of action. In a teleologically organized world like ours it is constitutive of acting that we do something (take some means) for the sake of something else (some end). I must do something in order to satisfy my hunger. But this is not to say that my intention to eat something and my eating caviar are two different things. This is Anscombe’s point: ‘Satisfying my hunger’ and ‘eating caviar’ are two descriptions of a single action. So we can say that the action of eating caviar expresses the intention to satisfy one’s hunger. The in294 For the view that the instrumental principle and the categorical imperative are constitutive norms of action see Korsgaard (2009, chapters 4 and 5).

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tention is not separate from the action. This becomes also evident once we see, as Hacker (2007, 69ff) has convincingly shown, that it is not the case that the cause of an action must precede its effect. He provides examples where effects are simultaneously produced, that is, where we cannot distinguish between cause and effect in the manner suggested by Davidson. Hacker discusses one example where a razor blade cuts a piece of paper but where we do not and indeed cannot distinguish temporally between the movement of the razor on the paper and the cutting of the paper by the razor. Likewise when we drop a stone into the water it is not that first the dropping occurs and only afterwards the water gets displaced. This puzzle dissolves once we realize that in all these cases there is an agent that does something, an agent that is the cause of a change in the world.295 However, since the agent as a living animal can also be his or her own cause of change – the agent is not only a mover but also a self-mover – Aristotle’s three causes, formal, final and efficient fall together in an animal that reproduces itself. The final cause of a developing animal is the form of the substance of the animal into which it will, partly by means of efficient change, eventually develop as the kind of animal it is. For example, the final cause of a puppy, i.e. developing dog is to be an animal with the characteristics specified in the definition of a dog. Thus in the case of an animal such as a dog its final cause falls together with its formal cause, its essence. As Cohen (2006) helpfully remarks, the identification of the final cause with the formal cause is only apparently vacuous: what this identification in fact tells us is that “(…)there is something internal to it [the developing entity] which will have the result that the outcome of the sequence of efficacious changes it is undergoing – if it runs true to form – will be another entity of the same kind.”

Something similar can now be said about the categorical norm constitutive of action understood as praxis. When we say that reason is the formal cause of action then we thereby say not only that this is its essence, namely what it means to be an action, i.e. good action. We also say that as formal cause the reason is the final end of action and not the action’s end or means taken separately. If the final end of action is good action, if what it means to act is to act well, then Korsgaard is right in arguing that acting well (and therefore the moral law) is a constitutive principle of human action. It is constitutive of the well-functioning of a certain kind of animal, i.e. a moral and rational animal. By way of only concentrating on action understood as making or producing an end we tend to think of the relation between end, reason and action as external and contingent, probably because we 295 If this is correct it is further evidence that to understand the concept of causation presupposes to understand the concept of action and agency and not the other way around. For a defence of this thought cf. Hacker (2007, 69).

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compare it to the relation between product and action where no internal or constitutive relation is assumed. But as I have tried to show, the sense in which action understood as means or act-type and its product (end) are separate is very different from the sense in which they are separate when they are related in the wrong way, that is externally instead of internally. It is with respect to action understood as praxis that we can see ends as part of a means-end relation that describes what makes the activity itself good. I think it’s no coincidence that Aristotle connects action so understood to choice.296 Choosing to do some action for its own sake, according to Aristotle, just is to act well. As Korsgaard (2008, 214) puts it, to act well is to be motivated by one’s own understanding of the appropriateness of what one does, i.e. of the action’s means-end relation as good as a whole.297 Only the action as a whole, consisting of the act (i.e. means) and the end together is open to both instrumental and rational evaluation. This is not to say, of course, that we only ever identify with a principle or maxim that is for the good of the whole.298 To say that praxis is the form of generic human action is compatible with saying that even defective action – action that is not for the good of the agent as a whole or for the action’s own sake – is action and therefore requires that we consider what we are doing to be good under some description. It requires that we give ourselves some law.299 It is for this reason that weak willed action is action, albeit defective. Taking another piece of cake out of mere comfort (one has had enough long ago) is not a good action as a whole since it fails to relate the means (eating another piece of cake) and the end (getting comfort) in such a way that the relation is worthwhile for its own sake. I think that every case of weak willed action necessarily is defective action while not every defective action, of course, is a case of weak willed action. Finally, if my argument so far is on the right track then there is an important further reason why instrumentalism about practical reason cannot be right and why our relation to others cannot be merely instrumentally normative. I have 296 Aristotle (1985, book VI.4, 1140a) is the locus classicus of this distinction. 297 Korsgaard (2008, 214) discusses this phenomenon under the notion of “rational motivation” for action, which we could also call self-conscious motivation. To act in this way, she explains, is to act on the basis of one’s own understanding of the goodness or value of what one does, which is at the same time the motive for why one does it. Rational motivation depends on the agent’s own awareness of the appropriateness of her motivation for action. 298 But if we do identify with the moral principle then we actively exercise our power to choose actions, instead of mere acts or means and thereby form or constitute ourselves into the kind of animal we are. 299 As I have stressed before, this need not happen explicitly. Many of our actions are not based on prior deliberation and often they are habitual. What is important is that we could, if need be, deliberate. That is, it must be possible that we could have acted otherwise if we had thought about what we were about to do.

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already mentioned it in chapter 4 section 2.2: The way in which one can be right or wrong with regard to following instrumental rationality is that one can either achieve one’s ends or that one can fail to achieve one’s ends. Success or failure in this case need be of no concern for others apart me. Of course it may be of others’ concern if they share an end with me the success of whose realization is partly up to me. The decisive point is that on the purely instrumental view of rationality it is not clear that others are acting wrongly when they decide that my contributions to the shared good are no longer sufficient and upon this recognition exclude me from their community. On Aristotle’s understanding of action as acting well, to exclude a person from a community on the grounds that her contribution to the shared end is not needed or insufficient (all else equal) would count as a rationally defective action. Efficient production of a shared end is not by itself a justification for excluding someone who doesn’t sufficiently achieve his part to the shared end. So I agree with Kratochwil ([1989]1995, 148) who argues that “[I]t is our common conception of the freedom and responsibility of moral agents that precedes, and has to be logically prior to, any attainment or utility of goals that agents choose to undertake, singly or in conjunction.”

I understand this as another way of saying that the primary way in which human beings are related to themselves and to each other cannot be instrumental normativity. The concept of human agency is not intelligible unless the concept of moral responsibility is logically prior to that of instrumental rationality. But if this is correct then the authority of a human agent’s will cannot be primarily instrumentally normative as Schmid seems to suggest. It is intrinsic to the concept of acting well that one takes responsibility for one’s actions that goes beyond taking the instrumentally sufficient means to one’s ends.300 Taking as good what one intends entails that what one wills as law or principle of action is not a single end but a whole maxim whose form is described by the instrumental order inherent in action. Rational action requires identification with a principle of the will because human ends do not necessarily determine action. They are not laws to us. So the capacity to intend an end is the capacity to think the end in some sense good that goes beyond being positively affected by the object of one’s desire. The practical point of our deliberation and its underlying emotions and desires is to indicate as I have already pointed out with Millgram (1997, 124) “whether what we are doing is going well and, and if we

300 Choosing means-end maxims is one essential way in which rational animals are productive of their own objects and thus experience themselves as practical agents that are transparent with themselves.

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ought to be doing it”. But how exactly does this work and how do we know whether what we are doing is going well and whether we ought to do it?

5.4

Human Desires Are Reason-Responsive

Our human nature resembles that of non-human animal creatures in that it is sensible or affective in the meaning of sentient. As infants it is largely our instinctual desires that tell us what ends we should pursue, namely those that help fulfil our self-maintaining function, and that further or well-being. So one way in which we can speak about human behaviour being under the so-called “guise of the good” is to say that our sentient nature as living creatures brings us to seek those ends that qua our sentient nature are valuable or good for us. Our nature can guide us in desiring what is good for us in that we find pleasant what is good for us and unpleasant what is bad for us. So the function of our original pleasures is to guide our actions and indicate how well we are doing; it is not to satisfy our pleasures whatever they are. Sensations of pleasure and pain are our innate indicators of how well we are doing. This is why, as Millgram’s (2005, 42) insightfully points out, they seem so obviously good. If they didn’t seem so obviously good they could hardly be the reliable indicators of our well-being that they indeed are. But this does not mean, as we have already seen, that satisfaction of our desires is intrinsically good, that is, good for its own sake. The instrumentalist’s emphasis on the satisfaction of our desires is at great risk of overrating the role of instrumental reasoning in our practical reasoning to the point of distorting our very understanding of rational agency.301 Surely, if we always failed in achieving to take the means to our ends we could hardly be said to be acting at all. This is granted if we accept, and I see no reason why we should not, Anscombe’s claim that the means-end relation is the order inherent in action. But we would not be acting either if we effectively took the means to whatever ends we just happened to have. While we do not have to learn that physical sensations of pleasure and pain are good sorts of things for us, we do have to learn to act for good reasons and which reasons are good. That is, we have to learn which instances of good sorts of things are actually good and which are not. We have to learn to care for our appropriately responding to the objects of our desires. Such learning, however, wouldn’t be possible if none of our desires were reason-responsive. Having said this, I thereby do not want to rule out that as we develop from children with a strong will to adults with an authoritative will we may first 301 The instrumentalist who thinks that the satisfaction of our desires is itself the ultimate goal of action is the hedonist.

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experience our will’s power of efficacy and thereby mistake it for the will’s authority. I think this may be quite natural for sentient beings with a developmental history like ours. The first things we do is manipulate things or other human beings in our environment to get what we need in order to ‘function’ well. When we grow older we learn to be productive of our own ends in a way that goes far beyond satisfying our bodily needs. Of course we are still affected by the objects of our sensitive desires, and we always will be, but we now also enter the realm of imagination in which we not only produce new ends but also find them in our own capacity to be brought about. What these ends are and how they are brought about is largely a matter of the child’s interests, curiosity and imagination. The experience of successfully building a castle of sand and the accompanying pleasure, say, is a powerful moment of experiencing the efficacy of one’s own will whose pleasant radiance will affect one’s motivation for pursuing all sorts of further possible goals. As children, not yet fully rational but already imaginative and creative, we seem to experience a kind of freedom of will never met before and, sadly, seldom to meet afterwards. It certainly isn’t freedom in the Kantian or Aristotelian sense; it is freedom as yet unrestricted by considerations about what is a justifying means-end relation or good reason. This is probably one explanation for why children’s company for adults is so thrilling and so nerve-racking at the same time. Be that as it may, the philosophically important point here is that the recognition of one’s will as authoritative is not without its pre-conditions. It develops together with our capacity to evaluate our responses to the objects of our desires as when we come to relate to them not only through our local and natural affections, inclinations and imagination but also through our understanding. Such understanding certainly includes instrumental rationality but cannot be reduced to it. Philip Clark (2010) has suggested in the spirit of Anscombe ([1957]1963) that we choose ends under certain descriptions, these descriptions involving good sorts of things but not necessarily things that are actually good or actually desirable (that is, desirable for their own sake). This explains why it is possible that we pursue things that we acknowledge are not good absolutely but that we nevertheless insist are good for us in some respect (cf. my discussion of weakness of will above). As examples of such descriptions of good sorts of things Clark (ibid.) mentions, among others, “funny, tasty, tidy, comfortable, amusing, interesting”. To this list we could well add the word “pleasant” as when we say that we eat pomegranates because we find it pleasant. But haven’t we thereby just succumbed to the Humean account of unmotivated desires that are supposed to terminate why-questions? No. Although “pleasant” terminates explanation in a certain sense it does so in a very different way than the Humean thinks it does.

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According to the Humean instrumentalist the chain of why-questions is brought to a stop by positing a non-cognitive sort of desire or an ultimate desire for pleasure. The Humean point is that this last link in our chain of explanations cannot be challenged by anyone because it is a non-cognitive psychological state, one that the agent just has. Clark’s idea, I think, is rather that when we terminate an explanation by saying “because it is pleasant” we do not thereby refer to an ultimate goal, namely pleasure or some sensation itself, but to the thing in which we take pleasure, i.e. the specific object of pleasure.302 But this is just another way of rendering more intelligible what we mean by the misleading notion of “distancing oneself from one’s desires”. Taking the object of pleasure seriously requires that one turns one’s attention away from one’s own desires and wishes to the object of desirability. This is what we do when we are not simply moved by the momentary strength of our desires towards a certain object but by the recognition of the object’s value. We normatively expect of others to take certain means to certain ends. How one takes the means and what means one takes reflects one’s appreciation of the value of an end as it presents itself in a certain context. To recognize something as valuable for its own sake therefore requires one to perceive the object in its context and in relation to possible means and to the support it gets from other ends one has. Practical deliberation is not just instrumental reasoning but a way of making intelligible to oneself the relations between ends and means and further ends, for example through generalization or specification. To illustrate: The means one takes to realize one’s ambition to making a career in a certain profession are sensitive to how this affects one’s other values and ends, for example the value of integrity. Perhaps one realizes that by pursuing a specific career requires specific actions and behaviour that one cannot reconcile with one’s self-conception as a person of integrity. Practical deliberation is a demanding endeavour precisely because it is neither merely deductive nor merely instrumental. The fact that a certain means is sufficient to realize a certain end is neither here nor there, on its own, to justify taking the means to the end. One must also know the conditions that render one’s reasons for which one 302 This is why when we find something desirable we do not normally refer to our wanting it in explaining why we want it but to the desirable or good-making properties of the object. Thus we can name the sweetness of the pomegranate, the cracking of the seeds under our teeth, the touch of them on our tongue etc. as that which makes the eating of pomegranates desirable or pleasant for us. Others of course may disagree. Unlike moral judgments, some aesthetical judgments, like judgments of taste, are intrinsically related to the likes and dislikes of the particular agent, which may themselves be influenced by the climate and the social and cultural context in which they live. For example, people living in countries with a hot climate have a strong preference for spicy food. This may have something to do with the fact that spicy food supports perspiring and can work effectively against bacteria that tend to thrive in hot climate.

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intends the end defeasible. Even though one’s mental attitudes would be consistent if one pursued an end by way of a non-justifiable means, one’s action would not only be rationally defective but also practically incoherent, for example if it violated deep seated personal commitments. If it is correct that when we say that we find something pleasant we thereby also refer to the good-making properties of the object, pleasure cannot be reduced to sensation.303 Pleasure must then also be understood as cognitive in the sense that the sensations that accompany the pleasure must be able to become susceptible to the influence of reason. After all, objects of desire – objects that are pleasant – can appear good when they actually are not good. Not everything that is pleasant is good. How do we learn when pleasure is a reliable indicator of goodness?304 What if, for example, someone insists that killing a dog for the sake of fun is good? Human beings must be exposed to virtuous action and various possible defeasibility conditions in order to learn when their pleasures are right. This is why the development of virtuous character is so important for acting well. Learning to get one’s pleasures right requires that one learns to care not only for the fact that certain things must be done or avoided but that oneself must do or avoid these things in ways that are compatible both with one’s human or moral self-conception and with one’s more contingent self-conceptions.305 One important way to learn which objects of our desires are indeed desirable and which are not depends on our learning whether what we are doing is going well.306 But learning whether what we are doing is going well requires that we learn to care for certain things to go well, as Millgram (2005, 41) points out. While pleasure and pain themselves are things that we do not first have to learn to care about – which may explain why we think of them as intrinsically good or bad – we have to learn to care about having the right pleasures. Even if we engage in activities that by their own standards are going well we also have to be clear about how we care about them and whether such care is intelligible. Naturally, such care goes well beyond caring for the satisfaction of ends.307 Because 303 For this claim see also Millgram (1997, 120 – 125). 304 This is essentially Aristotle’s (1995, bookIII.7, 431a) claim that thinking of something as good or valuable is not separate from imagining or experiencing it as pleasant. He writes: “To the thinking soul images are like contents of perception (…). That is why the soul never thinks without an image.” (Trans. J.G.) 305 This is another way of expressing our finding that we must take our will as normative in a deeper sense than the sense in which the instrumentalist about practical reason suggests. 306 For this claim see Millgram (2005, 41). 307 Since young infants are only about to adopt self-conceptions under which they can value themselves (they must first learn what it means to be a self) the typical way in which they care for their own good is by having their immediate desires satisfied. So it is not surprising that instrumental rationality should play a superior role in their lives.

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pleasure is reason-responsive, it is not just for the sensations that it produces that we find the pursuit of an object desirable (under normal circumstances). Whenever we refer in our explanation for why we did something to the pleasure of a thing we necessarily refer to very different things since the objects of pleasure are very different. The pleasure of eating an apple is very different from the pleasure of solving an intricate philosophical problem since the pleasures’ objects are very different. What pleasures have in common is the desirability a certain agent takes them to have. That such desirability is open to challenge follows from the fact that finding something pleasant is only a good sort of thing of which not every instance need be good. To see this consider the following example: If upon my laughing at a sick joke you ask me why I am laughing at that, I may well explain to you the joke’s subtle sarcasm that makes it so funny to me. While such an explanation is at least potentially intelligible the same explanation would not be likewise intelligible if I knew that somebody was present who would be deeply hurt (not just offended) by my laughing at such a joke. Even though a sick joke may be desirable qua appreciating a good joke this does not make it an object of intrinsic desirability or goodness. As practical agent I must learn by experience and help from others which conditions would render my otherwise intelligible action defeasible. To better understand the important point at issue here, consider the following possible answers by an agent A to the question why he killed his neighbour’s dog: 1) 2) 3) 4)

Because I found it was fun. Because I was bored. Because I hate my neighbour – he killed my dog, too. Because I wanted to demonstrate “the intact liberty in the unsubmissiveness of my will.”308 5) Because my older and authoritative brother told me to do so. Although objectively speaking none of these five explanations can justify the killing of a sentient being like a dog – that is, none of these actions are good for their own sake – not all of them are equally unintelligible as action explanation. Although this may seem to suggest that there is a distinction to be drawn between so-called motivating reasons and justifying or normative reasons I will say below why I think such a distinction is not actually helpful. Of all the five explanations I think there is only one that is utterly unintelligible. The intelligibility of the other four examples has to do with them being 308 This is an example Clark (2010, 241) makes in discussing Anscombe’s treatment of satanic behaviour.

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descriptions of actions that involve from the agent’s perspective at least one good sort of thing. The first explanation is intelligible if one thinks that psychopathy and sadism are real phenomena. Although having fun is a good sort of thing, killing someone for fun is not good. The psychopath gets his pleasures awfully wrong. With regard to the third explanation we may note that revenge is one of the oldest motives for killing (probably besides money and adultery). The motive for action is rendered intelligible by the emotion of revenge that is taken to be appropriate by the agent in some sense (“an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”). The fourth explanation is rendered intelligible by thinking of the intact liberty in the unsubmissiveness of one’s will as a good sort of thing although of course the particular instance of the good sort of thing here is not a good thing at all. The fifth explanation is rendered intelligible if we think of doing what one’s older brother tells one to do a good sort of thing. But of course not everything that one is told to do by one’s older brother, or even by one’s parents, is a good thing. What I think makes the second explanation so utterly unintelligible is that to say that one killed a dog out of boredom is close to saying that one killed it for no reason at all. This comes close to what I understand as evil action, action that is not just unintelligible in some sense – all four other action descriptions are unintelligible in some way – but unintelligible tout court.309 What I think explanations 1), 3), 4) and 5) have in common and puts them apart from the second one is that the motive that is supposed to make the action intelligible in the eyes of the agent is connected with value in some way. The agent considers what she does as good under some description, but which under close inspection turns out not to be good as a whole. This is because the phrase “good under some description” can be (mis-)understood as merely picking out that part of the action which is the end. Taken by themselves the ends mentioned like “having fun” or “cancelling an injustice” look like good and therefore appear to be good reasons for the action. However, as we have seen, ends are not intrinsically good or bad. Therefore we must combine the act-type “killing” with the end that regulates it, for example “having fun” in order to see whether the whole action description is good or not. That is, once we consider the action description as a whole, which includes both the means and the end in a justifying relation, we instantly recognize that none of the ends can be identified with what would be a good reason for the action since none of the ends justify the means or act-type, i.e. the killing of the 309 Note the difference (or should I say the similarity?) between the structure of evil behaviour and the behaviour of a creature that acts completely randomly and therefore acts not really at all. Evil behaviour cannot be random in this sense because it presupposes that the agent acts intentionally. This is why, I think, evil behaviour has such an air of paradox. It is to do something for no reason at all but nevertheless to do it intentionally.

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dog. This shows that the action as a whole cannot be good. It is not an objectively justifying reason. We were tricked into taking an action to be good by merely considering the action’s end instead of the whole action description including not only the end but also the act-type or means.310 But how exactly is an action’s intelligibility related to value? After all, we have seen that not every action that is intelligible is also valuable. I suggest that intelligibility stands to good sorts of things as objective value stands to things that can be justified for their own sakes. If this is correct we can illuminate the relation between value and intelligibility by distinguishing between subjectively and objectively normative reasons. This is the distinction between what an agent (rightly or wrongly) takes to be valuable and what is really valuable. We consider an action as intelligible to the extent that we recognize in what sense it might by perceived by the agent as valuable. Therefore, contrary to what Velleman (2009) thinks, intelligibility is grounded by value and not the other way round (cf. chapter 3 section 5).

5.5

Subjectively Normative Reasons and Objectively Normative Reasons

I have said that although none of the five explanations can justify the killing of a sentient being like a dog not all of them are equally unintelligible as action explanations. And this seems to suggest that there is a distinction to be drawn between so-called motivating or explanatory reasons and justifying or normative reasons. We can now reformulate the instrumentalist’s worry with respect to our latest findings, namely that bad reasons for action – and not bad ends! – cannot be substantive or normative reasons for action. I suggest that we address the revised worry by distinguishing between subjectively normative reasons and objectively normative reasons. Both of these are normative reasons for action. But by introducing this distinction I take away the basis on which the instrumentalist’s worry seems to rest, namely that reasons must be objectively justified in order to be normative. While subjectively normative reasons are good for the agent under some description and to this extent subjectively justified, objectively normative reasons are good in themselves. They are objectively justified. Whether something is an objectively normative 310 If this is correct then we can now see a further way in which an action’s intelligibility and its value are connected. “It’s pleasant” is a regress stopper of a possible chain of why-questions that cannot be further questioned if it is not only considered good under a certain description but if it is acknowledged to be good under any possible description, i.e. as good or pleasant in itself. Character traits can function as ultimate regress stoppers in action explanation since we do not normally have them for (ulterior) motives. For the importance of character for action explanation, see Baier (2009) and Schueler (2003, 69 – 87).

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reason for the agent depends on the evaluative status or goodness of her action, which is not contingent on her actual motivational set. Subjectively normative reasons differ from objectively normative reasons in that here the agent only thinks that she has good reasons to do a certain action but is wrong in thinking that she does. In other words, her action maxim cannot be willed for its own sake. Moreover, we should distinguish subjectively normative reasons into two further types to account for the philosophically important assumption that we can be responsible for our reasons, at least up to a certain extent. First, subjectively normative reasons may be such that the agent can be made responsible for wrongly thinking that she has good reasons to do something. Or, second, they may be such that the agent is not responsible for so thinking. It goes without saying that there will be a vast area of grey in between these two distinct types where it is not clear whether the agent is responsible for falsely taking her reasons as normative.311 Objectively normative reasons terminate why-questions while subjectively normative reasons of the first type only apparently terminate why-questions and subjectively normative reasons of the second type do so provisionally. Applying these considerations to our five examples of action maxims above we can say that killing sentient beings for ends that cannot justify the killing is something we ought to refrain from doing. Supposedly none of the ends discussed above justify the means, i.e. killing, which makes them instances of murder. However, this is not to say that every killing is a murder or nonjustifiable. Contrary to my proposal, most philosophers think that we should rather distinguish between justifying (or normative) reasons and motivating (or explanatory) reasons arguing that this distinction acknowledges two different roles of reasons: that of explaining or describing the action on the one hand, and the very different one of justifying the action on the other hand. My discussion of Anscombe above should have made clear that I am sympathetic of the idea of distinguishing between the description of the action understood as the intention that picks out the action’s aspect as a means-end maxim and the justification of the action that asks whether the means and ends are related in the right way such that the maxim is expressive of a good reason for action. The problem, as I have already indicated above, is that ‘justifying’ is almost always interpreted in the sense of ‘objectively’ or ‘morally justifying’. As a consequence, the possible category of subjective justification is being ignored 311 Cases where the reasoning is based on false premises whose falseness could be easily detected if only one were a little more careful belong to the first type. Under the second type can be subsumed those cases where someone lacks the relevant information without any fault of her own or where the agent finds herself in a situation of coercion without any fault of her own.

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while at the same time the concept of ‘motivating reason’ is taken to pick out the agent’s factual motive for the action, that is, her “real” motives. Although I have already said in my discussion of the Humean approach to weakness of will why this makes little sense, I want to render those findings in a slightly different way now. The idea is this: If one understands motivating reasons as psychological entities or facts about the agent that cause the agent to act, then there may indeed seem to hold an important difference between justification and explanation, namely that the latter is concerned with the kind of descriptive explanation used in the natural sciences. The problem with such an idea is that psychological or physiological states bear no conceptual relation to particular reasons, intentions or indeed actions. Whether an intention coincides with the psychological state is always an empirical matter.312 This means that action explanation understood as mere description of the motivational facts presupposes that one takes the agent to think that she has a normative reason for what she does – on what other grounds could one describe the agent as having a certain motive towards an action than by recognizing the reasons she takes herself to have for the action? Action description from an observer’s perspective depends on identifying what the agent thinka she has as a reason in the first place.313 This is why I think that with regard to action we should not distinguish between descriptive explanation and normative justification but between types of normative justification. If this is correct then action explanation is a normative matter oriented towards the question what a particular agent thinks she should or should not do in a certain situation. The importance of our attention to the perspective of the agent is further illuminated by the fact that without such attention the agent’s behaviour could be matched with any possible description that seems fitting. We would thereby fail to distinguish between correct and incorrect performances of what the agent does. Action explanation, therefore, is a normative matter, a matter about what the agent thinks she should do. It fundamentally differs from other forms of explanation, such as physical or causal explanation. In normal circumstances we do not explain an agent’s behaviour as we explain the movements or ends of intelligent systems precisely because we assume that action explanation is intelligible only as a species of reason explanation or justification. Therefore I think the interesting distinction is not that between motivating and justifying reasons but that between two types of the species of justifying or normative reasons: That between subjectively normative reasons and objectively normative reasons. Finally I would like to illustrate the explanatory fruitfulness of this distinction 312 For a defence of this claim see also Hennig (2008, 169). 313 For such a view see also Schueler (2003, 76).

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with respect to Schmid’s (2011b) original and illuminating discussion of the infamous Milgram Experiment.

5.6

The Milgram Experiment

In the years of 1961 and 1962 the social psychologist Stanley Milgram (1963) conducted experiments on behavioural obedience at Yale University whose findings soon came to stand, roughly, for the insight that there is a disposition in every human being to harm or even kill others if they are told to do so and that gets activated under certain conditions. The test subjects of the experiment were told to be taking part in a learning experiment in which they were asked to punish the learners with apparent electroshocks (to the point of electrocution) if they got their answers wrong. It turned out that 62 percent of the test subjects were ready to ‘harm’, and in some cases, they were even ready to ‘execute’ the pretending ‘victim’ for repeatedly making mistakes. The ‘victims’ were actors who pretended to suffer from what the test subjects thought were real electroshocks while no such shocks were actually administered. The common interpretations by scientists of what happened in these experiments, as Schmid (2011b) convincingly shows, are all centred in one way or another around the morally depraved character of the test subjects of the experiment. Dispositions for sadomasochism and compliance to external authority are just two of a whole range of possible explanations that were given for the test subjects’ outrageous behaviour. Schmid (ibid.) rejects these interpretations on the grounds that they depart from the dubious assumption that an individual’s moral integrity is purely a matter of the individual’s own inner life and character. For what Milgram’s experiments really show, according to Schmid’s original interpretation, is that what an agent does is a function of the cognitive and practical holistic frame in which her action is embedded. Thus, Schmid argues that we should be weary of conceptually separating morality and integrity from the social practices and forms of communication in which they are embedded. More specifically, Schmid’s verdict goes in favour of the test subjects and against the scientific method or set up of the experimenters. He argues that the test subjects are not being taken seriously as communicative partners who under normal circumstances are allowed to exchange reasons, which would surely include objections to harming others merely for making a mistake in some cognitive task. For whenever the test subjects tried to argue with the researcher against administering the electroshocks they were confronted with the experimenter’s repetitive and automatic orders. They refused any form of argument or criticism issued by the test subjects.

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As a consequence, by refusing to be addressed as communicative partners open to arguments and criticism, the experimenters thereby effectively undermined the normal setting of communication and dialogue in which human beings interact per default. Schmid in his reconstruction of the experiment argues that the test subjects were so unnerved by this paradoxical situation of non-communication or pretence communication that their compliance behaviour can be seen as a way of dealing with the abnormal situation forced upon them by the experiment’s artificial setting. If I understand Schmid correctly, then his main point is this: Why should the test subjects behave the way in which normal human beings in a normal communicative setting would behave when their instructors not only act like machines themselves but also treat the test subjects as mere receivers of orders? In a nutshell, Schmid argues that the test subjects’ abnormal behaviour was a response to the equally abnormal behaviour of and treatment of them by the instructors of the experiment. The fundamental methodological incoherence inherent in the experiment was that by the time that the test subjects’ behaviour was evaluated by the instructors these adopted an entirely different setting. Only now did the instructors treat the test subjects as communicative partners and moral beings and thus evaluated their ‘moral’ failings committed in the abnormal setting of the experiment against this new and normal background. The incoherence, as I understand it, is this: While in the experiment the test subjects were told to do their ‘job’, i.e. punish the ‘victims’ for making mistakes, they were afterwards made responsible for doing their job.314 This is a bit as if soldiers fighting in a war whose job is to kill the enemy soldiers were accused of murder after the war. This would be likewise absurd.315 I agree with Schmid that individual morality is embedded in and influenced by communicative action. As my Aristotelian account of action (which applies to both individual and collective cases) makes clear, virtuous action is necessarily embedded in a social context. This is why the practical syllogism all by itself will not tell the agent what it would be the good or virtuous thing to do. Although Schmid emphasizes the conceptual relation between moral integrity and shared social practices it is not quite clear to me how he spells out this relation as conceptual. What is uncontroversial, I think, is that social relations and practices are causally contributing to the individual’s developing capacity of acting well. With 314 Nevertheless, for some test subjects as they were given the impression that they were simply doing their job, this may have contributed to their understanding that there was no occasion to question the orders. 315 Of course there are regulations as to what counts as murder in the setting of war, for example, the intentional killing of civilians that cannot be defined as military threat and would therefore be interpreted as murder.

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regard to the conceptual point, however, I consider it helpful to distinguish between moral integrity and autonomy. One could argue that while autonomy is a necessary condition for moral integrity the reverse is not true.316 That is, one could say that an agent is autonomous to the extent that she chooses some law of action but which needn’t be the moral law. Against such a view I want to argue that if autonomy entails self-answerability and if self-answerability depends on answerability to others, which in turn is an essential mark of moral integrity, then autonomy requires moral integrity. When I do not choose the moral law as my principle of action I will be less open to critical perspectives (if at all) from others whereby autonomy is undermined. This is because, as I assume with Korsgaard (2009, 163), all other principles except the moral law are more for their own good than for the good of the whole (singular or plural) agent. For example, if my action principle is always to act on the desire of the moment, someone’s questioning my wanton behaviour will have no influence on me. If autonomous self-answerability conceptually requires answerability to other perspectives than one’s own and if such answerability comes with moral integrity then one cannot become an autonomous agent without acting morally. If we think that dialogical interaction and relationships are constitutive of one’s own practical identities, I think we can give the following interpretation of what happened in Milgram’s experiment. The test subjects’ self-answerability to external perspectives was completely cancelled in the setting of the experiment insofar the instructors both behaved like machines themselves and treated the test subjects like machines, thereby denying their status as autonomous and moral agents. If we think of autonomy as a relational concept then the test subjects found themselves in a situation where one essential reference point was missing, namely their answerability to external perspectives. In such a situation the test subject must fall back entirely on her own answerability which will largely concur with her own standing moral commitments and beliefs. What further complicated the test subjects’ situation was that their practical identity as test subject (or rather ‘information receivers’) was simply determined by the instructors (“follow my orders!”) instead of worked out on the basis of dialogue and interaction, as it is usually the case. At the same time their practical identity as moral beings, which they expressed in their protestations against executing the experimenter’s orders, was simply ignored by the experimenters. Here is where the concept of subjectively normative reasons proves helpful. It could be argued that it is at least questionable whether the test subject (alone) is responsible for wrongly believing that she had reasons to do what she was told to 316 For this claim about the conceptual relation between moral integrity and self-answerability see McLeod (2005).

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do. For in a certain sense she couldn’t believe that she had any reasons for doing what she did at all. I think two considerations speak for this interpretation: First, the average test subject’s behaviour seems like an involuntary reaction to an abnormal situation of conflict and therefore no action at all. This does not rule out of course that some subjects freed themselves of their agential and moral responsibility by outsourcing it, as it were, to the experimenters. The point is that the average test subject seemed to have experienced an involuntary loss of control over her behaviour as action. This would explain why some of the test subjects madly laughed in response to executing the instructor’s orders. Second, many of the test subjects violated the instrumentally rational order inherent in action when they continued executing electroshocks long after the ‘victim’ had stopped screaming. That is, the subjects continued their ‘job’ even after they must have thought that the test subject was either dead or severely injured. This is a good indication for the test subjects’ loss of orientation. By the ‘abnormal situation of conflict’ I mean the following: While the test subject found her fundamental practical identity as moral agent undermined through her treatment by the experimenters, it was exactly this identity which forbid her to execute the orders. The agent’s practical identity as moral being in this situation was in conflict with her practical identity as test subject; at the same time only the latter was acknowledged by the instructors. The conflict, moreover, was difficult to handle for the test subject since her contingent practical identity as test subject seemed not as such contradictory to her moral identity. It only seemed to lead to a conflict with her moral identity in this special test situation where the test subject was told to severely punish others for making mistakes. What rendered the situation difficult for the test subject in a further way was the fact that the test subject was told to perform an action whose parts were so obviously not related in the objectively right way. Making mistakes in learning even if it is subject to a research experiment, just doesn’t seem to justify punishment through administering electroshocks of increasing strength.317 My own conclusion to be drawn from the analysis of the Milgram experiment is not first and foremost to point to the fact that our actions can be and are influenced by the social context in which they are performed. I think this is granted. It is well known, for example, that soldiers’ actions in a war are far more strongly influenced, in principle, by the group in which they fight than by the individual soldier’s ideological and moral convictions. What makes the Milgram experiment so interesting to my mind is that it creates a situation that is devoid of 317 Note the importance for our analysis of the Milgram Experiment that we took into account the agent’s first person perspective of the situation instead of some psychological or neurophysiological description of what caused her to administer the shocks.

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Chapter 5: Why Human Self-Relation Cannot Be Instrumentally Normative

the most important social practice required for enabling to treat one another with respect, namely that of freely exchanging reasons and treating one another as agents that are susceptible to reasons. Thus, in a certain sense Milgram’s experimental context is one in which the intrinsically social and justificatory aspect of action is artificially suppressed. Finally, I would like to emphasize that just because we can be compromised in our actions as a consequence of our being essentially social creatures this does not cancel our individual responsibility for what we do. The authority of pure practical reason as moral law is not thereby undermined just as it is not undermined by the fact that our actual normative reasons need not be objectively normative. Against this background it becomes clear how important it is that we learn to get our pleasures right and that we become susceptible to virtuous action not merely based on affective habituation but on moral and intellectual understanding as well. This is what marks the difference between performing a ‘good’ action from affection, instinct or training and performing a good action also from one’s understanding of why it is good.

5.7

Conclusion

In this last chapter I have tried to show why, by drawing some of the lose ends of the dissertation project together, the relation of a human self to itself cannot be instrumentally normative. Moreover, I have applied the notions of action and reason that I have been defending in this book to the service of illuminating the relation between an action’s value and its intelligibility. In this process, the distinction between subjectively normative reasons and objectively normative reasons turned out to be a useful conceptual tool, which I have tried to apply in my analysis of the practical and moral parameters of one of the most disturbing psychological research experiments conducted in the last century, the Milgram Experiment.

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