Main authors discussed: Michael Bratman, John Broome, A.C. Ewing, Kieran Setiya

Schroeder’s main goal is to begin to develop an interesting view of the coherence requirements of rationality.  He focuses on two coherence requirements, the first of which is the instrumental requirement.  The naïve version of the instrumental requirement is Means-End:

Means-End:    Necessarily, if X intends to A and believes that B is a necessary means to A, then X ought to B.

Schroeder hypothesizes that the correct account of the instrumental requirement will also have the resources to account for a second coherence requirement, which holds that we ought to follow our conscience.  The naïve version is Conscience:

Conscience:    Necessarily, if X believes that she ought to A, then X ought to A.

Unfortunately, Means-End and Conscience are surely false.  For it might be that one ought not to A.  To use Schroeder’s example, B might be the act of paying an assassin, and A might be the act of killing one’s wife.  Surely it’s false that Zach ought to pay the assassin when he believes it’s necessary to killing one’s wife and he intends to kill his wife.  Moreover, it’s surely false that he ought to kill his wife because he believes he ought to.

A popular view about what is wrong with Means End and Conscience is that the ‘ought’ takes narrow scope over the consequent. Wide-scopers think the ‘ought’ takes wide-scope over the whole conditional.  Wide-scopers think  Means-End Wide and Conscience Wide are true:

Means-End Wide: Necessarily, X ought [to B if X intends to A and believes that B is a necessary means to A].

Conscience Wide: Necessarily, X ought [to A if X believes she ought to A].

Means-End Wide yields a disjunctive requirement.  One complies with Conscience Wide just in case one either As or disbelieves one ought to A.  Likewise, one complies with Means-End Wide just in case one Bs or doesn’t intend to A or doesn’t believe B is necessary for A. Thus, it’s not the case that Zach ought to kill his wife because he believes he ought to.  He simply must avoid believing he ought to kill his wife while failing do so. He can comply with Conscience Wide by giving up his belief or by killing his wife. The only way for Zach to comply with narrow-scope requirements like Means-End and Conscience, on the other hand, is to kill his wife or pay the assassin.

Schroeder thinks the wide-scope view has three fatal flaws. First, the wide-scope requirements are symmetric. The wide-scoper seems to hold that giving up one’s belief is just as rational as doing the thing one believes one ought to do. But if that’s true, then the wide-scoper thinks that following one’s conscience is rationally on a par with rationalization, or changing one’s beliefs about what one ought to do because one believes one won’t do it anyway.

Schroeder considers a response to this. The wide-scoper might maintain that even if one can comply with Conscience Wide by giving up one’s belief, one would necessarily violate some other requirement by doing so. Schroeder replies to this by pointing out—and this is the second fatal flaw—that if this is right then one’s belief about what one ought to do is infallible just so long as one holds the belief rationally.

The third fatal flaw has to do with Greenspan’s Principle: If one either ought to A or B, and one cannot A, then one ought to B. If Greenspan’s Principle is true and sometimes one cannot give up one’s belief that one ought to A, then in those cases it follows that one’s belief is infallible.

The rest of the paper is dedicated to working out a version of A.C. Ewing’s (1953) narrow-scope view. According to this view, there is a distinction between subjective oughts and objective oughts. The correct versions of Means-End and Conscience, according to Schroeder, maintain one subjectively ought to take the means to one’s ends and one subjectively ought to follow one’s conscience.

Schroeder’s first pass at fleshing out this idea is the Subjective Ought Test:

Subjective Ought Test:  X subjectively ought to do A just in case X has some beliefs which have the following property: the truth of their contents is the kind of thing to make it the case that X objectively ought to A.

This version gives a nice explanation of why one ought to follow one’s conscience: One ought to A when one believes one ought to A because if one’s belief were true, it would be the case that one objectively ought to A.

The problem is that the instrumental case isn’t like this. Zach can believe B is necessary to A without believing he ought to A. To solve this problem, Schroeder makes a distinction between subjective and objective reasons. Subjective Reason Test is his the way he fleshes out what subjective reasons are:

Subjective Reasons Test:  X has a subjective reason to A just in case she has some beliefs which have the property, if they are true, of making it the case that X has an objective reason to do A.

Schroeder then maintains one subjectively ought to A just in case one has decisive subjective reasons to A. Moreover, Schroeder holds that the weight of subjective reasons transfers over believed-to-be-necessary means. So, if X’s subjective reasons make it the case that X subjectively ought to A and X believes B is necessary to A, then X subjectively ought to B.

The final assumption that Schroeder makes is Nature of Intention:

Nature of Intention:    If you intend to do A, then you have some beliefs which are such that, if they are true, then you objectively ought to A.

Schroeder now has the resources to explain why one subjectively ought to take the means to one’s ends (the explanation of why we subjectively ought to follow our conscience remains essentially the same). By Nature of Intention, every time one intends to A, one believes things that make it the case, if true, that one objectively ought to A. Thus, when Zach believes he ought to kill his wife, he believes things that would make it the case, if true, that he objectively ought to kill his wife. He thus subjectively ought to kill his wife. Moreover, he believes paying the assassin is a necessary means to his end. Since the weight of  subjective reasons transfers from ends to means thought necessary to achieving them, he has decisive subjective reasons to pay the assassin. Thus, he subjectively ought to pay the assassin.

Reviewed by Errol Lord
Princeton University

Main authors discussed: Gregory Currie, Ian Ravenscroft, David Velleman, Shaun Nichols, Stephen Stich

Some philosophers (e.g., Currie and Ravenscroft, Velleman) have recently argued that pretense provides a counterexample to the standard Humean Theory of Motivation (HTM). Pretense behavior is a novel kind of mental state, namely, an imaginative analogue of desire, that motivates action. For example, when a child pretending to be a Jedi Knight swings a tree branch in his hand, his action is motivated by his imaginative desire to destroy his opponent with his “lightsaber.”

Funkhouser and Spaulding (F&S) reject this anti-Humean explanation of pretense action.  Although they are willing to grant the existence of imaginative desires (302), they deny that such states provide the motivation for pretense. On their view, we need not reject the spirit of Humeanism about psychological motivation to explain the pretender’s motivation; rather, we need only reject the traditional and overly narrow HTM. Their own account of pretense is given by their Guider-Motivator Thesis: “For every intentional action, there is a guider-motivator pair that both causes and rationalize that intentional action” (307).

Before making their positive case for this thesis, F&S respond to objections against the standard Humean account of pretense (most notably associated with Stich and Nichols). One class of such objections suggest that, by explaining all of a pretending child’s actions in terms of a desire to pretend, such an account over-intellectualizes the pretense behavior, leaves the pretending child outside the pretense, and denies the child’s creativity. In response, F&S argue that a child who is motivated by the desire to pretend need not have the concept of pretense. Children need only have a behavioral, not a mentalistic, understanding of pretense in order to engage in pretend behavior, i.e., “their desire to pretend that p is simply a desire to behave, loosely as if p were the case” (300). Relatedly, a child motivated by the desire to pretend may engage in pretend behavior without consciously consulting or being cognizant of that desire (301). Though Velleman suggests that a Humean account of pretense makes a child who pretends seem depressingly adult-like, F&S astutely counter that “It is not depressing, but rather comforting, that pretending children retain a relatively firm grip on reality” (301-2); otherwise, their pretend actions would be hard to distinguish from the delusional actions of a schizophrenic. With respect to creativity, F&S note that the Humean’s denial that imaginative desires motivate pretense is comaptible with the claim that children who pretend “have a genuine desire to act out their imaginings,” and this means that their creativity is limited only by their imagination (302).

In addition to defending Humeanism against these objections, F&S offer criticisms of the anti-Humean account of pretense. For reasons of space, I will here consider just one of these criticisms, namely, their worry that imaginative desires are not intrinsically motivational and hence cannot be motivational at all. As they argue, “Motivation is typically an intrinsic and essential feature of motivating states. For example, the motivational component of a desire is, at least typically, intrinsic to it” (303). But the imaginative desires that we experience in contexts other than pretense, such as when we engage with fiction or daydream, do not seem to have motivational power at all. Thus, the anti-Humean must claim “that imagination has distinctive motivational powers in the context of pretense” (303), and F&S find this claim implausible.

Here I worry a bit about their argument. In a footnote, F&S consider examples of various kinds of desires that seem not to be motivational. What should we think about desires that the agent believes are impossible to satisfy, such as the desire to square the circle or to travel to a distant galaxy? F&S note that they are inclined to deny that such states are really desires; rather, they are mere wishes. Dealing with such counterexamples by terminological fiat seems to me unsatisfying. Moreover, I doubt that the anti-Humean must deny that imaginative desires are intrinsically motivating. Our desires only move us to action in the context of the appropriate background beliefs, and one might think the anti-Humean could suggest something similar about imaginative desires.

After making their case against the anti-Humean view, F&S attempt to spell out their own view of the role of imagination in pretense in their defense of the Guider-Motivator Thesis. Rather than seeing intentional action as caused or rationalized by belief-desire pairs, F&S see it as being caused by a guider-motivator pair, where “motivators provide the thrust or pick the destination, and guiders direct or tell us how to get there” (307).

F&S thus part from traditional Humeans by broadening the class of mental states that can cause or rationalize action; on their view, imaginings as well as beliefs can serve as guiders. Importantly, this claim is also compatible with the views of their anti-Humean opponents who tend to claim not only that some imaginings can serve as guiders, but also that some imaginings can serve as motivators. It is this latter claim that F&S argue against in their paper. According to F&S, imagination can serve only a guiding role when it comes to pretense.

In the final part of their paper, F&S introduce the notion of a script for the class of guiders that provide a model for action: “A script, unlike the typical belief used in means-end reasoning, is something that can be imitated or enacted. Significantly, these scripts can sometimes guide action without being mediated by a belief or knowledge state” (309). Imagination can be one such script, but others can also guide action, and some of these might be external to the agent, such as when an actor’s behavior is guided by her reliance on a physical script, or when children’s pretense behavior is guided by the behavior of other children or various social norms. In accepting the existence of external scripts as well as internal ones, F&S commit themselves to a version of the extended mind thesis advanced by Chalmers and Clark.

On the whole, I find the arguments that F&S make against the anti-Humeans compelling, and I wholeheartedly agree with their claim that Humeanism is best defended by adopting a pluralistic rather than unitary account of the motivation for pretense. Though I find less satisfying their own positive view of imagination which considers it on analogy with a script, I nonetheless found their discussion of scripts to provide some important insights into the complexities of the interplay between imagination and pretense, and I recommend this paper as a must-read to anyone thinking about pretense, the imagination, or the Humean theory of motivation.

Reviewed by Amy Kind
Claremont McKenna College

Lasonen-Aarnio argues that a problem that might seem to affect only multi-premise closure (MPC), having to do with the accumulation of risk, is also a problem for single premise closure (SPC).

Here are the epistemic closure principles in question, as formulated by Lasonen-Aarnio:

(SPC) For all propositions P, Q, and all subjects s, if s knows P, and s comes to believe Q solely based on competent deduction from P, while retaining knowledge of P throughout, then s knows Q (157).

(MPC) For all propositions P₁, …, P_n, Q, and all subjects s, if s knows each of P₁, …, P_n, and s comes to believe Q solely based on competent deduction from P₁, …, P_n, while retaining knowledge of P₁, …, P_n throughout, then s knows Q (158).

Risk, or the “danger of error,” is a property of beliefs that is conceptually tied to epistemic luck. Lasonen-Aarnio suggests that we use ‘risk’ as a placeholder for something that knowledge can tolerate a little of, but that in excess quantities makes a true belief lucky in a way that disqualifies it from being knowledge (165). One sort of thing that fits the bill is the believed proposition’s objective chance of falsity. It must be conceded, on pain of skepticism, that one can know propositions with a slight objective chance of their being false. For example, barring an unacceptable skepticism about our knowledge of the future, I had better be capable of knowing that if I drop my pen on the table it will land on the table; but in an indeterministic world there is a very slight objective chance that if I drop my pen on the table, it will tunnel through (162). So knowledge can tolerate a small objective chance of falsity. On the other hand, if I believe that P but there is a high objective chance that P is false, then it is just luck if my belief is true, and so I do not know P (163). Although the objective chance of falsity is one source of risk, it should not simply be identified with risk, since as we shall see Lasonen-Aarnio argues that there is another source of risk.

The problem for MPC is that risk accumulates across multi-premise entailment—propositions that are only slightly risky to believe can jointly entail a proposition that is so risky to believe that it cannot be known. For example, let P₁, …, P_n be propositions that I know but whose objective probabilities fall slightly short of 1, and suppose I deduce the conjunction P₁&…&P_n and come to believe this conjunction on the basis of the deduction, retaining knowledge of P₁, …, P_n throughout. Given a large enough n, the objective probability of P₁&…&P_n will be low enough that it is just luck that my belief that P₁&…&P_n is true. So I do not know P₁&…&P_n, and MPC fails (162-163).

The preceding problem for MPC exploited the fact that the objective probability of the conclusion of a multi-premise entailment can be lower than the objective probability of any of the premises. It might seem, then, that SPC does not face an analogous problem, since if P entails Q, then Q’s objective probability is at least as high as P’s (158-159).

In order to introduce an analogous problem for SPC, Lasonen-Aarnio argues that competent deduction does not mean infallible deduction—often when one successfully performs a competent deduction, there was a small objective chance that the deduction would fail—perhaps as the result of a quantum event in one’s brain (165). This small objective chance of deductive failure, which Lasonen-Aarnio calls deductive risk, contributes to whether or not the deduced belief is lucky; that is, contributes to the risk of the deduced belief. So risk can accumulate even across single premise entailment; the fact that one’s competent deduction from P to Q was slightly risky can result in one’s belief that Q being slightly riskier than one’s belief that P. SPC will fail when s knows P but the risk of s’s belief that P falls just below the threshold above which beliefs are too risky to know, and s’s competent deduction of Q from P involves some deductive risk. The deductive risk will push the risk of s’s belief that Q above the threshold, so s will fail to know Q (164-165).

Lasonen-Aarnio also provides a more concrete counterexample to SPC that requires assuming a “most worlds safety” account of knowledge and a corresponding account of competent deduction (166-169). This counterexample, which strikes me as successful but is too complex to detail here, is of special importance given the popularity of safety accounts of knowledge.

Reviewed by Leo Iacono
Loyola University New Orleans

Main authors discussed: Gilbert Harman, John Doris, C. Daniel Batson

Recent work by both philosophers and social psychologists suggests that agents lack a moral character comprised of robust, global moral dispositions. According to situationists like Harman and Doris, most individuals overestimate the role dispositional factors play in explaining an individual’s behavior, and underestimate the role the situation plays. Drawing on experimental results in social psychology, situationists claim that our behaviors are best explained not be globalist conceptions of moral character traits, but rather by situational factors. While a number of virtue ethicists have attempted to call into question situationists’ criticism, Miller takes a different tack.

According to Miller, “there is an impressive array of evidence from the social psychology literature which suggests that many people do possess one or more robust global character traits pertaining to helping others in need. But at the same time, such traits are a far cry from the traditional virtues like compassion” (248). Miller thus argues “that we should adopt an intermediate position between the situationist proposals of Harman and Doris and the leading responses being offered by virtue ethicists” (248).

Section 1 of Miller’s paper briefly summarizes the situationists’ criticisms of the traditional globalist account of moral character traits. Global character traits are both consistent across a wide variety of trait-relevant situations and relatively stable across time. Character traits so understood are supposed to play a central role in: (i) explaining trait-relevant behavior, and (ii) helping to accurately ground predictions of such behavior in the future. But extant studies by social psychologists suggest that character traits are not consistent in the way globalists hold.

Miller focuses on helping traits, and argues in section 2 that, contrary to the claims of situationists, the empirical results are compatible with the widespread existence of one or more global character traits. Nevertheless, these ‘global helping traits’ (of GHTs) are “rather different from how compassion has traditionally been construed” (250) by globalist virtue ethicists. GHTs are dispositions to help others thought to be in need, and are sensitive to a number of different psychological factors, including background beliefs, normative convictions, feelings, moods, and embarrassment. Focusing on empirical studies related to the impact of mood on helping behavior, Miller writes:

When it comes to mood states, for example, we should expect that, other things being equal, many people with elevated levels of positive affect will be such that they help others in situations ranging from picking up dropped papers to volunteering time for charity organizations. On the other hand, we can expect that, again other things being equal, many people without elevated levels of affect will be such that they do not exhibit these and other forms of helping behavior (253).

And this is exactly what one finds in the relevant studies. (Miller is careful to note that while the studies are compatible with GHTs as he defines them, the studies do not yet provide direct evidence for the existence of GHTs.) The various factors that influence the expression of a GHT can thus add together to reach an ‘activation threshold’, which then results in helping behavior.

Miller briefly outlines, in section 3, what he takes to be the central features of empathy. X empathizes with Y’s feeling F if

(i) X tries to imagine what Y feels in the situation, rather than what X would feel like if X were in the situation which Y is in,

(ii) X experiences something similar to Y’s feeling F, and not necessarily F itself,

(iii) X believes Y is feeling F (or something similar to F), and

(iv) X’s empathizing with Y’s feeling F is conceptually distinct from X’s sympathizing with Y (258).

In section 4, Miller examines a number of recent social psychological experiments on empathetic behavior. In a 1982 study by Toi and Batson, college students who empathized with a fictional fellow student, Carol, were significantly more likely to agree to help than were control students who were not lead to empathize with her (71% vs. 30%). This study, as well as other similar studies, is consistent with the account of GHTs developed in section 2.

As a result, Miller claims in section 5 that the existing psychological data does not support the situationists’ claims that robust character traits do not exist, nor does it support the situationists’ claim that local character traits do exist. “The empirical data suggests that a significant number of people with raised levels of empathetic emotion would help in a wide variety of circumstances, while many of those without such raised levels would not. So there seems to be more structure at work than a fragmentation model of character would lead us to believe” (262f). However, nothing suggests that those individuals who engage in helping behaviors do so on the basis of the right motivating reasons, as traditional virtue ethics claims.

In section 7, Miller outlines two remaining worries that virtue ethics must face. First, the social psychology data suggests that most people do not seem to exhibit compassionate behavior when they have the opportunity to do so, even when the helping tasks are not particularly strenuous. So it looks like the majority of people lack the disposition to exhibit compassionate behavior when an opportunity arises, which could be taken as an embarrassment for virtue ethics. Second, if the virtue ethicist claims GHTs are in fact widely possessed, but merely are only relatively infrequently triggered, “we will need a story about how more people can instantiate the virtue of compassion…. But here the psychological results seem to put up a significant obstacle to such a proposal” (270) insofar as they suggest that the “empathy induced motivation to help is extremely fragile” (272). Miller concludes that while “the (widespread) existence of a traditional character trait like compassion might be in trouble, … it is premature to conclude from such a claim that no global traits whatsoever exist in this area” (272).

Reviewed by Kevin Timpe
University of San Diego