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Paul
Katsafanas ~ Dissertation
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Practical Reason and the Structure of
Reflective Agency
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Available here.
Abstract:
Confronted with normative claims as diverse as "murder is wrong" and
"agents have reason to take the means to their ends," we can ask how
these claims might be justified. Constitutivism is the view that
we can justify certain normative claims by showing that agents become
committed to these claims simply in virtue of acting. I argue
that the attractions of constitutivism are considerable. However,
I show that the contemporary versions of constitutivism encounter
insurmountable problems, because they operate with inadequate
conceptions of action. I argue that we can generate a successful
version of constitutivism by employing a more promising theory of
action, which I develop by mining Nietzsche's work on agency.
The first two chapters
of my dissertation articulate a new version of the constitutivist
strategy. I defend the following three-step procedure for
justifying normative claims. First, a certain aim is present in
every instance of action, precisely because the presence of this aim is
part of what constitutes an event as an action. Call this a
constitutive aim. Constitutive aims generate a standard of
success for action: an action is successful to the extent that it
fulfills the aim. The standard of success, in turn, generates
practical reasons: an agent has reason to perform those actions that
would meet the standard. I show that by distinguishing between
these three stages of the argument, we can overcome a series of
objections that have been leveled at the very possibility of a
constitutivist theory.
However, I also argue
that constitutivism faces a hitherto unrecognized difficulty. I
show that an adequate theory of practical reason must provide a way of
weighing reasons: for some actions A and B, the theory must be capable
of generating conclusions of the form "there is more reason to A than
to B." I show that in order to do so, a constitutivist theory
must establish that action has a differentially realizable constitutive
aim, rather than a simple constitutive aim. An aim is
differentially realizable if it can be fulfilled to different degrees
by different actions; an aim is simple if it can merely be fulfilled or
unfulfilled. I criticize David Velleman's claim that action
constitutively aims at self-knowledge, and Christine Korsgaard's claim
that action constitutively aims at autonomy, on the grounds that these
theories cannot establish that the aims in question are differentially
realizable; they establish at most that the aims are simple. As a
result, the theories of action endorsed by these philosophers are
incapable of generating adequate accounts of practical reason.
Thus, the first two
chapters argue that if we could show that action has a differentially
realizable constitutive aim, then constitutivism would succeed.
The remaining four chapters defend an account of action according to
which action does have a differentially realizable constitutive aim.
A constitutivist account
of practical reason can only be as compelling as the account of action
upon which it is based. Thus, I begin this stage of the argument
by setting constitutivism aside and arguing on entirely independent
grounds that we should accept a theory of action that I draw from
Nietzsche's work. This account focuses on the complex
interactions between conscious and non-conscious aspects of the mind
that occur during deliberation and action. The account yields a
unique and, I argue, philosophically fruitful theory of the conditions
under which an agent is in control of her action: an agent controls her
action if and only if (i) upon reflection the agent would affirm or
approve of the action, and (ii) further knowledge of the drives and
affects that figure in the action's etiology would not undermine this
approval. This account of action enjoys several advantages over
its contemporary competitors. For example, it captures the
increasingly influential idea that reflection plays a central role in
human agency, while maintaining a psychological realism: it does not
require an excessively intellectualized conception of action, and it is
consistent with empirical work on human psychology.
The primary reason for
accepting Nietzsche's account of action is the fact that it is more
adequate than its competitors. However, Nietzsche's account has
special significance here precisely because it entails that action has
a constitutive aim. This constitutive aim arises from a simple
and relatively uncontroversial fact about action, namely that action is
a temporally extended process. Nietzsche argues that this fact
about action implies that, in acting, we aim not only to realize
certain ends, but also to overcome resistance that arises in the
pursuit of those ends. He employs this idea in a powerful
argument for the surprising and no doubt counterintuitive claim that
each instance of action aims at encountering and overcoming resistance;
this is Nietzsche's will to power doctrine. Nietzsche argues that
the presence of this aim is part of what makes an event an instance of
action. To put the point into contemporary terminology, Nietzsche
argues that aiming to encounter and overcome resistance is the
constitutive aim of action. I show that this aim is
differentially realizable. As a result, the aim can generate a
substantive account of reasons for action. Thus, by drawing on
Nietzsche's theory of action, we can develop a successful version of
constitutivism.
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