Is Deciding an Action? (under review)
According to the Actional View, deciding, understood as forming an intention, is an intentional action that we perform.
In this paper, I argue against this dominant view. I first introduce a traditional challenge from the Simple View about intentional action: for S intentionally to A, S must intend to A.
Proponents of the Actional View standardly respond to the challenge by rejecting the Simple View and adopting an alternative, the Single Phenomenon View: for S intentionally to A, S must intend to do something, but S need not intend to A.
I raise a novel objection that assumes the truth of the Single Phenomenon View. I propose a necessary condition for intentional action, which I call “the intend-ability principle”:
for agent S, A-ing is an intentional action only if S is able to A as a non-deviant effect of intending to A. I argue that since deciding does not satisfy the principle, it is not an intentional action.
Finally, I address putative counterexamples to the intend-ability principle and respond to what I take to be the strongest argument for the Actional View, “the argument from picking.”
Efforts to Decide and Luck
I offer a novel criticism of the most recent and final version of Robert Kane’s solution to the problem of luck for libertarianism.
In response to his critics, Kane has modified his previous solution, “the concurrent-efforts model,” to what may be called “the subsequent-efforts model,” in his 2024 book, The Complex Tapestry of Free Will, published posthumously.
The main idea for Kane’s solution is that in a practical conflict, at a given moment, the agent is making an effort to decide in one particular way; the agent is ultimately responsible for the decision even though it is undetermined until the last moment because the decision in any case is a result of her successful, voluntary effort to decide that way.
I argue that even this last version fails to solve the problem of luck. The key argument for Kane’s solution is based on an analogy between the case of the assassin and self-forming choices. I show that according to his explicit understanding of “efforts to decide,” according to which an act of deciding is a causal outcome of an effort to decide, the analogy does not hold.
I then suggest how “efforts to decide” should be understood in order to preserve the analogy: a successful effort to decide must be identical to or is part of an act of deciding.
Finally, I argue that with “efforts to decide” thus understood, Kane’s account is either inconsistent or unsatisfactory. Therefore, Kane’s solution to the problem of luck fails.
Explaining Frege Cases from the Agent’s Point of View
The Explanation Objection, motivated by Frege’s puzzle, holds that Russellian theories of psychological content cannot account for the different explanatory values of mental states that share the same Russellian content.
A bold Russellian response, called Exceptionalism, maintains that Frege cases are harmless exceptions to the law-like generalizations grounding intentional explanations, and the Explanation Objection is thus undermined.
Focusing on Almotahari and Gray’s (2021) most recent defense of Exceptionalism, I show that it fails to save Russellianism.
I bring attention to a crucial challenge overlooked in the Explanation Objection, namely, enabling an action explanation to capture the agent’s perspective so as to rationalize the action.
I argue that Exceptionalism fails to meet this challenge. Finally, I assess the failure of Exceptionalism and suggest that Russellians should either reject the thesis that psychological explanation is in terms of intentional contents or adopt a “relationistic” shift from the naïve form of Russellianism.
