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.”