Cares, Identification, and Agency Reductionism

Abstract

Reductionists about agency maintain that an agent's causing something is reducible to states and events involving the agent causing something. Some worry that reductionism cannot accommodate robust forms of agency, such as self‐determination. One reductionist answer to this worry, which I call ‘identification reductionism,’ contends that self‐governing agents are identified with certain attitudes, and so these attitudes causing a decision count as the agent's self‐determining the decision. I argue that a prominent species of identification reductionism developed by Harry Frankfurt, Agnieszka Jaworska, Jeffrey Seidman, and David Shoemaker – according to which an agent is identified with his (deepest) cares – is inadequate.

Agency: Let's mind what's fundamental1

“…In what sense is the causal role of the agent “nothing over and above” the mental states and processes that cause action? The standard way of defending ECR says that the causal role of the agent is functionally identical to the causal contribution of the right mental states and processes (Velleman, 1992, p. 475; Franklin, 2017, p. 582). ECR looks for event‐causal processes in the mind that play the functional role of the agent.…”

“…Interestingly, the grounding problem shares similarities to two longstanding problems for ECR. For any given proposal about what mental states can stand proxy for the agent, sometimes the agent can be alienated from those states (Franklin, 2015, 2017). More generally, The Causal Theory faces notable problems with deviant causal chains, where the right kinds of mental states cause actions in the wrong way; Davidson (1973) imagines a climber whose beliefs and desires scare him into unintentionally doing what his beliefs and desires rationalized.…”