Abstract
An important recent debate in the philosophy of action has focused on whether there is a persistence requirement on intention and, if there is, what its proper formulation should be. At one extreme, Bratman has defended what I call Strong Persistence, according to which it’s irrational to abandon an intention except for an alternative that is better supported by one’s reasons. At the other extreme, Tenenbaum has argued that there isn’t a persistence requirement on intention at all. In the middle, philosophers like Broome, Ferrero, and Paul have defended persistence requirements with varying degrees of stringency while agreeing that Bratman’s proposed requirement is too strong. In this paper I side with Bratman in defending Strong Persistence. I argue, however, that Bratman’s own argument in favor of it is defective and an easy prey to the multiple objections that have been leveled against it. I thus offer in its place a “first-personally addressed constitutivist argument” whose aim is to show to the minimally reflective agent the kind of commitment involved in deciding and forming an intention in situations of incomparability—which are taken to be the litmus test for persistence requirements—and the persistence rational requirement governing it. Along the way I respond to the objections against Strong Persistence and explain why my argument represents an improvement over Bratman’s.
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Notes
The phrase is Broome’s (2013: p. 185), though not the view described in the text.
For simplicity’s sake, I haven’t included time notations in the formulation of the different persistence requirements discussed here, but they are all meant to be diachronic, i.e., requirements governing the attitude of intention across time.
O’Brien (2019) has also appealed recently to the agent’s first-person perspective to investigate the nature of intention. However, her goal in doing so is very different from mine, since she isn’t concerned with defending the existence and normativity of particular rational requirements on intention but rather with explaining the subjective experience of feeling bound by them (p. 355). Moreover, she thinks that this experience is compatible with a skeptical position regarding these requirements (p. 367).
What Bratman means by “locally irrational” is that violations of the rational requirement, although genuine rational breakdowns, don’t necessarily render the agent irrational all-things-considered (Bratman 2012: p. 75). (Think, for instance, in the usual example of an evil demon who demands that you violate a rational requirement lest she destroys the world.) I agree with Bratman that, for the purpose of showing that Strong Persistence is a genuine rational requirement, local irrationality is enough. See Sect. 4.5 below for more on this point.
The alternative course of action might simply be doing nothing, as when the agent realizes that her original intention is unachievable or has already being achieved.
The weaker form of constancy involves constancy “in the absence of supposed adequate reason for an alternative” (Bratman 2012: p. 82, italics added). So the contrast between (in my terminology) Strong Persistence and Weak Persistence is the contrast between abandoning one’s intention because one has decisive or conclusive reasons for an alternative and abandoning it for an alternative that is as adequately supported as the one originally chosen. I discuss these two alternative formulations of the persistence requirement (plus other two) at length in Sect. 4 below.
More generally, for Bratman the content of the norms of practical rationality is fixed by the functional profile of the attitudes governed by them.
By “entrenchment-immune circumstances” Ferrero means situations of normative underdetermination in which, according to him, the agent’s intentions can’t serve as fixed points for future deliberation and action.
By contrast, Bratman emphasizes (2012: p. 83) that the irrationality involved in violating (D) is different from, and independent of, the instrumental irrationality displayed by someone who shuffles from project to project and ends up accomplishing nothing. I agree, though I disagree with him about the proper way to explain the irrationality in question.
Recall that the alternative course of action might be doing nothing. See footnote 7 above.
Recall, however, that Paul’s view is that Strong Persistence isn’t a peremptory requirement of rationality but merely a kind of prudential advice one must heed often enough in order to preserve one’s capacity for undertaking effective commitments. This view is in clear tension with the thought voiced in the passage just quoted, namely that forming an intention is a commitment to Strong Persistence.
I say “mental operation” instead of “mental act” so as to avoid controversies about whether decisions and the formation of intentions are themselves actions. Similarly, I eschew the term “mental event” because I fear it unnecessarily prejudges this question.
Though see footnote 30 below.
This entails, among other things, that you come to see yourself as criticizable for deliberating and acting in these ways (O’Brien 2019: p. 363).
Since I want to be as neutral as possible on the question whether the relevant mental operation is a mental action or not (see footnote 16 above), I remain noncommittal about what exactly this kind of control involves (e.g., whether it’s voluntary or intentional control or not).
Ferrero (2010) explicitly acknowledges that deciding and forming an intention is a rational operation in this sense.
Bratman (2007) defends this “pluralist” view according to which acknowledging a plurality of conceptions of the good is not an obstacle for rationally settling a difficult practical question for oneself.
One might think that if Katherine expects that she will be able to implement her decision after she gets out of the elevator, then it’s plausible to reduce the rationality of her future-directed intention to the rationality of an intention in action. I don’t think this is the case, however. Suppose that Katherine’s expectation is wrong: she won’t be able to implement her decision after all (perhaps no one will come to rescue her). Even so, it would be implausible to deny that she has in fact deliberated, made a decision, and formed an intention. Therefore, the intention itself, and whatever rational constraints govern it, are independent from its implementation. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this concern.
This is a rough formulation of Broome’s Minimal Persistence requirement (see Sect. 4.3 below). I think, of course, that we need a stronger requirement (Strong Persistence), but at this point in the argument it’s enough for my purposes to establish that we need at least this weak requirement in order to falsify Tenenbaum’s No Persistence view.
I’ll argue in the next subsection that even good reasons don’t make it rationally permissible to abandon a resolve in scenarios of incomparability. However, showing at this point that we need at least good reasons suffices for discarding Minimal Persistence.
It’s worthwhile noting that Paul (2014) would concur with my assessment of Broome’s position, since in several places she insists that the agent’s commitment to action must be conceived by herself as being governed by what I call Strong Persistence (e.g., pp. 349, 351). Thus, she would agree that Broome’s characterization of the persistence requirement on intention is flawed. However, we part company over the question whether Strong Persistence is a peremptory requirement of rationality, that is, a requirement we have reason to follow in each and every case we form an intention. In Sect. 5 below I explain in detail why Paul is wrong in giving a negative answer to this question. Thanks to an anonymous referee for urging me to clarify this point.
Ferrero’s own formulation of the persistence requirement is way more complicated, but Weak Persistence captures its essence.
And, as I explained above (Sect. 4.2), appealing to a subjective evaluative judgment of the “best-for-me” variety won’t do if this implies that the agent mistakenly believes that she has decisive reasons for an alternative after all.
I thank an anonymous referee for forcefully pressing me to answer this worry.
On one way of reading Ferrero’s view, he is denying precisely that decisions can settle what to do in situations of incomparability. Cf. the passage quoted above to the effect that in these situations “the power of intentions to rationally settle practical matters is defused” (2012: p. 160). As I explained in Sect. 4.4, however, the plausibility of this view depends entirely on Ferrero’s conception of intentions as “summary attitudes,” which I have shown above is untenable.
See Chan (2013) for a recent collection of essays on the aim and norms of belief.
Or, to put it in the language in which an anonymous referee voiced their concerns, when we make decisions in situations of incomparability we have no choice but to play the “game” of settling rather than that of shuffling, just as we have no choice but to play the “game” of aiming at the truth when we forms beliefs.
The argument hasn’t made Strong Persistence’s authority dependent on the phenomenology of making a commitment, either. Even if a particular agent fails to experience their commitments as carrying any particular kind of authority over time, this is neither here nor there for the purposes of my argument, which appeals to the nature of the attitude of intention rather than to the way agents experience it. See my related remarks at the beginning of Sect. 4 above.
See Shpall (2014) for a congenial view about the nature of rational requirements.
See Schroeder (2013) for a similar idea about grounding rational requirements on “rational autonomy”.
Is Kolodny’s (2005) “why be rational” question pertinent here? Kolodny’s purpose in asking it was to raise skeptical doubts concerning the status of the norms of so-called “structural rationality.” According to his arguments, these norms aren’t norms of rationality at all, and so the “why be rational” question takes an ironic turn—something like “What reasons do we have for being rational, if rationality is what these norms suggest it is?” In my reading, then, Kolodny’s conclusion isn’t that we don’t have reasons for being rational, nor is it that this is a genuinely open question, but rather that the requirements of structural rationality don’t capture what rationality is. I, of course, think he is wrong: as I have shown, these requirements, understood as an expression of the agent’s own commitments, do capture an important aspect of the nature of rationality.
To clarify, my point in this example is that the normative force of rational requirements on belief doesn’t depend on how much believers care about the rational status of particular beliefs of theirs. When I talk about a low-stakes case I mean a case in which there aren’t bound to be serious epistemic consequences for the agent if she forms a belief (e.g., that a famous movie star is having an affair) on insufficient evidence and violates a rational norm actually applicable to her, and thus she doesn’t care about this. I don’t mean a case in which she is rationally permitted to form a belief on less than optimal evidence because some form of pragmatic encroachment is true. Thanks to an anonymous referee for urging me to clarify this point.
An anonymous referee correctly pointed out that Paul would respond to this case by insisting that the indecisive moviegoer has a strong pragmatic reason not to switch intentions in this way and, therefore, that she isn’t committed to the idea that, necessarily, the more one violates Strong Persistence the more spontaneous (in a valuable way) one is. However, this response won’t be enough for salvaging her view, because what she needs in order to disprove that Strong Persistence is a peremptory requirement of rationality is a case in which an agent has sufficient reasons for dropping an intention for insufficient reasons. In other words, she needs a case in which a violation of Strong Persistence is conducive to, or constitutes a, valuable form of spontaneity (one the agent has all-things-considered reasons to pursue), and this, I claim, won’t be forthcoming. This is because, as I explain in the body of the text below, those occasions in which an agent has sufficient reasons for being spontaneous (i.e., of doing something different from what she has done before) are occasions in which she thereby has sufficient reasons for taking an alternative course of action and, consequently, she wouldn’t be violating Strong Persistence if she does so and drops a previously formed intention. The case of the indecisive moviegoer has the purpose of highlighting the implausibility of the idea that dropping an intention for insufficient reasons could be conducive to a valuable form of spontaneity. Thus, even if Paul is right that this agent has prudential reasons for stopping switching intentions, the deeper point that even a single instance of abandoning an intention for insufficient reasons doesn’t constitute a valuable form of spontaneity still stands.
An anonymous referee helpfully suggested another (and perhaps better) case that illustrates the local/global distinction in the epistemic realm, namely that of an agent who forms a belief that p on insufficient evidence (e.g., a belief on the truth of a very controversial hypothesis) and this leads her to form many true beliefs entailed by the first. In this case, while the agent might be epistemically rational all-things considered, her original belief could still betray a local failure of rationality.
I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for another journal and two anonymous reviewers for this journal for their extremely helpful comments, objections, and suggestions, which led me to improve the paper very significantly.
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Rudy-Hiller, F. In defense of a strong persistence requirement on intention. Synthese 198, 10289–10312 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02719-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02719-8