Abstract
Once we accept the centrality of options, we face another question: should we give a reductive analysis of options, or should we take them to be analytically simple? In this chapter, I argue against reductive analyses of options, and advocate the view that options are analytically simple. I then defend two principles about options—the Performance Principle and the Possibility Principle—that will be crucial for the subsequent discussion.
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Notes
- 1.
As noted in the previous chapter, ‘S’ here is a free variable ranging over agents, the Greek letter α is a free variable ranging over acts, and ‘OPT’ denotes having an option, where this is a relation between an agent and an act.
- 2.
In the language that predominates in much philosophy of action, acts are ‘act-types’ rather than ‘act-tokens.’
- 3.
In many ways, I believe, acts play the role in practical reasoning that propositions play in theoretical reasoning. For a sympathetic account of the role of acts as the object of intention, see Baier (1970).
- 4.
This count is at best approximate, for there are verb phrases that correspond to no act, or nothing an agent does, such as—at least in the typical case—‘tripped,’ ‘fell asleep,’ or ‘sneezed.’
- 5.
The view of ‘act-individuation’ favored here is the kind of fine-grained approach advocated in Goldman (1970).
- 6.
This is an application, to the realm of options, of H.P. Grice’s highly instructive method of ‘creature construction’ (Grice, 1974).
- 7.
For instance, it may be that all counterfactuals with impossible antecedent are true (Lewis, 1973), and that a divine being is essentially such that it does not make choices. Then CA predicts that such a being has every option whatsoever, which may in fact be true if that being is omnipotent. But here it is clear that the extensional adequacy of CA in this case is merely coincidental.
- 8.
See Maier (2020) for a more extensive survey of these issues.
- 9.
See Albritton (1985) for an insistence on this supposed distinction, and a forceful defense of the freedom of the will so understood.
- 10.
On the symmetries between knowledge and action, see Williamson (2017).
- 11.
Although neither should we take it as unproblematic that we can define such notions. It may be that there is simply no unique solution to the question: what is left over of options, once one takes away their purely psychological element? On the problems of such philosophical subtractions, see Yablo (2014).
- 12.
This observation raises the prospect for a conjunctive analysis of options: perhaps having an option is a matter of satisfying some purely physical condition and being free of all psychological obstacles. The difficultly lies in articulating the nature of these physical conditions and absent psychological obstacles without appealing to the notion of having an option itself. The most serious attempt at doing this is developed in Peacocke (1999); a counterexample to that proposal is developed in Maier (2020).
- 13.
- 14.
Different accessibility relations will in turn be fitting for different kinds of possibility. For instance, a model in which accessibility is reflexive—that is, where every world can be accessed from itself—will be one in which the truth of a proposition suffices for its possibility. (If a proposition is true at a world and accessibility is reflexive there is an accessible possible world at which that proposition is true, namely that world itself.) A minimal modal logic, to be discussed presently, is one which holds for a model whatever the accessibility relations among worlds might be.
- 15.
This objection to MA is developed in Maier (2015), who grants the extensional adequacy of MA but argues that it cannot constitute a reductive analysis of options, since it requires some such notion in order to define the accessibility relation that governs agentive modality. The present argument makes the more fundamental argument that MA fails to even be extensionally adequate.
- 16.
Kenny does not put matters in terms of options, but in other details the case is essentially his.
- 17.
This reasoning relies on the following principle, which we might call the Equivalence Principle:
-
If S OPT α, and S performs an act of type α just in case S performs an act of type β, then S OPT β
If we let α be ‘pull a card from the deck’ and β be ‘pull a red or a black card from the deck,’ then the Equivalence Principle in this case underwrites the reasoning given in the text. We will have reason to revisit the Equivalence Principle, which some philosophers seem to have doubted, though it does not seem at all plausible to defend MA by denying it in the case at hand.
-
- 18.
Note that the objection is not quite that distribution over disjunction fails for options. Disjunction is not even defined for options: disjunction is an operation on propositions, not on acts. The dialectic of the objection is somewhat more complicated. Assume, for reductio, that options can be modeled within the framework of possible worlds. Then the kind of possibility that corresponds to options would fail to distribute over disjunction. But possibility distributes over disjunction in any normal modal logic. Therefore, options cannot be modeled within the framework of possible worlds.
- 19.
This is perhaps the most vulnerable premise of Kenny’s argument. Might we not instead say that there are many accessible worlds at which she picks a card—at some of these it is red, and at some of these it is black—but that there is no ‘fact of the matter’ about whether the card she picks at some accessible world is red or black? To make this claim is to depart from a model of possibility in terms of accessibility relations among individual worlds and to move to a model of possibility in terms of relations to sets of worlds (or, alternately, a model of accessibility relations between individuals worlds combined with supervaluation over claims about individual worlds, in the manner of the treatment of conditional excluded middle in Stalnaker (1980)). This is a marked departure from the normal modal logics considered in this chapter. We will revisit the prospects for this strategy in more detail in the next chapter.
- 20.
If I travel at some particular rate, I do so intentionally, but it does not follow that I intended to travel at exactly that rate. On the difference between what we intend to do and what we do intentionally, see also Bratman (1987).
- 21.
We can of course imagine cases where I do have this as an option, where I have sufficient control over my pace or access to sufficiently accurate timing mechanisms. I am stipulating that we are considering a case where such elements are absent.
- 22.
Omnipotent beings may constitute an exception. Discussions of omnipotence typically concern the power of omnipotent beings to perform tasks much greater than can any finite being. A less noted aspect of omnipotence—which we might call ‘omniprecision’—is the power of beings to perform infinitely precise tasks, such as having the option of lifting exactly r kilograms for any real number r. MA may well be extensionally adequate when applied to an omniprecise being. It fails as an analysis of options generally because beings such as ourselves have options, and we are not omniprecise.
On the present account, we might accept that MA is extensionally adequate for an agent who exercises precise control over the world. MA fails taken as an analysis of options generally, but it might succeed if taken as a description of the options of being of unlimited precision.
- 23.
This objection is in the neighborhood of the objections from indifference and from non-arbitrariness considered in Lewis (1986, pp. 123–133).
- 24.
A condition is independently specifiable just in case it does not itself include the option relation.
- 25.
In another sense, the simple view has a more copious ontology than other views, for it does not reduce options to anything else. A full inventory of the world must therefore include, among other things, the options of agents.
- 26.
As noted earlier, strictly these arguments concern only the unexercised options of agents. By the lights of what I will shortly dub the Performance Principle, an agent has the option of performing any act that she actually performs. Arguments for the incompatibility of options and determinism, which we will consider explicitly in Chap. 7, concern only those options that an agent does not perform.
- 27.
If anything, it is indeterminism that appears to threaten the truth of ordinary counterfactuals; see Hawthorne (2005).
- 28.
Another consideration is that, as observed in van Inwagen (1983, p. 121) any argument for the incompatibility of determinism and proper options is also, in virtue of that, an argument against CA. Therefore, if one’s aim is to answer these arguments, an appeal to CA threatens to be dialectically ineffective. The simple view, by contrast, provides a more fundamental grounds for questioning these arguments.
- 29.
Another is the need to give an account of essence; see Fine (1994).
- 30.
The thought that the modal approach is inadequate to agentive modality, on purely formal grounds, is developed in Maier (2018).
- 31.
For a thorough discussion of the physicalist project and how it might be understood, see Stoljar (2010).
- 32.
This doctrine is elegantly explained in Chalmers (1996), though Chalmers himself denies it.
- 33.
While this observation seems uncontentious, its implications may remain unappreciated. See Turner (2009) for an argument that the incompatibilist about options and determinism is required to deny a certain kind of supervenience thesis.
- 34.
Note that, as before, Greek letters such as α denotes acts, where these are understood as act types rather than act tokens. The acts that one performs, on the other hand, are particular happenings or act tokens, which may fall under more than one act type. (For instance, one may, with a single gesture, both raise one’s arm and alert the police.) The performance principle is stated as it is to capture this aspect of the ontology of action.
- 35.
This is a normative claim and, as the subsequent discussion indicates, it is a claim of objective normativity. That is, it is not a claim about what she ought to have deliberated above relative to what she knew, but about what she ought to have deliberated about simpliciter.
- 36.
In general, as noted in the previous chapter, options are not epistemically transparent: from the fact that someone has α as an option, it does not follow that she knows that she has α as an option.
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Maier, J.T. (2022). The Simplicity of Options. In: Options and Agency. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10243-1_2
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