A Companion to Arthur C. Danto. Группа авторов
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of exercising their agency. In his view, to register this is to register the normative basis from which agents self-knowingly deliberate, choose, and act.
Danto sets aside the issue of choice. He wants to make sense of how willing can be located within actions themselves, and so need not be preceded by any separate mental act such as choice or intention. It is a perfectly good goal to try to make sense of this idea – an idea that is sometimes put by saying that intending is in the doing. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the kind of first-person knowledge of our powers to perform basic actions that Danto attributes to us must in some sense be conditional knowledge – knowledge that we will perform the actions if we will them. For it is not as though the power to perform such actions drives us to perform them all the time, and when we are not performing them we know that it lies within our power to perform them in certain conditions. This is part of what Levi is getting at when he defines options in the way that he does – they are things we will do if we choose to do them. To some extent, we can make sense of such conditionality without bringing in an explicit act of choice, as follows: my knowledge that I can perform a certain kind of action is a belief that I will perform it insofar as I think it is called for by the circumstances in which I find myself, where to think it is called for is precisely to will it in the weak sense of recognizing that it is worth doing. In such a case, there would be no separation between willing and doing – my actions would literally be informed by thoughts, in the form of beliefs about what difference they make in the world, and about the worth of that difference.
I have been exploring the extent to which it might be fruitful to bring a normative orientation in the philosophy of action to bear in our efforts to make sense of Danto’s conception of basic actions. But when we adopt a normative orientation, we must also ask: Does Danto’s distinction between basic and non-basic actions hold any normative significance for the first-person point of view of agency – that is, is it something that agents ought to take due account of when they deliberate and act? My preliminary answer to this question is that its normative significance is very limited. From a normative point of view, the paramount questions that an agent faces concern: what actions are open to me to perform, and among them, which are more worth doing, and which is most worth doing? The subsidiary question which, among the actions that are open to me, are basic vs. non-basic appears to be a mere how-to question.
Danto does not regard this as a merely subsidiary, how-to, question, but rather as a question of philosophical significance – a significance that I will continue to probe in the next section.
4 The First-Person Point of View and Embodiment
Danto conceives an agent’s own body as that through which it performs basic actions; it is what falls within its direct intentional control when it performs actions just like that, at will. The agent can exert intentional control over other things in the world, too, by performing non-basic actions, but then its intentional control is merely indirect, a matter of producing causal effects in the world via the more direct form of intentional control that it has over its own body. Since basic actions are performed from a first-person point of view, the body, as Danto defines it is very much owned – it belongs to me, the agent who possesses it, as my body. This is of a piece with Danto’s point that to be an agent, and to possess a body, goes together with recognizing a basic metaphysical duality between the me and the not-me.
Recall that Danto raises a problem of other bodies, which he compares to, but also distinguishes from, the problem of other minds. Both problems are alleged to arise because we must conceive others in terms of what we can know only from our own first-person points of view. In the case of consciousness, the thought is that there is something it is like to be aware of my own feelings, experiences, etc., and I can never directly confirm that there is something it is like for others too – for all I know, they are mere zombies for whom there is nothing it is like at all. The parallel problem about other bodies would be that I know from my own case what it is to have a body in Danto’s sense, of possessing a repertoire of basic actions, but I can never directly confirm that others possess a body in this sense – for all I know, their movements are mere events and not actions at all.
The normative orientation that Levi, Bilgrami, and I all share does not give rise to any parallel problem about other agents. It does recognize a sharp distinction between the first-person point of view from which agents deliberate and act, vs. the third-person point of view of observation and prediction. But the former is not a point of view that generates so-called privacy. Agents’ capacity to conceive others as agents as being like themselves, in the respect of possessing the first-person point of view of agency, goes hand in hand with a social capacity to engage other agents from within the space of reasons in distinctively interpersonal ways, such as argument, conversation, criticism, etc. Agents cannot consistently engage others in these ways while raising a doubt about whether others are agents in the normative sense.
But if a normative orientation in the philosophy of action does not raise a problem in the region of Danto’s problem of other bodies, then, presumably, it does not accommodate the conception of the body that is supposed to rise to the problem; but in that case, it presumably does not accommodate the distinction between basic and non-basic actions either. This is a point to which I will return.
5 What Is an Agent?
Danto does not go so far as to equate the agent with its body; that is, he does not say I am my body. Rather, he equates the agent with its powers to perform basic actions – which leads him to say, rather poignantly, that the life of an agent diminishes as these powers diminish, and when they cease altogether that constitutes the death of the agent. The point that I want to emphasize, however, is that these powers are not separable from the agent’s first-person point of view – that is, these powers exist only insofar as the agent who possesses them knows that it possesses them in a first-person way. It follows that the life of an agent is inseparable from its first-person point of view.
When we adopt a normative orientation in the philosophy of action, we will agree with this last point. But we will conceive the agent’s first-person point of view in normative terms, as the body of commitments from which an agent is committed to deliberating as it strives to meet the normative requirements that define individual rationality. The most general such requirement is a requirement to arrive at and act upon all-things-considered judgments about what it would be best to think and do, where the “all” ranges over all and only the agent’s own commitments.
I take it to be a definitional point that an individual agent ought to meet the requirements that define individual rationality. Somewhat more controversially, I take it to be a corollary of this definition that whenever, and wherever, there is a commitment to meeting these requirements, there is an individual agent who reasons and acts as one. What makes this a normative analysis is that it makes no reference to any non-normative condition of agent identity, such as the living human organism. If we were to suppose that an agent just is a human being, then we would have to suppose that an individual human being ought to strive to meet the normative requirements that define individual rationality within the whole of its human life. This would mean that it ought to arrive at and act upon all-things-considered judgments that take into account all and only the thoughts that arise within its human life. However, a human life is not necessarily the site of a commitment to doing this – a commitment to reasoning and acting as one – within the whole of that human life. This commitment may also arise within different parts of a human life, and it may arise within groups of human lives. In all of these cases, there is an individual agent who reasons and acts as one, from a body of commitments that constitute its own first-person point of view. The upshot is that while there can be agents of human size, there can also be multiple agents within a single human being and group agents comprising many human beings.
This is not the place to try to elaborate or defend these