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The Action as Conclusion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Philip Clark
Philip Clark*
Affiliation:
Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS66506-1506, USA
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Extract

On the question of the conclusion of a piece of practical reasoning, few have been willing to follow Aristotle's lead. He said the conclusion was an action. These days, the conclusion is usually described either as a proposition about what one ought to do, or as a psychological state or event, such as a decision to do something, an intention to do something, or a belief about what one ought to do. Why favor these options over the action-as-conclusion view? By far the most oft-repeated answer is that these views, unlike Aristotle's, can accommodate the case in which a conclusion is drawn but not acted upon. The conclusion cannot be an action, it is said, because it is possible to reach a conclusion about what to do without doing the action. My thesis is that this objection fails, and that as a consequence no radical departure from Aristotle's proposal is warranted.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , December 2001 , pp. 481 - 505
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2001

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References

1 This article completes a project I began in an earlier contribution to this journal. See ‘Practical Steps and Reasons for Action,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 27 (1997) 17-46. The project is to lay out an account of the practical syllogism that can serve as the basis of a broadly eudaimonistic conception of rational motivation. The earlier paper deals mainly with what lies behind the conclusion.

2 Audi, Robert Practical Reasoning (London: Routledge 1989), 94Google Scholar

3 Raz, Joseph in his introduction to Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1978), 6Google Scholar

4 Charles, David Aristotle's Philosophy of Action (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1984), 91Google Scholar

5 Wiggins, David ‘Weakness of Will, Commensurability, and the Objects of Deliberation and Desire,’ reprinted with minor revisions in Needs, Values, Truth (Oxford: Blackwell 1987), 250Google Scholar

6 Davidson, Donald in Vermazen and Hintikka, Essays on Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1985), 220Google Scholar

7 Kenny, Anthony Aristotle's Theory of the Will (New Haven: Yale University Press 1979), 142ffGoogle Scholar.

8 On this response, see Dahl, Norman Practical Reason, Aristotle, and Weakness of the Will (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984), 161.Google Scholar

9 Nussbaum, Martha Aristotle's ‘De Motu Animalium’: Text with Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978), 40Google Scholar

10 Aristotle issues a parallel caveat at NE 1147a27-31, where he says the agent will do the conclusion ‘if he has the power and is not prevented.’

11 See Mele, Alfred ‘The Practical Syllogism and Deliberation in Aristotle's Causal Theory of Action,’ New Scholasticism 55 (1981), 302CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Kenny tries to forestall this objection. True, he says, Aristotle does say the ‘I have to make a cloak’ is an action. But what this shows, according to Kenny, is that Aristotle is ‘willing to calla decision to act “an action”’ (Aristotle's Theory of the Will, 143). This will not do. Deciding to make a cloak cannot plausibly be identified with making one, especially in the case where no cloak gets made. Kenny might reply that Aristotle has in mind the mental act of forming the decision. But this will not do either. Aristotle's aim in the passage is to contrast practical reasoning and theoretical reasoning. He does this by saying the conclusion of a piece of practical reasoning is an action, whereas the conclusion of, say, a geometric proof is not But Aristotle holds that in drawing the conclusion of a piece of theoretical reasoning one performs the mental act of affirming the conclusion (NE 1147a27). If we take Aristotle to be saying the conclusion ‘I have to make a cloak’ is the act of deciding, we lose the contrast that is the central point of the passage.

13 G.H. von Wright pursues such a view without directly attributing it to Aristotle. See his Explanation and Understanding (Ithaca, NY: Cornell 1971), ch. 3, and ‘On So-called Practical Inference,’ Acta Sociologica 15 (1972). See also Santas, G. ‘Aristotle on Practical Inference, the Explanation of Action, and Akrasia,’ Phronesis 14 (1969), 176.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 See Santas, ‘Aristotle on Practical Inference,’ 175ff.; Nussbaum, De Motu, Essay 4, 186; and Welch, John R. ‘Reconstructing Aristotle: The Practical Syllogism,’ Philosophia 21 (1991), 79–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 This reading also allows us to make sense of Aristotle's emphasis on the immediacy of action, without taking him to mean that every practical conclusion is a conclusion about what to do now. We can read Aristotle as arguing for the action-as-conclusion view on the ground that it explains a certain observation. The observation is that some patterns of reasoning are such that anyone who draws the conclusion will immediately act, barring prevention or compulsion. How is this possible? Aristotle's answer is that some patterns of reasoning are such that drawing the conclusion is settling on a course of action. Thus if I draw a conclusion about what to do now, this will lead to action now, barring prevention or compulsion. But this explanation does not commit him to saying that all practical conclusions are conclusions about what to do now. I might reach a conclusion now about what to do tomorrow. See Santas, ‘Aristotle on Practical Inference,’ 176, and Mele, ‘The Practical Syllogism and Deliberation,’ 299-300. For the opposing view see Cooper, John Reason and Human Good in Aristotle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1975), 24–6Google Scholar.

16 I follow the convention of representing reasoning with words the reasoner might use if she were ‘thinking out loud’ while doing the reasoning. I do not assume that being persuaded by an argument requires speech, intemalized or otherwise.

17 Grice, Paul and Baker, Judith ‘Davidson on “Weakness of the Will,”’ in Vermazen, and Hintikka, Essays on Davidson: Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1985), 42Google Scholar

18 Some might deny that reasoning ending in ‘So I'll do such and such’ is reasoning to a conclusion. Perhaps the complaint will be that forming an intention is not concluding that anything is the case. It is, rather, deciding to make something the case. But it is hard to see why every conclusion must be a conclusion about what is the case unless we are assuming that all arguments work by showing the truth of a conclusion. And that is just what the action-as-conclusion view denies.

19 Michael Bratman also treats ‘ought’ judgments as beliefs about the weight of reasons for action, although the reasons he has in mind are relativized to desires of the reasoner. See his Intention, Plans, and Practical Reasoning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1987), ch. 3.

20 The distinction between deliberation and the practical syllogism occupies a central place in Davidson's theory. See his Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1980), 16.

21 Essays on Actions and Events, 39ff.

22 Anscombe, Elizabeth Intention (Ithaca, NY: Cornell 1976), 58Google Scholar

23 See e.g. Gibbard, Alan Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1990).Google Scholar

24 See e.g. Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, 99ff.Google Scholar

25 Compare Hurley, Susan Natural Reasons (New York: Oxford University Press 1989), 218.Google Scholar

26 For discussions of the problem of internalism, see McNaughton, David Moral Vision (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1988), 23Google Scholar, and Smith, Michael The Moral Problem (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1994)Google Scholar.

27 On the idea that reasoning is an activity in which one aims to ‘get it right,’ see Velleman, David ‘What Happens When Someone Acts?’ Mind 101 (1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Section XIII, and Lawrence, Gavin ‘The Rationality of Morality,’ in Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995)Google Scholar.

28 This explanation of the motivational magnetism of ‘ought’ judgments does not commit us to the idea that such judgments are ever true. Nevertheless, we do need some account of what would qualify a step as deserving weight. My own view, which I defend elsewhere, is that steps deserve weight in deliberation in virtue of their connection with things it makes sense to want in one's life, that is, with goods of a certain kind. I defend this view against Velleman's, David autonomist alternative in ‘Velleman's Autonomism,’ Ethics 111 (2001) 580–93Google Scholar.

29 See Mackie, J.L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1977)Google Scholar, ch.l.

30 Harman holds that what one intends, when one intends to make a cloak, is to make a cloak as a result of this very intention. But this is compatible with the idea that what one intends is the act of making a cloak as a result of this very intention, as opposed to the intention itself. See Harman, Gilbert ‘Practical Reasoning,’ Review of Metaphysics 79 (1976) 431–63Google Scholar, and Change in View (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1986), 85-6.

31 The same test should guide our thinking about negative and conditional conclusions, like ‘So I won't tell anyone,’ or ‘So I'll call the doctor if the rash persists.’ On the face of it, keeping a secret and calling the doctor if the rash persists are the sorts of things one can do. So they are not ruled out by the claim that what one intends is an action, as I am understanding it.

32 See Rumfit, Ian ‘Frege's Theory of Predication: An Elaboration and Defense, with Some New Applications,’ The Philosophical Review 103 (1994), 619Google Scholar. Rumfit develops a view on which the content of an order or intention is a thing done as opposed to a doing.

33 A different reply to the specificity objection would be to let the intended action be whatever concrete action lies down the causal stream from the intention. Thus what I intend, when I intend to write a letter to my friend, is whatever event of writing a letter to my friend actually transpires as a result of the intention. This is not a promising strategy. One problem is that if no action lies downstream, nothing will have been intended. Another is that as we learn more about the action that materializes, on this view, we learn more about what we intended. And this just isn't right. The details of what I actually write are precisely what is missing from what I intended yesterday, when I only intended to write.

34 Vermazen, Bruce ‘Objects of Intention,’ Philosophical Studies 71 (1993), 224CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 Another defense of propositions as objects of intentions would rest on an analysis of intentions as beliefs. For instance, Velleman, David in Practical Reflection (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989)Google Scholar analyzes intentions as special kinds of expectations that one will act. Perhaps it will seem that if Velleman is right, then the ‘what’ of an intention to act is the proposition that forms the content of the belief. But in fact this does not follow. An analysis of what it is to be in a state with a certain object can leave the object untouched. For instance, some philosophers analyze states of valuing as beliefs. To value learning, on such a view, is to believe that learning is good. It does not follow, though, that what one values is the proposition that learning is good. The object of the valuing is still learning, even though the valuing itself is analyzed as a belief. Similarly, the object of an intention can be an action, even if we analyze the intention itself as a belief.

36 For helpful comments I thank Eugene Bales, Michael Bratman, David Copp, Jimmy Doyle, Kai Draper, Fred Dretsky, Sean Foran, Jim Hamilton, Ariela Lazar, Laurie Pieper, Betsy Postow, Marleen Rozemond, Chris Shields, Houston Smit, Janet Stemwedel, Sergio Tenenbaum, Michael Wedin, Gideon Yaffe, and several anonymous referees.