Does the ‘Standard Story’ Provide an Adequate Account of Human Agency?
Examining the Philosophy of Action
1. Introduction
In this essay, I will first explain why the standard story does not provide an adequate account of human agency and then proceed to explain why David Velleman’s theory doesn’t succeed either. Specifically, I will argue 2) that human agency is necessarily free agency, 3) that the standard story does not clearly account for free agency, and 4) that Velleman is right to add the unalienable desire to act rationality to the story of action but wrong to suppose that this is all that needs to be added. I will also 5) examine Jennifer Hornsby’s critique of Velleman’s naturalistic attempt to dissect agency, concluding that while she is right about agency being non-reductive, Velleman’s work does still contribute toward understanding agency.
2. Human Agency
Agency is, simply, “the capacity to act” (Schlosser), and one of the aspects of human agency distinct from the movements of animals or plants or non-living things is our capacity to act freely, not merely moved by prior causes to affect the world in a deterministic way. “What makes us agents rather than mere subjects of behaviour — in our conception of ourselves, at least, if not in reality — is our perceived capacity to interpose ourselves into the course of events in such a way that the behavioural outcome is traceable directly to us” (Velleman 465–466). Supposing, as some might, that animals can also interpose themselves into the chain of causality in this way would merely raise their level of agency, not lower ours to what I will argue is the level of the standard story. More concerning is the objection that humans, like everything else, are determined, and “our conception of ourselves” is “not in reality” true. But this objection is self-defeating.
Discard our ability to choose and we discard our ability to think, and if we discard our ability to think then we discard our ability to make objections to philosophical arguments. Our beliefs will not be our own, they will be mere effects in our material brain caused by prior events that were themselves impersonal. How could we suppose to care whether or not we were determined if we in fact were? Our caring would not be a choice, nor would someone else’s indifference, and a debate (though it could hardly be called that) between us would have a predetermined outcome. The pursuit of truth would be meaningless, like everything else, because we would have no say in whether or not to value it, or engage in it, or feel satisfied or dissatisfied with our progress in it. All human activity would be more accurately described by physics than philosophy, not that anyone could be said to study these fields anyway. To such an objector I say, if you are correct, then I am determined not to care, and determined to hope that no one else will either.
3. The Standard Story
The standard story says that action, and thus agency, is explained by a desire and a belief about how to obtain the object of desire together forming an intention that moves the body (Velleman 461). At worst, this theory doesn’t account for free agency, and at best, it is too simplistic to be used to properly describe free agency. Velleman critiques this theory by saying that an agent needs to be an entity involved in the process described by the standard story, not merely the sum of the parts of the story. “In a full-blooded action, an intention is formed by the agent himself, not by his reasons for acting. Reasons affect his intention by influencing him to form it, but they thus affect his intention by affecting him first. And the agent then moves his limbs in execution of his intention; his intention doesn’t move his limbs by itself.” (Velleman 462). I agree with this critique, and I think it demonstrates the inability of the standard story to properly describe free agency because, on its own, the mental states and events described by it can be and often are deterministic.
Take this example: A person feels the desire for food. Their sense of smell and their instinct to use it forms a belief that there is food in a certain direction. This desire and belief form an intention to move toward the food, and so the person does. This “agent” could also be an animal, or a plant, and even a robot could be programmed to interact with the environment in this way. But if we are looking for human agency, this story is insufficient. Furthermore, the examples Velleman and Harry Frankfurt use — the drug addict who desires to quit but cannot (Velleman 463), the assassin whose nerves cause him to shoot even as he intends not to (Velleman 463), and the man subconsciously intending to ruin a friendship without his conscious awareness (Velleman 464) — are instances where people feel alienated from their actions, something the standard story doesn’t account for, simply glossing over the differences between these instances and more agentive cases — the willing or reformed addict, the cold-blooded assassin, or the self-conscious man. Even if these examples don’t completely discredit the standard story, they at least show that human agency comes in degrees, which is something the standard story is too simplistic to properly accommodate.
Taking the food example again, while it applies to non-human entities, humans do also have to eat. A person who feels the unchosen desire to eat, reflects on it, chooses it as the right desire to act on, forms a belief about where the food is, the combination of which becomes an intention, and who moves in accordance with that intention toward the food, is a free agent. Thus, the standard story can, under a very liberal reading, be said to include both unfree and free actions. If this is its purpose, to describe all degrees of agency, then it succeeds so long as we don’t care to know which degree it is when we ascribe an instance to it. But if we do care to know what is uniquely human agency, then the story doesn’t add the necessary information to describe how some actions are free while others aren’t. The rest of the essay will be about how a person reflects on and chooses to act on their “standard” desires, thus making them a free agent.
4. Velleman
In order to add an unalienated agent to the story of action, Velleman claims that the desire to act according to reasons is “functionally identical” (480) to the agent as it is “always behind, and never in front of, the lens of critical reflection” (477) and
The only way for a person truly to suppress his concern for reasons is to stop making rational assessments of his motives, including this one, thus suspending the processes of practical thought. And in suspending the processes of practical thought, he will suspend the functions in virtue of which he qualifies as an agent. Thus, the sense in which an agent cannot disown his desire to act in accordance with reasons is that he cannot disown it while remaining an agent (479).
I agree that this aspect of agency needs to be added to the standard story, but I disagree that it is all that is needed and that the story is now complete. For starters, desires do not themselves judge between themselves, so that part of the agent is still missing. Velleman doesn’t clearly address this problem, only saying that the judging calculations commonly attributed to the agent “in fact… are driven by his desire to act in accordance with reasons” (479). I agree that the process of calculating the merits of different desires is itself driven by a desire, otherwise the calculations would not be performed, and in fact often aren’t. But this is not the same as saying that the drive to calculate is the same as the process of calculating.
Velleman then proceeds to discuss the calculations themselves, saying that the desire to act rationally “can throw [its] weight behind the weaker of those motives which are vying to animate his [the agent’s] behaviour… so that the two now form the strongest combination of motives” (480). If, for example, desire A has 100 soldiers fighting for it, and desire B only 50, then desire X, the desire to act rationally, allies with desire B and contributes its army of 100 soldiers so that 150>100. But on top of the still unresolved problem of why and how desire X chooses to ally with desire B, this story introduces the additional problem of what happens to the agent if desire A has 200 soldiers.
This is in fact what happens in Frankfurt’s unwilling addict example. Velleman says, therefore, that this is a case of deficient agency, but if that’s all there is to say about that then how could anyone ever avoid deficient agency? There is no mechanism in Velleman’s account of agency to strengthen desire X, and clearly it is not all-powerful, so it seems that factors outside our control determine if our desire to act rationally will win out or not, which is not compatible with an ideal of free agency.
To return to Velleman’s own standards for what would constitute an agent, “In a full-blooded action, an intention is formed by the agent himself, not by his reasons for acting” (462). But this desire that Velleman says is “functionally identical” (480) to the agent just is one of his reasons for acting. Velleman also says “the agent then moves his limbs in execution of his intention; his intention doesn’t move his limbs by itself.” (462). But how does this desire, which forms the intention, then execute that same intention and move the agent’s limbs? I think Velleman is giving this single desire far more responsibility than it can handle, and so does Hornsby, whose suggestion that we shouldn’t try to dissect agency I will now examine.
5. Hornsby
Hornsby argues that, if there is, as Thomas Nagel writes, “a larger course of events that no one “does” but that happens” (qtd. in Hornsby 174), and if, as Velleman accepts, “actions are events” (175), then “This makes it seem as if you could participate as agent only by being related [in terms of doing or causing] to something that might be present in a scene in which you yourself were not involved” (175), which is what she calls “unthinkable” (174) alienation. I think Hornsby is right that it is problematic to try identifying agents among what could otherwise be deterministic events (which is why we should assume people’s agency until proven otherwise), but it is also often problematic to identify the course of hypothetical scenarios. It is not always possible to say with certainty what would have happened had we done something different in some situation. Just because we cannot know potential futures does not mean that we shouldn’t think of ourselves as related to the futures we choose. It may be that some of the events we are related to would have occurred without our input, but it also may be that they wouldn’t have. In some cases it is clear, in some cases it is not.
As Hornsby’s solution to this problem she proposes a “nonreductive account” (179) of agency that says “where an action has been picked out, an agent has been” (175). And like my tentative agreement with her first claim, I also tentatively agree with her here because there is a sense in which the agent is the self, but another sense in which it is but a part. I am an agent, irreducibly, but sometimes I fail to exercise my capacity for agency. I fail through some fault in the parts of me that perform actions, but the responsibility for failing is mine as a whole agentive self. This topic of agency and identity deserves its own essay, but to connect it to Velleman, his answer to the standard story fails because his naturalism tries to reduce the whole agent to just one of its parts. Hornsby, however, is also not entirely correct in her criticism of Velleman because his analysis of the agent’s parts did lead to the necessary addition of the unalienable desire to act rationally.
6. Conclusion
The standard story does not adequately account for the human capacity for free agency, and Velleman’s addition to it, while valuable in bringing us closer to a story of all the parts that an agent is made of, does not complete the story either. Hornsby’s perspective — at least the aspect of it I agree with her on — that an agent is non-naturalistic and thus irreducible to a part of it, helps make sense of why Velleman’s theory runs into so much trouble. And both views could be accommodated and directed toward further progress in this area of philosophy simply by continuing to look for mental states and events necessary for free agency without naming them the agent. Perhaps Velleman and Hornsby would not agree to this compromise, but I at least found it valuable to do so.
Bibliography
Hornsby, Jennifer. “9 Agency and Alienation”. Naturalism in Question, edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2008, pp. 173–187. https://doi-org.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/10.4159/9780674271975-011.
Schlosser, Markus. “Agency.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 28 Oct. 2019, plato.stanford.edu/entries/agency/.
Velleman, J. David. “What Happens When Someone Acts?” Mind, vol. 101, no. 403, 1992, pp. 461–81.JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2253898.
