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the kind of agential unity required for autonomous action and offers an
alternative account that avoids these difficulties. One influential approach
to characterizing agency holds that autonomous action occurs only when
an agent is wholeheartedly committed to the motivation on which he or
she acts. The basic idea behind this approach (defended by Harry Frankfurt
and Christine Korsgaard, among others) is that autonomous action is action
that flows from motivations that are truly internal to the agent, and that it
is an agents wholehearted commitment to a motivation that makes it internal in the relevant sense. Reflection on the diachronic aspects of agency
reveals some serious challenges for this approach. These challenges are
diagnosed as stemming from a fundamental structural tension between two
of its key elements; on the one hand the requirement of absolute wholeheartedness about our commitments, and on the other the claim that questions of agency and autonomy must take as their target the principles, plans,
and projects that individual actions represent rather than the actions themselves. The article argues that this tension is unavoidable in the approach
as usually defended and outlines a different strategy for characterizing agential unity that does not require wholeheartedness.
KEYWORDS. Autonomy, diachronic commitment, wholeheartedness, narrative,
strong unity
I. INTRODUCTION
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There is much that is appealing in the approach, but there is also a great
deal that is troubling about it, and many philosophers have argued that the
requirement of wholeheartedness is implausibly strong when used to define
the agency or identity of beings as ambivalent and multiplicitous as we are.
In what follows, I will show that focus on the application of the strong
unity view to questions of diachronic identity can yield a deeper understanding of the underlying causes and implications of this problematic
requirement, as well as a strategy for addressing the problems it engenders.
I begin with a brief description of the main features of the strong unity
view. I then look at some questions about how the view applies in diachronic contexts, and use these to raise puzzles about the notion of wholeheartedness as it applies over time. This discussion shows that the strong
unity view contains key claims that are in tension with one another the
claim that questions about agency necessarily make reference to temporallyextended plans and projects and the claim that autonomy requires wholeheartedness. I conclude by sketching a suggestion for developing a view in
which the former claim can be maintained and the latter rejected.
II. THE STRONG UNITY VIEW
The strong unity view is, among other things, a response to the question
of what makes a particular event an action of an agent rather than a mere
occurrence in his or her history. Part of a plausible answer is that an
agential action requires some kind of an intention, but according to the
strong unity view it requires more than that. The motive on which I act
must be truly mine if I am to be an agent with respect to it. In order for
a motivation to be truly mine, in this view, I must endorse it or identify
with it and must do so without hesitation or ambivalence in Frankfurts
famous phrase, I must do so wholeheartedly.
The general contours of this view are familiar. It begins from the
recognition that humans, unlike other animals (at least as far as we know)
are not only able to experience motivations, desires, and impulses, but
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also to stand back from these and consider whether they want to, or
ought to, follow them. They are capable, in Frankfurts terms, of having
second-order desires (or volitions). The possibility of true autonomy or
human agency is taken to flow from this capability. Rather than just being
driven to action by whatever impulse happens to be strongest, we can
(indeed, as Korsgaard has it, must) take an evaluative attitude toward
these impulses, and this allows us to take a stand about which we want
to be moved by. The motivations that receive our endorsement are truly
ours and so have a special authority to represent us that unendorsed
motives do not. When we are moved by motivations we do not endorse,
this is something that happens to us rather than something we do.
Frankfurts early and illuminating example here is unwilling drug
addiction. We can imagine addicts with a powerful desire for a particular
drug who have vowed to fight their addiction with all their strength. They
experience impulses to procure and take the drug, but they view these
impulses as unwanted intruders. If they succumb to them they will experience their drug use as a failure to do what they truly wanted to do and
see themselves as passive and helpless in the face of alien forces.
The simple idea that we make motivations truly ours by endorsing
them or identifying with them requires some refinement, however.
Endorsement is just one more thing that we do, and it is therefore not
obvious why it should be able to constitute the difference between
autonomous and non-autonomous action. What, after all, makes the act
of endorsement a true action of mine? Both Frankfurt and Korsgaard
answer this concern, to which they are fully sensitive, with a requirement that our endorsements or identifications be entirely wholehearted. It
is not simply that I have the thought that I wish to be moved to action
by some motivation that makes it mine; I must be unambivalent in my
acceptance or rejection of it as a principle of action. The importance of
wholeheartedness is that it unifies the will and constitutes a well-defined
agential self capable of autonomous action. When I come down decisively behind a particular motivation there is a fact about what I want
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when he or she walks out the door. Frankfurt and Korsgaard make this
point explicitly. Having introduced the notion of caring as a form of
commitment, for instance, Frankfurt remarks that [] the notion of
guidance, and hence the notion of caring, implies a degree of persistence.
A person who cared about something just for a single moment would be
indistinguishable from someone who was being moved by impulse
(1988b, 84). And Korsgaard observes that If I change my mind and my
will every time I have a new impulse, then I dont really have an active
mind or a will at all I am just a kind of location where these impulses
are at play. And that means that to make up my mind even now to give
myself a reason I must conceive my reason as an instance of some general type (1996, 232; italics original). Constituting oneself as an agent thus
requires one to unify ones will both synchronically and diachronically. An
agent needs to have a well-defined and stable set of projects, plans and
commitments that provide principles of action over time.
There is a great deal that is convincing in this analysis, especially the
explanation of the way in which diachronic considerations must be part
of an account of agency. This insight, however, sits uneasily with the
demand for wholeheartedness, as we will see in the next section.
III. DIACHRONICITY AND WHOLEHEARTEDNESS
In this section I look at two different, and ultimately related, questions
about how to think about wholeheartedness with respect to projects,
plans, and relationships that stretch over time. The first is a question
about how consistent and unwavering wholeheartedness must be; the
second about how the notion of wholeheartedness applies to conflicts
between different diachronically extended plans, projects or practical
identities. In each case I will show that serious difficulties arise with the
notion of wholeheartedness.
The claim that the demand for wholeheartedness is problematic is
hardly a new one, and objections to the strong unity view have been raised
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(although, as Frankfurt often notes, this does not mean I feel no pangs of
regret, only that I know for certain what I wish to do, regrets or not).
As we have seen, however, the real target of my identification is supposed to be not just an individual action but the underlying motivation or
project from which it flows. According to the strong unity view, then, it is
not enough that I am wholehearted about signing the letter of acceptance
and sending it in; I must be wholehearted about the choice of pursuing a
career as an attorney, a project whose execution necessarily spreads over
time. While I may feel quite resolved about this decision at the moment of
accepting admission to law school, this provides no guarantee that my
attitude will remain constant over time. The first question I wish to raise
about the strong unity views notion of wholeheartedness is thus the question of whether wholeheartedness about a temporally-extended project of
this kind requires only that I feel unambivalent about the project as a whole
at the time of taking some particular action associated with it (e.g. accepting
admission to law school), or whether I must instead remain wholehearted
about it throughout the entire length of time it takes to pursue it.
The first possibility seems far too weak and is, moreover, explicitly
rejected by strong unity theorists. If I feel completely unambivalent about
being an attorney when I accept my first job, but have second thoughts
on the first day of work or the next week or even the next month , it
seems hard to conclude that I am really wholehearted about this endeavour.
If I change my mind in such short order it does seem difficult to distinguish between commitment and impulse as strong unity theorists suggest.
The second possibility, however, seems as much too strong as the first is
too weak. The kinds of plans, projects, relationships and practical identities
that are supposed to constitute us as agents take time, effort, and resources.
It is unrealistic to suppose that people will, or even should, remain completely unconflicted about their long term projects at every moment of
their undertaking, and if they did we might wonder if they are taking life
entirely seriously. It is completely natural to have periods of doubt or
ambivalence.
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This last observation suggests another possible reading. Perhaps proponents of the strong unity view will claim that the analyses I have given
so far simply misunderstand what they mean by wholeheartedness.
Wholeheartedness is not a psychological state, they might say, but rather
a structure of the will. If the attorney does indeed continue pursuing her
lawyerly duties despite having doubts we can say that she is in fact committed to the project throughout that entire time. Her wholeheartedness
is evidenced by her actions and her state of mind is not directly relevant.
This is, in many ways, a promising approach. It does indeed sound right,
at least to my ear, to say that a willingness to stick it out through periods
of doubt and discouragement is precisely what it means to be committed
to an endeavour whether it is a career, a marriage, a set of religious
principles or a political cause. This understanding of wholeheartedness,
however, seems in tension with much that strong unity theorists say about
it. Wholeheartedness about a project it now turns out is compatible with
extended periods of ambivalence. The attorney we are imagining is, during her periods of doubt, stepping back from her motives and questioning
whether she really wants to act on them and, we are imagining, she finds
that she does not know the answer to this question, even though she
keeps going through the motions.
Perhaps a final possibility for strong unity theorists is to claim that
the attorney is an agent throughout not because she is wholehearted
about being an attorney at each point, but rather because she is wholehearted about her principle of action at each point. During a period of
doubt she may step back from her conflicting motives and decide that
although she feels impelled to give up her career, she knows that such
impulses usually pass and can be explained by factors that do not necessarily imply that she has chosen the wrong career path. Her principle of
action is thus to wait it out, do nothing rash, and see if she feels better
about being an attorney next month after this horrible case is concluded.
This is also a promising analysis, but it raises further questions about the
notion of wholeheartedness and its relation to diachronic unity.
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what the strong unity view has to say about wholeheartedness and hence
about agency in the case of such conflicts.
It will, once again, be useful to have a concrete example to work with
in thinking through this question. Imagine a lawyer like the one we
described earlier, but without significant doubts about her career. From
the beginning she is wholeheartedly identified with the project of being
an attorney, and she maintains this attitude throughout her career. At
some point, however, she has a child and wholeheartedly identifies also
with her role as mother. This does not make her question the value of
being an attorney or her commitment to that career, but sits alongside
that practical identity as one equally valued about which she is equally
wholehearted. Predictably, a day comes when an important work-related
event is scheduled at the same time as an equally important event in her
daughters life say her first ballet recital about which she is immensely
excited and which she desperately wants her mother to attend. This womans wholeheartedness about her career and about parenthood do not tell
her how to choose between these demands. Indeed, the fact that she is
so deeply committed to each project is precisely what makes things so
difficult. Whether she goes to work or to the recital she is likely to wonder
whether she is doing the right thing and whether it would not have been
better to do the other.2
On the surface, the conflict this mother faces seems to be just the sort
that, according to the strong unity view, prevents there from being a fact
about what she wants to do, undermining her unity as an agent and making
a truly autonomous action impossible. It is just this kind of ambivalence
that strong unity theorists insist we must overcome in order to be agents.
Frankfurt, for instance, asks [...] what good is it for someone to be free to
make significant choices if he does not know what he wants and if he is
unable to overcome his ambivalence? What is the point of offering a beguiling variety of alternatives to people who can respond to them only with
irresolute vacillation (1999a, 102)?3 He concludes that [...] unless a person
is capable of a considerable degree of volitional unity, he cannot make
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coherent use of his freedom (1999a, 102). And in Personal Identity and
the Unity of Agency: A Kantian Response to Parfit, Korsgaard considers
the dilemma of a fictional split brain patient. We are to imagine someone
in whom the connections between the two hemispheres of the brain have
been severed and in whom each hemisphere has the capacity to form intentions. Suppose, she says, that they do not try to resolve their differences,
but each merely sends motor orders, by way of the nervous system, to your
limbs. Since the orders are contradictory, the two halves of your body try
to do different things. Unless they can come to an agreement, both hemispheres of your brain are ineffectual (1989, 110-111). She concludes: You
are a unified person at any given time because you must act, and you have
only one body with which to act (1989, 110-111). Our lawyer is in a relevantly similar position one part of her is telling her to go to the recital
and another to go to work and, since she cannot be in two places at one
time, she must overcome this conflict if she is to act at all.
But there is a puzzle here when we try to think about these kinds of
conflicts within the broader claims of the strong unity view. What we
need to understand is exactly how the relevant lack of wholeheartedness
is to be described. The strong unity view tells us what is important for
agency is that we are unambivalent in our identification with the project,
plan or relationship that motivates what we do. In this case, our subject
no matter which action she takes will have that kind of wholeheartedness, since she is committed wholeheartedly to each practical identity.
So where is the lack of wholeheartedness that undermines her identity?
The obvious answer is that she is not wholehearted about which
course of action to take. This means, as the earlier quotations suggest,
that she is in danger of going neither to work nor to the recital but, like
Buridans ass, vacillating between the two. But this cannot be the whole
story. If it were, all she would need to do to acquire agency would be to
do something, and this has little to do with endorsing general principles.
This woman could, after all, settle the conflict by meeting whichever of
the two demands happens to have more saliency due to some contingent
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factor (e.g. her daughter stands before her in the tutu looking cute while
work is out of sight). This does not seem to be the kind of decisionmaking the strong unity view sees as agential; she is simply letting the
stronger of the two impulses pull her because she does not know which
one she wants to follow.4
There are two different ways in which strong unity theorists might
respond to this kind of challenge. One is to say that because each of the
two commitments making a claim on the attorney/mother is a commitment she wholeheartedly endorses, she in fact is acting as an agent if she
lets impulse decide between them. The kind of ambivalence she experiences, it might be argued, is vastly different from that experienced, for
instance, by the attorney who is ambivalent about whether to go to work
because they are not sure they truly value their career and want to maintain it. Frankfurt suggests in his early work that there are different kinds
of conflicts a person can experience. One is a common kind of contingent conflict between desires that cannot both be fulfilled. His example
here is desiring both to go to a concert and to a film that are scheduled
at the same time. Conflicts of this kind, he says [...] require only that the
desires at issue be ordered (1988b, 66). This is contrasted with a conflict
in which one of the desires is to be rejected altogether. His example here
is of someone who wishes to congratulate someone on a recent achievement but notices also a jealous wish to injure this person, a desire he or
she does not endorse and with which he or she does not identify. In the
first kind of conflict, Frankfurt says, if the more highly-rated desire cannot be fulfilled the natural course of action is to try to fulfil the other;
this is not so for the second. When a person is frustrated in his desire
to see a film, he naturally turns to his second choice and goes to a concert. In the present example, however, the alternative of injuring his
acquaintance is not second to the persons first choice of offering him a
compliment (Frankfurt 1988b, 67). The desires to go to the concert and
the film are, he says, on the same level, while the desires to compliment
and injure his acquaintance are not.
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or being a good mother in the same way that there is a yes or no answer
to the question of whether someone is ingesting drugs, or signing an
acceptance letter for law school, or attending a recital. Because of this,
there is no simple answer either to the question of whether someone is
wholeheartedly committed to the pursuit of these goals. They can be
pursued with more or less vigour, success, constancy, and gusto; but there
is no clear-cut fact about exactly what being wholeheartedly committed
to one of these plans or projects would mean. To say that I endorse such
a plan or project does not yet settle the question of whether I will, or
even should, take any particular action at any particular time. This is what
we demonstrated in the previous section.
The strong unity view thus gets into trouble when it takes a notion that
is suited to questions about particular actions at particular times viewed as
isolated events and conjoins it with the claim that questions about agency
and identity necessarily make reference to plans and projects that stretch
over time. To avoid these difficulties one part of the view or the other
either the claim that the targets of our reflective endorsement are plans,
projects, and ways of life rather than isolated actions or the claim that
wholeheartedness is required for autonomy must be relinquished. I hope
that it will be clear from the discussion so far that the better path is to give
up the requirement of wholeheartedness. This leaves us, however, with the
problem that this requirement was originally introduced to answer, the
problem of infinite regress. How is this to be addressed without demanding
wholeheartedness? This is not a question I can answer fully here, but I can
point to a strategy for developing an answer. The seeds of a solution to the
problem of infinite regress are, I suggest, embedded in the very claim that
causes difficulties for the notion of wholeheartedness, the claim that questions of autonomy are not about isolated actions but rather about temporally-extended plans and projects.
The perceived need for a requirement of wholeheartedness arises
when we are asking about autonomy with respect to a particular act considered on its own the question, for instance, is whether an addict is
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to know not just that they repudiate it fully as they do it, but also what
happened before and after; how they got to this point and where they
go from it. Did they regularly attend their therapy sessions? When their
old friends from their drugging days called them up, did they call their
sponsor as they said they would or did they instead agree to meet up
with them and lie about where they were going? How often has this
happened? What resources have they been given to help them kick their
addiction and how actively and aggressively have they sought out such
resources? Do they use their slip as an excuse to go on a months-long
binge or do they immediately check themselves back into the hospital
for inpatient treatment? Depending upon the answers to these questions
we might want to say that the action is truly theirs, even if just at that
moment they were overwhelmed or that it is not theirs even if at the
moment they were not.
The suggestion, then, is that the special weight we are looking for
from wholeheartedness can come instead from a narrative of the individuals relation to a long-term project or plan and the role of individual
actions within it. If we want to understand the depth and type of commitment someone has to a temporally-extended project we will want to
know about the ups and downs of their attitudes toward it and how
these translate into behaviour. This is just what we saw in the case of
the lawyer who stuck it out through periods of doubt, and it is why we
do not have to doubt that a woman is committed to being a good mother
if she chooses, on some particular occasion, to attend a meeting rather
than a recital as long as she makes it up to her daughter later. This
approach does not so much offer a solution to the problem of infinite
regress as to show why it need never arise. The level and type of commitment we have to an action is understood by looking at the full story
of how it arises and operates in our lives, not in terms of an attitude of
endorsement taken at a particular time.
This suggestion is obviously not yet anywhere near precise enough
to provide a full-blown account of commitment, agency or autonomy, but
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Poltera, Jacqui. 2010. Is Ambivalence and Agential Vice? Philosophical Explorations 13:
293-305.
Schramme, Thomas. 2014. On Being Wholeheartedly Ambivalent: Indecisive Will, Unity
of the Self, and Integration by Narration. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17: 27-40.
Strawson, Galen. 2004. Against Narrativity. Ratio XVII/4: 428-452.
Velleman, J. David. 2002. Identification and Identity. In The Contours of Agency. Edited
by Sarah Buss and Lee Overton, 91-123. Cambridge: MIT Press.
NOTES
1. See, for instance, Benson (2005), Calhoun (1995), Gunnarsson (2013), Lugones (1987),
Marino (2011), Poltera (2010), Schramme (2013), Velleman (2002).
2. Patricia Marino (2011) uses a similar example to argue that ambivalence is not necessarily harmful to agency.
3. Frankfurt is actually talking about ambivalence here in the technical sense in which we have
stipulated that this attorney is not ambivalent. Still, the point is that conflicts between wholehearted
endorsements can interfere with the ability to act just as much as ambivalence in Frankfurts sense does.
4. Marino (2011, 45-47) says that in such a case it seems clear that letting contingent factors
decide the issue does not undermine agency. I tend to agree, but the point here is that this move
is not open to strong unity theorists.
5. For a detailed description of these issues see, for instance, Frankfurt (1988a).
6. In the course of writing this paper I have benefited from discussions with and comments from
many people. I would like especially to thank Tamar Schapiro for comments on a much earlier draft,
and Nomy Arpaly, Thomas Nys, Beate Roessler, the participants in the Workshop on Autonomy and
Diachronic Agency at the University of Amsterdam, and two anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft.
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