A wave of recent philosophical work on practical rationality isorganized by the following implicit argument: Practical reasoning isfiguring out what to do; to do is to act; so the forms of practicalinference can be derived from the structure or features of action. Nowit is not as though earlier work in analytic philosophy had failed toregister the connection between action and practical rationality; infact, practical reasoning was usually picked out as, roughly,reasoning directed toward action. But for much of the twentiethcentury, attention moved quickly away from this initial delineation ofthe subject area, to the interplay of beliefs and desires within themind (instrumentalist theories, including their Davidsonian andWilliamsian variants), or to procedures for checking that a plan ofaction was supported by sufficient yet consistent reasons (Kantiantheories), or to the ultra-refined sensibilities of the practicallyintelligent reasoner (Aristotelian theories). The hallmark of theemerging family of treatments to be surveyed here is, first, thesustained attention paid to answering the question, “What doesit take to be an action (at all)?”, and second, the use made ofa distinction between full-fledged action and its lesser relatives;characterizations and terminology vary, but often the less robustalternative is called “mere activity” or “merebehavior”. Very schematically, these arguments for a theory ofpractical reasoning try to show that reasons brought to bear on choicemust have some particular logical form, if action is not to lapse intosomething less than that.

The current state of the dialectic is evidently transitional, becausework of this sort for the most part does not yet speak to other workof the same kind. (Recent exceptions are marked below, and it doesspeak to earlier but differently focused work in the field.) Despitetheir shared agreement that practical reasoning is where the actionis, and the consequent willingness to accord explanatory priority toaction theory in developing theories of practical rationality, thesetheorists differ among themselves as to what the most central featuresof actions are, and accordingly they disagree about what thelegitimate patterns of practical inference turn out to be. They alsodiffer in their underlying philosophical motivations, as well as inwhat they take to be the upshots of their views for substantive moraltheory. For that reason, the considerations in play do not have thesort of mutual coherence and organization characteristic of thediscussion of some of the more settled philosophical problemspaces.

The purpose of this overview is to provide a map of this territory,and because interchanges between the theorists in it are infrequent,this is primarily going to mean describing the disparate researchprograms that have adopted its framing argument. Because the priorityis to highlight both their common ground, and the ways in which theseprograms nonetheless talk past one another, this article will notpress a number of problems internal to the several research programs.If you notice some obvious but unaddressed objection to some line ofinquiry, don’t assume you’re making a mistake, but don’t let itsidetrack you.

The features of action that have come in for the most attention are,first, its calculative structure, second, its attributability, third,its aspiration to be challenging and ambitious, fourth, its role insocial practice, and fifth, its evaluative features, and they will bediscussed in that order. That will permit us to conclude with remarksabout the prospects and agenda of this approach to practicaldeliberation.

• 1. The Calculative View of Action
• 2. The Authorship View of Action
• 3. The Challenge-Seeking View of Action
• 4. The Practice View of Action
• 5. Evaluation as Essential to Action
• 6. Prospects and Outstanding Issues
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. The Calculative View of Action

The most prominent advocates of the calculative view of action areCandace Vogler and Michael Thompson. We will start with Vogler’sversion of the view, and proceed to Thompson’s.

Callpsychologism the claim that the right way to do logicand theory of rationality more generally is first to figure out howthe mind works. Since the early seventies, almost all mainstream workon practical reasoning has been psychologistic in this sense; arepresentative example might be Michael Smith’s argument for the‘Humean theory of motivation’, which turns on what desires– a psychological state – are, and how they work (Smith1987). Vogler’s treatment of practical rationality (Vogler 2002) is asharp departure from the common approach, and an attempt to replicatein that field the anti-psychologistic turn which Frege and Husserlimparted to work on theoretical rationality in, respectively, theanalytic and Continental traditions. She takes herself to be followingG. E. M. Anscombe (Anscombe 1985, Vogler 2001), who was in turnfollowing Aquinas. (We won’t take up the historical background to thebody of work under discussion here, but see the entry onmedieval theories of practical reason.)

Vogler notices that instrumentalism – the view that all reasonsfor action are means-end reasons – is the default view incontemporary philosophy. There must, she infers, be a compellinginsight at the bottom of it; but instrumentalism has been much-refutedover the past few decades. What the many refutations ofinstrumentalism really show, Vogler believes, is that formulating theunderlying insight psychologistically (as a thesis about mentaloperations and the mental states involved in them) results in weak andunsustainable renditions of it. She concludes that in order toarticulate what instrumentalism is getting right, you have to stripaway the psychologism. The point being emphasized just now is that themotivation for this instance of the turn to action theory isanti-psychologism about practical rationality.

On one familiar reading of Frege (not the only reading, and we’ll seean alternative to it shortly), the proper way to do logic is not tolook inward, as it were to the gears of the mind, but outward, to thelogical relations that hold between suitable abstract objects, and toread the correct inference patterns off of these. In the practicalanalog of this move, when you look outward, away from the beliefs anddesires that preoccupy psychologistic theorists, what you find areactions, the external products of any successful deployment ofpractical reasons. So the logic of practical reasons is to be read offthe structure of actions in something like the way that, say,truth-functional logic is to be read off the truth-functionalrelations between propositions. This form of anti-psychologismpreempts a worry one might have had about what was described at theoutset as the organizing argument of the action-oriented approach. Theproposal, recall, was to read the inference patterns off the structureof actions; if one were to construe this as reconstructing the processof practical reasoning from its product, how far would thereconstruction be likely to get? (Compare: there are many ways to makea chair; you would not learn much about how chairs are fabricated bythinking about what chairs look like, or even about their conceptuallynecessary features.) But Vogler’s anti-psychologism insists thatquestions about rationality are not questions about whatprocesses of thought lead up to a decision.

Intentional actions are picked out and segmented into their parts byapplications of Anscombe’s ‘Why?’-questions. (‘Whyare you chopping the nuts?’ ‘I’m making a salad.’)The internal structure of actions is consequently a series of stepstowards a termination point (or ‘end’), a place where theactionstops. When you make Deborah Madison’s persimmon andhazelnut salad, you first coarsely chop the nuts; then you thinlyslice three Fuyu persimmons crosswise and put them in a bowl alongwith the nuts; then you add in three handfuls of trimmed watercress;then you toss with the dressing – and you’re done. A step can beshown to be rational by showing it to be a step on the way to thetermination point of the action that you are in the course ofperforming. A step can be shown to beirrational by showingthat it’s not: for instance, if you’ve finished making the salad, butyou obsessively keep chopping nuts. Vogler allows that there may beatomic actions, actions that do not have further actions as theirparts; perhaps blinking is such an action. But just about any actionwe care about will be a complex action (i.e., an action that hasfurther actions as parts); and since we don’t usually notice what wedon’t care about, atomic actions, if there are any, are hard to comeup with.

Vogler’s ‘calculative view’ is accordingly that whenever(or perhaps,almost whenever) you have a reason to dosomething, you have a calculative reason, that is, a reason whoseforce is: this is a step toward the termination point of my action.Vogler distinguishes two subclasses: means-end reasons, and part-wholereasons; buying the cress is best thought of as a means to making thesalad, whereas chopping the nuts is properly part of making the salad.It is not that she is insisting that there are no other sorts ofpractical consideration. In fact, she provides what she takes to be anexhaustive list of the logical forms the remaining sorts ofconsiderations can have. (See Millgram 2006 for a brief overview.)Rather, the claim is that when you have a reason of one of thesefurther sorts, you mustalso have a calculative reason.

The connection only runs one way, however. Since considerations ofother sorts organize, modulate and generally control actions, theypresuppose calculative reasons. But calculative structures (and thereasons they give you) do not presuppose these other sorts ofconsideration: you canjust tie your shoes, and Voglerregards theories on which such actions must be informed by, forexample, a large-scale conception of the good as modeling rationalityon a psychopathology akin to paranoia. This asymmetry is what Voglertakes to be the deep insight underlying instrumentalism. Because anyaction large enough to be something we care about must, if it is towork, be calculatively well-formed, the means-end/part-wholearticulation of actions is nonoptional, and consequently, we have topay due attention to calculative reasons. We cannot shrug off others’criticism of our calculative reasons, as we can shrug off theircriticism of, say, our pleasures. Calculative reasons are thusnonoptional, or binding.

This appeal to the structure of action as the foundation for practicalrationality has dramatic consequences for substantive moral theory,and an easy way to see how is to consider a terminological puzzleraised by Vogler’s presentation. She argues that her view isinternalist; Bernard Williams introduced the contrast between internaland external reasons via the connection, on the one hand, or lack ofit, on the other, between reasons and an agent’s motivational states(Williams 1981a); motivational states are part of an agent’spsychology; so how can an anti-psychologistic position like Vogler’sbe avowedly internalist? The answer to the terminological question hasto do with Williams’s own philosophical development. FollowingKorsgaard’s attack on his view (Korsgaard 1996, ch. 11), Williamsbegan (albeit without announcing the changeover) to use‘internalism’ for the claim that reasons for action candiffer from person to person; there’s no level, however deep, at whichthey must be the same. (Williams 1995, which gives astill-psychologistic example: the alcoholic has a reason to lock uphis liquor cabinet and throw away the key; the virtuous person doesnot; the explanation is that their characters rather than theirdesires differ.) So Vogler is claiming her view to be internalist inthis newer sense: there are no reasons that have to be the same foreverybody. Different people have different ends at different times;and since other sorts of reasons, she has argued, are optional, theyvary from person to person as well. But if internalism is correct (andthis was what had interested Williams in the thesis in the firstplace), then you can be, as the title of Vogler’s book has it,reasonably vicious; immorality of even the most extreme kind need notentail irrationality.

Michael Thompson’s equally anti-psychologistic account of calculativerationality (Thompson 2008, Part II) reverses the direction ofargument we have observed in Vogler. In the alternative reading ofFrege which it uses as a template, what comes first is our grasp ofinference; the inferences in the relevant part of the – asThompson occasionally puts it – “practicalBegriffsschrift” have actions as their subject matter.So it is an account of action that is being read off the inferencepatterns (rather than the other way around), in something like the waythat Fregeans of this stripe take us to read the logical form ofpropositions off our command of truth-functional and quantificationalinference. The direction of argument notwithstanding, Thompson belongsto the group of theorists we are considering, in that the objective ofthe argument is to exploit an account of action in order to establisha thesis about calculative practical reasons, namely, that thosereasons are not psychological states such as desires or intentions.

The argumentative strategy is adapted from Sellars (1997, pp.37–41; it bears comparison to related arguments in Nagel, 1970,pp. 29–31, and Brandom, 2001). A core practice, in this case ofreason-giving, is identified, one that adduces only actions (and notpsychological states); Thompson then exhibits the point of introducingapparently psychological locutions (such as “because I wantto…”) into such a practice. The explanation is supposedto demonstrate that these locutions do not reallynameanything on the order of desires or intentions, but are rather aroundabout way of conveying information about the progress of anongoing course of action. We will first describe the way Thompson setsup the core practice, and then briefly reconstruct his argument fornon-psychologistic renderings of apparently psychologically orientedreason locutions.

Like Vogler, Thompson uses Anscombian ‘Why?’-questions topick out intentional actions. He then draws our attention to the waythat grammatical aspect figures into their answers. Actiondescriptions can be either perfective (“I made the salad”)or progressive (“I’m making the salad,” “I wasmaking the salad”). Notice that these grammatical forms are notmerely ornamental; they carry different implications. From theperfective “I made a salad,” it follows that at some pointtherewas a salad. From the progressive “I was making asalad,” it doesn’t follow: perhaps I was interrupted by a phonecall, and never got back to chopping. Thompson demarcates ‘naiverationalizations’ as those which deploy the progressive inplacing one action as part of another. (“Why are you choppingthe nuts?” “I’m making a salad.”) The contrast iswith ‘sophisticated rationalizations’, which seem toinvoke psychological states like desires (“Iwant tomake a salad”).

We can imagine a society (call it theaction-theoretic state ofnature) getting by with only naive rationalization. But there isroom for improvement in their practice of calculative reason-giving,and here’s a short way to see how. Agents restricted to naiverationalizations will say “I’mBing because I’mAing,” whenBing is an action that is a partofAing, and they areAing. But such parts ofactions often come in sequence, one after another. So such an agentcan, at a particular time, be executing a containing action, i.e.,Aing, but not executing a subsidiary action,Bing,ifBing is an action that is a part ofAing, but onewhich comes earlier or later on in the sequence. Now, if, at aparticular time, an agent is not executing an action (again,Bing), then when someone asks if he’sBing, he’llsay he’s not. So it’s easy to put agents restricted to naiverationalizations in the position of saying both that they’reBing, and that they’re notBing. (E.g., “I’mBing because I’mAing, but I’m notBing.”) That’s potentially confusing.

We can suppose that such agents will adopt devices to obviate theconfusion. For instance, they’ll learn to say (as we do), “I’mBing tomorrow.” Against that background, however,“I’m going toB,” “I want toA,” and so on are evidently similar devices, and of apiece with “I’mBing tomorrow.” Each suchlocution carries a different sort of additional information. Forinstance, “I’m going toB” positions one as beingin the very preliminary run-up phases of an action; when one says,“I’m going toB because I’mAing,” oneis giving a naive rationalization, but one which registers that theBing phase ofAing has not yet arrived, even thoughthe reason for the former is that it is part of the latter. Likewise,“I intend toA” places one merely at the planningphase ofAing; “I want toA,” allowsthat one may be at a pre-planning phase. Briefly, the function ofthese locutions is to preempt confusion by placing the actions thatmake up a naive rationalization in their temporal sequence. But oncewe see that thatis their function, the temptation toconstrue them as invoking psychological states (intentions, desiresand so on) is evidently misguided. Desires, in Thompson’s Sellarsianview, are a mistake on a par with sense-data; just as the sense-datumtheorist treats a linguistic device for hedging one’s commitments(“It appears to be…”) as naming a psychologicalstate (a mere appearance), so the belief-desire theorist of practicalrationality is treating a linguistic device for sorting out the orderof subsidiary actions (“…because I wantto…”) as naming a motivating psychological state (adesire).

Like Vogler’s calculative view, Thompson’s account of calculativepractical reasons is motivated by anti-psychologism. Unlike Vogler,however, he is not arguing for restricting the mandatory part ofpractical rationality to calculative reasons; other parts ofLifeand Action discuss very different but evidently nonoptional formsof practical inference. Vogler, we saw, was concessive about thepossibility of atomic actions; Thompson gives a surprising argument tothe effect that all actions have further actions as their properparts. (See Millgram 2009, sec. 9.4, for a brief reconstruction.) Soalthough the two views are closely related, they also differ on manypoints.

2. The Authorship View of Action

A second approach takes the essential feature of action to be, not itsstepwise structure, but that it isauthored; there is no suchthing as an action without an owner, in something like the way thatthere is no such thing as a belief without an owner. The two mostdeveloped positions of this kind are due to Christine M. Korsgaard andJ. David Velleman.

On Korsgaard’s view, what gives an action an owner is that it isattributable to the person as a whole (rather than to a subpersonalpart, such as a drive or an especially strong desire). Whole-personattributions require aconstitution, a form of psychicorganization and regulation that is the smaller-scale analog of thepolitical constitution of a state. Constitutions are made up of theprocedures by which actions are to be produced; actions are owned, andso are full-fledged actions, only when they are so produced (Korsgaard2008, ch. 3, Korsgaard 2009).

The principles of practical rationality are the procedures, at asuitably abstract level of description, of a satisfactoryconstitution. So, and in contrast to Vogler’s view, Korsgaard’s theoryof practical rationality is psychologistic. Actions have explanatorypriority, but actions are the starting point of an argument used todetermine the proper structure of an agent’s psychology: that is, weask what psychological structure an agent must have in place for himto be able to author actions. And that psychology in turn determineswhat the correct forms of practical inference must be. Thephilosophical motivations of Korsgaard’s position are in partforensic: the connection between actions and agents must be such thatwe can hold agents responsible for what they do. More importantly,however, the account is meant to explain why your reasons are binding:what their ‘normative force’ is.

Here is a first-pass thumbnail sketch of that explanation: We have toact, because anything we do will be an action. Chairs are to sit on,and so a chair you can’t sit on is defective; being something you cansit on is a constitutive standard for chairs. Likewise, there areconstitutive standards for actions, in just that way; a would-beaction that did not conform to them would also be defective. InKorsgaard’s view, the question of why an item should conform to theconstitutive standards for its type ‘answers itself’(Korsgaard 2008, p. 61). So if she can show that deploying reasonssatisfying one or another requirement is a constitutive standard foraction – and the requirements she is going to argue for areKantian – that will amount to showing why you should act onreasons that satisfy those Kantian requirements. Before we proceed tothat argument, notice that we are starting to see how thephilosophical motivations of the work we are surveying differ fromprogram to program; the contrast between psychologistic andanti-psychologistic agendas is not the only, or even the mostimportant, dimension of variation.

Korsgaard contrasts acts (such as setting the table) with actions(such as setting the table to be ready before the guests arrive). Herview is that acts and the ends for which they are performed make up anaction when they are bound together by a principle, which must beformally universal (e.g., always set the table before the guestsarrive). We have already noted that actions must be attributable toagents, and an action is properly an agent’s only when it is producedby the agent as a whole. For attribution to be contentful, there mustbe a real distinction betweenyour actions, on the one hand,and events that resemble actions but are produced by your psychicparts, on the other; we can make out such a distinction only if youidentify with a principle of choice, where that is universal in form.(We won’t reconstruct her arguments for that last claim here; Millgram2011 gives a summary.) Consequently, reasons for action must beuniversal in form, and this entails, or so Korsgaard argues, thesubstantive correctness of Kantian moral theory, at any rate that partof it which imposes a universalizability requirement on practicalreasons: very roughly, it must be possible for you and everyone elsejointly to act on the basis of that universal-in-form principle,without assuring the frustration of the end it mentions. (For furtherdescription of Kant’s account, see the section on the universal law ofnature formula in the entry onKant’s moral philosophy.)

While it’s no part of the present task to defend or resist thecompeting views about action and practical reason under review, inthis case the easiest way to get Korsgaard’s position into focus is byconsidering how it can address a handful of worries, and the first ofthese has already given rise to a small literature. Allow for themoment that actions, understood as Korsgaard proposes, involveconstitutive standards. Still, why must we produceactions?The point that anything you do will be an action is likely to begranted only on the thinnest and most minimal reading of what anaction is; but we have just seen Korsgaard distinguishing between moreminimal ‘acts’ and more ambitiously structured‘actions’. Actions are constituted by acts together withtheir ends; why can’t you instead act aimlessly, like the charactersin Richard Linklater’sSlacker? If the penalty is that youwill thereby be a defective agent, why can’t the slacker shrug offthat complaint, perhaps with the remark that agents and actions comewith one set of constitutive standards, and slackers and theirless-than-actions come with others? Why should the slacker be held tothe standards for agency as opposed to those of slackerhood?Korsgaard’s argument appears to involve the sleight-of-handsubstitution of an ambitious and optional notion of action for aminimal and more plausibly nonoptional one. (For the back and forth,see Enoch 2006, Ferrero 2009, Tubert 2010, Katsafanas 2013, ch. 2.)

Korsgaard’s response comes in three laps. First, she inherits fromWittgenstein the thought that normativity involves the possibility ofcorrection, and she infers that if there is to be any normativity, itmust be possible to be in violation of a standard. Now, you can becounted as in violation of a standard only if you can’t simply shrugthe correction off. But if you can switch the kind an item counts asbelonging to, at will, then youcan shrug off any standardand any correction; as Korsgaard puts it, nothing will be defective,‘everything will just be different.’ (E.g., ‘I’vedecided I’m not an agent but a slacker, so the standards for agentsdon’t apply to me.’) Thus we must take there to be kinds suchthat youcan’t just shrug and say that you don’t see why theconstitutive standards of the kind apply. This first lap of theargument has the look and feel of an existence proof, and of softeningup; in particular, it doesn’t purport to show that the twin concepts,‘action’ and ‘agent,’ are among theseprivileged kinds (Korsgaard 2009, sec. 2.1.8).

Before turning to the second lap of Korsgaard’s response, let’sintroduce a second worry: that the argument’s attempt to exploit thewholeness of the agent, allegedly the essential feature of agency, istaking a wrong turn. Recall Korsgaard’s artifactual analogy: a chairis something you sit on, and so a chair is defective when you can’tsit on it – and of course it’s defective as a whole, because itsjob, as a whole chair, is to be a seat. Forany constitutivestandard, it’s the thing as a whole that’s supposed to live up to thestandard; so what’s distinctive about one standard or another is whatthe thing does or is, and not that it does it, or is it, as a whole.If, when it came to understanding chairs, you devoted your theoreticalattention to that ‘as a whole,’ as opposed to the seating,something would clearly have gone wrong. (Imagine a theorist of chairsarguing that the constitutive standards for being a chair must be metby the chair as a whole, and thus the essential feature of chairs, andthe key to understanding them, is that they hold themselves together.)Why isn’t Korsgaard’s focus on the shared unity condition some sort ofred herring?

But people, Korsgaard claims, are not just like chairs. (Actually,there’s a subplot in which she argues that chairs are more like peoplethan you’d think, but here I’m going to leave it to one side.) Chairsdon’t dissolve into their parts when they’re not seating anyone,whereas an agent constitutes itselfby acting, or ceases tobe an agent entirely. Imagine thatInvasion of the BodySnatchers had it almost right: as in the film, pod creatures fromouter space are eliminating us one by one, and replacing us withpod-grown impersonators; it is just that the films have gotten thesize of the pods wrong. Instead of being as large as a person, eachpod is roughly the size of a peapod, and so it takes a great many podcreatures working together to impersonate a single Earthling. (Theillustration adapts the argument of Korsgaard 1996, ch. 13, to fit herlater use of group agency as a model for individual agency.) If acolony of pod creatures is going to succeed in fooling the remainingEarthlings, it will have to behave as a single person, and to do that,the activities of the different pod creatures must be closelycoordinated; after all, if the pod creatures making up the feet go offin one direction, and the pod creatures making up the torso go off ina different direction, no one will be fooled. When the pod creaturesact together, and pull off the deception, theymake themselvesinto a collective agent. (One mark of this is the first-personindexical, as when they whisper to each other, ‘We’renow going to go off to the left’; their coordination induces apoint of view which is not that of any particular one of them.) That’swhy action has to be generated by you-as-a-whole, rather than yourpsychic parts.

At this point we can see why you’re not supposed to be able to opt forslackerdom. There are things wehave to get done, insomething like the way that the pod creatureshave to foolAunt Millie into thinking they’re her husband Melvin; acting is our‘plight, the simple inexorable fact of the humancondition’ (Korsgaard 2009, sec. 1.1.1). And that meansproducing actions, not mere acts; you act because there are things youhave to get done, and so when you act, you normally have an end inview; to act with an end in view is to perform an action. Acting isconstituting yourself as an agent out of your desires and otherpsychological elements, in much the way that the pod creaturesconstitute themselves as a group agent. The necessity of agency is notmetaphysical but practical. (This amounts to a reply to the objectionthat the argument for the ineluctability of action involved a sleightof hand: that a series of interlocking definitions, purporting to showthat you have no alternative to acting because nothing willcount as an alternative to action, could not amount to areason not to live like a slacker. The objection is misconstruingKorsgaard’s argument as turning on definitional rather than practicalnecessities.)

Now we can further see – although this is a shortcut rather thanthe argument – why constituting oneself as an agent involvesendorsing a principle. Suppose one of the pod creatures whispers toits nearby fellows, ‘Off to the left!’ If enough of themfollow to tilt the ersatz Uncle Melvin leftwards, was that an action,attributable to the group agent, or just that one pod creaturemomentarily getting its way? Suppose a moment later a different podcreature whispers ‘Off to the right!’ and ersatz Melvinteeters back; Aunt Millie will notice that something is amiss. Toavoid this sort of back and forth, the pod creatures collectively haveto adopt a general principle of action – perhaps, ‘Whenmimicking Earthlings, coordinate the movements of individual pods insuch and such a way.’ And in acting on that principle, theythereby constitute themselves into a (in this case, collective) agent.

Let’s pause to mark some of the contrasts between two of the theoriesof practical inference we have on the table. First of all, Kantianmaxims – the structured intentions on which theuniversalizability requirement is imposed – have means-end orcalculative structure: a maxim typically specifies not just what youare proposing to achieve, but how you propose to proceed. So Vogler’srequirement, that one come up with actions that are calculativelywell-formed, is compatible with Korsgaard’s view. But because Voglerregards noncalculative reasons as optional, Korsgaard and Voglerdiffer over whether the universalizability of maxims is mandatory. Nowbecause the universalizability test (the so-called CI-procedure) is tobe applied to one’s maxims as they arise, and because you may at anypoint consider an unprecedented maxim, it is still an open questionjust what the substantive moral theory generated by this theory ofpractical reasoning is. However, a handful of canonical dicta areusually thought of as constituting its core: not to lie; to adopt theend of helping others; to adopt the end of developing one’s talents.So, second, we are seeing differing conceptions of action give rise tostarkly differing views of the moral demands of rationality; onVogler’s view, the solely calculative conception of action allows forrational agents who lie, cynically exploit others, and don’t bother toimprove themselves. So Korsgaard’s account is morally more demanding,and it is morally more demanding because it is more demanding aboutwhat it takes to be an action, as opposed to mere bodily or mentalgoings on.

An important contrast between these views has to do with how theattributability of action is understood. Anscombian accounts construethe attribution of action as having to do with the special way inwhich you know what you’re doing – that is, without looking tosee, the way other people have to (Rödl 2007, ch. 2, Small 2012).Since youjust know what you’re doing, its beingyour action takes care of itself; whereas we’ve seen that inKorsgaard’s picture, action attribution is a task each agent has totake care offor himself, and arises out of meeting theexigencies of agency. If Kantian moral theory is to be nonoptional– something we can’t just turn our backs on – thenoncalculative Kantian reasons must be nonoptional. If thenoncalculative reasons are what it takes to have action that isauthored, then the ownership of actions must be demonstrablynonoptional. That necessity, we have seen, is practical; that is, it’sthe necessity of ‘gotta go, right now!’ But if that is theright way to reconstruct Korsgaard’s position, there is a final worryto register, one that we are not yet able to meet, but to which wewill return briefly when the time comes to assess the state of play ofthe field we are surveying.

We generally take arguments built around practical necessity to beresponsible to and modulated by the urgency and force of thenecessity. The point is once again easier to see when we areconsidering collective agents, so let us take up Korsgaard’s politicalanalogy once more. A state that aspires to having all activity withinits jurisdiction be its own actions is totalitarian. Democratic statesas we are familiar with them sometimes do mobilize themselves in a waythat approximates this extreme: usually, in times of all-out war. (Forinstance, during WWII, the American government imposed rationing,managed a great deal of industrial production directly, and so on.)But when there is no such occasion, liberals regard totalitarianism asan unreasonable and immoral mode of political organization, and prefera state in which most activity within the state is not attributable toit. Markets are a familiar instance of an alternative form ofcoordination: in a market economy, market outcomes are less thanchoices on the part of the government, and are not directlyattributable to the state. Recall that the argument for actionattribution turned on the need to avoid mutually frustratingactivities, as when the pod creatures pull in different directions. Amarket economy, however, pits competitors against each other; in thisapproach, coordination of activities does not consist in forestallingcompetition, but in creating a regulatory framework for it. If theanalogy goes through, action in Korsgaard’s sense is inevitable onlyto the extent that practical pressures on human agency are such as tomake totalitarian rather than, say, market-like approaches to theorganization of individual activity mandatory. So the final worry isthat we do not yet understand the ongoing practical demands warrantingforms of coordination that underwrite the full attributability ofaction, making the latter a demandalways to be met.

Korsgaard’s response to this worry, which is also the final lap of herresponse to the initial worry, is an argument that you cannot chooseto have a character with fault lines in it, one whose unity is‘contingent and unstable’ (2009, 8.5.2). That argument istoo opaque to permit an uncontroversial reconstruction, and instead Iwill conclude the exposition of her position by describing thechallenge the argument is meant to meet. On Korsgaard’s view, thepractical necessity of reconstituting one’s agency, from moment tomoment, must be a formal feature of any human personality. However, inour ordinary ways of thinking, practical necessities are substantiveand contingent pressures (in our earlier example, the demands ofwartime, as experienced by a state). When ersatz Uncle Milton is outof sight, it looks like the pod creatures get to relax; butyou are never allowed to take breaks from being an agent. Theformal feature of agency that replaces those substantive pressures isthe commitment to sustain one’s agency in any circumstanceswhatsoever: ‘our principles, moral principles, are supposed tohold us together in any environment, any circumstance, come whatmay’ (Korsgaard 2009, sec. 5.5.3). That commitment is supposedto be what makes action, rather than a more loosely organizedalternative to it, always our plight.

We turn now to the second of the positions that takes authorship to bethe essential feature of action. Like Korsgaard, Velleman takes action– “human actionpar excellence,” ascontrasted with mere activity – to be owned (Velleman 2015, 101and ch. 5,passim). Like Korsgaard, he takes ownership torequire a definite structure in an agent, and again like her, he takesthe forms of practical reasoning (and what practical reasonssubstantively will turn out to be) to be determined by the agent’sstructure. However, he disagrees with Korsgaard as to what thestructure of an agent is, as to what its practical reasons are, andincidentally with Korsgaard’s insistence that being authored by theagent as a whole means not being authored by a proper part of theagent. Velleman’s position will make more sense if we bear in mindthat it has more than one agenda; accordingly we will juxtapose twocomplementary entry points, and subsequently suggest that what lookslike a third and independent motivation for the view is reachable fromthose.

The sense of ownership in play in Velleman’s view is inheritedfrom an older debate about freedom of the will and autonomy, and ithas to do with whether the agent can honestly dissociate himself fromhis action or motivation (e.g., “It wasn’t really mespeaking; it was just the alcohol”). One might think that thissort of dissociation could be overcome by a further endorsement(“It reallywas me speaking”), but a familiar difficulty is thatmany forms of endorsement merely raise the problem anew: ownershipcannot be identified with an endorsement when the agent can dissociatehimself from that endorsement as well (Velleman 2015, 295–296). Thereis by now an extensive literature on agency built up of rounds of thisback-and-forth, and here is a very quick taste of it. Harry Frankfurthad suggested that a desire is full-fledgedly yours when you have asuitable second-order desire (a desire that the initial desiremotivate you to act; Frankfurt 1971); Gary Watson pointed out thatFrankfurt’s proposal merely pushed the question back to whether thatsecond-order desire was full-fledgedly yours, and he proposed fit withyour values as an alternative account (Watson 1975). But the rejoinderwas of course to ask what makes a set of values full-fledgedly yourown (Benson 1987), and the problem seemed to take on the shape of ahard-to-halt regress. (For more on this debate, see Section 2 of theentry onfree will.)

Velleman’s way of terminating the regress is to locate apsychological element from which an agent cannot dissociate himself(2015, chs. 5, 7). Because to act is to act for reasons, an agentcannot dissociate himself from a desire to act for reasons –not, that is, without ceasing to be an agent. (Treat the content ofthat desire as a temporary placeholder; we’ll return to itshortly.) When such a desire contributes in the canonical manner toproducing an action (say, by weighing in on the side of other desiresthat it endorses, and so tipping the decision toward that action), wesay that the agent produces the action (in something like the way thatwhen your intestines digest food, we say that you are digesting thefood). So, to recapitulate, actions are in the firstplaceowned; an action is owned, in the relevant sense, whenit cannot be disowned; the only anchor for an action that an agentcannot disown in turn, without ceasing to be an agent, is (roughly)the desire to act for reasons. So what it takes to be an action is tobe (appropriately) produced by such a desire.

An action is what is produced by the operation of this desire, and sothis desire amounts to the constitutive aim of action (in somethinglike the way, Velleman thinks, that truth is the constitutive aim ofbelief [2015, ch. 10]). It will thus serve to determine what putativereasons for actionare (good) practical reasons (in somethinglike the way that truth determines what reasons for belief are goodreasons). But then its content cannot quite be: to act for reasons.For that would amount to a viciously circular and vacuousspecification of the constitutive aim of action.

Velleman’s alternative specification of the content is (roughlyagain, because there is some room for variation) to know what one isdoing when one acts, or to make sense to oneself when one acts(Velleman 1989). So what counts as a (good) practical reason is thatwhich will make one’s actions intelligible to one, when oneperforms them. Velleman seems originally to have had something likethe following schema in mind: desires motivate, and so explainactions; so when you act on the basis of a desire, your action makessense to you; so when your desire to make sense to yourself, togetherwith more occasion-specific desires, produces an action serving theoccasion-specific desires, that is a full-fledged action on your ownpart, and not mere activity.

That default schema looks to be a version of the authorship view ofaction supporting an instrumentalist or means-end (rather than, as inKorsgaard’s development of it, a Kantian) account of practicalreasons. However, as Velleman’s position has evolved, he hassuggested further patterns. Often one emotion naturally gives rise toa sequel, as when in one familiar pop-psychology meme, denial of aloss is supposed to be followed by anger, which is in turn succeededby bargaining, which is followed by, ultimately, acceptance. Suchemotion cascades are the spines of narratives, and an action isrendered narratively intelligible as following on a step of such acascade (Velleman 2009, 191, 194–197). Thus, when supported by adesire to be intelligible to oneself, narratives give rise toactions. So instrumental reasons have been supplemented by whatVelleman construes as narrative reasons, and in later work, Vellemanhas further proposed character for the explanatory role (2009, ch. 1):if you stay in character (in rather the way that actors on stage aimat), what you do will make sense to you, and if you are motivated bythe desire to make sense to yourself, what you then do will count asan action. (A bit of nuance: in his earlier work, Velleman took therelevant desire to be a substantive motivation, on a par with otherdesires in the cognitive mix, but he has since relaxed thecharacterization; we can perhaps more properly think of it as a drive,implemented as a structural feature of a cognitive system, rather thanone of the items moved around inside that system; compare Velleman2015, pp. 169, 246.)

Now, notice what one’s reasons for action will turn out to be,formally. Once again, because reasons for action are picked out aswhat would explain one’s actions, we cannot, on pain of circularity,gloss what it is to be a satisfactory explanation of an action asbeing a practical reason (cf. Velleman 2009, 40). So we will insteadrely on an already available notion of explanation and, Vellemanconcludes, it must betheoretical, i.e., logically the samesort of explanation that would account for any matter of fact.Returning to the default schema for an illustration, desires arereasons because they (potentially) explain action, and they explainaction in the first place because theycausally explain it.

There is a second and equally important motivation for the position.It is almost unquestioned common ground in this field that there aretwo deeply different but parallel modes of rationality: theoreticaland practical. Of these, philosophers tend to see inference aboutmatters of fact as relatively unproblematic; to a first approximation,it is in order when you reliably derive truths from truths. Practicalreasoning is seen as an analogous enterprise, one which is, however,much more opaque: because it determines what to do, as opposed to whatto believe, it is much less clear when it is being executed correctly.Velleman’s move is to eliminate the commonly accepted distinction byreducing practical to theoretical rationality, and thereby reduce theproblem of the correctness of practical inference to problems in thephilosophy of explanation.

We have already seen how reasons for action are understood asexplanations of fact; facts explain facts; so the move furtherrequires construing decisions as factual conclusions of some kind, andthe live candidate is that they are predictions of one’s ownactions (Velleman 2015, ch. 3). They differ from other predictions inbeing self-fulfilling. (Though obviously not just any self-fulfillingprediction will serve: as Anscombe observed, ‘I’m going tobe sick’ does not normally express an intention – and itdoesn’t even if the thought of being sick is what brings on thenausea, and even if you can predict the nausea on the basis of whatyou have just eaten.) Thus, and returning to our theme, an actionproper will be the process of such a prediction fulfilling itself. Andso practical reasoning will be the explanation of future behavior thatunderwrites the self-fulfilling prediction of that behavior.

A third motivation, which is at first glance independent, is that ofaccounting for a thesis that has received a great deal of airplayrecently, namely, that when you act, you know what you’re doing.When you do things in order to make sense to yourself, you end up byand large knowing what you’re doing; thus the pervasiveness ofpractical self-knowledge is explained by invoking a desire for it. Thedesire is claimed both to be constitutive of agency, and announced tobe empirically present in a normal human psychology. Now, a commonresponse to Velleman’s insistence (2009, 136–138, 2015, 325)that people want to understand what they’re doing –moreover, that this is part and parcel of their desire to understandthe universe of which they are a part – is incredulity. A quickreminder or two of where those responses are coming from: academicsteaching large introductory courses look out on seas of apatheticfaces that don’t seem to care about understanding much at all;outside the classroom, those same academics are committed to research– which, as the saying has it, is what you’re doing whenyou don’t know what you’re doing. And nonacademics rubshoulders with New Age aficionados of mystery, with defeatedindividuals who have made compromises in life they would rather notthink about... briefly, with people who quite visibly would prefer notto understand what they are doing, even as they do it. Now, Vellemanadduces the cognitive dissonance and attribution literatures asfurther confirming evidence (Velleman 2009, 37f; Cooper 2007 is anoverview of the former), but his readers balk here also: after all,the striking feature of cognitive dissonance reduction is thatsubjects are unaware that they exhibit it, and are perturbed when itis pointed out to them. And indeed Velleman notices that what he‘regard[s] as the height of rationality’ others‘tend to regard... as irrational’ (2009, 92 n. 4).Because what Velleman takes as practical rationality in operationseems irrational to the agents themselves, it requires, precisely, notunderstanding what one is doing.

However, the thesis that one desires practical self-knowledge wasreached from the entry points we have already introduced, and if ourreading of the pressures on the view is correct, the inalienable drivetoward self-knowledge is best construed as a cognitiverequirement, one derived from, first, the need to anchoraction attribution and, second, the demand that practical rationalitybe reduced to theoretical rationality.

Let’s briefly turn to a handful of apparent difficulties, as away of bringing the view into clearer focus and indicating some of itsresources. First, the question of what counts as a practical reasongets deferred, in Velleman’s position, to a philosophical account oftheoretical explanation. We noticed in passing that not everypredictive technique will deliver reasons for action. (Anotherinstance: one can often predict one’s choices as the mistakes one isprone to make, but to treat what you understand to be a mistake as areason is next door to aMoore’s Paradox.)So Velleman must in someway restrict the scope of the considerations that can figure intoone’s self-fulfilling predictions. There is not just one type ofprivileged explanation that will serve; recall that Velleman allowsboth narrative and desire-driven folk-psychological explanations,perhaps along with others. The reader is directed to remarks which areevidently meant to address the issue of the required scope restriction(Velleman 2009, 31f, 42f; cf. also 2006, 7f, 14); the move doesn’tlend itself to a terse reconstruction or assessment, and here we willleave the intended resolution open.

Next, the picture of action and agency in question, on which you(always, exceptionlessly) decide what to do by asking yourself whatsomeone like youwould do, might sound both implausible andunattractive. (Implausible: it assimilates many substantivelydifferent forms of decision to one of them; unattractive: agents areturned inward, in the manner iconized by the tradition of absorptionpainting [Fried 1988] – and it is perhaps no accident that Velleman2006 appropriates an image from this tradition as its cover art.) ButVelleman has a response. True enough, if you were constantly busiedwith and focused on understanding yourself, something would have gonewrong; but practical reasoning is itself a sporadic activity.Practical rationality is, as he puts it in a vivid metaphor, in thepassenger rather than the driver’s seat (Velleman 2015, ch. 13). Mostof the time, you’re on autopilot; on his supervisory conception ofpractical reasoning, as long as you know what’s going on, thesupervisor does not need to intervene. Evidently, this solution has acost, that of attenuating the connection between action and itsconstitutive motivation; Velleman’s response to the problem is recent,and it’s unclear what we should expect in the way of downstreamadjustments to the earlier position. Nonetheless, this is a dramaticmove, on a par with the decision to assimilate practical totheoretical reasoning, and it merits careful attention. (He has twosecondary responses to the problem, which the interested reader canfind at Velleman 2009, 23f and 27f.)

Third, there might look to be a pair of related circularities hiddenin Velleman’s account. The presumption that desires or more generallymotivations explain action is plausibly a legacy of a theory ofpractical rationality on which desires arereasons for action– and therefore, it is concluded, their causes. (As Quinn 1994,236–239, points out, if desires are thought of as brute causes,desire-driven behavior looks like Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder,rather than rational action.) Similarly, the idea that a given emotionnaturally generates a particular successor emotion has often beentaken to be the result of training in narrative forms, patterns thatmust bealready culturally available. (For something likethis latter view, see Nussbaum 1992, ch. 12; Velleman responds at2009, 199 n. 15.) So theories of practical or narrative rationalitywould come first, because they are presupposed by causal explanationsappealing to desires or narratives (2009, 26f). Such theories wouldrender the account viciously circular, and (the objection concludes)are off-limits to Velleman’s project.

Velleman has an answer waiting in the wings, however. (Bear in mind that herewe are connecting a few of the dots in a way that hasn’t beenspelled out before.) Velleman, like other theorists we have surveyed,has a finish line in moral theory, a position he calls ‘kindaKantian’: because our lives are pervaded by the motivation tounderstand ourselves, over time that motivation, even if it is notvery strong, is likely to have deep effects; specifically, by way ofmaking ourselves easier to understand, we will simplify our typologyof persons, removing asymmetries in the social roles that we occupy,and graduallycome to be agents for whom Kantian moral theoryis a pretty decent fit. That treatment can serve as a model forunderstanding the psychological processes to which Velleman appeals,and render the circularities we were floating no longer vicious:perhaps we have gradually come to be agents of whom belief-desirepsychology is true, and in whom one particular emotion naturallyfollows on another, because conforming to these simple-minded theoriessimplified our personal and social lives, making it easier for us tounderstand ourselves. In that case, the causal factors these viewsinvoke are now elements of straightforwardly causal explanations; itno longer matters how they got that way.

Recapping, on one authorship view of action, an action is a predictionbeing enacted in part on the basis of a designated motivation, andpractical reasons are the explanatory support for such predictions.And a second such view is held to support a theory on which onlyuniversalizable maxims count as practical reasons. We are also seeingthat authorship views of action may have strikingly differentphilosophical motivations: in one case, to account for the bindingnessor normativity of reasons; in the other case, to assimilate practicalto theoretical reasoning, as well as a need to make room for a certainsort of first-person authority about one’s will.

We mentioned at the outset that the work of theorists in this areadoes not usually speak to other work of the same kind. Paul Katsafanasis a recent exception to this generalization. Some types ofexplanation may produce more in the way of self-knowledge than others;some principles may unify an agent more deeply or robustly. ButKatsafanas 2013, chs. 3 and 4, argues that neither Velleman norKorsgaard is in a position to show that having more rather than lessof, respectively, the former or the latter feature is a constitutiveend of action; consequently, neither has the resources to reconstructthe comparative notion we need, that of one’s havingmorereason to pursue one course of action than another.

We now turn to Katsafanas’s positive view.

3. The Challenge-Seeking View of Action

Actions, Katsafanas holds, are generated by drives. (Katsafanas 2013,ch. 6; he attributes most of the elements of his view to Nietzsche,this among them, but here we won’t be concerned with whether thehistorical claim is correct.) So if there is a characteristic thatactions must have insofar as they are generated by drives, then allactions have it.

Drives are characterized by their aims – for instance, the aim of theshopping drive is having lots of stuff – and they generate objects(typically, objects of desire), which are formally a very differentmatter. When an object is attained (continuing the illustration, whenyou bring home that gewgaw from the craft fair), the desire for itevaporates, and you are satiated; but after a while, the drivegenerates a new object (now a garment, which seems to you a steal at30% off). Drives working this way, that is, generating one object ofdesire after another, can be characterized more deeply as directedtoward encountering and overcoming resistance.

Now actions are the products of choice, and often enough ofdeliberation; when you deliberate, you take the outcome ofdeliberation to settle what you are going to do. (If you did not, youwould merely be attempting to predict what you are going to do, injust the way you might attempt to predict the actions of otherpeople.) Even when deliberation is absent, choice involves assessment,and the assessment, whether deliberative or not, determines you to actonly if you approve of the action; therefore, actions aspire to beactive, where that means that you approve of what you do, andfurther, that if you understood what the motivational inputs to thatdeliberative runup to the action really were, youwould continue to approve (Katsafanas 2013, ch. 5). That last demandcovers all of those inputs, and not just the official ones (as when you claim to be weighing the pros and cons of a request, but are also responsive to the attractiveness, social class, or gender of the one making it).

Because actions are produced by drives, you can only be fully activeif you approve of your drives’ role; that in turn requires approvingof the drives’ primary structural feature, namely, their ongoingproduction of challenging goals. It follows that whenever we dosomething, we have (or aspire to have, if we are less than fullyactive) a further aim (which, borrowing Nietzsche’s vocabulary,Katsafanas dubs ‘will to power’): that of selecting and structuringour activities so that they involve challenges we will exert ourselvesin meeting.

As in Velleman’s view, the upshot is that your various reasons areinvariably accompanied by a further reason: not, as in Velleman’scase, wanting to know what you are doing and to understand yourself,but rather an interest in choosing more rather than less challenging– but nonetheless attainable – objectives. Katsafanas takes thisinterest to answer the complaint he directed at authorship views ofaction. If you approve of an aim, you want to achieve it to thegreatest extent possible; therefore, if you are active, you arecommitted to more rather than to less challenging activities.(Although this underwrites the contrast between having more and havingless reason to do something, Katsafanas does not regard it as inducingthe commensurability of reasons across the board.) He also takes it tohave consequences for substantive moral theory; just for instance,because the struggle to overcome resistance involves suffering, thatsort of suffering counts as a good thing.

4. The Practice View of Action

In an early, influential, and Wittgenstein-influenced paper, JohnRawls introduced the notion of apractice as a generalizationor extension of the notion of a game (Rawls 1955). The importantfeature of a practice for our purposes is that it introduces statuseswhich are internal to it. For instance, in baseball, such statusesmight include being a ‘foul’, a ‘strike’, andso on; whatever what you’re doing looks like, it can’t be a (baseball)foul if you’re not playing baseball. A practice thereby introducesstandards; since something is a ‘home run’ only by virtueof the fact that what is being played is baseball, there arestandards, given by the rules of baseball, to which a home run has tolive up. A practice also introduces reasons which are internal to it;these reasons may be means-end or calculative reasons (as when therules specify the object of the game: in baseball, as Yogi Berrafamously put it, to win, by scoring more points than the opposingteam), or reasons of other kinds. (In squash, that the other player’shead is between your racquet and the ball is a reason to call a‘let’, but not because it is the best way to win; if youwere to exercise your option of hitting your opponent in the head, youwould win the point. In squash, calculative reasons are modulated bygentlemanly reasons.)

Tamar Schapiro has extended Rawls’s treatment, developing it into atheory of action (Schapiro 2001; she attributes the view to Kant, butagain the historical question will not be taken up). On her view,‘actions’ are just moves in the completely genericpractice; that is, ‘action’ is a status within the genericpractice in something like the way that ‘move’ is a statuswithin chess. Schapiro does not name the generic practice, but becauseit will be convenient to have a short way of referring to it, let’scall it ‘Intendo’. Intendo is the game you are playingwhenever you do anything at all; ‘agent’ is thus thegeneric role in the generic game (the analog of ‘player,’in chess or baseball). Practices specify standards and reasons, and so‘practical reason’ turns out to be a practice status aswell. Intendo consequently determines what forms practical reasons cantake, and so patterns of practical inference are to be read off ofwhat turns out to be the theory of action.

Practical reasons arepractical only if they could be broughtto bear on some decision resulting in action; being an action is astatus (the generic move) within Intendo; so there could be nopractical reasons coming from outside the practice of Intendo. (Other,more local practices have to accommodate reasons that come fromoutside the practice; for instance, in chess, the object of the gameis to win, but I may have personal reasons for not playing to win.)Therefore, if you can show that Intendo imposes some standard on itsreasons (for instance, and to anticipate, that they have to beuniversalizable), then you will have shown that all reasons have tomeet it.

An important metaethical question about practical reasoning has to dowith the modality (roughly, the force) of the family of operators thatincludes ‘may’, ‘must’, ‘should’,and so on, when what is at issue is what you have reason to do. (Callthis the ‘modality of freedom’.) Schapiro’s approachprovides a surprising answer to this question: the modality of freedomis that of the ‘can’ in ‘Can hedothat?’ – said of someone who has just run the basesbackwards. Freedom of the will ranges over the allowable moves in thegame of Intendo.

In extending Rawls’s view, Schapiro has departed from it in some ways.Rawls thought that ‘relatively few actions of the moral life aredefined by practices’ (op. cit., 32n), and worried about theconservatism implicit in taking ‘the social practices of [eachperson’s] society to provide the standard of justification for hisactions’ (32). On Schapiro’s view, being an actiontoutcourt is a status in Intendo, and being a reason is a status inIntendo. Rawls objected to the ‘summary’ conception ofrules characteristic of utilitarianism, that it allowed only‘one office and so no offices at all’ (28). But inIntendo, the sole office or role is that of ‘agent’. Rawls took itto be ‘essential to the notion of a practice that the rules arepublicly known and understood as definitive’ (24). This cannotbe true of Intendo; if what reasons for action could be was publicknowledge, and understood as definitive, there would not be a cottageindustry of philosophers arguing about the forms of practicalreasoning. And finally, the Wittgensteinian roots of Rawls’s treatmentsuggest that he would have been skeptical of a strategy that turned onfinding the deepest common features of all practices. The notion of apractice, again, is an extension of the notion of a game, andWittgenstein famously pointed out that there is no nontrivial featurecommon to all games (see Section 3.4, on language games, in the entryonLudwig Wittgenstein). However, to point out that Schapiro’s position differs from Rawls’sis of course not thereby to criticize it; rather, it is to warnagainst too quickly assuming her position to inherit all of thestructural features of the older and more familiar one.

Schapiro’s article eyes a finish line that is some version of Kantianmorality. She writes that ‘if it is right to think of universallaws on the model of practice rules, then the law of freedom can bethought of as an indeterminate practice rule, one which simplyrequires us to make every movement as if it were to count as a move insome possible global practice’ (108); this is a paraphrase, inthe vocabulary of this theory, of the Kantian demand that one act onlyon maxims of which one could will that they be universal laws. Thepatterns of practical reasoning are to be those acknowledged byKantian theory of practical rationality, and the substantive moralconsequences, those endorsed by Kantian moral theory.

Schapiro’s position is motivated in the first place by the history ofaction theory. She identifies two older conceptions of action, aconsequence-oriented view, on which actions are simply ways ofproducing effects in a given, natural world, and an expressivist view,on which actions function more or less as evaluative pronouncements.The practice view of action is meant to capture the truth in each ofthese, while avoiding their defects; it is, as it were, their Hegeliansynthesis. But Schapiro is also motivated by an appreciation of theimportance and value to us of a world enriched by practice statuses.It is not just that the predecessor theories are wrong about what anaction is; it is that forgoing the textured world created by ourpractices would be a terrible mistake. Korsgaard, we saw, developedher action-theoretic account of practical rationalitypsychologistically, and one might have jumped to the conclusion thatpsychologism was a deep feature of the Kantian position. However,while Schapiro’s position is notmotivated byanti-psychologism, it is nonetheless non-psychologistic. When youassess the reasons a practice generates, you can leave the psychologyof the players out of it. For instance, when the king is in check,then the chess player has a reason to move it out of check; you don’tlook inside anyone’s head, as it were, to determine that, but rather,at the constitutive rules of chess.

As before, if the Kantian moral conclusions are to be binding, thennot only must the practice conception entail the Kantian conclusions,but the practice conception of action must be shown to be nonoptional.The game of baseball gives its players reasons, but you can alwayschoose not to play in the first place, and you can choose to stopplaying; what’s more, the rules of baseball themselves bring baseballgames to a close. In either case, the reasons of baseball do not– or cease to – apply to you. Intendo must therefore be agame that you cannot walk away from. But why can’t you simply stopplaying Intendo, and start producing – not perhaps‘actions’, but activity of some other kind – that isnot practice-governed? We have already gestured at one answer: theimportance of living in a practice-informed world. One further answerSchapiro might give is that youcan’t do that – wherethe modality of the ‘can’t’ is the modality of freedom.(Since reasons are a practice status, questions having to do withpractical reason do not arise for the alternative forms of activity.)

The question is especially pressing in view of a further philosophicalmotivation for Schapiro’s project. Non-ideal theory is concerned withguidelines for action and moral thinking in a world that is not verymoral at all, and Schapiro 2006 takes up a traditional Kantian testcase, that of the murderer at the door. Kantian moral theory prohibitslying, and in a world in which there were no murderers, perhaps thatwould be fine; but here he is, asking if his intended victim, to whomyou have just served a cup of tea, is at home. The casuisticalexercise is that of providing an explanation, consistent with themoral theory, of the legitimacy of lying to him, and Schapiro’ssolution draws on the idea that moral reasons, like all reasons foraction, are statuses in the game of Intendo. If the murderer at thedoor is refusing to play the game, then your own moves cannot beresponses to his moves in the game. In this case, honesty meant as acontribution to the ‘co-legislation game’ (the game thatproperly played Intendo turns out to be) is simply not an option. Andif proper honesty is not an available move, perhaps other moves areavailable to you.

The tension is this: On the one hand, you must act out of the morallaw because you cannot opt out of the game of Intendo; that is whymorality is binding. On the other hand, however, you may lie to themurderer at the door, because hehas opted out of the game ofIntendo. Schapiro provides a label for what she intends as a way ofsplitting the difference: the murderer isbetraying thegeneric practice withoutopting out of it. But thedistinction marked by the label is as yet unexplained. The furtherdevelopment of the practice view will be shaped by the need toaccommodate these apparently conflicting theoretical constraints.

5. Evaluation as Essential to Action

We will review two variants of the thesis that evaluation isan essential feature of action, or of a privileged kind of action,due, respectively, to Sarah Buss and Talbot Brewer.

Buss distinguishes between mere “movements of the humanbody” and full fledged intentional action by requiring, for thelatter, that agents endorse their actions at the time they areinitiated; the content of the endorsement must in one way or anothercome to allowing the agent’s reasons to be sufficient for performingthe action (Buss 1999). Anything short of that, she argues, amounts toadopting a spectatorial stance towards your own actions: if youidentify a number of desires, notice that you could satisfy them byperforming an action, but then don’t arrive at an evaluative beliefwith roughly the content that that’s good enough to go ahead, you willbe doing no more than sitting back to see what happens – to seewhether the desires actuate your body.

Buss then considers a Humean moral psychology on which reasons foraction are drawn from two mutually exclusive classes of psychologicalstates, desires and beliefs, where beliefs are understood to have noproperly evaluative content (e.g., Smith, 1987). Since such a moralpsychology has no room for evaluative beliefs, and since intentionalaction requires one particular sort of evaluative belief, Humean moralpsychology is, she concludes, incompatible with there beingintentional actions. It evidently follows that a theory of practicalreasoning which presupposes Humean moral psychology cannot allow forintentional action, either. (There is a little bit of slippage here:one might allow for the evaluations, but then insist that these couldnot figure into practical reasoning. But this would be an awkward wayof resisting the conclusion.) Theories of practical reasoning whichidentify reasons for action solely with desires and beliefs socharacterized – so-called Humean theories – are directedtowards choosing actions, yet incompatible with actions being chosen.The conclusion we are invited to draw is that Humean theories ofpractical reasoning are incoherent. A dramatic way of putting it mightbe: if your will is to be free, instrumentalism must be false.

There is evident overlap between Buss’s view and Velleman’s: bothpivot on the concern that one act for one’s (sufficient or good enoughor best) reasons. (In Velleman, that concern appears as a desire,where in Buss, it appears as an evaluation.) But the concern isdifferently motivated: where Velleman is trying to halt a regress inthe structural analysis of agency, Buss is trying to express thephilosophical thought that action is active rather than passive. Oncepast the conclusion that a theory of practical rationality had betternot presuppose a Humean theory of motivation, Buss is open-minded bothabout what one’s practical reasons might turn out to be like, and thusabout the consequences for moral theory. And worries aboutpsychologism do not seem to figure into her view.

Turning now to Brewer, we encounter a shift of key. In the contrastsbetween full-fledged and lower-grade doings that we have reviewed sofar, “action ” was used to designate the first-classversion, and often “activity ” labeled its lesserrelative. In Brewer’s terminology,dialectical activity is the privileged category, and actionsmake up the inferior contrasting class. Actions are merely structuredto produce a “pre-envisioned state of affairs”. Butdialectical activity is marked out by two features. First, coming tounderstand better what the activity is counts as an essential aspectof the activity itself. And second, continually arriving at a deeperunderstanding of the good of the activity also is an essential aspectof such an activity (Brewer 2009, 55 andpassim). Forinstance, one might well think that part of what it is to be in ahealthy and satisfactory friendship is to be developing aprogressively deeper sense of what this particular friendship isabout, of why and how it is rewarding, and of what challenges it posesand how to navigate them. Moreover, it is also to be developing agradually improving understanding of the demands, rewards, promise andsignificance of friendship generally. (The view is positioned asrecovering insights from older ethics, with pride of place toAristotle, but as before, here we will not take up the historicalquestion.)

As we will shortly see, the anchor for the view is not that of ourpreviously surveyed positions, that to do is thereby to act, period.(And so Brewer’s view is perhaps a penumbral member of this family ofpositions.) Rather, firstly, mere actions typically will not makesense outside the context of a dialectical activity, and secondly,Brewer advances but does not quite directly argue for the suggestionthat dialectical activities make up everything that could count asintrinsically valuable for human beings. Anything that is worthwhileon its own – anyway, worthwhile enough to be taken seriously assomething one would try to fold into one’s life, fromconversation to friendship to philosophy – belongs in thiscategory.

Because the proposal is likely to bring to mind specificationistclaims about practical reasoning, some compare and contrast is inorder. Specificationism is built around the observation that,frequently enough, one’s ends are not concrete or definiteenough to launch questions about how to attain them; first, thecontent of one’s goals must be filled in and firmed up enoughfor that to be possible. For instance, and borrowing a low-keyexample from Bernard Williams (1981a, 104), if our objective is to beentertained this evening, and so far that’s all we have settled,we have to decide what sort of entertainment it will be, before we canconsider steps we might take. Therefore, there must be a mode ofpractical thinking that does that job. (For an overview of thespecificationist back and forth, see Millgram, 2008.) But where theaim of specificationist deliberation is to arrive at a sufficientlyconcrete rendering of an objective, at which point it ceases, andcalculatively structured action, more or less as we saw it rendered byVogler, resumes, in dialectical activity, the clarification of theactivity and of how it is desirable is ongoing, rather than apreliminary. You find out what the rewards of this friendship are byparticipating in it, and the longer you are someone’s friend,the more nuanced and the deeper your appreciation of what it brings toyour life becomes. When it’s just an evening’sentertainment, figuring out what we want it to be doesn’tusually turn up as part of entertaining ourselves; in the activitiesthat constitute friendship, however, it is grounds for complaint whenone of the participants ceases paying attention to the emerging shapeof the friendship itself. The deliberative baton is not simply handedover to means-end reasoning; rather, although one is moved to oneafter another after another goal-directed action, those actions arethemselves part and parcel of further comprehending just what thedialectical activity in which they ariseis.

Adapting one of Brewer’s illustrations, two friends may be on amotorcycle on their way to Vegas, for blackjack and wild times; whenwe check back, a few years later, we find them in the gardening aisleat Home Depot; a few years after that, doing something very differentfrom either of those things. There’s an observation we canextract, about the relation between activities and actions as otherviews we have surveyed conceive them: on the one hand, the activity offriendship produces an endless stream of subsidiary goals and actions(those roadtrips, gardening projects and so on); on the other, becausethe participants’ conception of the friendship will continue todeepen and shift, the actions in that stream cannot be concretelycharacterized up front. The versions of high-grade and low-gradeaction being contrasted with each other here are interdependent.Dialectical activity normally emits merely end-directed action on anongoing basis. (And the intelligibility of those ends normallydepends on their embedding within dialectical activity, if only theactivity of living one’s life; it makes sense that they’dbe biking to Vegas, given how, at that stage of the friendship, theyunderstand what their friendship is about, and without that context,it wouldn’t make much sense.) Conversely, the improving graspof what one is doing, central to the activity, depends on the frictionwith the surrounding circumstances produced by the end-directedactions; it was, perhaps, the way the Vegas trip didn’t workout, and the subsequent quarrel, that made the two of them rethinkwhat they were doing with each other, and start in on thegardening.

On the views against which Brewer is positioning his own, actions aremotivated by desires, which are propositional attitudes: that is,centrally, descriptions of states of affairs that might be realized inthe future, and in light of which you effect and adjust what you canand are willing to, so as to make the description true. (Brewerattempts to reappropriate the concept of desire for his own purposes,but I won’t spell that move out here.) However, what youaremoved – as opposed to ‘motivated’– by, in the course of a dialectical activity, cannot becaptured by a proposition. For one thing, a proposition has adefinite, stable content; propositions are sometimes thought of aspartitioning all the possible worlds – the ways things might beor might have been – into those that are, intuitively,compatible with it, and those that are not; the proposition effectsits partitiononce and for all. But the content of whatmoves you, in the course of dialectical activity, is deepening andevolving, and there is no point at which apprehending it is properlyover. So no proposition could successfully demarcate what it is theactivity is after and about.

Moreover, desires as nowadays standardly conceived set a propositionas to be made true at some point in the future. But the object ofdialectical activity does not lie in the future: living your life is adialectical activity, and you arealready living; your lifedoes not wait to be lived until it is over. If you aresomebody’s friend, you arealready participating, youhope successfully, in the friendship. If you are philosophizing in anappropriately philosophical frame of mind (and so, always strivingbetter to understand what philosophyis), you arealready philosophizing. So although the many simplersubsidiary actions that are constantly being spun off by dialecticalactivities can often be thought of as controlled by this sort ofpropositional attitude, dialectical activity cannot itself beconstrued as desire-driven, in this standard sense of‘desire’.

What is at stake in the disagreement over how to conceptualize theseongoing courses of action? In the example we’re using, thefriends’ goals change dramatically from time to time; seenthrough the lens of rationalization-by-desires, as standardlyconceived, the segments of the friendship are only collected into adeveloping trajectory retrospectively. The cost is not just that onemisses seeing what unifies the activity while it is in progress; oftenenough, the inability to understand the activity as unified, despitethe very different appearances of its segments, undercuts its unity.(Not always: Brewer adduces Augustine as an example of someone who didnot understand his life as a search for God until late on, even thoughthat is what it was and had been all along.) But then, one does nothavethat dialectical activity – here, a friendship,whose parties are jointly pressing towards a more truthful, moreworkable, or otherwise better understanding of what that friendshipis. That means that operating only on the basis ofrationalization-by-desires condemns one to life largely empty of thegoods that really matter – for instance, friendships. To besure, whether this is the cost of surrendering dialectical activitiesas Brewer describes them will depend on whether he is substantivelycharacterizing those central human goods correctly; an opponent willpresumably contest the view on those grounds.

Returning to the point of convergence with older specificationism, ifthe evolving conception of a dialectical activity and what makes itdesirable is deliberative rather than arational, there must bereasons, and reasoning, that can modify not only one’s decisionsabout how to attain what one already straightforwardly wants, but alsoone’s view of what one is after. That is, in the jargon, overand above instrumental rationality, deliberation of ends must bepossible. And that returns us to the question of the conception ofreasons tied to this contrast between dialectical activity and mereactions. Per the spirit of Brewer’s view, it shouldn’t bepossible simply to spell out what practical reasoning correctlyperformed must amount to; since practical reasoning is an aspect ofmost or all dialectical activity, our grasp of what practicalreasoning is will continue to develop alongside our grasp of suchactivities. Nonetheless, a number of upshots for practicalrationality stand out in Brewer’s discussion.

First, against the often implicitly accepted model of practicalreasoning as a matter of first surveying surrounding circumstances,then assessing them, and then deciding what new action to initiatenext, one largely attends to what one is already in the middle ofdoing, clarifying how it has gone hitherto, with an eye to acontinuation. The action does not commence only after the survey andassessment, and consequently the primary object of attention turns outto be the action already in progress. Here the model is an authorrereading his half-written book or paper, wondering how to completehis not-fully-formed train of thought – the train of thought heis in the middle of, rather than about to kick off – or perhapsthat author reviewing his rough drafts. Because understanding of whatone is doing does not come all at once but gradually, as one proceedswith one’s course of action, the ability to survey and assessall the considerations relevant to a decision up front, as presupposedby the competing model, will not normally be in place when anythingthat is itself significant is at stake.

Second, the question one finds oneself asking amounts to,‘What have I been doing?,’ and thosecharacterizations of what one is doing that drive further choice willbe largely framed using thick ethical concepts. That is, rather thanapplying concepts like ‘good’ or ‘right’ toevaluatively neutral descriptions of one’s circumstances oractivity, they will deploy descriptions whose very application dependson mobilizing one’s evaluative capacities. (E.g., in theelaborate case study which led Bernard Williams to identify this classof concepts, there isn’t any way to mark out what counts asobscene, if one occupies only the evaluatively neutral view of aMartian exobiologist; Williams 1981b, and for background, see theentry onthick ethical concepts.)Williams controversially claimed that thick ethical concepts could notbe factored into strictly factual and strictly evaluative components(for an overview, see Millgram 1995). Brewer argues that the unityover time of dialectical activities supports Williams’s view onthis point, and in addition, that our need to rely on thick ethicalconcepts undercuts the distinction we have used in framing this verysurvey, between theoretical and practical reasons – that is,respectively, reasons that figure into argument as to how the factsstand, and those that figure into arguments for doing one thing oranother.

And third and finally for now, certain of our qualms about delegatingour practical reasoning to others are accounted for. If practicalthought is, as Brewer puts it, ‘a seamless part of theactivity’ of, say, friendship, or conducting a conversation, ormaking one’s way through philosophy, or just living one’slife, then to contract out one’s deliberation and decisions tothird parties – even expert third parties – is to foregothe valuable activity itself.

Although both Buss and Brewer highlight the role of evaluation inaction, for Buss, the evaluation that matters is the settled output ofone’s evaluating; for Brewer, the evaluation that matters is theevaluating.

6. Prospects and Outstanding Issues

The turn to action theory is producing some of the most interestingrecent work on practical reasoning. As we have seen, however, theirshared methodology notwithstanding, these theorists disagree on justabout everything else: on their philosophical reasons for adopting theapproach in the first place, on what the correct theory of practicalreasoning is, on why one form or another of practical inference isnonoptional or binding, and on what the upshots are for morality orethics. However, as awareness of the shared agenda grows, we arestarting to see positions that attempt to take on board elements frommore than one of the theories currently in play and, in addition, takeup the task of explaining why competitors are misguided.

The primary source of the disagreements just mentioned is a furtherdisagreement, as to what it takes to count as anaction. Onone view, intentional actions are centrally characterized by theirstepwise or nested internal structure; on another, by their beingauthored or owned; on the third, by their location in a practice; on afourth, by entailing an evaluation of one’s reasons. (In onevariant, we saw, those evaluations are entailed by ‘dialecticalactivity’, contrasted with mere action, and characterized byongoing reconsideration of its point and nature.) As we have seen,some of these characterizations come with supporting arguments, andthis is a dramatic advance on the state of play as of about twodecades back; however, the norm in this subfield is still to omitexplanations of why arguments for competing conceptions of action areincorrect. In a famous essay that kicked off discussion of a differenttopic in practical reasoning, Robert Nozick observed that advocates ofthe alternative responses to Newcomb’s Problem were prepared toexplain why they thought their own position correct, but not what waswrong with arguments for the other alternative; such a posture isunsatisfactory, and Nozick emphasized that in such debates ‘itwill not do to rest content with one’s belief ... nor will it doto just repeat one of the arguments, loudly and slowly’ (Nozick1997, p. 48).

It follows that the most important item on the agenda of this researchprogram is to produce arguments that will decide between the competingconceptions of action in play. One can’t very well hang one’s theoryof practical reasoning, and one’s moral theory to boot, off an accountof action that is treated as obviously false by other researchers inone’s discipline, when one has no story to tell about why one’s ownaccount is correct, and theirs is not. We may conclude by observingthat there are two modes of argument one must choose between. Onemight try to establish that, as a matter of metaphysical fact, actionsare as this or that theory says; alternatively, one mightargue that oneis to (ought to, had better) produce actionswhich are as the theory says; that is, the top-level argumentationmight be either theoretical or practical.

The choice between the two modes of argument is tied to a furtherstrategic choice. On the approach we are examining, theories ofpractical inference inherit their bindingness from the non-optionalityof the associated conception of action. That entails that any suchtheory needs an answer to the question, ‘Given what is meant by“action”, why not produce activity of someotherkind?’ To quickly canvass the forms this question takes for thetheories we have on the table: Why shouldn’t I look for noncalculativecontrol structures, and manage my activity by usingthem?What’s wrong with answering the question, ‘Did you reallydo (i.e., author) that?’ with, ‘Well, no, it justkind of happened?’ What’s wrong with engaging in activities thatcompete with each other or frustrate themselves – that is, withbehaving as though you were a market on the inside, rather than atotalitarian state? Why shouldn’t I opt out of the game of Intendo, insomething like the way I might decline a round of pinochle? (And ifit’s simply not possible, how is it that I have to cope with peoplewho seem to have opted out themselves?) Why bother with evaluating thereasons for my action? Isn’t the fact that I am responsive to themenough? Whynot detour around activities with the structureof friendship, philosophizing, and conversation? Isn’t, say, harvestingan ongoing stream of sensual pleasures quite enough?Notice that we should not assume without argument that one oranother mode of action must be nonoptional; if the pressures towardone or another form of action amount to less than practical necessity,pluralism about action might be the appropriate conclusion (Millgram2010).

A theoretical answer would involve showing that there is nothing elsethat youcan – metaphysically – do: that whateveryou do (in the thinnest possible sense) is action (in the theory’sthicker and more substantive sense). A practical answer would involveshowing that, given the alternatives, the suggestion that you produceactions (in the substantive sense of one’s favored theory) is, as theyused to say, an offer you can’t refuse. The type of force orbindingness that one’s theory of practical reason will inherit fromone’s theory of action will be determined by the choice between thesetwo modes of argument.

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Acknowledgments

I’m grateful to Chrisoula Andreou, Sarah Buss and C. Thi Nguyen for comments onearlier drafts of this entry. An early version was read at aRosenblatt Free Lunch at the University of Utah, and I’m also gratefulto the audience for their feedback.