Agency and Habit
This interdisciplinary philosophical project aims to create a shared theoretical space for the investigation of agency and habit as mutually illuminating and highly interdependent concepts. It breaks away form a long intellectual tradition that sees them as either incompatible or belonging to different levels of the explanation of conduct. The ambition is to provide a new comprehensive theory of agency that integrates habit as a key dimension in order to advance our understanding of central, yet essentially contested concepts of great normative and practical significance: autonomy, responsibility and rationality.
Forthcoming:
Is Grit Irrational for Akratic Agents? In Patrick McKearney and Nicholas H.A. Evans (eds.), Against Better Judgment: Akrasia in Anthropological Perspective, Oxford: Berghahn Books
According to most philosophers, akrasia is a problem of motivation (or acting against one’s better judgment). This chapter proposes an alternative by emphasising that a lack of epistemic resilience or grit is just as constitutive of akrasia as the better-known problem of motivation. As such, this chapter makes three important contributions to the ethnography of akrasia. First, it gives credence to the idea that akrasia is most acutely felt when a certain set of normative expectations of what it is to be an agent are at work. Secondly it sheds critical light on the idea that identifying a particular person's act as akratic might have serious social and normative implications. Third, it puts forward a pluralist conception of rationality as both context and agent-sensitive. The implications of the proposed view for an ethnography of akrasia are then articulated with reference to three personal stories of addiction treatment in the NHS.
Autonomy and Responsibility. In Ben Colburn (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Responsibility, Abingdon: Routledge
This chapter offers a fine-grained analysis of the relationship between autonomy and responsibility in order to address a challenge according to which considering autonomy and responsibility as closely related is misleading since these concepts serve different normative objectives. In response to this challenge, I first explore two criteria of ascription – rationality and control – that autonomy and responsibility seem to share. I then contrast and compare three pairs of autonomy and responsibility conceptions. Examining these pairs rescues the idea that there are normatively significant connections between autonomy and responsibility, albeit that what that connection is and why it matters is highly sensitive to the different understandings of autonomy and responsibility one might adopt. The first pair, self-governance and accountability, posits a notion of core agency as irreducibly valuable. The second, authenticity and attributability, rests on a shared ideal of actively becoming a distinctive self. The third and final, relational autonomy and answerability, derives from the thought that unequal standing impacts heavily on whether and how the criteria of rationality and control are applied in specific cases. This analysis demonstrates that rationality and control are not independent criteria but always work in tandem. Failing to appreciate these conceptual interactions could obfuscate promising pathways for both supporting personal autonomy and challenging unwarranted responsibility ascriptions.
Moral Competence and Mental Disorder. In Maximilian Kiener (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Responsibility, Abingdon: Routledge
There are two ways of thinking about moral competence. According to the first, a morally competent agent is someone who knows right from wrong. According to the second, a morally competent agent is someone who responds aptly to reasons. These two conceptions are not mutually exclusive; however, they merit separate treatment as they offer different insights on how and why moral competence might be compromised. Severe episodes of mental disorder are instances where moral competence is apparently compromised. It is tempting to argue that the main issue is of reduced scope or capacity, that is, ‘hypo-agency’: a person gets to distinguish right from wrong in fewer cases, on the first conception, or to register fewer decisive reasons for action, on the second. Looking at specific case studies involving agency in the context of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and autism, this chapter will aim to show that the picture is more complex: in some cases, moral competence is affected in virtue of what looks like an increase of scope or capacity, that is, ‘hyper-agency’: the difference between right and wrong becomes arresting in almost every situation, on the first conception, or the call of decisive reasons for action is experienced as incessant and near irresistible, on the second. This picture reveals something significant about the nature of moral competence as a central condition for full-blown responsibility. As the case studies indicate, neither hypo-, nor hyper-agency are straight pathologies that necessarily undermine such responsibility. Having said that, any ascriptions of responsibility, full-blown or otherwise, would be off the mark if focussed on individual hypo- or hyper-agents at the expense of the various contexts in which their moral competence gets to be exercised. By attending to these contexts, we can see that the relevant requirement is not tracking a kind of propositional knowledge or understanding as suggested by the two initial conceptions, but a kind of practical knowledge that might be also embedded in habits rather than skills or personal policies only.
Work-in-progress:
Answerability and Epistemic Dis-Credit
I identify and explore how unjust epistemic inclusions, such as epistemic appropriation and epistemic exploitation may distort responsibility as answerability. Drawing on the notion of deep circumstantial luck I proposed recently, I aim to show that answerability expectations and exchanges get distorted in a distinctive way, even when unjust epistemic inclusions are effectively resisted. These distortions become apparent when we consider what I propose to term epistemic dis-credit: a normative burden that accrues to agents targeted for unjust epistemic inclusion independently of what they actually do. Offsetting this burden for good would require a comprehensive multi-strand strategy. I expand on one of these strands only which, pace recent ecological accounts of responsibility, calls for the un-scaffolding of one’s agency by splitting sensitivity to reasons and sensitivity to key audiences rather than keeping them closely aligned.
Implicit Bias, Epistemic Injustice and Moral Luck
Does implicit bias always lead to harms and wrongs and if so, why? To answer these questions, I contrast and compare the ways in which implicit bias might contribute to epistemic injustice and moral luck. When the former takes place, groups and individuals are wronged in their capacity of producers or communicators of knowledge and this happens in virtue of some identity prejudice that attaches to them. When the latter occurs, unlucky agents face inescapable moral pitfalls not of their own making and of which luckier agents are spared. In both cases, full responsibility may be aptly ascribed for actions and outcomes that by and large fall outside any individual agent’s direct control. A closer look at instances of epistemic injustice and moral luck that could affect psychiatric practice will help dispel the air of paradox and consider possible strategies for breaking the link from implicit bias to actual harms and wrongs. These strategies become available on a more holistic understanding of agency where conscious intention and choice are not the only reliable sources a person can draw on. With respect to psychiatric practice, this involves rethinking expertise in terms habituation rather than rule-following in the application of a professional skill set. To flesh out the proposed alternative, insights from hermeneutics and virtue theory are brought to bear.
Transformative Agency, Retrospection and Agent-Regret
There is a trend in recent discussions to conceive agent-regret as a fitting response to bad moral luck, such as that of a driver who kills a pedestrian through no fault of their own. Following this trend, agent-regret appears to be a lesser kind of guilt evoked by borderline exercises of one’s own agency: although not performed in the light of reasons, it seems callous to just shrug them off. This paper will take a different tack. It will be argued that in paradigm cases agent-regret is a fitting response to a transformative experience undertaken in the light of reasons, which however are subsequently voided by this experience. This approach has three advantages. First, it illuminates the crucial role of retrospection for shaping one’s initial space of reasons. Second, it shows that agent-regret responds to exercises of one’s own agency revealed as core rather than borderline. And third, it enables us to appreciate the distinctive nature of agent-regret, which is irreducible to guilt.
Forthcoming:
Is Grit Irrational for Akratic Agents? In Patrick McKearney and Nicholas H.A. Evans (eds.), Against Better Judgment: Akrasia in Anthropological Perspective, Oxford: Berghahn Books
According to most philosophers, akrasia is a problem of motivation (or acting against one’s better judgment). This chapter proposes an alternative by emphasising that a lack of epistemic resilience or grit is just as constitutive of akrasia as the better-known problem of motivation. As such, this chapter makes three important contributions to the ethnography of akrasia. First, it gives credence to the idea that akrasia is most acutely felt when a certain set of normative expectations of what it is to be an agent are at work. Secondly it sheds critical light on the idea that identifying a particular person's act as akratic might have serious social and normative implications. Third, it puts forward a pluralist conception of rationality as both context and agent-sensitive. The implications of the proposed view for an ethnography of akrasia are then articulated with reference to three personal stories of addiction treatment in the NHS.
Autonomy and Responsibility. In Ben Colburn (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Responsibility, Abingdon: Routledge
This chapter offers a fine-grained analysis of the relationship between autonomy and responsibility in order to address a challenge according to which considering autonomy and responsibility as closely related is misleading since these concepts serve different normative objectives. In response to this challenge, I first explore two criteria of ascription – rationality and control – that autonomy and responsibility seem to share. I then contrast and compare three pairs of autonomy and responsibility conceptions. Examining these pairs rescues the idea that there are normatively significant connections between autonomy and responsibility, albeit that what that connection is and why it matters is highly sensitive to the different understandings of autonomy and responsibility one might adopt. The first pair, self-governance and accountability, posits a notion of core agency as irreducibly valuable. The second, authenticity and attributability, rests on a shared ideal of actively becoming a distinctive self. The third and final, relational autonomy and answerability, derives from the thought that unequal standing impacts heavily on whether and how the criteria of rationality and control are applied in specific cases. This analysis demonstrates that rationality and control are not independent criteria but always work in tandem. Failing to appreciate these conceptual interactions could obfuscate promising pathways for both supporting personal autonomy and challenging unwarranted responsibility ascriptions.
Moral Competence and Mental Disorder. In Maximilian Kiener (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Responsibility, Abingdon: Routledge
There are two ways of thinking about moral competence. According to the first, a morally competent agent is someone who knows right from wrong. According to the second, a morally competent agent is someone who responds aptly to reasons. These two conceptions are not mutually exclusive; however, they merit separate treatment as they offer different insights on how and why moral competence might be compromised. Severe episodes of mental disorder are instances where moral competence is apparently compromised. It is tempting to argue that the main issue is of reduced scope or capacity, that is, ‘hypo-agency’: a person gets to distinguish right from wrong in fewer cases, on the first conception, or to register fewer decisive reasons for action, on the second. Looking at specific case studies involving agency in the context of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and autism, this chapter will aim to show that the picture is more complex: in some cases, moral competence is affected in virtue of what looks like an increase of scope or capacity, that is, ‘hyper-agency’: the difference between right and wrong becomes arresting in almost every situation, on the first conception, or the call of decisive reasons for action is experienced as incessant and near irresistible, on the second. This picture reveals something significant about the nature of moral competence as a central condition for full-blown responsibility. As the case studies indicate, neither hypo-, nor hyper-agency are straight pathologies that necessarily undermine such responsibility. Having said that, any ascriptions of responsibility, full-blown or otherwise, would be off the mark if focussed on individual hypo- or hyper-agents at the expense of the various contexts in which their moral competence gets to be exercised. By attending to these contexts, we can see that the relevant requirement is not tracking a kind of propositional knowledge or understanding as suggested by the two initial conceptions, but a kind of practical knowledge that might be also embedded in habits rather than skills or personal policies only.
Work-in-progress:
Answerability and Epistemic Dis-Credit
I identify and explore how unjust epistemic inclusions, such as epistemic appropriation and epistemic exploitation may distort responsibility as answerability. Drawing on the notion of deep circumstantial luck I proposed recently, I aim to show that answerability expectations and exchanges get distorted in a distinctive way, even when unjust epistemic inclusions are effectively resisted. These distortions become apparent when we consider what I propose to term epistemic dis-credit: a normative burden that accrues to agents targeted for unjust epistemic inclusion independently of what they actually do. Offsetting this burden for good would require a comprehensive multi-strand strategy. I expand on one of these strands only which, pace recent ecological accounts of responsibility, calls for the un-scaffolding of one’s agency by splitting sensitivity to reasons and sensitivity to key audiences rather than keeping them closely aligned.
Implicit Bias, Epistemic Injustice and Moral Luck
Does implicit bias always lead to harms and wrongs and if so, why? To answer these questions, I contrast and compare the ways in which implicit bias might contribute to epistemic injustice and moral luck. When the former takes place, groups and individuals are wronged in their capacity of producers or communicators of knowledge and this happens in virtue of some identity prejudice that attaches to them. When the latter occurs, unlucky agents face inescapable moral pitfalls not of their own making and of which luckier agents are spared. In both cases, full responsibility may be aptly ascribed for actions and outcomes that by and large fall outside any individual agent’s direct control. A closer look at instances of epistemic injustice and moral luck that could affect psychiatric practice will help dispel the air of paradox and consider possible strategies for breaking the link from implicit bias to actual harms and wrongs. These strategies become available on a more holistic understanding of agency where conscious intention and choice are not the only reliable sources a person can draw on. With respect to psychiatric practice, this involves rethinking expertise in terms habituation rather than rule-following in the application of a professional skill set. To flesh out the proposed alternative, insights from hermeneutics and virtue theory are brought to bear.
Transformative Agency, Retrospection and Agent-Regret
There is a trend in recent discussions to conceive agent-regret as a fitting response to bad moral luck, such as that of a driver who kills a pedestrian through no fault of their own. Following this trend, agent-regret appears to be a lesser kind of guilt evoked by borderline exercises of one’s own agency: although not performed in the light of reasons, it seems callous to just shrug them off. This paper will take a different tack. It will be argued that in paradigm cases agent-regret is a fitting response to a transformative experience undertaken in the light of reasons, which however are subsequently voided by this experience. This approach has three advantages. First, it illuminates the crucial role of retrospection for shaping one’s initial space of reasons. Second, it shows that agent-regret responds to exercises of one’s own agency revealed as core rather than borderline. And third, it enables us to appreciate the distinctive nature of agent-regret, which is irreducible to guilt.