Maria Alvarez
King's College London, Philosophy, Faculty Member
- Philosophy Professor, King's College Londonedit
Understanding human beings and their distinctive rational and volitional capacities is one of the central tasks of philosophy. The task requires a clear account of such things as reasons, desires, emotions and motives, and of how they... more
Understanding human beings and their distinctive rational and volitional capacities is one of the central tasks of philosophy. The task requires a clear account of such things as reasons, desires, emotions and motives, and of how they combine to produce and explain human behaviour. In Kinds of Reasons, Maria Alvarez offers a fresh and incisive treatment of these issues, focusing in particular on reasons as they feature in contexts of agency. Her account builds on some important recent work in the area; but she takes her main inspiration from the tradition that receives its seminal contemporary expression in the writings of G.E.M. Anscombe, a tradition that runs counter to the broadly Humean orthodoxy that has dominated the theory of action for the past forty years. Alvarez's conclusions are therefore likely to be controversial; and her bold and painstaking arguments will be found provocative by participants on every side of the debates with which she engages. Clear and directly written, Kinds of Reasons aims to stake out a distinctive position within one of the most hotly contested areas of contemporary philosophy.
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The last three decades have seen much important work on powers and dispositions: what they are and how they are related to the phenomena that constitute their manifestation. These debates have tended to focus on ‘paradigmatic’... more
The last three decades have seen much important work on powers and dispositions: what they are and how they are related to the phenomena that constitute their manifestation. These debates have tended to focus on ‘paradigmatic’ dispositions, i.e. physical dispositions such as conductivity, elasticity, radioactivity, etc. It is often assumed, implicitly or explicitly, that the conclusions of these debates concerning physical dispositions can be extended to psychological dispositions, such as beliefs, desires or character traits. In this paper I identify some central features of paradigmatic dispositions that concern their manifestation, stimulus conditions, and causal bases. I then focus on a specific kind of psychological disposition, namely character traits, and argue that they are importantly different from paradigmatic dispositions in relation to these features. I conclude that this difference should lead us to re-examine our assumption that character traits are dispositions and, ...
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We often explain human actions by reference to the desires of the person whose actions we are explaining: “Jane is studying law because she wants to become a judge.” But how do desires explain actions? A widely accepted view is that... more
We often explain human actions by reference to the desires of the person whose actions we are explaining: “Jane is studying law because she wants to become a judge.” But how do desires explain actions? A widely accepted view is that desires are dispositional states that are manifested in behavior. Accordingly, desires explain actions as ordinary physical dispositions, such as fragility or conductivity, explain their manifestations, namely causally. This paper argues that desires, unlike ordinary physical dispositions, are “manifestation-dependent dispositions”: dispositions whose attribution depends on their having been manifested. This feature of desires, I suggest, favours a “context-placing” approach to understanding how desires explain actions.
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Desire plays a pivotal role in our lives. Yet in recent times, it has not been a central topic in the philosophy of mind. The aim of this book is to redress this imbalance. What are desires? According to a dogma, desire is a motivational... more
Desire plays a pivotal role in our lives. Yet in recent times, it has not been a central topic in the philosophy of mind. The aim of this book is to redress this imbalance. What are desires? According to a dogma, desire is a motivational state: desiring is being disposed to act. This conception aligns with the functionalist approach to desire and the standard account of desire’s direction of fit and of its role in explaining action. According to a second influential approach, however, desire is first and foremost an evaluation: desiring is representing something as good. This is in line with the thesis that we cannot desire something without “seeing” any good in it (the “guise of the good”). Are desires motivational states? How are we to understand desire’s direction of fit? How do desires explain action? Are desires evaluative states? Is the guise of the good true? Should we adopt an alternative picture that emphasizes desire’s deontic nature? Which view of desire does the neurosci...
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The last three decades have seen much important work on powers and dispositions: what they are, and how how they are related to the phenomena that constitute their manifestation. Contributors to these debates have tended to focus on... more
The last three decades have seen much important work on powers and dispositions: what they are, and how how they are related to the phenomena that constitute their manifestation. Contributors to these debates have tended to focus on 'paradigmatic' dispositions, i.e. physical dispositions such as conductivity, elasticity, radioactivity, etc.. But it is often assumed, implicitly or explicitly, that the conclusions of these debates concerning physical dispositions can be extended to psychological dispositions, such as beliefs, desires or character traits. In this paper I identify some central features of paradigmatic dispositions that concern their manifestation, stimulus conditions, and causal bases. I then focus on a specific kind of psychological disposition, namely character traits, and argue that they are importantly different from paradigmatic dispositions in relation of these features. I shall conclude that this should lead us to reexamine our assumption that character traits are dispositions and, by implication, whether we can generalize claims about how dispositions in general relate to and explain their manifestations to character traits and their manifestations.
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Ignorance is often a perfectly good excuse. There are interesting debates about whether non-culpable factual ignorance and mistake subvert obligation, but little disagreement about whether non-culpable factual ignorance and mistake... more
Ignorance is often a perfectly good excuse. There are interesting debates about whether non-culpable factual ignorance and mistake subvert obligation, but little disagreement about whether non-culpable factual ignorance and mistake exculpate. What about agents who have all the relevant facts in view but fail to meet their obligations because they do not have the right moral beliefs? If their ignorance of their obligations derives from mistaken moral beliefs or from ignorance of the moral significance of the facts they have in view, should they be excused for failing to meet their moral obligations? It is not obvious that they should. In this paper we argue that the best non-skeptical accounts of moral responsibility acknowledge that factual ignorance and mistake will diminish moral responsibility in a way that moral ignorance and mistake will not. That is because factual ignorance is often non-culpable so long as it meets certain merely procedural epistemic standards but the same is not true of moral ignorance. Our argument is that the assumption that it is gets the standards of culpability for moral ignorance wrong, and that the mistake is encouraged by the thought that culpability in general requires an instance of known wrongdoing: that acting wrongly requires de dicto unresponsiveness to one’s obligations at some stage. We deny this and conclude that, therefore, ignorance and mistaken belief are indeed often perfectly good excuses – but far less often than some philosophers claim.
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We often explain human actions by reference to the desires of the person whose actions we are explaining: " Jane is studying law because she wants to become a judge. " But how do desires explain actions? A widely accepted view is that... more
We often explain human actions by reference to the desires of the person whose actions we are explaining: " Jane is studying law because she wants to become a judge. " But how do desires explain actions? A widely accepted view is that desires are dispositional states that are manifested in behavior. Accordingly, desires explain actions as ordinary physical dispositions, such as fragility or conductivity, explain their manifestations, namely causally. This paper argues that desires, unlike ordinary physical dispositions, are 'manifestation-dependent dispositions': dispositions whose attribution depends on their having been manifested. This feature of desires, I suggest, favours a " context-placing " approach to understanding how desires explain actions. We often explain human actions by reference to the desires of the person whose actions we are explaining: " Jane is studying law because she wants to become a judge. " But how do desires explain actions? A widely accepted view is that desires are dispositional states that are manifested in behavior. This view can be traced back to Davidson's influential 1963 paper " Actions, Reasons, and Causes, " which opens with this question: " What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent's reason for doing what he did? " (685). Davidson's answer, which subsequently became the orthodoxy in action theory, is that the relation between the reason that explains an action and the explained action is that of cause and effect and that, therefore, explanations that give the agent's reason for acting, which he called " rationalizations, "
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Entry in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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What kind of thing is a reason for action? What is it to act for a reason? And what is the connection between acting for a reason and rationality? There is controversy about the many issues raised by these questions. In this paper I shall... more
What kind of thing is a reason for action? What is it to act for a reason? And what is the connection between acting for a reason and rationality? There is controversy about the many issues raised by these questions. In this paper I shall answer the first question with a conception of practical reasons that I call 'Factualism', which says that all reasons are facts. I defend this conception against its main rival, Psychologism, which says that practical reasons are mental states or mental facts, and also against a variant of Factualism that says that some practical reasons are facts and others are false beliefs. I argue that the conception of practical reasons defended here (i) provides plausible answers to the second and third questions above; and (ii) gives a more unified and satisfactory picture of practical reasons than those offered by its rivals.
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My aim in this paper is to tease out and assess Ryle’s position on the relationship between motives and actions, in particular his claim that this relation is not causal and that, therefore, the corresponding explanations are not causal... more
My aim in this paper is to tease out and assess Ryle’s position on the relationship between motives and actions, in particular his claim that this relation is not causal and that, therefore, the corresponding explanations are not causal explanations. I shall argue that, although Ryle mistakenly assimilated explanations by motives to explanations by character traits, he nonetheless has much of interest to say about how motives and character traits are related to the actions they explain, respectively, and also about whether we should think of explanations of either kind as causal explanations.
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In this paper I propose a way of characterising human agency in terms of the concept of a two-way power. I outline this conception of agency, defend it against some objections and briefly indicate how it relates to free agency and to... more
In this paper I propose a way of characterising human agency in terms of the concept of a two-way power. I outline this conception of agency, defend it against some objections and briefly indicate how it relates to free agency and to moral praise-and blameworthiness. In the theory of action, agency is often characterised in terms of intentionality. Accordingly, there is agency when, and only when, something is done intentionally. And doing something intentionally is construed as doing it for a reason. In this paper, I propose an alternative way of characterising human agency in terms of the concept of a particular kind of causal power: a 'two-way' causal power. This approach is compatible with the intentional approach but I think it is preferable to it. For one thing, and although I won't discuss this in detail, it facilitates seeing human agency as a special case of the agency that is found throughout the natural world, both in animate and inanimate things, since that notion of agency also involves the idea of causal powers.
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In 1969 Harry Frankfurt published his hugely influential paper 'Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility' in which he claimed to present a counterexample to the so-called 'Principle of Alternate Possibilities' namely, to the... more
In 1969 Harry Frankfurt published his hugely influential paper 'Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility' in which he claimed to present a counterexample to the so-called 'Principle of Alternate Possibilities' namely, to the principle that 'a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise' (Frankfurt, 1969, 829). The success of Frankfurt-style cases as counterexamples to the Principle has been much debated since. In this paper I present an objection to Frankfurt-style cases that, in questioning their conceptual cogency, undercuts many of those debates. Frankfurt-style cases all require a counterfactual mechanism that could cause an agent to perform an action that he cannot avoid performing. I argue that, given our concept of what it is for someone to act, this requirement is inconsistent.
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In this paper I outline and defend a conception of motivating reasons – i.e. of the reasons for which agents act. Similar conceptions of motivating reasons have been defended persuasively by a minority of philosophers recently. However,... more
In this paper I outline and defend a conception of motivating reasons – i.e. of the reasons for which agents act. Similar conceptions of motivating reasons have been defended persuasively by a minority of philosophers recently. However, this minority position is still regarded as implausible or confused, mostly because it is not sufficiently well understood, or because it is thought to bring with it insuperable difficulties. Here I offer a detailed and distinctive version of that minority view, aversion that, I think, overcomes the apparently insuperable difficulties associated with the minority view. I also offer an account of the relation between motivating reasons and the explanation of action.
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In the past thirty years or so, the doctrine that actions are events has become an essential, and sometimes unargued, part of the received view in the philosophy of action, despite the efforts of a few philosophers to undermine the... more
In the past thirty years or so, the doctrine that actions are events has become an essential, and sometimes unargued, part of the received view in the philosophy of action, despite the efforts of a few philosophers to undermine the consensus. 1 For example, the entry for Agency in a recently published reference guide to the philosophy of mind begins with the following sentence: A central task in the philosophy of action is that of spelling out the differences between events in general and those events that fall squarely into the category of human action. 2 There is no consensus about what events are. But it is generally agreed that, whatever events may prove to be, actions are a species or a class of events. We believe that the received view is mistaken: actions are not events. In what follows, we shall defend this negative doctrine, criticize a number of related claims about the nature of agency and actions, and make some positive proposals of our own. Several of the points we shall be urging are not new; but we hope that by bringing them together, and organizing them properly in relation to one another, the received view may appear in a new and less favourable light. These points include the following: that agents do not cause their actions; that saying that an agent caused
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Since the publication of Davidson's influential article 'The Logical Form of Action Sentences', semantical considerations are widely thought to support the doctrine that actions are events. I shall argue that the semantics of action... more
Since the publication of Davidson's influential article 'The Logical Form of Action Sentences', semantical considerations are widely thought to support the doctrine that actions are events. I shall argue that the semantics of action sentences do not imply that actions are events. This will involve defending a negative claim and a positive claim, as well as a proposal for how to formalize action sentences. The negative claim is that the semantics of action sentences do not require that we think of actions as events, even if these sentences are best formalized in the manner that Davidson himself favours. The positive claim is that the simplest way of formalizing actions sentences which captures all and only licit inferences requires quantification only over the results of actions. If this is right, then the argument from semantics evaporates, and the claim that actions are events needs to be freshly argued for – or against.
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Reasons, Reason explanation, Psychologism, Causalism
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Entry on Thomas Reid's philosophy of action publsihed in the Companion to the Philosophy of Action, edited by Timothy O’Connor and Constantine Sandis, Blackwell, 2010