Sub-agents and the individuation of virtues
Susan Wolf’s “Reason View” - moral responsibility is the capacity to act in accordance with reason. Then:
- Moral responsibility is required for personhood, and MR is the disposition to act in accordance with reason
- This disposition can be internally finked (addiction, compulsion, severe depression)
- But the underlying rational capacities remain intact
- Complete loss of rational capacity = loss of the disposition itself Unpersoning
Challenges:
- how do you distinguish temporarily lacking/having a weaker disposition from having the same disposition finked? is that actually meaningful?
These are some other views where personhood or similar require certain dispositions:
Frankfurt’s Hierarchical Theory
Core claim: Persons are beings capable of forming second-order desires about their first-order desires, and acting in accordance with them when they identify with them.
This clearly involves dispositions - specifically the disposition to act in accordance with desires you identify with at a higher level.
Bratman’s Planning Agency
Core claim: Agency (and by extension, a robust notion of personhood) requires the capacity to form and execute plans that coordinate action across time.
Explicitly dispositional - you must have dispositions to form intentions, maintain them across time, and act in accordance with them.
Fischer & Ravizza’s Guidance Control
Core claim: Moral responsibility (and their broader account of agency) requires “guidance control” - acting from one’s own, reasons-responsive mechanisms.
This involves dispositions to respond to reasons in appropriate ways and to act from mechanisms that are properly “owned” by the agent.
It seems like part of the difference between virtue-ethical views and TDT/UDT is that the decision theories consider the policies as functions isolated from their environment, whereas the virtue theorist considers whe whole agent, including functions like attention that determine the inputs to decision-functions, and weakness of will, which mediate outputs of decision functions/inputs of actions.
- Surveillance + the threat of intervention (including self-intervention) finks your dispositions, you can make this a pun with fink as in informant surveilling someone
- Continuity of Responsibility Account of Personal Identity
The relevant differences could be shown by imagining choices that alter your attention/frames and akrasia, plus other functions that are upstream (attention, world models, concepts) or downstream (akrasia) of decision itself.
have a look at the connections between finks, the ability to do otherwise (frankfurt), two-level theories of compatibilism, and Shoemaker’s theory of properties. Use this to reformulate Korsgaards argument in Self-constitution.
could we somehow use all that stuff the prove an autonomy criteria for personhood, like Korsgaard does? the idea would be that, unless a self is well ordered, it won’t have the right kinds of disposition (i.e. a non-finkish one) to cause actions, and since, on Shoemaker’s account of properties, it’s essential to a property like ‘being a self’ that it has such a disposition to cause actions, we are only selves when we are well-ordered in this way.