6 - Decision-making and Teleology

Summary

AGENCY AND TELEOLOGY

Until recently most accounts of decision rationality in Anglo-Saxon philosophy assumed the Pro Attitude model. Justifications for decisions were explained in terms of justifications for acting as decided. It is easy to understand why. We conceive of decision-making as having a reason-applying, executive function. And, as we have seen, it seems to be the Pro Attitude model which is consistent with this conception of the will. It is true that decision-making, as we conceive it, also counts as a form of agency – as a second-order action – and that this active status is not obviously consistent with a Pro Attitude model of decision rationality. But, at least prior to the work of Harry Frankfurt, comparatively few Anglo-Saxon accounts of the will were much concerned with the active nature of decisions – with our freedom of will. Many theories of the will assumed what in chapter 1 I termed an Enlightenment psychology – a psychology in which the occurrence of second-order agency is ignored or denied. To the extent that such theories took any view of freedom at all, the view taken was broadly Hobbesian: we had freedom of action, but no freedom of will.

There is a further explanation for neglect of the Action model of decision rationality. This is the popularity of Teleological theories of agency rationality. A Teleological theory explains the rationality of agency in terms of its increasing the amount of good. According to a Teleological theory, an action is rational simply in virtue of the amount of good it is likely to produce – in virtue of its maximising, or at least sufficiently increasing, expected good.