Intention takes various forms. Must its objects be acts or activities? How much can be encompassed in the content of a single intention? Can intentions can have the content: to A for R, where ‘A’ ranges over act-types and ‘R’ over reasons for action, for instance to keep my promise? The question is particularly important on the widely accepted assumption that, for concrete actions (act-tokens) that are rational and have moral worth, both their rationality and their moral worth depend on the reason(s) for which they are performed. If intentions can have content of the form of ‘to A for R’, should we conclude that (contrary to the position of many philosophers) we have direct voluntary control of the reason(s) for which we act? If intentions cannot have such content, how can we intend to do, not just what we ought to do, but to do it with ‘moral worth’? This question is also raised by the idea that we can be commanded to treat others as ends in themselves – which presumably has moral worth. If the commandable is intendable, then, to understand commands and other directives, we need a theory of the scope of intention. This paper explores kinds and objects of intention, outlines an account of its scope, and brings out some implications of the account for moral responsibility.

Our planning agency contributes to our lives in fundamental ways. Prior partial plans settle practical questions about the future. They thereby pose problems of means, filter solutions to those problems, and guide action. This plan-infused background frames our practical thinking in ways that cohere with our resource limits and help organize our lives, both over time and socially. And these forms of practical thinking involve guidance by norms of plan rationality, including norms of plan consistency, means-end coherence, and stability over time.

But why are these norms of rationality? Would these norms be stable under a planning agent's reflection? I try to answer these questions in a way that responds to a skeptical challenge. While I highlight pragmatic reasons for being a planning agent, these need to be supplemented fully to explain the force of these norms in the particular case. I argue that the needed further rationale appeals to the idea that these norms track certain conditions of a planning agent's self-governance, both at a time and over time. With respect to diachronic plan rationality, this approach leads to a modest plan conservatism.

Libertarianism about free will is the conjunction of two theses: the existence of free will is incompatible with the truth of determinism, and at least some human beings sometimes exercise free will (or act freely, for short).1 Some libertarian views feature agent causation, others maintain that free actions are uncaused, and yet others – event-causal libertarian views – reject all views of these two kinds and appeal to indeterministic causation by events and states.2 This article explores the relative merits of two different views of this third kind. One is Robert Kane's prominent view, and the other is the ‘daring libertarian’ view that I floated in Free Will and Luck.3 (I labeled the view ‘daring’ to distinguish it from a more modest libertarian view that I floated a decade earlier.)4 I say ‘floated’ because I am not a libertarian. I do not endorse incompatibilism; instead, I am agnostic about it. But if I were a libertarian, I would embrace my daring libertarian view (or DLV, for short). This article's thesis is that event-causal libertarians should prefer DLV to Kane's ‘dual or multiple efforts’ view.5

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, by implication, whether we can generalize conclusions about physical dispositions to psychological dispositions, such as character traits and their manifestations.

I maintain that an account of knowledge how to do something – an account which might be supposed to uncover ‘the nature’ of such knowledge – can't be got by considering what linguists tell us is expressed in ascriptions of knowing how. Attention must be paid to the knowledge that is actually being exercised when someone is doing something. I criticize some claims about ascriptions of knowledge-how which derive from contemporary syntactic and semantic theory. I argue that these claims can no more provide an understanding of what it is to intend to do something than of what it is to know how to do something. Philosophy, not linguistics, must be the source of such understanding.

This essay is motivated by the thought that the things we do are to be distinguished from our acts of doing them. I defend a particular way of drawing this distinction before proceeding to demonstrate its relevance for normative ethics. Central to my argument is the conviction that certain ongoing debates in ethical theory begin to dissolve once we disambiguate the two concepts of action in question. If this is right, then the study of action should be accorded a far more prominent place within moral philosophy than previously supposed. I end by considering an extension of the above to aesthetic evaluation and, mutatis mutandis, that of our lives in general.

This paper starts by considering an interesting argument of H.A. Prichard’s against the view that to act is to cause a change; the argument is that causing is not an activity. The argument is important because of the recent emergence of an ‘agent-causation’ view according to which actions are the causing of changes by agents. I suggest a way of responding to Prichard’s argument, and then, profiting from one of his own conclusions, turn to consider the relation between neurophysiological changes and the causation of bodily movement by the agent. I make a suggestion about the proper way to understand the relation between the neurophysiological changes, the bodily movements and the action.

Virtue ethicists often appeal to practical skill as a way of understanding the nature of virtue. An important commitment of a skill account of virtue is that virtue is learned through practice and not through study, memorization, or reflection alone. In what follows, I will argue that virtue ethicists have only given us half the story. In particular, in focusing on outputs, or on the right actions or responses to moral situations, virtue ethicists have overlooked a crucial facet of virtue: namely, that through practice, virtuous agents develop a cache of perceptual skills that allow them to attend to, detect, and identify the relevant features of a perceptual array, the selection of which is central to recognizing and categorizing a situation as a moral situation of a particular type. In order to support this claim, I will appeal to empirical studies of motor expertise, which show that an expert's capacity to attend to and recognize relevant perceptual inputs differs in important respects from the layperson's. Specifically, I will argue that performing the right action in the right circumstances improves an agent's ability to attend to and identify the morally relevant features of a moral situation.

A measure of good and bad is internal to something falling under it when that thing falls under the measure in virtue of what it is. The concept of an internal standard has broad application. Compare the external breed standards arbitrarily imposed at a dog show with the internal standards of health at work in the veterinarian's office. This paper is about practical standards, measures of acting well and badly, and so measures deployed in deliberation and choice. More specifically, it is about the attempt to explain the unconditional validity of certain norms (say, of justice and prudence) by showing them to be internal to our agency and the causality it involves. This is constitutivism. Its most prominent incarnations share a set of assumptions about the nature of agency and our knowledge of it: conceptualism, formalism and absolutism. This essay investigates the merits and viability of rejecting all of them while still seeking the ground of practical normativity in what we are, in our fundamental activity.

In this paper, I try to argue that the recognition that non-human animals are relevant to the free will problem delivers interesting new ways of thinking about the central metaphysical issues at the heart of that problem. Some such dividends, I suggest, are the following: (i) that the problem of free will can be considered to be just a more specific version of a general question concerning how agency is to be fitted into the natural world; (ii) that action can be usefully regarded as an especially interesting form of downward causation; and that (iii) the metaphysical possibility of downward causation, and hence, indirectly, also of free will, can be illuminated in valuable ways by thinking about the hierarchical structure of, and systems of functioning within, biological organisms.

From its inception, the philosophy of action has sought to account for action in terms of an associated kind of explanation. The alternative to this approach was noticed, but not adopted, by G.E.M. Anscombe. Anscombe observed that a series of answers to the reason-requesting question ‘Why?’ may be read in reverse order as a series of answers to the question ‘How?’ Unlike answers to the question ‘Why?’, answers to the question ‘How?’ are not explanatory of what they are about: they reveal, not reasons for doing something, but ways of doing something, and they have the form of what Aristotle called a practical syllogism. The alternative to theorizing action in terms of explanation, is, thus, to theorize it in terms calculation. In exploring this alternative, I argue for three main theses: first, that (pace Anscombe) it is not a matter of indifference whether we theorize action in terms of the question ‘Why?’ or in terms of the question ‘How?’; second, that the question ‘Why?’ is a question for an observer of action, whereas the question ‘How?’ is a question for the agent; and finally, that the standpoint of the agent, revealed by the question ‘How?’, is prior to that of an observer, revealed by the question ‘Why?’.

Though everyday life accords a great deal of significance to practical abilities – such as the ability to walk, to speak French, to play the piano – philosophers of action pay surprisingly little attention to them. By contrast, abilities are discussed in various other philosophical projects. From these discussions, a partial theory of abilities emerges. If the partial theory – which is at best adequate only to a few examples of practical abilities – were correct, then philosophers of action would be right to ignore practical abilities, because they could play no fundamental role in an account of human agency. For the idea that practical abilities do play a fundamental role in human agency to be worth considering, an alternative conception of them is needed. As a first step, I attempt some of the necessary ground-clearing work.

In this paper I am going to argue that we should take actions to be prime. This will involve clarifying what it means to claim that actions are prime. I will consider Williamson's construal of actions as prime in a way that parallels his treatment of knowledge. I will argue that we need to be careful about treating our actions in the way suggested because of an internal relation between the success condition of an action and the action itself; a parallel relation does not hold for most cases of knowledge.