A planning theory of self-governance: reply to Franklin

Before considering Christopher Evan Franklin’s essay in Philosophical Explorations, “Bratman on Identity over Time and Identification at a Time” (2016), let me set the stage. My question is: what is it for an agent to be self-governing, and is such self-governance as much a part of the natural, causal order as other aspects of human psychological functioning? Here I focus on self-governance at a time (or during a short temporal interval), and put aside complexities about self-governance over an extended period of time. In a tempting image, a “self” steps back from, and reflects on, her system of attitudes – a system of beliefs, desires, intentions, evaluations, and the like – and moves the levers of action. But, taken literally, this homuncular model of self-governance is unavailable to a broadly naturalistic philosophy of action. Instead, what we want is a model of the functioning of the system of attitudes such that when these attitudes so function the agent governs. Such self-governance would consist in – to borrow from Harry Frankfurt – the relevant “operation . . . of the systems we are” (1988a, 74). What is crucial here is the provision of naturalistically embeddable sufficient conditions for relevant self-governance. We can allow for the possibility of multiple such sufficient conditions, since that would not block our claim that self-governance can be embedded within a broadly naturalistic view of ourselves. And we can allow that a somewhat weaker version of the sufficient conditions we do provide might also constitute a kind of self-governance. With an eye to providing such sufficient conditions, a broadly Frankfurtian strategy would be to suppose that the agent has a relevant practical standpoint, one that consists of attitudes that help constitute where she stands on certain practical issues (Frankfurt 1988b). When this standpoint appropriately guides, the agent governs. But what constitutes the agent’s practical standpoint and its appropriate guidance? As I see it, we need two ideas here. (1) First, certain attitudes play roles in the agent’s psychic economy such that their guidance constitutes the agent’s direction of action. (2) Second, this guidance involves practical thinking and deliberation in a way that qualifies this agential direction of action as, in particular, a form of agential governance. There is self-governance when both these conditions are, in a coordinated way, satisfied in the etiology of action (Bratman 2007b, 4–5; 2007c, 209). Beginning in 2000 I published a series of essays that explored these two ideas and their relation to the planning theory of our agency. A central proposal was that we specify the roles in (1) by appeal to attitudes that, as a matter of function, help constitute and support