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Agency: Moral Identity and Free Will D Agency AVID Moral Identity and Free Will W DAVID WEISSMAN EISSMAN There is agency in all we do: thinking, doing, or making. We invent a tune, play, or use it to celebrate an occasion. Or we make a conceptual leap and ask more ab- stract ques� ons about the condi� ons for agency. They include autonomy and self- appraisal, each contested by arguments immersing us in circumstances we don’t control. But can it be true we that have no personal responsibility for all we think Agency and do? Agency: Moral Ident ty and Free Will proposes that delibera� on, choice, and free will emerged within the evolu� onary history of animals with a physical advantage: Moral Identity organisms having cell walls or exoskeletons had an internal space within which to protect themselves from external threats or encounters. This defense was both and Free Will structural and ac� ve: such organisms could ignore intrusions or inhibit risky behav- ior. Their capaci� es evolved with � me: inhibi� on became the power to deliberate and choose the manner of one’s responses. Hence the ability of humans and some other animals to determine their reac� ons to problema� c situa� ons or to informa- � on that alters values and choices. This is free will as a material power, not as the DAVID WEISSMAN conclusion to a conceptual argument. Having it makes us morally responsible for much we do. It prefi gures moral iden� ty. A GENCY Closely argued but plainly wri� en, Agency: Moral Ident ty and Free Will speaks for autonomy and responsibility when both are eclipsed by ideas that embed us in his- tory or tradi� on. Our sense of moral choice and freedom is accurate. We are not altogether the creatures of our circumstances. As with all Open Book publica� ons, this en� re book is available to read for free on the publisher’s website. Printed and digital edi� ons, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.com Cover Image: Photo by Carlos de Toro on Unsplash at h� ps://unsplash.com/pho- tos/uVEVvDSYze8 Cover Design: Anna Ga� book eebook and OA edi� ons also available OPEN ACCESS www.openbookpublishers.com OBP To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: htps://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/1126 Open Book Publishers is a non-proft independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. AGENCY Agency Moral Identity and Free Will David Weissman https://www.openbookpublishers.com/ © 2020 David Weissman This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: David Weissman, Agency: Moral Identity and Free Will. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0197 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https:// doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0197#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Any digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https:// doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0197#resources All diagrams are by the author and released under the same license as the book (CC BY). ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-875-4 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-876-1 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-877-8 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-878-5 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-879-2 ISBN Digital (XML): 978-1-78374-880-8 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0197 Cover image: Photo by Carlos de Toro on Unsplash at https://unsplash.com/photos/ uVEVvDSYze8 Cover design: Anna Gatti Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Chapter One: Agency 11 1. Semantics 11 2. Two Points of Reference 11 3. Individuality 18 4. Purpose/Intention 19 5. Sensibility 23 6. Thought and Perception 26 7. Competence and Skill 30 8. Efort 31 9. Partners 31 10. Efcacy 32 11. Oversight 35 12. Frustration 38 13. Will 38 Chapter Two: Free Will 39 1. Introduction 39 2. Background 40 3. Freedom To and Freedom From 42 4. Ontology 44 5. Universal Determinism 45 6. Explanation/Prediction 47 7. Cause or Capacity 49 8. Leibniz or Laplace 50 9. “Things Are Not Up to Us.” 54 10. Emergent Wholes, Their Properties and Powers 62 11. Character/Sensibility 65 12. Initiative 68 13. Productive Imagination 70 vi Agency: Moral Identity and Free Will 14. Consciousness 71 15. Choosing Freely 72 16. Last Thoughts 93 Chapter Three: Socialization 95 1. Conficted Aims 95 2. Idiosyncrasy 97 3. Talent 101 4. Interiority 102 5. Social Space 104 6. Normativity 106 7. Socialization 107 8. Collaboration, Cooperation, Command 110 9. Cities 112 10. Disequilibrium 115 Chapter Four: Autonomy 119 1. Minerva 119 2. Semantics 120 3. Assertion 120 4. Self-Identifcation 122 5. Collaboration/Contention 123 6. Regulation 125 7. Oversight 126 8. In Itself, For Itself 128 Chapter Five: Moral Identity 129 1. Three Perspectives: Agents 130 2. Three Perspectives: Nodes 141 3. Three Perspectives: The Whole 147 Afterword 177 Bibliography 179 Index 185 In memory of Paul Weiss Acknowledgments Thanks to Alessandra Tosi and her team—Lucy Barnes, Anna Gatti, and Luca Bafa—for production values apparent in this fnished book; to an anonymous reader for his persistent queries; and to Laura Rodriguez for marketing that’s more than show. My wife, Kathy, mined the fnal proof for reams of my small errors. She was its fnal copy editor. I’m grateful to all. Introduction Agency implies purpose, action, and autonomy. We are inventive, efective, and self-appraising. But there is an ambiguity. Does agency signify reality-testing in the near-world where the existence and character of other people and things are independent of our thinking? Or is agency the activity of a mind inspecting sensory data, ideas, and itself? These are alternative foundational claims: one material and existential; the other subjective and epistemological. Aristotle described agency in detail, but his formulation is obscured by the Cartesian tradition that elides thought with being. It supposes that we know reality when mind turns on itself, though agency is apparent to anyone taking a walk or calling a friend. The diference between these views is suppressed rather than resolved when reality-testing is construed as the mere look of the data inspected: we only seem to be agents afoot in a world we haven’t made. These are sample passages from Heidegger’s Being and Time: [S]ciences have the manner of Being which this entity—man himself—possesses. This entity we denote by the term “Dasein.”1 Ontology and phenomenology are not two distinct philosophical disciplines among others. These terms characterize philosophy itself with regard to its object and its way of treating that object. Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, and takes its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein, which, as an analytic of existence, has made fast the guiding-line for all philosophical inquiry at the point where it arises and to which it returns.2 Heidegger is rightly credited with bringing Hegel to ground— universals cashed out in particularity—yet his ontology is speculative in 1 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 32. 2 Ibid., p. 62. © David Weissman, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0197.06 2 Agency: Moral Identity and Free Will a traditional way. For Dasein is an intuiting ego: everything real because intelligible is located in the minds discerning it. This is phenomenology as it claims transcendental competence: minds discern reality’s essential structure and details by inspecting experience and themselves. Much of philosophy is comfortable with this bias and its deference to Plato’s cave allegory: he alleged that minds can know the ordering principles of the cosmos because the quest for reality’s Forms is intuition’s trajectory.3 Descartes inverted Plato’s focus: distilling minds are self-discovering. Defecting the skepticism of his frst Meditation, Descartes discovered the theater where everything is set before our inspecting minds, all of it informed by mind’s clear and distinct ideas. Nor is anything else thinkable. For what can we know or imagine when nothing is either conceivable or existent if not inspectable? Esse est percipi was Descartes’ idea before Berkeley used the phrase. It embodies two claims: that evidence of existence is a necessary condition for existence, and that evidence isn’t secured if a mind isn’t aware of itself (thereby confrming its own existence) while inspecting things perceived. For “I am, I exist, that is certain. But how often? Just when I think,” 4 implying both awareness of something and mind’s awareness of its own existence while inspecting that thing. Put aside Descartes’ gesture when he introduced a god as the deus ex machina justifying moral certainty that the external world is largely as it seems. For all states of afairs lying beyond the arc of consciousness earn Kant’s designation as “negative noumena.”5 He reduced agency to the dimensions—the single souls—of Leibnizian monads;6 he fortifed the self-inspecting cogito, re-describing it as the agent responsible for schematizing experience in ways that satisfy the maker’s values and interests.
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