Alice has lived a long and reasonable life. She developed a lot of good habits. Every morning, she goes on a walk. On her walk, she looks at the lovely views, she smells the flowers in season, she gathers mushrooms, she listens to the birds chirping, she climbs a tree, and so on. Some of these things she does for their own sake and some she does instrumentally. For instance, she climbs a tree because she saw research that daily exercise promotes health, but she smells the flowers for the sake of the smelling itself.
She figured all this out when she was in her 30s, but now she is 60. One day, she realizes that for a while now she had forgotten the reasoning that led to her habits. In particular, she no longer knows which of her daily activities have innate value and which ones are merely instrumental.
So what can we say about her habitual activities?
One option is that they retain the teleology with which they were established. Although Alice no longer remembers that she climbs a tree solely for the sake of health, that is indeed what she climbs the tree for. On this picture, when we perform actions from habit, they retain the teleology they had when the habit was established. In particular, it follows that agential teleology need not be grounded in occurrent mental states of the agent. This is a difficult bullet to bite.
The other option is that they have lost their teleological characterization. This implies, interestingly, that there is no fact about whether the actions are being done for their own sake or instrumentally. In particular, it follows that the standard diviion of actions into those done for their own sake and those done instrumentally is not exhaustive. That is also a difficult bullet to bite.
I am not sure what to say. I suspect one lesson is that action is more complicated than we philosophers think, and our simple characterizations of it miss the complexity.
5 comments:
Here is a speculative idea: your ‘cares’ are among the things that sustain your habits, and that the cares that sustain any given habit might be enough to determine its teleology. So suppose the teleology of Alice’s tree-climbing changes from instrumental (for the sake of health) to non-instrumental over time. I would expect that one of the ways this would show up is in the kinds of things that could resist or break that habit. E.g., even were she to come to believe that tree-climbing is not a net benefit to her health, that would not make the habit any less robust.
In practice, it is very difficult to know the full network of our ‘cares’, because many of the things we care about are not things we consciously attend to very often. And it gets harder when we add the complication that habits are also sustained by things other than cares. But I think it might still get us the truthmakers we need for your examples.
Maybe. But suppose I care about friendship as such, but I don't remember whether sharing a meal with a friend is partly constitutive of friendship or is just instrumental towards increasing friendship. I have, however, a habit of sharing meals with friends.
Hey sorry Mr Pruss I've just been thinking of simultaneous causation time etc in regards to God. I know this supposes A theory but how does one solve this paradox:
God exists in eternity as St Thomas says time is caused but causation requires time so time can't be caused.
I know this is completely different convo buy wondering if you could help me out
Why think causation requires time, though?
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