Habitual action

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.

Acting because of and for reasons

It seems that:

1. If you pursue friendship because friendship is non-instrumentally valuable, then you pursue friendship non-instrumentally.

But not so. Imagine a rich eccentric offers you $10,000 to pursue something that is non-instrumentally valuable. You think about it, correctly decide friendship is non-instrumentally valuable, and pursue it to gain the $10,000. You are pursuing friendship because it is non-instrumentally valuable, but you are pursuing it merely instrumentally.

More generally, is there any conditional of the form:

2. If you pursue friendship because p, then you pursue friendship non-instrumentally

that is true in all cases, where p states some known reason for the pursuit of friendship? I don’t think so. For the rich eccentric can tell you that you will get $10,000 if it is both the case that p and you pursue friendship. In that case, if you know that it is the case that p, then your reason for pursuing friendship is p, since it is given p, and only given p, that you will get $10,000 for your pursuit of friendship.

Maybe the lesson from the above is that there is a difference between doing something because of a reason and doing it for the reason. That friendship is non-instrumentally valuable is a reason. In the first rich eccentric case, you are pursuing because of that reason, but you are not pursuing it for that reason. Thus maybe we can say:

3. If you pursue friendship for the reason that friendship is non-instrumentally valuable, then you pursue friendship non-instrumentally.

In the case where you are aiming only at the $10,000, you are pursuing friendship for the reason that pursuing friendship will get you $10,000, or more explicitly for the conjunctive reason that (a) if friendship is non-instrumentally valuable it will get you $10,000 to pursue it and (b) it is non-instrumentally valuable. But you are nonetheless pursuing friendship because it is non-instrumentally valuable.

There is thus a rather mysterious “acting for R” relation in regard to actions which does not reduce to “acting because R”.

Instrumental and non-instrumental goods

Aristotle writes at times as if the fact that something is non-instrumentally good for one makes it a greater good than merely instrumental goods. That’s surely false. Among the non-instrumental goods are many quite trivial goods: knowing how many blades of grass there are on one’s front lawn, enjoying a quick game of Space Invaders, etc.

Means inappropriate to ends

Consider this thesis:

1. You should adopt means appropriate to your ends.

The “should” here is that of instrumental rationality.

I am inclined to think (1) is false if by “end” is meant the end the agent actually adopts, as opposed to a natural end of the agent. If your ends are sufficiently irrational, adopting means appropriate to them may be less rational than adopting means inappropriate to them.

Suppose your end is irrationality. Is it really true that you should adopt the means to that, such as reasoning badly? Surely not! Instead, you should reject the end.

Instead of (1), what is likely true is:

2. You should be such that you adopt means appropriate to your ends.

But what is wrong with being such that you adopt means inappropriate to your ends is not necessarily the means—it could be the ends.

Unjust laws have no normative force, and stupid ends have no normative force, either.

An odd poker variant

Suppose Alice can read your mind, and you are playing poker against a set of people not including Alice. You don’t care about winning, just about money. Alice has a deal for you that you can’t refuse.

• If you win, she takes your winnings away.

• If you lose, but you tried to win, she pays you double what you lost.

• If you lose, but you didn’t try to win, she does nothing.

Clearly the prudent thing to do is to try to win. For if you don’t try to win, then you are guaranteed not to get any money. But if you do try, you won’t lose anything, and you might gain.

Here is the oddity: you are trying to win in order to get paid, but you only get paid if you don’t win. Thus, you are trying to achieve something, the achievement of which would undercut the end you are pursuing.

Is this possible? I think so. We just need to distinguish between pursuing victory for the sake of something else that follows from victory and pursuing victory for the sake of something that might follow from the pursuit of victory.

Pursuing a thing for its own sake

Suppose you pursue truth for its own sake. As we learn from Aristotle, it does not follow that you don’t pursue truth for the sake of something else. For the most valuable things are both intrinsically and instrumentally valuable, and so they are typically pursued both for their own sake and for the sake of something else.

What if you pursue something, but not for the sake of something else. Does it follow that you pursue the thing for its own sake? Maybe, but it’s not as clear as it might seem. Imagine that you eat fiber for the sake of preventing colon cancer. Then you hear a study that says that fiber doesn’t prevent colon cancer. But you continue to eat fiber, out of a kind of volitional inertia, without any reason to do so. Then you are pursuing the consumption of fiber not for the sake of anything else. But merely losing the instrumental reason for eating fiber doesn’t give you a non-instrumentally reason. Rather, you are now eating fiber irrationally, for no reason.

Perhaps it is impossible to do something for no reason. But even if it is impossible to do something for no reason, it is incorrect to define pursuing something for its own sake as pursuing it not for the sake of something else. For that you pursue something for its own sake states something positive about your pursuit, while that you don’t pursue it for the sake of anything else states something negative about your pursuit. There is a kind of valuing of the thing for its own sake that is needed to pursue the thing for its own sake.

It is tempting to say that you pursue a thing for its own sake provided that you pursue it because of the intrinsic value you take it to have. But that, too, is incorrect. For suppose that a rich benefactor tells you that they will give you a ton of money if you gain something of intrinsic value today. You know that truth is valuable for its own sake, so you find out something. In doing so, you find out the truth because the truth is intrinsically valuable. But your pursuit of that truth is entirely instrumental, despite your reason being the intrinsic value.

Hence, to pursue a thing for its own sake is not the same as to pursue it because it has intrinsic value. Nor is it to pursue it not for the sake of something else.

I suspect that pursuing a thing for its own sake is a primitive concept.

Instrumental bads

Suppose that a process Q has a chance r of producing some non-instrumentally bad result B, and nothing else of relevance. That fact gives us reason not to actualize Q. But suppose Q is actualized. Is it bad?

Well, if it’s bad, it seems it’s only instrumentally bad. It is no worse to be killed by a well-aimed arrow than by a well-aimed bullet, even though in the case of the well-aimed arrow the process of a deadly projectile’s flight lasts longer. Yet if a process producing a bad result were non-instrumentally bad, it would be worse if it lasted longer.

So we now have four options:

1. Q is always instrumentally bad (whether or not B eventuates)

2. Q is never instrumentally bad

3. Q is instrumentally bad if and only if B eventuates

4. Q is instrumentally bad if and only if B does not eventuate.

Option (4) is crazy. Option (2) destroys the very idea of an instrumental bad. So that leaves options (1) and (3).

If we opt for option (1), then we can have a world that contains instrumental bads without any non-instrumental bads—just imagine that Q obtains, B does not eventuate, and nothing else that’s bad ever happens. This seems a little counterintuitive: instrumental bads are derivatively bad, but how can something be derivatively bad without anything that is non-derivatively bad?

That suggests we should go for option (3): a process that has a chance of leading to a non-instrumental bad is bad only when the non-instrumental bad eventuates.

But now imagine Molinism is true. Suppose that God knows that Q, if actualized, would not lead to B, even though it has a non-zero chance r of doing so. In that case, the fact that Q has a chance r > 0 of leading to B is no reason for God not to actualize Q. But that something is bad is always a reason not to actualize it. If instrumental bads are an exception for this, then instrumental bads aren’t bads.

Now, I think Molinism is false. But whether (3) is true should not, it seems, depend on whether Molinism is true. So if (3) is false on Molinism, it is simply false.

So we seem to be stuck!

Maybe the right move is this. Fake money isn’t money and merely instrumental bads aren’t bad. This allows us an escape from the Molinism argument. For if merely instrumental bads aren’t bad, there is no problem about the fact that the Molinist God has no reason not to produce them.

Another move might be to say that (3) is true, but disproves Molinism. This doesn’t strike me as right, but maybe it’s defensible.

Until this is resolved, one really shouldn’t be running any arguments that depend on instrumental bads being actually bad.

The intrinsic badness of certain future tensed facts on presentism

It is bad that tomorrow someone will be in intense pain. On eternalism, we can easily explain this: tomorrow’s pain is just as real as today’s. But on presentism and growing block, future pains don’t exist.

Presumably, the presentist and growing blocker will say that the tensed fact of there being an intense pain tomorrow is bad, and this bad tensed fact presently exists.

Is this badness of the future tensed fact about the pain an instrumental or non-instrumental badness? If it’s instrumental, it is not clear what it could be instrumental to. The main candidate (apart from special cases where there is an obvious candidate, such as when the pain leads to despair) is that the fact that there will be a pain tomorrow is instrumental to tomorrow’s pain. But the fact that tomorrow there will be pain won’t cause that pain—otherwise, it would be trivial that every future event has a cause.

So the present badness of there being a pain tomorrow would be non-instrumental. But now imagine two scenarios with finite time lines.

• Scenario A: There is a mindless universe with a day of random particle movement, followed by the formation of a brain which has intense pain for a minute, followed by the end of time.

• Scenario B: There is a mindless universe with a century of random particle movement, followed by the formation of a brain which has intense pain for a minute, followed by the end of time.

Let’s suppose we find ourselves at the last moment of time in one scenario or the other. Then in Scenario A, there was a day of the obtaining of a “future pain fact”, and in Scenario B, there was a century of the obtaining of a “future pain fact”. If a future pain fact is a non-instrumentally bad thing, then there was non-instrumentally bad stuff in Scenario B for a much longer period of time than in Scenario A, and so Scenario B is much worse than Scenario A with respect to future pain. But that seems mistaken: the greater length of time during which there is a future pain fact does not seem any reason to prefer one scenario over another.

Non-instrumental pursuits and uncaused causes

Here’s a curious fact: It is one thing to pursue something because it is a non-instrumental good and another to pursue it as a non-instrumental good, or to pursue it non-instrumentally. A rich eccentric might offer me $100 for pursuing some non-instrumental good. I might then do a Google Image search for “great art”, and spend a few seconds contemplating some painting. I would then be pursuing the good of contemplation because it is a non-instrumental good, but not as a non-instrumental good. (What if the eccentric offered to double the payment if I pursued the good non-instrumentally? My best bet would then be to just forget all about the offer and hope I end up pursuing some good non-instrumentally anyway.)

Thinking about the above suggests an important thesis: To pursue a good non-instrumentally is something positive, not merely the denial of instrumentality. Simply cutting out of the world the story about the rich eccentric and keeping my contemplation in place does not make the contemplation be pursued as a non-instrumental good. Rather, such world surgery makes the contemplation non-rational. To make the contemplation a non-instrumental pursuit of a good requires that I add something—a focus on that good in itself. We don’t get non-instrumental pursuit by simply scratching out the instrumentality, just as we don’t get an uncaused cause by just deleting its cause—rather, an uncaused cause is a cause of a different sort, and a non-instrumental pursuit is a pursuit of a different sort.

Two ways to pursue y for the sake of z

The phrase

1. x pursues y as a means to z

is ambiguous between two readings:

2. x pursues y-as-a-means-to-z

and:

3. x’s pursuit of y is a means to z.

Case (2) is the standard case of means-end relationships: Alice goes on the exercise bike to keep her healthy.

But (3) can be a different beast. Bob’s psychologist has told him that it would be good for him to secrete more adrenaline; maybe striving to win at tennis is the most efficient of the safe methods for secreting adrenaline available to Bob; so, Bob relentlessly pursues victory in tennis. It is not the victory, however, that releases the adrenaline in my hypothetical story: it is the pursuit of that victory. In that case, it is Bob’s pursuit of victory that is a means to (mental) health. Moreover, it could be the case that what secretes adrenaline most effectively is the non-instrumental pursuit of victory:

It looks to me like in all these cases what we have are instances of final causation, where y’s endhood is caused by z’s endhood. In case (2), it is y’s instrumental endhood that is caused by z’s endhood, while in some cases of (3), like Bob’s adrenaline-releasing pursuit of victory, it is y’s non-instrumental endhood that is caused by z’s endhood.

There can also be cases where y’s instrumental endhood is caused by z’s endhood, but y is not a means to z. For instance, we could imagine that Bob’s psychologist told him that given his peculiar motivational structure, the most efficient way for him to release adrenaline would be to strive to gain money by winning at tennis. In that case, Bob pursues winning at tennis instrumentally for the sake of gaining money, but this pursuit is finally caused by his pursuit of adrenaline. So, the victory’s instrumental endhood is finally caused by adrenaline’s endhood, but the victory is instrumental to money, not adrenaline.

Note, also, that normally a case of (2) is also a case of (3): when x pursues y-as-a-means-to-z, then x’s pursuit of y is also a means to z. But there are pathological cases where this is not so.

Instances fo (3) that are not instance of (2) look like cases of higher order reasons. But they need not be cases of reasons at all. For case (3) can be subdivided into at least two subcases:

1. x voluntarily chooses to pursue y in order that z might be achieved by the pursuit

2. The unchosen teleological structure of x (e.g., the nature of x) is such that x’s pursuit of y is ordered to z.

In type (a) cases, indeed z can provide a higher order reason. But in type (b) cases, there need be no reasons involved. Lion cubs pursue play in order that they might grow strong, let’s say. But growing strong doesn’t provide lion cubs with a reason to pursue play, because lion cubs are not (let us suppose) the sorts of beings that can be responsive to higher order reasons. Nonetheless, there is final causation: the end of strength causes play to be an end.

Non-instrumental pursuit

I pursue money instrumentally—for the sake of what it can buy—but I pursue fun non-instrumentally.

Here’s a tempting picture of the instrumental/non-instrumental difference as embodied in the money fun example:

1. Non-instrumental pursuit is a negative concept: it is instrumental pursuit minus the instrumentality.

But (1) is mistaken for at least two reasons. The shallower reason is an observation we get from the ancients: it is possible to simultaneously pursue the same goal both instrumentally and non-instrumentally. You might have fun both non-instrumentally and in order to rest. But then lack of instrumentality is not necessary for non-instrumental pursuit.

The deeper reason is this. Suppose I am purely instrumentally pursuing money for the sake of what it can buy, but I then remove the instrumentality, either by ceasing to pursue things that can be bought or by ceasing to believe that money can buy things, without adding any new motivations to my will. Then clearly the pursuit of money rationally needs to disappear—if it remains, that is a clear case of irrationality. But if non-instrumental pursuit were simply an instrumental pursuit minus the instrumentality, then why wouldn’t the removal of the instrumentality from my pursuit of money leave me non-instrumentally and rationally pursuing money, just as I non-instrumentally and rationally pursue fun?

There is a positive element in my pursuit of fun, a positive element that would be lacking in my pursuit of money if I started with instrumental pursuit of money and took away the instrumentality and somehow (perhaps per impossibile) continued (but now irrationally) pursuing money. It is thus more accurate to talk of “pursuit of a goal for its own sake” than to talk of “non-instrumental pursuit”, as the latter suggests something negative.

The difference here is somewhat like the difference between the concepts of an uncaused being and a self-existent being. If you take away the cause of a brick and yet keep the brick (perhaps per impossibile), you have a mere uncaused being. That’s not a self-existent being like God is said to be.

Rationality is not merely of instrumental value

Here's a thought experiment based on an idea of John Spano, one of our grad students (I modified it in the first version below by adding that the decisions are "somewhat better"). Imagine you could get a microchip implanted in your brain. Whenever you needed to make a decision, it would tell you what decision you should make, and it would be guaranteed to make decisions somewhat better than you would. Likewise, when you needed to figure out something theoretical, it would figure it out for you, and again it would be guaranteed to be somewhat better than you at this. Would you do this?

If the value of rationality is purely instrumental, this is worthwhile. But a life based on the dictates of the microchip just doesn't seem to be a flourishing life. This is clearly true if the decisions the chip comes to are only somewhat better than the ones you would come to yourself. But I suspect that it is also true if the decisions are much better.

At the same time, maybe you should go for the microchip in the case of decisions that significantly affect the flourishing of others. If you are a doctor and a microchip would make better diagnoses and recommendations that you could, then it might be your duty to sacrifice your own intellectual flourishing to the medical good of others.