Action, Ethics, and Responsibility

4. Making Up One’s Mind

4 Often, on the basis of practical reasoning, one makes up one’s mind to do a certain thing. In so doing, one comes to have an intention to do that thing. As well, one often engages in theoretical reasoning and, on that basis, makes up one’s mind how things stand in some matter, thereby coming to have a certain belief. Making up one’s mind in either of these types of case is sometimes called deciding: in the first type of case, practical deciding (Mele 2000, 82)1 or deciding-to-do (O’Shaughnessy 1980, 297); in the latter, cognitive (Mele 2000, 82) or doxastic (Watson 2004b, 139) deciding or deciding-that (O’Shaughnessy 1980, 297). And both processes of reasoning leading to one’s making up one’s mind may fairly be called deliberation (cf. Audi 2001, 93). In both cases, there is some question or uncertainty in one’s mind, and one seeks a resolution by engaging in the appropriate sort of reasoning. If one succeeds at what one is trying to do, one takes a stand, therein coming to have a certain psychological attitude on the basis of one’s reasoning. The acquired attitudes, too, are in important respects similar. Both intending and believing are a matter of being committed, in the first case to performing an action of a certain type, in the second to things’ being a certain way. And both are “judgment-sensitive” attitudes, attitudes that, in a rational being, are responsive to that individual’s assessments of reasons favoring or disfavoring these attitudes (Scanlon 1998, 20). Individuals may be subject to criticism for failures to follow certain norms in forming intentions and beliefs. And the relevant norms, in both cases, include norms of rationality as well as ethical norms.2 In important respects, coming to have the attitudes one acquires when one makes up one’s mind differs from coming to have a headache or becoming hungry. Despite these similarities, there are important differences. An obvious one, already suggested, is that in standard cases, one makes up one’s mind Making Up One’s Mind Randolph Clarke 68 R. Clarke what to do on the basis of practical reasons, whereas one makes up one’s mind how things stand on the basis of evidence or epistemic reasons. Here I’ll draw attention to what appear to be two further—and interrelated—differences, one phenomenological, the other conceptual. These apparent differences underwrite the widespread view that there is a fundamental dissimilarity with respect to our agency in the two kinds of case. I examine these differences in the first section below and set out a prima facie case for dissimilarity. In the final two sections, I address two alternative views on which making up one’s mind what to do and making up one’s mind how things stand are on a par with respect to our agency. On one of these views, although one may in either case actively try to decide, in both cases the culmination of any such effort—the final making up of one’s mind—is essentially inactive; on the other view, the culminating event is active in both cases, and in the same sense. Defusing the arguments offered for these views supports the position that these two forms of making up one’s mind are, as regards our agency, fundamentally dissimilar. I won’t have much to say here about why practical deciding and cognitive deciding differ with respect to our agency. It’s easy enough to say that the answer has something to do with the kinds of reasons for which one may intend, on the one hand, and believe, on the other; but it’s far from easy—and something I’m not sure anyone has succeeded in doing—to fully explain this difference. My aim here is more modest. There is a prima facie difference between these two kinds of case of making up one’s mind; I aim to exhibit this apparent difference and rebut two denials of its reality. 1 Intentional Control Consider a typical episode in which you’re unsure how things stand in some matter, you conduct an inquiry with the goal of making up your mind, and on the basis of reasoning you come to have a firm belief about how things stand. Suppose, for example, that you’ve long been puzzled about what moved the jurors to acquit O.J., and you want now to settle the...