Like-Minded: Externalism and Moral Psychology

5. The Production of Action

5 The Production of Action Recent years have seen the development of the implications of the “personsituation ” debate in psychology for philosophical discussions of virtue, most notably by Gilbert Harman (1999, 2000) and John Doris (1998, 2002). The reception of this work has been lukewarm at best. I, for one, have been convinced, so I find this a bit puzzling. Presumably one reason for this state of affairs is that philosophers have not been convinced by the case that has been presented. Although I will briefly review this case, I have little to add to it. A deeper reason why the “situationist” case has not been well received is that both those making the case and those resisting it have underestimated the scope of the implications of this work. This will be the principal theme of the present chapter. To put it as straightforwardly as possible, I will return philosophical discussion of this debate to its original topic: the production of action. Since this is a book about moral psychology , I will begin with the familiar philosophical debate about the psychology of virtue. However, my primary topic is a much wider one. The aim of this chapter is to develop the Wide Moral Systems Hypothesis by demonstrating the possibility, the plausibility, and the moral-psychological importance of an externalist position on the production of action. Here are two vignettes to introduce the issues. First vignette: Michael is watching television. He rises from his seat and leaves the room. Kim asks “Why did John go to the kitchen?” Ramona replies “He wants a beer and knows that there is some St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout in the fridge.” This reply answers Kim’s question by citing two sorts of psychological state: a desire for a beer and a belief that there is a beer in the fridge. For decades many philosophers have thought that an important way to explain actions—a way that may be the very core of any adequate 158 Chapter 5 explanation of action—is in terms of the combination of states (e.g. beliefs) that represent the world and other states (e.g. desires) that realize a person’s values, goals, and, most generally, wants. Such explanations are common and seem to work. It is reasonable to think that when such explanations accurately explain behavior, it is because they have accurately captured something about the processes that produced the action in question. This means that how we understand explanations of action is a guide to the ways in which action is produced. The adequacy of belief-desire explanations of actions will not be radically questioned here. The present question is how to understand the states cited in an explanation of action. Must they be located within the physical bounds of an agent’s body, or can they extend beyond these bounds to include parts of the wider world. Mostly implicitly, most philosophers and psychologists assume an individualistic view of the states offered in explanations of action, and correspondingly of the states thought to produce action. In contrast, I will defend a wide view of the psychology of action-production. I will discuss Donald Davidson ’s influential view of the explanation of actions in section 5.8. In subsequent sections I will offer an externalistic account of action production using Davidson’s schema. Second vignette: Kim is watching television. She rises and leaves her seat. Michael asks “Why did Kim go to the kitchen?” Ramona responds “She wants to use the phone in there. She just saw an advertisement calling for emergency aid to China. Kim’s really nice, you know? I’d trust her with anything! She took care of my cat last summer. Now she’s giving money to Oxfam.” This explanation of action is much like the first. It consists of a belief that aid is needed in China and a desire to give money to help are cited to explain why Kim leaves the room. But in this story there is also an additional component: a trait of character—Kim’s benevolence—that by many standards would count as a virtue. I take it that there is nothing odd about finding such a trait in an explanation of behavior. The corresponding idea is that such traits can function in the production of behavior. I also assume that there is nothing peculiar about Ramona’s generalization of Kim’s niceness on the basis of two instances. There is reason to think that a common...