EL MESÍAS EN LOS NEVIIM (PROFETAS)

Consider the following case:

Sam’s Exam: Suppose Sam knows that she should be studying for her final exam, even though there’s a party going on that night that she re- ally wants to go to. She judges it would be best for her to study for her exam, endorses her desire to study for her exam, plans to study for her exam etc., and yet somehow she ends up going to the party anyway. Sam does not act on what she judges it best to do, or in line with what she plans to do, or on the desire she higher-order endorses. But com- mon sense tells us that Sam’s action is still self-expressive and so she nevertheless ought to be attributionally-responsible for her action. This poses a problem for traditional Deep Self theorists because, according to their views, agents are not attributionally-responsible for their actions unless their actions are aligned with their planning, endorsing, valuing, or caring states. Traditional Deep Self views thus face an important objection: they counter-intuitively hold that we are not responsible for weak-willed acts, and so fail to provide a necessary condition for attributability. Per- haps, then, the bounds of the Deep Self could just be drawn differently so as to cast a wider net around the class of attributable actions?

The problem, however, is more deeply entrenched than this. Deep Self views are custom-made to show how acting on desires that the agent her- self does not see as most favorable undermine agency in such a way as to make such actions non-attributable, as in the case of compulsion. But weakness of will is usually described as the failure to act in accordance with what one finds to be the most favorable course of action, and yet we

do intuitively think weak-willed actions are self-expressive.107 One of the motivations for Deep Self views is making sense of the claim that acting attributably just involves doing what one really wants to do, where “really wants” is qualified in such a way as to bracket off compulsive desires, which Deep Self theorists see as having the power to coerce agents ‘from the inside,’ so to speak. But they do this by bracketing off motivations that are counter to what agents judge best, endorse, or plan for, which also in- escapably seems to bracket off weak-willed actions. So traditional Deep Self views not only incorrectly classify weak-willed actions as non- attributable, they also seem to do so almost by design.108

107 I should note at the outset that I am operating under the assumption that compulsion is primarily a conative or volitional phenomenon rather than a merely cognitive one. It is possible that some things that we colloquially call ‘compulsions’ may instead be instanc- es of acting in accordance with pathologically acquired beliefs about the world. For ex- ample, an agent might come to believe that her house would burn down if she didn’t check that her oven was turned off 18 times. Suppose she does so instead of getting to a meeting on time. On a view like the Minimal Approval view, we could easily explain how she would be exempt from blameworthiness by showing how even though her ov- en-checking is attributable to her, given the background conditions, which include her epistemic state, she shouldn’t be blameworthy for doing what she reasonably judged to be the best course of action. If this account of why compulsion exempts agents from blame could be made plausible, there are two ways it might be bolstered to at least ad- dress the distinction between compulsion and weakness of will. One possibility is that it could be argued that weakness of will is a truly volitional occurrence while compulsion is cognitive. Another route would be to argue that both compulsion and weakness are cog- nitive phenomena and the distinction lies in differences in the beliefs, or the manner of their acquisition. Even if some compulsive cases do function in this this way, I am deeply skeptical that all compulsive cases function this way. If that’s right, there is a still a seri- ous problem to solve here. I am grateful to Sarah Buss for pressing me to articulate this assumption.

108 This problem has been articulated many times, notably in Vihvelin (1994), Haji (1998), Haji (2002), Fischer (2010), Fischer (2012), McKenna (2011), McKenna and van Schoelandt (2015), Strabbing (2016), and McKenna (forthcoming), and is often considered by many to be a knock-down objection to Deep Self views, despite Deep Self theorists having tradi-

Take, for example, Bratman’s planning view. On Bratman’s view an agent’s act is only attributable if it meshes with her self-governing policies and plans about which desires of hers to act on. So if an agent makes a self-governing policy to always act on her desires to stay home and study before an exam, but then when the time comes is unable to get herself to act on her self-governing policy, her action will be non-attributable. But Bratman is also inclined to describe weakness of will in this way, as an agent’s inability to get herself to act on her own self-governing policies. In short, weakness of will is usually defined as a failure of self-governance, and self-governance is usually what is required for attributable action. This makes the fact that weak-willed actions do seem blameworthy very difficult to accommodate on Deep Self views. This is a very serious prob- lem for these theories since weak-willed cases appear to many as cases in which it is particularly appropriate to hold agents responsible; in fact, Gideon Rosen has even argued that agents are responsible for their actions only when they are weak-willed.109

We do, intuitively, want to say that compulsive cases are cases of non- attributable actions, and Deep Self views are able to give a richly explana- tory account of why agents are not responsible for compulsion. When act- ing on compulsive desires, agents’ standpoints are overpowered such that their resultant actions do not express anything about what it is they really want to do. Yet the attraction of this proposal is severely undercut by the tionally relatively little to say about it. For example, Fischer writes of Frankfurt’s view, “The problem of weakness of the will is, in my view, a decisive problem for Frankfurt’s approach. Somewhat surprisingly, it has not received nearly as much attention as the so- called ‘regress’ problem. (Indeed, I am not aware of any discussion of the relationship be- tween his account of acting freely and the problem of weakness of will by Frankfurt)” [Fischer (2010)].

109 _{Rosen (2014) argues that agents could only be responsible for weak-willed actions be-} cause only weak-willed agents meet the high epistemic standards for knowing wrongdo- ing that he takes to be a prerequisite for blameworthiness.

fact that weak-willed cases have these same features yet intuitively these actions are attributable. It seems there must be some way of distinguishing compulsion from weakness of will as well as what makes the latter but not the former attributable, but traditional Deep Self views seemingly have no resources available to make such a distinction. Since it seems the distinc- tion between compulsion and weakness of will must be found elsewhere, we may wonder if we should look elsewhere, too, for an explanation of what makes agents non-blameworthy for compulsive actions.