Abstract

The relations between intentional actions and reasons for actions, between intentional actions and action plans, and between intentional actions and free actions are respectively examined in the three chapters of this essay. ;The first chapter argues that reasons do not cause actions and that reason explanations of actions are compatible with causal explanations of them. The key to these claims is the home-description argument. A thing's home-description is one used in originally identifying it. The argument is: a home description of the reason explanation for an action must characterize that action, but the home-description of the causal explanation cannot characterize it; thus the reasons cannot be the cause of the action. The reason explanation must characterize the action because of the conceptual connection between them resulting from limitations on what we count as a reason. Because of this conceptual relation between reason and action, the reason explanation can legitimately do its work regardless of whether or not the causal one does its. ;Chapter two explores how, according to Aristotle, agents are to construct appropriate plans of action, how they are to deliberate well. Practical reasoning can be cast into a syllogistic form in which the major premise indicates the desired end, the minor premise the means believed to be appropriate, and the conclusion the choice to act. The practically wise person deliberates about and grasps the right means through intuitive perception. However, one cannot deliberate about ends. They are grasped through processes of induction and habituation in moral education. ;According to the final chapter, an action is free if and only if the agent identifies with a self-structure of which the action is a part. The self-structure is a web of attitudes and actions with which the self identifies by evaluating them in a vocabulary of worth and by living out those evaluations in a narrative form. By forming action plans the self both "vertically" evaluates and "horizontally" narrates, thus identifying its self. Accordingly, if a free action is one identified with the self, then loss of freedom is a lack of identity between the self-as-agent and its established self-structure, specifically, between some action plan of the self-as-agent and the structured-self