Moore on intention and volition.

• Author: Bratman, Michael E.
• Position: Michael S. Moore - Symposium: Act & Crime

In Act and Crime,(1) Michael Moore defends 'the voluntary act requirement' for criminal liability.(2) In brief, this is the view that liability to criminal punishment requires 'the doing of a voluntary act."(3) Moore's claim is that this doctrine, with one qualification,(4) is both accurate as a description of Anglo-American criminal law and defensible as a condition on the justifiable imposition of criminal liability.(5) Moore tries to ground this view in a conception of action that is broadly in the spirit of the nineteenth-century Austin and Holmes, among others.(6) On this conception, actions are concrete, particular events, involving appropriate movements of the agent's body and having appropriate mental causes.(7) Further, it is Moore's view that the relevant mental cause will always be an intention specifically in favor of such a movement--an intention Moore calls a "volition."(8)

Moore's development and defense of the Austin-Holmes theory of action is impressively thorough and rich in scholarly detail.(9) Moore deserves great credit for bringing to the fore, with force and clarity, basic issues at the intersection of the philosophy of action and the criminal law. Moore has much to say about the two prongs of his theory of action--both the idea that voluntary action must involve a bodily movement,(10) and the idea that the cause of the bodily movement must be a "volition." His discussion of each of these prongs of his theory raises important questions, but in this Article I focus on the second prong. I distinguish between two Moorean views about intention and volition, and then argue that a planning theory of intention, along lines I have sketched elsewhere,(11) should accept one of these views but reject the other.

Moore calls the view that certain mental causes are distinctive of voluntary, intentional action the "mental cause thesis," and uses the term "volition" to indicate these causes.(12) In his exploration of what volitions are, Moore articulates two main theses. First, Moore identifies volitions with a species of intention.(13) In particular, volitions are intentions in favor of relevant bodily movements (in a sense of "bodily movement" that does not entail that the agent acted). Second, Moore develops a general approach to intention according to which intentions are distinctive states of mind, not to be reduced to desires and beliefs.(14) Let us call the second view the "thesis of the distinctiveness of intention," and the first the 'intention theory of volition." I am in broad agreement about the distinctiveness of intention, but I think there are serious objections to the intention theory of volition. These objections derive from our conception of ourselves as planning agents.

Begin with the observation that we use concepts of intention to characterize both our actions and our minds: we characterize actions as done intentionally and with a certain intention, and we attribute mental states of intending, or having an intention to act in certain ways now or later.(15) A common approach to intention is to begin with intentional action and action done with an intention.(16) From this starting point, it is natural to see the intentionality of action as lying in its relation to the desires and beliefs by appeal to which we normally explain such actions.

Suppose, for example, that I want (desire) to signal for a cab and believe I can do this by raising my arm. Suppose that is why I go ahead and raise my arm. If you asked me why I raised my arm, I would tell you that I wanted to signal for a cab and thought that I would do that by raising my arm: I would explain my raising my arm by citing an appropriate relation to my relevant desire and belief. It is natural to suppose that this desire-belief explanation is what insures that my arm raising is both intentional and done with the intention of signaling for a cab. On this approach, for me to raise my arm with the intention of signaling is just for my raising it (or perhaps its rising) to stand in an appropriate explanatory relation--a relation commonly seen as causal(17)--to my desire and belief. Similarly, under this approach, the fact that my arm-raising is intentional consists of the fact that it stands in an appropriate relation to some such desire-belief pair. In this way we are led to see intention, at least as it figures in action, not as a distinctive state of mind, but as consisting of certain relations between actions, desires, and beliefs.

This is a reductive approach to intention in action. But what about intention for the future--for example, my intention to fly back to San Francisco in two days? As Davidson has emphasized, I can intend to do something later and yet never act on that intention;(18) perhaps I die between now and then. So intention for the future cannot in general be understood as a relation between desire, belief, and intended action. Still, we could try to extend the reductive approach by identifying intention for the future with some sort of belief-desire complex.(19) This was the strategy of the nineteenth-century Austin.(20)

In a series of papers and in my book, Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason, I explore and defend a different, nonreductive tack.(21) Rather than beginning with intentional action, I begin with future-directed intention.(22) I ask about the roles such intentions play in our lives, eschewing the assumption that intention must be reducible to desire, belief, causation, and action.(23) I try to articulate the systematic relations between such intentions, other psychological states, deliberation, planning, and action, and describe a network of regularities and norms in terms of which we can understand what it is to have an intention for the future.(24) I take this tack because I believe that future-directed intentions play a central, coordinating role in our psychology, both individual and social, and that it is an error to ignore them in theorizing about intelligent agency.

In particular, we are planning agents. We frequently settle in advance on partial plans for the future, and these plans then guide and structure later planning and action. We do not only reason about what to do now, but frequently try to decide now what to do at some later time, and then figure out what to do in the interim given our decision about that later time. I deliberate, for example, about whether to go to Philadelphia next month. Having settled this question by deciding to go, I then need to figure out how to get there in a way that is compatible with my other, prior plans--for example, my plans concerning my teaching duties at Stanford. Such planning enables me to organize and coordinate my own activities over time. It also enables me to organize and coordinate my own activities with those of other agents--as I do when I make plans to meet a friend in Philadelphia.

Not all desire-belief agents are planning agents. I do not claim that it is essential to being a purposive agent that one be a planning agent. I only claim that we--normal, adult human...