Schechtman, Marya. Making Ourselves Whole

8/15/2019 Schechtman, Marya. Making Ourselves Whole

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ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES 21, no. 2(2014): 175-198.

© 2014 by Centre for Ethics, KU Leuven. All rights reserved. doi: 10.2143/EP.21.2.3030696

ABSTRACT. This article uncovers difficulties with a widely-held account ofthe kind of agential unity required for autonomous action and offers an

alternative account that avoids these difficulties. One influential approachto characterizing agency holds that autonomous action occurs only whenan agent is wholeheartedly committed to the motivation on which he orshe acts. The basic idea behind this approach (defended by Harry Frankfurtand Christine Korsgaard, among others) is that autonomous action is actionthat flows from motivations that are truly internal to the agent, and that itis an agent’s wholehearted commitment to a motivation that makes it inter-nal in the relevant sense. Reflection on the diachronic aspects of agencyreveals some serious challenges for this approach. These challenges arediagnosed as stemming from a fundamental structural tension between two

of its key elements; on the one hand the requirement of absolute whole-heartedness about our commitments, and on the other the claim that ques-tions of agency and autonomy must take as their target the principles, plans,and projects that individual actions represent rather than the actions them-selves. The article argues that this tension is unavoidable in the approachas usually defended and outlines a different strategy for characterizing agen-tial unity that does not require wholeheartedness.

K EYWORDS. Autonomy, diachronic commitment, wholeheartedness, narrative,strong unity

I. INTRODUCTION

There is a very influential (albeit controversial) approach to questionsof agency that I will call the ‘strong unity view’. This view, defendedby philosophers as different (and alike) as Harry Frankfurt and Christine

Korsgaard, is characterized by drawing close links between agency and

identity and defining the latter in terms of wholehearted commitment.

Marya SchechtmanUniversity of Illinois at Chicago

Making Ourselves Whole:

Wholeheartedness, Narrative, and Agency


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— 176 — Ethical Perspectives 21 (2014) 2

ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES – JUNE 2014

There is much that is appealing in the approach, but there is also a great

deal that is troubling about it, and many philosophers have argued that therequirement of wholeheartedness is implausibly strong when used to define

the agency or identity of beings as ambivalent and multiplicitous as we are.

In what follows, I will show that focus on the application of the strong

unity view to questions of diachronic identity can yield a deeper under-

standing of the underlying causes and implications of this problematic

requirement, as well as a strategy for addressing the problems it engenders.

I begin with a brief description of the main features of the strong unity

view. I then look at some questions about how the view applies in dia-chronic contexts, and use these to raise puzzles about the notion of whole-

heartedness as it applies over time. This discussion shows that the strong

unity view contains key claims that are in tension with one another – the

claim that questions about agency necessarily make reference to temporally-

extended plans and projects and the claim that autonomy requires whole-

heartedness. I conclude by sketching a suggestion for developing a view in

which the former claim can be maintained and the latter rejected.

II. THE S TRONG UNITY V IEW

The strong unity view is, among other things, a response to the question

of what makes a particular event an action of an agent rather than a mere

occurrence in his or her history. Part of a plausible answer is that an

agential action requires some kind of an intention, but according to the

strong unity view it requires more than that. The motive on which I actmust be truly mine if I am to be an agent with respect to it. In order for

a motivation to be truly mine, in this view, I must endorse it or identify

with it and must do so without hesitation or ambivalence – in Frankfurt’s

famous phrase, I must do so wholeheartedly .

The general contours of this view are familiar. It begins from the

recognition that humans, unlike other animals (at least as far as we know)

are not only able to experience motivations, desires, and impulses, but


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MARYA SCHECHTMAN – MAKING OURSELVES WHOLE

also to stand back from these and consider whether they want to, or

ought to, follow them. They are capable, in Frankfurt’s terms, of havingsecond-order desires (or volitions). The possibility of true autonomy or

human agency is taken to flow from this capability. Rather than just being

driven to action by whatever impulse happens to be strongest, we can

(indeed, as Korsgaard has it, must) take an evaluative attitude toward

these impulses, and this allows us to take a stand about which we want

to be moved by. The motivations that receive our endorsement are truly

ours and so have a special authority to represent us that unendorsed

motives do not. When we are moved by motivations we do not endorse,this is something that happens to us rather than something we do.

Frankfurt’s early and illuminating example here is unwilling drug

addiction. We can imagine addicts with a powerful desire for a particular

drug who have vowed to fight their addiction with all their strength. They

experience impulses to procure and take the drug, but they view these

impulses as unwanted intruders. If they succumb to them they will expe-

rience their drug use as a failure to do what they truly wanted to do and

see themselves as passive and helpless in the face of alien forces.

The simple idea that we make motivations truly ours by endorsing

them or identifying with them requires some refinement, however.

Endorsement is just one more thing that we do, and it is therefore not

obvious why it should be able to constitute the difference between

autonomous and non-autonomous action. What, after all, makes the act

of endorsement a true action of mine? Both Frankfurt and Korsgaard

answer this concern, to which they are fully sensitive, with a require-ment that our endorsements or identifications be entirely wholehearted . It

is not simply that I have the thought that I wish to be moved to action

by some motivation that makes it mine; I must be unambivalent in my

acceptance or rejection of it as a principle of action. The importance of

wholeheartedness is that it unifies the will and constitutes a well-defined

agential self capable of autonomous action. When I come down deci-

sively behind a particular motivation there is a fact about what I want


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and so a genuine distinction between acting on my own desires and

being acted through. The agential self is thus, according to the strong unity view, consti-

tuted by these wholehearted, and so self-unifying, choices. Frankfurt, for

instance, says that when someone makes a wholehearted decision “[…] the

decision determines what the person really wants by making the desire on

which he decides fully his own. To this extent, the person, in making a

decision by which he identifies with a desire, constitutes himself . The perti-

nent desire is no longer in any way external to him” (1988a, 170; italics

original). He goes on to say that our acts of “[…] ordering and of rejec-tion – integration and separation” of desires “create a self out of the raw

materials of an inner life” (1988a, 170).

Korsgaard makes a similar point, using an analogy between the per-

son and the state. This analogy features prominently and repeatedly in her

work, receiving its fullest development in Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity,

and Integrity. While the latter is an extended discussion of Plato’s use of

this analogy, it also contains her description of the ‘constitutional model’

of self. According to the constitutional model “[…] the agent is some-

thing over and above her parts the way the constitution of a city is some-

thing over and above the citizens and officials who live there” (Korsgaard

2009, 135). Large numbers of people who happen to be living in close

proximity do not constitute a unit, and there is no straightforward way to

interact with these people as a unified whole. If they organize themselves

into a state and put a constitution in place, however, a new entity comes

into existence, and now there is something that can be treated as a unit.If a person is to constitute him or herself through wholehearted

endorsement in this way, it is clear that he or she will need to be com-

pletely decided not only on what he or she is going to do, but also on the

principle of action that choice expresses. A particular action at a time may

be viewed simply in its own terms, or as an expression of some broader

principle, project, or way of life of which it is a representative or part.

This is a familiar point from action theory. A man may be seen simply to


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be digging a hole, but he may also be seen to be gardening, or getting

exercise or spending more time outdoors, or trying to please his wife. When we evaluate our motivations in the way that leads to autonomy as

the strong unity view describes, we are not just asking ‘Do I want to

do X?’ but ‘Do I want to be the kind of person who chooses to do X?’

What we are evaluating is thus not simply an action or impulse, but rather

a plan, project, relationship, or, in Korsgaard’s term, a “practical identity”

(an identity like mother, philosopher, union president, Democrat, recov-

ered addict) that the action implies (Korsgaard 1996, 101).

The fact that the targets of our identification or endorsement are notsimple individual actions, but rather principles of action, means that there

is a diachronic component to the question of agency. There are two main

reasons for this. First, the projects and plans that make up the principles

of action we need wholeheartedly to endorse usually take time to carry out.

If I wholeheartedly endorse a motivation to write a book, or to undertake

a particular career, or to kick my drug habit, I need to act not just now,

but also in the future. Many of our most important principles of action are

in fact open ended – e.g. devotion to a friend, partner, child, cause or

lifestyle. Korsgaard, explains that because our projects unfold over time

our commitments will “[…] automatically carry us into the future” (1989,

113). If you understand yourself as an agent “[…] implementing something

like a particular plan of life,” she says, “you need to identify with your

future in order to be what you are even now ” (1989, 113-114; italics original).

Second, the notion of commitment that stands at the centre of the

strong unity view suggests that we cannot know if an action is autonomoussimply by considering the actor’s attitude toward it at the moment; we also

need to know something about his or her attitudes over time. Commit-

ment is not something you can have for just a minute. Wholehearted

endorsement of a motivation cannot amount simply to being unconflicted

about it right now; otherwise the addict could be wholeheartedly committed

to getting straight while sitting in his or her counseling session and be just

as wholeheartedly committed to the life of an addict five minutes later


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when he or she walks out the door. Frankfurt and Korsgaard make this

point explicitly. Having introduced the notion of ‘caring’ as a form ofcommitment, for instance, Frankfurt remarks that “[…] the notion of

guidance, and hence the notion of caring, implies a degree of persistence.

A person who cared about something just for a single moment would be

indistinguishable from someone who was being moved by impulse”

(1988b, 84). And Korsgaard observes that “If I change my mind and my

will every time I have a new impulse, then I don’t really have an active

mind or a will at all – I am just a kind of location where these impulses

are at play. And that means that to make up my mind even now – to givemyself a reason – I must conceive my reason as an instance of some gen-

eral type” (1996, 232; italics original). Constituting oneself as an agent thus

requires one to unify one’s will both synchronically and diachronically. An

agent needs to have a well-defined and stable set of projects, plans and

commitments that provide principles of action over time.

There is a great deal that is convincing in this analysis, especially the

explanation of the way in which diachronic considerations must be part

of an account of agency. This insight, however, sits uneasily with the

demand for wholeheartedness, as we will see in the next section.

III. DIACHRONICITY AND W HOLEHEARTEDNESS

In this section I look at two different, and ultimately related, questions

about how to think about wholeheartedness with respect to projects,

plans, and relationships that stretch over time. The first is a questionabout how consistent and unwavering wholeheartedness must be; the

second about how the notion of wholeheartedness applies to conflicts

between different diachronically extended plans, projects or practical

identities. In each case I will show that serious difficulties arise with the

notion of wholeheartedness.

The claim that the demand for wholeheartedness is problematic is

hardly a new one, and objections to the strong unity view have been raised


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from many quarters by those who argue that it is completely possible to be

an autonomous agent with a divided will, that there are circumstances in which ambivalence can be an appropriate and healthy attitude, and that

attempts to force wholeheartedness can lead to inauthenticity.1 My discus-

sion in this section is very close in spirit to that found in many of these

objections. The force and focus of the concerns that I raise will, however,

be somewhat different in two ways that are central to my overall purpose.

First, the most common rejections of wholeheartedness are defences of

volitional ambivalence as a valuable feature of human life. While I do not

exactly deny this, the point I am making here is that in many cases of dia-chronic commitment it is not even clear what exactly counts as either whole-

heartedness or ambivalence. Second, the difficulties I am trying to highlight

with the dichotomy of wholeheartedness and ambivalence are connected

particularly to the application of these concepts to plans and projects that

unfold over time. I will therefore focus more directly on questions of dia-

chronic commitment than is typically the case.

Consistency

Our first question concerns the kind of consistency required for whole-

heartedness over time. When we think of an individual action at a given

time, it seems as if we have a fairly clear picture of what it means to be

wholehearted about taking that action. I sit, for instance, with a job offer

and an offer of admission to law school. The deadline for accepting them

both approaches and I need to sign and mail one acceptance letter or theother. I might find that I am deeply ambivalent about which to do and so

cannot act decisively. But I might also find that on reflection I am able to

make a decision that feels firm and clear. Right at that moment I am quite

sure about which offer I wish to accept. Decisively, and with no feeling of

alienation, I sign my name on the letter accepting admission to law school

and put it in the mail. With respect to the actions of signing and mailing

my will is unified and I am wholehearted in my endorsement of them


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(although, as Frankfurt often notes, this does not mean I feel no pangs of

regret, only that I know for certain what I wish to do, regrets or not). As we have seen, however, the real target of my identification is sup-

posed to be not just an individual action but the underlying motivation or

project from which it flows. According to the strong unity view, then, it is

not enough that I am wholehearted about signing the letter of acceptance

and sending it in; I must be wholehearted about the choice of pursuing a

career as an attorney, a project whose execution necessarily spreads over

time. While I may feel quite resolved about this decision at the moment of

accepting admission to law school, this provides no guarantee that myattitude will remain constant over time. The first question I wish to raise

about the strong unity view’s notion of wholeheartedness is thus the ques-

tion of whether wholeheartedness about a temporally-extended project of

this kind requires only that I feel unambivalent about the project as a whole

at the time of taking some particular action associated with it (e.g. accepting

admission to law school), or whether I must instead remain wholehearted

about it throughout the entire length of time it takes to pursue it.

The first possibility seems far too weak and is, moreover, explicitly

rejected by strong unity theorists. If I feel completely unambivalent about

being an attorney when I accept my first job, but have second thoughts

on the first day of work – or the next week or even the next month –, it

seems hard to conclude that I am really wholehearted about this endeavour.

If I change my mind in such short order it does seem difficult to distin-

guish between commitment and impulse as strong unity theorists suggest.

The second possibility, however, seems as much too strong as the first istoo weak. The kinds of plans, projects, relationships and practical identities

that are supposed to constitute us as agents take time, effort, and resources.

It is unrealistic to suppose that people will, or even should, remain com-

pletely unconflicted about their long term projects at every moment of

their undertaking, and if they did we might wonder if they are taking life

entirely seriously. It is completely natural to have periods of doubt or

ambivalence.


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There thus seems to be something of a dilemma for our attempts to

understand the notion of wholeheartedness as it applies to these kinds ofextended projects. To see the force of this dilemma, let us imagine a

trajectory that a given woman’s relationship with her identity as a lawyer

might take. Suppose she wholeheartedly pursues and accepts admission

to law school, arrives there with a full commitment to starting a legal

career, and has a glorious first couple of years. In the third year, however,

she experiences a rough patch during which she wonders whether this is

really what she wants to do with her life. The law, perhaps, is not quite

what she thought it was – or maybe she has discovered something abouther own proclivities. We can imagine this period of doubt being quite

protracted, but it may nevertheless be something she overcomes, renew-

ing her wholehearted endorsement of a career in the law, taking a job,

and flourishing. We can imagine further that she still experiences periods

of ambivalence from time to time, during which she wonders if she has

chosen the right path, but these usually dissipate once a particularly oner-

ous case is resolved or after she has had a short break. In middle age,

however, ambivalence about her chosen profession re-emerges. She once

again has the same kinds of doubts that have bubbled up now and again

throughout her career, but this time they are more insistent and last lon-

ger. Knowing that she gets this way when she is exhausted or fighting

with her colleagues she gives it time, but eventually is forced to acknowl-

edge that she no longer loves the law or believes in what she is doing.

Eventually, she quits her job and retrains as an elementary school teacher.

What are we to say about this woman’s wholeheartedness about hercommitment to a career as an attorney, and hence about her agency with

respect to the actions associated with this career? According to a very strict

reading of the strong unity view, the fluctuations in her commitment mean

that she was never truly wholehearted about being an attorney. Doubts

about this project surfaced regularly, after all, and in the end she gave it up

altogether. The implication would then be that none of what she had done

in conjunction with her life as an attorney was truly her act. This reading is


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fairly easy to dismiss. It is completely implausible and almost certainly not

what strong unity theorists would say. Among other things, these theoristsexplicitly allow that our wholehearted endorsements can change over time.

After emphasizing that our decisions at a given time must commit us over

time, for instance, Korsgard adds: “Of course this is not to say that I can-

not ever change my mind, but only to say that I must do it for a reason,

and not at random” (1996, 232; Although there is a question to be raised

about where she will find a non-circular account of what constitutes a rea-

son for change in this sense, since for Korsgaard reasons come from our

wholehearted commitments and nowhere else). Complete and unchangingdevotion to a project thus does not seem to be required for agency.

On a slightly weaker reading of the strong unity view, we might say

that the lawyer is frequently wholehearted in her identification and during

those periods her actions are autonomous and agential. During her periods

of ambivalence and doubt, however, she fails to be wholehearted and at

these times there is no real fact of the matter about what she wants to do,

which means that at those times there is no unified agent and no autono-

mous action. This position is unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons. First,

it brings us back to an understanding of wholehearted commitment that

depends on a person’s attitude to a project at a given time, irrespective of

what she thinks shortly before or after. This is an understanding that

strong unity theorists explicitly reject because it makes wholeheartedness

difficult to distinguish from impulse. More important, however, it is simply

not plausible. It is true that periods of doubt and ambivalence can be pain-

ful and troubling, but it does not sound right to say that there is no unifiedagent and so can be no autonomous acts at that time. Surely if the lawyer

continues to discharge the duties of her profession even while wondering

whether this is something she really wants to do we cannot reasonably say

that these activities represent merely the winning out of the strongest

temporary impulses – events that happen to her rather than actions that

she is taking. On the contrary, she seems to be extremely resolute of will

even in the face of doubt and discouragement.


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This last observation suggests another possible reading. Perhaps pro-

ponents of the strong unity view will claim that the analyses I have givenso far simply misunderstand what they mean by wholeheartedness.

Wholeheartedness is not a psychological state, they might say, but rather

a structure of the will. If the attorney does indeed continue pursuing her

lawyerly duties despite having doubts we can say that she is in fact com-

mitted to the project throughout that entire time. Her wholeheartedness

is evidenced by her actions and her state of mind is not directly relevant.

This is, in many ways, a promising approach. It does indeed sound right,

at least to my ear, to say that a willingness to stick it out through periodsof doubt and discouragement is precisely what it means to be committed

to an endeavour – whether it is a career, a marriage, a set of religious

principles or a political cause. This understanding of wholeheartedness,

however, seems in tension with much that strong unity theorists say about

it. Wholeheartedness about a project it now turns out is compatible with

extended periods of ambivalence. The attorney we are imagining is, dur-

ing her periods of doubt, stepping back from her motives and questioning

whether she really wants to act on them and, we are imagining, she finds

that she does not know the answer to this question, even though she

keeps going through the motions.

Perhaps a final possibility for strong unity theorists is to claim that

the attorney is an agent throughout not because she is wholehearted

about being an attorney at each point, but rather because she is whole-

hearted about her principle of action at each point. During a period of

doubt she may step back from her conflicting motives and decide thatalthough she feels impelled to give up her career, she knows that such

impulses usually pass and can be explained by factors that do not neces-

sarily imply that she has chosen the wrong career path. Her principle of

action is thus to wait it out, do nothing rash, and see if she feels better

about being an attorney next month after this horrible case is concluded.

This is also a promising analysis, but it raises further questions about the

notion of wholeheartedness and its relation to diachronic unity.


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According to this analysis, the target of wholeheartedness is not a plan

or a project or a practical identity, but a different kind of principle ofaction – one that urges caution before making major changes. There is

certainly nothing wrong with thinking of this as a principle of action, but

it is not clear how it relates to the identity-constituting aspects of the

strong unity view. It is, after all, our wholehearted identifications that are

supposed to constitute our identities as agents by giving us stable and

consistent principles of action. The examples we are given of the kinds of

wholehearted identifications that constitute an agent usually involve spe-

cific plans and projects – they are ‘practical identities’ (for Korsgaard) or‘what we care about’ or ‘love’ (for Frankfurt). Someone might, after all, be

wholeheartedly identified with a decision to act on impulse (like Emerson

who will shun all commitments when his ‘Genius calls’ [1983, 262]), or

Galen Strawson who describes himself as a happy ‘episodic’ with no sense

of diachronic continuity [2004, 431]). This reading of wholeheartedness

does not seem like a live possibility for strong unity theorists.

There are undoubtedly other possibilities that I have not considered,

and I do not claim to have shown that there is no possible conception of

wholeheartedness that can be applied to a trajectory like the one I have

described. I do hope to have shown, however, that there is real lack of

clarity about just what wholeheartedness means in this kind of case, and

about precisely what we must be wholehearted about if we are to be

autonomous agents. Similar issues arise in a somewhat different guise

when we ask how to adjudicate the competing claims of different extended

projects to which we are committed.

Conflicting Plans

We do not, of course, commit to only one project, relationship or practi-

cal identity in our lives, but to many. Because we have multiple long-term

commitments, we are bound sometimes to find ourselves in situations

where these make competing claims on us. The question I raise now is


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what the strong unity view has to say about wholeheartedness and hence

about agency in the case of such conflicts.It will, once again, be useful to have a concrete example to work with

in thinking through this question. Imagine a lawyer like the one we

described earlier, but without significant doubts about her career. From

the beginning she is wholeheartedly identified with the project of being

an attorney, and she maintains this attitude throughout her career. At

some point, however, she has a child and wholeheartedly identifies also

with her role as mother. This does not make her question the value of

being an attorney or her commitment to that career, but sits alongsidethat practical identity as one equally valued about which she is equally

wholehearted. Predictably, a day comes when an important work-related

event is scheduled at the same time as an equally important event in her

daughter’s life – say her first ballet recital about which she is immensely

excited and which she desperately wants her mother to attend. This wom-

an’s wholeheartedness about her career and about parenthood do not tell

her how to choose between these demands. Indeed, the fact that she is

so deeply committed to each project is precisely what makes things so

difficult. Whether she goes to work or to the recital she is likely to wonder

whether she is doing the right thing and whether it would not have been

better to do the other.2

On the surface, the conflict this mother faces seems to be just the sort

that, according to the strong unity view, prevents there from being a fact

about what she wants to do, undermining her unity as an agent and making

a truly autonomous action impossible. It is just this kind of ambivalencethat strong unity theorists insist we must overcome in order to be agents.

Frankfurt, for instance, asks “[...] what good is it for someone to be free to

make significant choices if he does not know what he wants and if he is

unable to overcome his ambivalence? What is the point of offering a beguil-

ing variety of alternatives to people who can respond to them only with

irresolute vacillation” (1999a, 102)?3 He concludes that “[...] unless a person

is capable of a considerable degree of volitional unity, he cannot make


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coherent use of his freedom” (1999a, 102). And in “Personal Identity and

the Unity of Agency: A Kantian Response to Parfit,” Korsgaard considersthe dilemma of a fictional split brain patient. We are to imagine someone

in whom the connections between the two hemispheres of the brain have

been severed and in whom each hemisphere has the capacity to form inten-

tions. “Suppose,” she says, “that they do not try to resolve their differences,

but each merely sends motor orders, by way of the nervous system, to your

limbs. Since the orders are contradictory, the two halves of your body try

to do different things. Unless they can come to an agreement, both hemi-

spheres of your brain are ineffectual” (1989, 110-111). She concludes: “Youare a unified person at any given time because you must act, and you have

only one body with which to act” (1989, 110-111). Our lawyer is in a rel-

evantly similar position – one part of her is telling her to go to the recital

and another to go to work and, since she cannot be in two places at one

time, she must overcome this conflict if she is to act at all.

But there is a puzzle here when we try to think about these kinds of

conflicts within the broader claims of the strong unity view. What we

need to understand is exactly how the relevant lack of wholeheartedness

is to be described. The strong unity view tells us what is important for

agency is that we are unambivalent in our identification with the project,

plan or relationship that motivates what we do. In this case, our subject

– no matter which action she takes – will have that kind of wholehearted-

ness, since she is committed wholeheartedly to each practical identity.

So where is the lack of wholeheartedness that undermines her identity?

The obvious answer is that she is not wholehearted about whichcourse of action to take. This means, as the earlier quotations suggest,

that she is in danger of going neither to work nor to the recital but, like

Buridan’s ass, vacillating between the two. But this cannot be the whole

story. If it were, all she would need to do to acquire agency would be to

do something, and this has little to do with endorsing general principles.

This woman could, after all, settle the conflict by meeting whichever of

the two demands happens to have more saliency due to some contingent


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factor (e.g. her daughter stands before her in the tutu looking cute while

work is out of sight). This does not seem to be the kind of decision-making the strong unity view sees as agential; she is simply letting the

stronger of the two impulses pull her because she does not know which

one she wants to follow.4

There are two different ways in which strong unity theorists might

respond to this kind of challenge. One is to say that because each of the

two commitments making a claim on the attorney/mother is a commit-

ment she wholeheartedly endorses, she in fact is acting as an agent if she

lets impulse decide between them. The kind of ambivalence she experi-ences, it might be argued, is vastly different from that experienced, for

instance, by the attorney who is ambivalent about whether to go to work

because they are not sure they truly value their career and want to main-

tain it. Frankfurt suggests in his early work that there are different kinds

of conflicts a person can experience. One is a common kind of contin-

gent conflict between desires that cannot both be fulfilled. His example

here is desiring both to go to a concert and to a film that are scheduled

at the same time. Conflicts of this kind, he says “[...] require only that the

desires at issue be ordered” (1988b, 66). This is contrasted with a conflict

in which one of the desires is to be rejected altogether. His example here

is of someone who wishes to congratulate someone on a recent achieve-

ment but notices also a jealous wish to injure this person, a desire he or

she does not endorse and with which he or she does not identify. In the

first kind of conflict, Frankfurt says, if the more highly-rated desire can-

not be fulfilled the natural course of action is to try to fulfil the other;this is not so for the second. “When a person is frustrated in his desire

to see a film, he naturally turns to his second choice and goes to a con-

cert. In the present example, however, the alternative of injuring his

acquaintance is not second to the person’s first choice of offering him a

compliment” (Frankfurt 1988b, 67). The desires to go to the concert and

the film are, he says, ‘on the same level’, while the desires to compliment

and injure his acquaintance are not.


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Since the attorney/mother’s desires to go to her daughter’s recital

and to go to the work event are on the same level, we might think, actingon impulse or flipping a coin or letting the fates decide does not under-

mine agency. This does not seem compatible with the overall position of

strong unity theorists, however, and is in tension with claims they make

elsewhere. In a much-discussed footnote, for instance, Frankfurt says that

“Agamemnon at Aulis is destroyed by an inescapable conflict between

two equally defining elements of his own nature; his love for his daughter

and his love for the army he commands.” He continues that stories like

Agamemnon’s cannot have sequels because “[...] there is a sense in whichthe person he had been [before making his decision] no longer exists.

Hence, there can be no continuation of his story” (1999b, 139). Here it

seems as if conflict between wholehearted desires goes to the very core

of one’s identity.

It may, admittedly, seem hyperbolic to compare the dilemma of the

attorney/mother to that of Agamemnon. He was faced, after all, with

destroying one of the things he loved. The attorney/mother does not

need to kill her daughter, only to disappoint her by missing her recital,

and she can make that up by giving her daughter’s needs priority over

work next time or spending some quality time with her that evening. This

is undoubtedly right, and I think a plausible account of agency must allow

for these kinds of compromises and negotiations. It is not evident, how-

ever, that the strong unity view, which defines the agent in terms of

wholehearted commitment, can do so. From this perspective, the differ-

ence between Agamemnon’s dilemma and the mother’s is really one ofquantity rather than of kind. We are finite beings with finite resources and

to this extent conflicts between our wholehearted commitments are never

entirely contingent. Pursuing one will always mean compromising others.

If the attorney/mother is genuinely wholehearted about her identity as

mother, acting against the legitimate claims this identity makes on her by

going to work instead of the recital is going to require acting against a

wholehearted commitment and so acting in ways that are non-autonomous


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and threaten her integrity as an agent. Korsgaard, in fact, says something

like this, claiming that the demands of all of our practical identitiesare completely categorical, and so when they come into conflict we are

necessarily caught between competing unconditional obligations that

cannot be mutually satisfied, and must do violence to ourselves (Korsgaard

1996, 102; 2009, 23-26).

If this perspective is to be accommodated it seems that I can con-

stitute myself as an agent in the face of conflicts between wholehearted

commitments only by establishing firm priorities among them. Our

attorney, for instance, might decide that career comes first, and if shedoes she now has a principle of choice in cases of conflict; there is a

fact about where she stands with respect to these desires. But this is a

very strong requirement. In order to preserve agential unity people must

be wholehearted not only about their projects, plans and practical iden-

tities, but also about their relative importance. And since wholehearted-

ness has a diachronic aspect, these priorities must be stable over time.

This seems an unrealistic and not entirely desirable demand. Obviously

we must prioritize to some extent, but, as already discussed, when it

comes to central features of our lives like career and family we must

sometimes simply try to negotiate as best we can, adjusting priorities on

a case-by-case basis and learning to live with a certain amount of stress

and guilt.

As with my questions about how consistent wholeheartedness

must be, there are undoubtedly further responses that strong unity

theorists could offer to these challenges. I hope to have shown, how-ever, that there are real perplexities here. Our consideration of ques-

tions of consistency and multiplicity has thus demonstrated not only

that the demand of wholeheartedness seems too strong for agency and

autonomy, but that in a diachronic context it is not even clear what it

would mean to be wholehearted. It suggests further that the strong

unity view cannot offer an internally consistent account of diachronic

wholeheartedness. This problem thus signals a tension in the structure


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of the view. Understanding this tension can help us determine a way

to move beyond it.

IV. THE SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM AND A POSSIBLE SOLUTION

To see the deeper implications of the problems with wholeheartedness

outlined above, it will be useful to review the original motivation for this

requirement. The strong unity view starts with a question about the auton-

omy of a particular action. Someone ingests drugs, or insults a colleague,

or accepts a job offer, and we want to know what makes it the case thatthis act is truly one’s action rather than an impulse acting through one.

The initially-proposed answer is that the act is truly one’s action if one

endorses it. But endorsement is itself only an act of the very same person,

so we can ask how we know that the act of endorsement is truly one’s own.

It would seem that one would need to endorse one’s endorsement of the

earlier act to make it one’s own, but for this to work one would then need

to endorse this endorsement. Wholeheartedness is brought in to stave off

the threat of infinite regress. A particular act at a time is an autonomous

action if the actor’s endorsement of it is wholehearted in a way that closes

off the possibility that that endorsement would be overturned by appeal to

a higher level of reflection.5

Whether one feels that this is a good solution to this particular prob-

lem or not, we can at least make some sense of the requirement of whole-

heartedness with respect to a particular action at a given time. Individual

actions are amenable to the kind of definitive, binary structure expressedin this requirement. At a particular time I either take a particular action

or I do not – either I take drugs or I abstain; either I insult my colleague

or walk quietly into the office; either I sign the acceptance letter or I do

not. And if I do take an action at a given time, either I am fully resolved

in my attitude toward it or I am not. There is, however, another funda-

mental element of the strong unity view that complicates matters, and

that is the insight that when we are interested in questions of agency and


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or being a good mother in the same way that there is a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer

to the question of whether someone is ingesting drugs, or signing anacceptance letter for law school, or attending a recital. Because of this,

there is no simple answer either to the question of whether someone is

wholeheartedly committed to the pursuit of these goals. They can be

pursued with more or less vigour, success, constancy, and gusto; but there

is no clear-cut fact about exactly what being wholeheartedly committed

to one of these plans or projects would mean. To say that I endorse such

a plan or project does not yet settle the question of whether I will, or

even should, take any particular action at any particular time. This is what we demonstrated in the previous section.

The strong unity view thus gets into trouble when it takes a notion that

is suited to questions about particular actions at particular times viewed as

isolated events and conjoins it with the claim that questions about agency

and identity necessarily make reference to plans and projects that stretch

over time. To avoid these difficulties one part of the view or the other –

either the claim that the targets of our reflective endorsement are plans,

projects, and ways of life rather than isolated actions or the claim that

wholeheartedness is required for autonomy – must be relinquished. I hope

that it will be clear from the discussion so far that the better path is to give

up the requirement of wholeheartedness. This leaves us, however, with the

problem that this requirement was originally introduced to answer, the

problem of infinite regress. How is this to be addressed without demanding

wholeheartedness? This is not a question I can answer fully here, but I can

point to a strategy for developing an answer. The seeds of a solution to theproblem of infinite regress are, I suggest, embedded in the very claim that

causes difficulties for the notion of wholeheartedness, the claim that ques-

tions of autonomy are not about isolated actions but rather about tempo-

rally-extended plans and projects.

The perceived need for a requirement of wholeheartedness arises

when we are asking about autonomy with respect to a particular act con-

sidered on its own – the question, for instance, is whether an addict is


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autonomous with respect to a particular instance of drug use. An initial

response is that this depends upon whether he or she endorses the useof that drug, but then we are left with the problem of how to give his or

her endorsement or non-endorsement any more weight in determining

what is truly attributable to him or her than the fact of what he or she

does. This is where wholeheartedness comes in. If we take seriously the

idea that the relevant target of endorsement or non-endorsement is a

temporally-extended project or plan, however, we should not expect to

be able to answer questions about particular actions taken in isolation;

they are not even well-posed. Questions of autonomy can only beanswered diachronically and answers to such questions require an under-

standing of where what is happening now fits into broader patterns of

conduct and affect.

To see what this difference amounts to, consider Frankfurt’s unwill-

ing addicts overwhelmed by their powerful desire to ingest the drugs that

are in front of them despite their wholehearted desire to kick the habit.

According to the original perspective, this description of the circum-

stances provides all the information we need to determine that they are

not autonomous with respect to the action and that it is not truly theirs.

But even within the strong unity view there is a glimmer of another per-

spective, which suggests that we will need to know much more to make

this determination. According to this view, commitment cannot occur for

just a moment, and so to know if the act of taking drugs is autonomous

or non-autonomous we need to know not just about the addict’s current

repudiation of his or her action, but also where he or she stands withrespect to the temporally-extended project of getting clean. We have seen

that the question of whether he or she is wholehearted with respect to

this project is not going to be very useful in deciding this, but there is a

straightforward alternative description of what we do need to know to

determine whether someone is truly committed to a project of this sort.

To know whether unwilling addicts are committed to the project of

getting clean, and hence non-autonomous in their drug use, we will need


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to know not just that they repudiate it fully as they do it, but also what

happened before and after; how they got to this point and where theygo from it. Did they regularly attend their therapy sessions? When their

old friends from their drugging days called them up, did they call their

sponsor as they said they would or did they instead agree to meet up

with them and lie about where they were going? How often has this

happened? What resources have they been given to help them kick their

addiction and how actively and aggressively have they sought out such

resources? Do they use their slip as an excuse to go on a months-long

binge or do they immediately check themselves back into the hospitalfor inpatient treatment? Depending upon the answers to these questions

we might want to say that the action is truly theirs, even if just at that

moment they were overwhelmed or that it is not theirs even if at the

moment they were not.

The suggestion, then, is that the special weight we are looking for

from wholeheartedness can come instead from a narrative of the indi-

vidual’s relation to a long-term project or plan and the role of individual

actions within it. If we want to understand the depth and type of com-

mitment someone has to a temporally-extended project we will want to

know about the ups and downs of their attitudes toward it and how

these translate into behaviour. This is just what we saw in the case of

the lawyer who stuck it out through periods of doubt, and it is why we

do not have to doubt that a woman is committed to being a good mother

if she chooses, on some particular occasion, to attend a meeting rather

than a recital as long as she makes it up to her daughter later. Thisapproach does not so much offer a solution to the problem of infinite

regress as to show why it need never arise. The level and type of com-

mitment we have to an action is understood by looking at the full story

of how it arises and operates in our lives, not in terms of an attitude of

endorsement taken at a particular time.

This suggestion is obviously not yet anywhere near precise enough

to provide a full-blown account of commitment, agency or autonomy, but


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it at least points a direction for developing an account that can capture

some of the most attractive features of the strong unity view – the con-nections it draws between identity, agency, and commitment and the rec-

ognition that questions of agency and autonomy are best directed at the

temporally-extended plans and projects individual actions represent than

at the actions themselves – without the need for the problematic require-

ment of wholeheartedness.6

W ORKS

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Benson, Paul. 2005. “Taking Ownership: Authority and Voice in Autonomous Agency.”

In Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays . Edited by John Christman

and Joel Anderson, 101-126. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Calhoun, Chesire. 1995. “Standing for Something.” The Journal of Philosophy 92/5: 235-

260.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1983. “Self Reliance.” In Emerson: Essays and Lectures , 262. New

York: Literary Classics of the United States.

Frankfurt, Harry. 1988a. “Identification and Wholeheartedness.” In The Importance of

What We Care About: Philosophical essays . Edited by Harry Frankfurt, 159-177. Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press.Frankfurt, Harry. 1988b. “Identification and Externality.” In The Importance of What We

Care About: Philosophical essays . Edited by Harry Frankfurt, 58-69. Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press.

Frankfurt, Harry. 1999a. “The Faintest Passion.” In Necessity, Volition, and Love . Edited

by Harry Frankfurt, 95-108. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Frankfurt, Harry. 1999b. “Autonomy, Necessity, and Love.” In Necessity, Volition, and

Love . Edited by Harry Frankfurt, 129-142. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gunnarsson, Logi. 2014. “In Defense of Ambivalence and Alienation.” Ethical Theory

and Moral Practice 17: 13-26.

Korsgaard, Christine M. 1989. “Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency: A KantianResponse to Parfit.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 18/2: 101-132.

Korsgaard, Christine M. 1996. The Sources of Normativity . Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Korsgaard, Christine M. 2009. Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity : New York:

Oxford University Press.

Lugones, Maria. 1987. “Playfulness, ‘World’-traveling, and Loving Perception.” Hypatia

2/2: 3-19.

Marino, Patricia. 2011. “Ambivalence, Valuational Inconsistency, and the Divided Self.”Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 83/1: 41-71.


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Poltera, Jacqui. 2010. “Is Ambivalence and Agential Vice?” Philosophical Explorations 13:

293-305.

Schramme, Thomas. 2014. “On Being Wholeheartedly Ambivalent: Indecisive Will, Unity

of the Self, and Integration by Narration.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17: 27-40.

Strawson, Galen. 2004. “Against Narrativity.” Ratio XVII/4: 428-452.

Velleman, J. David. 2002. “Identification and Identity.” In The Contours of Agency . Edited

by Sarah Buss and Lee Overton, 91-123. Cambridge: MIT Press.

NOTES

1. See, for instance, Benson (2005), Calhoun (1995), Gunnarsson (2013), Lugones (1987),

Marino (2011), Poltera (2010), Schramme (2013), Velleman (2002).

2. Patricia Marino (2011) uses a similar example to argue that ambivalence is not necessar-

ily harmful to agency.

3. Frankfurt is actually talking about ambivalence here in the technical sense in which we have

stipulated that this attorney is not ambivalent. Still, the point is that conflicts between wholehearted

endorsements can interfere with the ability to act just as much as ambivalence in Frankfurt’s sense does.

4. Marino (2011, 45-47) says that in such a case it seems clear that letting contingent factors

decide the issue does not undermine agency. I tend to agree, but the point here is that this move

is not open to strong unity theorists.

5. For a detailed description of these issues see, for instance, Frankfurt (1988a).

6. In the course of writing this paper I have benefited from discussions with and comments frommany people. I would like especially to thank Tamar Schapiro for comments on a much earlier draft,

and Nomy Arpaly, Thomas Nys, Beate Roessler, the participants in the Workshop on Autonomy and

Diachronic Agency at the University of Amsterdam, and two anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft.

Documents

Schechtman, Marya. Making Ourselves Whole