Douglas Lavin’s research while affiliated with University College London and other places

A measure of good and bad is internal to something falling under it when that thing falls under the measure in virtue of what it is . The concept of an internal standard has broad application. Compare the external breed standards arbitrarily imposed at a dog show with the internal standards of health at work in the veterinarian's office. This paper is about practical standards, measures of acting well and badly, and so measures deployed in deliberation and choice. More specifically, it is about the attempt to explain the unconditional validity of certain norms (say, of justice and prudence) by showing them to be internal to our agency and the causality it involves. This is constitutivism . Its most prominent incarnations share a set of assumptions about the nature of agency and our knowledge of it: conceptualism , formalism and absolutism . This essay investigates the merits and viability of rejecting all of them while still seeking the ground of practical normativity in what we are, in our fundamental activity.

The aim of this paper is to display an alternative to the familiar decompositional approach in action theory, one that resists the demand for an explanation of action in non-agential terms, while not simply treating the notion of intentional agency as an unexplained primitive. On this Anscombean alternative, action is not a worldly event with certain psychological causes, but a distinctive form of material process, one that is not simply caused by an exercise of reason but is itself a productive exercise of reason. I argue that to comprehend the proposed alternative requires an account of the temporality of events in general. An event does not simply have a position in time, but is itself temporally structured. With the inner temporality of events in view, the Anscombean conception of action as a specifically self-conscious form of temporal unity is made available for critical reflection.

This paper is about the interest of the second-person to ethics. The focus of recent discussion has been the explanatory power of the second-person, rather than its careful description or the very possibility of what is described. This paper is something of a corrective. Its aim is to get the claim that the second-person matters to ethics into a clearer focus with a view to raising further questions and puzzles.

“On the Problem of Action” contrasts two conceptions of the task of action theory: the dominant conception, which I call the decompositional approach, and an alternative, non-decompositional approach that is implicit in the tradition of action theory descending from Aristotle. Decompositionalists seek to characterize intentional action as a composite of something inward and something outward, bound together by some generic kind of causal relation. I show that this approach is committed to characterizing action in terms that treat the agent’s own standpoint on her action as a separable factor, not integral to the worldly happening that constitutes her action proper, and I argue that this commitment leads decompositionalists to focus their theorizing not on actions-in-progress, but on cases of completed action. I then show how the neo-Aristotelian approach to understanding action contrasts with the decompositional approach in each of these respects: it seeks, not to explain what intentional action is by decomposing action into several not-intrinsically-agential factors, but rather to characterize the understanding of what it is to act implicit in the agent’s knowledge of her own action-in-progress. The main aim of this paper is simply to show that there is an alternative to the decompositional project, one that resists the demand for an explanation of action in non-agential terms, while not simply treating the notion of intentional agency as an unexplained primitive. To see the possibility of this sort of understanding of action is, I argue, to see how action could turn out to be, not a worldly event with certain psychological causes, but a distinctive form of material process, one that is not simply caused by an exercise of reason but is itself a (productive) exercise of reason, it is itself the exercise of a power of practical cognition.

Dependence, mediacy, and complexity are abstract concepts, as are their complementary opposites, independence, immediacy, and simplicity. The determinate conception we have to do with here is of an instrumentally or teleologically basic action: very roughly, an action is basic in this sense when no means are taken in its execution, or equally, when it is not the end of any other action. The concept figures in the description of the structure of getting something done, specifically of getting something done on purpose or intentionally, and thus also in the description of the agent's point of view on the structure of his own efficacy. The agent so depicted understands himself as doing whatever he does through the performance of basic actions, with all the rest derived from these. Means-end rationality expands our sphere of influence and massively extends our reach—there are flags on the moon and at the bottom of the sea!—but it is precisely at the inner limit of this teleological order that a rational agent's power to make a dent in things is genuinely displayed. Where means-end rationality comes to a close, efficacy genuinely begins: this is where the conceptual rubber is supposed to hit the material road, in the things one does without thought about how they get done. Sometimes it is said there is a spark of the divine in this. My own view is the opposite, that there is at best only a shadow of the brute.2

The chapter is a defense of the thesis that rational agents must desire and act sub specie boni or under the guise of the good. Our thought is that what underlies the guise of the good thesis is a more general point about the explanation of any self-movement, a point that applies, in different forms, to the explanation of behavior in nonrational animals, and even to the explanation of the nutrition, growth, and reproduction of nonsentient living things. What these various kinds of explanation have in common, we suggest, is that they all have a teleological structure; and we argue that, in general, this sort of explanation works by connecting what a creature is doing with what is good for creatures of its kind. The special feature of the application of this explanatory structure to rational creatures is that such creatures belong to a kind in which this connection between action and goodness becomes self-conscious: They are creatures whose action is expressive of and explained by their conception of their own good. This, we argue, is why rational self movers must act under the guise of the good.

Philosophy