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Talking to Our Selves Reflection, Ignorance, and Agency John M. Doris OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, 0X2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © John M. Doris 2015 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2015 Impression: 2 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2014948349 ISBN 978-0-19-957039-3 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. For Stephen Stich Contents Advertisement viii I 1. Staging 3 2. Reflection 17 3. Skepticism 41 4. Experience 78 II 5. Collaboration 103 6. Agency 127 7. Responsibility 154 8. Selves 178 Afterwards 199 Acknowledgments 201 References 205 Author Index 251 Subject Index 258 Advertisement In 1957, a marketing consultant named James Vicary reported huge sales increases at a New Jersey theater concession. All one need do, Vicary said, was intermittently flash Eat Popcorn and Drink Coca Cola on screen for 1/3000th of a second, and unsuspecting moviegoers ate more popcorn and drank more Coke. Before long, subliminal advertising was a staple of Cold War paranoia. Exposés like Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders and Wilson Brian Keys Subliminal Seduction glutted bookstores, while The New Yorker pronounced Packard’s opus an “authoritative and frightening report on how manufacturers, fundraisers and politicians are attempting to turn the American mind into a kind of catatonic dough that will buy, give or vote at their command.” Pretty creepy stuff, this catatonic dough: movie night as Night of the Living Noshers, with film buffs cast as junk food zombies. The hysteria hadn’t to do with over-indulgence in sugar, salt, and grease, about which Americans have little compunction. What was sinister, according to alarmists, was that victims of subliminal sales techniques were made to do things; people’s desires were manipulated without their knowledge or consent. Clearly, something sneaky was going on: in 1974, federal regulators stepped in, ruling subliminal advertising deceptive, and “inconsistent with the obligations” of licensed broadcasters. Turns out the alarmists were unduly alarmed: after decades of research, scientific evidence for the effectiveness of subliminal advertising remains in short supply (Pratkanis and Greenwald 1988; Dijksterhuis et al 2005). By 1962, Vicary had recanted, admitting that the Coke and popcorn “study” was a publicity ploy for his marketing business. Near enough, he was never heard from again. Not everyone thinks it’s safe to go back in the theater. Surveys indicate that a majority of Americans have heard of subliminal advertising, and a majority of these believe it works (Rogers and Smith 1993). Books like The Secret Sales Pitch (Bullock 2004) and Subliminal Persuasion (Lakhani 2009) are still getting written; a celebratory 50th anniversary edition of The Hidden Persuaders appeared in 2007. Perhaps this persistence is due, as with other urban legends, to a kernel of truth: neighboring paranoid fantasy is a large body of psychological fact. Since we’re talking seduction, you’ll be interested to learn that anxiety can increase ADVERTISEMENT IX attraction (Dutton and Aron 1974); maybe your seat-mate on that turbulent flight was drawn to your winning smile and artful patter, or maybe he’s just a phobic flyer. Turning from the romantic to the pragmatic, naming your child Denise could make her more likely to become a dentist (Pelham et al 2002): maybe he’s a neurologist because he’s named Russell Brain, she’s a tennis pro because she’s named Margaret Court, and he’s a urologist because he’s named— I’m not making this up—Dick Finder. Major life choices, like location and vocation, can be corrupted by factors that the choosers themselves would regard as irrelevant, or worse, were they made aware of them. In brief: you may not know what you’re doing, or why you’re doing it, and if you did know, you might not like it. Evidently, the subversive unconscious is everywhere at work (though these workings may be more absurd than Oedipal). Should you take this prospect seriously, you ought begin to wonder about who—or what—is running your show. You’d then be wondering about what philosophers call agency, the ability of human beings to direct their own lives. Famously, these queries lack easy answers, partly because they’re ensnared in the most Gordian of philosophical tangles, free will and determinism. Such conundrums often evaporate into thin metaphysical air, but nearby is trouble of concrete practical significance, that of determining when people are morally responsible for their conduct: when is someone appropriately lauded for her good deeds, or excoriated for her bad? The difficulty is complicated, perhaps fatally so, by the sort of psychological phenom ena I’ve just recounted. Should he be admired for a life aiding the neurologically afflicted, if that life was shaped by the surname “Brain”? Should she celebrate your love, if that love is a symptom of anxiety? This might sound like panicking over “catatonic dough.” Folks aren’t com pletely reasonable, but they often enough seem to have their reasons, and they often enough seem to act on them. Every day, people deliberate, decide and, so far as anyone can tell, end up doing what they’ve decided. After all the philosophiz ing and psychologizing is done, we’re left to make our worlds, much as we did before all the philosophizing and psychologizing. Unfortunately, when such reassuring good sense is scrutinized, it is difficult to sustain: what’s now known about the mind presses hard questions about agency and moral responsibility. This book is in the business of asking these questions, and attempting to answer them. I’ll trace prominent themes in the philosophy and psychology of the past hundred years or so, and argue that if the psychology is taken seriously, some of the philosophy must be taken less seriously. X ADVERTISEMENT The philosophy at issue subscribes to reflectivism, a doctrine according to which the exercise of human agency consists in judgment and behavior ordered by self-conscious reflection about what to think and do. Typically, this doctrine is associated with a corollary: the exercise of human agency requires accurate reflection. In an exercise of agency, as construed by reflectivism, a person correctly divines the beliefs, desires, and other psychological states relevant to her decision, makes her decision in light of these states (sometimes called her reasons), and acts accordingly. There’s difficulty in the details, but at the outset it’s enough to recognize a pervasive and plausible assumption: when human beings are able to direct their lives in a manner approximating that philosophers dignify with the honorific “agency,” it’s because they know what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it. However attractive, this assumption is compromised by decades of research in the social, cognitive, and behavioral sciences. Empirical research suggests that reflection appears in a limited portion of human conduct; very often, behavior is altogether thoughtless, and quite unconstrained by the deliverances of reflection. And on those instances when people do reflect, there is little warrant for confidence that these reflections are informed by accurate self-awareness. If so, there’s something seriously wrong with both reflectivism and its corollary. Maybe what’s wrong is that people don’t often function as agents; maybe reflectivism has the standards for agency right, and human beings routinely fail to meet them. There’s precedent for pessimism; many a philosopher has rued, as Plato did, flesh and blood failing philosophical ideals. Provenance notwithstand ing, this is gloominess I’ll resist. At least in the cultures that are home to the Western philosophical tradition, there is an entrenched practice of people treat ing one another as morally responsible agents, and although this practice is sometimes egregiously infelicitous in its particulars, I’m convinced it is tolerably functional—in any event, considerably more functional than going without it. On my view, the trouble is not so much with the practice, but with extant attempts to provide theoretical support for the practice: reflectivist understandings of agency have prevented philosophers from understanding the ways in which human beings do, in fact, function as agents. I envisage an alternative theory. The theory is anti-reflectivist: it does not require reflection and accurate self-awareness for the exercise of agency. The theory is valuationah it locates the exercise of agency in the expression of a person’s values. The theory is collaborativist: it understands individual exercises of agency as products of social interaction. The theory is pluralist: it allows that a diversity of processes may effect the exercise of agency. ADVERTISEMENT XI Working all this out makes an intricate undertaking, as my stated aspiration to “theory” warns. In the first half of the book, I’ll develop the problem, first tracing the outlines of reflectivism, and then canvassing the psychological evidence that threatens reflectivism with skepticism about agency. In the second half, I’ll try to ameliorate the problem I developed in the first, by articulating my alternative to reflectivism. If I succeed, I’ll have a theory of agency sensitive both to what human beings are like—creatures with disorderly psychologies, and what human beings need—an ethical ordering of the lives they live together. I