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Part 1 Agency and the Self Chapter 1 What is Human Agency?

cy? (1977) In this paper Taylor wants to address two closely related questions: 1) what is involved in our notion of a self, which he defines minimally as a responsible human agent? and 2) what do we attribute to human agents which is not attributable to animals? He starts off from a distinction made by Harry Frankfurt between first order and second order desires. A first order desire is just any ordinary desire we might find ourselves having. Only human beings are able to form second order desires. Second order desire a desire whose object is the desirability of a first order desire. It manifests itself as a capacity for reflective self-evaluation. It is a desire whose object is my having a certain first order desire. Taylor wants to refine this distinction even further, in talking about two types of evaluation. Weak evaluation is concerned only with the outcomes of our desires. Between choice a) and b), for example, there is not distinction regarding their worth. While they are not qualitative, they are not simply quantitative either. The choice here is often based on preference. Strong evaluation instead is concerned with the quality of our motivation. Utilitarians reject strong evaluation in the attempt to reduce practical reason to calucation. Taylor notes that for the utilitarian, the rejection of strong evaluation is a necessary but not sufficient step in their reduction of practical reason to calculation. Taylor gives an argument against utilitarianism which basically says that practical reason necessarily involves evaluation. Evaluation is a distinctly human capacity. Human agency, Taylor says, is a mode of agency, of which an essential feature is self-evaluation. Taylor then outlines two features of weak evaluation which do not belong to strong evaluation. 1) In weak evaluation, it is a sufficient condition to call something good on the basis that it is desired. 2) In weak evaluation, when a decision is made, one desired alternative is set aside only because of its contingent incompatibility ( it is a matter of circumstances, and not a mode of life). What belongs to strong evaluation instead is a contrastive language of evaluative distinctions. This is what we deploy when we make decisions about the worth of a desire. Two desires are contrastively described if and only if their incompatibility is neither contingent nor circumstantial. (As a corollary: introducing new words into an evaluative vocabulary alters the sense of the existing words. These words are at least in terms of worth defined in terms of each other.

Utilitarianism advocates the abandonment of languages of qualitative contrast (they are value monists, value being synonymous with pleasure), and therefore a utilitarian position entails the loss of strong evaluative languages, which can only be set up contrastively.

Next step: the strong/weak evaluation distinction allows us to contrast different conceptions of the self. The strong evaluator sees his alternatives from within a richer language then the weak evaluator. Taylor captures this idea with the notion of articulacy and depth. The strong evaluator possesses a vocabulary of worth. This contrastive language of evaluation allows for the articulation of superiority. It is a condition for articulacy about our preferences (our first order desires). While it allows for articulation, it also allows for depth regarding the characterization of ones motives. In mere weak evaluation, depth is imposed by the de facto desires, and it terminates in the desirability of alternative consummations. Instead, in strong evaluation, there is a further dimension. Here the depth terminates in the examination of different possible modes of being. The strong evaluator not only asks which one should I choose? but also what kind of being am I in the carrying out of this desire?. The deliberation between incommensurable objects is carried on in a struggle of self-interpretations. He can ask what choice is truer, more authentic, less distortive of the meaning that things have for me?. Second order desires make the capacity for rational deliberation among ends possible. Thus it also allows us to understand responsibility more adequately. We are responsible not only for acting according to our evaluations, but also for the evaluations themselves. Responsibility cannot just be understood in terms of choice. This would imply that we create our own values, that they issue from outside any grounding reasons. We lose a sense of depth if we understand evaluation just in terms of radical choice. This gives us a way to riposte to Sartres Existentialism is a Humanism. He says that a man torn between the decision to join the Resistance, or to stay home with his mom is a genuine moral dilemma in which each choice makes an intractable claim on the person. Taylor points out that the source of the dilemma is that both options make moral claims. The dilemma is not created by radical choice; otherwise the predicament is resolved once he chooses. Radical choices are by definition ungrounded. We cannot say that the judgment of either choice is Right that would be an appeal to imposed obligations issuing from the predicament. In order to speak of choice, we must give assent to one in spite of the pull of the other. The agent of radical choice turns out to be no more than a simple weigher doing weak evaluation at best. Radical choice theory does not see that a choice is only intelligible in relation to the desirability of the alternatives. It is choice above and against the other choices; it is superior somehow. Radical choice

theory attempts to commandeer strong evaluation while denying these evaluations the status of judgments (it is just an avatar of the recurrent figure of modern philosophy, the disembodied ego). Strong evaluation is a conception necessary to agency, because it is bound to the notion of a self. Indeed, identity is tied to our strong evaluations which are inseparable from our self. So to lose ones identity is not to lose a property but to lose the property of being an evaluating agent. This is because strong evaluations form the horizon out of which we reflect and evaluate as a person. They are essential to our identity. In radical choice theory, at the moment of choice ex hypothesi there is no horizon. Taylor then deals with the relationship between responsibility and articulations. To articulate is to engage in a hermeneutical activity in which we shape our sense of what we desire. Our interpretations of our desire alter our desire altogether. Experience is partly constituted by self-interpretations. There are in fact certain modes of experience that are not possible without certain self-descriptions. Therefore, these descriptions are not simple, in that there objects are not independent. Articulations engage our responsibility more than a simple description does. The articulation must strive to be faithful to that inchoate sense of what is decisive for us. Evaluations can always be re-evaluated because they are often the least articulated and the most easily subject to illusion/distortion. An important question to ask is how these might be re-evaluated. It seems impossible to question the horizon, because the most basic terms that form the horizon out of which we evaluate are themselves called into question. Taylor is vague here, but he says that it must be carried on within the formulae already existing, but with great attention. He closes by remarking that this conception of human agency will be influential on the human sciences, particularly psychology. First, humans are self-interpreting animals, and so we cannot use concepts like drive as the basis of a motivational theory. Second, personality studies need to be more idiographic. Third, an account of the self must include a genesis of human responsibility in order to be a complete conception of the self.

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