The Bounds of Agency
Mark Brown within the Unity of Consciousness
Neither
Animalism nor Psychological Continuity
Theories of personal identity can
succeed as descriptive metaphysics because persons understand themselves both
as life forms and as forms of consciousness. Self-consciousness may be
theoretically separable from its embodiment but practical reason demands
essential reference to the body as the arena of subjectivity and the vehicle of
intentional action. Attempts to separate mind from body misrepresent lived
experience; reductions of the mind to the body drain consciousness of value.
Descriptive metaphysics flounders, making room for the kind of revisionary
metaphysics proposed by Carol Rovane in The Bounds of Agency.
Rovane reconfigures
the conceptual landscape of personal identity, although not perhaps how she
intended. Rovane’s third way analyzes personhood as the normative capacity to
deliberate and to recognize and engage the deliberative capacities of other
persons. The account is normative in the sense that ideals of rationality
regulate deliberation; it is thoroughgoingly normative in the sense that
nothing in the human embodiment of personhood imposes a metaphysical limit upon
its scope. Specifically, the normative account of persons is compatible with
the possibility of group persons constituted by more that one human being and
with the possibility of multiple persons who co-constitute a human being.
Rovane achieves this result by substituting the rational unity of deliberation
for Lockean phenomenological unity of consciousness as both necessary and
sufficient for personal identity. Groups and personalities count as persons if
they adopt the deliberative stance; human infants and the neurologically
damaged fall below the threshold because they cannot deliberate.
Rational
unity as understood by Rovane operates independently of the felt quality of
experience. The agent achieves overall rational unity when practical reason
arrives at all things considered judgments about what to do by resolving
contradictions in her belief set, deriving and accepting their logical
implications, ranking preferences, assessing values,
considering options and performing a
cost-benefit analysis on the likely outcome of each alternative.
Certain overriding goals, what Rovane calls unifying projects, fix the contours
of deliberation within a larger normative structure that confers meaning and
coherence upon the whole. A person, for Rovane, is anyone who acts under the
idea of practical reason, whether or not she fully realizes overall rational
unity.
The thesis of this essay is that
overall rational unity cannot function as the normative standard of personhood
because practical reason divorced from the phenomenal unity of consciousness is
non-demonstrative. Agents confront choice between incommensurable values,
combinatorial explosions of projected consequences of alternative means to
ends, undecidable weightings of competing considerations and arbitrary cut off
points mandated by the need to act promptly and the cognitive limits of the
agent’s mind. Rational unity must be supplemented by the felt quality of
phenomenal experience if the agent is to achieve deliberative closure. Groups
of persons are not group persons because the group cannot deliberate effectively
without drawing upon the phenomenal unity of consciousness of one or more of
their human sized members. Similarly, alternate personalities are not separate
multiple persons because the unity of consciousness they share decisively
affects the outcome of deliberation. My argument for this conclusion will
proceed in three stages. First, I consider the dynamics of deliberative closure
in the standard case of human persons; I then examine the limits of rational
unity in cooperative ventures; and end with a critique of Rovane’s idealized
rational reconstruction of Multiple Personality Disorder.
Phenomenal Unity
Phenomenal
unity can occur independently of rational unity in primates and pre-linguistic
children but for human persons rational unity is indissociably linked to
phenomenal unity. Conceptual self-consciousness builds upon, permeates and
transforms the phenomenal consciousness of persons. Any mental content that
enters phenomenal consciousness can give rise to a belief, desire or other
propositional attitude with respect to the experience.
Phenomenal
contents bring closure to deliberation. Consider the following scenario. You
are at work as a middle manager in a small but growing firm when a former lover
contacts you concerning a lucrative contract. She wants to discuss the details
over lunch today. Meeting her probably would be a good career move but it could
also place in jeopardy important social relationships if casual observers
misrepresent the circumstances of the meeting. There is no way to know for sure
the immediate or long term professional benefits or the degree of interpersonal
risk and there is no common scale on which to measure the relative importance
of business success and harmonious relationships. One could delegate the
meeting to a subordinate, but that option only multiplies the uncertainties.
Who would be the best choice to take your place? What impact would his success
or failure have on his career, and on yours? Is your former relationship an
asset or a liability? How would your supervisor react to a perceived lack of
initiative? Your former lover and prospective client is waiting for an answer.
The
deliberative capacities Rovane enumerates—resolving contradictions, deriving
implications, performing cost-benefit analyses— frame the question without
resolving the issue. Phenomenal beliefs, desires and their attendant emotions
must bolster practical reason if a timely decision is to be made. One might
feel acute embarrassment at the thought of one’s wife’s sister being seated at
an adjoining table in the restaurant; or one might swell with pride at the
thought of submitting the signed contract to the boss; but some affective
consideration is needed to tip the balance.
To paraphrase Pascal: The heart has reasons reason needs.
Rovane’s
account of prudential self-concern illustrates the inadequacy of pure practical
reason. On Rovane’s account, an agent’s unifying projects channel the drive for
overall rational unity in the direction of long term activities that encompass
her most fundamental concerns. A Rovane agent has internal reasons for
self-concern because unifying projects constitute her identity.
Her future well-being promotes what matters most to her. What a Rovane agent
cannot do is give reasons why what matters most to her is her future
well-being. This Ego Project, as John Perry called it, is the philosophical
crux of the justification of self-concern.
I don’t just want my wife to be satisfied, I want to satisfy her; I don’t
really care if the lottery is won unless it is I who win it; I want my book to
be written, but even more, I want to write it.
From the
point of view of rational unity the present self has no special reason to care
about its own future so long as it is convinced that its unifying projects will
flourish in its absence. The self-evident importance my prospects once had now
seem mysterious. What rationally justifiable reason do I have to care more
about a future self who will have gone on to other concerns than about my
friends and lovers, with whom I share unifying projects? Why should I sacrifice
now for a future self with whom I may have little in common? My life is not
worth more than theirs; my future doesn't matter more than their present.
From the point of view of phenomenal
consciousness, the importance of the Ego Project is self-evident. I care about
my future well-being because anticipation alters the content of phenomenal
consciousness, and phenomenal consciousness enters into my deliberations as the
Ego Project. I feel a twinge of fear when thinking about my upcoming eye
operation, relish the thought of meeting old friends and feel nauseous at the
prospect of yet another vertigo inducing ride at the County Fair because when I
imagine myself having these experiences I elicit in myself experiences with a
quite specific phenomenal quality. The associated feelings transform an
intellectual model of a projected scenario into a surrogate form of lived
experience that has far greater impact than stand alone representations of
completed unifying projects. I care about what happens to me because in
anticipation I get a foretaste of the phenomenal quality of my future
experience. I can if I wish extend the range of the Ego Project by an
empathetic identification that evokes in me phenomenal experience on behalf of
the imagined future of another person, but this is just another way phenomenal
unity resolves the rationally undecidable. Rovane’s account of practical reason
leaves out the decisive role of the Ego Project, and in so doing, misrepresents
the rational unity of human persons.
Group Persons
Human persons
express their agency through empathetic understanding of the rational points of
view and phenomenal consciousness of other persons. The ability to
imaginatively entertain alternative deliberative viewpoints within one’s own
considered judgment makes possible actions that may be attributed to a group of
persons or to an enduring institution. Group persons emerge, according to
Rovane, when separable deliberative standpoints jointly achieve overall rational
unity through a shared commitment to a unifying project.
Consciousness of unity supplants the unity of consciousness as the foundation
of personal identity.
Group persons
achieve a degree of like-mindedness and coordinated activity that obliges
persons to treat them as if they were separate agents with intentions and
motivations of their own. To speak with an executive at corporate headquarters
is to interact socially with another human being and simultaneously to
encounter attitudes and policies that are the expression of the larger
corporate entity; to interview for a position with the Yale Philosophy
Department is both to become acquainted with some interesting people and to
engage a group with its own agenda; to meet the husband or the wife of a happily
married couple is like meeting both if they tell each other everything, share
the same goals and values and engage the outside world as a unit. Rovane is
careful to note that these cases only approximate the overall rational unity of
fully achieved group persons, but she also recognizes that human sized persons
routinely fall short of ideal rationality.
Whether Rovane’s group persons are useful fictions or substantial realities
depends upon how the rational unity they exhibit measures up to practical reason
as it functions in human persons.
An
organization that operates by consensus approaches a group mind. Members act in
accord with established policies; institutional priorities channel initiative;
and expectations of others in the hierarchy encourage everyone to internalize
the mission of the institution. Few corporations come close to this ideal (and
even fewer Philosophy Departments!), but even when corporate culture dominates
the mindset of employees, group rational unity vastly underdetermines corporate
policy. The same quandaries of undecidable factor analysis weightings,
combinatorial explosions of means to ends and incommensurable preference
orderings that afflict individual deliberations deadlock group decision-making,
as anyone who has ever served on a committee can testify.
Rovane
suggests that group persons could “overcome . . . their computational
difficulties simply by appointing an executive authority whose charge would be
to make their all-things-considered judgments.”
But a human-sized Chief Executive Officer can no more resolve a deliberative
impasse through pure practical reason than can the organization she leads. She
must exercise effective leadership in the same way she makes decisions under
uncertainty in other spheres of life, by drawing upon the phenomenal quality of
remembered and anticipated experience. A postulated executive authority no more
explains the actions of a group person than immaterial souls explain the will
power of human beings. The CEO is the homunculus within the social machine.
Perhaps the
old married couple provides a better model for group persons. They share a
great many beliefs and desires, pursue common long term projects, and over the
years their temperaments, deliberative strategies and emotional dispositions
converge. Decades of deep love may even lead to a kind of joint Ego Project, in
which an anticipated joy or sorrow for one is felt by both.
Such a couple
may act in concert but not agree with one another. Even the closest marriage is
the product of a long series of compromises, accommodations, adjustments and
patterns of deference to the partner acknowledged to have a greater stake or
more expertise in a particular sphere of life. Wife and husband integrate their
partner’s anticipated preferences within their own rational unity because each
understands and respects the other’s point of view. Not every close marriage
works this way, but those that don’t veer toward the Chief Executive Officer
model. Either way, the appearance of a group person is an illusion.
Human social
organizations are hierarchical structures in which physically independent
higher levels control the lower levels. Pyramidal hierarchies such as a
military unit act through a well-defined chain of command in which ultimate
responsibility and control rests with the commanding officer. Flattened
hierarchies permit consensus to emerge from free exchange of views, but even
here a spokesperson must articulate from her own point of view the group’s goal
and plan of action. Flattened hierarchies that function through a democratic
process such as voting sum each person’s deliberative unity in search of a
metaphorical voice of the majority. In one way or another, hierarchies express
and depend upon the unity of phenomenal consciousness.
The lure of a non-hierarchical group
mind attracts many philosophers. Early Christians yearned for absorption within
the Mystical Body of Christ; Rousseau’s Spartans lived and fought with a single
will; and Plato’s Republic mirrors and models an image of a fully realized
human being; but in each case the idealized group person masked the hierarchy
within. Even before the onset of a Church hierarchy, Paul was the effective if
distant leader of early Christian communities; Sparta was a deeply divided
master/slave society that functioned as a unit through strict adherence to a
military chain of command; and Plato invested final authority in a cadre of
Philosopher Kings. In each case mythical group persons achieved deliberative
closure on the backs of the phenomenal unity of human minds. Rovane’s group
persons are no different.
Multiple Persons
Rovane does
not rest her case for multiple persons upon multobiographies, but she does cite
Sybil as the empirical foundation for “two features of multiple
personality disorder [which] suggest alters would be multiple persons within a
single human being.”
The reality of “alter personalities who approximate, and may even meet, the
condition of being multiple persons within a single human being” demonstrates
for Rovane the logical possibility of multiple persons.
Rovane first
reports that people diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder exhibit
behavior that invites others to engage each alternate personality as if it were
a separate person. Indeed, multiples may be so firmly convinced of the
independent existence of their alternate personalities that effective therapy,
not to mention good manners, mandates relating to each personality in a way
approximating normal social interaction.
Abrupt
switches between personality profile and assumed social role imply that the
human being is host to multiple persons only if one takes the reports of
multiples at face value. A therapeutic attitude of acceptance is entirely
consistent with an unspoken stance of active disbelief in the reality of
multiple persons. After all, people have personified just about everything.
Some people treat their pets as if they were persons; other people earnestly
believe the forces of nature are godlike persons and wholeheartedly embrace
them as friends, allies and enemies. One contemporary philosopher even
attempted to form an I-Thou relationship with a rock.
Moreover, people diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder exhibit symptoms
of clinical disorientation, confusion, depression and amnesia that together imply
that the fixation of belief in these subjects fails to reliably track reality.
The outward behavior of a multiple provides no more reason to believe that she
hosts separate persons than the outward behavior of a delusional personality
warrants believing that he is Napoleon.
Reported
co-consciousness is the second feature of Multiple Personality Disorder Rovane
cites in support of the logical possibility of multiple persons. If more than
one person can enjoy introspective access to the contents of a single
consciousness, then phenomenal unity cannot by itself constitute personal
identity. Co-conscious alters are distinct persons, according to Rovane,
because each reports deliberation emanating from a distinct commitment to their
own unifying projects. Alters rarely achieve overall rational unity, but this
is an ideal that also eludes human sized persons most of the time.
The
temptation to attribute co-consciousness to a multiple can be resisted. Most
multiples claim to have co-consciously witnessed some form of childhood abuse
from an adult sensibility that could not possibly be an accurate portrayal of
the event as experienced by a child. Consider the case of Renee, the social
identity of a multiple, who adopts the persona of Stella to describe a traumatic
incident from childhood:
It
was Easter. And she was 11. . . . I was watching . . . but she didn’t know it.
. . . I’ve been with men, but I wouldn’t do nothing like that with my own
father. . . . She was a complete wreck. . . . Well, I can see that it was hard
for her to take.
Stella seems to be a first person
witness to an episode in the life of Renee, but a closer look reveals that this
could not possibly be the case. Since “Stella” had “been with men” other than
her father, and eleven year old Renee had not, either Stella dissociated from
Renee after the rape or the Stella persona existed before the rape but her
consensual sexual experiences came later. Either way, Stella could not have
co-consciously experienced Renee’s rape in the way she describes. Rather, Renee
uses the adult perspective she segments as Stella to remember the trauma
without cueing painful memories encoded in childhood. Other putative cases of
co-consciousness also can be recast as forms of disordered awareness within a
unified consciousness.
At this point
Rovane shifts her attention to an idealized description of multiple persons who
enjoy unobstructed access to one another’s mental states. Imagine first three
sisters who wish to use to the limited resources of their family to pursue
separate life plans. They might arrive at a compromise solution in which each
followed the activities of the others while they took turns using the car, the
house and the family budget. The sisters would have much in common but no one
would question their separate identities. Now imagine a single human being who
wished to pursue simultaneously three independent careers, one as a teacher,
another as a philosopher, and a third as a concert pianist. Assume that each
fractional life plan has sufficient coherence to constitute a unifying project
and that the human being is committed to achieving overall rational unity
within each sphere of life. The teacher, the philosopher and the musician might
negotiate a mutually satisfactory time sharing agreement in which each would be
a co-conscious but silent and indifferent participant in the mental life
favored by the others.
If such an arrangement worked well, why question their separate identities?
The human
being in Rovane’s imagined case suffers none of the amnesic barriers or other
cognitive failures that generate serious pathology in real cases of multiple
personality. Since they participate equally in a single phenomenal unity of
consciousness, anything one experiences, all three experience. Rovane’s
idealized multiple persons not only know what each other knows, they feel what
each other feels. When the concert pianist gives a performance, the teacher and
the philosopher are right up there on stage, taking their bows, conscious of
every intention to strike a key, every expressive intonation, every creative
interpretation of the score, every lapse in technique. Similarly, the pianist
is fully aware of the teacher’s success or failure in the classroom,
experiencing along with her both the satisfaction of conveying a difficult
thought to a bright student and the embarrassment of a joke that falls flat.
When the philosopher hits upon an unnoticed solution to the mind-body problem
and publishes her results to rave reviews, the teacher and the musician feel
the same rush of satisfaction and pride as the philosopher.
If they are
to remain distinct persons in Rovane’s sense none of these shared experiences
can enter into one another’s rational points of view. In the absence of amnesic
barriers, multiple persons would need to act as border guards of their
deliberative standpoints, ever vigilant lest some cognitive or affective
leakage threaten their identity. The philosopher must not daydream about the
musician’s upcoming date to perform Beethoven’s Appassionata at Carnegie
Hall or allow the experience of the desire to practice the piano to influence
her all things considered judgment to catch up on the latest philosophy
journals. Similarly, the teacher cannot permit her experience of the
philosopher’s intellectual excitement to influence her all things considered
judgment about what to include in her afternoon lecture. Even though their
awareness of one another’s thoughts is linked normally to their shared hedonic
centers, they must somehow steeply discount the motivational impact of two
thirds of their experience. Only in this way can they preserve the overall
rational unity that for Rovane constitutes their personal identity.
I hope it is clear that the multiple
persons Rovane imagines, if they manage to maintain their separate identities
at all, are engaged in an inherently unstable and thoroughly pointless
enterprise. Actual multiples maintain the illusion of distinct identities only
because their disordered awareness blocks simultaneous access to the unity of
phenomenal consciousness. Rovane is thus faced with a dilemma: If multiple
persons suffer the cognitive failures characteristic of real cases of multiple
personality, then there is no compelling reason to postulate independently
existing alters. The phenomena of multiplicity can be explained more
economically, and with at least as much plausibility, as a dissociational
coping device. But
if multiple persons enjoy full introspective access to the experiences of their
alters, then their rational points of view will tend to merge as each takes
into account the subjective experience of the others. Either way, multiple
personality fails to challenge the presumption of the unity of consciousness at
the foundation of the concept of a person.
Conclusion
The Bounds of Agency is a
genuinely useful book. It recasts the debate on personal identity in a form
that brings to the forefront conceptual and empirical linkages that the method
of imagined cases buried under layers of intuition. Above all, Rovane’s
framework highlights the centrality of the unity of consciousness. Philosophers
can no longer take the unity of consciousness as a brute fact, not in need of
deep explanation.
It is now clear that a revisionary metaphysic of personal identity waits upon
just such an explanation of the unity of consciousness.
C. Rovane, The
Bounds of Agency (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
Susan Hurley calls this
phenomenon “self-evidence for content” in S. Hurley, Perception and
Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 143.
Antonio Damasio calls
this the Somatic Marker Hypothesis in A. Damasio, Descartes Error
(New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994), pp. 165-204.
J. Perry, “The
Importance of Being Identical,” in A. O. Rorty, ed., The Identities
of Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp.
67-90.
K. J. Warren, “The
Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism,” Environmental Ethics
12 (1990).
N. Confer and B. Ables
B., Multiple Personality: Etiology, Diagnosis, and
Treatment. (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1983), p. 137.
The example is
Rovane’s, pp. 175-177.
I provide such an
account of Multiple Personality Disorder as a failure of autobiographical
memory in M. Brown, “Multiple Personality and Personal Identity,” forthcoming
in Philosophical Psychology (2002).
D. Parfit, Reasons
and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 250.