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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 69 command. Or I can take a pill, or get a neurological implantation, or any number of other familiar agency subverters that get me to do what the intentional object of (2) requires, namely go to the store. To intend that I go to the store is to intend to bring it about, by whatever means are available to me, that I go to the store, even if the locomotive behavior constitutive of my going to the store is not itself voluntarily undertaken. In general, this is because to intend that P is to intend that some independent state of affairs, expressable in a sentential proposition which itself may be true or false, obtain. Thus that I intend to go to the store may be false, although that I go to the store is true, and vice versa. To intend that this independent event occur is to intend to bring about something - my going to the store - that itself bears no necessary relation to my own agency. This means that there is often no difference in the degree of voluntariness expressed between (2) and (3) I intend that Clive go to the store i.e. not much voluntariness at all. In both cases, my role may be merely to bring it about that the agent goes to the store - by cajoling, threatening, exhorting, hypnotizing, or implanting an electrode, without voluntarily or deliberately carrying out the object of my intention at all. For example, suppose I know that in two hours I will have fallen asleep, and will be incapable of deliberately carrying out any sustained plan of action whatsoever; but that it is nevertheless imperative that I go to the store in two hours. I may, through autohypnosis, implant in myself the suggestion that when I hear the clock strike five, I will interrupt whatever I am doing and go to the store. At five PM I hear the clock strike five times; I awake with a start, lace up my sneakers, and stumble off to the store. My behavior is goaldirected, so it is intentional. But for all the direct relation it bears to my original intention that I go to the store, it might just as well have been Clive whom I hypnotized as myself. This is the kind of case in which "intention that" and "intention to" locutions are not interchangeable. By contrast, I cannot carry out (1) by thus allowing hypnosis to subvert my agency. If I intend to go to the store, then whatever means I deploy to do so (a pair of sensible shoes, a bus, etc.) cannot involve putting someone or something else in direct command of my will in order to do so. In general, this is because to intend to do something requires that the event I intend bear a necessary relation to my own agency, i.e. that it be not only my behavior, but moreover under my voluntary control at the time I perform it. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
