Intention, Practical Rationality, and Self‐Governance

Ethics 119: 411–443.

The planning theory of intention and of our agency highlights the fundamental coordinating and organizing roles of structures of planning in the temporally extended and social practical thought and action of agents like us. Intentions are elements of plans of action, plans that are normally hierarchically structured, partial, and at least in part future directed. And these planning structures help to support and to constitute forms of agency that we value highly.

Planning agency involves characteristic norms of practical rationality. However, when we try to understand these norms, and their relation to practical reasons, we are led to a hard problem. In this essay I try to say what this problem is and to solve it in a way that is responsive to the recent literature. Some (I call them ‘cognitivists') see these rationality norms as, at bottom, norms of theoretical rationality. Some instead see the idea that these rationality norms have a distinctive normative force as a “myth.” I seek a path between, one that highlights connections between practical reason, planning structures, and the metaphysics of self‐governance: for planning agents like us, our reason for conforming to these norms of practical rationality derives in part from our reason to govern our own lives.

by Michael E. Bratman

Read the article.