Tessa Supèr
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Consider an agent who enjoys eating treats. One treat at most trivially impacts her health, but eating many treats daily will have adverse effects. Examples like these (“intrapersonal inefficacy cases”) are ubiquitous in our lives, and have raised interesting questions about momentary versus temporally extended instrumental rationality. Tenenbaum (2020), for example, defends the idea that an agent can be rational each time she eats a treat, and yet be irrational over time, as she finds her health declining. Andreou (2014; 2023), however, is skeptical about this suggestion. She argues that while an activity temporally extends beyond a particular moment, it is still the case that this activity is going on at that moment. It can thus be said that the agent, when she “enjoys a treat”, is also “ruining her health”, and therefore can be considered irrational at that moment. “Intrapersonal inefficacy cases” share structural similarities with “interpersonal inefficacy cases”, in which many people’s acts combined lead to an outcome, but none of the acts individually influences this outcome. Given these similarities, Andreou extends her proposal from intra- to interpersonal cases. For example, “damaging the environment”, even though extended beyond any individual’s action, can be going on when one person, say, “drives her gas-guzzling SUV”. However, there are various disanalogies between these types of cases. In this paper, I will examine to what extent these differences threaten the application of Andreou’s account to interpersonal cases. For example, since “damaging the environment” (unlike “ruining her health) involves many agents, it is unclear if the activity should be ascribed to the single agent who “drives her SUV”, or to the collective of agents who do so. I will argue that if she accepts the latter, Andreou’s arguments cannot be united with her skepticism about Tenenbaum’s claims, while if she accepts the former, this would commit her to a view about time-sliced agency that she explicitly rejects. Finally, I will utilize elements from the work of Michael Bratman on instrumental rationality and self-governance (e.g., 2018), to enrich Andreou’s account. This will allow Andreou’s insights to be applied to both intra- and interpersonal inefficacy cases, without running into the dilemma posed above.
Chair: M. Hadi Fazeli
Time: September 8th, 12:00-12:30
Location: SR 1.005
SOPhiA 2026 