CLAS 196/PHIL 196
Stoicism

Becker Chapter 6

• The goal of agency
• "To  ceaselessly optimize the number of endeavors that are successfully pursued"
• Agency tries to optimize, which is different from maximization.
  
• It attempts to move every single project the agent has forward.
• But it has to decide between them and prioritize them.
• Obviously, it is the clearing house, the bottleneck, the regulator. As such, the better it functions, the better the agent's optimization can be.
  
• In other words, agency is aimed at perfecting use of itself
• Perfecting our agency is the most comprehensive and controlling endeavor of our lives
• Thus it is our final end

• Agency is "an exceedingly complex set of powers (capacities, abilities, propensities), and the set varies greatly from person to person." (P. 82)
• I find it somewhat useful to think of agency as assent
• Empirical claims about agency:
• Empirically, every endeavor of agency has consequences for the agency itself
• Under favorable circumstances, every pursuit of an endeavor strengthens agency
• Two sorts of elements of agency
• "Received" elements are acquired without exercising one's agency
• "Constructed" elements are acquired by exercising one's agency
• Agency is a material feature of a material thing

• A "cradle" account of agency: start from the infant and follow human development
• Received elements and Constructed elements
• First, the received elements
  
• received endowments
• Our bodies and our neural systems: muscles, brain, nerves, eyes, ears, etc.
• Consciousness, which is a material feature of our brain
• Many impulses: babies already have impulses (seek sensation, seek comfort, identify objects, determine what is self, interact with others, etc.)
• Infants almost immediately have "persistent goal-directed initiatives": and a variety of them, not just one sort
• Many responsive activities: mimicking (vocal, physical, etc.), following objects.
• Fixed ways to process information: visual, auditory, etc. info. is apparently processed in a neurologically fixed way.
• Some of these things yield persistent mistakes: but agency can build in corrective procedures
• we realize that we are missing the basket in a particular way, so we experiment with changes until we get it right
• we notice that our eyes don't work so well, so we get glasses/stop driving/etc.
• we notice a disturbing pattern in our relationships, so we try to change ourselves or others, etc.
  
• we develop coping mechanisms or we correct the problem
• but this is getting ahead of itself: let's follow the cradle argument's story of agency
  
• Our cognitive development is relentlessly recursive: we build on what concepts we have acquired before and it determines what we subsequently acquire
• We have a "built-in motivational pressure for reducing cognitive dissonance": we try to achieve consistency and connectedness among thoughts
• Consciousness is a material feature (emergent?) of a material body
• We have both conscious and unconscious ways to process information (what would ancient Stoics say about the unconscious?)
• ancient Stoicism held that conscious thought was in control of our character and habits
• Becker says some unconscious processes are thoroughly unconscious and not amenable to conscious control
• What is more, he claims that Stoicism has no a priori commitment to the idea that conscious agency predominates.
• There are many bodily states that reduce the energy with which our agency can operate: grogginess, depression, low blood sugar, fever, weakness, diseases, etc.
• "Developments" of received endowments
• Routine-building: out of multiform uncoordinated infant activity, routines begin to emerge
• adults have many routines: they are an irrepressible feature of our lives
• Salience
• routinized behavior can be triggered or suspended by certain events
• think of driving: noticing various things subconsciously or at least nondeliberatively (i.e. we don't "think" about them) is a constant in driving
• those things are salients for driving routines: every set of routines has salients
• We acquire and employ them mostly subconsciously
• Persistent disagreements between agents can often be traced to different subconscious salients that factor in their deliberations
• That is what is happening when someone explains her side of the argument and the other person understands it but does not "get it": the explanation does not have salience: racism, sexism, etc. often have different salients at their root
• Some salients trigger affects (emotional responses), some don't
• some people cultivate them (aesthetes), while other renounce them (ascetics)
• Attachments: we first see something as distinct from us, then we form a sort of internal "attachment" to it, such that it is seen as a part of or integral to our selves
• attachments play a large role in our agency, because they have motivational force
• Representations
• Our experience is stored in representational memory and imagination
• Basic tenors of personality
• think things like shyness, confidence, benevolence, pessimism
• These things may be "inborn" in some cases, but by the iterative nature of learning, we reinforce or weaken them, and so they are also developments
• Constructed Elements
• Agency itself
• We start out with a sort of weak agency 
• But experience starts to build representations, including memory, concepts, awareness of our own projects, patterns of success and failure
• We formulate generalizations and thoughts that logically represent patterns
• We begin to build more and more practical reasoning into what we do
• At some point, "deliberation and choice becomes a determinative condition of (some of) our conduct": they begin to have effects on our practical reasoning itself and the revision of the routines of practical reasoning
• Children keep repetitively trying to get things right, to succeed at implementing projects
• At some point, the deliberation and the choices become determinative of our conduct: we construct our own agency
• we shape our primal impulses, affects, attachments, etc.
• Some generally widespread traits of human personality
• Reciprocity: we construct generalizations about how to react  to benefit and harms
• Benevolence: we develop affective responses to others' pleasure or pain
• Emotionality: we tailor our emotional response to situations: we reflect on the appropriate occasion for different emotions, the appropriate strength of emotional response, the duration, how it is expressed
• They are tailored to our endeavors (neurosurgeons are expected to leave their emotions at the door to the operating room, for example)
• Stoics "recommend an artfully constructed emotional life that enhances rather than obstructs the full range of our endeavors"
• Some traits Stoics recommend cultivating
• Courage: the ability to act despite fear
• Endurance: ability to act despite pain, weariness, or difficulty
• Perseverance: the ability to act despite failure
• Attachments
• adults train children "with respect to the appropriate strength, depth, and dissemination of various attachments"
• we can train ourselves
• some training is destructive:
• the attachment to loved ones that makes their loss crippling
• the attachment to kin that leads to blood feuds
• the attachment to church doctrine that leads to torture and persecution
• presumably, some training is not: some attachments are OK?
• how stoic is Becker willing to be about attachments? VERY: see next item.
  
• Stoic training recommends calibrating one's attachments to the fragility of the objects involved and encapsulating them such that the breaking of one does not render us incapable of preserving others
• Only one sort of attachment is completely rejected: that whose breaking leads to loss of ability to exercise agency itself
  
• Rationality
• generalization: found in most primitive agency, from simplest behavioral conditioning on up
• regularization: an example is language acquisition, which involves rule making and hence called "regularization": fitting observation to a pattern
• recursive and feedback application: applying regularization and generalization to the processes of generalization and regularization themselves is another step
• regularized regularization, regularized generalization, generalized regulation, generalized generalization
  
• effort to act consistently involves thinking in conditionals and assessing their truth
• all of this happens normally in humans and is a robust part of agency
• means-end reasoning
• foreseeing consequences
• predicting
  
• conflicts that are not decidable by simple deliberation occur: need to construct ways to break deadlocks
• compare endeavors
• compare choices within endeavors
• boundary between self and other: early on in agency (mapping of bodily sensations)
• ideas and concepts begin to form part of self too
• the effort to realize agency in ways that are consistent with our self-image happens: integrity
• both vertically (between more and less important endeavors) and horizontally (between equally important endeavors)
• unification of self and endeavors: integrated endeavors and self
• Bailly asks: significant others, children, etc. are adult-formed attachments that involve one's sense of self: some people think their "self" extends into other people. Stoics presumably do not. At what cost?
  
• Health and agency
• healthy agency just is psychological health and it happens that it maps very well onto what most people consider moral character and virtue
• unhealthy agency, on the other hand, is psychopathology and it happens that it maps well onto problems with moral character and virtue
• stoics assume that the endeavor to be and stay healthy (both bodily and mentally) are normal for humans, both in terms of a bell curve and in terms of a normative "should"
  
• attempted suicide, hypochondria, anorexia, etc are complex, but it certainly does not seem as if people who have them do so for the sake of psychological or bodily ill health: no one wants ill health
• Stoics also assume (along with Rawls) that "Other things being equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities..., and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity" (Rawls , Theory of Justice, P. 426)
• Physical health and agent health are analogous: both are amenable to practice, learning, acquisition of skills that improve them
• Becker says we can develop a sort of fitness for our agency powers: it will differ from person to person depending on their particular endeavors and training (ER doctors need different powers from pathologists, judges need different powers from police from lawyers...)
• Beyond simple fitness (a sort of ordinary ability), there is virtuosity: the development of one's agency powers to the limit of practical possibilities
• virtuosos set new standards often
• sometimes virtuosos are not adaptable or versatile: they have a niche of virtuosity
• sometimes they are adaptable and/or versatile
  
• in terms of agency, a virtuoso at agency must be adaptable and versatile: she must be able to meet (all) new situations
• Virtuoso agency is what Becker calls "ideal agency": being a "sage"
• the standard is "ability developed to the limit of human capacity"
• virtuosos become virtuosos by dealing with life: fear, pain, passion, failure: they are not simply born that way
• good imagination and generalization can reduce the need for direct experience here
• i.e. sages are particularly adept at learning from OTHER people's experiences
  
• not all sages are alike: they have particular endeavors and must know all that is humanly possible about them and about what they might face in efforts to optimize their achievement of their endeavors
• Becker's stoicism rejects the notion that there are forms of fragility and vulnerability that are necessary for excellence of character
• this is an important claim to make: do you agree? are there fragilities/vulnerabilities that are simply part of being an excellent person? of just being a human person at all?
  
• Virtuosos are immune to the passions in salient circumstances (airline pilots in flight emergencies, for example), but not in all circumstances
• Also, they have eupatheiai (joy, caution, )
• They have stable character traits
• Whether men can be sages at human agency worries Becker:
• there may be ranges of human behavior that are inaccessible to men: motherhood 
• Becker does not think that the case has been sufficiently made for motherhood being inaccessible to men in such a way that they cannot be virtuoso human agents
• the end
• agency is not directed at happiness
• it is aimed at virtue, which is the perfection of itself, agency: the perfection of practical reason
• happiness results from that, but we cannot aim at happiness itself
• also, the end, virtue, is ONE thing: it is one completely integrated perfection of agency, an optimization of oneself as agent; becoming a virtuoso
• the separate names of different virtues are simply names for the same agency in different circumstances
• Argument for Virtue: see if you agree with each of the following:
  
1. I have many endeavors (it's hard to think of an agent without many endeavors)
2. One of which is practical reasoning (nothing-else-considered)
• it's logically possible to have an agent who lacks the endeavor of improving her own practical reasoning, but I am not like that
3. I have many endeavors that are more or less well-integrated, but conflicts still inevitably arise
4. Each endeavor takes only part of my total agent resources: no one endeavor routinely claims all my resources
5. Thus, I will routinely face optimization problems (given many endeavors that have inevitable conflicts, no one of which can completely dominate my agency, what OUGHT I to do in order to optimize completion of as many of the most important of my endeavors as possible?)
6. Routine engagement with that sort of optimization problem leads to generalizations about agency (the endeavor to optimize my endeavors, including the endeavor to improve my practical reasoning)
• I do not continuously only think of my current local situation: I look beyond here and now. 
• In other words, the project to optimize my current endeavors, nothing else considered, leads me to realize that the best way to do that is to take an all-things-considered approach: to look beyond the here and now
7. Thus, "What I am required to do, as a necessary condition of exercising my agency, is to aim, through my practical reasoning, at the global optimization of my projects current and in the future"
8. Reflection reveals that the only way to optimize my endeavors is to make the perfection of practical reason itself the dominant endeavor of my life
• If I pursue it only for some other endeavor(s), then, by definition, I will not be aiming at global all-things-considered optimization
9. Anyone relevantly similar to me is required to do the same as I am.
10. Becker's "cradle argument" included claims that healthy agents will develop strong norms that represent the ordinary virtues such as courage, wisdom, prudence, etc.  Thus all agents like me are required to aim at the perfection of their practical reason and in doing so, they will also be required to be aiming at virtue (because the virtues are steps on the way to perfection of practical reason)
11. Since the pursuit of perfection of our practical reasoning is all-things-considered (7), it will trump any local endeavor.
• NOTE, HOWEVER
• Becker explicitly says that "It is important to keep in mind, however, that this argument is only sound for agents of the sort described in our developmental story, and that it is a mistake to characterize them solely in terms of rationality. Pure practical reason, shorn of the rest of the psychology of human agency, does not yield the normative propositions described in 1-11 (at least, we cannot see how it could). Rather, the argument outlined here depends crucially at every step, on the normative content found in the multiple, less-than-fully integrated endeavors of healthy agents, and on the operation of oikeiosis in their psychological development. Rational agents with a significantly different psychology (for example, rational agents who are primarily pleasure seekers, or who have only a very limited and thoroughly integrated repertoire of endeavors) fall outside the scope of this argument." P. 118
• Becker thinks he is talking about normal humans, not velociraptors or stones, and so he thinks his analysis applies to normal humans.
• It does not apply to pathologically affected humans, it does not apply to robots, it does not apply to far-gone "romantics" or "aesthetes" or "sadists" or "masochists" or "mystics" or ...
• but it does apply to people who have some tendencies toward the above phenomena.
  
• Becker abandons the idea that a person making progress is just as much drowning as a vicious criminal.!
• BUT
• Rational agents are always operating in terms of inferences, and inferences are either sound or not: there is no degree of soundness
• Any unsound inference will dis-integrate a system: thus as we get closer to fully integrating our endeavors via perfection of our rational agency, the more any individually unsound inference can do damage.
• Until we achieve ideal agency (virtuoso-agency: sagehood), there is no guarantee that the advantages of agency will accrue to us
• Virtue's value
• Why do stoics often say virtue is the only good?
• It is a good regardless of what circumstance we find ourselves in and regardless of whom we are with and regardless of how things turn out
• "true friendship" or something like that might be claimed as another such good: but Becker claims that "true friendship" or any other such thing will always involve virtue (in this case the virtue of our friends), and that virtue is what will make it such a good
  
• It is also equally good in bad or good circumstances, for the genius and the intellectually challenged
• its value cannot be compared with any other thing: it is incommensurable