CLAS 196/PHIL 196
Stoicism

Becker Chapter 5

"...if one pursues practical reasoning in a thoroughgoing way, one aims at constructing a general theory of the normative elements of one's life all-things-considered--that is, a moral theory of one's life. The next step is to represent one's own life as an instance of a type (of life), and to construct a moral theory for that type of life. Types of lives may then be considered as various ways in which moral agency itself may be expressed. And when one has reached the issue of normative propositions for the life of an agent as such, one has reached a form of universal moral theory."

• "Follow nature"
  
• Two ways to interpret it:
• Follow the Facts generally
  
• Pursue the full development of your human promise: follow the facts about humans (more on the facts about human development below)
  
• In terms of ethics, it means that ethics is a posteriori, not a priori:
• It does not start out with assumptions about human agents that are independent of empirical verification: that would be a priori.
• It cannot eliminate murder, genocide, etc. as wrong from the start: that would be  a priori.
• It takes its basic starting point from empirical observation about human agents: that is a posteriori
  
• Stoics must take seriously any endeavor that an agent has
• only endeavors/projects/purposes that individuals have count: no societal or group purposes, etc.
• "We can find no norms that are untethered to endeavors, and no endeavors that are not facts about individual agents"
• sure, there are dynamic systems that have directions such as the economy or a company, but they do not have a purpose: the only thing that can have a purpose is an individual agent
• Bailly says whoah! why? can't a society make a collective decision and follow it? I'm not here to debate Becker, so let's note this question and move on.
  
• It also means that Stoic ethics must accept ethical conflicts
• They are facts: they exist, both within an agent and between agents.
  
• Interpersonal integration
• Sometimes people's endeavors conflict with each other
• That's a fact
• Stoic theory has no a priori commitment to integrating people's endeavors
• We may integrate our endeavors, but Stoic theory makes no a priori claims that we ought to

• Practical Reason
• Practical reason is a relentless effort to achieve every goal we set for ourselves with as little loss as possible
  
• All other endeavors are considered in implementing any one endeavor, because practical reason is the clearing house that they all pass through: it considers them all all the time
• What practical reason comes up with is the normative proposition: "Given all my endeavors, I ought to do X now."
• Different people's practical reason would come up with different X's even if they had the exact same endeavors:
• because people have different risk tolerances, preferences, skill sets, willingness to delay gratification, etc.

• Reformative assessment:
• Agency is such that it is constantly reformulating, refining, adopting, adapting, and changing
• it does this partially by influences from outside
• but it does it also from within: it assesses and changes itself
• we think about who we are, who we want to be, what works, etc. and we change ourselves by those thoughts
  
• As we learn more about what produces results, what means-ends reasoning patterns work, every one of us formulates (parts of) a system of "logic" or reasoning
• each time we use that system of logic, we (can) improve it (even mere repetition enforces it, but also adds data)
  
• a full-hearted commitment to improving that system is what Stoicism requires.

• Human development
• We start out with a narrow self-interest
• If nothing external hinders us, "we develop a basically trusting, confident, optimistic disposition." This has to be based on statistics, observation, not just wishful thinking.
  
• Then things that we started out wanting for egotistical reasons (knowledge, skill, etc.), we start to want for their own sakes
• we like it, whether or not it's practical or has any results
  
• Knowledge is one of those things that we develop affection for for its own sake
• error, ignorance and falsehood repel us
• We acquire more experience and discover patterns of how things (including ourselves) work
• We (can) refine those patterns and use them more and more as predictive tools to help us reach our goals
• The process of formulating and refining those patterns in turn (can) influences what projects we undertake
• We (can) come to use those patterns as principles and adhere to them independently of their original usefulness
• Becker claims that broadly speaking cognitive development studies confirm this picture (which he says he is borrowing from ancient Stoic oikeiosis theory)
• Next, Becker claims, "through the operation of the ordinary, conscious psychological processes we call practical reasoning, together with the process of appropriation (oikeiosis), we can come to have an independent interest in moral virtue and good as such." (P.57)
• The important point Becker wants us to grant here is that agents can/do follow that developmental path and generate their own motivated norms autonomously.

• Autonomy and Heteronomy
  
• Autonomy
• "an agent's norms are autonomous if and only if the normative propositions that represent them are constructed (or constructable) from the features of that agent's own actual endeavors."
• Heteronomy
• an agent's norms are heteronomous if and only if the normative propositions that represent them are not constructed (or constructable) from the features of that agent's own actual endeavors."
• i.e. they are given to us by others: we simply adopt our parents' norms, our friends' norms, a book's norms, etc.
• BUT inevitably our heteronomous norms become autonomous, because by adopting heteronomous norms, by the process of reformative assessment mentioned above, we inevitably make them our own.
• "Agency is itself a datum, a given, but when conscious of itself, it operates transformatively upon itself as well"

• Agency, Autonomy, and Determinism
• Agency is basically our power to assent
• Agency is autonomous and not automatic
  
• Why isn't agency heteronomus and automatic like digestion (or circulation or healing or sweating or any number of other things that happen in agents)?
  
• digestion happens only because of the causal chains that cause it: when you say that the body "automatically" digests, you mean that there is a causal chain there that is different from non-automatic causal chains: doesn't agency happen because of causal chains that determine it too?
• digestion is sort of like gravity, a bit more complex, but "automatic." It does not and cannot change/transform itself. It's not plastic. It's scope is severely limited.
  
• but agency is much more complex: it is not nearly as predictable, plus it has feedback loops and self-regulatory mechanisms that digestion does not have, and those feedback and self-regulatory mechanisms can themselves be shaped by feedback and self-regulatory mechanisms.
  
• autonomy means that the agent regulates itself
• but that does not free it from the causal fabric which led to its creation and which continually influences it
• Agency can act on anything: it has virtually unlimited scope of action
• digestion can only act on the digestible
• What is more, Agency
  
• is robust: it is regenerative and self-corrective (feedback loops, etc.)
  
• digestion is not
  
• What about addiction?
• What about phobias?
• What about "paralysis" by "over-analysis" and obsessiveness?
• Yes, they happen and they exist, but
  
• stoics think that statistically as a matter of empirical fact:
• agency is highly resistant to extinction through other psychological factors
• when exercised at all, in relation to other constitutive powers, it tends to increase in relative strength
• an agency can thus become the most controlling psychological factor
• agency is also rebootable: trauma (psychological or physical) can shut it down, but it can be rebooted, either spontaneously or externally
• systematic errors that develop within agency tend to be reduced or corrected by exercising agency
• that doesn't mean every addict/phobic/etc. phenomenon gets corrected, but agency is a powerful tool that can and does help even in those situations
  
• Exercise of agency IS human freedom
• but agency is the determinate product of causal factors
• COMPATIBILISM: our agency is determined by causal antecedents, BUT we are still responsible for it, because it is also determined by things within us, things we sometimes call choice
  
• " the story of what we are doing at a particular moment is the story of one causal thread of our whole lives to that point"
• Bailly prefers to think of it as a web, a fabric, felted perhaps: it's not as linear as a thread, although parts of it are.
  
• "Agents are fully responsible for their acts if and only if they
  
• (a) are aware of what they are doing;
  
• (b) are aware of the causes of their actions;
  
• (c) assent to acting in those ways from those causes, that is, are acting in accord with the norms they recognize as their own ;
  
• (d) are aware of the causes of their assent, that is the causes of their own norms;
  
• (e) thereby introduce new causal factors into the determination of their actions through their awareness of the causal conditions that shape it;
  
• (f) are aware of this iterative, self-transformative causal process; and
  
• (g) assent to that, in the sense that they recognize that this process is normative for them."
• Note the "fully" in that: maybe agents can be partially responsible, legally responsible, etc. if they don't fulfill all of those requirements a-g?