The Problem of Representative Agency

This chapter sheds light on private actors that have the standing or capacity to exercise certain forms of power or make certain decisions in terms of representative agency. It discusses a novel account of the conditions that an agent must meet in order to act or speak in the name of another known as the internalist account of representative agency. It also points out how qua private actors from public institutions systematically fail to act even when private actors act under valid democratic authorization. The chapter elaborates how private actors fail to meet the demands of the representation condition on legitimate exercise. It explains what extent private actors meet the representation condition, confirming if they can truly act in the name of the people whom a government is meant to represent.

Normativity

This chapter attributes to Nietzsche, and uses him to develop, a novel ‘motive-value’ model of practical normativity. The model combines both a motive-condition and a value-condition into the truth-conditions for ‘reason’ claims, thereby delivering an internalist account supplemented by an evaluative condition the content of which is given by the substantive view of value from Ch.10. The resulting model inherits various attractions of extant internalist and externalist accounts of reasons, whilst avoiding the most serious problems besetting each. Its basic structure can be accepted independently of many of the more specific Nietzschean elements going into it and may thereby be of interest to those working in these contemporary debates.

Skill-based engagement with a rich landscape of affordances as an alternative to thinking through other minds

Veissière and colleagues make a valiant attempt at reconciling an internalist account of implicit cultural learning with an externalist account that understands social behaviour in terms of its environment-involving dynamics. However, unfortunately the author's attempt to forge a middle way between internalism and externalism fails. We argue their failure stems from the overly individualistic understanding of the perception of cultural affordances they propose.

Williams on Practical Reason

Bernard Williams’s controversial view about reasons for action is the topic of this essay. The essay explains Williams’s internalist account of reasons for action as an improvement on Donald Davidson’s account. It then corrects Williams’s criticism of externalist accounts of reasons for action by conceding that such accounts are viable as long as they do not imply that the reasons a person has for doing an action can explain his or her doing it. The concession follows from acknowledging the very different program of studying reasons in ethics exemplified in the work of Kurt Baier. Once the correction is made to Williams’s criticism, the essay offers a defense of his view against the criticisms of T. M. Scanlon and Christine Korsgaard.

Liberal autonomy in a troubled context

Autonomy, understood as self-rule, is almost routinely accepted as one of the core liberal concepts. Still, a closer view reveals that both the status and meaning of autonomy are controversial. The text departs from a short summary of the main theoretical disputes surrounding the concept. A critique of the standard internalist account is followed by an attempt to offer reasons for accepting a relational reading of autonomy. The central question of the text is context-specific. It asks about the possibility and meaning of liberal autonomy in a society whose past is marked by mass regime-sponsored (and sometimes widely supported) crimes. The background assumption is that mass crime leaves actors in heteronomous condition. At stake is reestablishing individual autonomies of two types of actors, whose group-specific identities have been created by crime: the ethical community of those who share collective identity with victims, and the ethical community of those who share collective identity with perpetrators.

Internalism and the problem of an isolated epistemic community

In this paper the author deals with one form of relativism which stems from the internalist account of epistemic justification. In the recent epistemological literature this form of relativism is usually indicated as the problem of an isolated epistemic community. By way of an example concerning an isolated epistemic community, it is shown that internalism is unable to provide a consistent account of epistemic justification due to the fact that internalist justification cannot secure the objective connection between beliefs and truth making it the case that one's epistemically justified belief is likely to be true. That means that in explaining epistemic justification we have to resort to some externalist requirements.

Dream Immorality

This paper focuses on an underappreciated issue that dreams raise for moral evaluation: is immorality possible in dreams? The evaluatiotial internalist is committed to answering ‘yes.’ This is because the internalist account of moral evaluation holds that the moral quality of a person's actions, what a person does, her agency in any given case is completely determined by factors that are internal to that agency, such as the person's motives and/or intentions. Actual production of either good or bad effects is completely irrelevant to the moral evaluation of that agency. Since agency can be expressed in a dream, the internalist is committed to dream immorality. Some may take this as a reductio of evaluational internalism, but whether or not this is the case the issue reveals what such a theory is committed to.In this paper I explore the significance of dreams to morality, and argue that the absurdity of dream immorality supports an account of moral evaluation with an externalist component, rather than a purely internalist account of moral evaluation.