Caroline T. Arruda (University of Texas) offrira une présentation intitulée: “Sticking to it and Settling: Commitments, Normativity and the Future”.

Abstract:

People often think that commitments are designed to secure various aspects of the way we exercise our agency over and through time. These include the following: commitments help us to resist temptation (Holton 2009; Marušić 2015 ); commitments block re-deliberation (Bratman 2004; 2016; 2018 Hinchman 2015; Holton 2009); commitments help us to do what we correctly think that we are unlikely to do (Marušić 2015 ); commitments ensure (or provide one route by which to ensure) the diachronic stability of our intentions or decisions (Morton 2013; Morton & Paul forthcoming). Broadly speaking, we can say that commitments are a source of what we might broadly classify as agential stability. Or, more simply, commitments explain how and why I should “stick to it” or “settle” on a course of action. In this paper, I argue that paradigmatic cases of commitments reveal that commitments themselves cannot nor could not provide any of these kinds of agential stability. Instead, I show that if commitments serve any of these functions, it is in virtue of their relationship to what we care about, what has import for us or what we value. If this is correct, it follows that it isn’t the commitment that does the work in explaining why we should “stick to it”; it is the reasons that we have to form the commitment in the first place.