Hope: a solution to the puzzle of difficult action

ABSTRACT

Pursuing difficult long-term goals typically involves encountering substantial evidence of possible future failure. If decisions to pursue such goals are serious only if one believes that one will act as one has decided, then some of our lives’ most important decisions seem to require belief against the evidence. This is the puzzle of difficult action, to which I offer a solution. I argue that serious decisions to φ do not have to give rise to a belief that one will φ, but can instead be accompanied by a hope to φ. Hope can motivate and rationalize the various actions that we associate with serious commitment. It can also account for the existence of special pressures to adopt an agential stance toward one’s future. Because hope can be cognitively rational when belief is not, there is no problematic tension between the ideal of epistemic rationality and the phenomenon of difficult action.

KEYWORDS:

• Hope
• belief
• intention
• weakness of will
• willpower
• practical rationality

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Sergio Tenenbaum, David James Barnett, Philip Clark, Miriam Schleifer McCormick, Katie Stockdale, Jennifer Morton, Juan S. Piñeros Glasscock, and Eugene Chislenko for their generous comments on an ancestor of this paper. I also wish to thank audiences at the Central APA and the ‘Resilience in Action and Belief’ workshop (sponsored by the CRÉ, Université de Montréal, and the GRIN).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See for instance Shah (2006) for a contemporary defense.

2 See especially Marušić (2012, 2015); Marušić and Schwenkler (2018); Schwenkler (2022); Marušić and Schwenkler (2022). Philosophers who accept the Seriousness Claim also plausibly include Harman (1976), Velleman (1989), and Setiya (2008).

3 These expressions are equivalent for my purposes. I say more on what seriousness involves in Section 2 and Section 3.

4 See for instance Marušić (2012), 19–20. More on this asymmetry in Section 4.

5 Success in these projects of course also depends on talent, opportunities, and a myriad of other factors. The important point for the present debate (see below) is that some projects are deemed difficult because they involve ‘volitional challenges’ having to do with continued motivation and strength of will in the face of setbacks, while other projects are seen as difficult for other reasons, extrinsic to the agent’s motivation.

6 See in particular Marušić (2012, 2015); Marušić and Schwenkler (2018); Schwenkler (2022); Marušić and Schwenkler (2022) for a defense of the Seriousness Claim along the lines to be developed in the rest of this paragraph.

7 See Marušić (2012, 6; 2015, Section 6.1); Marušić and Schwenkler (2018, Section 2.1); Schwenkler (2022, Section 5).

8 See Marušić (2012, 6); (2015, 33–35); Marušić and Schwenkler (2018, 316–321); Schwenkler (2022, Section 2).

9 Put differently: When φ-ing is difficult and up to you (as is true in many cases of difficult action), believing that you will φ is necessary for having seriously decided and for seriously intending to φ.

10 This case is adapted from Marušić (2015, 5–7).

11 More on this aspect of the view in Section 5. Marušić (2015) explicitly draws on Sartre (1943/1956).

12 In his (2012), Marušić describes his view as ‘pragmatist’ (while being careful to distinguish it from ‘classic pragmatism’, see below). In his (2015), he describes it as ‘Sartrean’, in order to distinguish it more clearly from classic pragmatism. I think that using both labels at once does full justice to the view.

13 Betsy’s case is similar to Sarah Paul’s (2022, 550–552) case of Sonia (heavily inspired from Sonia Sotomayor’s 2013 autobiography), except that the challenges that Betsy faces are ‘internal’ and have to do with her own weakness of will, instead of being ‘external’ and related to outside circumstances. Running the marathon is ‘up to Betsy’ who, contrary to Sonia, has warrant for thinking that the ‘world will cooperate with her efforts’ (see Marušić 2015, 169). Both agents have decided to φ without believing that they will φ.

14 See Paul (2022) for a full defense of the practical rationality of having a ‘Plan B’. Paul also draws on the notion of conditional intention. I discuss the key differences between Paul’s cases and mine in note 12.

15 See Rioux (2021) for an overview.

16 Other views of substantial hope (such as Bovens’ 1999 account on which hope involves ‘mental imaging’) may also be able to capture hope’s role in cases such as Betsy’s. My primary goal is not to argue for the superiority of the Attention View over alternatives, but instead to show that hope plays a previously underacknowledged role in cases of difficult action – a role that should be captured by any satisfying theory of its nature.

17 Many accept a connection between hope and risk-inclination (Bovens 1999; Rottenstreich and Hsee 2001). Rioux (2022, Section 6) argues that we can use the Attention View to explain why those who hope tend to be risk-inclined in Lara Buchak’s (2013) sense.

18 To be sure, the connection here is understood as contingent: there may sometimes be breakdowns between hope’s attentional focus, on the one hand, and the deployment of cognitive resources to generate paths to one’s desired outcome and risk-inclination, on the other. But because such breakdowns should be the exception rather than the rule, we can take the agents in our cases to have special reasons to hope. I thank an anonymous referee for inviting me to insist on this point.

19 We should instead recognize that those who have ‘knowledge-level” epistemic justification for the belief that they will not φ should never have intended to φ in the first place (Bratman 1987, Chapter 3, Section 3.4.2).

20 Like Milona (2019), I hold that we can rationally hope for outcomes that are up to us. Cases like Betsy’s and other examples of hopes for outcomes that are up to us (see Milona 2019, 713) are counterexamples to Meirav’s (2009) analysis of hope as always involving a ‘resignative desire’ (namely, a desire for something that lies at least partly outside of our control). See also Section 5 on Sartrean bad faith.

21 I thank an anonymous reviewer for urging me to consider this kind of case.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Société et Culture.