Abstract
The paper addresses the role personal projects play in defining who we are and in generating specific personal reasons. It is argued that committing oneself to personal projects generates a distinct normative framework for oneself, irreducible to other reason-providing sources. Personal projects comprise three core elements: (i) they are norm-governed; (ii) they engender project-dependent reasons to pursue the project and its components non-instrumentally; and (iii) they shape one’s identity once one commits oneself to a project. Based on this explanation, the notion of personal projects is distinguished from competing sources of personal reasons and it is argued for the independence and irreducibility of personal projects. Unlike desires, committing oneself to personal projects involves valuing the project’s content and also emotional engagement which, in turn, confers authority—and not merely weight—to the reasons generated. In contrast to (life) plans, pursuing a personal project is not exhausted in realizing, step by step, a kind of blueprint for leading one’s life. Finally, personal projects differ from personal ideals in that they comprise more numerous and more concrete action-guiding reasons than “just” idealized social roles or virtues to live up to. The conclusion is, therefore, that personal projects present an independent and irreducible source of personal reasons.
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Notes
- 1.
See Williams (1976a), 4.
- 2.
The only exception would be a moral project, such as helping as many of the very poor as possible.
- 3.
Williams (1973), 116.
- 4.
Williams (1976a), 5.
- 5.
Ibid., 12.
- 6.
Ibid., 13.
- 7.
Nagel (1986), 168.
- 8.
We could only pretend to value projects for their own sakes and thus lie. See Dancy (1993), 235ff, for an allusion to this possibility.
- 9.
Nagel (1986), 165.
- 10.
Scheffler (1982), 40.
- 11.
- 12.
This is what Portmore (2010), chapter 5, for example, tries to do.
- 13.
- 14.
It is conceivable that the money Anna makes from selling herbs enables her to print the fliers, which she then distributes. But such a causal connection is not necessary for Anna’s engagement in the different types of actions to amount to the pursuit of a personal project.
- 15.
Velleman (2010) interestingly notes that we typically act on concepts of what there is to do, concepts of so-called “doables.” Drawing on Velleman’s work, we might see personal projects as socially shared and socially structured action concepts that constrain what is doable and that frame which actions we should choose.
- 16.
I am indebted to Sam Scheffler for this point.
- 17.
Here, I am indebted to Scheffler (2004), 253–54.
- 18.
I elaborated on the rational role of regret in Betzler (2004), 197ff.
- 19.
Helm (2001), 196, draws our attention to what he calls “tonal” and “transitional” commitments of emotions. He notes: “To say that emotions involve tonal commitments is to say that if one experiences a positive emotion in response to something good that has happened or might happen, then, other things being equal, one rationally ought to have experienced the corresponding negative emotion if instead what happened (or conspicuously might happen) were something bad; not experiencing this emotion would be rationally inappropriate.” See also Helm (2000).
- 20.
This does not mean that rationally connected emotions cannot have other objects than personal projects.
- 21.
Velleman (2008), 420 ff., emphasizes that an agent is guided by the self-understanding he gains by having consciousness of how he thinks and feels about his alternatives.
- 22.
Rosati (2006) emphasizes that a person works herself into a relationship with something, such as a project.
- 23.
To my knowledge, Williams (1973) 108–12, introduced the term.
- 24.
According to psychological research, however, there is a mean number of personal projects (close to 15) that subjects come up with when asked to produce a list of their projects. See Little (1989), 18.
- 25.
Contrary to Calhoun (2009), I am of the opinion that a life without any projects is deficient. However, I will not be able to make the case for that claim in this paper.
- 26.
Rawls (1971), 48–49.
- 27.
See Smith (1994), 159.
- 28.
See Pettit and Smith (1990), 568.
- 29.
Bratman (1987), 29.
- 30.
Ibid., 30.
- 31.
Ibid., 31ff.
- 32.
Ibid., 33.
- 33.
Ibid., 34.
- 34.
Ibid., 31.
- 35.
Ibid., 32.
- 36.
Ibid., 33.
- 37.
Ibid., 28.
- 38.
Bratman draws this analogy between plans and recipes. He adds, however, that plans—as he understands them—have to involve a commitment by the agent to that plan, a commitment that recipes by themselves do not involve (ibid., 29). However, if we grant that a commitment to a plan is a necessary precondition for an agent to have a plan, a plan can still be compared to recipes, that is, the recipes to which an agent commits himself.
- 39.
Lewis (1989), 113 ff., differentiates nicely between these two perspectives.
- 40.
Raz (1986), chapter 13, suggests that valuing a project like friendship implies the “denial” of comparing one’s friends to money, for example.
- 41.
- 42.
According to Velleman (2002), when one acts out of identification with an ideal, one enacts a game of make-believe, a game “in which we pretend to be that with which we identify.” We thereby provide ourselves with a story that we are enacting, which helps us to make sense of what we are doing. Frankfurt (1993), by contrast, defends the view that the way to identify with ideals is through love—that is, by an attitude that we must not betray. Anderson (1993, 8) refers to ideals as “second-order desires.”
- 43.
For an illuminating discussion of the connection between personal ideals and a person’s self-conception, see Buss (2004), 172ff.
- 44.
Velleman (2002) emphasizes that self-conceptions of this kind provide reasons, which more immediate drives can “lean on.”
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Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Susanne Boshammer, Sebastian Elliker, Christian Budnik, Nadja Jelinek, Michael Kühler, Christian Seidel and to those who participated in my colloquium on practical philosophy, held at Berne University (Switzerland), for their helpful written comments on an earlier version of this paper. I would also like to thank David Velleman and Samuel Scheffler for an extremely stimulating discussion of this paper. Many thanks also to Michael Kühler and Nadja Jelinek for having invited me to revisit my ideas on the normative significance of personal projects for this volume.
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Betzler, M. (2013). The Normative Significance of Personal Projects. In: Kühler, M., Jelinek, N. (eds) Autonomy and the Self. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 118. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4789-0_5
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