Actions and explanations  (Page 3/3)

So some motivating factors are long-term policies or commitments on the part of the agent, his or her motivations, character or personality, and their social position. These desires might overcome various opposed desires.

An agent has a policy, such as the policy of keeping promises come what may, when he makes an unconditional judgment in favor of those actions which he sees is future offing for him, that fulfill promises. It is not just that he finds them qua fulfillments of promises attractive or compelling, a state which would leave him free not to perform them, finding them unattractive under other aspects. He selects in all their particularity those actions that he foresees; he decides resolutely for them. Such a policy resembles a state of intending something in this regard. What distinguishes it is that whereas the intending is fulfilled by a single action, however complex, the policy remains intact and directive no matter how many actions have satisfied it.

So, basically, a person has the same motivations for the actions he or she does over time. He intends one thing, and then does many actions that will fill this intention. Even when he accomplishes his intention, the drive behind the intention is still there.

An agents motivational profile is constituted by the state of his emotions and drives. Emotions are passing states of feeling which are not associated with any very restricted class of action: fear and jealousy, shame and joy, despair and sadness, may sensitize agents to any of a number of promptings and may lead to any of a variety of actions. They are associated with characteristic circumstances of arousal and they usually issue in distinctive involuntary expressions. Drives on the other hand are passing states of feeling which are pointed much more definitively towards particular tracks of behavior: avarice and envy, revenge and ambition, hunger and lust, are primarily identified by the promptings to which they make us responsive and the actions which they lead us to perform. Like emotions they have characteristic circumstances of arousal but they do not have such distinctive involuntary expressions. As states of feeling, emotions and drives have in common the fact that it does not make sense, as it would with a policy, to think of an agent revoking them: they are conceived of as unwilled, if sometimes welcome, visitations.

Clearly emotions and drives are going to lead people to do various actions. They would also help motivate and power certain actions while the person is doing them. Drives might prompt us to do things, and emotions might also make us more responsive to our desires to perform actions.

An agents character or personality consists in deeply enduring and only partially controllable habits of mind and heart whereby he may be distinguished from other individuals. It is often described by the use of words associated with certain emotions and drives, the implication being that the agent has a susceptibility to those states. Thus we have fearful and jealous, avaricious and envious, people as well as having the emotions of fear and jealousy and the drives of avarice and envy. Personality is often characterized too, not by habits of the sensibility but by habits of thought. When we speak of someone as obsessional or judgmental, or when we characterize his belief patterns as fascist or xenophobic, we are ascribing personality just as much as when we describe his affective dispositions. In either case we are focusing on something in the agent which, like his policies or her motivational profile, may mean that a given prompting occasions a distinctively powerful desire.

So, depending on a persons personality, different triggers are going to elicit different drives and motivations. When you describe someones beliefs, actions and values you are describing their personality as well. You could label certain characteristics of a response that is associated with certain emotions or drives.

Finally, an agent's social position, in a slightly unusual use of the phrase, is the frame constituted by the relationships with other people which constrain his behavior at any time. The traffic warden seeing children safely across the road, the bank clerk considering a request for credit, the tourist office attendant giving information to visitors: these are examples of people who so long as they exercise the activities described are in highly visibly social positions. Like the other factors mentioned, position is something on the side of the agent which can mean that a given stimulus to desire is exceptionally potent, and that the desire occasioned has the feature of readily prevailing over competitors.

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