LIT-596: Three Theories of Self-Governance

Michael E. Bratman, “Three Theories of Self-Governance”, Philosophical Topics 32(1/2), Spring/Fall 2004 (issue title “Agency”), pp. 21–46 — DOI-10.5840/philtopics2004321/25. Reprinted as chapter 11 of Bratman’s essay collection Structures of Agency (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 222–253, DOI 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195187717.003.0011. Crossref and the Philosophy Documentation Center give the article only the year, so published: carries 2004 as the first of January.

The brief’s citation is correct on both counts: the journal, volume and year, and the 2007 reprint in Structures of Agency. The book is filed separately in this batch by another reader; this entry is the essay.

Key takeaways

Registered from the publisher’s abstract of the 2007 reprint, not a reading. The abstract says the chapter:

• “revisits the important exchange between Harry G. Frankfurt and Gary Watson concerning the psychological structures involved in significant forms of free agency”, and treats that debate “as part of the debate about the psychological structures and forms of functioning that are central to human self-governance”;
• aims “to deepen the account of how to be a wholehearted, pluralist, self-governing agent” using Joshua Cohen’s reading of Rawls’s “idea of reasonable pluralism”;
• develops the “broadly Frankfurtian” claim that “agential authority is a matter of the non-Platonic psychological role in the Lockean organization of our temporally extended agency”, even for evaluative attitudes that also track the good, and says that “the normal hierarchical structure of self-governing policies helps them play these Lockean organizing roles”;
• “Finally, … proposes an intention-based theory.”

The title’s three theories are, on the abstract’s evidence, Frankfurt’s, Watson’s and Bratman’s own. The abstract does not number them, so that is my reading of it.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, as the record’s statement of Bratman’s planning theory of self-governance. It is philosophy of agency with no instruction for machine-learning practice, so no anthology topic holds it. The Anthology of the SOTA does not hold it: a grep of its literature.d for “Bratman” and the title found nothing.

Deferred because it was not read.

No relation is declared to Frankfurt. The brief suggested that compared_against Frankfurt might be true, and on the abstract it is likely: the essay sets its intention-based theory beside Frankfurt’s and Watson’s. But the record’s Frankfurt filings are “Identification and Wholeheartedness” (LIT-575), filed with this, and the 2004 Tanner Lectures (LIT-293), and I cannot say from an abstract which Frankfurt text the essay measures itself against; it may well be a third that the record does not hold. A reader should declare compared_against to whichever of the two the essay actually engages.

What the record already says about it:

• Buss and Westlund (LIT-296, NOTE-267) list this essay in their bibliography and never cite it in the text or notes.
• Dryden (LIT-297, NOTE-266) gives Bratman one sentence: personal identity is partly constituted by the organizing and coordinating role of plans and policies.
• THEORY-029 names “Bratman’s self-governing policies” in its promote_when as a reply it holds only by report. This essay is the reply. The question THEORY-029 puts to it is whether a policy’s “Lockean organizing role” is specifiable without presupposing the agent’s participation and is not disownable. A functional role in the organization of agency over time is a candidate that is specified without the agent’s endorsement; whether an agent can be alienated from such a policy is what the reading would have to establish.

Priority for a reading: high, with “Identification and Wholeheartedness” first, since Bratman’s essay is in part a reply to it.

Access when seeded:

• Crossref records for the article and the reprint (titles, pages, dates; the reprint’s abstract).
• The Philosophy Documentation Center’s article page (volume, issue, pages, DOI; purchase only).
• Oxford Academic’s chapter page returned 403 to a plain request.