Previous chapters have examined forms of action that the standard belief-desire model ignores. This chapter starts to dig deeper into the standard model itself. It is about how decisions get made (especially decisions that are commonly described as conscious ones), and about how those decisions subsequently give rise to actions. It draws on the scientific literature on prospection and on what is often called “neuroeconomics” to argue that valence (pleasure and displeasure) is the common currency of all decision-making. It also argues that the goals and intentions that result from decision-making are real, and distinct from beliefs and affective forms of desire. The chapter begins by showing that the ordinary notion of desire conflates two very different kinds of mental state, however, and it concludes by discussing how intentions and affective desires interact when they conflict.

The standard philosophical model of intentional action-explanation appeals to states of belief and desire to do the explaining. This chapter evaluates what philosophers have had to say about the nature of desire. Chapter 5 showed that the ordinary notion of desire encompasses two very different kinds of mental state: goals and intentions, on the one hand, and affective or emotion-like forms of desire, on the other. The focus here is on the latter. The chapter shows that desires of this sort always incorporate anticipatory pleasure, and that pleasure itself is an analog-magnitude representation of value. The chapter begins with what the science can tell us about the respective natures of pleasure and desire, before comparing the results with claims made by armchair-philosophers. Many of the latter are false, albeit sometimes containing partial insights.

This chapter explores the nature of the legislature and its relationship to constitutional government, focusing in particular on the importance of legislative agency and the dynamics that frame its exercise. The chapter begins by reflecting on the objects of legislative action, arguing that authorising a legislative assembly to legislate changes who legislates but not what it is to legislate. The object of legislative deliberation and action should be the common good and securing this end requires agency. The assembly faces many challenges in exercising agency, which it is structured to overcome, partly by way of its relationship to government, a relationship that goes well beyond acts of legislation. The relationship between legislature and government shapes the character of a constitutional order and bears on the relationship between legislature and the people. The legislature’s duty is to represent the people, which makes self-government possible. The legislature should deliberate and act for the people and be accountable to the people, with legislative deliberation taking its place in a wider public conversation. The legislature’s capacity for agency informs how legislative acts should be understood to change the law and helps explain the moral importance of legislative freedom and the limits on that freedom.

Many attempts have been made to capture the essence of manipulation in a definition, but all have arguably failed. Exploring an alternative strategy, this chapter provides an account of “manipulation” as a cluster concept. Roughly, cluster concepts are characterized by sets of criteria none of which is necessary for the applicability of the cluster concept term; the different subsets of criteria that instantiate the concept are characterized by “family resemblance,” and the more criteria an instance possesses, the closer it is to be prototypical of the concept. The chapter provides a set of ten criteria that participate in the constitution of “manipulation.” They are: intention (kind); intention (intensity); getting into the target’s head; exploiting psychological vulnerability; bypassing or subverting rational control; nontransparency; effect on the target; whether the influence is exercised for the sake of the influencer; making the target a pawn in the influencer’s grand plan; and low baseline expectation of influence. Chapter 2 claimed that the concept “manipulation” is diagnosed perceptually; this fits well with understanding “manipulation” as a cluster concept, since perception determines which combinations of criteria qualify as manipulation.

This and the next chapter deal with a number of notions and forms of which the linguistic or semantic status is or can be disputed, but which in the present analysis are considered non-attitudinal. The present chapter deals with the notions of directivity, volition and intention, which are argued to be action related, hence to pertain to the cognitive domain of communication planning. It also reanalyzes the concept of evidentiality, arguing for a very different cognitive status of inferentiality, as an attitudinal category, on the one hand, and on the other hand of the traditional categories of hearsay and experience, as well as of a less traditional category called ‘memory.’

This chapter analyses legal responses to three situations: someone pretending to intend marriage, someone entering marriage or a civil partnership for ‘ulterior motives’ and someone entering marriage or a civil partnership when an existing relationship disqualifies them from doing so. It argues that, historically, marriage was used to compensate women who experienced the first form of deception and to punish the men who deceived them; that in ‘ulterior motive’ cases, marriage might have been withheld from the deceptive party; and that bigamy provided legal recognition of the harms and wrongs experienced by duped individuals at the same time as it protected the state’s interest in shoring up marriage. The chapter concludes by arguing that the move away from each of these positions over time means that the extent to which the law protects individuals’ interests in avoiding deceptively induced intimate relationships has decreased. It further argues that this development has implications for how we assess the adequacy of contemporary legal responses to inducing intimacy.

This chapter focuses on the transition process, called the Expert Transition Cycle, which an individual goes through each time they make a transition. It reviews the more traditional models including vocational models, career anchors, psychometric models, work adjustment theories, and psychologically based models as well as ecologically and socially embedded models. It then reviews more contemporary transition process models, focusing on two models, working identity and identity status, which inform the study of identities in transition in the research. Finally, it presents the Expert Transition Cycle, which is the basis for determining how identity changes during a transition. This model includes five stages: Intention, Inquiry, Exploration, Commitment, and Integration.

Intentionalism is the least investigated approach to treaty interpretation. It is often discredited by international legal scholars on the basis of various pragmatic arguments. It is also normatively discouraged as a threat to the stability and predictability of treaty rules. At the same time, even a cursory glance at the case law of international courts and tribunals would be sufficient to realize that treaty interpretation discourse in practice is replete with references to the parties’ intention. This chapter situates the reluctance of international legal scholars about intentionalism in the broader intellectual history of international law and shows that most objections to intentionalism rest on a mentalist understanding of intention that has been severely criticized in philosophy. It also argues that given intentionalism’s close connection with consensualism, it is unrealistic to believe that it can be dismissed in practice.

This chapter addresses problems in the philosophy of interpretation with regard to Latin authors. Its central question is what we mean by the ‘author’. The history of ‘persona’, the notion that the speaker in first-person literature and by extension the image of the author presented in any text is a ‘mask’, is explored for its theoretical and interpretive value, but also critiqued for the potential ethical and political issues it raises. The author should be considered not a window onto the life of the flesh-and-blood Roman, but rather as a construct arising in part, but only in part, from an initial human consciousness living in a specific historical place and time, then developed through a dynamic process of reception. The battle for the life and soul of the author is the story of interpretation, in which the question of the extent to which ‘original intention’ can or should be the goal of exegesis was one of the great controversies of the 20th century and remains a creatively unsolvable problem. I argue that there are certain kinds of readings which are rightly and explicitly situated outside the scope of ‘original intention’, of which I take feminist readings as exemplary.

The author examines the place of consent in treaty interpretation at the time of the marginalization of the role of the intention of the parties. Whether the characterization of international law as a legal system grounded in State consent has ever been empirically true is, as he argues, open to discussion. For him, the law of treaties, however, is commonly seen as ‘a bastion of consensualism’. This sense of confidence has, however, never sat easily with treaty interpretation. The author claims that, despite the lip service sometimes paid to the fiction of the common intention of the parties, the official doctrine of treaty interpretation rests on the primacy of the terms of the treaty.

Chapter 2’s purpose is to provide some focused discussion on the meaning of the ‘force’ prohibited in Article 2(4) and customary international law. In seeking to expose the uncertainties regarding this particular term, various factors or common elements of ‘force’ are distilled. After looking at the prohibition of force in the context of the principle of non-intervention, the chapter moves on to look at the type of force that the prohibition is concerned with and, concluding that it is ‘armed force’, then moves on to attempt to distil the key elements of such force, including whether it is the means used or the effects created which is of importance, and whether force can be used indirectly. The chapter then addresses the ‘gravity’ or severity aspects of a use of force, in particular by distinguishing it from an armed attack or act of aggression, but also by examining whether there is a level of force – or de minimis threshold – below which an action falls out of the remit of the prohibition. Finally, and having distilled the key practical components of a prohibited use of force, the chapter focuses upon the mens rea component.