Recent studies by experimental philosophers demonstrate puzzling asymmetries in people’s judgments about intentional action,
leading many philosophers to propose that normative factors are inappropriately influencing intentionality judgments. In this
paper, I present and defend the Deep Self Model of judgments about intentional action that provides a quite different explanation
for these judgment asymmetries. The Deep Self Model is based on the idea that people make an intuitive distinction between
two parts of an agent’s psychology, an Acting Self that contains the desires, means-end beliefs, and intentions that are the
immediate causal source of an agent’s actions, and a Deep Self, which contains an agent’s stable and central psychological
attitudes, including the agent’s values, principles, life goals, and other more fundamental attitudes. The Deep Self Model
proposes that when people are asked to make judgments about whether an agent brought about an outcome intentionally, in addition
to standard criteria proposed in traditional models, people also assess an additional ‘Concordance Criterion’: Does the outcome
concord with the psychological attitudes of the agent’s Deep Self? I show that the Deep Self Model can explain a very complex
pattern of judgment asymmetries documented in the experimental philosophy literature, and does so in a way that has significant
advantages over competing models.
Keywords Experimental philosophy - Intentional action - Knobe effect - Folk psychology