In defense of the standard theory, Mele (2003: Ch. 10) has argued that the search for a mental attitude that plays the role of the agent is misguided and that Velleman’s critique of the view is off target. As Mele points out, it seems clear that a desire cannot possibly be the agent, because agents deliberate, decide, and act. Desires do none of these things. He suggests that any talk of a mental attitude as playing the role of the agent can at best be metaphorical. Further, there is no obvious reason why an agent’s failure to identify with a motive should be diagnosed in terms of the agent’s failure to participate. It seems more plausible to suggest that the agent does participate in such cases, but in a defective manner. Once defective participation is distinguished from a failure to participate, it is easy to avoid Velleman’s conclusion that the standard theory “leaves out the agent”. Moreover, one can then separate the question of whether the standard theory accounts for the agent’s participation from the question of whether it captures human action par excellence. According to Mele, the human agent is simply a human being who acts. On this view, the agent does play some role in all instances of agency, no matter how deficient. The standard theory provides, first and foremost, an account of what it is for an agent to perform intentional actions. It does not claim that the capacity to perform intentional actions is the capacity that separates human from non-human agency, and it does not claim to give an account of more refined or excellent kinds of human agency, such as self-controlled, autonomous, wholehearted, or free agency. It is an interesting and important task to investigate whether or not the standard theory can be extended so as to account for the more refined or excellent kinds of human agency (Mele 1995; Bratman 2007, for instance). But to reject the view because it fails to do so is to misconstrue its aim and scope (see also section 3.3).