Causal Theory of Action

In some recent work on omissions, it has been argued that the causal theory of action cannot account for how agency is exercised in intentionally omitting to act in the same way it explains how agency is exercised in intentional action. Thus, causalism appears to provide us with an incomplete picture of intentional agency. I argue that causalists should distinguish causalism as a general theory of intentional agency from causalism as a theory of intentional action. Specifically, I argue that, while intentional actions may best be understood as the causal products or outcomes of causings, we should identify exercises of intentional agency with causal processes. With a causalist account of intentional agency sketched, I respond to the challenge to causalism from omissions. I argue that when an agent intentionally omits there is a causal process that has a zero-sum outcome. But the causal process is sufficient to make it true that the agent exercises intentional agency in intentionally omitting. In the remainder of this paper, I will simply use "causalism" to refer to the causal theory of action and refer to proponents of the causal theory of action as "causalists."

An account of what sort of causal integration is necessary for an agent to exercise agency is offered in support of a soft-line response to Derk Pereboom's four-case argument against source-compatibilism. I argue that, in cases of manipulation, the manipulative activity affects the identity of the causal process of which it is a part. Specifically, I argue that causal processes involving direct manipulation fail to count as exercises of intentional agency because they involve heteromesial causal deviance. In contrast, standard deterministic causal processes do not involve heteromesial causal deviance and are agency-preserving. The upshot is that there is a relevant difference between a causal process involving direct manipulation by another agent and a deterministic causal process that involves no such intervention. If this is right, then Pereboom's four-case argument does not pose a threat to source-compatibilist theories of free will and moral responsibility.

When I raise my arm, my raising my arm is an event. When I stop at the store and buy milk, my doing so is a process. When I omit to raise my arm or to stop and buy milk, what, if anything, is my not doing these things? What, in general, are omissions to act? Sometimes when someone refrains from doing a certain thing, the agent performs an action of preventing himself from so acting. A policeman might hold his arm at his side to keep from shooting a fleeing suspect. 1 But in many cases of omission there's no such action. When I forget to stop and buy milk, my omission seems to be, in the first place, an absence, the absence of an action by me of buying milk. 2 But what is an absence of an action? Many things are absent from the world-many objects (unicorns), many states (perfect virtue), and many events (a World Series triumph by the Cubs in the last hundred years). If these things existed, they would be entities of various sorts. Are the absences of these things beings of some kind? If so, what kind of thing are they? Or are they nothing at all? I favor the view that absences aren't beings of any sort: there's no entity that is an absence. If this is correct, then in many cases in which someone omits to act, there's nothing in the world that is the omission. It isn't exactly common sense that the absence of a thing is itself a thing. And there are good reasons not to take absences as entities of any kind. Doing so would greatly proliferate beings. Think of all the objects, properties, events, etc. absent where you are right now! Further, admitting such things would generate difficulties

Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472 – 1529) is famously associated with the view that knowledge and action are unified (zhī xíng hé yī 知行合一). Call this the Unity Thesis. Given standard assumptions about what it means for a person to know, it may seem that the Unity Thesis is clearly false: I can know that p without currently acting in p-related ways, and I can know how to φ without currently φ-ing. My aims in this paper are, first, to draw on recent work in epistemology to explain and defend the Unity Thesis and, second, to argue that it offers us an attractive conceptual alternative to a standard way of thinking about the nature of intentional action. The first step of my argument draws on the idea that what distinguishes intentional actions from bodily events is the presence of knowing-to – that is, an agent is φ-ing intentionally if and only if she is currently doing something because she knows to do it as a way for her to φ. Such a notion of knowing-to allows us to explain otherwise puzzling features of the Unity Thesis, including the claim that knowing and acting occur simultaneously. In the second step, I argue that the Unity Thesis can help us avoid various long-standing issues in the philosophy of action, including the problem of deviant (formal) causation.

Virtues can be considered to play a causal role in the production of behaviour and so too can our self-narratives. We identify a point of connection between the two cases and draw a parallel between them. But, those folk psychological notions, virtues and self-narratives, fail to reduce smoothly to the underlying human physiology. As a first step towards handling that failure to connect with the scientific framework that is the familiar grounding for our understanding of causation, we consider the causal theory of action, a leading theory of action, which shows how reasons, understood as an appropriate pair of beliefs and desires, can be treated as causes of action. Davidson’s picture is based on cause as a relation between events, which can have both a description in scientific terms and in folk psychological terms. The character of both virtues and self-narratives is not that of events, even extended ones, so we need to refer to examples of scientific explanation that incorporate ...

Virtues can be considered to play a causal role in the production of behaviour, and so too can our self-narratives. We identify a point of connection between the two cases and draw a parallel between them. But, those folk-psychological notions: virtues and self-narratives, fail to reduce smoothly to the underlying human physiology. As a first step towards handling that failure to connect with the scientific framework that is the familiar grounding for our understanding of causation, we consider the causal theory of action, a leading theory of action, which shows how reasons, understood as an appropriate pair of beliefs and desires, can be treated as causes of action. Davidson's picture is based on cause as a relation between events, which can have both a description in scientific terms and in folk psychological terms. The character of both virtues and self-narratives is not that of events, even extended ones, so we need to refer to examples of scientific explanation that incorporate structural properties of objects. While we retain the spirit of the causal theory, we wish to guard against any unwarranted optimism that an explicitly scientific explanation for human action lies in our future, drawing on Chomsky's view that a causal explanation of human actions is likely to remain beyond human science forming capacities. We take a mild-realist view of virtues and self-narratives, in the style of Dennett. We argue that, in spite of that limited form of realism, underlined by Chomsky's mysterian position in this domain, we still need to frame our explanations of behaviour based on virtues and self-narratives in causal terms.

In contrast to Quine's Parmenidean (meta-)ontology and his preference for desert landscapes, recent years have seen a renewed interest in the non-being: non-existent entities, mere possibilia, negative properties, negative facts, absences, nothingness, voids, holes, etc. Interest in the category of the non-being is not limited to ontology, but has found applications in the philosophy of mind, both with the role that intentionality plays in relation to nonentities (Crane 2013, Priest 2016) and with the problem of perception of absences, and also in the philosophy of art with the much discussed status of absence art, i.e., art that features absences as esthetic objects (Farinnikova 2019). This issue of JOLMA aims to critically examine the role of nonexistence in our theorizing. We aim to collect both sympathetic and critical studies on this topic.

Some determinist approaches to free will opine that the human brain is subordinate to physical laws not fully under our control. This results in a weakening of the concept of the personal autonomy and moral responsibility of humans. Were we to acknowledge this assumption, we might consider automatic machines unable to influence the thoughts and intentions from which our actions take root. The key issue lies in the fact that an individual does not consciously engage in particular actions (automatisms), which challenges the concept of free will in an individual’s complex behaviour. Despite this issue, not all automatisms that lack conscious will can be viewed as lacking free will. The paper examines whether classical philosophical concepts may weaken the strict determinist approach, which seeks to deny that individuals have free will due to the existence of automatic actions.

In some recent work on omissions, it has been argued that the causal theory of action cannot account for how agency is exercised in intentionally omitting to act in the same way it explains how agency is exercised in intentional action. Thus, causalism appears to provide us with an incomplete picture of intentional agency. I argue that causalists should distinguish causalism as a general theory of intentional agency from causalism as a theory of intentional action. Specifically, I argue that, while intentional actions may best be understood as the causal products or outcomes of causings, we should identify exercises of intentional agency with causal processes. With a causalist account of intentional agency sketched, I respond to the challenge to causalism from omissions. I argue that when an agent intentionally omits there is a causal process that has a zero-sum outcome. But the causal process is sufficient to make it true that the agent exercises intentional agency in intentionally omitting. Keywords Omissions • Agency • Causation • Powers • Intention 1 In the remainder of this paper, I will simply use "causalism" to refer to the causal theory of action and refer to proponents of the causal theory of action as "causalists."

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WHAT THEORY OF ACTION? ON MICHAŁ BARCZ'S MECHANICS OF ACTIONS This is a review of Michał Barcz's book Mechanika działań. Filozoficzny spór wokół przyczynowej teorii działania (Mechanics of Actions: Philosophical Dispute over the Causal Theory of Action). The book discusses various causal accounts of intentional action and presents several arguments against them. The review focuses on accuracy in presentation of different causal theories of action and soundness of arguments presented against them by the author. At the end, I discuss some methodological issues raised by the book.

Teleological explanations of human actions are explanations in terms of aims, goals, or purposes of human agents. According to a familiar causal approach to analyzing and explaining human action, our actions are, essentially, events (and sometimes states, perhaps) that are suitably caused by appropriate mental items, or neural realizations of those items. 1 Causalists traditionally appeal, in part, to such goal-representing states as desires and intentions (or their neural realizers) in their explanations of human actions, and they take acceptable teleological explanations of our actions to be causal explanations. Some proponents of the view that human actions are explained teleologically resist this. 2 They regard the causal approach as a rival. I dub this position "anticausalist teleologism," or AT, for short. I favor the causal approach, but I will not directly argue for it here. My aim is more modest. I will develop a serious problem for AT that strongly suggests that teleologists need causalism; and I will rebut a style of objection to the project of providing a causal analysis of acting in pursuit of a goal that recently resurfaced in the literature on teleological explanations of action, a style of objection featuring a certain kind of causal deviance. 1. Davidson's Challenge and Two Unsuccessful Replies The idea that our actions are to be explained, causally, in terms of mental states or events is at least as old as Aristotle. 3 The first major source of its revival in contemporary action theory was Donald Davidson's "Actions, Reasons, and Causes" (1963). There, in addition to rebutting various arguments against the causal approach, Davidson raised the following challenge to noncausalists about action-explanation: If you hold that when we act intentionally we act for reasons, provide an account of the reasons for which we act that does not treat (our having) those reasons as figuring in the causation of the relevant behavior (or, one might add, as realized in physical causes of the be-Philosophical Perspectives, 14, Action and Freedom, 2000 havior)! The challenge is particularly acute when an agent has more than one reason for A-ing but As only for some of them. Here is an illustration that I offered elsewhere: Al has a pair of reasons for mowing his lawn this morning. First, he wants to mow it this week and he believes that this morning is the most convenient time. Second, Al has an urge to repay his neighbor for the rude awakening he suffered recently when she turned on her mower at the crack of dawn and he believes that his mowing his lawn this morning would constitute suitable repayment. As it happens, Al mows his lawn this morning only for one of these reasons. In virtue of what is it true that he mowed his lawn for this reason, and not the other, if not that this reason (or his having it), and not the other, played a suitable causal role in his mowing his lawn? (Mele 1997a, p. 240)

One of the biggest issues in theory of action concerns the circumscription of actions in relation to the other phenomena in the universe. Donald Davidson’s “causal theory of action,” supplemented by his “anomalous monism,” is regarded as one of the main lines of response to this conceptual issue. According to Davidson, roughly, a behavior counts as an action if its causal roots partially comprise internal events in the agent couched in terms of thoughts and desires that “rationalize” (i.e., work as reasons for) its occurrence. That is, Davidson proposes that actions are demarcated by reasons explanations, which appeal to thoughts and desires for a given behavior, taken as internal events that explain why that behavior takes place. Davidson’s model inherits the traditional dichotomy between thinking and acting, and is based upon a non-reductive physicalist identity between episodes of psychological events and episodes of neurophysiological events. In this paper, we dispute this influential model in action theory, and advance a behavioral counterpoint, basically in Skinnerian lines, whereby action is spelled out in terms of operant behavior, and the heterogeneous concept of thought is analyzed as a tool for talking about behavior (sometimes not apparent in the outside body) in relation to its contextual determinants. In the behavioral model the dichotomy between thought and action vanishes.
[Uma das grandes questões da teoria da ação diz respeito à circunscrição das ações em relação aos outros fenômenos do universo. A abordagem de Donald Davidson, conhecida como “teoria causal da ação”, complementada por seu “monismo anômalo”, é considerada uma das principais linhas de resposta a essa questão conceitual. Segundo Davidson, grosso modo, um comportamento conta como uma ação se suas raízes causais envolvem, em parte, eventos internos ao(à) agente descritos em termos de pensamentos e desejos que “racionalizam” (funcionam como razões para) sua ocorrência. O modelo de Davidson, assim, herda a dicotomia tradicional entre pensar e agir. Neste artigo, questionamos esse modelo influente na teoria da ação, e defendemos um contraponto comportamental, basicamente em linhas skinnerianas, no qual as ações são caracterizadas em termos de comportamento operante, e o conceito heterogêneo de pensamento é analisado como uma ferramenta para se falar de comportamentos em suas relações com determinantes contextuais. No modelo comportamental, a dicotomia entre pensamento e ação desaparece.]

This is a review of Michał Barcz's book Mechanika działań. Filozoficzny spór wokół przyczynowej teorii działania (Mechanics of Actions: Philosophical Dispute over the Causal Theory of Action). The book discusses various causal accounts of intentional action and presents several arguments against them. The review focuses on accuracy in presentation of different causal theories of action and soundness of arguments presented against them by the author. At the end, I discuss some methodological issues raised by the book.

Mark Sinclair offers in this book one of the first commentaries in English on the philosophy of Ravaisson, an author who is little read today and who nevertheless marked a whole generation of philosophers, especially French. This book sheds light on how the Ravaissonian concept of habit takes on a metaphysical rather than psychological meaning that has a great influence on French philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century. It also shows in what extent habit plays the role of method in the philosophy of Ravaisson. Concerning this last point, Sinclair not only offers us an internal commentary on Ravaisson but also tries to see how his philosophical approach sheds light on contemporary issues. Mark Sinclair wishes to highlight the metaphysical dimension of habit in Ravaisson's philosophy. Habit is characterized by inclination, which, according to Ravaisson, is at the root of both will and action: all dispositions, capacities, powers are to some degree a function of inclination or tendency. And since nothing exists in the world without dispositions or capacities, nothing exists without inclination. The aim of Mark Sinclair's book is therefore to show how Ravaisson proposes an original idea of inclination without necessitation, an idea of non-mechanical inclination. This way of conceiving a non-mechanical causality, a tendency which would be the very being of beings, leads to the reformulation of great philosophical problems: the problem of the link between the mind and the world, the problem of action, the problem of causality (theory of causation and metaphysics of powers). Ravaisson, when he speaks of inclination and tendency in habit as a disposition, a virtue, can serve to enlighten and develop some contemporary problematics, just as they may illuminate Ravaisson's philosophy.

Donald Davidson argued in " Agency " that all actions are identical to movements of the body. Apart from his own reasons for this view, we can see that it allows for a very simple statement of the dominant theory of action, the causal theory of action: an event is an action iff it is a movement of the body caused in the right way by certain mental states. Unfortunately, Davidson's view has received much criticism. If critics are right to reject his view of what actions are, and I think they are, then it is not clear what view we should adopt instead, nor is it clear how this will impact the causal theory of action. Here, I argue that the metaphysical resources are available for giving a view of action as events closely related to body movements without being identical to them. Instead, we can see that actions are constituted by body movements just as statues are constituted by lumps of clay. After motivating this view and discussing the few who have maintained it, I move on to show how this provides several advantages for a proponent of the causal theory of action. Apart from avoiding the objections to Davidson's view and allowing us to easily reformulate the causal theory, it provides a framework for understanding the relations between actions, it suggests a cohesive treatment of omissions, and it explains why we are drawn to a causal view of action in the first place.

The article discusses a challenge to the traditional intentional-causalist conceptions of action and intentionality as well as to our everyday and legal conceptions of responsibility, namely the psychological discovery that the greatest part of our alleged actions are performed automatically, i.e. unconsciously and without a proximal intention causing and sustaining them. The main part of the article scrutinises several mechanisms of automatic behaviour, how they work and whether the resulting behaviour is an action: actions caused by distal implementation intentions, four types of habit and habitualisation, mimicry and semantically induced automatic behaviour (which, however later is disregarded because of its unclarity). According to the intentional-causalist criterion, the automatic behaviours resulting from all but one of these mechanisms turn out to be actions and intentional; and even the behaviour resulting from the remaining mechanism (naturally acquired habits) is something we can be responsible for. Hence, the challenge, seen from close up, does not really call the traditional conception of action and intentionality into question.

In some recent work on omissions, it has been argued that the causal theory of action cannot account for how agency is exercised in intentionally omitting to act in the same way it explains how agency is exercised in intentional action. Thus, causalism appears to provide us with an incomplete picture of intentional agency. I argue that causalists should distinguish causalism as a general theory of intentional agency from causalism as a theory of intentional action. Specifically, I argue that, while intentional actions may best be understood as the causal products or outcomes of causings, we should identify exercises of intentional agency with causal processes. With a causalist account of intentional agency sketched, I respond to the challenge to causalism from omissions. I argue that when an agent intentionally omits there is a causal process that has a zero-sum outcome. But the causal process is sufficient to make it true that the agent exercises intentional agency in intentionally omitting.

The notion of basic action has recently come under attack based on the idea that any putative basic action can always be divided into more basic sub-actions. In this paper it is argued that this criticism ignores a key aspect of the idea of basic action, namely, the ‘anything else’ part of the idea that basic actions are not done by doing anything else. This aspect is clarified, and it is argued that doing the sub-actions of which a putative basic action consists does not amount to doing something different from doing that putative basic action.

In this paper, the ontological, terminological, epistemological, and ethical aspects of omission are
considered in a coherent and balanced framework, based on the idea that there are omissions
which are actions and omissions which are non-actions. In particular, we suggest that the
approach to causation which best deals with omission is Mackie’s INUS conditional proposal.
We argue that omissions are determined partly by the ontological conditional structure of
reality, and partly by the interests, beliefs, and values of observers. The final upshot is that
moral judgments involved in cases of omissions cannot be grounded on, but are the ground for
judgments about what INUS conditions count as omissions.

In this paper I contend that Hegel has an "expressive" conception of action, that pretends to unite systematically both the psychological and the social or public aspects of it. On the one hand, Hegel seems to assume that we cannot identify an event as an action unless we are able to connect it with the "will and knowledge" of the agent that caused it. On the other, however, Hegel contends that the agent (1) knows what he intended to do first as he has already done it and (2) that the action must not be conceived as a causal consequence of certain mental states, but as an "expression" of who the agent is. Both intuitions could be brought together if we abandon mentalist and causalist conceptions of action and agency.
Keywords: action as "translation" from what is merely subjective in what is public; action as self-realization; action and intention

In "The Talk I Was Supposed to Give" (2006), I argue that talk about negative events should not be taken at face value: typically, what we are inclined to think of as a negative event (John’s failure to go jogging) is just an ordinary, positive event (his going to the movie instead); it is a positive event under a negative description. Here I consider more closely the difficulties that arise in those cases where no positive event seems available to do the job, as with putative cases of causation by omission. In particular, I elaborate on Helen Beebee’s idea that not all causal explanations are reports of causation. When we mention John’s failure to turn off the gas as an explanans of why there was an explosion, we do not say what caused the explosion. We do not mention any of the relevant causes. We just remark that one sort of event that was supposed to occur, and whose occurrence would have prevented the explosion, did not in fact occur.

According to causalism, actions are events caused in the right way by appropriate mental states. According to responsibilism, the notion of action is understood as a complement to the notion of nonaction, which in turn is delineated by the presence of defeating conditions (e.g. spasms, ticks, etc.). I argue that responsibilism does not, while causalism does, have a problem in answering the title question negatively. The fact that a spasm causes the arm to rise does not compete with a possible additional causal process (with the appropriate mental etiology) that leads to (and overdetermines) the very arm rising.

We take ourselves to be able to omit to perform certain actions and to at times be responsible for these omissions. What's more, omissions seem to have effects and to be manifestations of our agency. So, it is natural to think that omissions must be events. However, very few people writing on this topic have been willing to argue that omissions are events. Such a view is taken to face three significant challenges: (i) omissions are thought to be somehow problematically negative, (ii) it is unclear where the event of an omission would be located, and (iii) if we accept any omissions as events, it seems like there would be far too much causation involving them. In this paper, I develop a novel view of omissions as events and as actions that provides answers to these challenges.

Teleological explanations of human actions are explanations in terms of aims, goals, or purposes of human agents. According to a familiar causal approach to analyzing and explaining human action, our actions are, essentially, events (and sometimes states, perhaps) that are suitably caused by appropriate mental items, or neural realizations of those items. 1 Causalists traditionally appeal, in part, to such goal-representing states as desires and intentions (or their neural realizers) in their explanations of human actions, and they take acceptable teleological explanations of our actions to be causal explanations. Some proponents of the view that human actions are explained teleologically resist this. 2 They regard the causal approach as a rival. I dub this position "anticausalist teleologism," or AT, for short. I favor the causal approach, but I will not directly argue for it here. My aim is more modest. I will develop a serious problem for AT that strongly suggests that teleologists need causalism; and I will rebut a style of objection to the project of providing a causal analysis of acting in pursuit of a goal that recently resurfaced in the literature on teleological explanations of action, a style of objection featuring a certain kind of causal deviance.