Philosophy of Action from Suarez to Anscombe

Constantine Sandis

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138614369
• eBook ISBN: 9780429874598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

Accounts of human and animal action have been central to modern philosophy from Suarez and Hobbes in the sixteenth century to Wittgenstein and Anscombe in the mid-twentieth century via Locke, Hume, Kant, and Hegel, among many others. Philosophies of action have thus greatly influenced the course of both moral philosophy and the philosophy of mind. This book gathers together specialists from both the philosophy of action and the history of philosophy with the aim of re-assessing the wider philosophical impact of action theory. It thereby explores how different notions of action, agency, reasons for action, motives, intention, purpose, and volition have affected modern philosophical understandings of topics as diverse as those of human nature, mental causation, responsibility, free will, moral motivation, rationality, normativity, choice and decision theory, criminal liability, weakness of will, and moral and social obligation. In so doing, it reinterprets the history of modern philosophy through the lens of action theory while also tracing the origins of contemporary questions in the philosophy of action back across half a millennium.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Philosophical Explorations.

Agents, objects, and their powers in Suarez and Hobbes

Thomas Pink

The paper examines the place of power in the action theories of Francisco Suarez and Thomas Hobbes. Power is the capacity to produce or determine outcomes. Two cases of power are examined. The first is freedom or the power of agents to determine for themselves what they do. The second is motivation, which involves a power to which agents are subject, and by which they are moved to pursue a goal. Suarez, in the Metaphysical Disputations, uses Aristotelian causation to model these two forms of power. Freedom is efficient causation, but in a special form that I explain as involving something that ordinary causation does not – the contingent determination of outcomes. Motivating power is final causation, which Suarez characterizes as the power of a goal or end to move us to attain it through its goodness or desirability. Suarez regards these two forms of power as consistent – we can be moved by the goodness of a goal freely to determine for ourselves that we act in order to attain it. Hobbes denied the existence of all forms of power beyond ordinary causation, the power of one motion in matter to determine another. So he denied the very existence both of freedom and of any form of motivating power beyond the ordinary causal power of desires as materially based psychological states to produce actions. The goodness itself of a goal never moves us, whether to desire the goal in the first place or to act in order to attain it. The paper examines Hobbes’s arguments and their consequence – establishing the foundations for Hume’s scepticism about practical reason.

1. Introduction

In the work of the Jesuit Francisco Suarez, we see one of the most developed versions of the late Aristotelian-scholastic action theory. This theory and the school that it represented was confronted by the radically new account of action proposed by Thomas Hobbes. The confrontation occurred at two levels. The first concerned the fundamental notion of purposiveness or goal-directedness. The second level, the main topic of this paper, had to do with the nature of the powers involved in a purposive agency.

At the very beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle characterizes agency as involving goal-direction.¹ Action is something done as a means to an end, in order to attain a goal. This seems a feature of action even when it is done for its own sake – when the goal of the action is its own performance. The goal of an action is often referred to as its object.

Now the object of an action seems to be mental, and to be an instance of a more general phenomenon, of the direction of the mind at various objects of thought. Just as there can be objects of belief or cognition, and objects of desire and emotion, so too there can be objects of action. Purposiveness looks as though it involves a further such relation of the mind to an object of thought – a goal presented by the understanding, that as something before the mind informs the action even prior to the goal’s attainment, but that may never actually be attained.

Action seems then to involve a distinctive mode of intentionality, of mental direction at a content-providing mental object. Such direction involves what contemporary philosophy refers to as a psychological attitude – a mental occurrence understood as consisting in direction at (an attitude towards) an object. Just as belief is a cognitive attitude of direction at an object as true and desire is an affective attitude towards at an object simply as desirable or good, so, it might be thought, action is a fully practical attitude directed at an object as a goal. Action is an attitude directed at an object not just as desirable or good, but as an end to be attained through the action. We have here the idea of purposiveness as a distinctive practice-or action-constitutive mode of intentionality – a mode of intentionality that occurs in the will as a faculty for active or action-constitutive motivation, in acts of decision and intention-formation.

The Aristotelian-scholastic tradition in action theory was built on just this understanding of agency as involving a practical mode of intentionality. But this account was rejected by Hobbes. For Hobbes and his successors, action is identified not as an attitude, but as an effect of attitudes. Possession of content and direction at a mental object is now viewed as a passive phenomenon, so that motivating attitudes in particular are viewed as no more than passions, never as mental actions. Actions no longer occur as decisions to act, which are now no more than passive antecedents of action, but only as the actions decided upon. Hobbes reserves the term “voluntariness” to characterize the very nature of purposive action as he now conceived it – to be the willed effect of a passive motivation to act. The goal of an action is no longer an object involving a content belonging directly to the action, but is inherited from the contents of the action’s passive efficient causes – from various desires for goals or ends, and the desire to perform the action as a means to those ends.²

This radical change in the theory of purposiveness was accompanied by an equally radical change at another level, in the theory of the kinds of power involved in agency. It is this change in the theory of power that I shall discuss here.

2. Action, object, and power

Human action involves two kinds of powers that exist in tension. One is a power involved in action’s purposiveness or goal-direction, a power that moves the agent to perform his action; and the other is self-determination, when the agent determines for himself what he does.

Action is explained by what motivates it. And what motivates it seems to be both its goal and something else involving that goal – a kind of force or power that gets the agent to act. The agent crosses the road in order to get to the other side. The goal of getting to the other side motivates the road crossing – and having that goal is what moves the agent to cross. This moving looks like a kind of push applied to the agent to get him to attain the end. So the goal-direction of action is linked to a kind of power involving the object of the action and to which the agent is subject. Perhaps the bearer of the power is the object itself.

And then there is the agent’s power to determine for himself what he does – a power on the agent’s part to determine or produce actions and outcomes. A very natural conception of this power is freedom, which involves the power to determine more than one action or outcome – a power which constitutes control of which action one performs.

Purposiveness is very different from self-determination. They involve very different relations. Purposiveness has to do with the action’s relation to an object of thought belonging to the action itself (on the scholastic theory) or to the action’s passive causes (on Hobbes’s theory). Self-determination, by contrast, has to do with agent’s relation to the action. Not only do purposiveness and self-determination involve different relations, they seem also to involve very different kinds of power. Motivating power is a power to which the agent is subject along with his action, whereas self-determination is a power which the agent himself exercises and to which only his action or its outcomes are subject. And the two powers may be in tension. If one is to count as determining for oneself what one does, that may rule out the action’s being determined by other things. In particular, determining action for oneself might rule out certain ways of being moved into action, and in particular, those that impose necessity. Motivation and self-determination may unite to produce one and the same action – but they may also oppose each other. Some forms of motivation may make self-determination impossible.

We might understand power very generally as a capacity to influence or determine processes or outcomes. Motivation and self-determination clearly involve power so understood. But what forms can power take, and which of these forms do motivation and self-determination involve?

Now Thomas Hobbes was to argue that power can take only one form; this is an efficient causal power as involving material objects and processes, such as the power of a brick to break a window or of heat to melt ice. And many modern philosophers within the English-language tradition would take Hobbes’s view. But is this understanding of power as being only of the kind involved in material impacts and the like – ordinary causation as I shall call it – a good way of understanding motivation and self-determination; and if not, exactly why not? How do the powers involved in motivation and self-determination relate to, say, the power of a brick to break a window?

Take the motivating power involved in purposiveness. If the bearer of the power really is the action’s object – so it really is the goal of the action that moves the agent to act in its pursuit – then if this object is operative as a kind of moving cause, it is certainly no ordinary cause. For although its operation is explanatorily and causally prior to the action, the object does not exist prior to the action as ordinary causes such as bricks and their motions do: that requires the success of the action – the goal’s production or attainment through the action – which is something posterior to the action’s own causation or production.

Nor is self-determination ordinary efficient causation either. This is suggested by the very idea of determining things for oneself, which ordinary causes certainly do not. When it hits the window, the brick does not determine for itself that the window breaks. The brick’s causation of the window’s breaking seems dictated by brick’s circumstances and its own given nature. That the window breaks is necessitated by the brick’s mere possession of a power to break it when hurled against it. That is why we do not think of a brick as being in control of alternative possible outcomes. It is not up to the brick whether the window breaks or not.

Suarez sees human action as produced both by motivation and self-determination and understands these to involve forms of causation and causal power that are different both from each other and from ordinary causation. Human action, which primarily occurs as an elicited action of the will itself, is both motivated by its goal and determined by its agent. That, for Suarez, makes it the product of two forms of causation operating together but which are otherwise very different. As determined by the agent, it is efficiently caused by the will – but through a distinctive form of free causation of which only rational agents are capable. And as motivated, the action is also caused by its object – the goal of the act of will, which however operates not as an efficient but as a final cause.

Thus they say one and the same action of the will is caused by the end and by the will itself, and in so far as it is caused by the will, the causation is efficient, in so far as by the end, the causation is final, and in respect of the former the motion is real and proper, since such an action comes from the power as from a properly physical principle, and in respect of the latter, the motion is metaphorical since it comes from an object attracting and drawing the will towards it.³

So the action is involved in two forms of dependence on distinct causes – an active dependence on the will characteristic of efficient causation, and another dependence on its goal or end characteristic of final causation:

So that same action, in so far as it is from the will is an active dependence on the will, in so far as it is from the end, is a final dependence.⁴

Bricks and other non-rational efficient causes operate of necessity. Once the circumstances hold required for them to act, they do so. But human agents are not like this. The will with the agent in possession of it, is, by contrast to a brick, a free cause. The agent’s operation as cause to determine his performance of a specific action is not necessitated by his circumstances and by his mere possession of the power to determine that action. The will is a free faculty:

Properly to resolve the difficulties that have been raised, we must first hold onto and expand that description of a free faculty in which two things are postulated. One is tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Agents, objects, and their powers in Suarez and Hobbes
• 2 Human action and virtue in Descartes and Spinoza
• 3 Action, knowledge and embodiment in Berkeley and Locke
• 4 Sympathetic action in the seventeenth century: human and natural
• 5 Hume’s better argument for motivational skepticism
• 6 Kant and Hegel on purposive action
• 7 Action, interaction and inaction: post-Kantian accounts of thinking, willing, and doing in Fichte and Schopenhauer
• 8 Nietzsche’s account of self-conscious agency
• 9 Before ethics: scientific accounts of action at the turn of the century
• 10 The touch of King Midas: Collingwood on why actions are not events
• 11 Remarks on the “thickness” of action description: with Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Anscombe
• Index