Action

Rowland Stout

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781902683973
• eBook ISBN: 9781317489047
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

The traditional focus of debate in philosophy of action has been the causal theory of action and metaphysical questions about the nature of actions as events. In this lucid and lively introduction to philosophy of action, Rowland Stout shows how these issues are subsidiary to more central ones that concern the freedom of the will, practical rationality and moral psychology. When seen in these terms, agency becomes one of the most exciting areas in philosophy and one of the most useful ways into the philosophy of mind. If one can understand what it is to be a free and rational agent, then one is some way to understanding what it is to be a conscious subject of experience. Although the book places the traditional Davidsonian agenda centre stage, it locates it historically by considering in particular Aristotle and Kant. It also takes the debate beyond Davidson by considering one of the most recent issues of interest in the philosophy of action, externalism. By focusing on the central issues of freedom and rationality as well as on the ontological structure of human action, Stout is able to offer readers a fresh and engaging treatment.

1

Introduction: inward-looking and outward-looking approaches to agency

Being an agent

At the very heart of our conception of what it is to be a person is the idea that we (as people) are both subjects and agents. Being subjects of experience, we are conscious of ourselves and our world. We are receptive to the way things are, and have perceptual and emotional experiences as part of that receptivity. But we also act on our world. We change it in the light of our reasons. We are agents as well as subjects: active as well as passive. Action and experience, agency and consciousness, hand in hand make up our very nature.

The properties of being an agent or a subject come in varying degrees. At the most minimal level we might think of the sun as an agent in the process of warming up a stone, or of a planet as subject to the force of gravity. And at the other extreme we have full-blown agency and consciousness. A person is the full-blown agent of an intentional achievement when they write a book. And they are the full-blown subject of conscious experience when they watch the sun set, attending to every shifting pattern of colour in the clouds.

There are intermediate cases. A sunflower turns to face the rising sun. This is an action in some sense. And although the behaviour of the sunflower is not deliberate, it is not accidental either. It is directed to the goal of its bloom facing the rising sun.¹ In some sense the sunflower registers the direction of the sun. But it is not consciously aware of the sun. So in a limited sense it is both subject and agent, but in a more full-blown sense it is neither. The same goes for simple animals. The snail acts when it pulls in its horns in response to someone touching it; and it is in a way aware of the finger touching its horns when it acts like this. But it is only in a very weak sense that it can be said to act and be aware. The snail’s horns’ retracting when touched is like your pupils’ contracting in bright light. It is automatic behaviour: not really action at all. Your registering of the bright light is not really awareness of it and nor is the snail’s registering of the pressure of someone’s fingers touching its horns.

With more and more complex animals the issue becomes more difficult to assess for both intentional agency and conscious awareness. Is the cow really consciously aware of its environment, and is it really able to act intentionally on its environment by eating grass for instance? I think these questions go hand in hand, and also hand in hand with the question of whether the cow is a person in some sense. Even though it sounds absurd initially, there is a weak sense in which a cow may be said to be a person. We may refer to the cow using a personal pronoun and attribute a personality to it: “She is being skittish today”. And in this vein we talk about what the cow sees, feels and does. But there is also a full-blown sense of being a person in which a cow is not a person. In just this full-blown way, the cow is neither really an agent nor really a subject either. At least you probably have to believe this in order to swallow beef without gagging on it.

As an infant grows it develops its nature as a person, and its agency and consciousness develop at the same time. Initially it may be said to be aware of the face of its parents, but only in rather a weak sense. And equally it may be said to act when it cries for food for instance. But its crying could not be said to be deliberate or intentional. The infant’s picture of the world then develops in tandem with its ability to achieve things in the world. It perceives the world as such only when responses to perceptual cues are integrated with each other and with adaptive behaviour patterns such as grasping and sucking.² Pretty soon it is a full-blown agent and subject.

The philosophy of action is concerned with the nature of agency: what it is to be a full-blown agent and what it is to realize one’s agency in acting deliberately on things. It is important in the philosophy of action to consider the weaker sense of agency too. Understanding what it is for one thing to act on another – for example the sun to warm the rock – is necessary in order to establish the general category in which we can make sense of real agency in which a person deliberately acts on their environment. Full-blown agency is a special case of agency in the weak sense.

What counts as intentional action?

Being an agent is being something that acts, something that does actions. This means that in the philosophy of action we are dealing with two types of entities: agents and actions. But it is important to remember that actions do not have existence independently of their agents. An action is an agent doing something, and as such essentially involves the agent. Understanding action is understanding what it is for an agent to act.

The question of what it is to be a full-blown agent needs to be answered in tandem with the question of what is it for someone to act in a full-blown way. And this is usually taken to be the same as asking what it is for someone to act intentionally. Characterizing intentional action and distinguishing it from lesser sorts of action or activity are the central goals of the philosophy of action.

There are plenty of things going on with our bodies that are not part of our acting intentionally. Our eyes dilate in the dark or in response to sexual arousal, our skin comes out in goose-pimples, our hearts beat, and so on. Also there are plenty of things that change in the world outside our bodies but are related to us in other ways that do not count as our actions or at least our intentional actions. When your sibling has a baby you might become an uncle or an aunt. Perhaps we could invent the verb to uncle or to aunt to describe this; so I uncled a few years ago. But this is not something I did intentionally. Likewise if accidentally I spill a drink or squash a microbe or surprise my friend when they see me at a distance cycling down a hill, I am not doing these things intentionally.

These are relatively clear-cut cases. There are also aspects of human activity that are more difficult to characterize as clearly cases of intentional action or clearly not such cases. Breathing is automatic behaviour that should on the face of it be categorized with the beating of our hearts. It is not something we do intentionally but is something that happens inside our bodies. However, grammatically it seems to belong with intentional action and not with bodily activity. Breathing is something we do; beating our hearts is not something we do. Now this grammatical point need not mean anything. Sweating is also something that we do. But at the same time it is something our skin does as part of our autonomic nervous system. However breathing is a more difficult example because it is something that may be brought under conscious intentional control. Although breathing is normally not intentional, sometimes it is. For example, you might hold your breath and then decide to take a breath at a certain moment.

Sometimes too it is very difficult to say one way or the other. Suppose you are following some relaxation techniques, concentrating on your breathing, making sure you take deep slow breaths and exhaling slowly too. What seems to be going on here is that an entirely automatic bodily process of breathing is going on but being moderated by some conscious intervention. It is not so much that the action of breathing is intentional but that the slow and relaxed quality of the breathing is intentional. And then when you stop concentrating on your breathing it continues to be slow and relaxed, at least for a while. You have initiated a way of behaving that continues under its own momentum. Much of our behaviour is like this. When we walk, the right knee bends and the left foot moves forwards in a controlled way, but we do not have to think about it. Indeed it is better not to think about these movements as they happen or else you start to limp. Should such automatic behaviour count as intentional action?

I am inclined to think that it should count as intentional, for so much of our behaviour is in this category. Having got out of bed in the morning, you may be on autopilot for a while. And even when you make a conscious decision to do something – for example to have some toast and jam for breakfast – the achievement of that goal may be largely habituated and automatic. Most of what you are doing is done without any thought. If we ruled all this behaviour out of the category of intentional action, we might not be left with very much.

There are stranger problematic cases too. Is acting under hypnosis acting intentionally? In the comic caricature of hypnosis, acting under hypnosis is acting like a zombie under an inescapable compulsion, and it does not look like intentional action. But in reality hypnosis is not like that. You may have been given the suggestion under deep hypnosis that when you have a cigarette in your fingers you will break it in half and throw it away. This suggestion would have no force if you were not party to it in some deep way; you may indeed have given yourself the suggestion during autohypnosis. When you break the cigarette, it is because you have decided to do that, and you feel proud of yourself for doing it.

Even compulsive behaviour usually counts as intentional action. Faced with the chocolate bar the compulsive eater will decide to eat it, perhaps hating themselves for doing so. Even if they do not think about it as they do it, and even if they describe the compulsion as overwhelming, it is still their action; it is something they must own and take responsibility for. If they were sitting next to someone who, as they knew, needed to eat that chocolate bar or die of starvation, they would not eat it; or if they did then they would have to accept their responsibility for that person’s starvation.

A more extreme case of compulsive behaviour is that of someone with Tourette’s syndrome. This is a neurological condition probably caused by some failure to process neurotransmitters properly that starts in childhood and results in the sufferer producing involuntary tics, both physical and verbal. These tics and jerks are not completely uncontrollable since the sufferer may with a great effort of will resist the compulsion to produce them, but in that case these tics will certainly come back later and in a more extreme form when the sufferer stops trying to stop them.

One aspect of this condition that occurs in perhaps 30 per cent of all Tourette’s sufferers is coprolalia: the compulsive utterance of obscenities. At the most inappropriate times the sufferer will utter the foulest words. The medical profession seems clear that the tics and obscene language and gestures are not intentional actions. The sufferer is often very distressed that they are producing them. And although a sufferer may control them for a short time, this is like controlling a sneeze or stopping oneself blinking; it is likely to come back again and not be controllable. When asked why they just ate a bar of chocolate the compulsive eater may hate the question and not want to answer it; but they have to acknowledge that it is a reasonable question. But the Tourette’s sufferer may say that it would be somehow inappropriate to ask why they did that tic. It does not make sense to ask why they did it, since in that sense they did not really do it; it was just something that happened, like blinking.

How to characterize intentional action

There are two places to look for an answer to the question of how to characterize intentional action. And these determine the two main approaches to the philosophy of action. One place to look for a defining characteristic is inwards to the human mind. Is there some structure of psychological entities, states or events whose presence means that the person is acting intentionally? For example, should we try to identify some internal mental act – an act of will – that marks out what then occurs as an intentional action? Or perhaps there is a state of mind – a belief, piece of knowledge, desire or intention – that must be present in the background, driving the behaviour, if that behaviour is to count as intentional.

The other place to look is outwards to the way the behaviour is related to the agent’s environment. Intentional action responds to what is required of the agent in different circumstances. It is sensitive to the environment. And this sensitivity is mediated in some way by rationality. What we do adapts to what we have reason to do. Intentional action is embedded in a system of reasons, subject to questions about justification, and sensitive to what should be done. Is this what marks it out as intentional action?

I think it is plausible that when we look inwards to the mental precursors of action we find something characteristic of intentional agency, and that when we look outwards to the sensitivity of action to what the environment gives us reason to do we also find something characteristic of intentional agency. The first of these is fairly clear. When you act intentionally, you must intend to act; and this means you must be in the mental state of intending.³ Also you must have certain beliefs: for example, that what you are doing is not impossible. And perhaps you must also know what you are doing; you must have some knowledge or consciousness of your own agency.

Many philosophers approaching the question of agency start by looking inwards. It may not seem obvious that we should look outwards at all to try to understand it. But action is the transformation of the world in the light of reasons, and reasons are not entirely internal things. When you think about what to do, you do not generally consider your own mental states; you think about what should be done given the external circumstances. To this extent you adapt your behaviour to reason; and reasons are provided (at least partially) by the world outside.⁴ Similarly, when you consider someone else’s agency you try to make sense of their behaviour in the context of the world they occupy as well as in the context of their psychology. Only by seeing what they do as responsive to what they should do in some sense can you see it as manifesting true agency. And what they should do is not determined just by looking inside their mind. So looking outwards to the rational sensitivity of action to its environment also reveals what is characteristic of real agency.

Applying the inwards-looking approach to the Tourette’s sufferer, we could ask them what was going on in their mind when they uttered some expletive. They might say that nothing at all was going on; they did not want to utter the expletive and did not intend to. And this would make us think that it was not an intentional action. But we could also apply the outwards-looking approach and observe that this utterance had no rational connection with anything else they were doing. And this would be more than seeing that what they did was a sort of mistake, since unlike a mistake the utterance is not subject to correction. The Tourette’s sufferer does not utter the expletive for a reason – good or bad – or even for no reason. It is simply inappropriate to apply the demand for reasons to this behaviour.

Volitionism

In his First Meditation Descartes considers the possibility of an evil demon deceiving us into thinking that there is any physical (i.e. spatial) world at all when all there is really is a mental (non-spatial) world. In this imaginary scenario the evil demon presents our minds with the very appearances that we are in fact aware of, but in this case without there being any reality behind them. Receiving these appearances into our mind is an entirely passive process, according to Descartes. Whether it is the world acting on us or an evil demon acting on us, we as agents have nothing to do with it.

But the evil demon cannot get any further into our minds than that. Although it can deposit false appearances into our mind, it cannot mess with our thoughts. It cannot simply deposit the thought that I am a thinking thing. Coming up with that thought must be something I do, which is why in this case its truth is not itself subject to reasonable doubt. So there is room in Descartes’s model for the agent to be in control of what goes on inside their mind. This means that in some very limited way agency is essential to our nature as conscious beings. But the agency that Descartes takes to be essential is not our acting in the world but our acting in our minds: acting mentally.

For Descartes, acting in the world consists in acting mentally by committing an act of will, and this then causing the body to move and the world to change.

[O]ur merely willing to walk has the consequence that our legs move and we walk.

(Passions of the Soul: section 18)

And the activity of the soul consists entirely in the fact that simply by willing something it brings it about that the little gland to which it i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: inward-looking and outward-looking approaches to agency
• 2 Acting for a reason
• 3 Reasons and passions
• 4 Agent causation
• 5 Mental causation
• 6 Deviant causal chains and causal processes
• 7 Acting with an intention
• 8 Prior intention
• 9 The metaphysics of action
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Suggestions for further reading
• References
• Index