The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Agency

Luca Ferrero, Luca Ferrero

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780429514197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

One of the most basic and important distinctions we draw is between those entities with the capacity of agency and those without. As humans we enjoy agency in its full-blooded form and therefore a proper understanding of the nature of agency is of great importance to appreciate who we are and what we should expect and demand of our existence.

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Agency is an outstanding reference source to the key issues, problems, and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising 42 chapters by an international team of contributors, the Handbook is divided into eight clear parts:

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• The Metaphysics of Agency
• Kinds of Agency
• Agency and Ability
• Agency: Mind, Body, and World
• Agency and Knowledge
• Agency and Moral Psychology
• Agency and Time
• Agency, Reasoning, and Normativity.

A broad range of topics are covered, including the relation of agency to causation, teleology, animal agency, intentionality, planning, skills, disability, practical knowledge, self-knowledge, the will, responsibility, autonomy, identification, emotions, personal identity, reasons, morality, the law, aesthetics, and games.

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Agency is essential reading for students and researchers within philosophy of action, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of psychology, and ethics.

PART 1 The metaphysics of agency Introduction to Part 1

Luca Ferrero

DOI: 10.4324/9780429202131-2

It would not be unreasonable to expect that a handbook in the Philosophy of Agency would open with a chapter titled ‘What is agency?’ or more positively ‘The nature of agency,’ especially if the first part of the book is devoted to nothing less than the metaphysics of agency.

Alas, you won’t find this chapter here. As I explained in the general introduction, although I think we have a fairly good intuitive grasp of what the core instances of full-blooded agency look like, it is far from clear whether we could offer some uncontroversial and straightforward statement about what the concept of ‘agency’ stands for. Our best bet, as I suggested in the introduction, is to try to unpack and explore various more specific issues, attacking the question from different angles, in the hope of eventually gaining a better articulation and understanding of agency. So the discussion of the metaphysics of agency will begin with the exploration of four distinct but not unrelated issues: what kind of causation underpins the operation of agency, the role of teleological explanations, the kinds of entities that might be at stake in the temporal exercises of agency, and whether omissions and refraining are genuine instances of agency, even if only of a ‘negative’ kind.

The first four chapters exemplify some of the important metaphysical dimensions that need to be explored to make some progress toward a comprehensive account of the nature of agency. They do not purport to be part of a single and unified view, and some of them might push in different and possible incompatible directions. But it is worth remarking that all the authors of these chapters explicitly frame their contributions by criticizing or distancing themselves from what is often known as the ‘standard story of action,’ which in its basic form claims that an action is a bodily movement caused (in the right kind of way) and rationalized (that is, made intelligible) by the agent’s desire for an end and her belief that moving her body in that particular way will bring about what she desires.

It is hard to tell whether something like the standard story enjoys the status of being the received view among the current philosophers of agency—which is, after all, a rather diverse group, with very different philosophical backgrounds, interests, and temperaments (as it should be evident by the contributions to this volume). But it seems undeniable that there is something at least initially attractive, if not even intuitive, about the standard story, so any view of the metaphysics of agency, at some point, might have to contend with it.

Hence, it is worth pointing out what might make this picture attractive in the first place: first, the picture does not divorce agency from causation but actually makes agency fit within a naturalistic understanding of our conduct; second, it recognizes the specific role of our psychology in shaping our agency, while also acknowledging the special role played by our bodily movements; it uses a metaphysics of events that seemingly fits both a standard understanding of causation and a plausible account of the individuation and location of actions, and how they relate to their consequences and results.

The first four chapters, however, take issue with some of the central features of the standard theory: how to understand causation, whether genuinely teleological explanations can really fit with naturalistic explanations, whether a metaphysics of events is at all adequate to account for the temporal extension and the dynamics of agency, and whether the standard story can really account for the seemingly genuine agential character of omissions and refraining.

Some of these criticisms might be taken as ultimately friendly to the standard story, suggesting how it could be improved. Others might be taken as inviting for a pluralism of approaches. Others still might be seen as criticizing the standard story as deeply misleading in its basic assumptions, possibly even in how it conceives of the basic desiderata for an account of agency. At this point, all these options are on the table. The point of this handbook is not to adjudicate the standard story (or any particular view of agency) but rather to explore the variety of approaches in the philosophy of agency.

This exploratory spirit should be especially evident in the last two chapters in this section, on bounded agency and games, which might seem an unlikely fit for a section on the metaphysics of agency. Let me explain why they appear here. First, the chapter on ‘Bounded agency’ by Elijah Millgram contains a sketch of a basic account of the nature of agency (‘agency as determination’) that has the potential to be useful to cover, at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, all kinds of agency, not just full-blooded agency. As such, it already points in the direction of the metaphysical questions highlighted in the next section on ‘Kinds of agency.’ But at the core of the paper is an intriguing methodological claim: that philosophical reflection about agency should focus on ‘bounded’ rather than ‘ideal’ agency. That is, it should focus on real-world agencies with their distinctive architectures that operate in response to localized challenges, constraints, resources, rather than trying to account for agency as a generic capacity for determination that could in principle operate across widely different locations.

The closing methodological suggestion of Millgram’s paper is that philosophers of agency should investigate various forms of agency “in the piecemeal manner of old-time botany and zoology.” It is partly to follow this recommendation that I have added the chapter on ‘Agency and games’ by C. Thi Nguyen at the closing of this section. The paper raises interesting metaphysical questions about the internal structure of our agency (especially about its internal layers and how we can navigate fluidly across them). But it does from an entry point—game playing—that might be unfamiliar to many philosophers of agency. I think that the topic of games and agency could help us wear the old-time naturalist hat, as Millgram urges us to do. This is because, as Nguyen argues, games contain a ‘library of agencies’—a rich repository of different codified forms of agency that might be used as an entry point for further explorations into the thick, deep, and lush philosophical jungle of agency.

Agency and causation

What is the best way to characterize the relationship between the exercise of agency and causation? This is the topic of Jesús H. Aguilar and Andrei A. Buckareff’s ‘Agency and causation.’ As a preliminary matter, they characterize the power of agency as the power to settle whether a state of affairs obtains or not, rather than a power to act. In their view, this is preferable because we manifest the power agency not just in acting but also in omitting to act and in the intentional outcomes of our actions and omissions.

There are three possible general approaches to the nature of causation in agency. First, agency as causal initiation: agency is exercised either in a basic mental action (an act of will or a trying) or by the agent-as-cause. One major problem with this approach is that it does not account for the guidance of extended pursuits beyond their initiation. Second, agency as outcome: agency resides in the effect or outcome of mental causes (as in the standard causal theory of action). The problem with this approach is that the agent seems to play no role: the mental attitudes do all the agential job. Third, agency as causal process: the process includes among its part the causing items (such as the intention to A) and their outcome (the A-ing). The process can either be Russellian (a diachronic series of discrete items in counterfactual dependence) or neo-Aristotelian (a process that has unity and direction in virtue of a constellation of causal powers, which are activated in mutual interaction, and whose collective outcome can be simultaneous with the causing). This latter approach is the one defended by Aguilar and Buckareff. They claim that it has a compelling advantage: it accounts for the exercise of agency in a way that by default involves the agent and takes place over time as an extended activity.

A second important (but often neglected) question about the metaphysics of causation that bears on agency is whether causation is a relation of production rather than mere difference-making. According to the latter view, causation is non-productive; it is just a matter of counterfactual dependence or nomic regularity. According to causation as production, causings are the results of actual rather than counterfactual features of objects. Aguilar and Buckareff argue that causation as production is the correct view because it can satisfy the conditions of spatiotemporal locality and contiguity between action and its causal antecedents, which appear necessary to account for non-inferential epistemic authority, the sustaining of extended activities, and the context-sensitivity of agency. Difference-making theories, by contrast, cannot account for the causal connectedness between the agent and the outcome of their exercise of agency.

Finally, if agency is causation by process, the question arises about the location, within the process, of the effective causes. There are three options. First, they could be located in the events. But this is unsatisfactory because it obscures the role of the capacity of the agent to make a causal difference. Second, they could be located in substances. This is a better option since the exercise of agency is now a manifestation of the agent’s causal powers. But there are still two concerns: the focus is on the agent qua substance (but not on how that substance causes what it does) while ignoring the contribution of other causal powers. The authors argue in favor of a third option: the effective causes are the powers manifested in the process. According to their neo-Aristotelian account, the powers are manifested in a unified teleological process, in a constellation of powers that collectively cause the outcome (a solution that shifts the focus away from the substance as a whole to the specific relevant ways in which a specific substance operates).

Agency, functions, and teleology

At the core of the concept of agency is the idea that agents act for purposes or reasons: unlike the motions of rocks, planets, or elementary particles, actions are goal-oriented behaviors. Hence, it is no surprise that we ordinarily explain actions in teleological terms: we explain why the agent did what she did by citing the state of affairs toward which her behavior was directed. But teleological explanations raise a philosophical problem, as discussed by Scott Sehon in ‘Agency, functions, and teleology.’ Teleological explanations do not seem to have a place in the natural sciences. Does this mean that agency, especially human agency, stands mysteriously outside of the natural order?

This conclusion is not warranted provided that we can find a way to reduce teleological explanations to other kinds of explanations available within the normal sphere of naturalistic science. Unfortunately, as Sehon argues, the two standard strategies of reduction fail.

The first strategy reduces teleological explanations to straightforward causal explanations in disguise. In outline, actions are those behaviors that are caused by appropriate mental states (such as a combination of belief and desire). The trouble with this standard causalist explanation ...