Transcript Agent Causation

Agent Causation
Daniel von Wachter
http://daniel.von-wachter.de
Causation in actions
• When people do something they are often said to
be the cause of the result of the action. E.g. Jones
caused the braking of the window.
• In which sense can agents be causes?
• Are there any events that come about other than
through event causation (i.e. via tendencies)?
• Does it make any difference whether the action
was free?
Plan
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What is a free action?
Terminology: tryings, etc.
Freedom and determinism
The free will dilemma
The dilemma and agent causation
Chisholm; critique of Chisholm
The right solution
Free action
• What is an action?
• What makes an action a free action?
• Intuition: if S did A freely he could have done
otherwise.
• If the action - everything involved in it - was just
the result of ongoing causal processes, then it was
not a free action.
• Is free action compatible with determinism, i.e. the
view that every event has a sufficient cause?
Tryings
• Imagine Ludwig has a cup of tea for breakfast...
He tries to lift it, but due to an injury of his arm
the arm does not rise. He tries again, then the arm
obeys.
• A trying is a mental event of the type that occurs
when we try to do something regardless of
whether we succeed.
• Alternative terms: undertakings, purposings.
• Thomas Reid (1788), Richard Taylor (1966),
Roderick Chisholm (1976), Richard Swinburne.
Tryings (cont)
• Reid, Thomas. 1788. Essays on the Active Power of the
Human Mind. In Inquiry and Essays, edited by R. E.
Beanblossom and K. Lehrer. Indianapolis: Hackett.
• Taylor, Richard. 1966. Action and Purpose. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ.
• Chisholm, Roderick. 1976. The Agent as Cause. In Action
Theory, edited by M. Brand and D. Walton. Dordrecht:
Reidel.
• Swinburne, Richard. 1997. The Evolution of the Soul
(Revised Edition). Oxford: Clarendon Press, ch. 7.
• O'Connor, Timothy. 2000. Persons and Causes: Oxford
UP.
Tryings (cont)
• Action can be defined in terms of tryings.
• The dilemma of free will can perhaps be
tackled with tryings.
Terminology
• An action leads to the intended result via a
causal process, the action process.
• An action is governed by an intention to
bring a certain thing about. (This is to be
distinguished from a definite plan, also
often called intention.)
Compatibilist free will
• Compatibilism is the view that the existence of
free actions is compatible with determinism.
• S did A freely iff he did what he wanted to do.
• Attempts to preserve “he could have done
otherwise” by assuming chance in:
– how the decision is made (Clarke)
– the process of deliberation (Dennett, Mele)
– chance diminishes control!
Incompatibilism
• “Libertarian free will”.
• A free action is not fully caused by
preceding events.
• The question is not whether free will is
compatible with determinism but which
kind of free will is compatible with
determinism.
The dilemma of free will
• If determinism is true, then the action is just
the result of ongoing causal processes and
the agent could not have acted otherwise,
and hence it is not true.
• If determinism is false, then the action
occurs as a matter of chance, and hence it is
not a free action because the agent lacks
control.
The Dilemma and agent c
• Agent causation (AC): some causes are not
events but substances, namely agents.
• AC is usually put forward by defenders of
libertarian free will.
• Does AC help to solve the Dilemma?
• Does AC help to make sense of libertarian
free action?
Chisholm’s theory of agent
causation
• Undertakings
• When Ludwig successfully raises his arm he is the
cause of the arm’s rising (and of the undertaking).
Agent causation is not reducible to event
causation.
• A free action is one involves an undertaking for
which there is no preceding “sufficient causal
condition”.
• So there is agent causation in free as well as nonfree actions!
Chisholm (cont)
S contributes causally at t to p =Df. Either
(a) S does something at t that contributes
causally to p, or
(b) there is a q such that S undertakes q at t
and S-undertaking-q is p, or
(c) there is an r such that S does something
at t that contributes causally to r, and p is
that state of affairs which is S doing
something that contributes causally to r.
Objection against Chisholm
• A free action is one involves an undertaking for
which there is no preceding “sufficient causal
condition”.
• Does it follow that the action was up to the agent?
that the agent had control?
• What if the undertaking occurred as a matter of
chance?
• In non-free action there is, contra C, no other
causation involved besides event causation!
Chisholm’s linguistic turn
• “The philosophical question is not - or at least it shouldn’t
be - the question whether or not there is ‘agent causation’.
The philosophical question should be, rather, the question
whether ‘agent causation’ is reducible to ‘event causation’.
Thus, for example, if we have good reason for believing
that Jones did kill his uncle, then the ph question about
Jones as cause would be: Can we express the statement
‘Jones killed his uncle’ without loss of meaning into a set
of statement in which only events are said to be causes and
in which Jones himself is not said to be the source of any
activity? And can we do this without being left with any
residue of agent causation - that is, without being left with
some such statement as ‘Jones raised his arm” wherein
Jones once again plays the role of cause or partial cause of
a certain event?”
Turn back: Causation in free action
• Describe the causation involved in free
actions
• Consider the action process, leading to the
action result
• If you can trace it back well before the
action then the action was not free.
• The process must have started somewhere.
Call a first stage initial event.
Causation in free action (cont)
• How did the initial event occur?
– It was not entirely the result of ongoing causal
processes
– It did not occur by chance
• The occurrence of a part of the initial event must
be due to the agent. Choice event.
• Trace back the causes of the action result; you end
up at an event a part of which has no preceding
cause and whose occurrence is due to the agent.
• Free agents can make certain events pop up, just
by (or as) choice.
• You can say that the agent is cause of the choice
All dilemmas solved
• Actions are neither fully caused by earlier
events nor do they occur randomly.
• Agents have control over what they do.
They can initiate (and sustain) certain
causal processes.
Mysterious?
• It is not more mysterious that an event
should occur because someone chooses so
than that an event should occur because a
certain other event occurred earlier.
• Al-Ghazali:
All events are God’s choice events.