Abstract
Some philosophers have argued that refraining from performing an action consists in actively keeping oneself from performing that action or preventing one’s performing it. Since activities must be held to be positive actions, this implies that negative actions are a species of positive actions which is to say that all actions are positive actions.
I defend the following claims:
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(i)
Positive actions necessarily include activity or effort, negative actions may require activity or effort, but never include the activity or effort which may be required.
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(ii)
Unless it is, or was, at some time in P’s power to Q, P does not refrain from Q-ing.
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(iii)
Negative actions are actions, they are causings of negative facts.
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Notes
I’ll define the terms ‘negative action’ and ‘positive action’ shortly. In any case, on any acceptable definition of these terms ‘marching 5 miles’ must come out positive and ‘refraining from talking’ negative.
Ayer (1952) points out that, in general, negative statements are not statements expressed by means of negations such as ‘not’, ‘no’, ‘nobody’, ‘nowhere’, ‘nothing’, etc. It may be possible to express the same statement by means of a grammatically negative as well as by means of a positive expression. For example, saying that no mountain is as high as Mt. Everest is equivalent to saying that Mt. Everest is the highest mountain in the world.
I shall later show that negative actions can be nonintentional. However, in that case they must have been level-generated by an intentional negative action.
Employing this term of Goldman’s (but not his definition of it which is wider), I shall say that P’s Q-ing level-generates her R-ing if, and only if, she R-s by Q-ing. And I shall say that P’s Q-ing is a basic action if P does not perform an action R, such that her R-ing level-generates her Q-ing.
I shall later discuss negative actions which are not refrainings.
I thank Professor Carolina Sartorio and the referee for making me aware of this possibility.
xi-xvii do not form a minimal set of conditions. For example, xvi is implied by xv. If Q-ing had not been a real option for P, then her intention not to Q would not have prevented her Q-ing. She would not have Q-ed in any case.
This is not to say that the effort is necessarily temporally prior. It may last for as long as the refraining lasts.
Bennett’s proposal cannot be extrapolated to negative facts in general. That the Vesuvius does not erupt now would seem to be a negative fact, but there are not vastly more possible states of the universe which are compatible with its not erupting than with its erupting (if there are more at all). Still, his proposal might be capable of extrapolation to restricted dominions of discourse. Restricting oneself to colours, something’s not being blue might be held to be a negative fact because it is compatible with its having vastly more colours than its being blue allows. Likewise, in the domain of numbers, a number’s not being zero could, for a similar reason, be held to be a negative fact. Negativity would then depend on the domain of discourse. In a domain containing only equal quantities of blue and red objects, not being blue would not be a negative fact (nor a positive one).
It is surely not accidental that Rescher chooses an example where the person who refrains from performing an action feels an urge to perform that action. That is, his example is not representative for refrainings in general.
Presumably, Brand means by ‘the date of e2’ the time at which e2 would have happened if e1 had not occurred.
Given this definition of causal relevancy, if e1 causally prevents e2, e1 is not causally relevant to e2 but rather to the non-occurrence of e2.
Brand (1971) feels that freedom of acting should not be built into the definition of ‘refraining’. Consequently, he does not require that a person who refrains from Q-ing can Q. This has the strange implication that one may refrain from playing the violin, even if one does not have a violin at one’s disposal and does not have the ability to play the violin.
Brand says: ‘I can refrain from raising my hand by putting it in my pocket, by sitting on it, or by keeping it at my side’ [Loc. cit., pp. 49-50]. The impression is created that a struggle with the hand is involved which, if left to its own devices, would fly off and rise. But a person who does not suffer from a rare nervous illness does not have to struggle with her hand when she refrains from raising it.
Brand needs the requirement that P R-s in order to prevent his Q-ing so as to guarantee that it is intentional that P does not Q. Without this requirement, his assumptions would imply that one refrains from Q-ing whenever one’s activity makes it impossible for one to Q-which is clearly false.
Russell initially upheld the existence of negative facts. See Russell (1918).
That there is not now a smell of rotten eggs in this room is not implied by whatever positive facts obtain inside or outside this room (It is implied by the absence of H2S molecules in this room but the absence of such molecules is itself a negative fact).
Even the fact that John is not at home is not entailed by the mere fact that he is at his office. We must also employ the fact that John is not at the same time at two different places. But this is a negative fact.
Richard M. Gale’s account of the truth-conditions of ‘Jones did not play hockey yesterday’ is as follows: ‘There is some positive event-sortal Q, such that Jones instantiated Q yesterday and Q is incompatible with playing-hockeyness’. Examples of kinds of Q which would render this true are: lying-in-bedness, working-around-the house-ness, etc. See Gale (1970: 206–217; 1976:117).
However, the fact that lying in bed is incompatible with playing hockey is itself a negative fact. It is to say that one cannot at the same time lie in bed and play hockey.
If a set of events contains one or more positive events, then the concatenation of these events is a positive event. A change must occur for the concatenation to exist.
Dowe (2001, pp. 221-223) treatment of quasi-causings is substantially the same as Bruce Vermazen’s discussion of causings of (or by) negative events.
It does not seem that there are stronger reasons to doubt the transitivity of quasi-causation than there are to doubt the unexceptional transitivity of regular causation.
The death of the last dinosaur was a change and therefore a positive event. But this event entailed the subsequent absence of dinosaurs. And it would be strange if the impact of the meteorite caused the death of the last dinosaur, but not the state of the world entailed by its death.
It may happen that a person refrains from doing one thing by refraining from doing another. One may, for example, refrain from meeting someone by refraining from opening the door.
An action-tree is the set of actions generated by a given basic action. I borrow this term from Goldman.
Sometimes the suppression (the authors’ italics) of movement is a significant feature of an animal’s behavioral repertoire (as when an organism freezes upon detecting a predator)’ (Allen and Bekoff (1997), ch. 3).
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Acknowledgement
I want to acknowledge the invaluable help given in writing and proofreading these pages by my loved friend, the author Chayym Zeldis who passed away on 8 October 2008.
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Mossel, B. Negative Actions. Philosophia 37, 307–333 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9163-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9163-3