Online research in philosophy

My purpose in this paper is to set forth a theory of agency that makes no appeal to mysterious notions of agent causation. But lest I be misunderstood at the very outset, I should perhaps clarify the point that my emphasis here is on the term “mysterious” and not on the expression “agent causation.” I shall begin with what seems to me the best possible example of agent causation: the sense in which a supremely perfect God, if one should exist, would initiate or originate his own actions. I shall not, however, simply adopt without modification the standard understanding of agent causation, assuming there to be such an understanding. I shall not make it true by definition, for example, that an agent-caused event can occur only in a context of alternative possibilities and hence can never be necessitated. Neither shall I make it true by definition that the internal states of an agent can never determine, or even causally determine in the case of human beings, a genuine instance of agent causation.1 Instead, I shall begin with the assumption that God represents the best and the clearest example of..

In this paper, I argue that trying is the locus of freedom and moral responsibility. Thus, any plausible view of free and responsible action must accommodate and account for free tryings. I then consider a version of agent causation whereby the agent directly causes her tryings. On this view, the agent is afforded direct control over her efforts and there is no need to posit—as other agent-causal theorists do—an uncaused event. I discuss the potential advantages of this sort of view, and its challenges.

O’Connor refines the “transfer” or “consequence” argument for Incompatibilism, and responds to objections (chap. 1). He argues against attempts to save freedom of action by appeal to the “simple” indeterminism of Carl Ginet and the “causal” indeterminism of Robert Kane and others (chap. 2). The main positive project of Persons and Causes is to explain the selfdetermination of action by appeal to agent causation (chaps 3-5). O’Connor’s strategy is to defend a nonHumean view about event causation, and then argue that agent causation is no more mysterious or objectionable than event causation is on this nonHumean view. I will argue that O’Connor does not succeed in making agent causation palatable. But his general strategy should recommend itself to all defenders of agent causation, and his development of agency theory is an important contribution to the project. In..

My primary objective is to motivate the concern that leading libertarian views of free action seem unable to account for an agent’s behavior in a way that reveals an explanatorily apt connection between the agent’s prior reasons and the intentional behavior to be explained. I argue that it is this lack of a suitable reasons explanation of purportedly free decisions that underpins the objection that agents who act with the pertinent sort of libertarian freedom cannot be morally responsible for what they do because their intentional behavior is a matter of luck. The accounts scrutinized include a Kane-type event-causal view, Clarke’s account that appeals to both agent causation and event causation in the production of free action, and O’Connor’s pure agent-causal account. I conclude by discussing an advantage these libertarian accounts enjoy over compatibilist contenders: they possess a feature necessary to accommodate the truth of judgments of moral obligation.

Key elements of Randolph Clarke's libertarian account of freedom that requires both agent-causation and non-deterministic event-causation in the production of free action is assessed with an eye toward determining whether agent-causal accounts can accommodate the truth of judgments of moral obligation.

In what follows, I will contend that the commonsense view of ourselves as fundamental causal agents - for which some have used the term “unmoved movers" but which I think might more accurately be expressed as “not wholly moved movers” - is theoretically understandable, internally consistent, and consistent with what we have thus far come to know about the nature and workings of the natural world. In the section that follows, I try to show how the concept of ‘agent’ causation can be understood as a distinct species (from ‘event’ causation) of the primitive idea, which I’ll term “causal production”, underlying realist or non-Humean conceptions of event causation. In section III, I respond to a number of contemporary objections to the theory of agent causation. Sections IV-V are devoted to showing that the theory is compatible with ordinary reasons explanations of action, which then places me in a position to respond, in the final section, to the contention that we could never know, in principle, whether the agency theory actually describes a significant portion of human activity.

According to agent-causal accounts of free will, agents have the capacity to cause actions, and for a given action, an agent could have done otherwise. This paper uses existing results and presents experimental evidence to argue that young children deploy a notion of agent-causation. If young children do have such a notion, however, it remains quite unclear how they acquire it. Several possible acquisition stories are canvassed, including the possibility that the notion of agent-causation develops from a prior notion of obligation. Finally, the paper sets out how this work might illuminate the philosophical problem of free will.

Perhaps the central challenge for indeterministic (“libertarian”) accounts of human freedom is one of integration: squaring one’s understanding of an agent’s control over his own free action with a plausible account of how such actions are properly explained by the reasons the agent had for so acting. Two types of account predominate.1 One is centered on the notion of agent causation. The other holds that a free action is the (event) causal, but nondeterministic outcome of antecedent factors including the states of the agent’s having reasons for so acting. Many philosophers judge that typical agent causal accounts of freedom improperly sacrifice the possibility of rational explanation of the action for the sake of securing control, while others judge that the reverse shortcoming plagues typical event causal accounts. (Of course, many philosophers make both these judgments.) After briefly rehearsing the reasons for these verdicts on the two traditional strategies, we undertake an extended examination of Randolph Clarke’s recent attempt to meet the challenge by proposing an original, “integrated agent-causal” account of human free action. We argue that Clarke’s account fails. In a final section, we sketch a more promising route to integration.

According to what I call the reductive standard-causal theory of agency, the exercise of an agent's power to act can be reduced to the causal efficacy of agent-involving mental states and events. According to a non-reductive agent-causal theory, an agent's power to act is irreducible and primitive. Agent-causal theories have been dismissed on the ground that they presuppose a very contentious notion of causation, namely substance-causation. In this paper I will assume, with the proponents of the agent-causal approach, that substance-causation is possible, as I will argue against that theory on the ground that it fails as a theory of agency. I will argue that the non-reductive agent-causal theory fails to account for agency, because it fails to account for agential control: it cannot explain why the stipulated irreducible relation between the agent and an action constitutes the agent's exercise of control over the action. This objection, I will argue, applies to the agent-causal theory in particular, and to the non-reductive approach in general.