Action and Responsibility

200 Pages·2006·0.872 MB·English

by  Andrew Sneddon (auth.)

ACTION AND RESPONSIBILITY
LIBRARYOF ETHICS AND APPLIED PHILOSOPHY
VOLUME18
Managing Editor:
Govert A. den Hartogh, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
ACTION
AND
RESPONSIBILITY
by
ANDREW SNEDDON
University of Ottawa, ON, Canada
AC.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN-10 1-4020-3996-4 (HB)
ISBN-13 978-1-4020-3996-6 (HB)
ISBN-10 1-4020-3982-4 (e-book)
ISBN-13 978-1-4020-3982-9 (e-book)
Published by Springer,
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© 2006 Springer
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Printed in the Netherlands.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Preface ix
Chapter 1: Two Questions 1
Appendix I: The Status Question: What to Look For? 13
Chapter 2: Ascriptivism Resurrected: The Case for Ascriptivism 19
Chapter 3: Ascriptivism Defended: The Case Against Ascriptivism 33
Appendix II: An Alternative Reading of Hart 49
Chapter 4: Responsibility and Causation I: Legal Responsibility 51
Chapter 5: Responsibility and Causation II: Moral Responsibility 67
Chapter 6: Foundationalism and the Production Question 97
Chapter 7: Foundationalism and the Status Question: Strong Productionism 119
Appendix III: Reflections on the Pursuit of a Causal Analysis of Action 131
Chapter 8: Nouveau Volitionism 137
Chapter 9: Weak Productionism 151
Chapter 10: Concluding Reflections on Ascriptivism and Action 169
BIBLIOGRAPHY 181
INDEX 187
v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I gratefully acknowledge permission granted to reprint the following either
partially or in their entirety:
1] “Considering Causalisms”, Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, Vol.
XL (2001), no. 2, pp. 343-66. Published by the Canadian Philosophical Association
and Wilfrid Laurier Press.
2] “Does Philosophy of Action Rest on a Mistake?” First published in
Metaphilosophy, Vol. 32: 5 (Oct, 2001), pp. 502-522. © Metaphilosophy LLC and
Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001.
3] “Prichard, Strawson, and Two Objections to Moral Sensibility Theories”,
Journal of Philosophical Research, Vol. 29 (2004), pp. 289-314. Published by the
Philosophy Documentation Center.
4] “Moral Responsibility: The Difference of Strawson and the Difference It
Should Make,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, forthcoming as of time of
publication. Published by Springer.
vii
PREFACE
This book is an exploration of what it takes for an event to count as an action. I
first became interested in this topic nearly a decade ago while working on a different
topic. I kept coming across philosophers making claims about the nature of action
that seemed false or at least dubious to me. As a consequence I turned to the
philosophy of action directly, to get to the heart of the matter. I have wrestled with
this territory ever since. I hope that, with this book, I have finally earned the
intuitions that put me at odds with the philosophers I was originally reading.
This book develops ideas in Part Two of my doctoral dissertation, which I wrote
at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. I loved being at Queen’s, for
both professional and personal reasons. My thanks go to the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support as a doctoral
candidate. Steve Leighton and Ronald de Sousa were readers for my dissertation.
They provided some early and invaluable challenges to the ideas developed here.
My deepest debt of gratitude is owed to David Bakhurst, my supervisor. I learned a
lot from David; this book would not be the same without his help.
The earliest version of this manuscript was written during 2001-2 at the
University of Calgary, where I was the Killam Postdoctoral Fellow. My thanks go to
the Killam Foundation for generous support. Bob Ware was my postdoctoral
supervisor at Calgary. He read and discussed the first draft. His input was very
helpful, but even more important has been his friendly support, dating back to before
he even met me, when I was a doctoral student soliciting help in taking the next step.
It pleases me immensely to acknowledge publicly the help Bob has given me in the
book that I wrote in a position that I held in large part due to his generosity.
Stephen Hawkins provided invaluable assistance in preparing the manuscript for
publication.
My wife Debbie has been with me through every part of the process, since before
the germination of the first ideas in Kingston until the writing of these words in
Ottawa. I see the hands of David and Bob in particular parts of the book, but I see
Debbie everywhere. This is for her.
ix
CHAPTER 1
TWO QUESTIONS
. . . what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise
my arm?
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §621
1.QUESTIONS
As has long been recognized, Wittgenstein’s question about arms rising and the
raising of arms is a worthy place to begin a study of action. The reason for this is
that it poses a pregnant challenge. It is a challenge because it seems like a question
we, both as philosophers and as ordinary people, should be able to answer. It is
pregnant, however, because it is ambiguous.
On one reading, Wittgenstein’s question could be interpreted as a challenge to
specify what makes an event count as an action.1 Arms rise without necessarily
counting as actions. Some such movements are actions and some are not. The
movement of the arm seems to be identical across such cases, so some other
factor(s) must make the difference between these kinds of events. Specifying this
other factor will provide an answer to the question, what makes an event count as an
action?
Since this question concerns the status of events qua actions, and how they come
to have this status, I will call this the status question.
Status Question: What makes an event count as an action?
Corresponding issues will be called status issues. Terminology germane to this
question and to these issues is status terminology.
Looked at in another light, Wittgenstein’s question could be seen as a causal
query. The action of raising one’s arm is brought about through a series of causally
related events, including muscle contractions, neural activity, and the overt bodily
activity mentioned in the question. The movement of the arm is at the end of this
chain that somehow realizes the action. Since it is at the end, the overt bodily
movement is the wrong place to look if one wants to determine how actions are
produced. Subtracting the movement of arm clears the way for proper examination
of the sequence of events that brought about the action.
1 Throughout, I will restrict attention to human action. For ease, I will refer just to ‘action’.
1
2 CHAPTER1
Since this version of the question emphasizes how an action is produced, I will
call it the production question:
Production Question: How are actions produced?
As with the status question, corresponding issues are production issues, and the
terminology appropriate to this sort of inquiry is production terminology.
These questions will be familiar to anyone versed in contemporary philosophical
study of action. Status issues are generally addressed in the attempt to develop a
theory of action. Production issues come up most importantly during the
development of a theory of action explanation. Alfred Mele begins a recent
introduction to the field by stating that the philosophy of action is structured around
two questions: ‘. . . (1) What are actions? (2) How are actions to be explained?’2 The
first question is the status question. The second question, about explanation, appears
different from the production question, but in fact there is much in common between
the two. Twentieth century philosophy of action, from the 50s through 70s, was
preoccupied wondering whether reasons could be causes. Very briefly, the issue was
this: actions seem to be events explainable in terms of reasons. Reasons rationalize
actions, make them intelligible. Explicating reasons that lead to actions shows the
light in which the action appears favorable to the agent who performs them. All of
this caused some to wonder whether they were the right sort of phenomenon to
cause anything. Donald Davidson’s landmark ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’3
turned this debate in favour of those who thought reasons could be causes, and such
a view has characterized the dominant strain of philosophy of action ever since.
Seen this way, Mele’s explanation question looks very much like my production
question. If reasons are causes, then a rationalizing explanation gives us some detail
about the causal chain by which a given action was produced. Hence it is fair to
claim that both status and production issues are at the heart of contemporary
philosophy of action.
A notable wrinkle appears at this point. Contemporary philosophy of action
conflates the two sorts of issues. Answers to the production question are given using
status terms, and vice versa; in more traditional terms, theories of action and of
action explanation are deeply intertwined. Mele introduces what he calls causalism
in exactly this way:
A popular approach to understanding both the nature of action and the explanation of
actions emphasizes causation. Causal theories of action hold that an event’s being an
action depends on how it was caused. These theories feature as causes such
psychological or mental items as beliefs, desires, intentions, and related events (e.g.
acquiring an intention to A now). If causal theories of action are on the right track, they
provide a metaphysical underpinning for a popular view of the explanation of actions—
the view that actions are to be explained, causally, partly in terms of items of the kind
just mentioned. The conjunction of these two ideas—one about what actions are and the
other about how actions are to be explained—may be termed causalism.4
2 Alfred Mele, The Philosophy of Action, ed. Alfred Mele (Oxford, 1997), p. 1.
3 Donald Davidson, ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’, in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, 1980).
4 Mele, The Philosophy of Action, pp. 2-3.