Personal Agency: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action

241 Pages·2008·1.79 MB·English

by  E. J. Lowe

Personal Agency
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Personal Agency
The Metaphysics of Mind and Action
E. J. Lowe
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Preface
I have been interested in the philosophy of action for more than thirty
years. In fact, my very first venture into print—‘Neither Intentional
nor Unintentional’, Analysis 38 (1978), pp. 117–18—was on the subject.
In retrospect, it seems to me that since then I have gradually been
putting together the parts of a complex jigsaw puzzle, which is at last
made complete by the comprehensive account of human action defended
in this book. Initially, I was primarily interested in understanding the
distinction between intentional and unintentional action, largely on account
of its moral significance. This then led me to examine the closely related
notion of voluntariness. Partly through a study of John Locke’s views on
the matter, I became convinced that a volitionist account of the nature
of voluntary action must be correct. Because I was at the same time
becoming increasingly attracted to a version of psychophysical dualism in
the metaphysics of mind—a version that I now call non-Cartesian substance
dualism—I also became interested in trying to overcome a popular line
of argument in favour of physicalism, the argument from causal closure.
Until this point, however, I felt relatively neutral on the question of
free will—neutral, that is, between compatibilist and libertarian responses
to this question—but my neutrality was finally overcome in favour of
libertarianism once I became persuaded that only a thoroughly externalist
account of reasons for action is defensible.
The last piece in the jigsaw puzzle concerns the distinction between
event causation and agent causation. For a long time, I considered that
all causation is fundamentally event causation and that I could happily
accommodate my volitionism within this broader view. More recently,
however, I have come to the conclusion that all causation is fundamentally
substance causation, with voluntary human action constituting a special case
of this. It struck me as being, in effect, a gross category mistake to talk of
events as literally being causes, when causal powers and liabilities manifestly
belong to substances—that is, to persisting, concrete objects—rather than
to events. According to my non-Cartesian substance dualism, human
vi Preface
persons—that is, human agents, for persons are necessarily also agents—are
‘individual substances’ of a distinct and irreducible kind. Following Locke,
I regard the will as a power possessed by such agents, which is exercised
by them whenever they engage in voluntary actions. However, whereas
Locke is at best ambiguous on the question of wherein our freedom of
action lies, I hold it to lie in the fact that our will is a spontaneous power,
which we are able to exercise freely—freely, that is, in the libertarian
sense—in the light of the reasons for action that our senses and intellects
reveal to us. I do not, then, espouse the kind of position in the philosophy
of action that normally goes under the description of ‘agent causalism’,
for this is typically associated with a rejection of volitionism and an
endorsement of the view that a human agent purely qua agent is a cause
of his or her intentional actions—whereas I want to say that an agent
always causes what he or she does voluntarily only by exercising his or her
power of will. Accordingly, my position with regard to voluntary action
steers a middle path between classical agent causalism on the one hand
and, on the other, those versions of volitionism that take all causation to
be, fundamentally, event causation. I explain all of this more fully in the
Introduction.
I have divided the chapters of this book into two Parts, to reflect the
difference between those aspects of my current position that are relatively
neutral concerning the distinction between event causation and agent
causation, the question of free will, and the nature of reasons for action and
those that commit me to the primacy of substance causation, libertarianism,
and a thoroughgoing externalism of reasons. A reader who was convinced
by the dualistic account of mental causation defended in Part I of the
book might not necessarily be persuaded to accept the main doctrines
advanced in Part II, even though I myself now regard the combination as a
natural and compelling one. Many of the chapters have appeared in print in
previous versions, but I have revised and rewritten them for the purposes of
this book in an effort to make it an integrated monograph rather than just
a collection of entirely independent papers. However, because the book’s
chapters were originally independent papers and I didn’t wish to disrupt
the internal thread of argument in each of them, there is inevitably some
repetition of themes and arguments across the book from time to time.
But even where this occurs, it is usually accompanied by some change of
perspective, focus or context, and so will not, I hope, unduly distract the
Preface vii
reader. Furthermore, this method of proceeding means that the individual
chapters, and certainly both Parts of the book, are still perfectly capable of
being read independently of one another, which may suit the purposes of
readers who are mainly interested only in some of the topics that the book
covers.
Acknowledgements
Various chapters of this book are based upon the following previously
published papers of mine—all of them relatively recent—and I am grate-
ful to the editors and publishers concerned for permission to reproduce
original material from them. I retain the titles of the original papers as
the corresponding chapter titles so as to avoid possible confusion, but in
many cases there are significant changes of content in the present versions.
Chapter 1: ‘Self, Agency, and Mental Causation’, Journal of Conscious-
ness Studies 6 (1999), pp. 225–39. Chapter 2: ‘Causal Closure Principles
and Emergentism’, Philosophy 75 (2000), pp. 571–85. Chapter 3: ‘Physical
Causal Closure and the Invisibility of Mental Causation’, in S. Walter
and H.-D. Heckmann (eds), Physicalism and Mental Causation: The Meta-
physics of Mind and Action (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003). Chapter 6:
‘Event Causation and Agent Causation’, Grazer Philosophische Studien 61
(2001), 1–20. Chapter 7: ‘Personal Agency’, in A. O’Hear (ed.), Minds
and Persons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Chapter 8:
‘Substance Causation, Persons, and Free Will’, in C. Kanzian, J. Quitterer,
and E. Runggaldier (eds), Persons: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Vienna:
Ho¨lder–Pichler–Tempsky, 2003). Chapter 9: ‘Rational Selves and Free-
dom of Action’, in A. Corradini, S. Galvan, and E. J. Lowe (eds), Analytic
Philosophy Without Naturalism (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
Chapter 10: ‘Needs, Facts, Goodness, and Truth’, in S. Reader (ed.), The
Philosophy of Need (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). In
addition, I have based parts of the Introduction on my ‘Between Agent
Causalism and Volitionism: AMiddle Path’, in F. Castellani and J. Quitterer
(eds), Agency and Causation in the Human Sciences (Paderborn: Mentis, 2007).
I am grateful to the publisher and editors for permission to do this. I
have also based parts of Chapter 5 on material first published in my ‘Non-
Cartesian Dualism and the Problem of Mental Causation’, Erkenntnis 65
(2006), pp. 5–23. I am grateful to the publisher, Springer, for permission
to do this.
Acknowledgements ix
Most of the material in this book was first presented in the form of
invited conference papers or lectures, as detailed below, and I am indebted
to the organizers and audiences concerned for their encouragement and
help in the genesis and improvement of it. The Introduction draws upon
my paper ‘Between Agent Causalism and Volitionism: A Middle Path’,
which was delivered at a conference on Agency and Causation in the
Human Sciences, held in the University of Trento in June 2005. ‘Self,
Agency, and Mental Causation’ was first presented to an audience in
the University of Stirling in May 1997. ‘Causal Closure Principles and
Emergentism’ was delivered at a conference on The Completeness of
Physics, held in the University of London, School of Advanced Study,
in May 1999. ‘Could Volitions be Epiphenomenal?’ was presented to a
workshop on Epiphenomenalism at the conference of the Gesellschaft fu¨r
Analytische Philosophie, held in the University of Bielefeld in September
2003. ‘The Self as an Emergent Substance’ was delivered at a conference on
Emergence in Science and Philosophy held in the Catholic University of
Milan in June 2007. ‘Event Causation and Agent Causation’ was presented
to a workshop on Agents and their Actions at the conference of the
Gesellschaft fu¨r Analytische Philosophie, held in the University of Bielefeld
in September 2000. ‘Personal Agency’ was delivered as a Royal Institute
of Philosophy Lecture in London in February 2002. ‘Substance Causation,
Persons, and Free Will’ was an invited paper presented at the International
Wittgenstein Symposium, held in Kirchberg, Austria, in August 2002.
‘Rational Selves and Freedom of Action’ was presented at a conference on
Analytic Philosophy without Naturalism, held in the Catholic University
of Milan in June 2003. ‘Needs, Facts, Goodness, and Truth’ was presented
at the Royal Institute of Philosophy conference on The Philosophy of
Need, held in the University of Durham in September 2003.
Finally, I should especially like to express my gratitude to Peter
Momtchiloff of Oxford University Press for all his help and encour-
agement and to several anonymous readers for the Press for their careful
and constructive advice. I am also very grateful to Susan Lowe, Tim Lowe,
Maria Alvarez, and Meghan Griffith for commenting on all or part of
a late version of the manuscript. I have made various amendments as a
consequence.