The philosophy of action, as the
editors point out in their Preface, is experiencing a resurgence that is
"one of the most exciting developments in philosophy in the last fifty
years" (vi). The present collection, derived from the Royal Institute of
Philosophy Conference held at Oxford University in September 2002, provides an
excellent sample of the kind of innovative and insightful work that is now
being done in the field. Here, however, I can only offer some brief glimpses of
this work as it is represented in the eleven papers contributed to this volume.
(For a good overview of recent work in the philosophy of action, see Maria
Alvarez, "Agents, Actions and Reasons," Philosophical Books 46
(2005): 45-58.)

The collection opens with Jennifer
Hornsby’s "Agency and Actions", which attempts to debunk the
‘standard story of action’, according to which beliefs and desires cause
actions. On this view, Hornsby points out, actions are identified with events
of a certain sort (specifically, bodily movements), thus introducing a
conception of the causal order in which agents have no place — as Thomas Nagel
puts it, "There seems no room for agency in a world of neural impulses,
chemical reactions, and bone and muscle movements" (quoted by Hornsby on
p.11). The ‘standard story’, then, is not a story of agency at all.

In "Two Ways of Explaining
Actions", Jonathan Dancy explores the inter-relations between ‘normative
explanations’ (which give the agent’s reasons for doing what she did) and
‘causal explanations’ (which attempt to explain what the agent did without
looking to her reasons for doing it). Dancy argues that these two ways of
explaining actions are not in fact distinct, for on closer analysis causal
explanations collapse into normative ones.

 Richard Moran’s paper, "Anscombe
on ‘Practical Knowledge’", discusses Anscombe’s concept of ‘practical
knowledge’ as developed in her 1957 book, Intention. Examples of
practical knowledge of what one is doing include the knowledge that I am
painting the wall yellow and the knowledge that I am opening the window. Such
knowledge Anscombe characterizes as ‘non-observational’, in the sense that this
knowledge is not perceptually derived from the world. Moran goes on to show how
this view supports a special kind of privileged access: "if the agent
doesn’t know what he is doing, then no one else can know" (68). 

 In the next paper ("Action,
the Act Requirement and Criminal Liability"), Antony Duff defers to the
philosophy of action in order to provide a new understanding of the ‘act
requirement’ in criminal law, the requirement that one cannot be held
criminally liable unless one has performed some (voluntary) act. Moving from
legal theory to psychology, David Charles (in "Emotion, Cognition and
Action") looks at Stoic or cognitive theories of emotion, according to
which emotions consist of valuational judgements (or beliefs) and resulting
affective states. Charles is critical of this approach and offers an
alternative (non-cognitive or experiential) account, before closing with some
consequences his account has for action explanation.

In "Kantian Autonomy",
Terence Irwin examines Rawls’ view that Kant takes autonomy to require the
construction rather than the recognition of moral principles. "Kant’s
conception of autonomy," Irwin finds, "not only does not require
constructivism, but positively excludes it" (162). In the following paper
("The Structure of Orthonomy"), however, Michael Smith hopes to
divert attention away from autonomy, or the capacity an agent has to rule
himself, and to encourage philosophers to think in terms of ‘orthonomy’, or the
capacity an agent has to get things right or correct, thereby displaying both
control and responsibility. Smith goes on to offer a commonsense account of orthonomous
action, in contrast to a radical Humean account, where the former account (but
not the latter) allows the desires for ends that produce actions to be the
product of a rational capacity and thus to be subject to rational evaluation.

 R. Jay Wallace, in "Normativity
and the Will", returns to the theme of constructivism, arguing against
Christine Korsgaard’s constructivist view of normativity (where the will serves
as the ‘source’ of normativity), and in favour of a normative moral realism, 
according to which normative principles "are not made normative for us by
our commitment to comply with them, rather their normative force is taken to be
prior to and independent of our particular decisions about what to do"
(195). Within this realist framework, Wallace argues that the most promising
conception of rational agency is that offered by ‘volitionism’, the basic idea
of which is that "when we are rational we ourselves determine what we
shall do, in a way that is guided and controlled by our conception of what we
have reason to do" (213).

 In the next paper Alfred Mele
asks, "Can Libertarians Make Promises?" Initially, at least, it seems
that they can’t, for as Mele points out, "it is arguable that honest,
reflective agents who were to become persuaded that their internal indeterministic
workings (or abilities) are such that there is a real chance that, despite
promising to A and despite being convinced, at the time of action, that
they have no good reason to break that promise, they will break it would feel
very uncomfortable about making promises, and would even conclude that they are
not in a position to make sincere promises" (224-25). Mele sketches two
"predictable reactions" from the libertarian side (the ‘close enough
view’ and the ‘restrictivist view’), before offering what he takes to be the
most promising solution: ‘the conferred freedom idea’. This is the idea that
free actions can confer freedom on suitably related subsequent actions of the
agent. It is therefore possible that an act of promise-keeping is free (due to
having freedom conferred on it from suitably related past actions), even though
the promise-keeper was not able at the time to perform an alternative
intentional action.

 Rae Langton’s interesting paper,
"Intention as Faith", is a critique of the doxastic account of
intention advanced by David Velleman. Langton raises two objections against
such an account. Firstly, the doxastic account lacks the resources to
distinguish intention from faith — that is, the kind of faith that involves
wishful thinking and self-fulfilling beliefs. Secondly, given the dubious
epistemological standing of wishful and self-fulfilling beliefs, intention must
be as bad as faith (insofar as the two cannot be adequately distinguished).
There is, however, an important oversight in Langton’s critique. In arguing
that wishful belief seems impossible, since we cannot, just like that, believe
something simply because we want to believe it, Langton seems to overlook the
distinction between exercising direct voluntary control over our beliefs
(which may well be impossible, or at least irrational) and exercising indirect
voluntary control over our beliefs (which we often seem to do, and in an
epistemically responsible way). (Langton does attend to this distinction on
p.255, but there the issue is whether a self-fulfilling belief can be directly
willed.)

The final and longest paper in this
collection (running to 84 pages!) is by Michael S. Moore on "The
Destruction of the World Trade Center and the Law on Event-Identity". It
is a fascinating paper, illustrating (as the author puts it) "the
potential help that philosophy can give to law" (341), in this case, to
insurance law. In the context of the present collection, however, Moore’s paper
is somewhat misplaced, as its philosophical coverage is mainly limited to
metaphysical issues such as the nature of events and event individuation, with
little coverage of topics directly related to action theory.

Very briefly, Moore is concerned to
answer the initially flippant-sounding questions: "how many occurrences of
insured events were there on September 11, 2001 in New York? Was the collapse
of the two World Trade Center Towers one event, despite the two separate
airliners crashing into each tower? Or were these two separate insured
events?" (259). It is precisely these questions that form the subject of
litigation, over billions of dollars, between various insurance companies and
the owners of the World Trade Center lease, the Silverstein group. (The
insurance companies are, of course, claiming that there was only one occurrence
or insured event.) In search of a plausible solution, Moore launches into a detailed
examination of how occurrences are individuated in American insurance law,
uncovering in the process some sophisticated views relating to causation and
event-identity. Moore’s conclusion is that, on any of the three most reasonable
tests for determining the number of occurrences (for insurance purposes), there
were two occurrences on September 11, 2001.

In short, this is an excellent
collection, showcasing some of the best contemporary minds at work in the
philosophy of action. It should be of value, however, not only to philosophers,
but also to those working in fields such as psychology and law, where issues
pertaining to action and agency often loom large.

© 2005 Nick Trakakis

Nick Trakakis,
Department of Philosophy, Monash University, Australia.

Categories: Philosophical