Free Action

A.I. Melden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351785884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

That a science of human conduct is possible, that what any man may do even in moments of the most sober and careful reflection can be understood and explained, has seemed to many a philosopher to cast doubt upon our common view that any human action can ever be said to be truly free. This book, first published in 1961, looks into crucially important issues that are often ignored in the familiar arguments for and against the possibility of free action. These issues are brought to light and examined in some detail.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

BODILY MOVEMENT, ACTION AND AGENT

IT will be useful at this time to bring together the tangled threads of the argument. It will be remembered that I reviewed a number of attempts to explain the distinction between a bodily movement or happening and a bodily action, in terms of the order of causes. I concluded that it is impossible by any adjunction of events or factors to transform a bodily movement into an item of human action. This moral has now been reinforced by the detailed inquiry into the role of motives and desires in the explanation of human conduct. Traditionally, these have been construed as causal factors, internal thrusts or pushes that issue in movements or actions, the distinction between which has been generally obscured by the muddying term ‘overt behaviour’. But the connection between these and action is, I argued, a logical connection, not causal. It is impossible to grasp the concepts of motive and desire independently of the concept of an action. And, further, the sense in which a motive or a desire explains an item of conduct is altogether different from the sense in which, say, the presence of a spark explains the explosion of a mixture of petrol vapour and air. Our concern with matters of conduct, in inquiring into a man’s motive or desire, is not to discover whether a case of a bodily movement is a case of an action—that much is already settled in our minds when we ask what a person’s motive is or what it is that he desires—nor is it to discover how it is that a case of a bodily movement, now understood as an action, has been produced. Our concern, rather, is to learn something more about the character of both the man and his action.

But how does all of this contribute to an understanding of the concept of an action, as distinguished from that of a mere bodily movement? And if, as I argued in the preceding chapter, our starting point in the explanation of the role of intentions and desires in conduct is a human agent, a being who acts intelligently, attentively and for a reason, does this not imply that the concepts of agent and action are primitive and indefinable? In that case the obscurantism in the intuitionist’s account of acts of volition has indeed come home to roost, albeit on a different perch.

These are related questions but disturbing as they may appear on first sight, the results so far achieved in the account of both intentions and desires are of major importance in removing their sting.

To begin with, a necessary comment about philosophical explanation, in particular the sort of explanation given of the concepts of intention and desire in the preceding chapters. For reasons I have indicated, it is natural to suppose that the difficulty we may have in understanding what an intention or desire is, is the difficulty involved in the discovery of an elusive item in our experience. We intend and desire; and because we do, we act. Intentions and desires, being dated, are phenomena of our inner experiences; hence they are causal factors that normally issue in conduct. But pictured in this way, they become mysterious indeed. What are the events that occur whenever, and only when, we intend or desire something? And how can such events, supposing there were any, exhibit the required logical features of intentions and desires? The task of giving a proper account of these matters by discovering the properties of events labelled ‘intentions’ and ‘desires’ is not simply difficult because of the elusiveness of the events in question; it is, rather, hopelessly impossible. This sort of move is a familiar one in philosophy. It arises quite naturally in the puzzles and obscurities that surround the concept of meaning—the elusive mental processes that ride piggyback, so to speak, on the words we utter and which, allegedly, constitute our understanding of them. So it is in the case of promises: since one cannot bind oneself simply by uttering words, the promise must consist therefore in something mental in which we engage when we utter the words ‘I promise …’. But the elusiveness of these alleged processes derives from the fact that no event distinguishable from the uttering of the words, either in the case of the promise or in that of meaning, exhibits the required logical features.¹ In these as well as in other cases the difficulty we encounter, as Wittgenstein has remarked, seems at first sight to be that of attempting to discover something that eludes our ordinary view of what goes on in our minds, as if we could, by a more critical inspection, by adjusting the focus of our intellectual microscopes (this is his figure of speech), bring into view the hidden event that slips by too quickly and thus eludes our coarser inspection. But this is an enormous paradox, for how if this were so would it be possible for persons of quite ordinary intelligence and perspicacity to employ as they do the concepts in question?

But this, it may be charged, is unfair. Our business as philosophers is, as it is often put, to analyse concepts, not to make quasi-empirical discoveries of events and their properties. But how does one ‘analyse’ a concept? No doubt there are complex features of concepts like those of intention and desire—this indeed is what I attempted to show in the preceding chapters. But does this mean that a concept is some sort of refined complex of parts, the composition of which escapes us, as indeed the composition of sugar now escapes me? And if by ‘analysing a concept’ one does not intend the sort of logical decomposition into constituents with which Moore, for example, believed himself to be concerned in Principia Ethica, what does ‘analysing a concept’ mean? The truth is that the term ‘analysis’ is very often a bit of jargon, frequently applied as a term of conceit to anything one says about any subject at all, however vague, muddled and intellectually irresponsible one’s talk may be. In any case, what are the concepts with which we are concerned when, as philosophers, we address ourselves to intentions, desires and the like? The trouble here is that the expression ‘analysis of concepts’ often conceals and embodies a crucial philosophical prepossession. We are led to look for the elusive hidden events to which we attach the labels ‘intention’, ‘desire’, ‘meaning’, ‘promise’, etc., thus converting a question about meaning into an extremely questionable view about matters of psychological occurrence (this indeed is the fatal blunder), because of the picture commonly conveyed by the term ‘concept’. We suppose, for reasons I have been at pains to express and expose, that our concepts of intention and desire, like the others I have cited above, are the concepts of happenings that could conceivably operate in the mechanism of a mind; and hence that an account of these concepts would consist in setting forth a list of properties that could be ascribed to the happenings properly labelled by the terms ‘intention’ and ‘desire’. This, as we have seen, is to lead us down the garden path; no such events are discoverable precisely because no such events could exhibit the requisite logical features of the concepts we employ.

What we need to do, therefore, is to abandon this picture and instead to examine carefully the manner in which terms like ‘intention’ and ‘desire’ operate in our familiar discourse about actions and agents. There is no royal road to the understanding of these and other related concepts by some sort of sheer intuition of non-temporal objects of the mind—entities labelled ‘concepts’ whose complex constitution it is our business as philosophers to lay bare. And if we suppose that entities of this kind are the subject of our inquiry, then here too questions of meaning are transformed illegitimately into questions of discovery: the disclaimers by some philosophers that they are unable to intuit the alleged objects must be put down to the paradoxical fact that these philosophers, who after all do show a grasp of the concepts in their familiar use of these terms, lack the required ability to perform an act of critical inspection; or worse, that they are dishonest. But even if we granted the existence of certain objects of intellection, the test of a person’s understanding would remain, as always, his grasp of the manner in which the words ‘intention’ and ‘desire’ are employed in our discourse about agents and their actions. Understanding consists, indeed, in understanding the import of statements about intentions and desires by recognizing, among other things, the relevance to such statements of the various forms of questions that may be raised and the answers that may be given, the challenges that may be made and the manner in which they may be met. In short, it would consist in understanding the character of the language in which these terms and their cognates are embedded, and thereby the crucial logical relations between these and other concepts.

It is this view of the matter that the tediously detailed inquiry in the preceding chapters has been designed to promote. We have seen something of the complexity involved in the understanding of the concepts that concern us by exploring certain of the logical relations that hold between the concepts of intention, desire, action, agent, reason for acting, the desirable, belief, hope and decision. It is no accident that in our account of desires we have been led back to the concept of intention, to recognize that one may explain an agent’s conduct equally well by making clear what it is that he wants as by stating what it is that he intends in acting as he does. For a statement of intention, insofar as it is a declaration of a man’s reasons for doing what he does, does this precisely because there is something to be got by his action which he wants and if his reasons justify him in his conduct, some envisaged good to be achieved thereby, Yet ‘intention’ and ‘desire’ are no mere synonyms even though in practical circumstances ‘what does he want?’ and ‘why does he do …?’ when asked about a man’s conduct are only different ways of getting at the same thing—a better understanding of both a man’s conduct and his interests—by calling for the filling in of different but related details in the proceedings we want to understand.

Our account of the place of intentions and desires in the conceptual framework of our language must necessarily be incomplete. A full account would call for a detailed examination of notions like choice, deliberation, expectation, belief, decision and the like—a whole gamut of mental terms which have figured importantly in the debates pro and con the possibility of free and responsible action. To do this would be an enormous task: it would consist in tracing out the complex conceptual pattern embodied in our total discourse about persons and their conduct, including a detailed examination of the whole cluster of related concepts involved in the notion of a reason for doing. I have connected this idea with that of something wanted by the agent who can and does want things for the good in them. That there is a restaurant across the street, for example, may be interesting and true, but this does not justify his crossing the street unless there is something he wants and can get there, e.g. food, which is worth having. But there is neither a single good to be achieved by all action nor is there always a single way in which any good may be secured. ‘Good’ is by no means the exclusive preserve of moralists. It would be excessive moralism to make a moral issue in general about getting such goods as pleasure, health or aesthetic satisfaction, just as it would be ridiculous if not indecent to argue for the morality of one’s conduct by appealing to the pleasure it affords, the health it promotes or the aesthetic satisfactions it provides. That pleasure is good is a tautology, and so with health and aesthetic appreciation. But any good, moral or not, may be secured in indefinitely many ways. Consider the very many ways in which a person’s reason for doing something may be involved in getting food for the good, namely health, that it provides; and consider all of the very many sorts of things a person may do merely in order to get proper food. He will perhaps be guided by the advice of his physician or follow his orders. Or, he will purchase food and in doing so exchange money for food, thus participating in a transaction intelligible only in the light of an elaborate system or conventions and statutes—for there is a difference between placing coloured pieces of paper in the palm of a person’s hand and making a payment to a grocer for food received; yet paying a grocer is no less an action, something one can observe taking place, than moving a piece of coloured paper from here to there by executing the required and in itself complicated bodily action. Or, one will drive one’s car to the market in order to get food; yet think of the very many sorts of bodily actions one will perform in the course of doing this and how, e.g. raising one’s arm, given the rules of the road, and the proper circumstances, is the action of signalling. And one can get the proper food by stealing it from the grocer, yet it would be ridiculous to attempt to justify the theft on the ground that one was following doctor’s orders even if the doctor had ordered one to eat that kind of food. So there are moral considerations variously described by writers as rules, principles, precepts or maxims, to be observed in one’s doings, all of which may also be described as getting food that is good for one. One could go on, too, to remark upon other social matters and conventions: the expectations of others which we take account of in our conduct and our expectations of their conduct to which we adjust in acting as we do; our abstentions in order to permit or to allow others to act and conversely (as in the case of a motorist who waits for pedestrians to cross the road before he proceeds); the matters of small manners (but how important when ignored or flouted!) that normally govern even trivial cases of social intercourse; and so on indefinitely.

All this is not to say that one could not have a conception of a human action unless one had the conception of traffic rules, or of these particular rules, laws or conventions governing the social intercourse of persons which happen to obtain in our society at this or that particular time. But if we are concerned with action we are concerned with the actions of human beings who are social and moral beings and who are guided in their conduct by social and moral considerations in their dealings with one another. Nor is it necessary if, correctly, we apply the term ‘action’ to an observed motion of someone’s arm, that it must be possible to describe in social and moral terms what the person is doing. There may be no reason of any sort applicable to a given case; to ‘Why?’ the correct answer may be, ‘No reason at all’. And even if a reason may be given, that reason need not involve any matter of social or moral import: ‘Why did you raise your arm?’—‘To stretch my muscles.’ Yet to understand the concept of a human action we need to understand the possibilities of descriptions in social and moral terms; we need to recognize, in other words, the relevance and applicability of reasons that operate, not only in the privacy of one’s study, but also in the social arena where persons take account of each other in doing what they do and are guided in their thought and action by an intricate network of moral and social considerations.

In earlier chapters I explored some of the conceptual connections between action, desire, intention, belief, etc. In the present chapter I remarked that this marks only the beginning of the investigation of the network of concepts which needs to be carried forward in order to understand the conceptual role of the term ‘action’ in our language. But it is clear now that we need also to focus attention upon the very many descriptions of actions which follow logically from the correspondingly many sorts of reasons for actions noted above and, in addition, the goods with which human beings are concerned. But this is to say that no account of the concept of action will do that does not attend to the status of a person as a practical being, one who is not only endowed with the primitive ability to move his limbs but who, in his complex dealings with others, acts as he does for the very many sorts of reasons that operate in conduct and out of concern with a variety of envisaged goods. ‘Action’ and ‘agent’ are conceptually related terms, not only in the anaemic sense that where there is action there is agent, and conversely, but more importantly because the character of the conception of the one is logically connected with the character of our conception of the other. And since our conception of an action is not restricted to that of a bodily action but applies to bodily actions and abstentions which are understood as cases of dealings—more or less complex in respect of the background against which they must be viewed in order to be understood—of social and moral beings with one another, the concept of a person must also be enlarged and enriched. For a person is no mere owner of mental status, no mere mover of arms and legs, but a being who has such states and does such things in the very many sorts of transactions in which he engages, not only with the things that interest and concern him in the privacy of his study but also with the persons to whose interests, actions, hopes, etc., he is attentive in the conduct of his life.

In the previous chapter I argued that if we are to understand the concepts with which we are concerned in this inquiry, our starting point must be that of an agent who acts, one who does things for a reason and with proper attention to what he is about. Failure to adopt this correct starting point is the source of the recurrent appeal in the history of philosophy to a mysterious efficacy or power ascribable to agents or persons and in terms of which allegedly the notion of a human action is to be viewed. It is unnecessary to comment upon the inherent obscurity of such a move—a typical appeal to indefinables that makes a mystery of the most commonplace matter. But this recently revived move does have a point. It is in fact the point which Hume in his attack on the idea of causal efficacy failed completely to recognize; and the fact that his own version of causation may not do justice to the sorts of explanations of events provided in well-established physical sciences adds more than a touch of irony to the history of the debate. For the alleged idea of causal efficacy or power by which events, according to its proponents, are necessitated is an idea that has always been thought to be peculiarly relevant to the actions of agents. The fact that the philosophers Hume attacked applied this obscure notion of agency to all natural phenomena and thus lent cogency to his polemic obscured what was important in the idea of causal efficacy—something Hume simply failed to recognize, namely, that an action is no mere effect of an internal mental doing in the way in which an explosion is an effect of the introduction of heat in a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. Contemporary writers who have revived this talk about powers and agencies do not, in general, wish to apply this way of speaking to natural phenomena; they restrict it to agents and their actions. It is no good, except as a first step, attacking this move on the grounds of its inherent obscurity. What is important is, first, to recognize the legitimacy of the consideration that prompts this philosophically stultifying move, namely, the inapplicability of the ordinary causal model to the scene of human action, and secondly, the mistake of supposing that because ordinary causal models will not fit—for actions are no mere happenings, and it is persons that act—some myste...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• I. THE CASE AGAINST FREE ACTION
• II. CHARACTER AS CAUSAL CIRCUMSTANCE
• III. ACTION AND HAPPENING—PROBLEMS AND PERPLEXITIES
• IV. HOW DOES ONE RAISE ONE’S ARM?
• V. BY WILLING, ONE DOES …
• VI. PHYSIOLOGICAL HAPPENINGS AND BODILY ACTIONS
• VII. LEARNING AND PHYSIOLOGY
• VIII. ‘ACTION EQUALS BODILY MOVEMENT PLUS MOTIVE’
• IX. MOTIVE AND EXPLANATION
• X. WANTING AND WANTING TO DO
• XI. WANTING TO DO AND DOING
• XII. WANTING TO DO, REASONS FOR DOING, DOING
• XIII. BODILY MOVEMENT, ACTION AND AGENT
• XIV. CONCLUSION—DECISION, CHOICE, PREDICTION AND THE VOLUNTARY
• INDEX