Causal Theories of Action (I): Difficulties With Acting for a Reason

In defending Davidson’s causal account of reasons, Mele suggests that the strongest defense for this account is provided by a challenge Davidson raises to non-causalists: “If you hold that when we act intentionally we act for reasons, provide an account of the reasons for which we act that does not treat (our having) those reasons as figuring in the causation of the relevant behavior.” (Mele 2003, 69) Davidson does make quite a lot of this challenge, arguing that the causal account—i.e., an account on which reasons are causes of actions—gives us a way of explaining why an intentional action occurred. Lacking any other explanation, we must take up the causal account as the best one. One might add, also, another common point to strengthen this one: a non-causal account in principle cannot explain, or fully explain, why something occurred (Honderich, Chapters 2 and 4).

Mele goes on to claim that “the challenge is particularly acute when an agent has two or more reasons for A-ing but A-s for only one of them” (Mele 2003, 70). Mele illustrates this with an example:

Al has a pair of reasons for mowing his lawn this morning. First, he wants to mow it this week and he believes that this morning is the most convenient time. Second, Al has an urge to repay his neighbor for the rude awakening he suffered recently when she turned on her mower at the crack of dawn and he believes that his mowing his lawn this morning would constitute suitable repayment. As it happens, Al mows his lawn this morning only for one of these reasons. In virtue of what is it true that he mowed his lawn for this reason, and not the other, if not that this reason (or his having it), and not the other, played a suitable causal role in his mowing his lawn? (Mele 1997)

Mele’s point is that if I have more than one reason for acting but act for only one of these reasons, it is unclear how we could explain this occurrence without seeing the reason for which I acted, but not the other reason(s) I had, as playing a causal role in the production of my action. Let’s call examples of this sort Multiple Reasons Scenarios (MRSs).

Interestingly, very much the same MRS can be used to defend a non-causal account of reasons. Witness the following, from John Searle:

[One] way to see the existence of the gap is to notice that in a decision making situation you often have several different reasons for performing an action, yet you act on one and not the others and you know without observation which one you acted on… Suppose for example that you had a whole bunch of reasons both for and against voting for Clinton in the presidential election. You thought he would be a better president for the economy but worse for foreign policy. You liked the fact that he went to your old college but didn’t like his personal style. In the end you voted for him because he went to your old college. The reasons did not operate on you. Rather you chose one reason and acted on that one. You made that reason effective by acting on it… The remarkable thing about this phenomenon is: in the normal case you know without observation which reason was effective, because you made it effective. (Searle, 16)

Unlike Mele, who uses an MRS to demonstrate the need for a causal account (or, rather, to point to an explanatory problem that—in his view—is best resolved by a causal account), Searle uses an MRS to show that, as far as our experience is concerned, there is a gap between our reasons and our actions. There are, of course, ways of bringing these accounts together—some libertarians (e.g., van Inwagen, Kane), for example, accept that reasons cause actions, but insist that they do so indeterministically. Both the causal theory and the gap are thus preserved.

When the same kind of scenario, an MRS, seems to support conflicting positions, however, it may seem worthwhile to look at what sort of bedrock the scenario provides; is it really solid enough to support any conclusions whatsoever? I do not think so. There is a hidden assumption within any MRS that makes it, to my mind, impossible to use it as a premise in any argument.

The assumption is this:

Given multiple reasons R[1-n], agent S can act for/on reason Rp and not for/on any other reason Rq, where p,qЄ{1-n}

You might be thinking: what kind of hidden assumption is this? Of course we are capable of acting for some particular reasons out of a set of reasons we might have to do something! That’s obvious! But now, suppose you have to justify this claim. However you go about doing it, you certainly cannot appeal to the thing that makes it seem so obvious, i.e., introspection. I will deal with this in the next post. First, I want to point out that it is possible that, when we have multiple reasons for doing something, we never act on only one of them. If so, then it would be false that we play any active role in selecting one reason out of a group to act on, or that one reason out of a group causes us to act. That this is possible does not make it true, of course. But without a way of dismissing this possibility, one has no right to use it as evidence for anything else.

In the next post, I will look at various ways of defending the MRS in question and suggest that their failure may lead us to the thought that any causal account of action must be backed by a theory of the will.

Honderich, Ted. (2002) How Free are You?

Mele, Alfred R. (2003) “Philosophy of Action” in Kirk Ludwig, ed. Donald Davidson, 64-84.

Mele, Alfred R. (1997) Agency and Mental Action, Philosophical Perspectives, 11, 231-49.

Searle, John. (2001) Rationality in Action.