Davidson on Pro-Attitudes: Evaluative and Dispositional

As is well known, Davidson sees actions as events caused by reasons, which themselves involve a combination of a belief and a pro-attitude. Davidson, and many others, often use “desire” in place of “pro-attitude”, though we do best to keep in mind that this use of desire is meant to be very broad. These pro-attitudes are supposed to be mental states, capable of both playing a causal role (when re-described appropriately as physical states) and a rationalizing role (that involves making the action they cause intelligible, both to observers and the agent). I’ve started to get concerned, though, about whether Davidson’s accounts of what pro-attitudes are can be sufficient.

First, we can start out with Davidson’s earliest account of pro-attitudes, given in “Actions, Reasons, and Causes”. Here, under the category of pro-attitudes

are to be included desires, wantings, urges, promptings, and a great variety of moral views, aesthetic principles, economic prejudices, social conventions, and public and private goals and values in so far as these can be interpreted as attitudes of an agent directed toward actions of a certain kind. The word ‘attitude’ does yeoman service here, for it must cover not only permanent character traits that show themselves in a lifetime of behaviour, like love of children or a taste for loud company, but also the most passing fancy that prompts a unique action, like a sudden desire to touch a woman’s elbow (A&E, 4)

There is already, I think, something a bit off here. Keep in mind that the point of introducing pro-attitudes as essential to the action-producing causal sequence is that they are supposed to rationalize an action, i.e., to make it intelligible. But the introduction of passing fancies into the mix seems to undermine that. There is no doubt that at least some actions do arise as the result of passing fancies. But it is not clear how such fancies can help make actions intelligible: that is, the action may well be intelligible in light of the fancy, but the fancy itself is not intelligible. If the entire point of introducing pro-attitudes is to ensure that it is possible to make sense of actions, then pro-attitudes that seemingly spring out of nowhere don’t help; if we’ve identified the proximal cause of an event but not the cause of that cause, we haven’t really given a causal explanation of the event at all; we’ve only pushed that explanation back a step, resting satisfied with having done very little. The passing fancy does not, by itself, serve to make sense of the action: something else is needed to make the fancy itself meaningful. This suggests to me a tension in two ways in which pro-attitudes play explanatory roles: their explanatory role as making an action rational, and their explanatory role as making the action intelligible. For Davidson, these are the same thing—intelligibility implies rationality—but the above considerations suggest to me that the connection is not so direct.

Let’s move on to an account of what pro-attitudes must be like if they are to have a role in making an action rational. For a mental state to rationalize something is for that state to be capable of playing a role as a premise in a practical syllogism. The state’s contribution to rationalizing an action, then, is provided by its content, which Davidson characterizes in “Intending” as follows:

The agent’s pro attitude is perhaps a desire or a want; let us suppose he wants to improve the taste of the stew. But what is the corresponding premise?... we do not want a description of his desire, but an expression of it in a form in which he might use it to arrive at an action. The natural expression of his desire is, it seems to me, evaluate in form; for example, ‘It is desirable to improve the taste of the stew,’ or, ‘I ought to improve the taste of the stew.’ We may suppose different pro attitudes are expressed with other evaluative words in place of ‘desirable’. (A&E, 86)

Davidson is completely right, I think, in pointing out that the propositional content of a desire cannot be something like “to improve the taste of the stew”, or “the taste of the stew is improved.” That content could play no role in a practical syllogism, because it is missing the crucial element needed at this point in the practical syllogism, namely, the evaluation.

Davidson sometimes suggests that the propositional content of mental states is all that we need to know about them in order to understand how they function as mental states. For example, in “Problems in the Explanation of Action,” he tells us that,

beliefs, desires, intentions, and intentional actions must, as we have seen, be identified by their semantic contents in reason-explanations. The semantic contents of attitudes and beliefs determine their relations to one another and to the world in ways that meet at least rough standards of consistency and correctness. (PR, 114)

Now this is partly right: to understand an agent’s action, we need to know why she thought the action worth performing, and the evaluative claim tells us this. But we should also note that the content so given does not exhaust what there is to be said about the mental state. This is fairly obvious from the fact that the judgment is carried out in evaluative terms such as “it is desirable” or “I ought to”, etc. Such evaluative terms as “ought” and “desirable”, if we are to make sense of them and not simply of their place in a practical syllogism, require a further account in terms of the non-propositional features of states such as desire or obligation. So an account of pro-attitudes in terms of evaluations is not exhaustive; something needs to be added. But what?

Davidson seems to suggest an answer to this while explaining why we need reference to pro-attitudes in action explanation:

To deny the need for a pro-attitude in the etiology of action is to lose an important explanatory aid. If a person is constituted in such a way that if he believes that by acting in a certain way he will crush a snail he has a tendency to act in that way, then in this respect he differs from most other people, and this difference will help explain why he acts as he does. The special fact about how he is constituted is one of his causal powers, a disposition to act under specified conditions in specific ways. Such a disposition is what I mean by a pro-attitude. (PR, 108)

On this account, pro-attitudes are dispositions to behave in a certain way. But this account is clearly insufficient to explain what pro-attitudes or mental states in general are, since dispositions to behave in certain ways might not be mental, intentional, or propositional at all. So Davidson’s claim that a disposition to act in specific ways under specified conditions is “what I mean by a pro-attitude” is confusing: such dispositions are not at all what Davidson means by a pro-attitude, unless those dispositions include an evaluative content. Moreover, there are—as Davidson recognizes—plenty of pro-attitudes that never issue in action at all, and so there are pro-attitudes that do not yield themselves to a dispositional account except counterfactually. Understanding pro-attitudes as dispositions helps us to make actions intelligible, but not necessarily rational, in the way that understanding the molecular structure of salt and water makes the solubility of salt intelligible without rationalizing it.

The difficulty, then, is that Davidson seems to have several different accounts of pro-attitudes, none of which are sufficient to explain what pro-attitudes are. What does seem necessary for a pro-attitude to play the role Davidson needs it to play is its evaluative content. But this evaluative content requires a further, non-evaluative element, in order to explain its evaluative meaning; at the same time, we need a further element in order to explain how pro-attitudes as such can be meaningful for an agent, a point brought out by cases of “passing fancy” problem. But this further element, in turn, cannot be provided by a dispositional account, since the dispositional account only provides an account of pro-attitudes if we already assume the evaluative account. The evaluative account explains the action as rational, but does not explain why the agent performs the action, only how her performing it might make sense in rational terms; it neither makes sense of the motivating force of particular pro-attitudes, nor does it explain how the attitudes themselves are meaningful for the agent. The force of the evaluation remains unclear. But that force cannot be provided by the dispositional account, since that account already assumes the evaluative account; otherwise it would not be an account of pro-attitudes at all. My suggestion, then, is that both accounts of pro-attitudes given by Davidson require a phenomenological account as a foundation in order to make sense of the motivational and meaning-bestowing power of pro-attitudes.

References:
A&E=Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events. Clarendon, 1980.
PR=Donald Davidson, Problems of Rationality. Clarendon, 2004.

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Causal Theories of Action (II): The Limits of Explanation Abstractions

In the last post I looked at multiple reason scenarios (MRSs), cases where an agent has more than one reason to act and ends up acting for only one of those reasons. I looked at attempts by both causalists and non-causalists to use MRSs to argue for their approaches, and suggested that MRSs cannot provide a good foundation for any argument whatsoever unless one can dismiss the possibility that there are no such scenarios.

So how can one dismiss the possibility? How can one show that, at least sometimes, agents in possession of multiple reasons to A end up A-ing for only one of those reasons? Searle seems to appeal to this simply as a fact of experience: we just know that sometimes we act for a particular reason and not another. If so, Searle’s experience must be exceptionally shallow; it is a fairly common fact that, often, looking back upon our past actions we realize that we did not take those actions for the reasons we thought we did. In any case, introspection is notoriously unreliable in such cases, as any decent account of self-deception (my favorite, of course, is Sartre’s) will show. Take the example Mele gives: Al has two reasons to mow his lawn this morning (because it is convenient, and to spite his neighbor), but only mows the lawn for one of those reasons. Can Al be sure that he mowed the lawn for only one of those reasons through introspection? Al may well believe that he is mowing the lawn because this is a convenient time to mow the lawn and not because he wants to get back at his neighbor. But the fact that Al believes that he is not petty does not prove that he is really not petty. My point is not that introspection is fallible; everybody already knows that. My point is that introspection has limits, and this is one of them: introspection cannot tell us, in any situation, which reason, out of a set, we really acted on.

Searle’s entire introspective scenario, in fact, strikes me as wildly implausible. He insists that we simply know which reason we acted on, and that we know it because we chose that reason. But I can’t imagine this happening: if I have two competing reasons for doing something, and I end up doing it, there is only one type of case in which I can then be sure that I acted on only one of the reasons: if I experience one reason as motivationally stronger than the other. But this is precisely not something that I chose—what I chose, or at least perhaps experience myself as having chosen—was to act. But choosing to act is not the same as choosing a particular reason to be the reason I act on. And of the latter sort of choice, I doubt anyone can have any experience whatsoever. Reflecting on such experiences, instead, seems to support the idea that our reasons act on us and not the other way around.

Can Mele or Davidson do better? I don’t think so. For how would they go about justifying the claim that, sometimes, agents with multiple reasons for A-ing actually A for one particular reason? Well, they could appeal to the causal theory: since every action is caused by some reason, it is at least theoretically possible to be certain that a particular reason, and not any other, is responsible for some action. But of course this would be question-begging: we cannot use the conclusion that the MRS is supposed to yield in order to justify the plausibility of the MRS. Davidson, in discussing a somewhat different point (responding to the claim that knowledge of causal laws is always inductive), tells us the following:

You may be wrong about which motive made you do it. The fact that you may be wrong does not show that in general it makes sense to ask you how you know what your reasons were or to ask for your evidence… Then your knowledge of your own reasons for your actions is not generally inductive, for where there is induction, there is evidence. Does this show the knowledge is not causal? I cannot see that it does… In any case, in order to know that a singular causal statement is true, it is not necessary to know the truth of a law; it is necessary only to know that some law covering the events at hand exists.(Davidson, 18)

Not only might we be wrong about our reasons for an action, but we also have no evidence to appeal to. In other words, there is no reason to think that we aren’t always wrong; there is no reason to think that we have any causal knowledge whatsoever when it comes to our reasons. We might know that, in general, some of our reasons are causally involved in producing our actions, but we have no knowledge about what reasons in particular might be involved. And we can know the former point only because we “know that some law covering the events at hand exists”; that is, we know that events are caused. But, again, this does not show that some particular reason, rather than all available reasons, is involved in the causal production of any action.

In fact, the example Mele uses is itself pretty strained: I am not at all sure it is possible for Al to mow the lawn only because it is convenient, and not because he wants to get back at his neighbor. The problem is this: if one reason Al has to mow the lawn this morning is to get back at his neighbor, then he is aware that his mowing the lawn this morning will irritate his neighbor. And so it seems that if Al does mow his lawn, he does so with the awareness that he is irritating his neighbor; and unless he specifically wants to irritate his neighbor by his action, then the reason is—if anything—a reason against his mowing the lawn, not for it. Of course there is a way out: Al might have both reasons but act on only one of them if he simply forgets about the other reason. This is perfectly feasible. But in such a situation the one reason he remembers is active; the other reason is not, but only because it is not functioning as a reason at all. And this comes down to saying that the MRSs can only work properly by cheating, that is, by treating all but one of the existing reasons for an action as simply inert. And this seems much like the scenario where the agent really has only one reason for action to start with.

So, getting to the point: It should be fairly clear that causal theories of action, in their exposition, are generally abstractions. In real life, we do not act for precisely one reason unless we are only aware of one reason. More commonly, I suspect, our actions are produced by a causal circumstance rather than a given cause. The causal circumstance might be quite broad. Let’s say that I decide to eat a cake. My reasons for this may well include not only that the cake looks good to me, but also a general predisposition to sweets, or a gnawing hunger and lack of hot dogs in the vicinity, a general proattitude toward eating based on the past experience of its feeling good, perhaps also a commitment to keeping my strength up or not going too long between meals so as to avoid putting on weight. Each of these commitments, in turn, is likely to have other commitments behind it. To speak of an action being caused by one reason is, generally, to oversimplify matters—not just because the causes involved go far beyond any one reason, but because the relevant causes involved, the reasons, are not usually limited to one. It is not only philosophers who oversimplify, of course. In everyday life, if we stop to think about it, we often imagine that there is a particular reason for our actions. Having such a reason—or a defined set of reasons—comes in handy when we need to justify an action to others, or even to ourselves. But this focus on particular reasons may well serve to cover up a deeper fact: that our actions are, more commonly, caused by a broad range of dispositions, desires, beliefs, habits, urges, and commitments. Focusing on particular causes rather than on the whole relevant causal circumstance—what might be called “the will” in the proper sense—has benefits. It allows us to individuate the causes of actions in order to find the ones that best explain that action. But it has the disadvantage of making us forget that the range of relevant causes of any action is, normally, far wider than often thought. Understanding how these causes can operate together in producing an action—as a unified will—is thus a project underlying any causal theory of action.

The suggestion, then, is that there is a gap between explanation and reality. We rely on abstractions in explanations because we require intelligibility. And because are minds have relatively simple computational abilities, to have intelligibility we need simple models. But reality is not simple; action does not, generally, issue from one particular reason, even if one particular reason provides the most effective explanation of that action. Sticking with the Davidsonian account, then, has a problematic disadvantage: what it gives us is a theory of action-explanation. But it says little, if anything at all, about action.

Davidson, Donald. (1963) “Actions, Reasons, and Causes” in Essays on Actions & Events, 3-20.

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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.

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Evil and Akrasia in the Context of Authenticity

Davidson claimed to have been the first to separate the problem of weakness of will, or akrasia, from the moral context in which the problem is traditionally taken up. He is right to make this separation, though it is a separation that needs to be carried out consistently. Davidson’s interest is in separating out akrasia as a distinctive problem for philosophy of action. But it seems equally important from the standpoint of moral philosophy to separate the problem of akrasia from that of evil. Akrasia is not equivalent to evil, and here I want to suggest a way of distinguishing the two in a vaguely Heideggerian language.

Heidegger characterizes our being as a being thrown into the world into the midst of pre-given possibilities. Some of these possibilities we will live through; others we will bypass entirely. Some we will take up as authentic, as genuinely our own. Others we will see as foreign to our selfhood. Akrasia seems to me to involve acting on possibilities that we are living inauthentically, but which are opposed to other, authentic possibilities. For example: Let us say that I am a student and see studying as the authentic possibility of my life. Occasionally, instead of studying, I go out clubbing and drink until 5 in the morning instead of getting any work done. Let us say (there is obviously no necessity in this) that I do not see this partying as authentically my own. In other words, I see a certain kind of behavior as defining of my self, as genuinely mine, and yet I am capable of taking up a behavior that I see as foreign to who I am, to my self, and to my will. How is this possible? This, I take it, is a way of characterizing the akrasia problem.

But the problem of evil involves something different: it involves the question of how I might choose to act contrary to a law that I see as the law supremely binding on me. This law—and I am here using the Kantian model of morality—is a law that is genuinely my own insofar as I am a person. Sometimes I may be tempted to break this law, and I do so. It is, of course, possible that what is involved in my breaking the moral law is nothing but a weakness of the will; in cases of that kind we have to look for an explanation along the lines mentioned in the previous paragraph. But the more interesting question of evil is that of an evil that is specifically chosen as evil; that is, I am both aware of my obligation according to the moral law and of the fact that the choice I am making explicitly violates that law. Yet at the same time I make this choice, and do so not through any weakness, but in a fully intentional way.

The way to characterize the second problem, I think, is by seeing it as a conflict not between an authentic and an inauthentic possibility, but as a conflict between two authentic possibilities. Both the moral law and the incentive to deviate from it belong to my self. This seems like a correct characterization of moral conflict: the difficulty is not simply that I am not strong enough to act on my judgment of what is morally right, but that I myself have made the other incentive powerful enough to oppose the moral law. I have done this by making the incentive into an authentic possibility for me. Kant does sometimes imply that moral conflict boils down to a case of akrasia, which is why he defines virtue as the strength to resist non-moral incentives. But it is also clear that, for Kant, we are responsible for having chosen those non-moral incentives as powerful enough to need resisting. That the incentives opposed to the moral law are, in fact, incentives we have made our own is the pre-condition for a theory of virtue as strength.

Obviously this rough account is not sufficient to explain moral conflict: we will need, among other things, an explanation of why morality should be seen by us as authentic at all. My goal here was only to suggest a framework within which akrasia and evil can, I think fruitfully, be distinguished. Only by seeing evil as involving a choice in favor of a certain view of one’s own self, rather than a simple fleeing from the self-conception implied by the moral law, can we start to understand the sort of responsibility involved in a violation of morality.

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Davidson and the Causes of Action: A Problem of Permission

Philosophy of action has for decades focused on reasons; since Davidson, a good deal of debate has centered on the question of whether reasons are causes, whether those causes are occurrent or agential, and whether we can use reasons-explanations to replace causal explanations altogether in discussions of agency. My suspicion is that something is missing from the discussion. The focus on reasons comes from the conviction, first, that they provide us with the best way of explaining an action as something other than simply an event and, second, that it is by focusing on reasons (or, in a related branch of investigations, on endorsements of desires) that we bring out the role of the agent as deliberator. But is this dual approach sufficient to capture the notion of an agent? I suspect that it is not, and what is misleading in the standard account is that, by taking explanation and rational deliberation as its starting points, it fails to give adequate attention to the most basic aspect of action: it is often irrational and involves little or no deliberation.

Of course problems of irrationality—self-deception, akrasia, addiction—have taken a central place in analysis; but they are generally viewed as problematic in a secondary way: a theory of rational action is expected to account for them, but only against the backdrop of a pre-existing theory of rationality. The typical approach comes from the methodology of the sciences: first one formulates laws, then one goes on to explain away exceptions. Similarly, one first tries to come up with a generally rational explanation of action, then one attempts to explain away deviations from that rationality. But does this take matters in the order appropriate to a subject matter like action?

In his Dialectic of Duration, Gaston Bachelard takes on the orthodox view of Bergson, according to which time is fundamentally a continuity, which the intellect then breaks up artificially into a series of instants. Instead, Bachelard posits that in every field—action, psychology, science, poetry—it is the instant that is primary, with continuity being constructed in a secondary manner by the intellect. Thus, for example, memory involves particular moments that stand out—I remember waking up early, then a diploma being placed in my hand, meeting my roommate’s parents, and only then do I fill in the gaps between these events to evoke in memory a continuous commencement ceremony. Similarly in the domain of action: every action, for Bachelard, has at its central core the instant of permission. To act, I must give permission to do something. Whatever deliberation precedes the act, it is moot until I permit the performance of its dictates. Whatever consequences follow from my action—and whatever purposes are intended in it—are dependent ultimately on that instant. Thus, Bachelard opposes a phenomenology of the instant to that of duration, so that the continuity of action—its precursors and products—are dependent on the permission to act.

Davidson, I think, presents us with a similar scheme. In fact, it is the priority of the instant—or, in his case, the causal relation between reason and action—that allows explanation of action to be an explanation at all. But at the same time, Davidson conceals the cause by explaining the action as a bodily moment that is rationalized by a primary reason (a combination of a desire and a belief). The concealment is this: while the causation of an action by its corresponding reason explains the action, it explains it only because the action itself (along with its consequences) is explained by reference to its causal precursors. The emphasis on causality, so central to Davidson’s account, is only an explanatory feature that allows the past and future of the instant to be neatly brought together into a single whole. This creates a difficulty, and I think it is a difficulty that is internal to Davidson’s account: he cannot explain the very thing he is trying to explain.

To see this, let us take a look at Davidson’s view of freedom. His goal is not to reconcile freedom with determinism, but to show that freedom is a causal power. The central problem is that if the causal precursors of an action are themselves seen as actions—as something an agent does—then we are caught in an infinite regress because we must now account for the freedom of those prior actions. The way to resolve the problem is to posit precursors to the action that are not themselves something an agent does; they must be states or events that are not done in any sense, so that it makes no sense to even ask whether or not they are free. The solution, of course, is that an action is caused by reasons. The desires and beliefs that make up those reasons are states or events, but they are certainly not actions. Insofar as these reasons cause an agent to act, his action is intentional and free. And freedom, here, is a causal power because what makes the action free is precisely that it is caused by an agent’s reasons.

But I think Davidson cannot explain freedom as a causal power because he cannot explain the causality of reasons. He admits, essentially, that his account can only explain the causal precursors of an action provided that the action has already been carried out. Prior to this, there is no way to predict an action—that is, there is no way to derive the necessity of an action from its causal precursors (although statistical analysis can get us pretty close to this). Davidson’s major concern, then, is to show that something can be called a cause even in the absence of strict laws relating the cause to the effect. But what is lacking is any account of the agent’s role in this relation. If I act on my reasons, this involves an instant of permission—I do not just give myself a reason to act (as, say, Robert Kane’s analysis suggests), nor do I put an end to deliberation and let the final step in the deliberative process carry me to action (this is the overlooked Hobbesian account of action). Rather, I actively permit myself to act. It has seemed to many philosophers of action that if we start from this instantaneous act, we are stuck in an irrational and inexplicable kind of agent-causation. But I think that only holds so long as we emphasize the causality of the instant of “permission.” Instead, I am suggesting, the causal aspect does not underlie the instant of permission; rather, without the permission, we cannot explain causality at all.

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