Though all the great philosophers since Plato have included accounts of action in their philosophical systems, the philosophy of action only began to be conceived of as a discrete topic in philosophy towards the end of the last century. It is only recently that we have begun to find graduate classes devoted entirely to philosophy of action. The work of   Wittgenstein has been seminal in this change, and with that in mind we have placed some especially influential passages from this work in Chapter 1, outside the six parts that follow. With this exception, the material in the volume is divided thematically rather than chronologically (though the various parts have been ordered chronologically where doing so makes sense).

While appreciating that readers often dip into anthologies with very specific purposes, we have grouped the papers we reprint here (all except John McDowell’s chapter are already in print) into six parts. These are to some extent artificial, and certainly could have been done differently, but our aim was to offer a structure that might help in the design and development of a course on recent philosophy of action. That structure itself has led to some classic papers failing to find a place; most of them are mentioned in the Further Reading at the end of the introduction to each part.

Each part has an introduction designed to give students an overview of the material it contains that will help them navigate through it. The philosophy of action is a fast-growing field that cuts across a large number of philosophical and scientific discourses. We have tried to give a taste of some of the latest research without prioritizing this over the work that has made the subject what it is.

A number of acknowledgments are due: many thanks to several anonymous referees for helping us with the selection and organization of the material included here. We also received sage advice on these matters from Maria Alvarez and John Hyman; Erasmus Mayr gave us timely and perceptive feedback on all of our introductions.

In addition, we are very grateful to John McDowell for allowing us to include a new recension of some of his recent work on intention. For correspondence and permission to make minor editorial changes to their work we should also like to thank Maria Alvarez and John Hyman (again), Michael Bratman, Fred Dretske, Jennifer Hornsby, E. J. Lowe, Joseph Raz, and Michael Smith.

At Wiley-Blackwell we should like to thank Nick Bellorini for commissioning the volume, as well as Lindsay Bourgeois, Jennifer Bray, Liam Cooper, Jeff Dean, and Allison Kostka for their invaluable help and patience throughout. Particular thanks are owed to Christopher Feeney for his meticulous copy-editing and to Joanna Pyke for overseeing everything.

Finally, we owe thanks to our research assistants Robert Vinten and István Zárdai for helping out with the first and last stages of the work. We should not have been able to fund them without generous support from Oxford Brookes University’s Central Research Fund and the Darrell K. Royal Fund at the University of Texas at Austin.

The editors and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book:

1. Wittgenstein, L. (2009), Philosophical Investigations §§611–628 (omitting 626), 4th edn., ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell). © 2009 by Blackwell Publishing. Reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
2. Davidson, D. (1971), “Agency,” in R. Binkley, R. Bronaugh, and A. Marras (eds.), Agent, Action, and Reason (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 3–25. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
3. Bennett, J. (1973), “Shooting, Killing and Dying,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2 (3), 315–323. Published by University of Calgary Press. © Jonathan Bennett. Reprinted with kind permission of the author.
4. Frankfurt, H. G. (1978), “The Problem of Action,” American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (2), 157–162. Reprinted with permission.
5. Alvarez, M., and Hyman, J. (1998), “Agents and their Actions,” Philosophy 73 (2), 219–245. Published by Cambridge Journals, Cambridge. © Royal Institute of Philosophy 1996. Reproduced with permission.
6. Hornsby, J. (2004), “Agency and Actions,” in J. Hyman and H. Steward (eds.), Agency and Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1–23. © Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2004. Published by Cambridge University Press. Reproduced with permission.
7. Prichard, H. A. (1945), “Acting, Willing, Desiring,” in Moral Obligation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), 272–281. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.
8. Ryle, G. (1949), “The Will,” in The Concept of Mind, 60th anniversary edn. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 62–74. Reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis Books.
9. Hornsby, J. (1980), “Acting and Trying to Act,” in Actions (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), 33–45. Reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis Books.
10. Lowe, E. J. (1996), “Action and Volition,” in Subjects of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 140–156. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996. Reproduced with permission.
11. Anscombe, G. E. M. (1957), Intention §§1–9 (omitting 2 and parts of 8) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 1–16. Copyright © 1957, 1963 by G. E. M. Anscombe. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
12. Donnellan, K. S. (1963), “Knowing What I Am Doing,” Journal of Philosophy 60 (14), 401–409. Reprinted with permission of The Journal of Philosophy.
13. Davidson, D. (1978), “Intending,” in Y. Yovel and D. Reidel (eds.), Philosophy of History and Action (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University), 41–60. First published by D. Reidel. Reprinted with permission of Springer.
14. Bratman, M. (1984), “Two Faces of Intention,” Philosophical Review 93 (3), 375–405. Copyright © 1984 Cornell University. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder and current publisher Duke University Press, www.dukeupress.edu.
15. McDowell, J. (2009), “Acting As One Intends.” This chapter was prepared by Jonathan Dancy from McDowell’s Hägerström Lectures, given at Uppsala University in 2005. © John McDowell. Reprinted with kind permission of the author.
16. Knobe, J. (2003), “Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language,” Analysis 63 (3), 190–194. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.
17. Kavka, G. S. (1983), “The Toxin Puzzle,” Analysis 43 (1), 33–36. Published by Oxford Journals, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.
18. Stoutland, F. (2008), “The Ontology of Social Agency,” Analyse & Kritik 30, 533–551.
19. Davidson, D. (1963), “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” Journal of Philosophy 60 (23), 685–700. Reprinted with permission of The Journal of Philosophy.
20. Dancy, J. (2000), “How to Act for a Good Reason,” excerpts from Practical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press), chs. 5 and 6. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.
21. Korsgaard, C. (2008), “Acting for a Reason,” in The Constitution of Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 207–229. © C. Korsgaard 2008. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.
22. Hursthouse, R. (1981), “Arational Actions,” Journal of Philosophy 88 (2), 57–68. Reprinted with permission of Rosalind Hursthouse and The Journal of Philosophy.
23. Raz, J. (2001), “Agency, Reason, and the Good,” in Engaging Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 22–45. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.
24. Watson, G. (1977), “Skepticism about Weakness of Will,” Philosophical Review 86 (3), 316–339. Copyright © 1977 Cornell University. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder and the present publisher, Duke University Press, www.dukeupress.edu.
25. Hempel, C. G. (1963), “Explanation in Science and in History §§1–3,” in Robert G. Colodny (ed.), Frontiers of Science and Philosophy (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press), 276–284. Reprinted with permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.
26. Dray, W. (1957), “The Rationale of Actions,” in Laws and Explanation in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 118–137. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.
27. Hempel, C. G. (1963), “Explanation in Science and in History §§4–7,” in Robert G. Colodny (ed.), Frontiers of Science and Philosophy (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press), 284–296. Reprinted with permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.
28. Smith, M. (2009), “The Explanatory Role of Being Rational,” in D. Sobel and S. Wall (eds.), Reasons for Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 58–80. © Cambridge University Press 2009. Reprinted with permission.
29. Malcolm, N. (1968), “The Conceivability of Mechanism,” Philosophical Review 77 (1), 45–72 (omitting final section). Philosophical Review is published by Duke University Press, Durham, N.C.
30. Collins, A. W. (1984), “Action, Causality, and Teleological Explanation,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 9 (1), 345–369. Reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
31. Dretske, F. (2004), “Psychological vs. Biological Explanations of Behavior,” Behavior and Philosophy 32 (1), 167–177. Behavior and Philosophy is published by the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies. Reprinted with permission.
32. Chisholm, R. (1964), “Human Freedom and the Self,” in The Lindley Lectures (Lawrence, Kans.: University of Kansas), 3–15. Reprinted with permission of The University of Kansas.
33. Frankfurt, H. G. (1969), “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” Journal of Philosophy 66 (23), 829–839. Reprinted with permission of Harry Frankfurt and The Journal of Philosophy.
34. Fischer, J. M. (1997), “Responsibility, Control, and Omissions,” Journal of Ethics 1 (1), 45–64. Reprinted with permission of Springer.
35. Strawson, G. (2011), “The Impossibility of Ultimate Responsibility?,” in R. Swinburne (ed.), Free Will and Modern Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 126–140. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.
36. Steward, H. (2011), “Moral Responsibility and the Concept of Agency,” in R. Swinburne (ed.), Free Will and Modern Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 141–157. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.
37. Mele, A. R. (2011), “Free Will and Science,” in R. Kane (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 499–514. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

611. “Willing – wanting – too is merely an experience,” one would like to say (the ‘will’ too only ‘idea’). It comes when it comes, and I cannot bring it about.
 Not bring it about? – Like what? What can I bring about, then? What am I comparing it with when I say this?

612. I wouldn’t say of the movement of my arm, for example, that it comes when it comes, and so on. And this is the domain in which it makes sense to say that something doesn’t simply happen to us, but that we do it. “I don’t need to wait for my arm to rise – I can raise it.” And here I am making a contrast between the movement of my arm and, say, the fact that the violent thudding of my heart will subside.

613. In the sense in which I can ever bring about anything (such as stomach-ache through overeating), I can also bring about wanting. In this sense, I bring about wanting to swim by jumping into the water. I suppose I was trying to say: I can’t want to want; that is, it makes no sense to speak of wanting to want. “Wanting” is not the name of an action, and so not of a voluntary one either. And my use of a wrong expression came from the fact that one is inclined to think of wanting as an immediate non-causal bringing about. But a misleading analogy lies at the root of this idea; the causal nexus seems to be established by a mechanism connecting two parts of a machine. The connection may be disrupted if the mechanism malfunctions. (One thinks only of the normal ways in which a mechanism goes wrong, not, say, of cog-wheels suddenly going soft, or penetrating each other, and so on.)

614. When I raise my arm ‘voluntarily’, I don’t make use of any means to bring the movement about. My wish is not such a means either.

615. “Willing, if it is not to be a sort of wishing, must be the action itself. It mustn’t stop anywhere short of the action.” If it is the action, then it is so in the ordinary sense of the word; so it is speaking, writing, walking, lifting a thing, imagining something. But it is also striving, trying, making an effort – to speak, to write, to lift a thing, to imagine something, and so on.

616. When I raise my arm, I have not wished it to rise. The voluntary action excludes this wish. It is, however, possible to say: “I hope I shall draw the circle faultlessly.” And that is to express a wish that one’s hand should move in such-and-such a way.

617. If we cross our fingers in a special way, we are sometimes unable to move a particular finger when someone tells us to do so, if he only points to the finger – merely shows it to the eye. However, if he touches it, we can move it. One would like to describe this experience as follows: we are unable to will to move the finger. The case is quite different from that in which we are not able to move the finger because someone is, say, holding it. One is now inclined to describe the former case by saying: one can’t find any point of application for the will until the finger is touched. Only when one feels the finger can the will know where it is to engage. – But this way of putting it is misleading. One would like to say: “How am I to know where I am to catch hold with the will, if the feeling does not indicate the place?” But then how do I know to what point I am to direct the will when the feeling is there?
 It is experience that shows that in this case the finger is, as it were, paralysed until we feel a touch on it; it could not have been known a priori.

618. One imagines the willing subject here as something without any mass (without any inertia), as a motor which has no inertia in itself to overcome. And so it is only mover, not moved. That is: one can say “I will, but my body does not obey me” – but not: “My will does not obey me.” (Augustine)
 But in the sense in which I can’t fail to will, I can’t try to will either.

619. And one might say: “It is only inasmuch as I can never try to will that I can always will.”

620. Doing itself seems not to have any experiential volume. It seems like an extensionless point, the point of a needle. This point seems to be the real agent – and what happens in the realm of appearances merely consequences of this doing. “I do” seems to have a definite sense, independently of any experience.

621. But there is one thing we shouldn’t overlook: when ‘I raise my arm’, my arm rises. And now a problem emerges: what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm rises from the fact that I raise my arm?
 ( (Are the kinaesthetic sensations my willing?) )

622. When I raise my arm, I don’t usually try to raise it.

623. “I want to get to that house at all costs.” – But if there is no difficulty about it, can I strive at all costs to get to the house?

624. In the laboratory, when subjected to an electric current, for example, someone with his eyes shut says “I am moving my arm up and down” – though his arm is not moving. “So”, we say, “he has the special feeling of making that movement.” – Move your arm to and fro with your eyes shut. And now try, while you do so, to talk yourself into the idea that your arm is staying still and that you are only having certain strange feelings in your muscles and joints!

625. “How do you know that you’ve raised your arm?” – “I feel it.” So what you recognize is the feeling? And are you certain that you recognize it right? – You’re certain that you’ve raised your arm; isn’t this the criterion, the measure, of recognizing?
 […]

627. Consider the following description of a voluntary action: “I form the decision to pull the bell at 5 o’clock; and when it strikes 5, my arm makes this movement.” – Is that the correct description, and not this one: “… and when it strikes 5, I raise my arm”? — One would like to supplement the first description: “And lo and behold! my arm goes up when it strikes 5.” And this “lo and behold!” is precisely what doesn’t belong here. I do not say “Look, my arm is going up!” when I raise it.

628. So one might say: voluntary movement is marked by the absence of surprise. And now I don’t mean you to ask “But why isn’t one surprised here?”

1.

Although accounts of action have been central to most philosophical systems from Plato to Kant, it is only in recent years (following the writings of Wittgenstein and Anscombe, Chapters 1 and 11) that philosophy of action has come to be seen as a subject in its own right. We begin this volume with enquiries into what we might call the most basic question in this area of study: what is action?

One obvious suggestion is that action is bodily motion. But not all bodily motion is action; when you jog my arm, the motion of my arm is not an action of mine – I haven’t moved my arm – and it isn’t an action of yours, either. So what is the difference between those bodily motions that are actions and those that are not? The most popular strategy is to adopt a causal theory, whereby the distinction between actions and other forms of behavior lies in their causal origins; a sneeze, for instance, is typically not going to count as an action, because it has the wrong sort of cause. So which causes are of the right sort? Davidson’s influential answer to this question identifies the causes of action with (the onset of) beliefs and pro-attitudes (such as desires, preferences, and values) that rationalize the action, that is, show how the action that is their effect made sense to the agent, and so can be thought of as the agent’s reasons for doing what he did (see Chapter 19). Most sneezes are not actions, because they are not caused by rationalizing beliefs and desires, but by such things as tickles. Davidson saw this account as an improvement on earlier views which identified the causes in question with inner acts of will. His view is a form of event-causalism (since the action is an event and its causes are events, too), and due to its prominence in the literature is frequently also referred to as ‘the standard view’.

Event-causalism faces two general challenges. The first, recognized by Davidson himself, is that the right sort of cause (viz. a ‘rationalizing’ one) can bring about an action in the wrong sort of way (i.e. not in virtue of its rationalizing power). So we don’t just need things of the right sort to do the causing, we need them to do their causing in the right sort of way. Davidson (Chapter 2) gives the now famous example of a climber who wants to rid himself of the weight and danger of holding another man on a rope, and who knows that the way to do this is to let go of the rope; but if this belief and desire together so unnerve him that his grip relaxes and the rope slips through his fingers, the loosening of the grip is something that happens to him rather than something that he does; so it is not an action of his even though it is caused by a rationalizing belief-desire combination (Davidson 1973). This has come to be known as the problem of deviant causes (addressed by Smith in Chapter 28).

The second challenge to event-causalism relates to the lack of any causal role played by agents themselves in all this. If actions are events caused by (the onset of) prior mental states and/or neural processes, we arguably lose sight of what, if any, role we play in all this. If we are not ourselves actively involved, are we really the agents of our own actions or are we mere vehicles for them? It seems insufficient for agency that the causes in question occur inside us. Our digestive processes, for example, are alien to our agency in a way in which our actions had better not be. This worry has come to be known as the problem of ‘the disappearing agent’; it affects any account that, like Davidson’s, understands actions as a species of events, viz. ones with a cause that is not identified with the agent. This problem is the focus of Hornsby’s contribution in this part (Chapter 6). (There are other challenges to the details of Davidson’s view, which are discussed in Parts IV and V.)

So an alternative strategy that is not event-causalist – and is sometimes even misleadingly described as non-causalist – identifies the cause with the agent himself (Chisholm 1964; Reid 1969; O’Connor 2000) rather than with some event. This idea, known as agent-causation, is thought to avoid the two problems discussed above. Agent-causalists disagree over whether the agent causes her action or whether the action consists in her causing a certain result (the latter is argued by Alvarez and Hyman in Chapter 5). But either way, there is the further question of whether an agent’s causing something should itself be understood as an event, and if so, what, if anything, brings about that event. (Ruben 2003 denies that there are such events as the causing of things by agents; O’Connor 2000 denies that they need further causes.)

Not everybody agrees that action is bodily motion with a particular kind of cause. For instance Frankfurt (Chapter 4) defends the non-causalist view that what makes a bodily motion of yours an action is that you are embracing it as your own and that it occurs under your guidance. On this account there can be actions that do not involve the causation of bodily motion at all, so long they are embraced by the agent in the relevant way. Examples of such actions might be pressing one’s hand against a door to keep it closed, refraining from apologizing, and omitting to send a card. In addition, some ‘volitionist’ philosophers identify actions not with bodily motions, however caused, but with the inner causes of those motions, which they take to be acts of will or volitions. Other volitionists take actions to be complex events composed of volitions followed (causally or otherwise) by bodily movements; on this view neither the volition nor the bodily motion is itself an action. These and other related views will be considered in more detail in the introduction to Part II.

Whatever the causes of action may be, most of the above views seem to identify actions themselves with events of some sort. But some thinkers identify actions with processes rather than events. The precise difference between the two characterizations is contentious, but it is generally agreed that – unlike events – processes need not occur throughout or across a temporal stretch (Mourelatos 1978). Dretske (1988) argues that an action is the causal process of a mental/neural event causing a bodily event. More recent process-theorists inspired by Aristotle (e.g. Stout 1997) prefer to think of actions as non-causal processes. These are teleological processes defined by an end or goal that need not be achieved in order for it to be true that the process has taken place. One may, for example, be in the process of baking a cake without ever succeeding in baking one, or crossing the road without ever making it to the other side. So understood, there can be cake-baking or road-crossing processes without there having been a cake-baking or road-crossing event.

Whether actions are events or processes, it may seem that they are at least occurrences or happenings. In Anscombe’s terms, “I do what happens … there is no distinction between my doing and the things happening” (1957: §29). On this outlook, the problem of action we have been dealing with is that of offering a way of distinguishing the doings of an agent from what ‘merely’ happens to him (see the chapter by Frankfurt in this part). But even this framework can be, and has been, rejected. Some philosophers take actions to be instances of relations (e.g. Hyman 2001). Others remind us that to act is to do something (e.g. bring about x) and then proceed to distinguish between the thing done (the deed?) and the event of one’s doing it (Macmurray 1938; Hornsby 1980; Ricœur 1986). This distinction is often compared to that between the thing thought and one’s thinking it, or between the thing said and one’s saying it.

2.

The term ‘basic action’ was first introduced by Danto, in his 1963 paper “What We Can Do.” Danto’s goal was to identify the point at which agency begins (and arguably freedom and moral responsibility with it, but see the discussion of these issues in our introduction to Part VI). Danto’s governing thought is that no matter how complex the action I am doing, there must always be a basic element to it, viz. something by doing which I do everything else that I am doing. But the notion of the basic needs careful handing everywhere in philosophy, not least in the case of basic action. Baier (1971) has raised the worry that there are at least eight kinds of basicness, some of which are a matter of degree rather than kind: causally basic, instrumentally basic, conventionally basic, ontologically basic, logically basic, genetically basic, ease basic, and isolation basic. If so, we need to be sure which one of these we are talking about. Danto’s own example of a paradigmatic basic action is that of moving an arm “without having to do anything to cause it to move” (so pushing it with the other arm won’t count). Volitionists, by contrast, maintain that such an action as moving one’s arm is the effect of a volition; this volition is the basic action and its effect, the moving of the arm, is another action (done by means of the basic action of willing).

Chisholm has offered an alternative, teleological, definition of basic action intended to be neutral on these issues of causality: “‘A is performed by the agent as a basic act’ could be defined as: the agent succeeds in making A happen, and there is no B, other than A, which he undertook to make happen with an end to making A happen” (Chisholm 1964: 617, n.7). But it seems odd to talk of succeeding in making one’s own actions happen. In later works Danto himself replaces all talk of causal or temporal basicness with the notion of mediation: “Actions we do but not through any distinct thing which we also do … I shall call basic, and mediated ones are accordingly non-basic” (Danto 1973).

A remaining and persistent difficulty with any non-teleological view of basicness is that in order to locate those actions that are basic, we need a principle of action individuation. Anscombe (in §26 of Intention) and Davidson (in numerous works, including “Agency”) famously argued that the basicness of an action is sensitive to our description of it. This account falls out of the more general position that actions are events with an indefinite number of descriptions, each of which will highlight some psychological and/or physical feature(s) of the event in question.

For example, suppose that Donald poisons the inhabitants by replenishing the water supply, and that he does the latter by operating the pump, which in turn he does by moving his arm in a particular way. Arguably, what we have here is not four actions but one action with four different descriptions, viz. those of poisoning, replenishing, pumping, and moving. (It is not equally plausible that all by-relations operate in this way; if I win an award by performing well in a contest, my performing well is not my winning.) One of these descriptions is the most basic description of the action, and the ‘by-relation’ may tell us which it is. Donald poisoned by pumping, he did not pump by poisoning.

So how many actions has Donald performed, four or one? As we have seen, Anscombe and Davidson argued that what we have here is not so much four actions as four different descriptions of one action. According to this ‘reductionist’ view, being basic is a matter of description. Davidson accordingly maintains that all actions are basic or ‘primitive’ under some description, since, strictly speaking, “we never do more than move our bodies: the rest is up to nature” (“Agency”, p. 18 in this volume). By contrast, ‘pluralists’ or ‘multipliers’ such as Goldman (1970) and Thomson (1971) argue that each of the above descriptions picks out a different action, and that only one of them (at most) is basic. Hornsby (1979) rejects the labels ‘unifiers’ and ‘multipliers’ in favor of ‘identifiers’ and ‘differentiators’ on the grounds that the former pair serves to conflate identity criteria with counting questions that do not obviously apply to action.