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Philosophical Theories of Action

What distinguishes your actions from things that merely happen to you? (‘The Problem of Action’)

Kinematic features? Coordination of body parts? Falling down stairs vs Buster Keaton stunt.

Standard Answer: actions are those events which stand in an appropriate causal relation to an intention.

Causal Theory of Action: an event is action ‘just in case it has a certain sort of psychological cause’ (Bach, 1978, p. 361).

How do we arrive at this?

Redescriptions of action need not relate to your intentions

My spilling the coffee can be caused in at least three ways ...

 

where I mistakenly take the coffee to be tea and do not intend to spill coffee
causeis my action?
1an intention of mine to spill the coffee✔
2an intention of mine to spill the tea✔
3you jiggling my hand✘
Reflection on (1) and (2) rules out the view that my spilling the coffee is an action of mine only if I intend to spill the coffee.
‘What is the difference [between (2) and (3)]? The difference seems to lie in the fact that in one case, but not in the other, I am intentionally doing something. My spilling the contents of my cup was intentional; as it happens, this very same act can be redescribed as my spilling the coffee. Of course, thus redescribed the action is no longer intentional; but this fact is apparently irrelevant to the question of agency.
‘And so I think we have one correct answer to our problem: a man is the agent of an act if what he does can be described under an aspect that makes it intentional.’ (Davidson, 1971, p. 46)

Question 1

What is the relation between an instrumental action and an outcome to which it is directed?

Standard Answer

The outcome to which an instrumental action is directed is that outcome specified by the intention which caused it.

Question 2

What distinguishes your actions from things that merely happen to you?


Standard Solution

Your actions are those events which stand in an appropriate causal relation to an intention of yours.