e Ontology, Etiology, and Moral Psychology of Action: Aristotle and Today
by
Bryan C. Reece
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of Philosophy University of Toronto
© Copyright by Bryan C. Reece ()
e Ontology, Etiology, and Moral Psychology of Action: Aristotle and Today
Bryan C. Reece
Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of Philosophy University of Toronto
Abstract
Aristotle’s theory of action answers two central questions in Action Theory today:
What causes action? What role do psychological attitudes play in action?
Chapter dispels misunderstandings about Aristotle’s theory of causation.
In uential interpretations assume that Aristotle’s material, formal, and nal causes are explanatory only as constituents of an efficient-causal event, and that all efficient causes are productive. Productive efficient causes are those for which the effect is numerically distinct from the causal activity of the cause. Aristotle makes neither assumption. Instead, he thinks that some efficient causes are not productive, and that material, formal, and nal causes are explanatory in their own right rather than as constituents of efficient-causal events.
Chapter 2 argues that Aristotle countenances four causes of action: Agents’ bodies are material causes of their self-movements, their occurrent psychological attitudes (such as desire and decision) are formal causes, agents themselves, as self-movers actualizing a
ii particular potentiality, are efficient causes, and agents’ goals are final causes. This view challenges the prevailing assumption that psychological attitudes are efficient causes of actions. They are instead formal causes—paradigms for acting and parts of what defines the sort of action that the action is.
Aristotle’s four-causal view makes progress in addressing problems for recent theories of action. Chapter 3 treats Davidsonian and Anscombean theories, the most prominent. Davidsonians face the problem of deviant causal chains (where psychological attitudes cause actions accidentally) and of the disappearing agent (the agent herself plays no role identifiable as agency). Anscombeans encounter the problem of deviant formal causation (a foreseen side-effect is wrongly counted by the theory as part of the intended aim) and of disappearing agency (without appeal to psychological attitudes, it is difficult to account for agential control). Aristotle's account makes headway on these problems.
Chapter 4 treats constitutivist theories, which insist that agential control over action is at least partially constitutive of the action rather than a matter of antecedent efficient causes. Existing constitutivist accounts misconceive the causal role or range of psychological attitudes that are relevant for agential control. Constitutivists can advance by understanding psychological attitudes as Aristotelian formal causes of action.
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In loving memory of James, a true scholar, who early on encouraged my philosophical pursuits.
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Acknowledgments
I have received signi cant support for writing this dissertation from many sources.
My supervisor, Lloyd Gerson, as well as my committee members, Brad Inwood and Phil
Clark, have given uncountable bits of helpful advice, stimulating challenges, and suggestions for reading. eir quick, yet thorough, feedback on chapter dras was invaluable, as was their expertise in their respective elds. I could not have attempted a project of this scope without having the bene t of their combined knowledge.
I want to thank my examiners, James Allen and Chris Shields, for contributing their expertise through thoughtful reading of the dissertation and participation in the defense.
David Charles has been a great help to me at various stages of the project’s development.
He met with me regularly during my period of research travel in Oxford in to assist me in re ning my core ideas. He has continued to take an active interest in the dissertation, reading and discussing multiple chapters with me. James Allen, Sarah Broadie, Rusty Jones,
Chuck Latham, Christopher Taylor, and Sergio Tenenbaum gave helpful comments on chapter dras or substantial parts thereof. Martin Pickavé, Juan Piñeros, Ravi Sharma,
Benjamin Wald, and Jennifer Whiting provided feedback on several key arguments.
I presented parts of chapters at the University of California at Berkeley in
November , at the University of Toronto in March , at the University of Oxford in
October , at the American Philosophical Association Central Division Meeting
(Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy session) in March , and at the University of
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Cambridge in March , and bene tted from constructive criticism from audience members on each occasion. I am particularly grateful for the extensive feedback from Klaus
Corcilius on the occasion of my talk at Berkeley and subsequently. I have had very bene cial conversations about the content of the dissertation with Randolph Clarke, Ursula Coope,
David Enoch, Dorothea Frede, Daniel Graham, Fred Miller, Jennifer Hornsby, Anna
Marmodoro, and Gisela Striker. Many of the themes of this dissertation were developed during my time with the Corpus Christi College Centre for the Study of Greek and Roman
Antiquity in May–June , made possible by the University of Toronto School of
Graduate Studies Research Travel Grant. My PhD research has been generously funded by the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and the Robinson Fellowship in Classical
Philosophy at the University of Toronto. I want to thank Sidney Robinson in particular for generously taking an active interest in my academic trajectory throughout my PhD program.
Finally, I want to thank my family for the encouragement and love they have given me. I have already mentioned my cousin, Rusty Jones, who rst introduced me to philosophy and has been my closest philosophical companion ever since. My parents,
Wyatt and Cynthia Reece, as well as my grandparents, Charles and Jennie Vaughan, have seen to my academic welfare from the start. My wife, Sharon, has patiently supported my efforts and has seen me through all of the highs and lows of the dissertation. Her love
vi sustained this work through to completion, and I am thankful to her for everything she has done to make it possible.
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Contents
Abstract ii Acknowledgments v
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER . ARISTOTLE’S FOUR AITIAI
. e arguments of recent commentators . Against recent commentators . Ontological priority . Aitiai: causes, explanations, or something else? . Are the aitiai coordinate causes?
CHAPTER . ARISTOTLE’S FOUR CAUSES OF ACTION
. Kinêseis and the four causes . e four causes in action explanations . Skill, desire, decision, and the four-causal interpretation
CHAPTER . ARISTOTLE’S VIEW AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO DAVIDSONIAN AND ANSCOMBEAN ACCOUNTS
. Davidsonian views . Anscombean views . How Aristotle’s view helps . Aristotle and the strengths of Davidsonian and Anscombean views
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CHAPTER . FORMAL CAUSES OF ACTION: TOWARD A NEW CONSTITUTIVIST THEORY
. What is constitutivism? . Steward’s denial of the relevance of intentional mentality for control . Wu’s Many-Many Problem and structuring causation . Korsgaard on agential unity, deliberative decision, and akratic acts . Intentional mental items as Aristotelian formal causes of action
CONCLUSION
Bibliography
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INTRODUCTION
is dissertation addresses two central questions in action theory: What causes action? What role do desire, decision, and other psychological items play in action? e majority of philosophers of action divide into two camps over these issues. Davidsonians think that psychological items, or events involving them, are the causes of action.
Anscombeans prefer not to talk about causes of action at all, but rather about the purportedly less obscure notions of goal-orientedness and the practical syllogism. ey think that psychological items, with the possible exception of practical knowledge, are not very important in an account of action.
Both groups claim Aristotle as their ancestor. is is remarkable for several reasons, two of which I will mention. First, and obviously, if two opposed views both derive from
Aristotle, the most likely explanation is either that Aristotle’s view is a muddled mess,
Aristotle’s view is extraordinarily capacious, or Aristotle’s view has been misunderstood. I think it is somewhat capacious and very misunderstood.
e second reason is that Aristotle does not seem particularly interested in the sort of project that Davidsonians and Anscombeans undertake, namely prosecuting a study of action isolated from its broader physical, metaphysical, psychological, and ethical context.
Aristotle is certainly interested in the nature of action, but we nd in his extant works no treatise dedicated to its study. We might have expected practical science to study praxis
(action) in its own right, but instead it comprises ethics and politics. Action is constantly present, however, not only in Aristotle’s works on practical science, but throughout his corpus. is profusion suggests that the most promising way to study Aristotle’s remarks on action is to approach them as a system, but without ignoring the context in which they appear. I will say more about methodology aer foreshadowing my arguments.
While it is true that both Davidsonians and Anscombeans claim to be following
Aristotle’s lead, most Aristotle scholars believe, or at least write in ways that make little effort to avoid suggesting, that Aristotle’s view is basically of the Davidsonian variety.
Davidson’s broadly Humean theory of action is built upon a correspondingly Humean theory of efficient causation. Many commentators suppose that Aristotle’s material, formal, and nal aitiai are not causes in ‘our’ sense (i.e., the Humean sense), but the efficient aitia is. Chapter presents and rebuts the two main arguments that support this. e rst is that
‘our’ sense of causation essentially involves producing some effect that is distinct from the cause’s activity, and only the efficient aitia does this. is argument fails; Aristotle denies that efficient aitiai must be productive. e second argument is that the causal relation in
‘our’ sense has events as its relata, but this is not true of Aristotle’s material, formal, and
nal aitiai, whose etiological relationship to that of which they are the aitiai holds only insofar as these aitiai are constituents of events. is argument fails because at least formal and nal aitiai have their own distinctive etiological relationship to that of which they are
the aitiai, rather than a relationship that holds in virtue of their being constituents of efficient-causal events.
Chapter argues that animal self-movement in general, and human action in particular, should for Aristotle be explained in terms of his four aitiai: Animals’ bodies are the material causes of their self-movements, their active psychological items are the formal causes, the animals themselves, as self-movers actualizing a particular potentiality, are the efficient causes, and their goals are the nal causes. is view challenges the prevailing assumption that Aristotle thinks that psychological items (or events involving them) are the genuine efficient causes of actions, and other things that might be called ‘causes’ of action, such as agents and goals, are merely derivative causes of actions because of their association with psychological items. By ‘formal causes,’ I mean paradigms for structuring one’s actions in accordance with a goal, proper parts of an action that render determinate what sort of action the action is.
Aristotle’s view, thus understood, can diagnose and solve problems that have arisen for various recent theories of action. Chapter treats Davidsonians and Anscombeans directly. ere are two main problems for Davidsonian views, namely deviant causal chains and the problem of the disappearing agent. Furthermore, the former is usefully characterized as a symptom of the latter. ere are two structurally similar problems for
Anscombean views, namely deviant formal causation (a foreseen side-effect is wrongly counted by the theory as part of the intended aim) and disappearing agency (without appeal
to token psychological items, it is difficult to account for agential control). Again, the deviance worry is a symptom of the disappearance worry. Aristotle's account, properly understood, solves all four problems. Furthermore, it explains what the other accounts were purportedly best equipped to explain. In the case of Davidsonian accounts, this was the compatibility of reasons explanations and causal explanations. In the case of
Anscombean accounts, it was the goal-oriented structure that action has.
Chapter treats constitutivist theories, an emerging group of views that focus on the constitutive causes of action rather than on the antecedent efficient causes. Such theories insist that agential control over action is at least partially constitutive of the action itself. Several recent accounts have this common theoretical core and marshal compelling insights in its defense. However, each ultimately fails to make good on the central constitutivist promise: to give a more compelling account of agential control than do rival views that locate control in factors external to action or merely contemporaneous with it.
Constitutivists can make progress by understanding psychological items as Aristotelian formal causes of action—proper parts of actions that partially constitute what it is to be those actions, and paradigms for performing those actions in accordance with a goal.
It will be clear from this outline that I think it is appropriate to appeal to ancient texts in order to gain insight into current debates. Not everyone will agree with this, perhaps because they think that philosophers of the distant past should be given purely historical attention, and current philosophers should be treated in some other way. I think
that current philosophers are every bit as enmeshed in historical particularity as any other philosopher is, and that philosophers of the distant past were perfectly capable of producing arguments with which we still have not quite come to grips. So, I believe that it is misguided to ignore either the historical situation or the live theoretical contributions of in uential philosophers, whether they are living or dead, and I will be assuming as much throughout the dissertation. I will take an interest, for example, in the patterns of in uence among recent philosophers’ accounts of causation and action. I will be equally interested in locating elements of Aristotle’s view that can defuse powerful counterexamples. In each case, I will be taking the relevant philosophers seriously as historically situated thinkers who have something to teach us today.
A couple more methodological particulars are worth mentioning. All translations of ancient works in this dissertation are my own unless otherwise noted. I have consciously attempted to translate as literally as possible without making the texts appear so stilted as to call into question why anyone would voluntarily read such things. I have done this in part because Aristotle’s formidable technical vocabulary has the potential to throw any related philosophical discussion into the profoundest confusion if it is translated inconsistently or without sufficient attention to his own patterns of usage. Indeed, I think that excessively free translations have been to a signi cant degree responsible for some of the mistaken assumptions I hope to dispel in the rst half of this dissertation.
In the rst two chapters I oen refer to ancient and medieval commentaries on the works of Aristotle. is is not because I think that these commentaries have special authority, or even that they must be more likely to present Aristotle’s views denuded of the layered vestments of interpretation that they have accumulated over the centuries. Aer all, the extant ancient and medieval commentaries were written long aer Aristotle’s death, and their writers had agendas and peculiar training of their own just as commentators do today. However, I have found it worthwhile to consult the ancient and medieval commentaries for this project for two reasons. First, they oen have the most thorough discussions of particularly treacherous bits of Aristotle’s texts. Second, although I have just said that there is no necessary connection between being ancient and being a reliable guide to Aristotle’s thought, I think that Hume (and later, Davidson) effected such a paradigm shi in thinking about causation and action that it is difficult to nd recent commentaries that do not make the assumptions they urged. Commentaries that antedate Hume’s interventions show us what the alternatives once were, and may even help us get a grasp of what the alternatives could now be. It is particularly noteworthy when several commentators who are otherwise quite at odds with one another all come to the same view of a nettlesome passage in Aristotle, and when this view is opposed to the approach that now predominates.
CHAPTER
ARISTOTLE’S FOUR AITIAI
Aristotle’s doctrine of the four aitiai is foundational for much of his philosophical system.1 What these aitiai actually are is highly controversial. Here is what Aristotle says about them:
Now then, one sense of ‘aition’ [material] is that out of which, as a constituent, something comes to be. For example, the bronze and the silver and their genera are aitiai of the sculpture and the bowl, respectively. Another sense of ‘aition’ [formal] is the form and the paradigm, and this is the account of the essence and its genera (for example, the aition of the octave is the relation of :, and more generally number), and the parts of the de ning formula. Yet another sense of ‘aition’ [efficient] is the primary starting-point whence motion and rest arise. For example, the person who deliberates is aitios, as the father is aitios of the child and in general the maker is aition of the thing made and what initiates change is aition of the thing changed. A fourth sense of ‘aition’ [ nal] is the end, what something is for. For example, health is aitia of taking a walk (Physics . .b– ).2
Many recent commentators have suspected that Aristotle’s material, formal, and
nal aitiai are not causes in ‘our’ sense. ey think that only Aristotle’s efficient aitia is a cause in what they somewhat presumptuously call ‘our sense’ because that sense includes
1 ‘Aitia’ (pl. aitiai), ‘aition,’ and ‘aitios’ are variously translated as ‘cause,’ ‘a because,’ ‘explanation,’ ‘causal explanation,’ ‘explanatory factor,’ or ‘generative factor.’ 2 All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. For Aristotle’s works I follow the Oxford Classical Texts unless otherwise indicated. For De motu animalium I follow the text by Martha Nussbaum (). For the ancient commentaries I follow the texts in the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca series.
the claims that events are the relata of the causal relation, and that a cause must produce some effect that is distinct from the cause’s activity. Whether or not these commentators are right that this is ‘our’ sense of cause, they are wrong to think that Aristotle’s efficient aitia ts the bill.3 ey are further wrong in claiming that formal and nal aitiai are derivatively explanatory only insofar as they are constituents of the event that is the efficient aitia. When we attend carefully to the texts, we see that at least Aristotle’s formal, efficient, and nal aitiai have a distinctive feature that is oen neglected:4 Each is ontologically prior to that of which it is the aitia in a distinctive way, and thus is explanatorily fundamental in its own right. Appreciating how this fact gures in Aristotle’s examples will allow us to see that none of Aristotle’s aitiai has anything essentially to do with events or with production.
Rather, at least the formal, efficient, and nal aitiai relations are distinctive and coordinately applicable kinds of ontological dependence relations.
3 Michael Frede () also argues, though on different grounds, that not even Aristotle’s efficient aitia is a cause in ‘our’ sense. 4 I say ‘at least’ because it is controversial whether there is a sense in which the material aitia is in some way ontologically prior to that of which it is the aitia. My argument throughout is compatible with affirming or denying this. It is enough for my purposes that the formal and nal aitiai are ontologically prior to that of which they are the aitiai, for my argument will be that this falsi es the claim that they are derivatively explanatory only insofar as they are constituents of the efficient aitia.
. e arguments of recent commentators
Various arguments have been given for thinking that material, formal, and nal aitiai are not causes in ‘our’ sense.5 I will later treat several isolated arguments, but for now
I will discuss the two most prevalent sorts. Both of these latter rely on assumptions about causation that ultimately derive from Hume’s Treatise and Enquiry, and have been reinvigorated by Donald Davidson (). Arguments of the rst sort take this form:
[Productive]: A cause in our sense is essentially productive. at is, it is such that its causal activity is wholly distinct from its effect. is is not true of Aristotle’s material, formal, and nal aitiai. So, they are not causes in our sense.
Arguments of the second set take this form:
[Events]: e causal relation in our sense has events as its relata. is is not true of Aristotle’s material, formal, and nal aitiai, whose etiological relationship to that of which they are the aitiai holds only insofar as these aitiai are constituents of events. So, they are not causes in our sense.
e idea that causes are essentially productive is to be found in Hume’s Treatise .
. , where he asserts that ‘causation’ and ‘production’ are synonyms. In particular, as Hume explains more fully in the Enquiry . –, causes produce some effect that is wholly distinct from the activity of the cause:
5 Some commentators, such as Richard Sorabji (, ), contend that material, formal, and nal aitiai are not causes in ‘our’ sense, but do not seem interested in explaining what ‘our’ sense is. I will focus on proposals that attempt to give content to ‘our’ sense, at least in part because I think that it is misguided to suppose that there is such a thing, and still more misguided to attribute this sense to Aristotle. Nathanael Stein (, ) adverts to the wide variety of current views about causation, some of which claim to replace the Humean elements popular among the commentators I discuss here with elements that are supposed to be distinctively Aristotelian, such as causal powers, as reason for doubting that there is such a thing as ‘our’ sense of cause that militates against Aristotle’s aitiai.
e mind can never possibly nd the effect in the supposed cause, by the most accurate scrutiny and examination. For the effect is totally different from the cause, and consequently can never be discovered in it. Motion in the second billiard-ball is a quite distinct event from the motion in the rst; nor is there any thing in the one to suggest the smallest hint of the other... In a word, then, every effect is a distinct event from its cause. It could not, therefore, be discovered in the cause, and the rst invention or conception of it, a priori, must be entirely arbitrary. And even aer it is suggested, the conjunction of it with the cause must appear equally arbitrary.
Davidson () adopts several elements of Hume’s view. He thinks that the relata of the causal relation are individual events, and that causes temporally precede their effects
(). e latter claim entails the Humean proposition that effects are wholly distinct from the activity of their causes.
ese Humean assumptions about causality have been so in uential that many have taken them for granted as at least partially constituting ‘our’ conception of cause.6 Jonathan
Barnes () appeals to such a conception as the reason for being wary of construing
Aristotle’s aitiai as causes:
Hence “cause”, as it is used in colloquial English, is a fairly good translation of aitia (cf. the conjunction “because”). Philosophical usage, however, seems generally to base itself on a Humean analysis of causation; and an aitia is
6 Recently, however, both of the Humean assumptions I here combat have been challenged by those who espouse a ‘powers theory of causation,’ for example Lowe (), Mayr (), Molnar (), and Mumford and Anjum (). Powers theorists believe, roughly, that causes are powers, that effects are or have necessary connections to their manifestations, and that there are therefore necessary connections between the activity of causes and their effects. As I will argue, especially in chapter , Aristotle thinks that being the efficient cause of an action is one species of actualizing a two-way power as a self-moving substance. However, this is very different from saying that the efficient cause is a power. So, while metaphysical attention to powers certainly has Aristotelian roots, I do not see Aristotle pursuing the explanatory strategy advocated by powers theorists, and so I will not have much to say about such ideas here. Nonetheless, I think that powers theorists are beginning to have a salutary effect on the literature about the ontology of causation by dispelling some of the Humean mystique.
not a Humean cause. For this reason it is probably advisable to adopt a different translation; “explanation” seems better than “reason” ().
Likewise, William Charlton () warns against thinking that Aristotle’s aitiai are causes in our sense: “We talk of causes operating and producing effects. Aristotle had no such expressions” ().7
Both Barnes and Charlton are correct in noting that none of the aitiai is a cause in our sense if our sense is the Humean one, despite the paucity of argumentation they give in support of this claim. eirs has not been the predominant view, however. Several in uential commentators have subsequently contended that while three of the aitiai speciously simulate the Humean shibboleth, the efficient aitia stands alone as a cause in our sense. ese commentators appeal to [Productive] and [Events].
Max Hocutt () argues that Aristotle’s theory of aitiai would be incoherent if it were a theory of causes, but makes good sense if it is understood as a theory of deductive explanation along the lines of that propounded by Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim
(). He is guided by the idea that “to translate the term [‘aitia’] as ‘cause’ is to make nonsense of Aristotle’s talk about any but the efficient aitia, since the English word ‘cause’ means productive agent or event, and nothing else” (). He believes that “B can be called the “cause” and C the “effect” with strict accuracy only when the explanation is mechanistic,
B being that which produces C” (). In view of such considerations, he prefers the
7 I think that whether Aristotle had such expressions is debatable, though I agree with a signi cantly weakened version of Charlton’s claim: Aristotle thinks that production is not essential to causation.
translation ‘a because,’ which manifests Aristotle’s intention to treat the aitiai as explanations rather than causes. Hocutt thinks that, notwithstanding Aristotle’s protestations to the contrary, the nal aitia is not a genuine explanation in its own right.
Rather, the nal aitia is explanatory only derivatively “as a constituent of a motive or desire” ().
Julia Annas () argues in similar spirit that since causes must be productive,
Aristotle’s material, formal, and nal aitiai cannot be causes:
Until recently, it was usual to think of Aristotle's account of the four aitiai as a theory of causation. But his examples of X’s standing as aitia to Y include: the bronze to the statue; the ratio : to the octave; the planner to the deed; the aim of health to walking (Physics b-). ese cannot all be causes without absurdity (we cannot have the bronze producing the statue, or the goal exercising ghostly causal tugs from the future), and those who have spoken of them as such have generally been assuming a pliable and confused notion of causality (, italics in original).
She further thinks that the relata of the causal relation are events, and that while some have charged that Aristotle’s conception of efficient aitia is confused because it appears to involve other categories (e.g., substances) as the relata, Aristotle is in fact giving “elliptical” descriptions of events, which have substances as constituents (). Aristotle is not confused, Annas contends, for he believes deep down that the only genuinely causal aitia, the efficient-causal one, has events as its relata.
Gail Fine () assumes that our notion of causation is that of “a relation between spatially and temporally contiguous events, the rst of which brings about or produces the
second” ().8 According to this notion, only Aristotle’s efficient aitia counts as a cause.
She associates the efficient aitia with production and distinguishes other aitiai from it on the grounds that they are not productive (). Like Annas, Fine thinks that one might mistake Aristotle as having said that substances are efficient aitiai (). But also like Annas, she proposes that events are the real efficient aitiai, and since substances are constituent objects of events they can be said in a loose way to count as derivative efficient aitiai ().
So, on her view, the real efficient aitiai “are, or are close to, causes in ‘our’ sense” (). e other three aitiai remain etiologically relevant in a way, despite not being genuine causes, for they are constituents of the events that are the real efficient causes.9
According to Terence Irwin (), the efficient aitia is itself an event (), and examples of the efficient aitia “seem to t our conception of causes fairly easily” (). Irwin believes that the efficient aitia is the most exact description of the cause and that the other three aitiai are “essential constituents” of this cause ().
8 Fine notes that this assumption is controversial, but her endorsement of this model of causation is expressed less tentatively later in the paper: “Causation relates events; and we can hope to understand what causation involves only if we are clear about its relata, events” (). 9 “us, consider an example of an M-aitia: the bronze of a statue. e bronze of course does not produce the statue it constitutes; it is not a producing cause or an E-cause. None the less, it is a constituent of various events explaining the history—the causal history—of the statue” (, italics in original). See also .
. Against recent commentators
Having identi ed [Productive] and [Events] as the primary arguments that have led commentators to claim that Aristotle’s efficient aitia, and it alone, is a cause in our sense, I will now contend that these arguments fail.10
.. [Productive]
e problem with [Productive] is that not even Aristotle’s efficient cause is essentially productive. As discussed above, a productive efficient cause is such that its causal activity is wholly distinct from its effect. is is crucial for Humean views of causation, because it blocks a priori inference from a cause’s activity to its effect. However, in
Metaphysics Θ Aristotle says that there are causal activities that yield no product over and above the actualization that they are (μὴ ἔστιν ἄλλο τι ἔργον παρὰ τὴν ἐνέργειαν) (a–
). Examples include seeing and contemplating. Seeing and contemplating are plausibly construed, on Aristotle’s view, as being at least partially constituted by the causal activity of their efficient cause. While Aristotle is not explicitly discussing efficient causation in this passage, it is in the background. is is because in order to talk about changes, Aristotle appeals to potentiality and actuality. Every change, in the sublunary domain at least, has an efficient cause. Furthermore, every change is the actualization of the potential qua such
(Phys. . , a–). So, we know that seeing and contemplating will have an efficient cause, namely something that actualizes the potential to see or contemplate. Aristotle tells
10 In this section I will follow my interlocutors in speaking of efficient aitiai as efficient causes.
us that for seeing and contemplating, the actualization that they are is in the one who is actualizing the potentiality for them (Metaph. Θ , a–). So, the actualizer's activity is the actualization, and this actualization is nothing over and above what the actualizer is doing. But if this is right, then what the actualizer is doing is not wholly distinct from the actualization, and so there are at least some efficient causes that are not productive.
Examples of non-productive efficient causes are not limited to the sphere of human activity, however. One of Aristotle’s favorite examples is the lunar eclipse, which he says is efficiently caused by the earth (Metaph. H , b–).11 But in what way does it count as an efficient cause, particularly given that for Aristotle the earth occupies a xed position?
It is not that the earth does something, interposing itself between the sun and the moon, which then produces something else, the eclipse. Rather, the eclipse is at least partially constituted by the earth being between the sun and the moon. As long as the most plausible description of Aristotle’s view of the lunar eclipse is that it is at least partially constituted by the earth being between the sun and the moon, then the eclipse will be a counterexample to the claim that for Aristotle efficient causes are essentially productive.
11 Aristotle refers to the earth as the ‘cause as mover’ (αἴτιον ὡς κινῆσαν) of the eclipse, immediately aer saying that the eclipse has no matter, and immediately before saying that there may not be anything for the sake of which the eclipse occurs, and that the form is the account (logos). While ‘cause as mover’ is not the most common label that Aristotle uses for his efficient cause, and one could reasonably deny that it must mean ‘efficient cause’ in every context, its presence in a list of matter, form, and that for the sake of which suggests that Aristotle has an efficient cause in mind here.
Suppose one denied that this is the most plausible description of the lunar eclipse.
en, one could deny that it is a counterexample to the claim that for Aristotle efficient causes are essentially productive. Such a move would preserve harmony between Aristotle’s view and the Humean thesis that the effect cannot be deduced from the causal activity of the efficient cause.12 However, such harmony is not possible, for Aristotle thinks that one can deduce the effect (lunar eclipse) directly from the activity of the cause (the earth)
(Posterior Analytics . ). e ability to deduce the nature of effects from premises about their efficient causes is a crucial and distinctive feature of Aristotelian syllogistic science that would be threatened by the Humean view of causation.13
.. [Events]
ere are two problems with [Events]. I will rst mention a surface-level problem, and then treat a deeper problem at length. e rst problem for [Events] is that there is not much evidence that Aristotle thinks that events as such are always the relata of the efficient- causal relation.14 As several of the commentators I mentioned above acknowledge, Aristotle very oen speaks of substances as efficient causes. eir strategy for dealing with this fact, as we saw, is to say that when Aristotle does this he is speaking elliptically of events. e
12 See Hume’s Enquiry , –. 13 At the end of section I will give an argument that the Humean denial of an a priori connection between cause and effect is incompatible with the details of Aristotle’s view of the ontological priority of the aitia to that of which it is the aitia. 14 Nathanael Stein () casts doubt on the idea that even ‘our’ sense of cause features events as the unique relata.
trouble with this strategy is that we could at least as easily take what appear to be descriptions of events (of which there are far fewer uncontroversial examples) as elliptical references to the causal activity of substances. Even if we think that events sometimes gure irreducibly in Aristotle’s causal scheme, this is far from enough to support [Events], which requires that events are the unique relata of the causal relation.15
ere is another, deeper, problem for [Events]. Recall that according to [Events], formal and nal aitiai are etiologically related to that of which they are the aitiai insofar as they are constituents of an efficient-causal event. But it is implausible that formal and nal explanations must be true in virtue of some efficient-causal fact.16 e reason this is so is that Aristotle thinks that formal, efficient, and nal aitiai are ontologically prior to that of which they are aitiai in distinctive ways, and thus are explanatorily important in their own right. I will now clarify and defend this claim.
. Ontological priority
Aristotle says that “the aitia is prior to that of which it is the aitia” (τὸ γὰρ αἴτιον
πρότερον οὗ αἴτιον) (Post. An. . , b). What sort of priority is at issue? Metaphysics α
15 Frede () thinks that neither Aristotle nor other ancient philosophers prior to the Stoics thought of events as the unique relata of the causal relation. Julius Moravcsik (, ) thinks that events have no place in Aristotle’s etiological scheme. Richard Sorabji (, ) and Cynthia Freeland (, ) take the weaker view that Aristotle is open to a wide variety of entities standing in the aitia relation. 16 is is particularly clear in the case of nal-causal explanations. See John Hawthorne and Daniel Nolan (, ) for a defense of this claim.
indicates that at least in the case of formal, efficient, and nal aitiai it should be ontological priority. is chapter argues that there cannot be an in nite series of aitiai, that the rst thing in the chain is the most genuine aitia, and that this rst thing is ontologically prior to the other things. Evidence that Aristotle is talking about ontological priority comes primarily in the form of the example he gives of being, becoming, and not being (a–
). But what is ontological priority, exactly, and why is it important for an aitia to be ontologically prior to that of which it is an aitia?
Aristotle speaks of ontological priority as priority in nature (φύσις) or priority in being (οὐσία).17 At Categories , b– he characterizes this sort of priority in etiological terms: “ere would seem also to be another sort of priority beyond the ones already mentioned. For, among things which counterpredicate with respect to implication of being, that which is in whatever way aition of the being of the other would rightly be called ontologically prior” (δόξειε δ' ἂν καὶ παρὰ τοὺς εἰρημένους ἕτερος εἶναι προτέρου τρόπος·
τῶν γὰρ ἀντιστρεφόντων κατὰ τὴν τοῦ εἶναι ἀκολούθησιν τὸ αἴτιον ὁπωσοῦν θατέρῳ τοῦ
εἶναι πρότερον εἰκότως φύσει λέγοιτ' ἄν). is tantalizing description cries out for
17 In his most widely discussed general de nition of ontological priority at Meta. Δ , a–, Aristotle says that things that are ontologically prior can be (εἶναι) without the things that are posterior to them, but things that are posterior cannot be without the things that are prior to them. ere is signi cant controversy about what this means, much of it centering on how to interpret ‘εἶναι.’ I translate ‘εἶναι’ neutrally as ‘be’ or ‘being’ in contexts of Aristotle’s descriptions of ontological priority. The traditional approach is to construe it as ‘exists.’ Michail Peramatzis (2011), by contrast, argues that a host of problems results unless we take it to mean ‘be what it is.’ I cannot here engage with the numerous intricacies of this debate. Instead I want to discuss a passage that specifically treats the ontological priority of the aitiai as such. In the course of this treatment, though, a view will emerge that bears some similarities to Peramatzis’s.
elucidation, but all we get from Aristotle on this score is the example of the being of a man being prior in this way to the truth of a statement about him (or his being [so?]?). Some have declared this example odd and rather unhelpful for understanding what counterpredicating with respect to implication of being amounts to in etiological contexts,18 and this reaction is likely to be shared by many. What, then, should we make of
Aristotle’s description of this sort of priority?
Several of the ancient Greek commentaries on this passage add the more straightforward example of the parent and the child.19 On their view, as on Aristotle’s, the parent is clearly aition of the child. Furthermore, these two counterpredicate qua relatives
(πρός τί), things whose being is relative to the being of something else. Any parent is the parent of a child, and any child is the child of a parent. ere is no other way to be a parent, and no other way to be a child. Aristotle thinks that relatives as such are counterpredicable
(Cat. , b; , a–). Some of the Greek commentators take care to remind us that prior and posterior are relatives,20 and others use Aristotle’s terms from the Posterior Analytics,
‘aition’ and ‘aitiaton’ (that which is caused/explained),21 to mark the fact that Aristotle is
18 For example, J.L. Ackrill (, –). 19 See Ammonius (.–), Philoponus (.–), Simplicius (.–), and Elias (.–). 20 See especially Ammonius (.). Porphyry marks the connection between Aristotle’s discussions of priority and of relatives (.–). 21 See Olympiodorus (.– ) and Simplicius (. – ). Aristotle distinguishes between aition and aitiaton at Post. An. . , a– and . , a. In the former passage he connects the distinction not only with priority but also with value for understanding.
here treating of relatives.22 Once this is understood, we can be more precise about the way in which each aitia will be prior to that of which it is the aitia. Aristotle is adamant that it is necessary to specify the relatives properly:
But sometimes relatives will not seem to counterpredicate, if the one giving the relative errs and that in relation to which it is said is not properly given. For instance, if a wing of a bird is given, a bird of a wing does not counterpredicate. For, the rst thing has not been given properly as a wing of a bird, for it is not qua bird that a wing is said to be of it, but qua winged thing (πτερωτόν); for wings also belong to many other things that are not birds. So, if the relative is given properly it counterpredicates; for example, the wing is a wing of a winged thing and the winged thing is a winged thing with a wing (Cat. , b–a).
is passage shows us that the aition qua such is relative to the aitiaton qua such.
It is proper, on Aristotle’s view, to say “this form is aition of this informed thing,” “this mover is aition of this moved thing,” and “this goal is aition of this thing whose goal it is.”
is is, of course, the account Aristotle gives in Physics . of per se aitiai.
Polycleitus qua sculptor is the per se efficient aitia of the sculpture qua such, whereas
Polycleitus qua pale man is merely the accidental efficient aitia. Aristotle thinks that if an aitia is related merely accidentally to that of which it is the aitia, it cannot be the per se aitia of it. Now, as we have seen, being a per se aitia of something is a way of being per se ontologically related to it. So, a consequence of Aristotle’s view is
[C]: If x is an aitia of y only insofar as x is related to z, then it is possible that x is not per se ontologically related to y.
22 Simplicius (.–) says that causal priority is to be referred to the category of relatives in the same way that temporal priority is to the category of time and priority in arrangement is to the category of position.
For example, Polycleitus qua pale man need not be per se ontologically related to the sculpture (since it is only insofar as he is related to Polycleitus the sculptor that he is related to the sculpture at all), whereas Polycleitus qua sculptor must be. But we know from other things Aristotle says that
[C]: Each of the aitiai is per se ontologically related to those things of which they are the aitiai.
At least formal, efficient, and nal aitiai are ontologically prior to those things of which they are the aitiai, and material aitiai are at least the substrata of those things of which they are the aitiai. So, it is impossible for any aitia as such to be ontologically related to that of which it is the aitia only insofar as the aitia is related to something else. is dooms the recent interpreters’ proposal that material, formal, and nal aitiai are etiologically related to that of which they are the aitiai only insofar as they are constituents of efficient-causal events. To say that is to claim that these aitiai are etiologically related to that of which they are the aitiai only in virtue of their relationship to something else, and this contradicts the conjunction of [C] and [C]. So, this proposal, which is part of [Events], cannot re ect
Aristotle’s view.
Furthermore, we now have still more evidence that Aristotle utterly rejects the
Humean claim underwriting [Productive], namely that it is impossible to deduce the effect from the cause. Since the aition and aitiaton are relatives, and since, as Aristotle says, “if
someone knows any relative de nitely he will also know de nitely its correlative” (Cat. ,
a–), the Humean view of causation cannot be right, according to Aristotle.
. Aitiai: causes, explanations, or something else?
e fact that at least formal, efficient, and nal aitiai are ontologically prior to that of which they are the aitiai suggests that they have to do with items in the world, and are not primarily a matter of epistemic, linguistic, or interest-relative features. In fact, aitiai must be non-interest-relative if Aristotle is to maintain his distinction between being prior and more familiar to us and being prior and more familiar by nature (Post. An. . , b–
a and Physics . , a–).23 Aristotle thinks that we gain scienti c knowledge by ascertaining the aitiai, which are prior and more familiar by nature. If they were prior and more familiar to us instead, as our interests as inquirers are, there would be no need for science. is is a prima facie reason for supposing that Aristotle’s aitiai are causes rather than, say, explanations. I have cast doubt on the two main arguments for the view that
Aristotle’s formal and nal aitiai are not causes, namely, [Productive] and [Events]. But now that I have elucidated the relevance of ontological priority we are in a position to discuss and rebut three more minor arguments that aitiai are not causes.
23 Irwin (, ) makes roughly this point. Sorabji () has the view that the aitiai are best thought of as explanations () in part because explanations are relative to the interests of inquirers (). Freeland () says that the interest-relativity of explanations does not threaten Aristotle’s causal realism. Interests can re ect pragmatic considerations, but they point to real causal stories. ere are indeterminately many real accidental causes and effects, and we select from them based on what our interests are ().
Moravcsik () argues that aitiai are not causes because he thinks the aitia relation differs from the causal relation in the following way: Grasp of the aitia relation guarantees understanding whereas grasp of the causal relation does not. He motivates this claim by considering examples of one event standing in the causal relation to another, and of one physical object standing in the aitia relation to another (). Appealing to such examples is illegitimate in two ways. First, Moravcsik has begged the question against the view that Aristotle’s aitiai are causes, for Moravcsik also says that events have no place in
Aristotle’s etiological scheme (). If events have no place in Aristotle’s scheme, and the example we give of a cause is of one event causing another, it will be completely unsurprising that the example seems not to t Aristotle’s system.
Second, there may be signi cant intuitive noise in the examples that Moravcsik gives. To get a fair comparison between the causal relation and the aitia relation, he would need to hold the relata constant and see what is different about what relates them. If an event could be an aitia of another event (which, as we have seen, Moravcsik denies), how would this be different from being the cause of the event? Likewise, if a substance can be a cause of a change, how would this differ from it being the aitia of a change? Moravcsik would need to answer these questions in order to give reason for supposing that the aitia relation guarantees understanding whereas grasp of the causal relation does not.
Annas () argues that material, formal, and nal aitiai are non-causal explanations on the grounds that a cause must be a cause of kinêsis (movement or change)
and only the efficient aitia is one.24 But this claim is ambiguous. It could mean a) that anything that counts as a cause applies to a kinêsis, and that only the efficient aitia so applies, or b) that anything that counts as a cause is the source of kinesis. (b) directly begs the question in favor of the view that only Aristotle’s efficient aitia counts as a cause, since
Aristotle calls the efficient aitia the source of kinesis. What about (a)? Both of its conjuncts are severely problematic. As for the rst conjunct, not even the efficient aitia always applies to kinêsis, whether according to Aristotle or to intuition. Aristotle frequently describes the efficient aitia as a source of kinêsis and of stasis (rest or staying the same). is seems apt.
If I am sitting motionless and silent while someone withdraws all of the money from my bank account using my ATM card, we will want to know the reason why I do not intervene.
A natural place to start would be the efficient cause, the person (or event, or whatever) who lashed me to a chair and gagged me with a stack of otherwise useless deposit slips. e second conjunct of (a) is false because in point of fact Aristotle does cite material, formal, and nal aitiai for instances of kinêsis.25 He says that anger is a sort of kinêsis, and describes its material, formal, and nal causes as blood, desire, and revenge, respectively (De anima
. , a–b). Likewise, in Politics . - he identi es the formal aitia of metabasis (a change in political constitution) as the disposition of those who rebel, and the nal aitia as
24 “e material, formal and nal aitiai explain in non-causal fashion, but the efficient aitia is the source of kinesis, movement or change. e use to which Aristotle puts it makes it clear that it is recognisably a cause in our sense: it is the kind of item cited in the explanation of why a particular change occurred” (). 25 I discuss both of the following examples at length in the next chapter.
wealth or equality. So, it is very implausible to suppose that anything that counts as a cause applies to a kinêsis, and that only the efficient aitia so applies
Hocutt () argues that focusing on the right parts of Aristotle’s works will convince us that his four aitiai are explanations rather than causes. Earlier commentators like W.D. Ross tended to concentrate on Aristotle’s purportedly more “metaphysical” () treatment of the aitiai in Physics . However, according to Hocutt, they lacked “the advantage that contemporary work in the philosophy of science has given the rest of us”
(, n. ). So, in Hocutt’s estimation we are best served to prioritize the account given in
Posterior Analytics . Aristotle’s description of the four aitiai from Post. An. . , a– is as follows:
Since we think that we understand whenever we know the aitia, and there are four aitiai—the what it is to be, that which, if certain things are so, it is necessary for this to be, the rst mover, and that for the sake of which—all of these are revealed through the middle term (Ἐπεὶ δὲ ἐπίστασθαι οἰόμεθα ὅταν εἰδῶμεν τὴν αἰτίαν, αἰτίαι δὲ τέτταρες, μία μὲν τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι, μία δὲ τὸ τίνων ὄντων ἀνάγκη τοῦτ' εἶναι, ἑτέρα δὲ ἡ τί πρῶτον ἐκίνησε, τετάρτη δὲ τὸ τίνος ἕνεκα, πᾶσαι αὗται διὰ τοῦ μέσου δείκνυνται).
First of all, it is not as clear as Hocutt supposes that the Post. An. treats the aitiai as explanations rather than as causes. He thinks that Aristotle de nes ‘aition’ as the middle term of a syllogism ():
So then, it follows that in all inquiries we seek whether there is a middle term or what the middle term is. For the middle term is the aition, and in every case this is sought. Is it eclipsed? Is there some aition or not? Aer these, knowing that there is some aition, we seek what this is. For the middle term is the aition of a substance being not this or that but rather being
without quali cation, or of its being not without quali cation but rather one of the things in itself or accidentally (Post. An. . , a–).
If Aristotle is indeed de ning ‘aition’ as a middle term, and if, as Hocutt thinks, middle terms are elliptical syllogisms (), and syllogisms are explanations, then aitiai will be explanations.26 However, in this passage Aristotle is not de ning ‘aition’ as a middle term, but means instead that the middle term of a syllogism adverts to the aition, such that if we have ascertained the aition we will have a syllogism.27 is alternative is motivated by
Aristotle’s claim at . , a, in his description of the four aitiai, that “all of them are revealed through the middle term (πᾶσαι αὗται διὰ τοῦ μέσου δείκνυνται).” So, the aition to which the middle term adverts could well be a cause, for all that Hocutt has said.
Even if it were clear that the Post. An. account construes aitiai as explanations, it would not be clear that we should prioritize it over the Physics account in the way that
Hocutt recommends. He thinks that we should prioritize the Post. An. account because it is “the longest and most complete” discussion of aitiai in Aristotle’s works (). I do not want to commit myself to prioritizing either account over the other, but I think that certain arguments for prioritizing the Physics account are at least as compelling as Hocutt’s
26 us Hocutt: “A ‘because’, then, is an explanation, and is elliptical for a syllogism. at is, it is a demonstration” (). “For Aristotle, then, ‘causes’ are explanations. I want now to go further and argue that, for Aristotle, explanations are demonstrations” (). 27 Indeed, Barnes () thinks that the passage “must be read” in roughly the way I suggest (, my italics). G.R.G. Mure (), in his response to Hocutt’s paper, also adopts the interpretation I advocate: “Since ‘we know when we know the cause’, the middle term of demonstration can no doubt be called an aition, because it re ects an aition, but there is equally no doubt that Aristotle’s theory of causation is primarily ontological and not an application of syllogistic…” (, italics in original).
argument for prioritizing the Post. An. account. Even if the Post. An. treatment is longer than the one we nd in the Physics, it is less comprehensive. Aristotle says in the Physics that the four aitiai are exhaustive, but he never claims that all explanations have the syllogistic structure that we nd in the Post. An.28 Indeed, some have complained that
Aristotle’s official deductive model in the Post. An. is not applicable to contingencies, such as Aristotle’s own example of the outbreak of the Persian war.29 Whether or not Aristotle can be rescued from their criticisms, it is of course possible that Aristotle recognizes that broadly syllogistic reasoning is a much more general and loose type than the pattern he explores in the Analytics,30 so general perhaps as even to include his notorious practical syllogism. is may mean that Aristotle is exploring certain aspects of the formal application of syllogistic reasoning in the Analytics, but is not exploring the theory in full generality. However, this should give no comfort to interpreters like Hocutt, for it proffers no reason to suppose that the Post. An. itself gives us a more comprehensive theory than does the Physics.
ere is another reason for seeing the Physics account as more comprehensive. In
Post. An. . , the formal, efficient, and nal aitiai look familiar enough. e other one,
28 Sorabji (): “e theory of four causes is the more comprehensive theory [than “the syllogistic theory of explanation”]. Aristotle maintains that the four causes are the only modes of explanation (Phys. II , II ; Metaph. I ), whereas he does not maintain that all explanation has a syllogistic structure. At most, he argues in An. Post. II that any of the four causes can feature in a syllogism as the middle term (the term that occurs twice in the premises) and can explain the conclusion” (, italics in original). 29 Ross (, ) and Barnes (, ). 30 is is plausibly to be expected in light of Aristotle’s contention in Topics . that there are only two sorts of dialectical argument: induction and syllogism.
though, is described as “that which, if certain things are so, it is necessary for this to be” (.
, a–). Aristotle gives as an example the premises of a syllogism. Ross () argues that Aristotle cannot here mean to designate the material aitia in general, for whereas premises necessitate a conclusion, the material aitia is necessitated by that of which it is the aitia (). I am inclined to make a weaker claim than Ross does:31 At least sometimes the material aitia is necessitated by that of which it is the aitia. is is enough to secure the further claim that the Post. An. description of the four aitiai does not cover as full a range of material aitiai as that of the Physics does. is does not render the accounts incompatible, of course, but it does call into question why one would want to prioritize the
Post. An. account.
While more arguments can be and no doubt have been arrayed against the idea that the aitiai are causes, I think that the foregoing remarks make it at least provisionally reasonable to proceed under the assumption that the aitiai are items in the world that furnish understanding and explanation by standing in ontologically salient, non-interest- relative relationships to the things of which they are aitiai,32 and that this is enough to count as causes in some sense. If they do indeed count as causes in some sense, there is a pressing question that needs to be addressed, to which I now turn.
31 Barnes (, ) makes the weaker claim, as well. 32 Formal, efficient, and nal aitiai are ontologically prior to that of which they are the aitiai, and the material aitia is (at least) the substratum.
. Are the aitiai coordinate causes?
A long interpretive tradition has portrayed Aristotle’s aitiai as being coordinate, that is to say, such as all to apply to one and the same thing.33 Several recent scholars have argued, however, that Aristotle’s texts do not support the view that the causes are coordinate.34 e argument is roughly this:
) Our familiar impression of the four causes as coordinate derives from the example of a sculpture having a material, efficient, formal, and nal cause. But this example is due to Seneca and Alexander of Aphrodisias, not to Aristotle.
) What we nd instead in Aristotle is a variety of causal questions and answers to those questions, each in different contexts and about different things.
) Seeing the four causes as coordinate promotes various misunderstandings.
) So, Aristotle’s four causes should not be viewed as coordinate.
However, there is some evidence in Aristotle’s own canonical presentation of the four aitiai that he means them to be coordinate. He says at Phys. . , a–:
So then, while there are said to be roughly this many causes, since there are said to be various causes it follows, too, that there are multiple non- accidental causes of the same thing. For example, both the sculptor's art and the bronze are causes of the sculpture, not qua whatever else it may be, but rather qua sculpture, and not in the same way, but rather one as matter and the other as that whence the motion comes.
Aristotle says here that it follows from the fact that there are various sorts of causes that there are multiple causes of the same thing. is inference would be invalid unless it is true that the four causes (or at least some of them) must be coordinate, at least for natural
33 See for example Seneca’s Epist. .– and Alexander’s De fato ..–. 34 See Rosamond Kent Sprague (), Robert Todd (), and Irwin (, ).
objects.35 Furthermore, Aristotle's example would make little sense without this assumption, particularly the part about non-accidentality and the sculpture qua sculpture.
Furthermore, Aristotle does furnish examples of things to which he says all of the four causes apply: a human being (Metaph. H , a–b), anger (De anima . , a– b), a change in political constitution (Politics . –), and a house (Metaph. B , b – ).36
is last passage about the house in particular leaves no doubt that Aristotle thinks that the four causes can be coordinate:
It is possible for all of the types of causes to belong to the same thing. For example, a house has that whence motion comes (the skill and the housebuilder), that for the sake of which (the function), matter (earth and stones), and form (the account) (ἐνδέχεται γὰρ τῷ αὐτῷ πάντας τοὺς τρόπους [τοὺς] τῶν αἰτίων ὑπάρχειν, οἷον οἰκίας ὅθεν μὲν ἡ κίνησις ἡ τέχνη καὶ ὁ οἰκοδόμος, οὗ δ' ἕνεκα τὸ ἔργον, ὕλη δὲ γῆ καὶ λίθοι, τὸ δ' εἶδος ὁ λόγος).
e critics may ask why, if Aristotle has examples like this up his sleeve, he does not appeal to them in his canonical descriptions of the four causes, forestalling any confusion about whether they are coordinate. Aside from the comforting nal-causal explanation “So that
Aristotle scholars might have gainful employment,” there might be a good reason: Perhaps in giving his canonical descriptions of what the four causes are, Aristotle wants to articulate a theoretical framework that he will elsewhere deploy in scienti c practice. He might
35 To be sure, this does not mean that everything that needs explaining will have all four causes. 36 Aristotle does not explicitly cite the material cause of a change in constitution in Politics . –, but he has already indicated in . .b– that when there is a change in constitution the material substratum is composed of the citizens.
believe, rightly or wrongly, that the framework is best elucidated by describing and exemplifying the causes in a higher degree of theoretical isolation from each other than they oen have in their deployment. If in the initial exposition of the framework he starts right off with the very deployment he eventually intends, there will be little dialectical reason for articulating the framework as an object of study in its own right.
Conclusion
I have argued that Aristotle’s aitiai are rather different from what many recent interpreters, following a Humean line, have supposed. e efficient aitia is not, as they have thought, essentially productive. Neither is it the case that formal and nal aitiai are non- causal factors dependent for their explanatory purchase on the events of which they are purportedly components. Rather, they are explanatory of those things of which they are the aitiai in virtue of standing in ontologically salient relationships to them. Likewise for the material aitia, which is the substratum of that of which it is the aitia. For this reason,
Aristotle’s aitiai can rightly be called ‘causes.’ Furthermore, despite what some interpreters have thought, Aristotle thinks that all four sorts of cause can apply coordinately to phenomena to be explained.
ese results will inform the arguments of subsequent chapters as follows. In chapter , I will turn my attention to the issue of how to construe the four causes in cases of animal locomotion and human action. Continuing to argue against the currently
dominant Humean/Davidsonian paradigm, I will contend that self-movers are non- productive efficient causes of their self-movements, of which actions are a species; that self- movers’ bodies are the material causes of their self-movements; that self-movers’ desires, decisions, and other active psychological items are the formal causes; and that self-movers’ goals are the nal causes.
In chapter , one of my aims will be to answer Donald Davidson’s challenge to say how a reason can be a cause for action. His preferred view is that a reason is an event involving a desire-belief pair, and that this produces one’s action. I argue in chapter that this view is not Aristotle’s. I think that, looking to Aristotle’s view, we can furnish a different answer to Davidson’s challenge. Davidson views it as a constraint on genuine explanation in the sphere of action that the explanation be causal. It is unproblematic for this purpose that Aristotle’s aitiai need not be events and do not essentially involve production, because as chapter has shown, being an event and essentially involving production need not be what distinguishes causal explanation from non-causal explanation. Whether or not these properties make one doubt that Aristotle endorses causes in ‘our’ sense, they are not properties the lack of which would render Aristotle’s aitiai unserviceable for meeting
Davidson’s explanatory constraint, and thus for answering the challenge that he poses.
Being able to meet Davidson’s explanatory constraint in this way gives Aristotle’s four- causal explanation of action various advantages over Anscombean approaches, which claim that what is essential to action is not its causal provenance, but rather its goal-
oriented structure. Such accounts leave open a deviant causal path by which a foreseen side- effect is wrongly counted by the theory as part of the intended aim. Furthermore,
Anscombean accounts deprive themselves of the conceptual resources for giving a proper account of agential control. Such resources include appeals to psychological items such as active desire, as well as to skills agents possess. Aristotle’s account is properly equipped to avoid both of these problems because he treats such things as active desire and skill as non- accidentally formally structuring action, rather than depending only on the goal-oriented structure of practical knowledge.
In chapter , I will show that Aristotle’s four-causal account of action can furnish what is lacking in recent non-Davidsonian, non-Anscombean theories of agential control.
ese theories, propounded by Helen Steward, Wayne Wu, and Christine Korsgaard, share a common theoretical core, insisting that agential control over action is at least partially constitutive of the action itself. ey reject the Humean/Davidsonian idea that an action is an event produced by some other event, preferring instead to see agents as non-productive efficient causes of action. However, for various reasons each of these constitutivist accounts ultimately fails to make good on the central constitutivist promise: to give a more compelling account of agential control than do Davidsonian views that locate control in factors external to action. Constitutivists can make progress by understanding intentional psychological items, such as desire and decision, as Aristotelian formal causes of action.
Such formal causes are proper parts of actions that partially constitute what it is to be those
actions, and paradigms for performing those actions in accordance with a goal, rendering determinate what sort of bodily movement is taking place when an agent acts in a particular way. Aristotelian formal-causal constitutivism has the resources to answer the challenges faced by other constitutivist accounts.
CHAPTER
ARISTOTLE’S FOUR CAUSES OF ACTION
Aristotle thinks that human action is a species of animal self-movement, and animal self-movement is a species of natural kinêsis (change, movement). Natural kinêseis are to be explained in terms of the four causes (Phys. . , b–). So, as I will argue, animal self-movement in general, and human action in particular, should for Aristotle be explained in terms of the four causes: Animals’ bodies are the material causes of their self- movements, their active psychological items are the formal causes,1 the animals themselves, as self-movers actualizing a particular potentiality, are the efficient causes, and their goals are the nal causes. Despite the fact that Aristotle never explicitly articulates the four-causal view that I will describe, its central structures are built only from materials found in his works and glossed in ways familiar to his ancient and medieval commentators. ese
1 I use ‘psychological items’ to cover psychological states, psychological processes, etc. By ‘active’ I mean something like what is nowadays meant by ‘occurrent,’ but I want the label to retain more of a linguistic connection to Aristotle’s usage. As I will remark in chapter , Aristotle does not say all we might like him to have said about what it is for a psychological item to be active or what kinds of psychological items can be active, but this does not put his view at a disadvantage relative to other views. One might wonder how an active psychological item can be a formal cause of anything if one believes that to be active in the relevant sense is to be a second actuality, but only rst actualities can be formal causes. One who believes these things could suppose that the active psychological items Aristotle has in mind are second actualities insofar as they are actualized potentialities, but rst actualities of the bodily movements. is accords with Aristotle’s claim that one way of being an actuality is to stand “as movement to potentiality,” and the other is to stand “as substance to a sort of matter” (Metaph. Θ , b–). As we will see, the fact that Aristotle extends his four- causal framework to kinêseis, which are not substances, means that several elements of his framework will apply in an extended sense.
materials have not yet to my knowledge been combined systematically in the way I propose.
However, the interpretive approach that I will take allows us to solve longstanding textual and philosophical puzzles, and puts us in view of a rich framework in which to situate much of Aristotle’s philosophy of action and moral psychology as part of his theory of natural kinêseis.2
My approach challenges the prevailing assumption that Aristotle has what is nowadays called “the causal theory of action.” According to that theory, psychological items (or events involving them) are the genuine efficient causes of actions, and other things that might be called ‘causes’ of action, such as agents and goals, are merely derivative causes of actions because of their association with psychological items.3 Taking this view,
2 I will be operating under the assumption that Aristotle nowhere offers a systematic treatment of human action as such, but rather makes numerous important remarks, scattered throughout his writings, that provide the ingredients for a uni ed account of animal locomotion and the resources for explaining how speci cally human action is a special case of this. For articulation and defense of this assumption, see especially the introductions in Klaus Corcilius and Christof Rapp () and Corcilius (). See also Patricio Fernandez (, –). Fernandez is primarily interested in exploring the connection between human action and animal locomotion through consideration of the practical syllogism, which I will not be discussing here. 3 e most popular, but by no means the only, causal theory of action is the ‘standard model’ popularized by Donald Davidson (, –). Some of the central elements of this theory spring from Hume’s Treatise . , –. Various contemporary philosophers of action have managed to get the idea that Aristotle is a progenitor of this theory. See for example Jesús Aguilar and Andrei Buckareff (, ), and Sarah Paul (, ). is may be due in part to numerous claims made by Aristotle scholars, which, even if they are not intended to assimilate Aristotle’s view to Davidson’s ‘standard model,’ do seem to embody the central claim of causal theories of action more generally. I will list a few examples here. Michael Woods () says that “In the case of human actions… the efficient cause [will be] the inclination [orexis] for the achievement of the goal that led to the action” (). Jessica Moss () says that “cognition and desire combine to cause action” (; cf. , , n. , ). Moss further says that “phantasia [is] able to cause action, by inducing emotions and desires” (). Klaus Corcilius and Pavel Gregoric () indicate that Aristotle focuses on “episodes of psychic activities, some of which Aristotle takes to be the efficient cause of animal motion” (). Susanne Bobzien () says both that “we are the efficient causes of [our] actions” (), and that “choice, in turn, is the efficient cause and origin of action” (). John Cooper () says that Aristotle’s theory is about the
interpreters have thought that when Aristotle appears to speak of an agent as the efficient cause of his action, this is an elliptical way of saying that the agent’s psychological item, or an event involving it, is the efficient cause.4 But if my interpretation is correct, the dominant account is backwards: When Aristotle appears to speak of a psychological item or an event involving it as the efficient cause of an action, this is an elliptical way of saying that the agent qua actualizing a particular potentiality is the efficient cause of the action. e psychological item that corresponds to this actualization is really the formal cause of the action rather than the efficient cause. If this is correct, then Aristotle’s view will not be a version of the prevailing Humean and Davidsonian account, but rather an interesting alternative to it. Aristotle’s view preserves much of what is appealing about that account by
causal responsibility of agents for actions, but he also says that such items as desire do the real efficient-causal explanatory work, and are the originating causes of action ( and , , , –, , , respectively). Robert Heinaman () gives the explanation for how these claims fit together: “An agent will be the cause or proper origin of an action when his want or choice causes the action” (258, cf. 264). Likewise, Terence Irwin (1980) supposes it to be the case that “ “Because of himself” just means “because of his own impulse” ” (). David Charles () and Ursula Coope () have notably resisted the trend, though for different reasons and to a different extent than I do. Charles objects to ‘the standard model’ because it construes actions and their causes as events, whereas he thinks actions and their causes are oen processes that are not reducible to events. Coope rejects the idea that Aristotle has ‘the standard model’ on the grounds that “though Aristotle thinks that human actions are explained by desires and beliefs, it is not because they are explicable in this way that they count as actions. On Aristotle’s view, what makes a particular change an action is the fact that it is the exercise of a certain kind of causal power: it is a causing of something” (, italics in original). As will be seen, I will urge a more radical rejection of ‘the standard model’ than either Charles or Coope does. 4 See especially Julia Annas (, ) and Gail Fine (, ) for the idea that Aristotle thinks that substances (agents, for example) are efficient causes in only a derivative sense as constituents of the events that are the genuine efficient causes. Several recent philosophers think that agents are causes of actions derivatively from the fact that their psychological items are the genuine causes. See for example Michael Bratman (), Harry Frankfurt (), and David Velleman (). ere has been considerable interest of late in arguing against such views. Two of the most sustained critiques are Erasmus Mayr () and Helen Steward ().
identifying an important way in which its privileged explanatory elements, psychological items, have an irreducible role in explaining action.5 Rather than being the efficient causes of action, psychological items are instead what structures the action and makes it the sort of action that it is.
is chapter falls into three parts. Section adduces textual support for the claim that Aristotle cares about the project of specifying four causes for actions and related natural movements, such as affections. I devote particular attention to Aristotle’s claims that the formal causes of such movements are psychological items, for example active desires. Section spells out in detail how each of the four causes of action is to be construed.
Section explains how my four-causal interpretation is compatible with Aristotle’s apparent claims that skill, desire, and decision are efficient causes, rather than formal causes, of action.
. Kinêseis and the four causes
Although we are perhaps most accustomed to Aristotle appealing to the four causes to explain artifacts and natural substances like organisms, he indicates that we should also refer the principles of “every sort of natural change” to his four-causal framework (Phys. .
5 is is no trivial feature, for not every view makes ineliminable explanatory appeal to psychological items. See for example that of G.E.M. Anscombe (), and more recently Michael ompson ().
, b–).6 e implication is that not only substances themselves, but also the natural changes they undergo and effect, are supposed to be studied with reference to the four causes. As we see from Aristotle’s biological works, this includes characteristic kinêseis of organisms, for example animal reproduction and the formation of animals’ parts. It also includes kinêseis like affections and locomotive movements (for example, human actions),7 several examples of which I will discuss.
At DA . , a–b Aristotle refers to anger, an affection, as a sort of kinêsis:
If things are this way, it is clear that the affections are enmattered accounts. So, their de nitions will be of this sort, for example ‘Anger is a sort of movement of a certain kind of body, part, or faculty by a certain cause for the sake of a certain end.’ Because of this the study of the soul (either every soul or at least this sort of soul) already has to do with natural science. e natural scientist and the dialectician would de ne each of the affections differently, for example what anger is. For, the dialectician would de ne it as the desire for revenge, or something of this sort, whereas the natural scientist would de ne it as the boiling of the blood and of hot stuff around the heart. e latter gives the matter and the former gives the form and
6 Malcolm Scho eld (, ) thinks that applying the four causes to natural processes of change is already something of an extension and transformation of the explanatory projects that motivate the four causes individually, and that such application is necessary for natural philosophy. 7 Aristotle says that an action is a kind of kinêsis at EE . , b– and . , b. This is compatible with the distinction he draws between kinêseis and energeiai (actualities) in Metaph. Θ , b–. There Aristotle uses both terms in a sense that is narrower than usual, and notoriously difficult to spell out. The important thing for now is that all kinêseis in the broad sense are energeiai in the broad sense (more precisely, they are incomplete energeiai, cf. Phys. . , b), but no kinêsis in the narrow sense is an energeia in the narrow sense. All actions are kinêseis in the broad sense (and therefore also energeiai in the broad sense). Some actions are kinêseis in the narrow sense, and some are energeiai in the narrow sense. See J.L. Ackrill (). A very different view is to be found in Carlo Natali (). Natali thinks that actions are energeiai in the narrow sense identified in Metaph. Θ , b–, and says that Aristotle calls actions ‘kinêseis’ in the EE only to introduce the idea that a human being is that whence motion comes (ὅθεν ἡ κίνησις) with respect to his action, thus making it possible for Aristotle to develop an argument about the problem of determinism. This seems like an implausible way of reading ‘action is a kinêsis’ to me.
account. (εἰ δ' οὕτως ἔχει, δῆλον ὅτι τὰ πάθη λόγοι ἔνυλοί εἰσιν·8 ὥστε οἱ ὅροι τοιοῦτοι οἷον ‘τὸ ὀργίζεσθαι κίνησίς τις9 τοῦ τοιουδὶ σώματος ἢ μέρους ἢ δυνάμεως ὑπὸ τοῦδε ἕνεκα τοῦδε,’ καὶ διὰ ταῦτα ἤδη φυσικοῦ τὸ θεωρῆσαι περὶ ψυχῆς, ἢ πάσης ἢ τῆς τοιαύτης. διαφερόντως δ' ἂν ὁρίσαιντο ὁ φυσικὸς τε καὶ ὁ διαλεκτικὸς ἕκαστον αὐτῶν, οἷον ὀργὴ τί ἐστιν· ὁ μὲν γὰρ ὄρεξιν ἀντιλυπήσεως ἤ τι τοιοῦτον, ὁ δὲ ζέσιν τοῦ περὶ καρδίαν αἵματος καὶ θερμοῦ. τούτων δὲ ὁ μὲν τὴν ὕλην ἀποδίδωσιν, ὁ δὲ τὸ εἶδος καὶ τὸν λόγον).
Aristotle thinks that the movement that anger is should be described in terms of his four causes.10 e material cause is the blood (since the blood boils when one is angry), the efficient cause is an unspeci ed person, the formal cause is an active desire, and the nal
8 e text is controversial here. Codd. U and X, as well as emistius’s paraphrase (In DA . –) and Sophonias’s paraphrase (In DA . ), read ‘λόγοι ἔνυλοι.’ Codd. C and E read ‘ἐν ὕλῃ.’ My current point, as well as the argument of this chapter, do not depend on which reading we adopt. 9 I take it that this ‘τις’ is used in its more typical classificatory sense—‘a sort of’—rather than in the alienans sense—‘a sort-of-but-not-entirely.’ Some commentators, e.g., Christopher Shields (, n. ) and Myles Burnyeat (, ) think that the latter sense is in play in other parts of DA, most notably when Aristotle says that perception seems to be an ‘ἀλλοίωσίς τις’ (. , b, . , b). eir reason for thinking so is that Aristotle later denies that perception is properly thought of as an ἀλλοίωσις (. , a). at reason is not readily applicable to the passages I discuss. 10 I agree with Alan Code and Julius Moravcsik (, ) that in this passage ) “It is the anger itself that is the kinesis, not some underlying physiological state that can be speci ed independently of the other two factors (agent and purpose)” and ) “the boiling of the blood is not matter for the anger; rather, the boiling is a kinesis of blood, the blood being a part of the body, and hence matter.” ere is debate about both claims. It is crucial for my inclusion of the anger example as part of the motivation for my overall interpretation that anger itself is the kinêsis. ere are many aspects of the extensive literature on this passage of DA . that I will not be addressing. In particular, I do not intend to pronounce on the extent to which the matter and form of pathê are ‘pure’ or ‘inextricable.’ On this issue see the exchange between David Charles () and Victor Caston ().
cause is revenge.11,12 Since Aristotle thinks that active desire is itself a sort of movement (καὶ
ἡ ὄρεξις κίνησίς τίς ἐστιν, ἡ ἐνεργείᾳ) (DA . , b–),13 the proper de nition of anger
ts his general schema for de nitions of affections as follows:14 Anger is a movement of the faculty of desire (and a movement of the faculty of desire is itself an active desire)15 caused by an offender with revenge as its aim.
Aristotle likewise gives a hylomorphic analysis of a type of kinêsis in the Politics when he identi es the formal and material causes of metabasis (a change in political constitution). He urges a hylomorphic analysis of the state in general in . and talks about
11 Granted, these remarks occur in a dialectical section early on in the De anima, but there seem to be sufficient indicators in the surrounding context and later in that work that Aristotle indeed favors such an analysis. Furthermore, Aristotle says in Rhet. . , a– that anger is “a painful desire for vengeance.” ough this de nition lacks explicit reference to matter, I agree with R.D. Hicks () in seeing this as an abbreviated de nition in the same spirit as the one Aristotle gives at DA . , a– (“desire for revenge”). In these abbreviated forms, Aristotle is focusing on the formal and nal causes. ese are the de nitions in which he thinks the dialectician will be interested. e fuller form, which mentions matter, is of interest to the natural scientist. Ronald Polansky (, –) has an extensive discussion of the relationship between dialectical and physical de nitions as it plays out in this passage. 12 Polansky () aptly expresses the relevance I see for this passage: “Other emotions and most likely other affections of the soul should be similarly de ned. An affection is a motion in genus, and the rest of the de nition—of some sort, of something, by something, for the sake of something—supplies the difference. e sort of motion is the form, that which is in motion is the substratum, what gives rise to the motion is the moving cause, and that for the sake of which is the nal cause” (). 13 Here I follow the OCT, though as Hicks () notes there is disagreement about how the text should read. He makes a conjecture deriving from ‘Philoponus’ (In DA . and . ; I resort to inverted commas to mark the fact that whether Philoponus is the author of this section of the surviving commentary on De anima is disputed) and cod. E, to the effect that orexis is a kinêsis or (ἢ) an energeia. Polansky (, ) also reads ‘ἢ’ instead of the OCT’s ‘ἡ.’ It does not much matter for my project which reading is adopted, but the OCT provides a slightly shorter argumentative route. 14 Michael Wedin (, ) stresses the importance of observing that what Aristotle gives in a– is a general schema with anger as the example, and the lines following focus more speci cally on anger. 15 Recall that Aristotle says at Metaph. Θ , b– that one way of being an actuality is to stand “as movement to potentiality,” and the other is to stand “as substance to a sort of matter.” In the DA passage under discussion, he is saying that active desire is an actuality of the former type, namely a movement of the faculty of desire.
how various sorts of causes are involved in metabasis in . –. Aristotle here announces that he will consider the causes of rebellions and changes in constitution. He lists three causes: ) how those rebelling are disposed, ) that for the sake of which they are thus disposed, and ) the starting-points of political disturbances and rebellions. He clari es () as follows:
One must suppose that the most universal cause of being somehow disposed (ἔχειν πως) with respect to change in constitution is the one of which we have in fact already spoken. For those who desire (ἐφιέμενοι) equality rebel if they think (νομίζωσιν) that they have less despite being equal to those who have more, but those who desire inequality and superiority rebel if they suppose (ὑπολαμβάνωσιν) that despite being unequal they do not have more but equal or less. It is possible to desire (ὀρέγεσθαι) these justly or unjustly. For those who are lesser rebel so as (ὅπως) to be equal, and those who are equal so as (ὅπως) to be greater. How those who rebel are disposed (πῶς ἔχοντες στασιάζουσιν) has now been said (a–).
e idea here is that determining whether the rebels desire equality or inequality is crucial to determining what kind of rebellion and change in constitution is afoot, for example whether it is democratic or oligarchic in character. is is different from identifying the goals the rebellion aims to achieve or the factors that precipitate the rebellion, which Aristotle discusses in the immediately subsequent sections. e disposition of those who rebel, in particular whether they desire equality or inequality, is thus more appropriately described as a formal cause than as a nal or efficient cause.
We see dispositions put to similar use in describing a kinêsis at EE /NE . ,
b–:
e starting-point for the investigation is whether the enkratic and akratic are distinguished by what they are concerned with or by how they are disposed (ὥς ἔχοντες), viz., whether the akratic is akratic only by being concerned with certain things, or rather by how he is disposed, or by both.
Here Aristotle proposes to elucidate akratic and enkratic action by determining whether those who act akratically and enkratically are distinguished by their objects or by their dispositions (i.e., ways of being related to such objects).16 e disposition distinctive of the weak akratic,17 he tells us, is deciding not to pursue a certain pleasure but then pursuing it anyway (b–). at is to say, the weak akratic's way of being related to a particular pleasure is formally de ned with reference at least in part to his decision. His disposition is a formal cause of acting akratically rather than self-indulgently, for example.
ese passages from DA, Politics, and NE suggest the following chart: kinêsis anger change in constitution action
Material cause blood citizens body
Formal cause desire rebels’ dispositions desire/decision
Final cause revenge pro t/honor [some goal]
16 One might object that here Aristotle is not talking about akratic and enkratic action, but rather about akratic and enkratic agents, and that this fact minimizes the relevance of this passage for my current project. However, it is worth keeping in mind that Aristotle thinks that states of character inherit many of their properties and individuation conditions from the corresponding action types. See NE . , a–, for example. 17 I will discuss the distinction between the weak akratic and the impetuous akratic, as well as say more about Aristotle’s discussion of akrasia in general, in chapter .
Building on this model, my proposal is that Aristotle countenances four causes of human action: e agent’s body is the material cause, an active psychological item (for example, desire or decision) is the formal cause, the goal is the nal cause, and, as I will soon argue, the agent as a self-mover actualizing a particular potentiality is the efficient cause.18 While Aristotle never explicitly announces that he has a four-causal view of locomotion and action (if he had then there would be much less for those interested in
Aristotle’s philosophy of action to do), there are texts that support the idea that Aristotle was concerned with each of these causes in explaining locomotive self-movement and action. is is what we would expect in light of Aristotle’s claim that self-movements, including actions, are kinêseis, and thus situated in the domain of natural phenomena. In fact, it would be surprising if Aristotle were not interested in referring locomotion and action to his theory of the four causes, for this would imply that he thinks they are not properly studied by the natural scientist.19 So, a tting task for the interpreter is to spell out
18 ere is some difference between the way that desire counts as a formal cause of anger and the way it counts as a formal cause of action. Aer all, action is not a type of desire, whereas anger is. However, I think that desire is a formal cause in both cases because Aristotle thinks that there are different, though related, ways of being a formal cause. One way of being a formal cause is to be the account of the essence, another way is to be part of the de nition, and a third is to be a paradigm (Phys. . , 4b–). In the case of anger, desire is the account of the essence. In the case of action, it is a part of the de nition and a paradigm. I will explain these further in the next section, but for now I will say this: De nitions have two parts, a material part and a formal part (Metaph. Ζ , a–). e material part of the de nition of action is a kinêsis, and the formal part is a desire, decision, or some other active psychological item. us, we can de ne weak akratic action, for example, as a kinêsis in accordance with an appetite for base pleasures and against a decision to abstain from such pleasures. What I have listed as the material cause in the case of anger, blood, is the material part of the de nition of anger, whereas what I have listed as the material cause in the case of action, body, is the material cause of the entity to which the de nition applies, namely the biological substance. 19 To be sure, natural science is not the only sort of science that studies action, for Aristotle; practical science is obviously concerned with the nature of action.
how Aristotle’s remarks about locomotion and action are referred to his four-causal framework.
. e four causes in action explanations
.. Material Cause
NE . , a– and MA , a– suggest that action has crucially to do with moving the instrumental parts (τὰ ὀργανικὰ μέρη). ese presumably include, whether or not they are limited to, parts of one’s body.20 is is in keeping with Aristotle’s general idea in Phys., DA, and MA that the body is what is moved in cases of self-motion. e body counts as a material cause for action because it is the locus of potentiality and what persists through and underlies change while action is occurring. It is important to note that we should not take the material cause to be the body moving or being affected in a particular way. is is because a particular process or state of the body is an actuality, which cannot be the locus of potentiality or what persists through and underlies change. If one takes the material cause to be the body moving in a particular way, one will be tempted to ask how this movement relates to the movement that is action. e two most obvious answers to this question are that the action is the bodily movement or that it is something other than
20 If actions can extend beyond the body, for instance if a laser-pointer counts for purposes of action as something like an extension of one’s arm, I would be comfortable extending the notion of material cause beyond the body to accommodate such examples. I here speak for the sake of simplicity as if actions do not extend beyond the body.
the bodily movement. e rst answer would entail that the material cause of the action is identical with that of which it is the material cause, namely the action itself. e second answer would give one the task of spelling out what kind of movement the action is, if not a bodily one. Given these issues, it seems best to say that the material cause of action is the body rather than a movement of the body.
.. Efficient Cause
Aristotle thinks that locomotive movements, including actions, have a starting- point (archê). Aristotle speaks of starting-points of many things, for example in Metaph. Δ
: a road has its starting-point in each of two directions, a house has its starting point in its foundation, a child has his starting point in his parents, and a demonstration has its starting point in its hypotheses. Some of these things have a starting-point of motion (ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς
κινήσεως). For example, a father is such a starting point of his child. In such cases, it seems reasonable enough to translate ‘ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς κινήσεως’ and related formulae as ‘efficient cause,’21 for such formulae identify the fact that A (the father) counts as the starting-point of B (the child) in a moving way.
We might be tempted to think that, at least in contexts of locomotion and action, it is always appropriate to translate ‘ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς κινήσεως’ and related formulae as ‘efficient cause.’ e problem arises when we recognize that even just in these contexts Aristotle calls
21 Examples of such formulae include ‘ὅθεν ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς κινήσεως,’ ‘ὅθεν πρῶτον ἡ κίνησις,’ and ‘ὅθεν ἡ κίνησις.’
several categorically different things starting-points of motion: substances (EE . , b–
), capacities (Metaph. Δ , a–), decisions (EE /NE . , a–), goals (MA ,
b–), skills (Metaph. Δ , a–), God (EE . , a–), nature (Phys. . ,
b–), a point at rest (MA , b–), the heart (MA , a–), and even the up, the right, and the front (DC . , b–, IA , a–a).22 is ‘too many movers problem’ seems twofold. First, there appears to be a multiplicity of starting-points of motion for one motion, and second, these starting-points of one motion are of diverse
Aristotelian categories. ese thus look like competing causal explanations of the same thing, and so we must seek an explanation of how they might be related to one another.23,
24
I want to suggest a principled way to determine when we should understand a starting-point of motion as an efficient cause of motion in contexts of action. My proposal is that we should employ the following two-step procedure: First, we should look to the
22 One might be tempted to think that formulae that include ‘whence’ (‘ὅθεν’) will always indicate an efficient cause, even if ‘ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς κινήσεως’ need not. omas Tuozzo () evidently has this idea. He says that “the expressions [of ‘archê tês kinêseôs’] including the directional word “from where” (hothen) seem always to refer to the efficient cause” (). I think that DC . , b– and MA , b– give cause to doubt this claim. 23 A somewhat similar interpretive problem is posed by Aristotle’s remark at Phys. . , 4b that “man and the sun beget a man” (ἄνθρωπος γὰρ ἄνθρωπον γεννᾷ καὶ ἥλιος). We are le to wonder about how the sun counts as a begetter, and whether Aristotle here commits himself to some sort of causal over- determination. Whatever solution we might devise to this interpretive problem will not necessarily be applicable to the problem I intend to treat in this chapter, since the latter is concerned squarely with contexts of action and the former may not be, and the former mentions only substances rather than things of different categories. 24 I am not here concerned to problematize the idea that psychological items, capacities, and goals could be efficient causes of some process or other relevant to action, but rather the idea that they are efficient causes of the process that is action.
examples that Aristotle uses when distinguishing the efficient cause from the other three causes, and second to how he appeals to these very examples in elucidating the nature of action.
At Phys. . , b– and Metaph. Δ , a–, Aristotle gives his canonical distinction between the efficient cause and the other three causes: “Next is the primary starting-point of change or stability, for example the deliberator is a cause, and the father is a cause of his child, and generally the maker is the cause of the thing made and the changing thing of the thing that is being changed.” At Metaph. Δ , a– he distinguishes the efficient-causal sort of archê from other sorts of archê: “at non- constituent from which a thing rst arises, and from which the movement or the change naturally rst begins, as for example a child comes from the father and the mother, and a
ght from abusive language.” We can see that in characterizing the efficient cause, Aristotle leans heavily on examples of substances. In fact, substances are the only examples of entities that make explicit appearance both in these aforementioned passages25 and in Aristotle’s clari cations of the nature of action. Aristotle is particularly fond of the example of parents
25 I do not need to claim that substances are the only examples that gure in these aforementioned passages. Aer all, one of Aristotle’s examples is of a ght coming from abusive language. As will become clear later, however, I think that this example is more fully described as follows: “A is the cause of the ght between A and B insofar as A actualizes his potential for verbally abusing B.” (Further description may need to be given of the effect, i.e., the ght, too.) At this stage of my argument, though, all I need is the claim that substances are the common factor in the canonical descriptions of the efficient cause as contrasted with the three others and in passages where Aristotle causally clari es the nature of action.
and children. Here are three instances in which Aristotle appeals to that example in contexts of action or self-motion:
) All substances are by nature starting-points of a sort, and that is why each one is capable of generating many others of the same kind, for example a human can generate humans, and in general an animal can generate animals and a plant plants.26 But in addition to these things a human is, alone among animals, also a starting-point of certain actions; for we would not say that any of the other animals acts. e starting-points that are of this sort, whence movements rst arise (ὅθεν πρῶτον αἱ κινήσεις), are called ‘controlling,’ most rightly so in the case of things whose results cannot be otherwise, as perhaps where God is a starting-point (EE . , b–).
) Or ought we now to dispute the things that have been said, and to say that man is neither a starting-point nor a begetter of actions as of children? (NE . , b–).
) For the what and the that for the sake of which are one, and that whence movement rst arises (τὸ ὅθεν ἡ κίνησις πρῶτον) is the same as these in species; for a human generates a human—and generally as many things as move while being moved (Phys. . , a–).
It is also telling that roughly the same formula that Aristotle uses when describing the efficient cause, ‘the primary starting-point of change or stability’ (ὅθεν ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς
μεταβολῆς ἡ πρώτη ἢ τῆς ἠρεμήσεως), is used to refer to the sort of starting-point that is in substances (Phys. . , b– and b–). It is easy to see why if substances are the efficient causes of their own self-motion, for Aristotle.
I have been claiming that there is prima facie evidence that Aristotle thinks that substances are the efficient causes of their own self-motion, and that there should therefore
26 is generating emphasis is also present, for example, in GA . , a–, where the begetter is called “ὅθεν ἡ κίνησις.”
be a presumption in favor of translating ‘starting-point of motion’ (‘ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς κινήσεως’) and related formulae as ‘efficient cause of motion’ in contexts of action only when they refer to substances. Whether we should accept this claim, though, will ultimately depend on how much sense it can help us make of Aristotle’s texts, and how much philosophical fruit it bears.
e prima facie evidence I have just given will need signi cant unpacking. I want now to explain how substances could be the efficient causes of actions, on Aristotle’s view.
e brief version of this explanation is that some substances are self-movers; actions are a particular sort of self-motion; to be an efficient cause of an action in the relevant sense is to be engaged in that process of self-motion; to be engaged in that process of self-motion is to actualize a rational, teleologically-speci ed dunamis (potentiality); and actualizing such a rational dunamis formal-causally requires the teleologically-sensitive activity of active psychological items like desire or decision. Spelling this out will require saying something about motion in general in Phys. . –, self-motion in Phys. , and dunamis (potentiality) and energeia (actuality) in Metaph. Θ.
Aristotle says that “motion is the actualization of the potential qua such” (Phys. .
, a–). For the process that is motion to occur, what is actually F must bring what is potentially F into actuality. is is in some way the same process as what is potentially F being brought into actuality by what is actually F (Phys. . , a–, Metaph. Θ ,
a–). Aristotle indicates through examples that the processes are numerically
identical but different in de nition (Phys. . , b–), like the interval between and and the interval between and , the incline and the decline, the road from ebes to
Athens and the road from Athens to ebes.27 is is presumably because actuality and potentiality are the same in the sense of belonging to one and the same thing, but not in the sense of being the same in essence (Phys. . , b–, Metaph. Η , b–). If the actuality itself were the same as the potentiality itself, what it is to teach would be the same as what it is to learn, and the teacher would always be learning in virtue of teaching.
ere is a question about that with which the process of motion itself is strictly identical. I endorse a view derived from Simplicius (In Phys. . –. ) and Aquinas
(In Phys. lib. , . , n. ), and apparently taken up by W.D. Ross (, ), each of whom is commenting on Phys. . , b–. It is that there is one motion with two elements, and the motion is not identical with either element. Rather, each is an element of the same motion. As will become clear, this squares with my general view of self-motion as follows:
ere is one motion with two elements, and one self-mover with two elements. e self- mover’s relationship to the motion is that of efficient cause.
Aristotle thinks that a certain sort of substance, namely an animal, is capable of self- motion. He is emphatic that the animal moves itself as a whole (Phys. . , b–, b–
27 is interpretation follows the general approach found in Simplicius In Phys. . –. , . –, . –. , and . –, as well as in Aquinas In Phys. lib. , . , nn. – and lib. , . , n. . eir approaches differ somewhat in the details of their descriptions of how the elements in Aristotle’s examples are different in de nition.
, . , a–), though to be clear, an animal does not impart motion as a whole, nor is it moved per se as a whole (Phys. . , a–).28, 29 is is because motion requires that what is in actuality must bring what is in potentiality into actuality, and the same thing cannot be both actual and potential at the same time in the same respect (Phys. . , a–
). Aristotle thinks that some sort of division into ‘parts’ is necessary, such that one ‘part’ imparts motion and another is moved per se (Phys. . , b–), and the ‘part’ imparting motion is moved accidentally (Phys. . , b–, DA . , a–).30 e ‘parts’ must be distinct in some nuanced way (Phys. . , b–). ey cannot be unquali edly separate, for that would entail falsely that they are capable of independent existence (DA .
, a–). Likewise, they cannot be spatially separate, for the part imparting motion is not spatially located in its own right at all (Phys. . , b–). Rather, they are different in de nition, as we saw above that actuality and potentiality are.31 Metaph. Η , b–
28 Aquinas puts these points particularly clearly at In Phys. lib. , . , n. . 29 Benjamin Morison (, ) argues that this latter is the reason why Aristotle would say that “We must grasp the fact, therefore, that animals move themselves only with one kind of change, and that they do not move themselves with this kind of change strictly speaking, for the cause is not from the animal itself” (Phys. b–, Morison’s translation with re-punctuation of the OCT). Morison says that animals fail the ‘strictly speaking’ condition not because something external causes their motion, but rather because one part of them imparts motion and another part is moved. is may be right, though one alternative that Morison does not consider is that animals may fail the ‘strictly speaking’ condition because something external is in some way causally relevant to their motion. 30 Aristotle argues that the part imparting motion cannot be moved per se. For more on why Aristotle makes this strong impossibility claim rather than the weaker factive claim, see Christopher Shields (). 31 ere are presumably multiple ways of being different in de nition, and the ‘parts’ of a self-mover need not be different in de nition in precisely the same way that, for example, the incline and the decline are. Perhaps the right way to characterize the sort of distinction in de nition at issue with the ‘parts’ of a self- mover is as what Aquinas and Scotus later call a “real minor” (realis minor) distinction. is sort of distinction assumes irreducible complexity but restricts this complexity to one entity. In the case of the incline and the decline, there seems to be no real distinction, but rather only a conceptual distinction. If this is correct, then
gives us the explanation of why: Matter and form are related to one another as potentiality and actuality are, and the latter are somehow one.32 In this way, a hylomorphic substance is a natural unity (see also Metaph. Θ , a–).
For Aristotle, animals are hylomorphic substances, and they count as self-movers because the soul (the animal’s form) is in actuality, but the matter is in potentiality.33 As argued above, the form and matter of a hylomorphic substance are separable only in de nition and likewise for the actuality and potentiality to which they correspond.34 e substance’s form is said to move (transitive) because it is the actuality imparting actuality to the potential. e substance’s matter is said to be moved because it is the potentiality being actualized in movement.35
Since the process of self-movement (which like motion in general has two elements,
A actualizing B and B being actualized by A) is engaged in by self-movers as a whole (since
A and B are the two elements of self-movers), we should think of self-movement as the process in which self-movers are engaged as a whole. is squares with Aristotle’s explicit
Aristotle would be pitching the analogy at the level of difference in de nition, and not at the more ne- grained level of speci c ways of being different in de nition. 32 ere is, of course, signi cant disagreement about the way in which they are one, with signi cant consequences for Aristotle’s philosophy of mind. Charles (), Nussbaum (), and Shields () among others, give in uential and sharply contrasting views. My argument in this chapter is independent of this disagreement. 33 Indeed Phys. . , b– and . , a– indicate that the way in which an animal as a whole counts as a self-mover is by having mover and moved parts that are somehow distinct. 34 ey meet Aristotle’s requirement that mover and moved be in contact because they are in contact in an extended sense that does not involve discrete magnitudes. For examples of such a sense, see Metaph. Θ , b and Λ .b. 35 It is interesting that Aristotle criticizes his predecessors’ accounts of self-motion precisely on the grounds that they give insufficiently subtle descriptions of the union of soul and body (DA . , b–).
contention: “It is most clear that the self-mover moves (transitive) in the strictest sense in the locomotive way” (Phys. . , a–). I further claim that to be engaged in this process of self-motion is to be the efficient cause of that process, and that no other relationship to the process of self-movement would qualify as being an efficient cause of it. is is the sense of efficient cause, I contend, that is at issue in passages (), (), and () above (EE . ,
b–, NE . , b–, and Phys. . , a–).
We might be tempted to reject this characterization of an efficient cause of self- movement because of an assumption that efficient causes are essentially productive. Recall that a productive efficient cause is such that its causal activity is wholly distinct from its effect. But, as I argued in chapter , Aristotle does not share this assumption. With this assumption ruled out, the primary obstacle to my argument in this sub-section has been removed. is argument has been that self-movers are the efficient causes of their self- movements not by producing something wholly distinct from their causal activity, but rather by engaging in that activity. I will now say more about how the process of self- movement, as the subject of which a self-moving substance counts as an efficient cause of its locomotive movements, unfolds. As we have seen, motion in general is the actualization of the potential qua such. So far, this identi es only the broad type of potentiality at issue.
One of Aristotle’s projects in Metaph. Θ is to say more about the content of this potentiality and the conditions under which it can be actualized. One possibility, suggested by Stephen
Makin (), is to specify the content of potentialities teleologically: “We attribute to the
oak a capacity to produce acorns, rather than a capacity to produce wood knots, because it is the production of acorns which is good for an oak tree, and contributes to the ourishing of the species” (). On such a proposal, substances’ potentialities would get their identity and individuation conditions from some particular good for the substance. is good would also be part of the speci cation of the corresponding actuality.
e current proposal can also help us describe the conditions under which potentialities are exercised. ere are two broad classes of potentialities which Aristotle describes in Metaph. Θ: non-rational potentialities and rational potentialities. Non-rational potentialities are actualized “whenever the agent and the patient are together so as to be capable, the former acts and the latter is acted upon” (Θ , a–). Rational potentialities are not like this, for they require something else in addition to determine when they are actualized (Θ , a). Aristotle says that they require “desire or decision” (Θ , a).
It is not clear whether these are supposed to be exhaustive or whether they are only examples. What matters for now is to identify the way in which such things as desire or decision determine when a rational potentiality is actualized.
e predominant view is that active desire or decision efficient-causally determines when (viz., at or during what time) the potentiality is actualized. My view is that active desire or decision formal-causally makes there be a determinate fact about when (viz., at or during what time), and partially constitutes the conditions under which, the potentiality counts as being actualized. I will explain this further in the next section.
.. Formal Cause and Final Cause
I will contend in this section that, for Aristotle, active psychological items like desire and decision formal-causally make there be a determinate fact about the time at or during which, and partially constitute the conditions under which, rational potentialities count as being actualized. If an action is a process that consists in the actualization of a rational potentiality,36 active psychological items will be formal causes of action, as they are of affections like anger.37
Before proceeding with a detailed explanation of formal causes of action, I should note that some of Aristotle’s commentators have made tantalizing suggestions in this connection. For example, Averroes, commenting on . , b–, says that desire is the form of the body in motion,38 and Aquinas seems to construe objects of intellect as the formal causes of action.39 While neither Averroes nor Aquinas articulates what I am calling
‘the four-causal interpretation,’ I think it is worth noting that the idea of a formal cause of action is not a new one.40
36 is is intentionally ambiguous between ‘is de ned as a process…’ and ‘is an example of a process…,’ in keeping with Aristotle’s own lack of clarity about, for example, what sorts of living things have rational potentialities and whether ‘desire or decision’ in Metaph. Θ , a is an exhaustive disjunction. 37 See the discussion of DA . in section . 38 Magnum in DA comm. , –. 39 ST I-II, q. , a. c. e idea is that the object of the act, grasped by the intellect, determines not whether the actualization of a potentiality takes place or not, but rather determines what sort of actualization it is (for example, seeing white rather than seeing black). 40 More recently, Natali () has argued for formal causality in the theory of action, but of a very different kind than that which I am proposing. He thinks that actions are actualities (energeiai) composed of movements (kinêseis), but are not identical with the sum of those movements. Rather, the action stands as form to the individual movements that are its matter. is account is strikingly similar to Michael
Now I shall move on to the details. If, as discussed above, the content of potentialities should be speci ed teleologically, then to count as actualizing the potentiality at all one must be actively sensitive to the good in a particular way. We can think of this activity of being actively sensitive to the good as, say, active desire or decision, which are themselves kinêseis.41 Or perhaps put more weakly, since sensitivity to the goal is necessary for counting as actualizing a rational potentiality at all, and desire or decision is necessary for sensitivity to the goal, desire or decision is necessary for counting as actualizing a rational potentiality at all.42 Depending on the content of the desire or decision, one could be actualizing the potentiality in one way or in the contrary way. But with no desire or decision, one fails to control the movement that is action because one fails to actualize a rational potentiality at all.
is account explains why it is that whenever someone acts for his good, it is no accident that he does what he does in the way that is good for him.43 It does so by making a certain sort of sensitivity to the good (for example, active desire or decision) partially
ompson’s () purportedly neo-Aristotelian theory. ompson is apparently not aware of Natali’s view, though. 41 See DA . , b–. If active desire and decision are themselves kinêseis, one might wonder whether they are in turn actualities of rational potentialities, and then whether they require something else to determine whether the potentiality gets actualized. We can stop this regress by saying that desiring or deciding just is our natural sensitivity to the good, though it can be guided and speci ed through habituation and re ective adjustment. 42 is largely echoes David Charles (a, –). However, Charles is more inclined than I am to describe the role of desire or decision in efficient-causal terms. 43 Charles (a) assigns great importance to this non-accidentality. It is, aer all, in keeping with the spirit of Aristotle’s argument for nal causes in Phys. . . ere, Aristotle says that nal causes are needed to explain good-related regularities. In the context of rational potentialities, intentional objects are needed to explain the evident good-related regularities of movements.
constitutive of the actuality of a rational potentiality. It gives active desire or decision the crucial role in explaining how the goal is a per se cause, rather than an accidental cause, of our action. e goal would not be the per se cause unless one actively desired or decided.
Without actively desiring or deciding, one could be moving, but this movement would be only accidentally related to any particular goal. An agent controls his movements in accordance with his desire or decision.44 His movements are thus structured by the active desire or decision, ordered in light of the goal to which they are sensitive. So, there are two reasons that Aristotle says at Metaph. Θ , a– that desire or decision is “that which determines” (τὸ κύριον). First, the active desire or decision makes it determinate whether a certain rational potentiality counts as being actualized or not. Second, we are controllers of our actions at least partially in virtue of guiding the process of action in accordance with our active desire or decision.
Correspondingly, psychological items like active desire and decision count as formal causes for Aristotle in two related senses. First, they are principles of unity for bodily movements since one controls one’s actions in accordance with them. Such a formal cause is a paradigm, as Aristotle says at Phys. . , b–, not in the sense of an un-instantiated
Form, but rather as that in accordance with which one acts in a determinate way by neither
44 A formal cause is the right sort of thing in accordance with which to control one’s movements. is is perhaps why Philoponus (In Phys. . –) refers to the formal cause in Aristotle’s canonical exposition in Physics . as “that in accordance with which”: “καλεῖ δὲ τὴν μὲν ὕλην ἐξ οὗ, τὸ δὲ εἶδος καθ' ὅ, τὸ δὲ ποιητικὸν αἴτιον ὅθεν ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς κινήσεως, τὸ δὲ τελικὸν δι' ὅ.”
overrunning nor falling short of the paradigm, and as what determines when one who is acting in accordance with it has achieved the goal and can stop acting.45 For example, a house-builder performs the action of house-building when she builds in accordance with her desire or decision, which in turn has as its intentional object the goal of building a good house. is goal is simultaneously characteristic of the action of house-building and essential to the house-builder’s desire or decision being the desire or decision that it is. For this reason, the house-builder would not be performing the action of house-building unless her desire or decision to build a good house is what serves as the paradigm for her activity of building. If she were to move wood and bricks around without desiring or deciding to do so, she would be doing so unintentionally, and then she could not very well be said to be the per se efficient cause of house-building. Since her desire or decision has as its intentional object the goal of building a good house, this desire or decision serves as a standard in light of which one can assess how the activity is going and adjust performance in accordance with the standard. e house-builder can take stock: “Have I built what I decided to build? Almost. I must press on.”
A second way in which psychological items like active desire and decision count as formal causes is that they are partially constitutive of the actuality of a rational potentiality,
45 is sense of ‘paradigm’ is explained by Philoponus in his comments on the aforementioned lines of the Physics (In Phys. . –), and by Alexander of Aphrodisias in his comments on the parallel passage at Metaph. Δ . a– (In Metaph. . –). Simplicius quotes a passage from Alexander’s commentary on the Physics, a work that has since been lost, that indicates that Alexander’s remarks on Phys. . , b– were similar to his remarks on Metaph. Δ , a– (In Phys. . –. ).
viz., part of the logos (formula, account) of the action. A part of a logos counts as a formal cause according to Phys. . , b–. Here Aristotle uses the example of the octave without giving many clues about its applicability, but we learn from other passages that a part of a logos is a part implied in the de nition of the species form (Phys. . , a–,
Metaph. Ζ , a–, and Ζ , a–).46 For example, ‘’ and ‘’ are parts of the de nition of the species form ‘musical ratio of :,’ and ‘rational’ and ‘mortal’ are parts of the de nition of the species form ‘rational mortal animal.’ Likewise, on the view I am proposing ‘appetite’ and ‘decision’ are parts of the de nition of the species form ‘action in accordance with appetite for base bodily pleasures and against decision’ (weak akratic action), and are thus formal causes of akratic action.47
So, the view I have been articulating is that psychological items like desire and decision count as formal causes of action in two ways: as paradigm and as part of the logos.
We control our actions in accordance with and with reference to active psychological items, proceeding toward their intentional objects. ese psychological items serve as part of the
46 Alexander (In Metaph. . –) and Simplicius (In Phys. . –. ) highlight the connections between Phys. . , b– and Aristotle’s focus on de nition particularly well. 47 One might suppose that the following is a problem for my view. While raising an aporia in Metaph. Β , Aristotle claims that pathê, kinêseis, and logoi, among other predicables, are not substances and do not count as “some this” (b–). But if they are not substances and do not count as “some this,” how can they be determinate in the way that would allow us to speak of de nitions or parts of them, as my view requires? ere is good reason to think that this is not much of a worry. It is well known that Aristotle is perfectly willing to speak of parts of logoi, for example throughout Metaph. Ζ. e reason is that while he thinks that pathê, kinêseis, and logoi do not have de nitions in the simple and strict sense (like a substance would), he thinks that they do in a secondary and limited sense (Metaph. Ζ , a–). Aristotle evidently thinks that the limited sense is sufficiently interesting to warrant signi cant philosophical investigation, and I think that it is sufficiently interesting for purposes of this chapter.
speci cation of the success conditions for action in that they render determinate when our rational potentiality counts as being actualized. Since on Aristotle’s view something must have a formal cause to have determinate existence, actions must be in accordance with some active psychological item or other. us, every action will be intentional in the weak sense that it has as its formal cause an active desire, decision, etc.48 is does not entail that every action will be intentional in a stronger sense, for example deliberately decided.
.. Distinctively human action
Having described what the four causes of action are according to the four-causal view, I will now say how the interpretation handles Aristotle’s remarks about distinctively human action in his ethical works.49 It is crucial to focus on these remarks because Aristotle limits ‘action’ in the strict sense to mature humans, since they alone are “already acting on the basis of reasoning” (ΕΕ . , a–). is does not immediately clarify his restriction, though I will address later why it is important. Fortunately, we have a related bit of more tractable information: He says that animals and children cannot act akratically because they lack the right sorts of active psychological items (EE /NE . , b–) to be
48 Jennifer Whiting (, ) thinks, following DA . , b–, that every instance of locomotion is intentional, viz., for an end and accompanied by imagination and desire. Whiting says in n. that merely being for an end would be too weak a condition, for nutritional processes would meet this condition. To engage in locomotion an organism must be connected to the end by active psychological items. If this is the correct interpretation of DA . , b– then the result of the four-causal approach mentioned above squares well with Aristotle’s contention. 49 As Corcilius and Rapp () emphasize, Aristotle’s discussions of human action in his ethical works locate action within the framework of natural scienti c explanation, but also insist that it is impossible fully to characterize what sort of action one is performing without answering distinctively ethical questions. To get the full story about human action, we must be engaged in natural science and practical science.
capable of the internal con ict that akratics and enkratics experience (EE . , a–).
One acts akratically “in virtue of having contrary impulses within himself” (EE . , a–
) and in accordance with appetite for base pleasures instead of decision or belief that one ought to abstain from such pleasures.50 is indicates that the formal causes of movements are important for determining whether they count as actions and what sort of actions they are.51
Aristotle thinks that the capacity to perform full-blown actions requires the capacity to decide deliberately, which animals lack. is capacity is or involves the deliberative capacity. Having this capacity is part of having rationality (which at least involves the capacity for reasoning, mentioned at EE . , a–, a passage which explains why animals and children cannot perform full-blown actions). e key is that having rationality transforms the rest of one’s motivational apparatus.52 is is why the
50 In this chapter I speak primarily of Aristotle’s weak akratics, but in chapter I will say a bit more about his impetuous akratics, who “aer deliberating do not stand by the things about which they deliberated because of passion’ (EE /NE . , b–). 51 is feature of my view has important rami cations for the debate about whether Aristotle has a doctrine of distinctively moral responsibility or rather a doctrine of causal responsibility. e former is the position of Terence Irwin (). Cooper () advocates the latter. My view may permit an intermediate position that captures desirable features of both. It differs from Irwin's in that he thinks one’s attitudes need make a difference only to responsibility and not to the occurrence and individuation of the action (–), whereas I think they make a difference to the action, too, because they are its formal causes. My view differs from Cooper's in that he thinks responsibility for action is a matter of efficient causation, whereas I think that other sorts of causes are also relevant. So, I think responsibility is causal, but morally relevant factors are to be found among the causes, and so there's a sense in which it counts as distinctively moral responsibility, too. Proper development of such a view, and adequate attention to the arguments of Irwin, Cooper, and others who have weighed in on this issue, for example Susan Sauvé Meyer (), must await another occasion. 52 An extended argument for a “transformative view” of rationality and against “additive views” of rationality is to be found in Matthew Boyle (forthcoming). According to additive views, rationality is tacked on, as it were, to lower capacities. Transformative views see rationality as coloring the functioning of lower
range of psychological items that can be formal causes of full-blown-actions can be wider than deliberative decision itself. Even if appetitive desire is the formal cause of my eating cake, the way I appetitively desire is different from the way a non-human animal appetitively desires, and so the appetitive desire itself is not the whole story. For I have rationality and it transforms even my appetitive desires. For example, I can conceptualize the object of my desire, or could at least in principle deliberate about whether the desire is worth satisfying, whereas an animal cannot. In addition, it is in principle possible for my appetitive desires to become integrated with my reason, whereas this is not possible for non-human animals.53 Such integration is at least in part a matter of one’s appetitive desires being in accordance with right reason, rather than merely being overruled or silenced.
Furthermore, their being in accordance with right reason is not merely accidental; rather, having practical wisdom makes it the case that one’s appetitive desires reliably have good intentional objects.54 e temperate person’s desires and reason are integrated in this way,
capacities in important ways. Fernandez () and Whiting () urge transformative interpretations of Aristotle. e part of this view that I am most concerned to adopt is the idea that once an animal has nous its desires will have a more complicated structure than do those of other animals possessed of desires. See Whiting (, ). Lloyd Gerson () urges a transformative interpretation of Plato. 53 Paula Gottlieb () argues that this sort of integration between desires and reason is what Aristotle means to pick out when he uses “μετὰ τοῦ ὀρθοῦ λόγου,” e.g., at EE /NE . , b. I repeat her description of this sort of integration in the following lines of the main text. 54 Gottlieb says that “To be in a state which is meta...logou requires not just mastering the impulses of the non-rational part of the soul so that one's rational desire wins out, but being in a state which causes one to have those non-rational impulses in such a way that they do not con ict with what reason prescribes (cf. EE II b - )” (, ellipses in original). Perhaps appealing to formal causes helps in further describing this integration in the causal terms that Gottlieb appears to favor. For appetitive desires to be integrated with reason might be for all of the parts of one’s soul to be informed by practical wisdom. When one’s capacities are informed in this way, the actualizations of those capacities, namely active psychological items, will be directed toward good goals. In turn, these active psychological items will inform one’s actions, which will
whereas those of the enkratic and akratic are not. So, while it is true to say that a non- human animal cannot be the appetitively desiring kind of cause of full-blown-actions, it is also true to say that I can be.
So far I have been describing Aristotle’s view about the cause of actions in general.
I have not yet addressed his extensive and intricate discussion of what it takes to be a voluntary cause of actions. Now I will brie y say how in general my interpretation as outlined above ts with it. At the most general level, I think that for Aristotle one counts as a voluntary cause of her action when her action has formal causes of a certain kind.
Identifying the sort of formal cause at issue is the task Aristotle undertakes in EE . –. He spends much of . and the beginning of . arguing that the voluntary cannot be demarcated solely in terms of being in accordance with (kata) desire or decision, and then makes the conditional claim that “If it was necessary for the voluntary to be one of these three, namely what accords either with desire or decision or thought, and it is not one of the rst two, it remains for the voluntary to be found in acting with thought in some way”
(. , a–). Now, ‘some sort of action based on thought’ (ἐν τῷ διανοούμενόν πως
πράττειν) must not be stronger than ‘in accordance with thought’ (κατὰ διάνοιαν) if
Aristotle’s inference here is to be valid. Indeed, I take it to indicate roughly that whenever one acts voluntarily, thought is somehow involved in the speci cation of the formal cause
thus be performed in the virtue-involving way rather than merely in accordance with what virtuous people do. Full articulation of such a view, which requires an in-depth analysis of Aristotle’s discussion of practical wisdom, must await another occasion.
of the action. It should not mean anything as strong as that when one acts voluntarily one acts in accordance with thought as opposed to in accordance with appetitive desire, for example. Aer all, the akratic acts voluntarily and in accordance with appetitive desire.
ought should be involved in the speci cation of the formal cause of the action to a weaker degree, which will be clearer soon.55
Aristotle next tells us that forced actions are involuntary (. , a–), as are actions done because one is ignorant (. , b).56 In the case of actions done because one is ignorant, we should not suppose that ignorance efficiently-causes what one does.
Rather, we should think that if one is ignorant she does not have the sort of knowledge that would count as or be included in the right formal cause for the action to be voluntary. So, the action is involuntary because her action does not have the right formal cause. is can be elliptically captured by “because one is ignorant.” Aristotle has now given some content to the claim discussed above that whenever one acts voluntarily, thought is somehow involved in the speci cation of the formal cause of the action. To act voluntarily, one must
55 David Charles (b, – n. ) recognizes this incompatibility between acting in accordance with thought as opposed to appetitive desire and acting akratically. However, rather than insisting on a weak interpretation of “ἐν τῷ διανοούμενόν πως πράττειν,” as I propose, he takes this passage as grounds for claiming that “In this respect, Aristotle’s description of the acrates in the CE [common books] resembles that implied in the NE and differs from that required in the EE.” 56 Aristotle’s discussion of forced actions is extremely complicated, difficult, and beyond the scope of this chapter. I will be focusing rather on actions done because one is ignorant.
have a certain sort of knowledge of the circumstances in which one acts.57 Such knowledge will be mentioned in the speci cation of the formal cause of one’s voluntary action.
. Skill, desire, decision, and the four-causal interpretation
In this section I will address several well-known texts that seem difficult to square with the four-causal interpretation. Interpreters have appealed to some of these very texts to motivate the claim that Aristotle thinks that psychological items are efficient causes of action, and it is not hard to see why. However, I will argue that the four-causal interpretation furnishes plausible readings of these passages.
.. Skill
Aristotle refers to the sculptor’s skill as the efficient cause of the sculpture at Phys.
. , a–:
So then, while there are said to be roughly this many causes, since there are said to be various causes it follows, too, that there are multiple non- accidental causes of the same thing. For example, both the sculptor's skill and the bronze are causes of the sculpture, not qua whatever else it may be, but rather qua sculpture, and not in the same way, but rather one as matter and the other as that whence the motion comes.
is might seem incompatible with the claim that the sculptor herself is the efficient cause.
But the right thing to say, I think, is that ‘the sculptor’s skill’ is elliptical for ‘the sculptor
57 Shortly before moving on to discussing decision, Aristotle apparently summarizes his remarks about the voluntary as follows: “Now then, all that one does without ignorance that is up to oneself not to do is necessarily voluntary, and the voluntary is this” (. , b–). How or whether this summary remark coheres with NE . , a– is a matter of debate. See Charles (b), for example.
qua actively exercising her skill.’ e difficulty for this quick reply is that Aristotle seems to refer to skill as “the highest cause” (τὸ αἴτιον τὸ ἀκρότατον) at Phys. . , b. One might be tempted to think that this indicates that Aristotle privileges the skill over the sculptor as the real efficient cause, which would block the attempt to say that the reference to the skill is an elliptical description of the sculptor qua exercising her skill. But is this correct? As far as I can tell, ‘τὸ αἴτιον τὸ ἀκρότατον’ occurs only this one time in Aristotle’s extant works, and it is not clear how to interpret it. One who objects to the four-causal interpretation might say that ‘ἀκρότατον’ here has the sense it has at NE . , a–, where it modi es
‘practicable goods’ to the effect that there is nothing that counts more as a practicable good than it does. On that reading, ‘τὸ αἴτιον τὸ ἀκρότατον’ would mean ‘that cause than which nothing counts more as a cause.’
Another option, the one that I prefer, comes from emistius’s paraphrase (In Phys.
. –) and Philoponus’s commentary (In Phys. . –) on this section of Phys. . .
Both think that we should understand ‘ἀκρότατον’ here as ‘most proximate’
(προσεχέστατον).58 e key, as commentators such as Alexander of Aphrodisias,
Philoponus, and Simplicius recognize, is that ‘proximate’ can apply to causes other than the efficient cause.59 For instance, as Alexander and Philoponus think, the proximate
58 is derives some motivation in the context under discussion from Aristotle’s claim at Phys. . , b– that among accidental causes some are nearer (ἐγγύτερον) and some more remote (πορρώτερον). 59 See for example Alexander (In Meteor. . ) and (In Aristotelis Metaph. . –. ), as well as Simplicius (In Phys. .).
(προσεχὲς) formal cause of the octave is the ratio :, a more remote (πορρωτέρω) formal cause is the double, and an even more remote (ἔτι πορρωτέρω) formal cause is number in general.60 e proximate formal cause gives the most informative characterization of the nature of the effect, and of the efficient cause’s relationship to the effect. In Philoponus’s words,
One ought not say that the man or the crasman is the most proximate cause of the house, but rather that the house-builder is—and not insofar as he is something other than a house-builder, but rather insofar as he is one who has the skill of house-building; for it is not insofar as he is, say, bald or musical or a man in general (.–).
e idea, grounded in Aristotle’s distinction between per se and accidental causes in Phys.
. , a–b that we encountered in chapter , is that in order to specify the per se efficient cause and per se effect (the house-builder qua actualizing his house-building potentiality in building a house), rather than an accidental cause and accidental effect (say, the house- builder qua actualizing his aria-humming potentiality in entertaining the site manager), we must advert to the potentiality most proximate to the activity of house-building. is will of course be the skill of house-building, which is of the highest explanatory value for characterizing what sort of activity (house-building) is afoot. is strikes me as a plausible understanding of what it is for the skill to be “the highest cause” (τὸ αἴτιον τὸ ἀκρότατον).
.. Desire
60 See Philoponus (In Phys. . –) and compare Alexander (In Metaph. . –).
Aristotle makes several claims about desire’s status as a mover that might be thought to threaten the four-causal interpretation. Some interpreters have thought that such texts clearly say that desire efficiently causes one’s movements. D.W. Hamlyn (), for example, alleges that “the faculties in question appear to function as agencies of some kind…and there is no doubt that [Aristotle’s] thinking on the matter is relatively crude”
(). Such interpreters tend to focus primarily on the bits of text that I have underlined:
I) And indeed these two appear to be movers, namely desire and intellect, if one takes imagination as a form of intellect; for many follow imaginations against knowledge, and among the other animals there is neither intellect nor reasoning, but rather imagination. So both of these are capable of moving according to place, namely intellect and desire, but intellect that reasons for the sake of something and is practical; and this differs from theoretical intellect in its end. And every desire is for the sake of something, for the object of desire is the starting-point of practical intellect, but the last thing is the starting-point of action. So plausibly these two appear to be the movers, desire and practical thought. For the object of desire moves (transitive) and through this thought moves (transitive), because the object of desire is its starting-point.61 And also when imagination moves (transitive), it does not move (transitive) without desire. Indeed there is one thing that moves (transitive), the faculty of desire. For if two things moved, intellect and desire, they would move according to some common form; but now whereas intellect does not appear to move (transitive) without desire (for wish is a sort of desire, and whenever one is moved in accordance with reasoning one is also moved in accordance with wish), desire moves (transitive) even against reasoning; for appetite is a sort of desire. Now then, intellect is always right, but desire and imagination are sometimes right and sometimes wrong. at is why the object of desire always moves (transitive), but this is either the good or the apparent good (not every good, but rather the practicable good). And the practicable good is that which can possibly be otherwise. Now then, it is clear that this sort of power of soul, the one called ‘desire,’ moves (transitive) (DA . , a–b).
61 ‘Its’ is as ambiguous in English as ‘αὐτῆς’ is in Greek, since its referent could be desire or thought.
II) For all animals both move and are moved for the sake of something, so that the end is for them the limit of all motion. Now we see that the things that move (τὰ κινοῦντα) the animal are thought and imagination and decision and wish and appetite. And all of these are referred to intellect and desire. For in fact imagination and perception have the same place as intellect; for all are discriminative, but they differ according to the aforementioned distinctions between them. Now wish and spirit and appetite are all kinds of desire, but decision shares in thought and desire, with the result that the object of desire and of thought moves (transitive) rst. Not every object of thought moves, but only the end among matters of action. at is why the mover (transitive) is this sort of good, but not every ne thing; for this sort of thing moves (transitive) insofar as something else is for the sake of it, and insofar as it is an end for something else. Now it is necessary to suppose that the apparent good, as well as the pleasant, can have the place of the good, for the pleasant is an apparent good. Hence it is clear that in one way what is always in motion is moved by what is always moving (transitive) in a way similar to how each of the animals is moved, but in another way differently. So, though the former is always being moved, the motion of animals has a limit. But what is eternally ne, and what is truly and primarily good and not sometimes good and sometimes not, is too divine and too honorable to be relative to something else. Now then, the rst mover moves (transitive) without being moved, whereas desire and the faculty of desire move (transitive) while being moved. But the last of the things being moved need not move (transitive) anything. It is clear from these things, too, that locomotion is the last of the movements in generated things; for the animal is moved and goes about in virtue of desire or decision, being altered in some way in accordance with perception or imagination (MA , b–a).
Commentators who focus on desire’s status as a mover oen fail to mention the crucial fact that these passages occur in contexts that describe the objects of desire and of thought as nal causes of animal motion. e bold-type bits of (I) and (II) show the importance Aristotle places on the goal-sensitivity of psychological items in these passages.
He draws conclusions about psychological items’ status as movers from their relationship
to intentional objects.62 Aristotle says repeatedly in the context of (I) and (II) that the object of desire, viz., the good or apparent good, moves (transitive) (DA . , a–, . ,
b–; MA , b–, , b–, , b–). An intentional object counts as a starting-point and moves (transitive) in the way I indicated above, and as Aristotle indicates at EE /NE . , b– and NE . , b–: It serves as a nal cause for one’s movement. It is therefore plausible to understand Aristotle as suggesting that psychological items count as movers in the same sense that they count as “that which determines” (τὸ
κύριον) in Metaph. Θ : e presence of active desire or decision, as an animal’s activity of being sensitive to the good, formal-causally renders determinate whether its rational potentiality counts as being actualized with respect to its goal or not, and provides a paradigm for the goal-directed performance of the action.63, 64
But an opponent of the four-causal interpretation might object to this way of construing desire’s status as a mover on the grounds that DA . , b– says that desire
62 is is what we would expect in light of Aristotle’s view, obliquely alluded to in (II), that intentional items like desire fall under the category of relatives and thus cannot be understood apart from their characteristic objects (Cat. , b–, Top. . , a–b). emistius (In DA .–), paraphrasing passage (I) above, draws this connection. For a detailed discussion of how this point is important for Aristotle’s views about desire and self-motion, see Corcilius (, –). 63 Morison (, ) mentions MA passages in which Aristotle says that the objects of thought and desire are movers, and interprets them, like I do, as saying that these objects move as nal causes and do not challenge the claims from the Physics that animals are self-movers. Morison does not address why Aristotle would say that thought and desire as faculties, states, or activities count as movers. 64 I think the results of this discussion can be applied to similar effect in interpreting passages like EE /NE . , a–: “erefore whenever the universal belief is in one preventing him from tasting, and so is the belief that everything sweet is pleasant and that this is sweet (and this belief is active), and when appetite happens to be present, then one belief says to avoid this, but appetite leads it on; for it can move each of the parts.”
moves by an instrument through pushing and pulling, a mode of moving (transitive) which seems incompatible with desire being a formal cause rather than an efficient cause:
Desire moves (transitive) by an instrument, and this is already something bodily, which is why one ought to study it in the works on functions common to body and soul.65 But now to give an outline, the mover moves (transitive) instrumentally where the starting-point and end-point are the same, as in the case of a joint. For here the convex and the concave are the end-point and starting-point, respectively (which is why one part is at rest and the other is moved), being different in account but inseparable in magnitude. For everything is moved by pushing and pulling. at is why it is necessary for something to stay still, as in the case of a circle, and for the motion to begin from there. Now then generally, as has been said, the animal is capable of moving itself insofar as it is capable of desiring. But it is not capable of desiring without imagination. And every imagination is either calculative or perceptive. Of the latter the other animals also partake.
Two claims here might seem to cause problems for the four-causal approach. First, if desire moves (transitive) by an instrument, this might give us a picture of a chain of efficient-causal movers: Perception or imagination or thought moves desire, desire moves an instrument, and the instrument moves the animal. Such a chain might remind us of
Aristotle’s chain of movers at Phys. . , a–: e man moves his hand, his hand moves the stick, and the stick moves the stone. If the four-causal interpretation is correct, desire
65 ere are multiple options for translating “ἐν τοῖς κοινοῖς σώματος καὶ ψυχῆς ἔργοις.” ‘Philoponus’ (In DA . –), ps.-Simplicius (In DA . –), Hicks (, ), and W.D. Ross (, ) take it to refer to works of Aristotle’s on things common to body and soul. By contrast, Averroes (Magnum in DA comm. 54, 55–62) takes it to refer to actions common to body and soul, and Hamlyn (), Nussbaum (, ), and J.A. Smith (in Barnes ) take it to refer to functions common to body and soul. Corcilius (, ) takes ‘Untersuchungen’ as understood and translates ‘ἔργοις’ as ‘Leistungen.’ My translation follows Corcilius here, though it makes no difference for my overall view.
should not be an efficient-causal link in a chain resulting in an animal’s motion, but should rather be the formal cause of the motion.
e second problem this passage raises is its claim that all motion is by pushing or pulling, a claim Aristotle also makes elsewhere (e.g., Phys. . , b–, IA , b–).
Since pushing and pulling sound like what an efficient-causal mover would do, and
Aristotle oen says that desire is a mover, we might now think we have reason to believe that every mover, including desire, is an efficient-causal mover.66 is of course con icts directly with the four-causal interpretation.
Here again, though, I think that we can draw upon existing resources for clarifying why Aristotle claims that desire moves by an instrument and that all motion is by pushing and pulling. Desire’s instrument is most oen taken to be either pneuma (connatural spirit or air) or the heart.67 As will be seen, it does not matter much for my view which one of these we settle upon. Philoponus (In Phys. . –. ) says that Aristotle assimilates the instrumental cause to the material cause rather than to the efficient cause. If this is right,
66 Perhaps a similar issue is raised for Plato at Laws D – C , where we are said to be like puppets and our emotions to be like cords or strings that pull us about. 67 ‘Philoponus’ (In DA . –), as well as various recent interpreters including Nussbaum (MA, ) and Polansky (, ), takes the instrument to be pneuma. Ps.-Simplicius mentions pneuma among a series of interpretive possibilities (In DA . –). Alexander of Aphrodisias, (De anima . –) links the themes of Aristotle’s DA . with MA , making explicit reference to pneuma in connection with desire as a starting-point of motion. Themistius thinks that whereas pneuma is the instrument of perception (In DA . ; . ), the heart is the instrument of desire (In DA . -). Corcilius (), too, favors the heart as the instrument of desire (, n. ; ), and says that pneuma and desire stand in a relation of functional correspondence (“funktionalen Entsprechung”) as moved movers, such that they both receive and transmit impulses ().
then pneuma (or the heart) would be a material cause. But of what would it be the material cause? I propose that for Aristotle pneuma (or the heart) is the material cause of various movements, including certain emotions, that fall short of being locomotive movements of the animal’s whole body.68 Now since part of the body counts as a material cause of the whole body (as we know from Phys. . , a), and the body in turn is the material cause of locomotive movements (as argued above), there is a straightforward sense in which pneuma (or the heart) counts as a material cause of locomotive movements of the animal’s whole body.69
e next step is to say how desire moves the body through its instrument. My view is that desire is the formal cause of the sorts of movements of its instrument that Aristotle has in mind in DA . .70 If the instrument is a material cause of locomotion in virtue of being a part of the body, which is the material cause of locomotion, and desire is the formal cause of the motion of the pneuma (or the heart) as well as a formal cause of the whole bodily movement, then it is plausible that desire’s formal causality with respect to the
68 My view differs from Nussbaum’s (, ) and Charles’s (, ) that pneuma is the material realization of desire in a couple of ways. First, I do not think that its relationship to desire makes pneuma (or the heart) an efficient cause of locomotive movements. Second, I am not committed to pneuma rather than the heart being related to desire as matter to form. Corcilius () argues that to the extent that anything counts as the instrument of desire it is the heart, and that pneuma is instead the instrument “vom Prozess der Bewegungsgenese insgesamt” (, italics in original). My view is compatible with this claim, as long as what it is to be an instrument in this context is understood in the way I indicate below. 69 is interpretation does not rule out the idea that pneuma (or the heart) might be the efficient cause of some process or other related to action. It does rule out the idea that it is the efficient cause of one’s entire locomotive act. 70 is contrasts with the view of Corcilius and Gregoric (, n. ), according to which “the immediate causal antecedent of the expansions and contractions of connate air is…thermic alterations which we identify with pleasure or pain and desire.”
movement of the pneuma (or the heart) is instrumentally related to desire’s formal causality with respect to the whole bodily movement. at is to say, pneuma (or the heart) counts as desire’s instrument in the sense that it is at least partially in virtue of being the formal cause of the movement of pneuma (or the heart) that desire is the formal cause of the body's movement. Here is an example to motivate this use of ‘instrumental’: If stock A increases by this year, it will have been instrumental in achieving my portfolio's annual gains.
It is not as if stock A (or its increase) efficiently-caused my portfolio to make gains. Rather, it was at least partially in virtue of stock A’s gain that my portfolio composed of A, B, C, and D made gains. is being so, there is a plausible way of interpreting the claim that desire moves the body by an instrument in a way that is perfectly compatible with the four- causal interpretation.
ere are two ways of addressing the claim that all movement is by pushing and pulling. e rst is to restrict its scope, and the second is to adopt a non-literal reading of
‘pushing and pulling.’ ese strategies could even be combined to say that the claim that all movement is by pushing and pulling should be taken in a literal way in some domains and in a non-literal way in others. Both ways are principled because there is independent reason for thinking that not every motion is by literal pushing and pulling. Circular motion, for example, does not seem to involve literal pushing and pulling. In light of this, Ross (,
) thinks that Aristotle’s claim that every motion is by pushing and pulling ranges only over “organic movements…of the arm or fore-arm, or of the leg or the lower part of the
leg.” is way of restricting the scope, though, does not take account of Phys. . , a–
, where Aristotle contrasts self-movers with things moved by something else, and says that movements of the latter can be referred to pushing, pulling, carrying, and twirling (the latter two being reducible to some combination of pushing and pulling (a – b)).
e implication is that in contrast to the movements of things moved by something else, the movements of self-movers should not be referred to literal pushing and pulling. Now presumably a self-mover’s leg, arm, or hand could be moved by pushing and pulling by something else in a case of forced motion (as in Aristotle’s own example of forced motion at EE . , b–), though not as part of ordinary self-locomotion. So, instead of Ross’s proposed scope restriction, we might say that Aristotle’s claim that every motion is by pushing and pulling applies only to instances of one substance moving another substance.
us restricted, the claim would apply neither to circular motion, which was problematic on the unrestricted version of the claim, nor to cases of self-motion. e restricted claim would thus not create a problem for the four-causal interpretation.
e other, and perhaps complementary, way of interpreting the claim that all motion is by pushing and pulling is to understand ‘pushing and pulling’ in a non-literal sense. In explaining Aristotle’s claim, ‘Philoponus’ says that “pulling is the motion that occurs toward us and pushing is the motion that occurs away from us” (In DA . –). It is clear that this is non-literal pushing and pulling from the example ‘Philoponus’ gives a few lines later of circular motion occurring by one semicircle ‘pushing’ and the other
semicircle ‘pulling’ (. –). Ps.-Simplicius gives an equally non-literal rendering that differs somewhat in detail, saying that ‘being moved by pushing and pulling’ should be understood as meaning “that ‘one part is at rest’ of that by which the mover moves
(transitive), ‘and the other part is moved,’ to the effect that the part at rest pushes or pulls and the moved part is pushed or pulled” (In DA .–). Both commentators seem to think that in this context Aristotle’s talk of pushing and pulling serves to mark the fact that one thing (or part) remains at rest whereas another thing (or part) is moved by it.
Adopting this non-literal reading of ‘pushing and pulling’ is the way ‘Philoponus’ and ps.-Simplicius see to square Aristotle’s claim that every motion is by pushing and pulling with the descriptions Aristotle gives of how desire’s instrument, whether it is pneuma or the heart, works. Aristotle compares the instrument to a joint and to circular motion. According to ‘Philoponus’ and ps.-Simplicius, the joint and circular motion are supposed to be analogies for the way desire’s instrument works, and the nexus of analogy is that in each case one part is moved and the other is not. is makes it perfectly true that in a way all motion is by pushing and pulling: All motion involves a mover and moved related in that one thing (or part) is moved and the other is not. Such a claim is not at all problematic for the four-causal interpretation.
.. e divine in us
Another group of passages presents a different challenge to the four-causal interpretation.
() And just as a city, too, and every other system seems to be the most controlling thing most of all, so is a human being. And indeed the one who loves this and grati es it is most of all a self-lover. And one is called ‘enkratic’ or ‘akratic’ in virtue of intellect being in control or not, on the ground that this is each one, and the things people have done with reason are thought to be most of all their own and voluntary. Now then, it is clear that each person is this or is so most of all, and also that the good person loves this most (NE . , b–a).
() For that which is proper to each thing is by nature best and most pleasant to each. And indeed for a human being the life in accordance with intellect is best and most pleasant, since this is a human being most of all. is life therefore is also happiest (NE . , a–).
() a) is is what we are seeking, namely what the starting-point of motion in the soul is. b) In fact it is clear what it is. Just as in the universe the starting-point is God, so also in each person. c) For the divine in us in a way moves everything. d) And the starting-point for reason is not reason but rather something greater. e) So what could be greater even than knowledge and thought except God? For virtue is the instrument of intellect (EE . , a–, subsection markers added).
From () and () one might get the idea that a human being is identical with her intellect, which is the most divine part of her. One might also think that in () the “the divine in us” is meant to be the efficient cause of one’s movements, and that it is identical with intellect. Combining these ideas, the resulting interpretation would be that our intellect (or perhaps one of its activities, such as belief or knowledge) efficiently causes our locomotive movements.71 Such an interpretation would seem to con ict with the idea that
71 Irwin (, ) seems to have this view: “When Aristotle says the origin is in ‘us’, we need to ask more carefully what he identi es with ‘us’. If we are essentially rational agents, then the origin will be strictly in us only in so far as it is in our rational agency; otherwise it will only be incidentally in us, since one of our non-essential features will be the origin. I have a rational soul in so far as I live by decision and rational planning resting on some conception of my life as a whole. e origin that is internal to an animal
the agent as a self-mover actualizing one of her rational potentialities is the efficient cause of her movements. I will draw attention to a few features of passages ()–() and suggest a way of integrating them into the account I have been developing in this chapter.
e rst thing to notice is that even if we take () and () in the way mentioned above, this alone does not entail that we are to be identi ed with our intellect when being considered as the efficient cause of our actions.72 Only when combined with the aforementioned interpretation of () (or of a passage saying the same thing) would () and
() clearly exert such pressure. I will argue below that () can be read alternatively.
e second thing to notice is that () and () can be read in accordance with the transformative view of rationality discussed above. e idea would be that an intellectual soul is the kind of soul we have (as opposed to a perceptive soul like animals have or a nutritive soul like plants have), though a human with such a soul is still capable of the functions of lower forms of life.73 Since a soul is a form and a form is an account of the essence, there is a standard Aristotelian sense in which we are most of all our intellect. Our
‘itself’ will not depend on its rational agency, since it is not essentially a rational agent. Since I am essentially different from an animal, the origin in me will support claims about responsibility even though it would not support them for the animal.” Irwin is drawn to this view because he wants to say how we are responsible but animals are not. He does not think that this asymmetry can be plausibly defended if we focus only on efficiently causing behavior. In this I agree with Irwin, but as will become clear in this section I think we have another option: Humans and animals cause movements as self-movers, but the way I cause as a self- mover (i.e., the formal cause of my action) is of a different sort than it is for animals. us, the four-causal approach gives us space to avoid squarely identifying ourselves qua efficient causes of action with our intellect. 72 at is to say, co-referring terms may not be intersubstitutable salva veritate across different explanatory contexts, and this may be a different explanatory context. 73 Such an idea might gain support from the fact that () picks up on the language of the rst few lines of NE . , which in turn recall the language of the function argument in NE . .
form is that of an intellectual being. According to the transformative view of rationality, having such a form transforms all of the functions of one’s soul. So, it would be the most important factor in explaining, for example, the structure of our intentional items. We believe, decide, wish, desire, etc. in the way that we do because we have the intellectual kind of soul. is is perfectly compatible with such psychological items being, as I have suggested, the formal causes of our actions rather than the efficient causes.
I will now argue that passage () need not be read as saying that the “the divine in us” is meant to be the efficient cause of one’s movements. To establish this, it is necessary to show only that “the starting-point of motion in the soul” in (a) might refer to a formal or nal cause rather than to an efficient cause.
As Myrna Gabbe () points out, “the starting-point of motion in the soul” is ambiguous between i) “the starting-point located in the soul” and ii) “the starting-point of motion, namely the motion in the soul” (). In light of Aristotle’s view that the soul is moved only accidentally, we must understand “in the soul” in (ii) as referring to the motion of the individual as a whole, which belongs to the soul accidentally. As long as (ii) is understood in this way, it does not matter for my purposes whether (i) or (ii) is what
Aristotle means in this passage. I will now say what makes it possible for each to be compatible with the four-causal view of action.
Aristotle can be read as saying in (b) that the starting-point of motion in the universe is God and the starting-point in the individual is God.74, 75 What kind of starting- point is God? If ‘God’ here refers to Aristotle’s unmoved mover (which some commentators doubt but I will here affirm), Metaphysics Λ. says that he is a nal-causal starting-point.76 Given the parallelism in (b), we would expect God to be a nal-causal starting-point for motion in the universe and for motion in us. In what way might God be a nal-causal starting-point for motion in us? e answer comes in (c): “For the divine in us in a way moves everything.” is answer needs unpacking, of course. ‘e divine in us’ can refer to our intellect.77 If it does, God, or contemplation of God, could be the object at which our intellect aims. Such an aiming relation seems to be supported by (d) and (e).78
In that way, intellect can count as a mover in a way precisely parallel to the way I argued above that desire counts as a mover. Both have intentional objects at which they aim, which objects count as the nal-causal starting-points of the corresponding processes (for
74 One might also read him as saying that the starting-point of motion in the universe is divine and the starting-point of motion in us is divine. is is a weaker parallel than that suggested by my reading. Woods (, ) seems to have such an interpretation. 75 Such an interpretation seems possible without following Spengel in reading ‘ἐκείνῃ’ in place of ‘ἐκείνῳ’ in a. If ‘ἐκείνῳ’ just means “in the individual,” as translated by Inwood and Woolf, it would just be picking up an implicit antecedent suggested by the context. If one wants to insist on Spengel’s emendation, whereby τῇ ψυχῇ would be the antecedent of ἐκείνῃ, my interpretation would work just as well with it. 76 It is striking that the immediate context of () is replete with nal-causal references, as is EE . – in general. 77 Woods (, ) denies that it refers to our intellect, citing the next lines. As I will show, if we adopt the interpretation of () that I am suggesting, the next lines do not mean what he thinks, and thus there is no pressure to follow him in denying that ‘the divine in us’ refers to our intellect. 78 us far I agree with Gabbe (), who argues that in this passage ‘God’ refers to Aristotle’s unmoved mover, who is the nal-causal starting point of our intellectual activity.
example, contemplating and locomotion), and thus as movers. In virtue of being characteristically sensitive to these objects, intellect and desire would count as movers in the formal-causal way I speci ed previously. In order to understand how intellect could count as “in a way mov[ing] everything,” we could appeal again to the transformative view of rationality. Intellect transforms our entire motivational apparatus, and thus any active psychological item of ours will aim at its objects in ways that are impacted by our possession of intellect.79 If, as I have urged, these active psychological items are formal causes of our actions, all of our movements will in turn be impacted by our possession of intellect. So, in this way intellect could count as moving everything.80 If this is right, () need not be read as saying that the “the divine in us” is meant to be the efficient cause of one’s movements.
If it means “the starting-point located in the soul,” it is compatible with our intellect being a formal-causal starting-point of action. If it means “the starting-point of motion, namely the motion in the soul,” it is compatible with the object of our intellectual activity, God, being a nal-causal starting-point of action.
.. Decision
On the four-causal interpretation, desire, decision, etc. are formal causes of action instead of efficient causes, but Aristotle appears to say otherwise at EE /NE . , a–
79 is way of deploying the transformative view of rationality is again similar to Whiting (, ). 80 If this seems an especially odd way of moving everything, I would draw attention to ‘πως’ in a, which in combination with the infamous difficulty of this passage perhaps licenses a moderate application of interpretive ingenuity.
: “At any rate, decision is a starting-point of action—that whence motion comes rather than what it is for the sake of—whereas desire and reasoning for the sake of something are a starting-point for decision” (πράξεως μὲν οὖν ἀρχὴ προαίρεσις—ὅθεν ἡ κίνησις ἀλλ' οὐχ
οὗ ἕνεκα—προαιρέσεως δὲ ὄρεξις καὶ λόγος ὁ ἕνεκά τινος).
First, this remark of Aristotle’s is nettlesome on any view, for deliberative decision clearly cannot be the efficient cause of every action. Aer all, according to Aristotle akratic actions are not even in accordance with deliberative decision, let alone efficiently caused by it. So, we should assume that some implicit quali cation or nuance must be afoot unless
Aristotle has here forgotten his own views.
Furthermore, it is important to recall the problem about translating every occurrence of ‘ὅθεν ἡ κίνησις’ as ‘efficient cause’ in contexts that are about action (which this clearly is). All that these lines say is that decision is a starting-point whence motion comes. I think this is perfectly true: Decision is a formal-causal archê whence motion comes in the way I have spelled out in previous sections.81
81 Roughly the same thing should be said about DA . , b–, where Aristotle makes similar claims about the role of decision and thought in locomotion, and Rhet. . , b–a, where he speaks of actions being through (dia) habit or desire. For the exibility of ‘dia’ in referring to various causal relationships, see Physics . , b. Commenting on the DA . passage in a way that attends to its anti- Democritean context, Hicks () says that this is “A general argument, disposing of the whole theory that soul moves itself and the body thus mechanically by an appeal to the fact (φαίνεται) that man is acted upon by nal causes. Cf. the sweeping argument De Gen. et Corr. . , a–.” As Hicks sees it, Aristotle here speaks of decision and the more general category of thought in order to introduce a part of the explanation of self-motion to which Democritus is not entitled: nal causes. Decision is one of the main ways in which we are connected to nal causes, and so Aristotle here appeals to it. If Aristotle instead were introducing decision as an efficient cause of self-motion, the DA passage could not be the kind of general argument against mechanism that Hicks plausibly claims it to be.
e key to a plausible interpretation of this passage comes a few lines later: “at is why decision is either desiderative intellect or intellectual desire; and a human being is a starting-point of this sort” (διὸ ἢ ὀρεκτικὸς νοῦς ἡ προαίρεσις ἢ ὄρεξις διανοητική, καὶ ἡ
τοιαύτη ἀρχὴ ἄνθρωπος) (EE /NE . , b–). Here we are told that a human being is a starting-point of the prohairetic sort. One way of interpreting this is to say that we are starting-points derivatively only insofar as we act in accordance with a deliberative decision
(the real starting-point). is is implausible because, as I previously indicated, a human being is (whether derivatively or non-derivatively) the starting-point of her akratic actions, which are not in accordance with a deliberative decision.
e interpretation I prefer is that human beings count as efficient-causal starting- points non-derivatively insofar as we are the sorts of beings capable of deliberative decision, and deliberative decision is itself a formal-causal starting-point.82 is interpretation harmonizes with other claims in the EE, for example that “We do not say that the child acts, or the animal, but only one who is already acting on the basis of reasoning” (. , a–
), as well as the claims about the divine in us that I discussed in the previous subsection.
According to the transformative view of rationality discussed above, having rationality
82 Still another interpretation, with which I would not be particularly unhappy, is that in this passage ‘decision’ is a metonym for the human being herself. J.A. Stewart () seems to say this in his commentary on b, though his remark is quite telegrammatic: “therefore man, as ἀρχὴ πράζεων, is ἢ ὀρεκτικὸς νοῦς ἢ ὄρεξις διανοητική” (29). Aquinas seems to hold a version of this interpretation in his In EN, summarizing a– as saying that “mens est principium actus.” Aquinas apparently thinks that the mind (mens), not in just any condition but rather only when quali ed as having a practical purpose, counts as an efficient-causal mover, and that ‘decision’ is here Aristotle’s way of referring to the mind quali ed in this way.
involves having the capacity to deliberate, and this capacity is associated with having the capacity for deliberative decision. Only beings with this capacity are capable of full-blown action, and having it transforms the rest of one’s motivational apparatus. is, as indicated previously, is why the range of psychological items that can be the formal cause of full- blown actions can be wider than deliberative decision itself. In this way, human beings can count as efficient-causal starting-points insofar as we are the sorts of beings capable of deliberative decision.83
Conclusion
I have argued that Aristotle’s texts provide us with the resources to see action as having four causes: e body is the material cause, the active psychological item (for example, desire or decision) is the formal cause, the goal is the nal cause, and the agent qua self-mover actualizing a particular potentiality is the efficient cause. Recognizing this helps us to make better sense of the difficult remarks about locomotion and action scattered throughout Aristotle’s works, situating them in the wider context of his natural science. I have also allayed worries about the four-causal view, giving interpretations of passages that might seem to tell against it. In the next chapter, I will discuss how this view compares with
83 In giving examples of efficient causes in his canonical causal taxonomies, Aristotle is fond of using ‘the man who deliberated’ (Phys. . , 4b, a; Metaph. Δ , a–, b–). It seems clear enough that the man himself is the efficient cause, but Aristotle thinks it is important to qualify him as a deliberator.
the two most popular theories of action nowadays, namely Davidsonian and Anscombean theories.
CHAPTER
ARISTOTLE’S VIEW AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO DAVIDSONIAN AND ANSCOMBEAN ACCOUNTS
Having argued that Aristotle thinks action should be referred to his four causes, a view that is different from and preferable to the one that most recent interpreters have attributed to him, I will now argue directly against the two most prominent current alternatives to Aristotle’s position and show how Aristotle’s position addresses the main problems that they encounter. ere are two problems for Davidsonian views, namely deviant causal chains and the problem of the disappearing agent. Furthermore, the problem of deviant causal chains is usefully characterized as a symptom of the problem of the disappearing agent. ere are two structurally similar problems for Anscombean views, namely deviant formal causation and disappearing agency. Again, the deviance worry is a symptom of the disappearance worry. Aristotle's account, properly understood, allows us to make headway on all four problems. Furthermore, it explains what the other accounts were purportedly best equipped to explain. In the case of Davidsonian accounts, this was the relationship between reasons explanations and causal explanations. In the case of
Anscombean accounts, it was the goal-oriented structure of actions.
. Davidsonian views
Donald Davidson () and those his project has inspired want to understand action as part of the ordinary event-causal framework of the world in general. As I drew attention to in chapter , this ambition derives ultimately from Hume. For Davidsonians, a proper account of action will identify one event, a bodily movement, as an action (rather than, say, an involuntary twitch) in virtue of being efficiently caused by an event of a particular type, namely by what Davidson (, ) calls the “onslaught” of the state of one’s having a particular pro-attitude and belief. is state is one’s reason for action. So, on
Davidson’s account, an intentional action is a bodily movement performed for a reason, where ‘for a reason’ means that the onslaught of the state in which the reason consists is the efficient cause of the bodily movement. Davidson thinks that this view, which has come to be known as ‘causalism,’ is needed to explain the difference between acting when one merely has a reason so to act, and acting for that reason (). A reason for which one acts, as opposed to a reason one merely has, must be a state whose onslaught is the efficient cause of the action. In this way, Davidson claims to have defended “the ancient—and common- sense—position that rationalization is a species of ordinary causal explanation” (), which he takes to be Aristotle’s view (). Of course, since Davidson () and () takes “ordinary causal explanation” to be efficient-causal explanation with events as the relata, we have seen in chapters and that this view is not Aristotle’s.
ere are several prominent variations on Davidson’s theme, differing with respect to the sort of psychological item (or the onslaught of the psychological item) that is taken to be the efficient cause of action. Harry Frankfurt () thinks that the relevant psychological items are second-order volitions, David Velleman () that they are our desires to act in accordance with reasons, and Michael Bratman () that they are our higher-order self-governing policies. Each has the same basic event-causal framework and seeks to assimilate reasons explanations of action to ordinary efficient-causal explanations, though they disagree about certain details. ese theories and others like them are the ones
I call ‘Davidsonian.’
.. e problem of deviant causal chains
e rst difficulty facing Davidsonian views is that deviant causal chains are counterexamples to their analyses of action. In such cases, the onslaught of an agent’s psychological item causes his bodily movement, but in the wrong way for it to count as an intentional action. Davidson’s (a) own example is as follows: Suppose a climber intends to let go of the rope that prevents his fellow climber from falling to his death.
Further suppose that his intention makes him so intensely nervous that it causes his grip to fail, which sends the fellow climber to his death. e intention caused the bodily movement of letting go of the rope. So, this bodily movement meets the Davidsonian conditions for intentional action. e bodily movement is caused by the onslaught of a psychological item. However, the climber’s letting go of the rope in this way fails to count
intuitively as an intentional action. It is not an intentional action because the bodily movement occurred without the ill-intentioned climber having agential control over whether it occurred or not. But Davidsonians cannot accept this diagnosis, for they purport to have explained agential control by adverting to the efficient-causal role of psychological items. On their account, there is nothing over and above the climber’s intention efficiently causing him to let go of the rope to which his control could have amounted. For this reason,
Davidsonian views cannot adequately distinguish between bodily movements that are intentional actions from those that are not, and this is precisely because they cannot adequately distinguish between bodily movements that are agentially controlled and those that are not.
Harry Frankfurt () thinks that what opens up space for the problem for
Davidson’s view is the idea that psychological items are antecedent efficient causes of actions.1 If the cause is antecedent, then the bodily movement can always go awry once it is underway. So, Frankfurt thinks, any view according to which the cause of action is antecedent to the action will be unable to deal with the problem of deviant causal chains.2
Frankfurt’s remarks suggest that one might solve the problem by insisting that the psychological item that causes the action must be contemporaneous with the action it
1 Cf. William Alston (, ). 2 Similarly, Mayr () argues that any view according to which psychological events are efficient causes of action will be susceptible to deviant causal chain worries, for “it is always possible to insert between [the steps in the chain] a series of further steps, which can turn the original chain into a deviant chain” (, italics in original).
causes rather than antecedent to it.3 Indeed, the most prominent strategy for addressing the problem of deviant causal chains has been to claim that when the psychological item sustains the bodily movement through to completion this movement is an action.4
is maneuver will not solve the problem of deviant causal chains, however. e reason is that it is possible for a psychological item that occurs contemporaneously with a bodily movement to cause it deviantly. Consider the following case from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace: Natasha has just arrived at a ball and wants to appear attractive to the other guests. is strong desire to appear attractive makes her nervous, which in turn causes the muscles in her face to contort, and this produces a facial expression that happens to be her most attractive. It is perfectly conceivable that the desire, the muscular contortions, and making the facial expression could last for precisely the same amount of time. e desire would then be, according to the modi ed Davidsonian views under consideration, a contemporaneous cause of the bodily movement, and so the bodily movement would count
(counterintuitively) as an action. is example and others like it show that causal deviance is a problem not only for Davidsonian views that construe psychological items as antecedent efficient causes of action, but also for those that construe them as
3 Frankfurt does not put his own view in quite this way. He says that a bodily movement is an action when it occurs contemporaneously with the dispositions of sub-personal mechanisms to cause changes in one’s behavioral trajectory. I will discuss his position further in chapter . 4 Dorothy Mitchell (, –), John Searle (, – and –), Irving alberg (, ), Robert Audi (, and –), and Afred Mele (, –) all appeal to roughly this idea in an attempt to solve the problem of deviant causal chains.
contemporaneous efficient causes of action. is is because the problem is not about timing, but rather about the tightness of the connection between agential control and the action. is will be one of the central themes of chapter .
.. e problem of the disappearing agent
e problem of deviant causal chains that I have just described is perhaps best understood as a symptom of the more fundamental problem of the disappearing agent.5
Recall that deviant causal chains meet Davidsonians’ conditions for action because
Davidsonian accounts fail in their aim of explaining agential control. ey fail to explain agential control because in these accounts there is no role identi able as agency for the agent herself to play. e agent has disappeared from the analysis. David Velleman () puts the worry as follows:
[e standard story] fails to include an agent—or, more precisely, fails to cast the agent in his proper role. In this story, reasons cause an intention, and an intention causes bodily movements, but nobody—that is, no person—does anything. Psychological and physiological events take place inside a person, but the person serves merely as the arena for these events: he takes no active part (, italics in original).
Velleman thinks that this problem afflicts some Davidsonian views, but that his account is able to solve it by introducing a psychological item that he believes is a more plausible
5 E.J. Lowe () also sees the problem of deviant causal chains as a symptom of a more fundamental conceptual problem for Davidsonian views, namely the problem that “behaviour that is caused by an agent’s beliefs and desires is typically either automatic or habitual in character, or else indicative of a psychopathological condition” (). is problem is related to the problem of the disappearing agent.
candidate than intentions, desire/belief pairs, etc. are for playing the intuitive role of an agent:
What really produces the bodily movements that you are said to produce, then, is a part of you that performs the characteristic functions of agency. at part, I claim, is your desire to act in accordance with reasons, a desire that produces behaviour, in your name, by adding its motivational force to that of whichever motives appear to provide the strongest reasons for acting, just as you are said to throw your weight behind them ().
Velleman’s proposed solution lacks dialectical traction, for it will not be accepted by anyone who is not already convinced that the agent is functionally reducible to her desire to act in accordance with reasons.6 Such a reduction is a version of the central Davidsonian project, namely to understand reasons explanations of action as susceptible to ordinary efficient-causal explanations, and so will not be conceded by opponents of the project. In fact, any proposed solution to the problem of the disappearing agent that seeks to identify a psychological item to which the agent is supposed to be functionally reducible will fail for the same reason. Opponents will always be entitled to say “You have been talking about a very interesting sort of psychological attitude, but now talk about the agent.”
Another difficulty facing any Davidsonian response to the problem of the disappearing agent is that agency ought at least to include causing things for reasons, but no psychological item, not even a desire to act in accordance with reasons, causes anything
6 Even some who are sympathetic with the claim that psychological items are the efficient causes of action doubt Velleman’s claim. See Mele (, –), for example.
for a reason.7 is is because the connection between the psychological item and what it causes will be purely a matter of the same sort of causality that holds between billiard-balls.
If reasons explanations of action are assimilated to ordinary efficient-causal explanations of this sort, the only sense we could assign to causing for a reason would be that a reason
(construed as a psychological item) is the efficient cause of what happens. But then we have not appealed to an agent acting for a reason. Rather, reasons have been assigned the only agency there is on this picture.
. Anscombean views
In contrast to Davidsonians, G.E.M. Anscombe () and those who have followed her approach have wanted to understand action not in terms of its efficient-causal provenance, but rather in terms of its goal-oriented structure. In fact, Anscombeans tend not to have any positive efficient-causal requirement at all on what counts as an action. is may be because of the suspicion that “the topic of causality is in a state of too great confusion.”8 Furthermore, they do not think that any particular psychological items are sufficient or even necessary for action, and indeed are not very important at all in ascertaining what is essential to action.9 Rather, “Intentional actions are ones to which a
7 Elements of this difficulty are suggested by Lowe (, ). 8 Anscombe (, ). 9 Anscombe (, , , , ). Cf. ompson (, ).
certain sense of the question ‘why?’ has application.”10 Actions get their structure from the wider context, and so both the attributor and the agent must know a great deal about this context in order to attribute or perform actions.11 e sort of knowledge that the agent has is non-observational practical knowledge, the structure of which is laid bare in the practical syllogism. e content of the agent’s practical knowledge is, then, what structures the action in light of a goal, making it the case that the agent is doing a particular thing rather than some other thing and that in acting she has one goal rather than another. is is evidently at least part of the meaning of Anscombe’s contention that “Practical knowledge is ‘the cause of what it understands’” (). Although Anscombe does not explicitly describe the content of practical knowledge as a formal cause of action, the structuring role it is supposed to play makes it appropriate to describe it as such.
It is important to keep in mind that on such a view it is the content of practical knowledge that is a formal cause of action. Making an omelet is an action because it is an instance of the goal-oriented activity composed of beating eggs, heating the stove, etc., and the sort of goal-orientedness that omelet-making exhibits is what the agent knows without
10 Anscombe (, ). 11 ompson (, , , ). He goes so far as to say that “the explanation of action as it appears most frequently in human thought and speech is the explanation of one action in terms of another” (, italics in original). is is naïve action explanation, which is opposed to sophisticated action explanation. e latter is what Davidsonians do, explaining action in terms of psychological items. ompson thinks that “an event…is an intentional action just in case it is the ‘cause’ of its own parts” (). Since parts constitute wholes, ompson thinks that “it is among the marks of intentional action that such a thing is ‘cause of itself’” (). He sees this as a sort of reversal of Anscombe’s project of providing a ground for action in terms of application of the question ‘Why?’ since for ompson action is itself the ground (, n. ).
observation when he is making the omelet. To put it another way, the formal cause and
nal cause are the same: the goal. It is not because of any token psychological item that bears the content of the agent’s practical knowledge that his making an omelet counts as an action. In part for this reason, on an Anscombean view formal causes of action will be multiply instantiable.12 e content of one’s practical knowledge is the right kind of thing for this job, rather than any token psychological item.
By contrast, Aristotle’s view as described in the previous chapter is that token psychological items, such as active desire or decision, are formal causes of action. ey have content, namely an intentional object, but it is not the content that structures the action.
Rather, the active psychological item itself is what relates the agent to her goal in a way such that the agent’s action is a structured and determinate unity.
A further difference between Anscombean and Aristotelian formal causes of action is that while the former are purely cognitive, the latter are cognitive and conative.
Anscombean practical knowledge cognitively grasps a fact about the world, say, the goal- orientedness of one’s bodily movements. It is not a pro-attitude. By contrast, human desire and decision, to which Aristotle appeals, are cognitive and conative. ey have representational content of a sort, but they also bear information about the agent’s
12 ompson hints that a formal cause of action should be multiply instantiable; it must have the right “generality” (–).
attraction to her goal. Practical knowledge that P is compatible with ruing that P, but a desire or a decision that P is not.
.. e problem of deviant formal causation
Anscombean views face a problem that Sarah Paul () calls “deviant formal causation.” Basically, the problem is that the content of practical knowledge is too coarse- grained to be the formal cause of the action, since practical knowledge ranges not only over what one intends in acting, but also over foreseen side-effects of so acting.13 Acting with an intention is the same as acting with practical knowledge, which in turn is the same as acting with a certain sort of non-observational awareness of what one is doing.14 e problem,
Paul says, is that such awareness is no different in the case of an intended aim than it is in the case of a merely foreseen side-effect. In order to illustrate this problem, Paul relies on a pair of Anscombe’s examples. She imagines two gardeners, Indifferent Gardener and
Murderous Gardener, pumping water they know to be poisoned into a cistern that supplies water to the inhabitants of a house. Both move their bodies in precisely the same ways, and both know all of the same information about the circumstances and about their bodily movements. e difference is that Indifferent Gardener intends only to earn his pay and
13 Paul acknowledges that the term “deviant formal causation” is not a perfect t for the examples she describes, though she thinks that it is still apt since in such examples there is an accidental conformity between the form of one’s action and one’s non-observational knowledge of what he is doing (). 14 Paul’s primary targets are those who think that the content of practical knowledge is a formal cause of action, as do Anscombe, ompson, and others, but she thinks that the problem she poses also challenges views that combine Anscombean and Davidsonian elements in arguing that intentions embody practical knowledge and efficiently cause actions (, n. ).
views the foreseen poisoning of the inhabitants as a side-effect of his pumping, whereas
Murderous Gardener intends to poison the inhabitants. But according to Paul, Indifferent
Gardener and Murderous Gardener do not differ with respect to the content of their practical knowledge. at is, their non-observational awareness of what they are doing is the same in each case. If different actions must have different forms, and the content of practical knowledge is the formal cause of actions, there is no basis for saying that the two gardeners have performed different actions, though intuitively they have.
One might think that Indifferent Gardener and Murderous Gardener perform different actions because they have different attitudes toward the foreseen effects of their action. However, it is not open to Anscombeans to say that the actions differ based on the differing psychological items of the agents. Murderous Gardener’s desire to poison the inhabitants, for example, is not supposed to be relevant to what action he is performing, according to Anscombean views. e content of his practical knowledge, that is, his non- observational awareness of what he is doing, is supposed to be what matters. But as long as practical knowledge has as its content both intended aims and foreseen side-effects,
Anscombean accounts will be unable to exclude the latter from formally determining what sort of action is being performed. Practical knowledge alone is too blunt an instrument to carve at the joints of what goal the agent actually has in acting.15
15 Niels van Miltenburg () and Stephen Davey () have attempted to respond to the problem of deviant formal causation, but I believe that neither succeeds. Van Miltenberg changes the subject, arguing in essence that knowledge of intended aims is the efficient cause of action but knowledge of foreseen side-effects
.. e problem of disappearing agency
Recall that the problem of deviant causal chains for Davidsonian views is helpfully understood to be a symptom of the problem of the disappearing agent. Likewise, it is helpful to understand the problem of deviant formal causation for Anscombean views as a symptom of the problem of disappearing agency, which is different from but related to the problem of the disappearing agent. e problem of disappearing agency is that
Anscombean views deprive themselves of the resources to explain agential control.
Anscombean views prioritize explanations of the goal-oriented structure of actions, but they do not give us much insight into what it amounts to for the agent to be controlling her action. Imagine a novice skier asking the advice of a ski patrol officer about whether he should attempt a black diamond run:
“Pardon me, but may I ask you whether this run would be suitable for me?” “How long have you been skiing?” “Two days.”
is not. He says that knowledge of intended aims differs from knowledge of foreseen side effects in that only the former is “the driving force behind intentional action,” “efficacious,” and “productive” (). is response will not be relevant to the problem of determining what formal causes of action might be. Davey argues that Murderous Gardener poisons with the intention to poison whereas Indifferent Gardener poisons intentionally, that acting with an intention and acting intentionally are distinct, and that this distinction is enough to answer Paul’s challenge. e problem with his response is that in explicating the difference between acting with an intention and acting intentionally and how it bears on answering Paul’s challenge, Davey speaks of viewing or seeing poisoning as a reason for action (, ). e trouble comes in characterizing this ‘viewing as’ or ‘seeing as’ in such a way that Indifferent Gardener and Murderous Gardener will each bear a different kind of relation to poisoning the inhabitants. is is because whatever relation Murderous Gardener has to his aim is supposed to be sufficient for his aim to count as a formal cause of his action, whereas whatever relation Indifferent Gardener has to the foreseen side-effect is not supposed to be sufficient for it to count as a formal cause of his action. On some understandings of ‘seeing as,’ Indifferent Gardener could see poisoning the inhabitants as a reason for pumping the water, but still not act for that reason. Davey abstains from further clari cation, charging that Paul’s own Davidsonian account of the difference between an intended aim and foreseen side-effect does no better at discharging this explanatory burden ().
“at’s probably not enough experience to give you the necessary level of skill for this run.” “But I know what I’m doing.” “Do you have full control over your path down the mountain?” “I assume so. I have full practical knowledge of the circumstances at all times. I know without observation how my body is moving and how each movement ts into the goal of getting me down the mountain safely and elegantly.” “Splendid, but that’s not really what I’m asking about. Can you stop when you decide to? Can you turn as a matter of skill rather than when the terrain makes it the path of least resistance? Can you regulate your speed by how quickly you desire to go?” “I don’t know. I’m not really into thinking about those kinds of things.” “I wouldn’t recommend proceeding until you have control.”
e ski patrol officer we are imagining wants to know about how things like desire, decision, and skill bear on the novice skier’s bodily movements. To the extent that our explanatory concerns resemble hers, we will want to know about these things, too. But
Anscombean accounts bar themselves from appealing to such psychological items for characterizing what sort of action is afoot. So, they cannot readily invoke them for giving an account of how the agent is or is not controlling her action.
Deviant formal causation is a symptom of this problem for the following reason: It is because Anscombean accounts eschew the explanatory resources of psychological items for characterizing actions in general that they are unable to appeal to them in distinguishing what one’s goal is in acting. But without being able to do this they will continue to face the problem of deviant formal causation.
Anscombeans have presumably resisted appealing to psychological items at least in part because they see as the only alternative an efficient-causal appeal of the sort that
Davidsonians make. If psychological items must either be efficient causes of actions or fail to be causes of actions at all, then it is no mystery why Anscombeans would not want to appeal to them. But, as I will argue in the next section, Aristotle’s account of action shows us an alternative. We need not face the problems I have mentioned for Davidsonian and
Anscombean views.
. How Aristotle’s view helps
.. Aristotle and deviant causal chains
On Davidsonian views, psychological items (or events involving them) are efficient causes of actions. Whether they are taken to be antecedent to one’s bodily movements or contemporaneous with them, there is room for a deviant causal pathway by which the psychological item (or event involving it) can efficiently cause the movement but without it being an action. On Aristotle’s view, though, psychological items are formal causes of action. Whereas a movement can have the right efficient cause but still not be an action, it is impossible for it to have the right Aristotelian formal cause but still not be an action.
Here is how Aristotle’s view pronounces on the two examples of causal deviance I mentioned in section .: e climber’s decision to loosen his grip on his fellow climber’s rope was not the formal cause of his grip-loosening movement. It was not what structured the movement, and the movement did not get its identity conditions from it. Since his decision was not the formal cause of his movement, the movement does not count as an
action. Likewise, Natasha’s desire to appear attractive to other guests at the ball was not the formal cause of the movement of her facial muscles. It does not matter that it lasted precisely as long as her facial expression did, for it did not impart the identity conditions of the movement at any point. Since her desire was not the formal cause, the movement does not count as an action.
Aristotle’s view allows us to say that what happens in such cases is that there is a merely accidental correspondence between one’s psychological item and one’s bodily movement. But Davidsonian views cannot say this, for they require that if a psychological item of the right sort (or an event involving it) is the efficient cause of a bodily movement, the movement is an action. is indicates not an accidental connection between one’s psychological item and one’s movement, but rather an intrinsic, explanatory connection.
Aristotle’s view, by contrast, gives the intuitively correct verdict.
.. Aristotle and the disappearing agent
On Davidsonian views, there is no role identi able as agency for the agent herself to play. is is because the only agency there is on this picture belongs to psychological items, which cannot cause things for reasons even if they are themselves reasons.
On Aristotle’s view, though, agents are the efficient causes, as self-movers actualizing a particular rational potentiality, of their actions. Agents cause things for reasons, whether reasons are identi ed with their psychological items or with the intentional objects of those psychological items. So, the agent is front-and-center on
Aristotle’s view, and what the agent does—causing things for reasons—is perfectly recognizable as agency.
.. Aristotle and deviant formal causation
Anscombean views face the problem of deviant formal causation because they treat the content of practical knowledge as what gives action its structure, and practical knowledge has as its content both intended aims and foreseen side-effects. On Aristotle’s view, by contrast, token psychological items such as desire and decision are the formal causes of action. As I mentioned above, such psychological items have cognitive and conative content. Aristotle’s view can exclude foreseen side-effects from formally causing the action because they are not the intentional objects of the token psychological items that he thinks are the formal causes of actions. He can say that what distinguishes the actions of
Indifferent Gardener and Murderous Gardener is that they have different desires. is is because Indifferent Gardener’s desire, earning his pay, does not have as its intentional object the poisoning of the inhabitants, whereas Murderous Gardener’s desire has precisely that as its intentional object.
Sarah Paul () anticipates something like this move, though not with Aristotle’s view in mind. She argues that there are two problems with treating desire as the formal cause of the action. e rst, which she purports to derive from Jonathan Bennett (), is that desires are too ne-grained to be formal causes of action. e second is that desire might be “overly expansive” (). I will discuss these in reverse order.
Paul says that desire might be “too expansive” to be a formal cause of action in light of examples like the following: Suppose Indifferent Gardener is a reluctant sadist, and therefore that he actually does desire the deaths of the inhabitants. is, Paul evidently thinks, blocks saying that appealing to desire gives us a way to rule out foreseen side effects as formal causes of action. But if her example is more fully described, we can see that it is irrelevant to Aristotle’s view. e most plausible precisi cation of the example is that
Indifferent Gardener is now supposed to have two desires, one to earn his pay and one for the inhabitants to die, and the second is latent. is problem, if it is in fact a problem at all, does not afflict Aristotle’s view, according to which one’s active psychological items are formal causes.
Paul claims to be following Bennett in arguing that desires are too ne-grained to be formal causes of action. Here is what Paul says:
[A]s Jonathan Bennett has emphasized, the state of affairs that would satisfy one’s desires may be a surprisingly minimal aspect of what one intentionally brings about. In the classic example of the Terror Bomber who desires to induce terror in the enemy population by dropping bombs on the civilians, for instance, Bennett points out that strictly speaking, all the Terror Bomber requires to satisfy his desire is that the civilians appear to be dead for the duration of the war—no need for them to actually be dead. For all his desires reveal, his means are limited to making it appear that the civilians are dead, while their actual deaths are merely the foreseen side effects of using bombs to make them appear dead. What this illustrates is that the desirability- characteristic the agent sees in a course of action may be a very thin slice of a complex situation—even a nomologically impossible slice. Our Indifferent Gardener really only needs his employers to believe he is doing his job in order to be paid; one might then conclude that lling the cistern is a side effect of his inducing this belief by operating the pump handle in view of his
employers, and that if he could do this without thereby lling the cistern, he would. e point is that the part of the content distinguished by reference to the agent’s desires may oen be far too narrow to ground the intuitive distinction between side effect and aim (, italics in original).
Paul neglects to mention that Bennett is not actually talking about desire in the passage to which she refers (Bennett , –), but rather about intention. Intentions may well depend on the agent’s beliefs about what is nomologically possible in ways that desires do not, and so Bennett’s discussion does not actually establish what Paul claims.
Even if we treat Bennett as posing a problem only about intention, it is not clear that the problem is, as Paul thinks, “insuperable” (). Bennett himself holds that the solution is to say that in the cases Paul has in mind, the neness of grain of intentions is restricted by how far one gets in thinking of means for bringing about the intended result
(). For example, one cannot really intend an act of terror-bombing that leaves civilians temporarily stunned rather than dead because one has no idea how to bomb someone into a merely stunned state.
Perhaps Paul thinks that her modi ed Indifferent Gardener case in the quotation above circumvents Bennett’s proposed solution. Aer all, it is much more easily conceivable that one could think of a means for bringing about the intended result (earning one’s pay) in this case than that one could think of a means for leaving bombed civilians stunned rather than dead. But this would be too hasty, for Bennett’s solution seems to handle the Indifferent Gardener case well. If Indifferent Gardener thinks of a means to deceive the inhabitants into giving him his pay without actually pumping poisoned water
into the cistern and without them actually drinking it and dying from it, and he takes this means, then there is no mismatch between the neness of grain of his intention and the
neness of grain of his action. If he thinks of such a means but does not take it, instead going on to pump the poisoned water and kill the inhabitants, then we will judge that he intentionally poisoned the inhabitants. So again, there is no mismatch. If he does not think of such a means and so does not take it, there is no mismatch; his intention is as ne- grained as his action.
So, neither in the Terror Bomber case nor in the Indifferent Gardener case has Paul given an example that shows that there is a problem about the neness of grain of intentions. Even if she had, this would not be tantamount to showing that there is a problem about the neness of grain of desires. us, I continue to think that Aristotle’s account escapes the problem of deviant formal causation.
.. Aristotle and disappearing agency
e problem of disappearing agency arises for Anscombeans because they do not appeal to the resources needed for giving an account of agential control, namely active, token psychological items. Aristotle, by contrast, appeals to the latter as formal causes of action. As I will argue at length in the next chapter, this allows us to give a promising account of agential control. Unlike Anscombean views, Aristotle’s view enables us to give a determinate answer to the question of whether an agent has control over his movements.
e skier in the example from section . will have or lack control of his skiing insofar as
the potentialities he is actualizing in his self-movements have as part of their de nition an active desire or decision.
. Aristotle and the strengths of Davidsonian and Anscombean views
Aristotle’s view does not merely lack the weaknesses of Davidsonian and
Anscombean views; it also captures their strengths. Davidsonian accounts are geared toward explaining the relationship between reasons explanations and causal explanations.
Anscombean accounts prioritize explaining the goal-oriented structure of actions.
.. e relationship between reasons explanations and causal explanations
Recall that a central objective of Davidsonian views is to explain the difference between acting when one merely has a reason so to act, and acting for a reason, and to do this in a way that makes it clear that reasons explanation is a species of ordinary causal explanation. ey do this by arguing that a reason for which one acts, as opposed to a reason one merely has, must be a state whose onslaught is the efficient cause of the action.
us, for Davidsonians, the relationship between reasons and causes is straightforward: reasons for action are causes of action.
It is typically supposed that alternatives to Davidsonian views are not able to explain the relationship between reasons and causes in a compelling way. Aristotle’s four-causal view of action, though, explains the relationship as follows: A reason for which one acts is one’s active psychological item or the content of that psychological item. A reason one
merely has is one’s latent psychological item or the content of that psychological item. I give these disjunctive formulations because it does not matter for the viability of Aristotle’s account whether reasons for action are internal reasons or external reasons.16 Aristotle’s view is compatible with either. If reasons are internal, they will be the active psychological items themselves.17 If reasons are external, they will be the [proper] intentional objects of those psychological items. In the former case they would be formal causes of action, and in the latter case they would be nal causes of action.
Davidson () thinks that it is important that reasons explanation should be a species of “ordinary causal explanation” () and that this is Aristotle’s view (). He would be quite right about this if he meant “ordinary causal explanation” to cover any of the four kinds of causal explanation that Aristotle countenances and views as crucial components of any scienti c inquiry we might undertake. However, by “ordinary causal explanation” Davidson means “efficient-causal explanation,” and this is where he goes wrong. In section I discussed the problems for the view that reasons, rather than agents, are the efficient causes of action. As I argued in section , these problems do not attend
16 Basically, internalists think that reasons are internal to agents, identical with psychological items of theirs, whereas externalists think that reasons are out in the world (e.g., as facts), outside of agents. For this distinction and an argument for reasons internalism, see Bernard Williams (). Warren Quinn (a) and (b) argues for reasons externalism. 17 One sort of Aristotelian internalist might hold that only active psychological items count as reasons. On such a view there is no problem with distinguishing reasons for which one acts from reasons one merely has, because there are none of the latter. Another sort of Aristotelian internalist might hold that active psychological items are reasons for which one acts, and latent psychological items are reasons one merely has.
Aristotle’s view. is is because Aristotle thinks that reasons explanations are causal explanations, either formal-causal or nal-causal (depending on whether reasons internalism or reasons externalism is adopted). For him, both the formal cause and the nal cause are perfectly ordinary sorts of causal explanation, and perfectly at home in the natural world.18
.. e goal-oriented structure of actions
Anscombeans recognize that merely citing an efficient cause of action, as
Davidsonians do, is not of much help in saying why the action is a particular sort of action rather than some other, or why it counts as an ordered series of movements in the rst place. To give such explanations, Anscombeans appeal to the content of practical knowledge, which is revealed in the practical syllogism. is content is what structures bodily movements, situating them within a wider context and giving application to the question “Why?” when asked of those movements.
Aristotle, too, recognizes the appeal of such explanatory projects. He thinks that active, token psychological items structure bodily movements, rendering determinate what sort of action is being performed. Such psychological items make the difference between a haphazard series of movements and an ordered, goal-directed sequence that counts as an action. Drawing this distinction is a crucial preoccupation of the group of views I will
18 For a defense of these claims, see especially Malcolm Scho eld ().
discuss in the next chapter. For now, though, it should be clear that Aristotle’s view, like
Anscombean views, attends to and explains the goal-oriented structure of actions.
Conclusion
I have argued that Aristotle’s four-causal account of action lacks the weaknesses and preserves the strengths of Davidsonian and Anscombean accounts. It avoids the problem of deviant causal chains and the problem of the disappearing agent, which
Davidsonians face, and also the problem of deviant formal causation and the problem of disappearing agency, which Anscombeans face. Furthermore, Aristotle’s account, like
Davidsonian accounts, explains the relationship between reasons explanation and causal explanation; and like Anscombean accounts, it explains the goal-oriented structure of action. With this package of advantages, Aristotle’s account can speak to several major issues of contention within the philosophy of action literature. In the following chapter, I will argue that Aristotle’s view has further appeal for improving upon an emerging group of theories of action.
CHAPTER
FORMAL CAUSES OF ACTION: TOWARD A NEW CONSTITUTIVIST THEORY
Constitutivist theories of action say that the way to get a proper account of agential control is to focus on the constitutive causes of action rather than on the antecedent efficient causes of action.1 Constitutivists think that this is because control over action is internal to acting. I will take as my starting-point the recent proposals made by Helen
Steward (), Wayne Wu (, ), and Christine Korsgaard (). Each has captured attention in part because of its distinctiveness, but despite appearances these three views share a common core of important theoretical motivations. In section , I will show that these views form a natural grouping. I will contend in sections – that the problems for these views form a natural grouping, too. Each holds that agential control is at least partially constitutive of action, but goes wrong by misconceiving the causal role or range of intentional mental items that are relevant for agential control. In section , I will argue
1 ‘Constitutivism’ names at least two different positions, one in the philosophy of action and one in metaethics. I treat the former, categorized broadly, which focuses on constitutive features of action, whether they are constitutive aims, constitutive parts, or whatever. ‘Constitutivism’ sometimes names a subset of such views in the philosophy of action, namely those that focus on constitutive aims of action in particular. Metaethical constitutivism is the position that constitutive aims of action ground ethical normativity. David Enoch () gives an in uential argument against metaethical constitutivism that prescinds from whether constitutivism about action (either in the narrow or in the broad sense) is true. Christine Korsgaard, one of Enoch’s primary targets, is a constitutivist about action in the narrow sense and about metaethics. My own view and the views of others with whom I am engaging in this chapter, Helen Steward and Wayne Wu, are constitutivist about action in the broad sense but do not take a position about metaethics.
that constitutivists should embrace the idea that active intentional mental items,2 such as desires, decisions, etc., are Aristotelian formal causes of action.3 On a formal-causal version of constitutivism, active intentional mental items are proper parts of actions that partially constitute what it is to be those actions, and are paradigms for performing those actions in accordance with a goal. My objective is not to articulate a full theory of agential control, but rather to identify the proper role and range of intentional mental items in a constitutivist theory.4
. What is constitutivism?
e constitutivist views that I will discuss are pitched from very different theoretical perspectives: metaphysics in Steward’s case, cognitive science in Wu’s, and historically
2 In this chapter I mean ‘intentional mental items’ to refer to what I have called ‘active psychological items’ in previous chapters. I have adopted this terminology in order more easily to engage with the constitutivists I discuss in this chapter, since a couple of them use similar terminology. Sarah Broadie (), by contrast, uses ‘intentional items’ to refer to the intentional objects of such attitudes, processes, or activities. She views such intentional objects as ‘formal causes,’ by which she means determinants of one’s determinable capacity for self-motion (). 3 Various constitutivists have derived inspiration from Aristotle’s metaphysical doctrines. For example, Steward () draws on Aristotle’s idea of a two-way potentiality in explaining the power to act (–, n. ), and Korsgaard () relies on a purportedly Aristotelian notion of a formal cause to explicate the constitutive standards that actions must meet (, ). She thinks of a formal cause of action as the form of a Kantian maxim. Likewise, Tamar Schapiro () obliquely refers to Aristotelian formal causes in articulating a Kantian theory of action: “e Kantian conception…holds that action is an exercise of authorial causality. Authorial causality, like Aristotelian formal causality, is the constitutive power to organize given materials in such a way as to make them describable as a uni ed substance governed by its own law” (). I will offer a description of formal causes that I think is more Aristotelian and less Kantian. 4 More precisely, I aim to articulate a plausible role for intentional mental items in a constitutivist theory and motivations for this role that are consistent with whatever range of such items turns out to be appropriate once a full theory of agential control is given.
focused moral philosophy in Korsgaard’s. None cites any of the other authors’ work, and the bodies of literature with which they engage have little in common. ese facts and others have not done very much to invite comparisons between these views, and indeed I know of none in print.
However, we stand to gain important insight into how best to frame questions and answers in the philosophy of action by considering these accounts as falling under a common heading. ey are united in urging a controversial focus, as well as in the considerations they adduce to motivate this focus. Each of the three accounts I consider here insists that a proper theory of action should concentrate on causes internal to the action rather than on those external to it. is is what I take to be the core constitutivist claim, and the details of what it amounts to and what it contrasts with will emerge in what follows.
Constitutivists are motivated by at least two concerns. First, they think that views that emphasize factors external to the action itself fail to give satisfying explanations of what it means for an agent to exert causal control in acting. Korsgaard takes aim chie y at
Hume’s view, and Steward and Wu target Davidson’s version of causalism.5 According to
5 See Davidson (). e view arguably derives inspiration from Hume’s Treatise . , –. One might wonder how constitutivist views relate to the views of G.E.M. Anscombe () and those her work has inspired. As indicated in chapter , Anscombeans are less interested in speaking of causes of action or of causal control of agents over actions. ey prefer to speak instead of non-causal reasons explanations. is contrasts rather starkly with Wu, who insists that he is giving a kind of causal theory, though of an explicitly non-Davidsonian variety, and that he is attempting to explain agential control causally (, ). Likewise, Steward says that actions consist in causing bodily movements (), and explicitly disagrees with Anscombean views by denying that an action must be intentional under at least one description ().
them, the kind of view that Hume and Davidson endorse is that an action is efficiently caused by some intentional mental item of the agent’s (or an event involving it), where the intentional mental item is antecedent to, and thus not counted as part of, the action. is locates the cause of the action and the source of its intelligibility, and thus the most plausible candidate for causal control over the action, outside the action itself.
Constitutivists, by contrast, think that causal control is internal to the action itself rather than in something numerically distinct from it.6
It is important to recognize that constitutivists adopt a particularly strong version of the thesis that agential control must be internal to action. Harry Frankfurt maintains
Anscombe makes no appearance in Korsgaard’s book. e formal-causal constitutivist view I endorse later in this chapter is not Anscombean for several reasons, one of which is that it treats intentional mental items as differentiae of actions (since Aristotelian formal causes are differentiae according to Physics . , a– ). However, many features of constitutivism will be welcomed by Anscombeans. Constitutivism’s relationship to agent-causal views of action is complicated. Agent-causalism is oen taken to be a species of incompatibilism in debates about freedom and determinism, for example by Roderick Chisholm () and (), Randolph Clarke (), and Timothy O’Connor (). Steward () is both a constitutivist and an agent-causalist in this sense. In contrast to Steward, Christopher Evan Franklin (forthcoming) argues that one can, and should, be an agent-causalist whether one is an incompatibilist or a compatibilist. However, he still treats agent-causalism as a claim about free action rather than about action as such. Mayr () advocates a form of agent-causalism that is about action as such rather than about free action. Such a view is closer to the animus of constitutivism. Some agent-causalists believe that every instance of causation whatsoever is by agents. Examples include George Berkeley () and omas Reid (). Lowe () has the slightly weaker view that all causation is by substances, some of which are agents. is sort of causal monism can be accepted or rejected by constitutivists. 6 Wu clari es that “the threat to agency resides not in the fact that the controlling cause is distinct from the agent but rather in the fact that an element numerically distinct from the agent's action is the source of control with action as its target. at the postulated controlling element is part of me does not de ect the criticism that control has been incorrectly located in something distinct from my acting rather than as a constitutive feature of it… e [Davidsonian] Causal eory attempts to identify causal processes that yield agentive control, but it errs when it locates the relevant properties in the numerically distinct cause of action rather than as features of action itself. e nature of agency is not to be subject to control and guidance of any form; agency itself exempli es control and guidance. e requisite form of control must then be an internal property of action” (, ).
something like this internality thesis in a much weaker, temporal form in his (). He rejects Davidson’s version of the Causal eory of Action and others like it because they hold that what distinguishes an action from a mere movement is something that occurs temporally prior to the movement. Rather, Frankfurt thinks, a movement is an action when it occurs contemporaneously with agential guidance (), which is the disposition to alter the movement efficient-causally if it begins to go awry ().7 He denies that agential guidance is even partially constitutive of movements that count as actions, since he believes that such movements are in themselves indistinguishable from mere movements and differ from the latter only in virtue of occurring contemporaneously with the separate activity of agential guidance (). For example, if my arm moves in a hypnogogic jerk and knocks over a lamp, this movement is type-identical with my arm moving and knocking over the lamp because I intentionally moved it in this way. e difference is that only the second token of this type occurs contemporaneously with agential guidance, which is an activity numerically distinct from the bodily movement. at is the weak sense in which agential
7 One reason that Frankfurt thinks that the disposition to intervene, rather than the actual causal sequence, is what is important for agential guidance is that he believes that “the fact that certain causes originate an action is distinct from the considerations in virtue of which it is an action” and that therefore “there is no reason in principle why a person may not be caused in a variety of different ways to perform the same action” (). His dispositional view has the following odd result: If guidance is a matter of there being an independent causal mechanism that could intervene if necessary, then the counterfactual manipulator in the famous Frankfurt cases (see Frankfurt ) would appear to be guiding the ‘actions’ of the person he is manipulating. Douglas Lavin () argues that the notion of guidance as the disposition to intervene in the development of a mere happening is incoherent. If we are to suppose that what is being guided is a mere happening that is not already suffused with the sort of means-end structure characteristic of action, then it is hard to see how one could know that the mere happening is going awry until it is too late to prevent it from doing so ().
control is internal to action. On Frankfurt’s view, agential guidance is a numerically distinct extra feature that, when it occurs at the same time as a bodily movement, makes it right to call the movement an action (). As long as a bodily movement occurs contemporaneously with this extra feature, it counts as an action “even if its occurrence is due to chance” () or “caused by alien forces alone” (). But, we might ask, since many extra features occur at the same time as the bodily movement, why should we isolate one of these, the presence of a disposition to intervene if the movement goes awry, as special?8
Constitutivists think that agential guidance is not an extra feature, but is rather at least partially constitutive of the sort of movement that counts as an action. at is to say, they think that agential control is part of the essence of such a movement rather than an accidental feature of it.9
e second motivating concern for constitutivists is this: ey think that a theory of action ought to explain how in acting we are able to get a determinate and uni ed set of movements and experiences out of a manifold of inputs. I will call this ‘the Problem of the
Practical Manifold.’ Importantly, Steward, Wu, and Korsgaard all agree that a satisfying
8 Anton Ford () makes roughly this criticism of the Causal eory of Action in general. He says that one who thinks of action as an event conjoined with what Anscombe (, ) calls an “extra feature” must explain why one extra feature, say, being efficiently caused by desire, is philosophically interesting whereas another extra feature, say, being performed at night, is not (). Since at this point I am still registering the differences between constitutivists and their rivals, I will not pronounce on the extent to which Ford’s sort of criticism gives us reasons to reject the views of Frankfurt and others. 9 Constitutivists join Anscombeans in rejecting the idea that an action is a bodily movement (or other mere happening) conjoined with some extra feature. Lavin (), for example, gives an extended Anscombean argument against that idea.
solution to this problem will amount to a proper account of agential control.10 Wu argues roughly as follows that anything that counts as an agent faces this problem of getting one action out of many inputs (, ; , –): Either a creature’s behavioral space has a simple one-one structure (one input mapped to one output in every case), or it has a more complicated structure. If it has a simple structure, the creature has nothing recognizable as agency and does not perform actions. If it has a more complicated structure, it faces the problem of selecting inputs and/or outputs. Korsgaard argues similarly: We have a manifold of incentives for action, which we then must unify through deliberative decision in order to count as acting at all (, ). According to Steward, our problem is that we are complex biological entities with a myriad of simultaneously operating subsystems and ends to which those subsystems are directed, and an action cannot be just an aggregation of the activities of these subsystems if it is to be attributable to us as agents (–). Rather, there must be some top-down principle that structures and coordinates the operation of these subsystems.
Each of these versions of the Problem of the Practical Manifold shares important similarities with two issues that Aristotle highlights centrally in his Metaphysics. First, as
Korsgaard explicitly recognizes (), it echoes Aristotle’s claim in Metaph. H that if x is to be a determinate, whole thing, x must not be a mere heap. Second, it calls to mind
Aristotle’s distinction in Metaph. Θ between non-rational potentialities and rational
10 See Steward (, ), Wu (, ), and Korsgaard (, xi).
potentialities. Inanimate things have the former sort, and at least some animate things have the latter sort. Having rational potentialities creates a more complicated story about whether a certain behavioral output will coordinate with a given input. Since in acting we actualize rational potentialities, we are faced with the task of determining the manner, mode, end, and other features of our action from an enormous space of possibilities.
Despite the similarities in their views, one might still harbor suspicion that Steward,
Wu, and Korsgaard are not talking about the same thing. is is because whereas Wu and
Korsgaard are focused on intentional action, Steward does not limit her account to these.
She thinks that a theory of action should explain why sub-intentional actions count as full- blown actions. Does this mean that these philosophers are talking past each other? Might it be that Steward is characterizing one part of the domain of actions and Wu and
Korsgaard another? No, for each of the three thinks that his or her account captures the essence even of fully deliberative, fully intentional actions. So, although they disagree about the extension of ‘action,’ the fact remains that all three are answering the same fundamental question: In virtue of what does an action count as being a controlled, uni ed thing rather than a heap of haphazard movements? Furthermore, all three think that a constraint on a viable answer to this question is that it should focus on factors that are at least partially constitutive of the action itself. is makes it the case that they all count as versions of constitutivism.
I have been clarifying what it means for these three views to count as constitutivist, and motivating the idea that despite their initial appearances of dissimilarity they each fall under this heading. Each responds to a similar set of theoretical problems about agential control and adopts a broadly similar strategy in motivating a solution to these problems. If these problems and strategies for solving them are well motivated, so is constitutivism as a general research program. However, I will now argue that all of these constitutivist accounts face the same problem: Each gives an inadequate account of the agential control that is supposed to be at least partially constitutive of action because of misconceiving the causal role or range of intentional mental items that are relevant for agential control.
Steward’s account goes awry by eliminating intentional mental items from consideration,
Wu’s account by misconstruing their causal role, and Korsgaard’s by excessively restricting the admissible range of such items. Each has powerful reasons for going in these directions, but I will argue that an alternative is available. An account of intentional mental items as
Aristotelian formal causes of action provides a more promising constitutivist understanding of agential control.
. Steward’s denial of the relevance of intentional mentality for control
Steward claims that actions are processes consisting of the causing of bodily movements (). In other words, my causing my bodily movements in a certain way constitutes an action. is gives Steward the burden of saying how the process of causing
bodily movements unfolds without committing herself to the view that some intentional mental item, or an event involving it, is the antecedent efficient cause of this process. For, such a commitment would give one a Davidsonian view rather than a constitutivist view.
Steward approaches this explanatory task by appealing to the notion of “settling.”
Being able to perform actions is being able to settle (as a whole agent) how one’s bodily movements occur ().11 An organism counts as a settler when it is sufficiently complex to sustain an owner/body distinction (). An owner is one who has “discretion,” which is “a power selectively to control certain of its own subsystems in the light of constantly updated information, in such a way (roughly) as to optimise its chances of survival and success”
(). e fact that an owner of a body has discretion does not mean that he always acts with forethought, deliberation, or intention, for Steward thinks many actions are not intentional under any description (). Not only do we not choose or decide on them, we bear no conscious intentional relationship (e.g., desire) to them (). Indeed, Steward claims that intentional mental items are not necessary for action at all (). Her motivation for this seems to be that she wants to forestall the objection that settling could be reduced to the antecedent causal activity of mental items (–). So, her strategy is to
11 One of Steward’s aims is to show that animal locomotion in general presents a challenge to compatibilist theories of free will. at is why she takes instances of basic animal self-movement as the primary phenomena for which a theory of action needs to account. However, she thinks that a theory that accounts for these phenomena is applicable even to adult human action.
say that such mental items would have to be intentional mental items, and that not every action requires those.
It is important to Steward that agents settle the details of what will occur (mode, manner, means, etc.) rather than “whether an action of some given type would occur within a given timeframe” (, italics in original). Kleptomaniacs and drug addicts, for example, settle “such matters as what in particular will be stolen, how, and where it is to be concealed, or whether the drug will be smoked or injected and in which arm” (). On her view it is not that they decide on such details, but rather that “by acting [they] close off all possibilities except one” for such details ().
ere are two related difficulties for Steward’s notion of settling, which is at the heart of her constitutivist theory of agential control. Both result from her claim that intentional mental items are not necessary for action, and cast doubt on whether her account gives an adequate ground for the sort of agential control that is supposed to be at least partially constitutive of action.
e rst problem is that since Steward thinks that intentional mental items and conscious awareness are not necessary for action, she has to distinguish between a) voluntary non-intentional/non-conscious movements and processes (such as turning one’s head slightly or jiggling one’s foot, which for her can be actions) and b) non-voluntary non- intentional/non-conscious movements and processes (such as heartbeats or breathing, which are not actions). She draws the distinction by saying that the former but not the latter
have the disposition to be brought “under the control of genuinely intentional processes at a moment’s notice” ().12 First of all, one might think that it is possible to bring at least some details about one’s breathing under intentional control at a moment’s notice.13 But there is also a deeper worry: Why should we privilege a disposition to be brought under intentional control if, as on Steward’s view, there is nothing privileged about intentional control in the rst place? It is not just that according to Steward we would be wrong to insist that one must always have an active intentional mental item; rather, Steward insists that we will never get the right view of action as long as we privilege intentional mentality as a category (–).
Second, as I remarked above, Steward relies crucially on the notion of discretion, “a power selectively to control certain of [the organism’s] own subsystems in the light of constantly updated information, in such a way (roughly) as to optimise its chances of survival and success” (). It is not available to Steward to characterize discretion as intentional, since for her it is crucial for action and actions do not require intentional
12 Steward’s dispositional view is subtler than Frankfurt’s (), which I mentioned above. She thinks that the actual efficient-causal sequence matters for assessing whether the movement is a self-movement (it must be efficiently caused by the organism as a whole), and that the disposition to be brought under conscious control matters for distinguishing self-movements that are actions from self-movements that are not. A modi ed version of Lavin’s () argument against Frankfurt’s view applies to Steward’s view: If we are to suppose that what is being guided is a self-movement that is not already suffused with the sort of means-end structure characteristic of action, then it is hard to see how one could be aware that the self-movement is going awry until it is too late to prevent it from doing so (). 13 Christos Douskos (, –) raises this problem for Steward, who in turn agrees in her (, – ) that the dispositional criterion she gives in her () is unsatisfactory and that a new criterion must be sought.
mental items. But if discretion is not intentional, why do we need the top-level discretional system at all instead of only the subsystems, and why should it have to do with optimizing survival and success? Steward has not adequately explained how the goal of optimizing survival and success can be a constraint on the behavior of the top-level discretional system without discretion being intentional.
ese difficulties for Steward’s view that I have been describing are both species of the same general worry: If we deny a place to intentional mental items in explaining agency, we will have a hard time giving an intelligible account of agential control. is is particularly serious since one of the main selling points of constitutivism is supposed to be that it can give a better account of agential control than competitor views do. ere seem to be deep intuitions that action requires a certain degree of agential control, and that we have this degree of control only when we can monitor and order our behavior in light of our goal. Our mode of connection to this goal, plausibly, is an intentional mental item of ours. So, we would expect that the sort of control required for action in turn requires the involvement of intentional mental items in action. is is not meant to be a direct argument that intentional mental items must gure in action, but rather a way of systematizing the intuitions behind my three arguments above. ese intuitions, I think, strongly militate against eliminating intentional mental items from an account of agential control.
I have been arguing that two related problems arise for Steward’s account because of her claim that intentional mental items are not necessary for an account of action. Each
of the views that I go on to discuss rejects this claim while attempting to preserve Steward’s guiding intuition that the agent’s role as controlling cause of her action must not be swamped by the efficient-causal activity of intentional mental items. Whereas Steward rejects intentional mental items as grounds for agential control, Korsgaard admits them but excessively restricts the sorts of items that are relevant for determining whether something is an action, and Wu misconstrues the causal role played by such items.
. Wu’s Many-Many Problem and structuring causation
Wayne Wu’s (, ) account is built around the intuition that mental items like intentions or perception must inform bodily action. is need can be seen by considering what he calls the “Many-Many Problem”:14 “[H]ow is coherent action possible in the face of an overabundance of both sensory input and possible behavioural output? . .
. Action arises only if the agent reduces this many-many set of options to a one-one map”
(, ). To solve this problem, and thus to act at all, an agent “must select a speci c input to inform a speci c output” (, –). is ‘informing’ must be done by a mental item with representational content, Wu thinks. In informing behavioral outputs, such mental items will be part of “the internal causal structure of action” (, ).
14 (Wu ) applies the explanatory apparatus of (Wu ) and (Wu ) to address the problem of how to distinguish skilled and expert actions from deviantly caused actions using a strategy different from that employed by Davidsonians, such as Clarke ().
Wu distinguishes two versions of the Many-Many Problem, both of which are solved by intentional mental items (, ). e Deliberative Many-Many Problem is the problem of re ectively formulating an intention or plan for action. e Non- deliberative Many-Many Problem, by contrast, is the problem of executing this intention or plan in acting (, ). It “is solved once visual and motor selections are made in accordance with the content of that very intention [that solved the Deliberative Many-
Many Problem]” (, , italics in original). Wu says that in solving the Non- deliberative Many-Many Problem we must be acting in accordance with our current intention, or “the resulting action will out our intention and in that sense be incoherent”
(, ). In general, intentional mental items “constrain what counts as an appropriate one-one link” (, ), and in so doing constrain “which causal processes can occur”
(, –). To describe how this constraining works, Wu adverts to Fred Dretske’s
() notion of a structuring cause, which Dretske describes as “causes of more or less persisting conditions (B) which make (events of type) E depend on (events of type) T in such a way that tokens of T (if and when they occur) cause tokens of E” (). Dretske says that an example of a structuring cause is when “I wire a switch to a light so that I can— again and again—turn on the light by throwing the switch” (). A structuring cause thus differs from a triggering cause, an example of which is my ipping the switch sometime aer wiring it to the light (). Both the structuring cause and the triggering cause are
causes of an event of lighting the room.15 We are now in a position to understand a crucial part of Wu’s view, namely that intentional mental items are structuring causes of actions.
Intentional mental items structurally cause solutions to the Non-deliberative Many-Many
Problem, and thus make intentional action possible.
Wu claims that “solving the Non-deliberative Problem in the way described is necessary and sufficient for intentional bodily agency and control” (, ), and gives the following description:
(NS): Necessarily, for all agents, S, bodily action types B, motivational states, m, towards B-ing and action contexts C:
S’s motivational state m (paradigm: an intention to B) structurally causes the selection required in implementing a solution to the Non-deliberative Many-Many Problem appropriate to action B for S in C if and only if S intentionally B’s in C in the sense that she B’s because she is in motivational state m (, , italics in original).
Wu anticipates and disarms two types of purported counterexamples to (NS), namely deviant causal chain examples and anarchic hand syndrome examples. In examples of the former type, as I discussed in chapter , an agent’s motivational state causes an action, but in the wrong way for it to count as intentional. Davidson’s (a) famous case is of a climber who intends to let go of the rope that prevents his fellow climber from falling to his death, but whose intention causes his grip to fail without him having control over whether it fails or not. Wu says that such examples are not counterexamples to (NS)
15 Something is a structuring cause of an event E by causing (in some other way, perhaps as a triggering cause) the more or less persisting condition B that makes possible the aforementioned dependence relation.
because they do not meet the antecedent of the sufficiency side of the biconditional. at is, in deviant causal chain cases, ‘S B’s because she is in motivational state m’ is false.
In cases of anarchic hand syndrome, one’s hand moves in ways that are irrelevant to or even contrary to the way in which one intends it to move. e purported problem is that in many such cases “the Many-Many Problem must have been solved, yet the agent is not in control and hence not acting intentionally” (, ). However, Wu thinks that anarchic hand examples are not counterexamples to (NS) because, again, they fail to meet the antecedent of the sufficiency side of the biconditional. e movements “are clearly disconnected from any of the agent’s current motivations, at least those motivations that the agent would acknowledge” (, ).
Even if Wu has successfully de ected these purported counterexamples, a genuine counterexample results if the two examples are combined: We can imagine deviant anarchic hand cases, such that being in motivational state m deviantly causes one's hand to behave anarchically. Such cases are coherently describable whether m counts as an antecedent efficient cause or as a structuring cause.16 Here is an example of a deviant anarchic hand case where m is supposed to be a structuring cause: Suppose that Jones
intends at t to type an email to his boss at t. Knowing that he is afflicted with anarchic hand syndrome and that the only chance he will have at typing the email in the intended
16 Wu is not entirely clear about how to construe the ‘because’ in the antecedent of the sufficiency side of (NS). e example I give understands the ‘because’ in a structuring-causal way. If ‘because’ is to be understood in an antecedent efficient-causal way, the example will be simpler.
way is to type with his le hand and keep his anarchic right hand occupied by holding a paperweight, he intends to do just that. is intention causes him to be in the more or less persisting condition of holding the paperweight with one hand, and confers on Jones the dispositional property of being such that were the paperweight removed from his hand it would behave anarchically. Now suppose that his colleague, Smith, wants to see Jones’s purpose frustrated. Knowing the details of Jones’s situation, Smith removes the paperweight from Jones’s right hand just as Jones is about to begin typing the email, which then rapidly presses precisely the keys that Jones’s le hand would have pressed. Jones tries to press each key with his le hand before his right hand intervenes, but the latter, disencumbered of the inefficiencies of cognitive bureaucracy, is simply too quick. In such a case the antecedent of the sufficiency side of (NS) is met; Jones B’s because he is in motivational state m (the intention to type an email to his boss), where the ‘because’ indicates structuring causation.17 But there is no agential control, and so Wu cannot count the action as intentional. So, we have a counterexample.
We might attempt to block this sort of counterexample by insisting that motivational state m should cause not only the bodily movement type, B, but also each minor component of it. If this condition is added to Wu’s (NS) to yield (NS+), we might doubt that the example will meet the conditions of (NS+). is is because while Jones’s
17 Notice that it is not available to Wu to say that Jones’s hand B’s in this case rather than Jones, since the conditions under which we have personal-level control over our bodily movements are precisely what he is attempting to spell out.
motivational state causes typing the email, it does not cause the individual nger movements by which it gets typed.
is move is problematic for two reasons. First, it sounds plausible only if ‘cause’ means ‘triggering cause’ rather than ‘structuring cause.’18 It seems that indeed m is not the triggering cause of the individual nger movements, but there is no obvious obstacle to saying that m is the structuring cause of such movements. It could very well be the case that, in Dretske’s words, m is the cause “of more or less persisting conditions (B) which make (events of type) E depend on (events of type) T in such a way that tokens of T (if and when they occur) cause tokens of E” (, ).
Second, bee ng up (NS) to (NS+) gives one the problem of specifying what the limit is for how ne-grainedly we should individuate bodily action types, especially if ‘cause’ is supposed to be understood as ‘triggering cause.’ To satisfy (NS+), must m determine the contraction of each muscle ber, for example? What about each instance of ATP re- synthesis? e proposed way of blocking the counterexample turns out not to be so simple.19
It seems, then, that construing intentional mental items as structuring causes of action provides an insufficient basis for a viable constitutivist theory because it does not yet
18 Recall that it is somewhat unclear which sort of cause Wu means in the antecedent of the sufficiency side of the biconditional (NS). If it is a triggering cause, then Wu’s view is closer to the Davidsonian causalist views that he purports to reject. 19 Douskos (, ) raises a similar point about intentional mental items and the neness of grain of bodily action types as part of an objection to Steward ().
build them closely enough into the internal structure of actions. ere is still room for causal deviance and lack of agential control even when one’s intentional mental item is a structuring cause of one’s movements. I think that Wu is right that intentional mental items must be internal causes of intentional actions, and that to do full justice to this insight we will need to construe their causal role as something other than Dretske’s structuring causes.20 In the next section, I will discuss a view that even more tightly binds intentional mental items to the internal nature of the action itself, but that excessively restricts the range of intentional mental items that are relevant to determining what counts as an action.
. Korsgaard on agential unity, deliberative decision, and akratic acts
Korsgaard is committed to the view that actions are attributable to a whole agent, rather than to some part of her, some item within her, or something outside of her. Much like Steward, she thinks that what the whole agent causes is a bodily movement that constitutes the action (). is is how she purports to solve the Problem of the Practical
Manifold, the problem of explaining how in acting we are able to get a determinate and
20 e fact that structuring causation gives an insufficient foundation does not mean that it is false that intentional mental items are structuring causes of action. One might attempt to construct a constitutivist theory that is more complicated than Wu’s by supplementing structuring causation with other conditions, rather than rejecting it. I do not intend to develop or to argue against such a project here. However, I suspect that adding conditions to a theory that already permits a sort of causal deviance would either open up space for the conditions to be jointly satis ed by accident (which would reintroduce other forms of deviance), or would seem ad hoc. Instead, for the rest of this chapter I will concentrate on views, including my own, that advocate stronger relationships between intentional mental items and actions than structuring causation does.
uni ed set of movements and experiences, instead of a mere heap, out of a manifold of inputs. She offers a distinctive criterion for agential wholeness: agential unity achieved through deliberative decision.21 is criterion amounts to a rejection of Steward’s claim that intentional mental items are not necessary for action, since deliberative decision is an intentional mental item. us, Korsgaard is able to avoid the problems I mentioned above for Steward’s account.
Furthermore, Korsgaard’s view does not fall prey to the counterexample I mentioned for Wu’s theory, since she goes for something stronger than structuring causation. Instead, she thinks that something does not count as an action unless deliberative decision is the organizing principle of one’s causality, that is, unless one’s action is given structure and unity by a deliberative decision that uni es one as an agent.
is rules out deviant anarchic hand cases, wherein one’s body moves in accidental accordance with a decision that was the structuring cause of one’s movements. For
Korsgaard, one’s decision is not a structuring cause of what one does, causing a disposition in virtue of which a certain dependence relation between a triggering cause and an effect obtains. Rather, her movements depend for their identity as actions on embodying her deliberative decision to act in a certain way for the sake of a certain end. Or, as Korsgaard
21 I use ‘deliberative decision’ to mark a contrast with non-deliberative choice (e.g., picking or taking). I do not want to rely merely on the difference between ‘decision’ and ‘choice’ since each is sometimes used to describe something deliberative.
thinks is another way of putting it, one’s movements are actions if and only if they are expressions of oneself as a whole that can constitute one’s deliberative agency.22
In this section, I will argue that two of Korsgaard’s central claims push her to restrict excessively the range of intentional mental items relevant for agential control. ese claims are as follows:
(A) Only deliberative decision can organize one’s causality in the way required for acting as a uni ed agent.
(B) Acting as a uni ed agent is the only way of having control over one’s actions.
For Korsgaard, there is only one kind of cause you can be when solving the Problem of the Practical Manifold by performing actions in a controlled way: a uni ed cause, where uni cation occurs only by deliberative decision. I will argue that (A) and (B) in combination eliminate the resources for saying how akratic acts are controlled by agents without assimilating them to wicked acts.23
.. Unity and decision
22 Korsgaard does not directly address the problem of causal deviance, and is not always sufficiently precise about what unifying and organizing one’s causality are to give a clear idea of how she would address it. So, I may be mistaken in claiming that the sort of unifying and organizing that she has in mind amount to something other than structuring causation. If so, then her account has the same problem I have just identi ed for Wu. However, I attempt to understand Korsgaard’s view in such a way that it does not encounter this problem. 23 is problem is in some ways similar to a purported problem for real-self views of responsibility, such as those of Harry Frankfurt (), Gary Watson (), David Velleman (), and Michael Bratman (). According to real-self views, actions for which we are responsible must be caused by some psychological item which most represents our real self, for example our second-order volitions, our system of values, our desire to act in accordance with reasons, or our higher-order self-governing policies. ese views are sometimes said to have difficulty explaining how we can be responsible for akratic acts, since they do not seem to be caused by such psychological items.
Korsgaard’s view integrates a Greek emphasis on psychic harmony with a Kantian emphasis on agential autonomy.24 e result is an account that stresses agential unity as the most crucial condition for action. She believes that “it is essential to the concept of action that an action is performed by an agent” (), that “it is essential to the concept of agency that an agent be uni ed” (), and that “For a movement to be my action, for it to be expressive of myself in the way that an action must be, it must result from my entire nature working as an integrated whole” (, italics in original).
For Korsgaard, the sort of unity action requires is very robust. She stresses constituting one’s agential identity in acting through principles of reason, principles that are de nitive of one’s rational will (, ). Action requires unity achieved in constituting oneself ().
For humans, unlike for other animals, the choice that constitutes yourself as the author of your action must be deliberative (). She thinks that “nature sets each human being a task: self-consciousness divides his soul into parts, and he must reconstitute his agency, pull himself back together, in order to act” (). Pulling oneself together in
Korsgaard’s view requires acting in accordance with a deliberative decision:
When you deliberate in accordance with [rational] principles, you pull yourself together and place yourself, so to speak, behind your movement, rendering it an action that can be ascribed to you as a whole. In fact, deliberative action by its very nature imposes unity on the soul. When you
24 I happen to think that Korsgaard goes too far in asserting that “Aristotle’s view of the nature of action is precisely the same as Kant’s” (). However, I will not be arguing for any particular interpretation of Kant in this chapter.
deliberate about what to do and then do it, what you are doing is organizing your appetite, reason, and spirit, into a uni ed system that yields an action that can be attributed to you as a person (, italics in original).
is passage makes clear that Korsgaard thinks the sort of unity one must have in order to perform actions is achieved by deliberating about what to do and then doing it.
.. e problem of akrasia
Korsgaard’s commitment to (A) and (B) exerts pressure to think that insofar as one acts akratically one is not controlling one’s action. e correct description of what occurs in cases of akrasia is famously controversial. However, all I am interested in establishing is that there is at least one important type of akratic act that has a set of features, and that
Korsgaard’s account cannot attribute all of these features to it. It is this type of act that I call ‘akratic’ in this section, and I leave open what other types of akratic acts there may be.
e sort of akratic act I have in mind has at least the following features:
i. It is voluntary and under the agent’s control, despite involving internal con ict and regret.25
ii. It is a bad act not performed in accordance with a deliberative decision (either the agent’s original deliberative decision or a revised deliberative decision), and is thus different from a wicked act (which would be performed in accordance with a deliberative decision).26
25 Some, for example Neil Levy (), deny that akratic acts are voluntary and that we are morally responsible for them. Such a view runs counter to the spirit of Korsgaard’s project, however, and so I will not consider it here. 26 We might suppose that akratic acts can be performed in accordance with non-deliberative choice, but this position is not available to Korsgaard. She thinks that “Constituting your own agency is a matter of choosing only those reasons you can share with yourself. at’s why you have to will universally, because the reason you act on now, the law you make for yourself now, must be one you can will to act on again later, come what may, unless you come to see that there’s a good reason to change it” (–, italics in original). is is no chance fact about agency, on her view, for she thinks that this is just another way of saying that the
It is difficult to see how, on Korsgaard’s view, one could perform an akratic act with features (i) and (ii).27 According to her, acting in such a way that the action is under the agent’s control requires solving the Problem of the Practical Manifold, solving this problem requires acting as a uni ed agent, and acting as a uni ed agent requires acting in accordance with deliberative decision. But since akratic acts with feature (ii) are not in accordance with one’s deliberative decision, it seems that agents will not count as uni ed in her sense insofar as they are acting akratically. Unless we recognize a way of controlling one’s actions other than being uni ed in her sense, we cannot say that one controls one’s actions insofar as one acts akratically.28 If this is an unwelcome consequence, we need to
categorical imperative is rationally binding for all agents. is is where her project connects the constitutive principles of agency with the principles of practical reason. e akratic’s deliberative decision clearly meets Korsgaard’s requirements. He decides to abstain from cake because he wants to lower his risk of diabetes. He legislates this now, and he can will to act on it again later. But he does not act in accordance with this decision. Rather, he eats the cake anyway, and for a reason (perhaps because it seems pleasant to him). If Korsgaard instead says that akratic acts are in accordance with non-deliberative choice, a choice to take the cake, this choice would not meet her requirements. One’s reasons for acting akratically are not reasons he can share with himself. He is con icted about them and regrets what he did. For this reason, Korsgaard cannot say that non-deliberative choice is sufficient to ground agential unity for the akratic, and neither would she want to say it anyway, for such choices would seem to be what undermine agential unity in cases of akratic action. 27 One might think that Korsgaard’s emphasis is on the activity of deliberation rather than the result of deliberation (a deliberative decision), and so allege that Korsgaard does not face the problem I pose. Appealing to the activity of deliberation does not really help matters, though, for akratic acts of the type I am describing are not in accordance with one’s activity of deliberation any more than they are in accordance with the result of one’s deliberation. 28 I am not suggesting that on Korsgaard’s view one who acts this way is never a uni ed agent, or is not a uni ed agent in general. My claim is merely that on Korsgaard’s view he is not performing akratic acts as a uni ed agent. Since Korsgaard thinks that acting admits of degrees, one might think that it is available for her to say that akratic acts are actions to a lesser degree than other types of action, and that this is not such an implausible position. However, we must keep in mind that, on Korsgaard’s view, “tyrannized souls” like serial sex killers will be uni ed through deliberative decision to a greater degree than akratic agents will be. us, appealing to the idea that action comes in degrees will not do much to mitigate the counterintuitive consequences of her view. e agent may have achieved unity in general through deliberation, but this deliberative unity is precisely that in accordance with which he does not act when he performs akratic acts with features (i) and (ii). It is not merely that akratic acts fail to contribute positively to one’s agential unity
look for a way to affirm that akratic agents solve the Problem of the Practical Manifold, and are therefore in control of their akratic acts.
. Intentional mental items as Aristotelian formal causes of action
So far, I have been arguing that the constitutivist accounts that I have discussed fail in their central ambition of saying how agential control is at least partially constitutive of action. Steward attempts to ground control in “settling,” Wu in “structuring causation,” and Korsgaard in uni cation achieved through deliberation, but none of these captures the essence of agential control. Steward eliminates intentional mental items as candidates for grounding agential control, Wu misconstrues their role, and Korsgaard unduly restricts their range. Because Steward’s view is that no intentional items are necessary for action, it removes the necessary ingredients for an intelligible account of agential control. Wu’s structuring causation leaves room for causal deviance and lack of agential control, failing to make intentional mental items as internal to action as they will need to be in order to avoid deviant anarchic hand examples. Korsgaard’s view that only deliberative decision can organize one’s causality in the way required for acting as a uni ed agent, and that acting as a uni ed agent is the only way of having control over one’s actions, eliminates akratic acts from the class of controlled action.
achieved through deliberation. Rather, akratic acts undermine this unity because they contravene the agent’s deliberation.
In this section I will show how an alternative constitutivist view based on the
Aristotelian account presented in previous chapters avoids these problems by giving a more plausible description of the role of intentional mental items in agential control. I will provide just enough detail to show schematically how such a view could rectify the problems for existing constitutivist accounts. A formal-causal constitutivist view would allow us to say that the agent controls her action, while also affirming that intentional items are causally involved, but without limiting the relevant intentional items to deliberative decision. In doing so, we can join Steward in rejecting a conception of the causal role of intentional items that would swamp the agent’s causal role, but can also honor the intuition
(in a way that Steward cannot) that we have agential control only when we can monitor and order our behavior in light of our goal. We can affirm with Wu that intentional mental items must inform action, but adopt an understanding of informing that will not fall prey to the kinds of counterexamples that I mentioned for his view. We can also agree with
Korsgaard that actions have a constitutive formal structure, and that such structure is imparted by our intentional items, but without insisting that deliberative decision is the only intentional item that can play this structuring role. All of this is possible if we construe intentional mental items as Aristotelian formal causes of action. I will rst reach back to chapter to say what such a cause is, and then say how it allows us to avoid the problems about the role and range of intentional mental items that face the other constitutivist views.
.. Formal causes
Recall that constitutivists aim to solve the Problem of the Practical Manifold, which is that of explaining how in acting we are able to get a determinate and uni ed set of movements and experiences, instead of a mere heap, out of a manifold of inputs. I mentioned above that Korsgaard in particular recognizes the structural similarity of this puzzle to one that Aristotle raises, and the plausibility of the answer that he gives:
For all things that have multiple parts and for which the whole is not like a heap, but rather is something besides the parts, there is a cause [of being one]… It is clear that if people go about thus de ning and speaking as they are accustomed to do, they cannot explain and solve the puzzle. But if, as we say, one [part] is matter and another form, and one is potentially and the other actually, the question will no longer seem to be a puzzle (Metaphysics H , a–, –).
An Aristotelian formal cause is the constitutive cause of something that explains what kind of thing the thing is. It is what makes something determinately the way that it is, rather than a mere heap. Aristotle describes it as follows: “And in another way, ‘cause’ designates the form, viz., the paradigm, and this is the de nition of what it is to be and the genera of this (for example the cause of the octave is the relation :, and number in general), and the parts in the de nition” (Physics . , b–). Aristotelian formal causes are inherent in those things of which they are the formal causes. at is to say, they are not separate entities. It might be tempting to describe something’s formal cause as its physical shape, but this would be a mistake. Shape is a proper subset of formal causes. is is why things like octaves can have formal causes. A formal cause is, in general, a principle of
organization and de nition. It structures, partially constitutes, gives the de nition of, and grounds the being of that of which it is the formal cause.
As I argued in chapter , the formal causes of actions are active intentional mental items like desires and decisions. ese are psychophysical motions that are proper parts of actions, which are in turn psychophysical motions.
Active intentional mental items are those parts of actions that provide the identity conditions for the actions. If I help a neighbor with a task, this might have as its formal cause a desire to bene t my neighbor, or alternatively a desire to be done a favor in return.
In the former case, the action would be a bene cent action. In the latter it would be a sel sh action. It does not matter for purposes of classifying the action that I have a latent desire to vacation in Spain at the next available opportunity. Active intentional mental items specify what sort of action is taking place and partially constitute what it is to be that action.
Active intentional mental items are also principles of unity for bodily movements, paradigms in accordance with which one controls one’s actions. It is by acting in accordance with such a paradigm that one acts in a determinate way, neither overrunning nor falling short of the goal.
So, the formal-causal constitutivist view is that active intentional items like desire and decision count as formal causes of action in that they partially constitute what it is to be an action of a particular sort, and are paradigms for performing that action in accordance with a goal. ese intentional items serve as part of the speci cation of the
success conditions for action in that they render determinate when we are acting in a certain way rather than in some other way. Since something must have a formal cause of this kind to have determinate existence, actions must have some intentional mental item or other as a formal cause.29 us, every action will be intentional in the weak sense that it has as its formal cause an active desire, decision, etc. is does not entail that every action will be intentional in a stronger sense (deliberately decided, for example).
Formal-causal constitutivism adopts and rejects major elements of both
Davidsonian and Anscombean accounts. Unlike Anscombean views, it does not take the goal-orientedness of actions as basic. Rather, it shares the Davidsonian ambition of showing what it is in virtue of which actions have the goal-oriented structure that they do, and of giving an account in terms of the agent’s psychology of why she is acting in the particular goal-oriented way that she is.30
Unlike Davidsonian views, formal-causal constitutivism identi es that which makes an action an action with a constitutive part of the action, rather than with something
29 Of course, intentional mental items are only one kind of intentional item. Since I think that an organism can self-move without performing full-blown actions, I think that the account of action that I give here is an application of a more general account of self-motion that extends beyond the category of the mental. 30 A good foil for formal-causal constitutivism is the view of ompson (), according to which actions stand as form to the individual movements that compose them, and actions count as actions in virtue of being parts of broader actions. I agree with ompson’s strategy of focusing on forms and parts in giving an account of action, but I want an informing relation that runs the opposite direction: Actions are actions in virtue of having formal causes as proper parts, not in virtue of being proper parts of something that informs them. ompson prefers the direction of the informing relation that he does because, as an Anscombean, he takes the goal-orientedness of actions as basic. Setiya () argues that rather than making the goal-orientedness of actions a fundamental principle of a theory of action, we ought to give an account of actions’ goal- orientedness in terms of agents’ psychology. Formal-causal constitutivism does this.
external to the action, leaving the view signi cantly less exposed to worries about causal deviance. It shares Anscombeans’ misgivings about identifying intentional mental items as efficient causes of action, and shares their focus on the organization of actions as goal- oriented wholes with goal-oriented parts since intentional mental items are goal-directed proper parts of actions.
Formal-causal constitutivism is naturally complemented by an agent-causal theory of action. Although it is not strictly necessary to suppose that agents are the efficient causes of their actions in order to be a formal-causal constitutivist (perhaps one might think that nothing efficiently causes actions, for example), I nd it more plausible to say that agents are efficient causes of their actions and active intentional mental items are formal causes of actions. Other constitutivists, in particular Steward, have built their constitutivist views on an agent-causal foundation, and I will not here go beyond what I said in chapter about how agents can be the efficient causes of their actions. Rather, I will assume that various constitutivists are already on board with agent-causalism, and will be amenable to the project of supplementing their accounts of the efficient causation of action with the account of the formal causes of action that I here describe. One who opposes agent-causalism can profess a lack of interest in the efficient causes of action, and take formal-causal constitutivism as all that needs to be said about the causes of action. e ones who cannot accept formal-causal constitutivism are those who want to maintain that the efficient causes of action are outside the action and that they make the action count as controlled.
.. Advantages of formal-causal constitutivism
I will now show that construing active intentional mental items as Aristotelian formal causes of action allows us a better understanding of the role of intentional mentality in a theory of agential control than do the constitutivist accounts that I discussed earlier.
Steward rejects appeals to intentional mental items because she apparently thinks that the only alternative is to accept a Davidsonian causalist view according to which intentional mental items, or events involving them, are the antecedent efficient causes of one’s actions.
But formal-causal constitutivism allows us to say that the intentional mental items to which
Davidsonians are wont to appeal, such as desires and decisions, are not efficient causes of action, but rather formal causes: ey partially constitute what it is to be an action of a particular sort, and are paradigms for performing that action in accordance with a goal.
Intentional mental items are necessary for a theory of action, on the formal-causal constitutivist view, because something must have a formal cause to count as the particular sort of thing that it is.
Formal-causal constitutivism improves upon Wu’s account of how control is at least partially constitutive of action by providing an alternative to Wu’s structuring causes of action. An Aristotelian formal cause is a proper part of something that makes it the kind of determinate thing that it is, and is thus as internal to the thing in which it inheres as anything could be. Construing active intentional mental items as formal causes of action rules out deviant anarchic hand cases, which caused problems for Wu’s view of control,
because in such cases the intentional mental item is not a formal cause of the bodily movement. e reason is that it is not what imparts the identity conditions of the movement in such cases.
On formal-causal constitutivism intentional items other than deliberative decision can structure one’s causality in the way required for agential control, and this is what allows it to include akratic actions among the class of controlled actions, which Korsgaard’s view cannot do. e formal causes of actions can include desires and decisions, and perhaps others such as beliefs, knowledge, perception, attention, etc. is explains why one can be in control of one’s action despite not acting as a uni ed agent, which Korsgaard’s view does not allow. In cases of akratic action, for example, the formal causes will be, at least, appetitive desire and deliberative decision. As became clear in the course of my discussion of Korsgaard’s view, it is not enough to mention only deliberative decision when describing cases of akratic action. is is because there is a sort of con ict, contrariety, or disunity that one undergoes when one acts akratically that is not present when one acts virtuously or wickedly. Both of these latter cases involve acting in accordance with the deliberative decision that one has made, whereas the akratic makes a deliberative decision but then acts in accordance with appetite. Despite this disunity, the agent is still in control of his akratic acts. is is because these acts have as their formal causes the agent’s appetitive desire and deliberative decision. ese partially constitute the action, making it an akratic action rather than some other sort of action. I will give more clari cation in the next section about
how formal causes of akratic action work by examining some of Aristotle’s remarks about akratic action.
.. Aristotle on akrasia
Unlike Korsgaard, Aristotle is very concerned to distinguish akratic action from wicked action while insisting that it is sufficiently subject to agential control to be fully voluntary and blamable. is project is part of his chief concern in EE /NE . –, which is to give a moral-psychological taxonomy of various types of agents. Most prominent among these are the temperate, the enkratic, the akratic, and the self-indulgent. Each of these is concerned with the same objects, bodily pleasures, and is distinguished from the others on the basis of his disposition toward them (EE /NE . , a–; /. , a–
; /. , b–a). As in the case of the revolutionaries from the Politics with whom we met in chapter , these dispositions are one’s active intentional mental items: appetitive desire, decision, etc.
Aristotle’s basic taxonomy is as follows: e temperate person differs from the enkratic person because the latter has base appetites (EE /NE . , a–), though the two are similar in that both act in accordance with a good decision or belief about what they ought to do.31 e akratic person differs from the self-indulgent person because the
31 As Aspasius mentions in his commentary (.–, .–), throughout EE /NE Aristotle does not take much care to distinguish between a decision that one ought to do something and a more generic wish, belief, or bit of reasoning that one ought to. For much of the discussion he treats them as interchangeable. However, there is at least one important case in which they are not, which I will discuss in the next paragraph.
latter acts in accordance with a bad decision, whereas the former does not, even though both pursue excessive or base bodily pleasures (EE /NE . , b–; /. , a–).
e basic taxonomy is complicated by the fact that Aristotle mentions two types of akrasia: weak akrasia and impetuous akrasia. According to Aristotle, the weak akratic makes a decision and then fails to act in accordance with it, whereas the impetuous akratic has not made a decision about the case at hand (EE /NE . , b–; /. , a–;
/. , a–). What the impetuous akratic acts against is a general belief that he ought to act in a certain way in cases of the relevant sort. Without such a belief, one will not be akratic, but rather wicked (NE . , b–), and it will be hard to see how the impetuous akratic could be regretful, as every akratic is said to be (EE /NE . , b–), if he lacked such a belief. So, both weak and impetuous akratics are aware, either through belief or decision, of what they ought to do, but they act in accordance with an appetitive desire for excessive or base bodily pleasure instead.
e formal-causal constitutivist position I have been articulating makes good sense of why Aristotle would give this taxonomy in terms of intentional mental items, as I will soon argue. However, there is another concern of Aristotle’s in EE /NE , which is that of explaining how it is psychologically possible to act akratically at all. Aristotle devotes far less attention to this concern than to the taxonomical concern, and has far less success in
explicating it to the satisfaction of posterity.32 Formal-causal constitutivism sheds no more and no less light on this concern than do other prominent approaches in characterizing
Aristotle’s remarks about it, so I will restrict my discussion to the taxonomical concern.
Most interpreters of EE /NE tacitly assume a Davidsonian view of action according to which each sort of agent’s action is efficiently caused by a decision (in the case of the temperate person, the enkratic, and the self-indulgent person) or an appetitive desire
(in the case of the akratic). In order to follow Aristotle’s concern to distinguish these agents from each other on the basis of their intentional mental items, they have to say how temperate, enkratic, and self-indulgent action differ, since they think that all are caused by decision. is is not so hard for temperate and self-indulgent action, for these interpreters can say that the former is caused by a good decision and the latter is caused by a bad decision (one in favor of pursuing inordinate or base bodily pleasures). It is more difficult to distinguish temperate and enkratic action, for these interpreters must say that each is caused by the same sort of good decision. e most obvious strategy is to say that unlike the temperate person, the enkratic person has a bad appetitive desire, but this appetitive desire is prevented from causing the enkratic’s action because his good decision somehow
32 e relative priority of these concerns is oen obscured by a narrow focus on Aristotle’s least clear remarks about akrasia in EE /NE . to the exclusion of other parts of book /. From the rst lines of /. to the end of /. , Aristotle is concerned to give a moral-psychological taxonomy of a wide variety of conditions, paying particular attention to how they are distinguished with respect to the dispositions characteristic of each. His remarks about akrasia form only part of this discussion, of which in turn his treatment of how akrasia is psychologically possible occupies only a subsection.
temporarily knocks out his bad appetitive desire. But this (even if it can be explicated non- metaphorically in a plausible way) explains at best only why the enkratic is prevented from acting in accordance with his appetitive desire. It does not give a causal explanation of the enkratic action itself that differs from the causal explanation of temperate action.
Other non-causal ways of distinguishing between temperate and enkratic action are available to such interpreters, too. For example, one might say that they are distinguished counterfactually: If one would have acted on base appetites if he did not have a decision that prevented him from doing so, then one is not acting temperately. Or, one might say that simply having the base appetite makes one enkratic rather than temperate. None of these strategies is entirely implausible, but each seems like a drastic compromise on the central agenda of those who have a Davidsonian view of action. Such theorists want to keep action tied to causation, but the aforementioned strategies all give up on the possibility of specifying a cause for why the agent acts enkratically rather than temperately. at is to say, for these interpreters nothing about the proximate causal antecedent of enkratic action intrinsically distinguishes it from temperate action. Furthermore, the lack of intrinsic connection between the enkratic’s appetite and his action makes it hard to see how this appetite could bear on the unfolding or phenomenology of that action.
By contrast, formal-causal constitutivism can give a causal explanation of the difference between temperate, enkratic, akratic, and self-indulgent action that re ects the details of Aristotle’s view. is is an advantage over views that assume a Davidsonian
framework, and I will spell it out aer mentioning one further difficulty that such views have in describing enkratic and akratic action. is difficulty is a consequence of the problem of the disappearing agent. ‘e problem of disappearing con ict,’ as I will call it, is that if the agent disappears from the account, as happens in Davidsonian views, then the agential con ict and disunity that are supposed to be marks of enkratic and akratic action disappear, too. It is especially bad for the agent to disappear from an account of akratic action if one wants to be able to explain how the agent is con icted about what to do and regrets what he does aerward.33, 34
Now I will spell out how the formal-causal constitutivist, following Aristotle’s remarks in EE /NE , can distinguish temperate, enkratic, akratic, and self-indulgent action on causal grounds. is account is admittedly speculative, for Aristotle’s remarks in
EE /NE are notoriously obscure, but it is compatible with many details of existing interpretations.35 e central claim is that for Aristotle, the decision (or belief) of the akratic
33 Davidson (b) does not seem particularly interested in explaining why akratic and enkratic agents feel con icted. Rather, he seeks to explain why what might appear to be a logical problem for the possibility of akrasia is dissolved once we get clear about the role that the logical grammar of ‘prima facie’ plays in a proper account of practical rationality. He argues that akrasia is a certain sort of practical irrationality in which one forms an unconditional judgment that a is best to do, as well as a conditional judgment that b is best to do, and does b. e conditional judgment differs from the unconditional judgment because the former includes a ‘prima facie’ operator. us, akrasia involves no logical contradiction between the two judgments that the akratic makes, since a sentence with the ‘prima facie’ operator cannot con ict with a sentence that lacks it (). 34 Notice that non-causal ways of distinguishing between temperate and enkratic action exacerbate the problem of disappearing con ict. It becomes doubly difficult to see how the enkratic is genuinely con icted about what to do while he is doing it if only his decision and not his appetitive desire is intrinsically related to his action. 35 Rather than adopting this speculative account, a formal-causal constitutivist could rest content with one of the non-causal ways of distinguishing between temperate, enkratic, akratic, and undisciplined action
and the appetite of the enkratic are in some way causally relevant to the actions each performs, even though they are the intentional mental items against which these agents act.
e akratic’s appetite and the enkratic’s decision are obviously active, for each acts in accordance with these. However, the akratic’s decision or belief and the enkratic’s appetite are also active during the akratic and enkratic actions, respectively, but in a different way than that in which the akratic’s appetite and the enkratic’s decision are active. While
Aristotle does not do much to elucidate this contrast between ways of being active (other than indicating obliquely at EE /NE . , a– that it is not the same as the familiar distinction between rst and second actuality), there are some clues in the text about what it might involve. If this is right, then the decision or belief of the akratic and the appetite of the enkratic could still be active enough to count among the formal causes of the akratic's and the enkratic's actions, respectively, but not active in the same way as the akratic's appetite and the enkratic's decision. is of course raises the question of how active something has to be to count as a formal cause, but Aristotle gives no guidance at all on this score as far as I can tell. us, my account is compatible with Aristotle's remarks about moral psychology, but leaves mysteries to be solved.36 However, if the account succeeds
that Davidsonian interpreters favor, such as the counterfactual strategy or ‘mere having’ strategy. However, this would sacri ce the advantage of keeping the account tied to causality. 36 For example: In what, precisely, does a psychological item’s being active consist in, and how much room is there between activity and latency? Can there be active sub-conscious psychological items that are reasons for action, for example? As far as I know, such questions have not been entirely settled in today’s debates about consciousness and the nature of attention. Furthermore, Aristotle’s account says nothing that would rule out various fruitful possibilities for answering such questions.
then it will distinguish temperate, enkratic, akratic, and self-indulgent action on (formal-) causal grounds, which neither Korsgaard nor those who assume a Davidsonian framework seem able to do. It will also lack the problem of disappearing con ict that afflicts
Davidsonian views.
e main sources of textual evidence for the claim that the akratic’s decision or belief and the enkratic’s appetitive desire are sufficiently active to count among the formal causes (together with the akratic’s appetitive desire and the enkratic’s decision) of akratic and enkratic actions, respectively, is drawn from Aristotle’s remarks about akratic action.
Given a few plausible assumptions, however, the points are readily extendable to enkratic action. Aristotle evidently agrees with the endoxic claim that the akratic is aware (εἰδὼς) in some sense that his action is base (EE /NE . , b; /. , a).37 is is why “vice escapes one’s notice, but akrasia does not” (EE /NE . , b). Aristotle cannot mean that one who is acting viciously is not aware of what he is doing, for that would make it involuntary (NE . , a–). He means instead that one who is acting viciously is not aware of the action as base, for his only sources of practical knowledge, his decision and universal belief, are corrupt. e decision and universal belief of akratic agents, though, has not been corrupted (EE /NE . , a–), and this allows akratics to be aware in some sense of the baseness of their actions. Furthermore, they are aware in some sense of the
37 is is the view of Aspasius (.). By contrast, Moss (, ) thinks (and indeed her overall account of Aristotle’s psychology requires) that the akratic agent is “temporarily ignorant of the fact that her action is bad.”
baseness of their actions while performing them. Here is why: If they were unaware of the universal (e.g., overeating is base) while acting, they would be acting self-indulgently. If they were unaware of the particular circumstances (e.g., I am presently overeating) while acting, they would be acting involuntarily. Of course, this does not entail that they have knowledge in the proper sense of the universal or the particular circumstances while acting, which is what most commentators think akratic agents lack, but they must have awareness.38 Aristotle never denies that the akratic is aware in some sense of the connection between the universal and particular just mentioned, which would yield awareness in some sense of the entailed conclusion that one is presently doing something base, and indeed he would have been remiss to do so.
If the akratic is aware while acting that he is acting badly, this is strong evidence that his good decision or belief is still active in some way while he is acting. Otherwise, it is very difficult to explain the source of his awareness that he is acting badly. is awareness is unlikely to come from appetite itself. Rather, the akratic’s rational capacities are active in some sense.39 But in what sense are they active? Aristotle thinks that the enkratic and akratic are both pained while acting by the intentional mental item in accordance with which they
38 Charles () highlights the importance of distinguishing between being aware (εἰδέναι) and knowing systematically (ἐπίστασθαι) in evaluating Aristotle’s remarks in EE /NE . . 39 is contrasts with Hendrik Lorenz’s (, –) view, according to which the akratic undergoes temporary, comprehensive disablement of his rational faculties. Lorenz therefore has to argue that the non- rational faculties possess a high degree of awareness independently of the rational faculties, and that such awareness can operate even when the rational faculties are “not in functioning order” (). I simply do not see how one can be aware that one is acting badly if one’s rational faculties are comprehensively disabled.
did not act (EE . , a–b). e enkratic is pained to act against appetite, but has anticipatory pleasure from the hope of having acted well, whereas the akratic has anticipatory pain from his awareness that he is acting badly (EE . , b–). Such combinations of pleasures and pains can come only while one is acting.40 Furthermore, the akratic rebukes himself while acting (EE . , b–). is is one of the things Aristotle might mean when he says that “one acts akratically under the in uence of reason and belief in a way” (EE /NE . , b). In addition to being associated with pain and regret, the akratic’s decision or belief and the enkratic’s appetite might color their actions in other ways. For example, the akratic might eat less cake than he otherwise would have if he were self-indulgent, or eat it at a different pace. Likewise, the enkratic might vividly imagine enjoying the cake and salivate even as he pushes it away, whereas the temperate person would not. Formal-causal constitutivism explains how these are all features of the unfolding and phenomenology of these actions: e akratic’s decision or belief and the enkratic’s appetite play some role in structuring their actions, even though they do not act for the sake of the goal recommended by those intentional mental items.
40 Aristotle is more explicit in EE and than he is in EE /NE that the akratic is aware that he is acting badly while he is doing so. Some think that the common books were originally part of the EE and substantially revised for inclusion in the NE, and so we cannot automatically infer that Aristotle’s view in the EE is the same as his view in EE /NE . However, nothing in EE /NE rules out the view in EE and , and so the most plausible interpretation is that Aristotle thinks in each of these books that the akratic is aware that he is acting badly while he is doing so.
If this is correct, then formal-causal constitutivism has a way of giving a (formal-) causal account of the distinctions between temperate, enkratic, akratic, and self-indulgent action. is, as I have argued, is something that neither Korsgaard’s account nor
Davidsonian accounts can accomplish. On this score, again, formal-causal constitutivism has the advantage.
.. A problem for formal-causal constitutivism?
One consequence of construing intentional mental items as formal causes of action is that there will be no such thing as a sub-intentional action. is is because there can be no determinate action without a formal cause, and a formal cause of action must be an active intentional mental item. us, there will be no action that lacks an intentional structure, and so no sub-intentional action. is consequence will seem unsettling to some at rst. Aer all, do we not perform actions all the time without intending, planning, or perhaps even explicitly desiring to do so?
However, we must keep in mind that intentional mental items are just those that have intentional objects. ese might include a wide range of items, perhaps decisions, desires, beliefs, knowledge, perceptual awareness, and others.41 I am committed to saying
41 It is not necessary for my purposes here to give an exhaustive speci cation of the range of intentional mental items that is relevant to agential control. My primary goal is to articulate a plausible role for intentional mental items in a constitutivist theory and motivations for this role that are consistent with whatever range of such items turns out to be appropriate once a full theory of agential control is given. Put another way, as long as the commitments of formal-causal constitutivism do not rule out a type of intentional mental item that should be featured in a full theory of agential control, it will be an improvement over the other constitutivist accounts I have discussed. Wu’s account does not pick out the right causal role for intentional mental items, and Steward and Korsgaard have deep commitments that are inconsistent with
that if one’s bodily movements are not informed by any such items, then such movements do not amount to an action. But this is the right result, I think. I do not see how one could be controlling her movements if she lacked any active desire, belief, and perceptual awareness whatsoever pertinent to those movements. So, I wish to affirm that there are sub- intentional actions when ‘intentional’ is taken to mean ‘informed by a deliberative intention or explicit plan,’ but to deny that there are sub-intentional actions when
‘intentional’ is taken to mean ‘informed by some active intentional mental item or other.’
.. Further explanatory potential of formal-causal constitutivism
Formal-causal constitutivism is poised to explain two important and related features of our internal experience of agential control. e rst is that an agent’s perceptual process and her goal functionally integrate and structure her experience of acting.42
Formal-causal constitutivism gives a neat explanation of why this is so: ey functionally integrate and structure her experience of acting because they functionally integrate and structure the action itself and, as active mental items, are necessarily experienced. A formal cause structures the action itself as part of what makes the action the action that it is. Since formal causes of action are active intentional mental items, such items necessarily have
countenancing an appropriate range of intentional mental items. It is important to Steward to break away from the category of intentional mentality in order to extend robust agency to animals that lack intentional mentality. Korsgaard is motivated by her Kantian constructivist commitments to restrict the range of intentional mental items relevant to determining what counts as an action to deliberative decision. 42 Joshua Shepherd (, ) argues this on largely empirical grounds.
intentional objects: goals. ey are necessarily experienced because something cannot be an agent’s active intentional mental item without being experienced by that agent.
e second is that, as Anscombeans customarily emphasize, our experience of our actions includes a sort of productive self-knowledge as opposed to merely observational knowledge. Formal-causal constitutivism can explain why we have such self-knowledge rather than taking it as the basis of a theory of action. We have productive self-knowledge of action because part of what makes our action what it is is the active intentional mental item that is our mode of connection to that action’s goal. We know non-observationally what we are doing because the deed is informed by our active desire, decision, perceptual awareness, etc. ere is no gap between these items and our consciousness of them that observation would need to ll, and thus no gap between our consciousness and the actions they inform. According to formal-causal constitutivism, productive self-knowledge of action is not, as Anscombe () says, “the cause of what it understands” (). Nor is it the effect of what it understands, as if it were “speculative knowledge.” Rather, it is the effect of the (formal) cause of what it understands.
Much more will need to be said about these two features of our experience of agential control. I have said just enough about them to highlight one of the theoretical directions that a formal-causal account might fruitfully take.
Conclusion
I have argued that in order to take advantage of the full explanatory resources of constitutivist theories of action for giving a theory of agential control, we should have a plausible account of the role and range of intentional mental items relevant for action. e constitutivist accounts that I discussed in sections – fall short in this regard, but these accounts can be improved upon by understanding intentional mental items as Aristotelian formal causes of action. While this proposal for how to construe the role and range of relevant intentional mental items does not amount to a full theory of agential control, it is an appealing element of such a theory for those who are drawn to the basic premise of constitutivism, namely that we will do justice to agential control only by focusing on the constitutive causes of action rather than on the antecedent efficient causes or causes that are internal to action in some weaker sense.
CONCLUSION
is marks the end of my overall argument. I will brie y review the terrain I have covered in the preceding chapters. I began by arguing that several prominent interpreters of Aristotle have attributed to him an etiological framework that is more Humean and
Davidsonian than it is Aristotelian. In particular, they give the following arguments in support of their view that Aristotle’s material, formal, and nal aitiai are not causes in what they call ‘our sense’:
[Productive]: A cause in our sense is essentially productive. at is, it is such that its causal activity is wholly distinct from its effect. is is not true of Aristotle’s material, formal, and nal aitiai. So, they are not causes in our sense.
[Events]: e causal relation in our sense has events as its relata. is is not true of Aristotle’s material, formal, and nal aitiai, whose etiological relationship to that of which they are the aitiai holds only insofar as these aitiai are constituents of events. So, they are not causes in our sense.
Both arguments fail. e assumption underlying [Productive] is crucial for
Humean views of causation because it blocks a priori inference from a cause’s activity to its effect. But Aristotle does not agree that every efficient cause must be productive. He distinguishes between productive and non-productive efficient causes, and leans heavily on examples of the latter sort in various contexts. In fact, he thinks that it is very important to be able to draw a priori inferences from a cause’s activity to its effect, and thus rejects the assumption underlying [Productive].
[Events] assumes that material, formal, and nal aitiai are etiologically related to that of which they are the aitiai only insofar as these aitiai are constituents of efficient- causal events. Aristotle rejects this assumption, too, for he thinks that (at least) formal, nal, and efficient aitiai each are ontologically prior in distinctive ways to that of which they are the aitiai, and thus are causally explanatory in their own right rather than derivatively from some relationship to one of the other aitiai. is is incompatible with [Events].
Since [Productive] and [Events] fail, Aristotle’s account of the four aitiai turns out to be more complicated and distinctive than is oen recognized. Appreciating this allows us to make progress in understanding, or at least prevent us from misunderstanding, the speci c appeals to the four aitiai that Aristotle makes in various contexts, which appeals make it reasonable to think of Aristotle’s four aitiai as coordinate causes.
is led to my argument in the second chapter that recent commentators have been mistaken about Aristotle’s account of the etiology of action. Again, the predominant view has been more Humean and Davidsonian than Aristotle’s texts warrant. I argued that
Aristotle sees action as having four coordinate causes. e material cause is the agent’s body. e formal cause is the agent’s active psychological item. e efficient cause is the agent qua self-mover actualizing a rational potentiality. e nal cause is the agent’s goal.
is view challenges the prevailing assumption that psychological attitudes (or events involving them) are the efficient causes of actions. ey are instead the formal causes, by
which I mean paradigms for acting and proper parts of actions that make them the sorts of actions that they are.
I outlined this model by considering Aristotle’s hylomorphic treatment of various sorts of natural motions, including anger, change in political constitution, and akratic action. en, I gave the details of the model, which included Aristotle’s views on self- motion, rational potentialities, and voluntariness. Finally, I offered interpretations of passages in which Aristotle appears to deny the four-causal view that I ascribe to him. ese included passages about skill, desire, the divine in us, and decision. In each case, I argued that a plausible reading is available that does not con ict with the four-causal view.
In the third chapter I argued that Aristotle’s view, properly understood, is an attractive alternative to Davidsonian and Anscombean views of action. I mentioned problems for those views and showed how Aristotle’s view addresses them.
e problems for Davidsonian views are deviant causal chains (where psychological items cause actions accidentally) and the problem of the disappearing agent (the agent herself plays no role identi able as agency). ere are two structurally similar problems for
Anscombean views: deviant formal causation (a foreseen side-effect is wrongly counted by the theory as part of the intended aim) and disappearing agency (without appeal to psychological attitudes, it is difficult to account for agential control).
Aristotle's account makes headway on all four problems. It goes as far as an account can in ruling out causal deviance, since an Aristotelian formal cause of action is as internal
to an action as anything could be. is leaves the least possible conceptual room for deviance. Furthermore, the agent does not disappear on Aristotle’s view. Rather, she herself is the efficient cause of her action. Deviant formal causation is not a problem for Aristotle’s view, since it can exclude foreseen side-effects from formally causing the action because they are not the intentional objects of the token psychological items that he thinks are the formal causes of actions. Finally, agency does not disappear from Aristotle’s picture since he assigns a formal-causal role to the active, token psychological items that are required for giving a determinate answer to the question of whether an agent has control over her movements. On his view, one will have or lack control insofar as the potentialities he is actualizing in his self-movements have as part of their de nition an active psychological item like a desire or decision.
In addition, I argued that Aristotle’s account explains what the other accounts were purportedly best equipped to explain. For Davidsonians, this was the compatibility of reasons explanations and causal explanations. For Anscombeans, this was the goal- oriented structure of actions.
e fourth chapter treated constitutivist theories of action, which focus on the constitutive causes of action rather than on the antecedent efficient causes, insisting that agential control over action is at least partially constitutive of the action itself. Existing constitutivist views fail in their ambition of giving a plausible description of how agential control is at least partially constitutive of action because they misconceive the causal role
or range of intentional mental items that are relevant for agential control. Helen Steward, by supposing that no intentional psychological items are necessary for action, removes the necessary ingredients for an intelligible account of agential control. Wayne Wu appeals to psychological items as structuring causes, but structuring causation leaves room for causal deviance and lack of agential control, failing to make intentional mental items as internal to action as they will need to be in order to rule out an important class of counterexamples.
Christine Korsgaard thinks that only deliberative decision can organize one’s causality in the way required for acting as a uni ed agent, and that acting as a uni ed agent is the only way of having control over one’s actions. But, as I argued, this eliminates akratic acts from the class of controlled action. In each of these three cases, the role or range of psychological items relevant for giving an account of agential control has been misconstrued.
I argued that constitutivist theories can be improved by understanding active intentional mental items as Aristotelian formal causes of action: proper parts of actions that partially constitute what it is to be those actions, and paradigms for performing those actions in accordance with a goal. is account lacks the problems facing Wu’s notion of structuring causation, and unlike Korsgaard’s account allows for a plausible and thoroughly Aristotelian description of how akratic action is fully voluntary but distinct from wicked action. For these reasons, an Aristotelian formal-causal version of constitutivism has the resources to answer the challenges faced by other constitutivist
accounts even while preserving their strengths, as well as to give new insight into important features of our internal experience of agential control.
At various points throughout this dissertation, I have made reference to two sets of views that share certain similarities with the Aristotelian view I have been advocating. On the one hand, there are powers theories of action, according to which action consists in manifesting rational powers. On the other, there are those who think that actions do not have psychological items as formal causes, but rather are themselves formal causes. ere is more to be said about these two views than I have been able to say here, and I will end by gesturing brie y at what I think needs to be said on another occasion.
An important aim of powers theories is to respond to a problem called ‘Davidson’s
Challenge,’ which I mentioned in chapter . Meeting the Challenge requires showing how to identify one’s reason for acting in the way that she does. Some powers theorists give novel arguments that Davidson’s own way of addressing the Challenge is unworkable, and contend that their accounts are better able to address it. I think that their responses to the
Challenge fail, but that the Aristotelian four-causal view I have endorsed in this dissertation can succeed.
ose who think that actions stand to their constituent sub-actions as form to matter, such as Carlo Natali and Michael omson, hold that I count as acting if and only if my movements count as parts directed toward ful llment of the whole action. is view does not sufficiently engage with those who share David Hume’s concern to tie the theory
of action to an agent’s psychology. My preferred way of appealing to formal causation is to say that an agent’s occurrent psychological attitudes are the immanent formal causes of her actions. Unlike the views of Natali and omson, my view engages with Hume’s concern and carves out logical space for a principled disagreement with Hume’s followers (rather than talking past them) about what causal role psychological attitudes play in a theory of action.
In addition, I have raised a few issues that must await fuller treatment elsewhere.
ese included the task of specifying what a forced action might be, saying what precisely the relationship is between causal and moral responsibility, and ascertaining what it would means for virtuous actions to be informed by practical wisdom. What I have argued here should be sufficient to show, however, that the Aristotelian four-causal view of action has the potential to inform debate about these and similar matters.
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