Action

2. ‘Basic acts’

Acts are done by doing other acts. But not every act someone does could be done by doing some different one, or nothing would ever get done. Among the things that a person does on occasion, then, there must be something which is simply done – not done by doing something else. This has been called the basic act. Where someone Φs by Ψ-ing, Ψ-ing is said to be more basic than Φ-ing; and the basic act is defined as the one than which no other was more basic.

Moving the body (that is, moving a bit of it in one or another way) is usually a basic act. When Mary raises her right arm directly – in order to vote at the meeting – raising the right arm is the basic act. But in the unusual case in which someone raises their right arm by lifting it with their left arm, raising the right arm, although a bodily act, is not the basic one. (What is basic here is moving the left arm.) Such an example shows that in order to say what was basic in a particular case, one has to know not only what bodily movements occurred in that case but also what was actually done by doing what else. Acts, then, are not basic tout court. Relative to Mary’s action, but not relative to the action that was someone’s raising their right arm ‘indirectly’, raising the right arm is basic.

The need to think about applications of basicness in connection with particular cases has sometimes given rise to talk of basic actions. But such talk conflicts with the coarse-grained account of actions’ individuation. Where a person’s raising their arm is considered to be identical to their voting, it cannot be supposed that their raising their arm is basic and their voting is not. If a notion of a basic act that is not relativized to particular cases is wanted, we have to think about what someone can do directly. (The person who used their left arm to raise their right arm might, or might not, have been able to simply raise their right arm.) Using a notion of a basic ability, we could speak of things as basic for a person with a particular repertoire of motions (not relative to any particular action now).

We encounter relations of dependence when we go through a list of more and more basic acts. Considering Paul’s action, and going through his various acts – causing an accident, shutting off the engine, depressing the lever, moving the arm – it is natural to think of what is less basic as depending on what is more basic. We may think of all the dependencies as causal ones in the particular example. But there are different kinds of dependence, and when the different kinds are distinguished, different relations of ‘more basic than’ can be distinguished. For example if we take it that a convention must obtain for someone’s raising their arm to count as their voting, we could say about Mary’s action that voting was conventionally more basic than raising the arm.

The thought that moving the body is basic seems now to be the thought that moving the body does not usually depend upon anything else – neither causally, nor in any other way. And yet physiologists tell us that, in fact, our bodily movements depend upon our muscles’ contractions – that we move our bodies by contracting our muscles. It seems, then, that even where someone simply moved their arm we have a candidate for a more basic act than moving the arm – namely, contracting muscles. In fact, what this shows is that the perspective of an agent is ordinarily assumed in thinking about what is done; when moving the body is taken as basic, the focus is on things that the people might think of themselves as doing. A different notion of basicness is needed to accommodate the facts that the shift to a physiologists’ perspective reminds us of. To allow for the fact that moving the body depends upon other things being done, a ‘purely causal’ notion of basicness may be introduced. This is not the intuitive, central notion that recapitulates the idea of what someone ‘simply does’ or ‘does directly’. Philosophers have meant a variety of different things by ‘more basic than’.