Action

5. Philosophy of action applied to ethics and law

There is another sort of narrowness in accounts of action that confine themselves to a conception of actions as a species of events. In marking out a class of actions, and investigating how these relate to volitions, movements, etc., the philosopher does not start to address many of the conceptual questions that are asked about action by the legal, or moral, philosopher. An ordinary concern with human action is not a concern with which events occur, but is a concern with what people do. (A fine-grained ontology, of ‘act tokens’ or ‘tropes’ is sometimes introduced in order to reflect this ordinary concern.)

Arguably ‘intentionally’ is the only piece of psychological vocabulary needed to characterize the actions, when actions are taken to be a species of events (see above). But resources beyond ‘intentionally’ are certainly required to make the many distinctions needed to understand lawyers’ accounts of mens rea and moral philosophers’ accounts of responsibility. In considering someone’s culpability, it is not enough to consider those of their attitudes which constitute their reason for doing what they do and which connect with what they do intentionally. One might need to know, for instance, whether some effect that was not intended by them as a means was or was not one which they foresaw as resulting from their choice. (Did Paul know what he was doing when he unintentionally shut down the engines?)

For a person to be praised or blamed as an agent there need not be any event which is an action of theirs. There are cases, for example, where someone intentionally does not do something (Jane intentionally did not answer the question, say), and where although ‘intentionally’ applies, its application is not to any event (there is no event which is Jane’s not answering the question). There are other cases where an agent is held responsible for some effect in the world, but where none of the things they did or did not do was something they intentionally did, or did not, do. Legal conceptions of recklessness, negligence, or strict liability would all introduce examples in this category (see Moral agents; Responsibility).

Questions asked in legal and moral philosophy require a more broadly-based conception of the phenomena of agency than the action/theoretic account on its own can provide.