Action

3. Volitional theories: actions, parts and causes

Events like muscles’ contractions, which occur beneath the body’s surface, come to notice not only in our thinking about different ideas of basicness: they may be prominent also when we enquire what precise causal story should be told about any action. And it is not only physiological thinking which makes philosophers want a precise causal story: a definition of ‘an action’ as ‘someone’s doing something intentionally’ belongs with a view which distinguishes actions from other events by reference to a particular sort of psychologically specifiable causal history. On this view, a person who does something intentionally does the thing because they have a reason to. Saying what their reason was requires knowing what their relevant beliefs and desires were (see Belief; Desire; Intention); and it provides a distinctive kind of explanation of why they did the thing (see Reasons and causes). But it may be asked whether there is not a more immediate causal story to be told about an action than that which shows up in a reason explanation. Do actions have immediate mental antecedents of a certain sort?

It has sometimes seemed that actions must have such antecedents, because wanting, believing and intending all seem inadequate to explain actually doing something. Suppose you want to move your arm. Your arm doesn’t move until … what? ‘Until there is a volition’ was an answer often given in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: philosophers often posited volitions, or acts of will (as they are alternatively called), as events which initiate the causal process of acting, bridging the gap between wanting and doing. This was a gap between the mind and the body in the thinking of dualists (see Dualism; Will, the).

Volitions fell out of philosophical favour when Ryle objected to them as spurious (Ryle 1949). Ryle asked why ‘the Will’ has to be exercised in action at all, thinking that the postulation of volitions was a hangover from the idea of a ‘ghost in the machine’. One of his arguments against volitions posed a dilemma: either volitions are themselves ‘active’, or they are not. If they are ‘active’, then if a volition really were required for a genuine action, we should always have to posit a new volition as cause of any volition, and we should be led to an infinite regress. If, on the other hand, volitions are not themselves ‘active’, but are mere causes of actions, it is hard to see why anyone should think that their introduction helps in recording what is special to action.

Some volitional theories rather obviously escape this objection. John Stuart Mill, for instance, thought that an action was ‘a series of two things; the state of mind called a volition followed by an effect’ (Mill 1843: I 3.5). In its twentieth-century guise, the Millean theory takes an action to be composed from (a) a volition (b) a movement of a bit of the body of the person whose volition it is. On this theory, Ryle’s question as to whether a volition itself, or only its effect, is ‘active’ has no simple answer, since each of these things is a part of an action. But Ryle’s underlying question may still be pressed: ‘Why posit a sort of mental item such that actions are present only when an item of that sort is a cause?’

The account of volitions as parts of actions draws attention to the distinction between actions, each one of which is someone’s moving a bit of their body, and bodies’ movements, each one of which is a bit of someone’s body’s moving. (The thesis which is often used to summarize the coarse-grained view of actions’ individuation – that actions are bodily movements – is now seen to be crucially ambiguous at best.) When this distinction is made, there are two other views about bodies’ movements, both different from the Millean, componential view. (A) Actions are identical with bodies’ movements, so that, for instance, a person’s raising their arm is their arm’s rising. (B) Bodies’ movements are not even parts of actions, so that a person’s arm’s rising is wholly distinct from their raising it. (A) is implausible inasmuch as it seems to sever the connection between acting and doing something; unless a person’s arm’s rising is itself the person’s doing something, that connection is broken when movements are identified with actions. (B) is a more plausible view – at least for the philosopher who think that actions are described in terms of their effects; for the latter, a person’s arm’s going up can be the effect of their raising it, just as a flag’s going up is the effect of someone’s raising the flag.

According as (A) or (B) is accepted, the doctrine that volitions cause bodies’ movings turns out differently. When bodies’ movings are thought to be actions, volitions are conceived in the manner Ryle found objectionable – they are thought of as the last item in a mental causal chain leading outward to something physical. But when bodies’ movings are thought to be no parts of actions, the theorist can say that a volition causes a body’s movement and is itself an action. When that is said, an item is recognized the status of which is ineluctably psychophysical, being both a volition and an action; the theorist may refuse any picture in which the mental can be marked off from the physical on a causal chain. It remains a good question why one should suppose that there is a faculty of the Will the products of which, volitions, have to be brought into an account. But when volitions are identified with actions, we can be certain at least that there is nothing mythical or ‘ghostly’ about them.

The claim that physical actions are redescribable in recognizably psychological terms is made not only by philosophers who say that actions are volitions, but also by others who have no truck with volitions. Some philosophers argue that anyone who does something intentionally tries to do it. (They allow that one need not think of oneself as trying to do the things one does intentionally, and they allow that ‘They tried to do it’ is not usually a natural thing to say about someone who encountered no difficulties and who did not need to make any special effort.) If that is correct, then, given a coarse-grained view of individuation, each action is someone’s trying to do something. One may arrive at an account in which a person’s having a reason to do something leads to their trying to do it; when their trying to do it has the effects they want (as usually it does), it is their doing the thing. To the question ‘Your arm doesn’t move until … what?’, the answer now could just as well be ‘Until you move your arm’ or ‘Until you try to move it’ (see Mental causation).