Action, Causation, and Discretion: An Essay on the Metaphysics of Intentional Action

“What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §621). What, that is, is the difference between an action of mine and a (perhaps empirically indistinguishable) change in me that is not my action? This essay seeks to give a partial answer to this question: My arm’s going up is my action, I will say, just in case it is brought about by me at my discretion. An agent is a special sort of cause. He is the cause of certain changes in himself that do not just happen to him. These changes are neither causally determined by other changes, nor are they causally undetermined; they are determined by the agent; they are, in a word, radically up to him. This, I claim, follows from our every-day, pretheoretical conception of what an action is, a conception that, I claim, is closed to revision in the light of new information about those changes whose supposed relation to us gives rise to the idea that they are in a special sense attributable to us and, so, that they are our actions.Ph.D