Agents, Actions and Reasons

The idea that there is a branch of philosophy called ‘the philosophy of action’ can be dated roughly to the second half of the twentieth century. But while the label is new, the subject matter is not. At least since Socrates, philosophers have concerned themselves with the themes and problems now gathered under that label. In essence, the philosophy of action seeks to offer an account of the behaviour that characterises humans as ‘rational animals’, to use Aristotle’s phrase; behaviour that provides the grounds for judgements about people’s goals, characters and values, and on account of which they are held to be causally, and sometimes morally, responsible for certain outcomes and situations. Anscombe’s book Intention, which was strongly influenced by Aristotle’s and Wittgenstein’s views, is rightly regarded by many as the most important direct contribution to the philosophy of action in the twentieth century. Intention set the agenda for subsequent work in the area by replacing questions about free will and the voluntary, which had occupied philosophers for centuries, with questions about intention and the intentional; in particular, with the question: “What distinguishes actions which are intentional from those which are not?” (Intention, §5). Anscombe’s answer was that “they are actions to which a certain sense of the question ‘Why?’ is given application; the sense is of course that in which the answer, if positive, gives a reason for acting” (ibid.) Given this answer, the question about intentional actions, though not identical to, became synonymous with the question: ‘What distinguishes actions done for a reason from those that are not?’. In the process of clarifying both question and answer, Anscombe touched upon, or explored in some detail, most of the central issues in the theory of action; issues which might be gathered under three main headings: the nature of actions, the nature of reasons, and the relation between the two. In the years following the publication of Intention, and especially after the publication in 1963 of Davidson’s paper ‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’, the theory of action concentrated mainly on