Treating as Action

Abstract

The events we commonly treat as actions cover a broad range — from the fully intentional to the disastrously mistaken, from the carefully premeditated to the unexpectedly spontaneous, from the predictably sensible to the thoroughly thoughtless. Philosophy of action, as practiced to date, is poorly suited to accommodate this variety. The near-ubiquitous approach has been to start with some events we take to be paradigmatic actions — something like clearly intentional doings — and build a theory premised on an understanding of those. Challenging cases at the periphery remain there, acknowledged only in passing.

In this paper, I propose a new approach that removes intention from the spotlight — start by casting a wider net and try to account for the underlying commonalities of “paradigmatic” and “peripheral” cases all at once. Such an approach, if successful, would be well-placed to explain “action” in its various manifestations. To carry it through, some pre-theoretical way of identifying what events we treat as actions is needed. It is relatively common ground among action theorists that when we take something someone has done as an action, we hold him responsible for it. I use responsibility attribution as my mark — the events we treat as actions are those for which we hold an agent responsible. I argue that available, intention-focused theories of action do not align well with our practices of holding people responsible for what they have done. This clears the ground for a new theory of action that is responsive first and foremost to our actual practices of treating some events, but not others, as actions.

Keywords: Action, Moral Psychology, Intention, Responsibility