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Who's in Control Here?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Robert V. Hannaford
Robert V. Hannaford
Affiliation:
Ripon College
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Extract

The question arises from recent arguments, including one by G. E. M. Anscombe, which hold that a belief in one's ability to choose one's actions is incompatible with a causal account of the world. For, if one's arguments deny either choice or causal sequences, how can one account for human control of actions? If to control one's actions means to work to cause some chosen end, and if either point of the argument were correct, how could anyone ever control one's actions at all? Yet we must be able to control actions if we are to seek out and select from evidence or develop any kind of conceptual scheme. I want to develop this necessity-of-control notion to show that arguments such as those advanced by Miss Anscombe are incoherent and to show that we must retain our notion of choice while giving a causal account of the world. I will argue that deterministic sequences and the notions of choice and control go together: in order for us to have a tenable explanation of the world we must be able to talk about choice and control and we must identify and use predictable deterministic sequences in our acting and choosing. I shall argue that we can retain both causal explanation and choice only by employing two different conceptions of causal agency: merely physical agency and the voluntary agency of embodied actors.

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Type
Articles
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Philosophy , Volume 51 , Issue 198 , October 1976, pp. 421 - 430
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1976

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References

1 I model this on a version employed (though not endorsed) by Anthony Kenny in lectures given at Oxford during Michaelmas Term, 1974—lectures to which this paper owes a great deal.

2 The argument may be more formally stated as follows: Where S 3 is the antecedent set of conditions for S 2 and S 2 the antecedent set of conditions for my act S 1:

If S 3 necessitates S 2 and S 2 necessitates S 1,

If S 3 is beyond my control, S 2 is beyond my control.

Then, if S 2 necessitates S 1, S 2 is beyond my control.

In the formal statement we note the same question-begging use of ‘necessitates’ that the informal version of the argument displays.

3 Parallel arguments, with parallel difficulties and solutions, are sometimes advanced using one's character traits as the ‘necessitating causes’ of one's actions. Here again the argument does not work because a trait will not count as a trait of my character if I had no part in its development.

4 Causality and Determination (London: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 26Google Scholar.

5 See, for example, Honderich's, Ted ‘One Determinism’, in Essays on Freedom of Action, ed. Honderich, Ted (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973)Google Scholar.

6 This does not answer the problems of specifying when we can so describe a child and of determining what other animals must be so described.

7 I am indebted to Michael Pritchard for his thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this paper; they helped me clear up ambiguities in it, though I am solely responsible for whatever difficulties remain in this version.