Causally Situated Agency

Abstract

Abstract: The question of whether human beings genuinely choose or merely experience the effects of antecedent causes remains central to philosophy of action, moral philosophy, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. I argue that this question becomes confused when several distinct concepts are treated as interchangeable: free will, practical choice, freedom from constraint, agency, and the subjective experience of authorship. A causal explanation of a decision does not by itself establish that the agent lacks all forms of control; equally, the presence of deliberation and reasons-responsiveness does not establish that the agent is an ultimate, self-originating source of action. I distinguish causal authorship from ultimate origination, and distinguish the capacity to act for reasons from the metaphysical ability to have acted otherwise under an identical total past and identical laws of nature. I then examine compatibilist, incompatibilist, hard-determinist, and existential approaches, before considering the implications of neuroscience, developmental psychology, evolutionary biology, and social structure. The neuroscience of decision-making, including Libet-style paradigms, provides important evidence about the temporal relation between neural preparation and conscious intention, but it does not straightforwardly demonstrate that all conscious agency is illusory. I use romantic attachment as a case study: people generally do not select the initial emergence of attraction, yet they retain varying capacities to interpret, regulate, sustain, or leave a relationship. This case clarifies the distinction between the causes of a desire and the reasons an agent offers for acting on it. Finally, I argue that moral and legal responsibility should be assessed through a graded account of competence, reasons-responsiveness, coercion, and control, rather than through an all-or-nothing assumption of ultimate self-creation. The resulting position is a form of causal realism about human beings combined with a differentiated account of agency. Human beings are causally situated agents: their actions arise from histories and conditions that they did not choose, while their capacities for reflection and intervention can themselves become causally effective parts of the world. Keywords: free will; determinism; compatibilism; agency; responsibility; causal explanation; reasons; neuroscience; romantic attachment; social constraint