'All Actions Occur inside the Body' E. J. Lowe Analysis, Vol. 41, No. 3. (Jun., 1981), pp. 126-129. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-2638%28198106%2941%3A3%3C126%3A%27AOITB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W Analysis is currently published by The Analysis Committee.
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'ALL ACTIONS OCCUR INSIDE T H E BODY'
I
N her recent book Actions (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980)' Jennifer Hornsby develops a theory of action concerning which she admits that '[tlhe result is a view about actions that is surprising on the face of it' (p. I ; all page references hereafter are to this book). Not least surprising is her avowal that 'I . . . claim that all actions occur inside the body. And that summarizes the principal thesis of this essay' (p. 14). My contention in this paper will be that Hornsby's 'surprising' view of actions arises from a serious misconception of the relationship between the notions of action and causation. In order to understand Hornsby's argument for her 'principal thesis', it is necessary first to take note of her (admittedly quite useful) device of employing the subscripts 'T' and 'I' in order to distinguish transitive from intransitive readings of certain verbs like 'move', as illustrated in the sentences 'John moved, his foot' and 'John's foot moved,'. (Other verbs like 'push' and 'pull' are clearly not ambiguous in this way.) The argument may then be summed up in Hornsby's own words as follows: 'Whatever events they are that cause the body to [move,] they presumably occur inside the body . . . But movements, cause the body to move,. And actions are movements,. Thus . . . all actions . . . occur inside the body' (p. 13). (It should be remarked, incidentally, that the actual text contains 'move,' where I have written '[move,]': this correction seems necessary in order to make sense of Hornsby's' argument.) Now there is one premise of this argument which I shall not question here, although not because I agree with it. This is that '[all] actions are movements,', i.e. that all actions are to be identifed with agents' movings, of their bodies (for instance, that, in the famous example discussed by G. E. M. Anscombe in her book Intention, Blackwell, 1957, the pumper's action of moving, his arm is identGable with his action of poisoning the inhabitants of the house; cf. Hornsby, pp. 6 ff). But while I happen to believe that the criterion of action identity implicit here is mistaken, it doesn't appear to me that Hornsby's view would be any the less 'surprising' if it were restricted only to claiming that all bodil3, movements, (e.g. turnings, of eyes and noddings, of heads) 'occur inside the body' (my emphasis), so I shall limit myself to a critique of this narrower claim. The crucial premise of Hornsby's argument is just this: that 'movements, cause the body to move,' (p. 13). Clearly, since we have ample neurophysiological evidence that the causes of bodily movements, (such as turnings, of eyes and noddings, of heads) are events inside
people's bodies-and more specifically events in their brains and nervous systems-then if those actions that are bodily movements, (such as turnings, of eyes and noddings, of heads) are also causes of the bodily movements,, it seems that, short of postulating some quite implausible kind of causal overdetermination of these movements,, we have no alternative but to identify the actions with the internal neural events. (My own view at this point is that Hornsby's suggestion that such an identity obtains is so counter-intuitive that her argument actually constitutes a redtrctio ad absurdm of the supposition that bodily movements, cause bodily movements,; but, of course, to urge this here would merely be to beg the question against Hornsby). Now let us just see, in a specific instance, what Hornsby's crucial premise commits us to saying. It commits us to saying that if John raises his arm, then his action of raising his arm causes his arm to rise. (The example is particularly convenient because English already supplies us with different forms for the transitive and intransitive senses of the movement verb involved.) But this, as I say, seems to me to betray a serious misconception of the relationship between the notions of action and causation. That the notions are intimately related is not in dispute: clearly, John's raising his arm is somehow connected with the fact that his arm is caused to rise. It is even clear enough that, if John raised his arm, then the counterfactual conditional 'If Johnhad not raised his arm, his arm would not have risen' will very probably be true; though this in itself is certainly not a sufficient reason for saying that John's raising his arm cagsed his arm to rise. We can, I believe, get some leverage on the problem if we allow our attention to be drawn to a fact that Hornsby herself notices, namely, that 'rllawyers believe that questions about whether persons have done certain things can be reduced to questions about whether they have caused certain other sorts of things, and numerous philosophers have spoken of actions as agents' bringing things abozit' (pp. 9-10; Hornsby's emphasis). (Obviously, the 'things' thus caused or brought about will be events.) Hornsby evidently believes that this manner of speaking is not only compatible with her views concerning the relations between action and causation, but actually tends to support them. But does it, really? According to this philosophico-legal manner of speaking, saying that John raised his arm is reducible to saying that John catlsed his arm to rise or brought abo~dtthe rising of his arm. And this seems sensible enough, if a little clumsy from the point of view of English style. But does it, as Hornsby seems to think, give support to the thesis that John's raising his arm (i.e. his action of arm-raising) caused his arm to rise? I don't see that it does. Indeed, if John's raising his arm is a matter of his causing his arm to rise, Hornsby's thesis commits us to saying that John's causing his arm to rise caused his arm to rise. This is, to say the
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ANALYSIS
least, distinctly odd, and not, I would suggest, something to which the lawyers and philosophers in question would necessarily want to commit themselves. All the same, to say that A's causing x caused x (where A is an agent and x is an event, e.g. where A is John and x is the event of his arm rising) is not perhaps quite as manifestly absurd as to say, for instance, that y's causing x caused x (where both x andy are events). After all, it may be urged, that A caused x is a matter of 'agent causation' whereas that A's causing x caused x is a matter of 'event causation'. So perhaps a philosopher who maintained that there is an irreducible distinction between agent causation and event causation could without total absurdity, even if not without considerable implausibility, maintain that A's causing x caused x. But Hornsby is surely not such a philosopher: she certainly does seem to believe that agent causation is somehow reducible to event causation. For she remarks: 'An implicit assumption of mine has been that "A person caused something" can be taken to say that an event in which the person played a role caused something' (p. 15, fn; Hornsby's emphasis). Now, it is not entirely clear whether in saying this Hornsby is endorsing the view that ' A caused x' is reducible to some sentence of the form 3 caused x', wherey is an event in which A 'played a role' (whatever that may more precisely mean), or rather the view that 'A caused x' is reducible to some sentence of the form 3 caused x and A played a role in y ' (her remarks in Chapter Seven, pp. 96 ff., tend to disfavour the former interpretation). But let us consider each possibility in turn. First, then, suppose that Hornsby is endorsing the view that 'A caused x' is reducible to some sentence of the form fy caused x'. Now in this case, if she also holds, as she apparently does, that 'A's causing x caused x' is true whenever 'A caused x' is true (e.g. that if John caused his arm to rise, then John's causing his arm to rise caused his arm to rise), then she is evidently committed to what I have called the 'manifest absurdity' of maintaining that sometimes, viz whenever 'A caused x' is true, a sentence of the form 3's causing x caused x' is true. For if 'A caused x' is reducible to 3 caused x' this presumably implies that 'A's causing x' denotes the same event or occurrence as 3's causing x', in which case 'A's causing x caused x' implies, by Leibniz's Law, 3's causing x caused x'. And what is implied here surely is absurd. (Of course, someone who held that Leibniz's Law does not apply to, or has certain exceptions in the case of, causal statements, might attempt to avoid this implication. But it certainly doesn't appear that this is a line of defence that would sit at all comfortably with Hornsby's general position, particularly in view of her sympathy with a Davidsonian criterion of the identity of events in terms of the sameness of their causes and effects : see p. I 3 5 .)
Secondly, however, suppose that Hornsby is endorsing the view that
'A caused x' is reducible to some sentence of the form ty caused x and A played a role iny'. In this case it cannot be argued that Hornsby is ever straightforwardly committed to maintaining the truth of any manifestly absurd sentence of the form 3's causing x caused x', but still it appears, by parallel reasoning, that she is committed, by virtue of the thesis that 'A caused x' implies 'A's causing x caused x', to there being circumstances in which, for some x and y , j ' s causing x at least partial4 caused x (only partially now because an agent A's 'playing a role' i n y will also have been a causal factor). But this certainly seems no less absurd a consequence. From all this it should be clear enough that if, as Hornsby appears to believe, agent causation is reducible to event causation (and I personally have nothing to say one way or another on the matter), then, pace Hornsby, an agent's actiolg, i.e. his causing something x (such as the rising of his arm) cannot without absurdity be regarded as a cause (in the event causation sense) of the event x (and notice that this is true independently of whether or not the action is merely a bodily movement,). But if an action like John's raising his arm cannot then be regarded as a cause of his arm's rising, we can have after all no reason to suppose that the action occurs wholly 'inside the body', Indeed, the very question of where an action occurs would seem, according to this line of argument, often to be capable of no veryprecise answer at all. For if action sentences are ultimately reducible to causal sentences of the form 3 caused x' (or even only of the form 3 caused x and A played a role iny'), then to ask where (or indeed when) the action occurred is tantamount to (or at least involves) asking where (or when) y caused x , and this question itself may apparently have no very precise answer, especially if x and y are quite far apart in space (or time). (And on these grounds one might even question Hornsby's assumption, so far accepted uncritically, that actions are properly speaking events at all, though this is a large issue which I cannot go into here.)
