Agent Causation

Agent Causation

The concept of an agent's causing some event seems distinct from that of an event's causing another event, and this apparent distinctness has been exploited by some philosophers of action—agent causationists—to defend an incompatibilist and libertarian account of free will. Agent causationism is associated historically with, among others, the philosophers Francisco Suárez and Thomas Reid, and in more recent times has been defended by Richard Taylor and Roderick Chisholm.

Agent Causation and Event Causation

What is indisputable is that causal statements come in at least two forms, one in which a term denoting a person or persisting object is the subject of the verb cause and one in which a term denoting a particular event occupies this role. Compare, for example, "The bomb caused the collapse of the bridge" and "The explosion of the bomb caused the collapse of the bridge." Here it seems plausible to contend that the first of these statements is elliptical, meaning something such as "Some event involving the bomb caused the collapse of the bridge," and more generally that the causation of events by inanimate objects is always reducible to the causation of those events by other events involving those objects. However, it is less evident that this sort of analysis applies in cases in which a person or other intelligent agent is said to cause some event.

Agent Causation article

Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 2,113 words (approx. 7 pages at 300 words per page).