Agent Causation | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

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. Sentences containing transitive verbs of action generate many such cases, because an action sentence such as "John raised his arm" clearly entails a corresponding agent-causal sentence, "John caused a rising of his arm." What seems less clear is that the latter sentence entails an event-causal sentence, "Some event involving John caused a rising of his arm," at least on the assumption that John raised his arm as a so-called basic action.

A basic action is standardly taken to be one that is not done by doing anything else. An action such as closing a door is nonbasic, because one can only close a door by doing something to it, such as pushing it. It is possible to raise one's arm as a nonbasic action—for example, by pulling on a rope attached to the arm, using one's other arm. But, it seems, there is nothing one needs to do in order to raise one's arm when one raises it in the normal way. This appears to generate a difference between the case of the bomb's causing the collapse of the bridge and that of John's causing the rising of his arm: the bomb caused the collapse by exploding, but John, it seems, did not cause the rising by doing anything else.

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