Whether or not 'agent-causation' as distinct from 'event-causation' is comprehensible is supposed to be a problem. Some think that what is puzzling about it is not something to do with agents, but something to do with 'substance-causation' more generally. Randolph Clarke develops this theme at some length in Chapter 10 of Libertarian Accounts of Free Will.
I do not find this notion puzzling at all, so I suppose I should say something about why. I would be very interested to find out what was wrong with this line of thought, since both this question and the more general question about whether objects can be causes have always irritated me: they seem like non-questions. Consider:
First, as far as I know, there are no 'bare' events. Events involve objects: the bat strikes the ball, the boiling water turns to steam, I type the word "word" on my keyboard. Barring, then, the elimination of the distinction between objects and events, or the demonstration that there are bare events and/or no objects, it seems as though objects and events are part of the same 'universe' of entities, and there is no principled reason why types of object-causation might not be defined in relation to event-causation.
Second, there is a fairly clear way of doing this. Consider a potassium-40 atom undergoing radioactive decay. Every so often, the atom emits a beta particle. The potassium-40's emitting of the beta particle is surely an event.
Let us assume, as appears to sometimes be the case, that there is no cause external to the potassium-40 atom for this decay. And let us imagine, this time contrary to the facts, that the potassium-40 atom is an undivided whole with no internal structure; or, alternately, let us assume that for whatever reason we have regimented our speech to strictly avoid any discussion of the internal structure of the atom.
What in this case can we say about the cause of the emission? Ex hypothesi there is no event to trace it back further to. But does that mean there is no cause? I'd rather say that the potassium-40 atom is the cause, that the potassium-40 atom causes the potassium-40 atom's emission of a beta particle.
Most of us are trained to think here: OK, but there must be something going on inside the potassium-40 atom that causes the emission to occur, and those internal events are the real causes of the omission. I used an example of radioactive decay to conjure a vague sense of prima facie plausibility for the idea that this might not be the case, but since this is metaphysics let's put the real world to one side. For the question will repeat itself with respect to the entities that constitute the internal structure of the potassium-40 atom, or whatever thing we are talking about. Do those events always have outside causes? Or are there some objects which just do things?
We could look at fundamental particle physics at this point to get a sense of how our world works, although there are going to be some confusing issues - for instance, the entity status of quarks, which never appear bare, and also how to interpret the second formulation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and/or the idea of the universe as a kind of energy field in terms of objects. There are some fairly intelligent people who think that quantum field theory might ultimately imply some sort of extreme holism of the kind more often associated with, say German idealism than the kind of quasi-mechanistic philosophy that often naturally fits with the kind of object and event talk that we are doing here. On the other hand, at least some fundamental particle decays sort of look like cases where a thing just exists for a while and then transforms into a different kind of thing by emitting a photon, say. It might be that there's a cause, but it might just be that that's what particles of that kind do, in which case the causal chain either stops with the particle itself or goes back to the event which brought that particle into being in the first place.
But those are at least quasi-physical questions. Metaphysically it seems that we can simply restrict ourself to the following: any event will involve one or more objects. Their causes will come from one or both objects themselves or from events external to it/them (or both). Cases where only one object is among the causes of an event are possible (vibrations, particle emissions). If the causes do not come from events external to the object then they must either come from the object considered as a whole or from the parts of that object. If it comes from the object considered as a whole in some way, then I think I would say and others would say that that object is the cause of the event in question. If it comes from the parts of that object, then we may run the same set of options, until one of a few things happens.
(a) it turns out that the universe is infinitely divisible, in which case (I think, this is sketchy) it will always be somewhat arbitrary where we want to draw the line between whole objects as causes and invoking events involving their constituent parts, which again seems to suggest at least a limited place for object-causation in blocking regress; or
(b) it turns out that there are events causally traceable to partless objects and/or whole objects but not their parts, in which case the causal lines either terminate on that object or go all the way back from that object's current state to the event that brought it into being in the first place; or
(c) all events all the way down, even those involving partless objects, are caused by something external to them, so that there is never an event without two distinct objects being involved (as e.g. the vibration of an energetic particle might be imagined to be).
If case (b) is conceivable it is a conception of what sort of universe we might need a special place for 'object' or 'substance' causation in. If there are partless wholes and/or irreducible wholes that cause events, such that the only prior event that can be sensibly invoked (assuming that the partless and/or irreducible wholes are not eternally existent) is the event which brought those wholes into being in the first place. Since normally events proceed in a sort of web, and here we have an at least conceivable locus of event-generation which remains the same over time, we likewise have a potential role for object- or substance-causation to play in an event-causal universe.
We might put this a different way by saying that while normally causes occur in strict temporal sequence - the bat's swing takes up all the time until the bat strikes the ball, and the ball's flying out of the park begins after it is struck by the bat - object-causes involve 'time jumps' between event-causes, where the only prior event causing, say, the beta particle emission is the event that formed, say, the potassium-40 atom in the first place. Or, if a certain conception of free will is correct, the only prior cause of my writing this note is my having been conceived by my parents.
Here is another set of considerations that makes a plea for object-causes along similar lines. We often say things like
Bonds' swinging the bat caused
the bat to strike the ball, which caused
the ball to fly out of the park.
So, the bat's striking caused the ball's flying, and Bonds' swinging caused the bat's striking. What caused Bonds' swinging? Well, the pitch, external social factors about the game, but also presumably Bonds himself. So what caused Bonds to swing? It would be natural to just say "Bonds" here. This may simply be a marker of our ignorance - the hard determinist thinks so, for example - but we use these markers all the time, when we treat objects, agents or otherwise, as wholes whose special nature contributes in some way to their actions but whose parts and internal structure we don't really want to consider. The metaphysical question is whether there must always be such structure and the type of event-linking that goes with it; I have tried to sketch out some reasons for thinking that it is concievable that there is not. There is also of course the physical question about which of these our universe most ultimately resembles. But we can at least sketch out a metaphysical possibility in which we can mark out object-causes distinct from event-causes.
If readers are so inclined I would be interested in what you think about how to relate these reflections to the perdurantism/endurantism debate. The pessimistic view is that the above discussion requires endurantism to be true; a more optimistic assessment might be that we have here the seeds for indicating the kind of causal structure needed to pick out 'enduring objects' in a world of time-slices, and thus an outline of a sort of argument for endurantism, or alternately an indication of what sort of things we need to know about the world in order to decide whether it's time-slices all the way down or whether enduring objects have a special role in its causal structure. But that is all even more sketchy than the preceding, so it's time to stop.
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