Abstract
If causalism is a complete theory of what it is to behave intentionally, it also has to account for intentional omissions. Carolina Sartorio (Noûs 43 (3), 513–530, 2009) has developed a powerful argument, the Causal Exclusion for Omissions, showing that intentional omissions cannot be explained by causalism. A crucial claim in the argument is that there is a causal competition between a mental omission and the mental action performed instead. In this paper I reject the argument by demonstrating that there is no causal competition ever between an omission and the action performed instead. I propose what I call the Realisationist Conception of Omissions, which consists in considering omissions as multiply realisable absences whose realisers are specific positive actions. I further argue in favour of the Determinationist Conception of Omissions, according to which the relation between omissions and their realisers is a determinable/determinate relation. Since there can be no causal preemption between a determinable and its determinates, there can be no causal preemption between omissions and the actions performed instead, and causalism is safe. I also show that this view of omissions has some other independent advantages – like for example that of solving the problem of the spatio-temporal localisation of omissions.
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Notes
Although I am not focusing in this paper on the issue of what it is for an omission to be intentional, I take it to be impossible for an omission to be intentional if the corresponding non-action is non-intentional, and vice versa. See Clarke (2010: 159) for the rival thesis that it is possible for me to intentionally not perform an action, while still non-intentionally omitting to perform the same action.
See Brand (1971: 49) for the similar idea that S refrains from performing A1 if and only if (i) it is not the case that S performs A1, and (ii) there is some action that S performs, A2, such that S performs A2 in order that S’s performing A2 prevents S’s performing A1.
I am assuming here for simplicity’s sake that one omission is always realised by just one positive action. Actually many omissions turn out to be realised by a conjunction of positive actions. I will come back to this fact in the last section of the paper. Fischer and Ravizza (1998) have developed a similar view in which omissions are taken to be constituted by actual bodily movements. A major shortcoming of their account, as opposed to mine, is that “a large class of omission is apparently left out of their view” (Clarke 2014: 21): in fact all omissions of mental acts (like, for example, my omitting to recall the dates of the Napoleonic battles) seem to need a positive mental act – though no actual bodily movement – realising (or, constituting) them. I will turn back on omissions of mental acts later in the paper.
One may object that the occurring of a particular positive action of mine Ai incompatible with my performing A1 is just a necessary condition of my omitting to perform A1, and does not necessarily realise it. My answer is that – while characterising omissions as absences of actions requiring the occurring of such an incompatible action as a necessary condition would leave the metaphysical nature of omissions undetermined – RCO provides a satisfactory metaphysical account of omissions that does explain why the necessary condition holds.
RCO seems to entail that, among all the omissions realised by my jogging in the park now, there are also the absences of those actions that I would not have been able to perform, in any case or in that particular situation. Thus my jogging in the park now realises – among other things – my omitting to fly to the constellation of Lyra now. While some may accept this consequence, others will rebut that one omits to perform action A1 only if she is able to perform action A1 (Feinberg 1984, p. 160; Bach 2010, p. 52; Clarke 2014, p. 90). It is possible to opportunely modify RCO so as to incorporate this limitation. For example, consider the disjunction of specific positive actions of mine A2 ∨ A3 ∨ A4 ∨ … ∨ An such that a necessary condition for me not to perform action A1 is my positively performing some disjunct Ai. We may establish that my performing Ai counts as realising my omitting to perform action A1 only if it is not impossible for me (that is, I have both the ability and the opportunity) to do something different from A2 ∨ A3 ∨ A4 ∨ … ∨ An in the first place. In fact the fundamental idea under RCO is that my omitting to perform A1 cannot but come in a certain way, that is, in virtue of my performing either A2, or A3, or A4, or …, or An; and this in turn is grounded on the non-empty truth that, should I perform no action included in the set {A2, A3, A4, …, An}, I would necessarily perform action A1. But if it is impossible for me to perform action A1, then the latter requirement turns out either false or emptily true – and in this case we might conclude that my performing A1 has not been realised, and consequently has not occurred.
Since the property of omitting to perform action A1 is identical to the property of non-performing action A1, shifting to a talk about properties seems to require conceding that negative properties exist. If one concedes this, however, my account of omissions as multiply realisable determinables whose determinates are specific positive actions also opens the door for a general account of negative properties as multiply realisable determinables whose determinates are specific positive properties. Nonetheless we may also say that there are not negative properties, and that ‘omitting to perform action A1’ actually refers to the positive property – say – of being a subject omitting to perform action A1 (and, accordingly, ‘performing action A2’ refers to the property of being a subject performing action A2).
I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this objection.
E.g. Zimmerman (1981).
Indeed we normally allow that, in spite of my action of going to New York being absent today, my omission to go to New York does not occur today if yesterday I died of a sudden hearth attack. In other words, we do not normally conceive dead people to be omitting to perform the positive actions that are not performed by them as a consequence of their being dead. I take DCO to offer a clear metaphysical explanation of such a fact. Note that we may want to consider an absence of an action performed by a dead person as an omission under special circumstances. For example, provided that I committed suicide yesterday in order not to reveal important military secrets today, we may want to say that today I have (intentionally) omitted to reveal important military secrets. DCO can account for such special cases by treating them as it treats the case of my omitting to go to the cinema at 9.00 as a consequence of my being sleeping at 9.00. As previously said, my omitting to go to the cinema at 9.00 can be considered as realised, and determined, by my being sleeping at 9.00. Similarly, my omitting to reveal important military secrets today can be considered as realised, and determined, by my happening to be dead today – an event which is a consequence of a particular positive intentional action I have performed yesterday (my committing suicide). Generally speaking, I take RCO and DCO to be entirely at ease in metaphysically accounting for all our practises of ascribing, and omitting to ascribe, omissions.
See e.g. Beebee (2004) for a defence of the thesis that absences cannot be causes.
If we want to extend RCO as to allow that we can mentally omit also when we are passing through portions of time during which we do not mentally act (see Section 1 above), we must say that I cannot omit to intend to jump in the pond unless I perform some particular positive mental act alternative to intending to jump in the pond, or – if I am not mentally acting at all – I undergo some particular positive mental event alternative to intending to jump in the pond, like dreaming or hallucinating. We may even decide to allow that – in case I am passing through a portion of time during which I am experiencing no mental event at all, and yet I am alive – my omitting to intend to jump in the pond can be realised by my happening to be in whatever condition or state that make me unable to mentally act or to undergo any mental event. Such extensions of RCO, however, are in no way necessary.
For an attempt to offer a definition of a mental act and its varieties, see e.g. Proust (2001). I take my intending to omit to jump in the pond to be a positive mental act, and therefore a possible realiser of my omitting to intend to jump in the pond. Note that, although each omission needs to be realised by some positive action, it does not follow that each act of intending to omit needs to be realised by some act of intending to perform a positive action. In other words, when the omission is just part of the intentional content of a mental act, it obviously does not need to be realised. Also note that my intending to omit to jump in the pond is by no means considered as required by my omitting to intend to jump in the pond – not even by my intentionally omitting to intend to jump in the pond (see Sartorio (2009) and Clarke (2010) for support to the thesis that it is possible to intentionally omit to perform action A1 without intending to omit to perform action A1).
Each mental act counting as a realiser of the mental omission is taken to be incompatible with the omitted mental action in the sense that it is psychologically impossible for the same subject to perform the two mental acts at the same time.
Clarke (2014: 21) observes that “sometimes there’s a lengthy period during all of which one neglects to do a certain thing”, and suggests that there is “no principled way of selecting” only one or some positive actions realising such an omission.
Note that, since an omission is spatio-temporally located where its realiser is, omissions turn out to be truly located in spatio-temporal locations they may not appear to be located in at first sight. Suppose, for example, that I promised my little son to bring him to the football match being played at Wembley Stadium in London on May 20, 2018. Nonetheless I break the promise, and I finish my work at my office instead. My omitting to be at the football match with my son is spatially located at my office where its realiser is located, and it is not spatially located at the Wembley Stadium in London, as it could appear to be. Thus I agree with Clarke (2014: 38) that we cannot generally locate omissions where the absent actions would have been.
Considering non-punctual omissions as being multiply realisable means considering them as identical to a conjunction of disjunctions of positive actions.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Carolina Sartorio and the anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions and challenging questions.
Funding
This work was partly supported by the Italian national project Models and Inferences in Science. Logical, Epistemological and Cognitive Aspects, Prin 2012, financed. CUP J88C13000910001.
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Bacchini, F. Reconciling Omissions and Causalism. Rev.Phil.Psych. 9, 627–645 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0402-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0402-7