​Chapter 11

Existing accounts of authorship fail at the point where they must distinguish action from chance. Agent-causal theories begin with a pre-constituted agent who causes the act.

Chisholm draws the line between what a person does and what happens in him by saying that an action is immanently caused by the agent himself — not by a prior state, which would restore the chain, but by the agent as a substance with causal power. O'Connor grounds that power in emergent properties: a substance whose causal role does not reduce to the events composing it. Meixner narrows it to the claim that an agent makes an event actual without any event causing it, and takes the actualizing relation as a conceptual primitive. Clarke integrates the two directions, letting a free action be caused both by intentions and by the agent, so that rational explanation survives inside a libertarian account.

A substance with the power to actualize outcomes has that power before the choice, and the question why it was exercised toward taking the money is available to ask, the bearer of the power having been there before the exercise and after it. Taking the actualizing relation as primitive supplies no ground that made this outcome rather than the other, and the account offered here supplies none either. The difference lies in whether the question can be put at all. Where the author arises in the settling, nothing held a power beforehand and no exercise was directed one way rather than another. The cost of that is that nothing can be said of the author prior to the act, including that he could have done otherwise.

The causation can stay in events while the determination goes. Motives and efforts cause the decision without necessitating it, and in Kane's self-forming actions the agent is trying to realize two incompatible ends at once, each effort indeterminate as to its outcome. Whichever way it goes, the agent wanted it and worked for it, so the result is his either way. The account earns its plurality and pays for it: at the moment of resolution neither effort settles which succeeds, and the indeterminism that makes the outcome open sits where the accounting for it would have to be.

On the compatibilist account, the deed causally expresses a formed character, purchasing attribution by giving up the undetermined joint entirely.

Non-causal accounts come close. Ginet locates activity inside the action: a simple mental act has the intrinsic feature of being performed, and no relation to an agent behind it supplies that feature. McCann does the same for decisions, taking them as intrinsically active and needing no producer. The move is the one made here — authorship as the internal form of the act rather than a link running to it from outside. Scope divides the two. For Ginet the feature belongs to action, so that raising a hand carries it along with closing a deliberation, and every ordinary deed has to be accounted for in those terms. What is claimed here is rare and local: an author arises where a question was closed and sufficiency established, and most conduct executes an answer settled long before, with no author arising in it at all. Ginet must find activity in acts the formation produces; this account hands those to the formation and claims the seam alone.

The remaining case has already been stated: the act constitutes its author, and the relation is constitutive and primitive. What separates it from agent-causation is what carries an author across his acts. Meixner needs a substance possessing the power to actualize, and a power held before any exercise of it is a nature. Nothing holds a power beforehand here. An author arises in the settling and reaches another settling by the Name, which is an act and not a property.

An author complete before the settling would supply the answer from what he was, and an author added afterward would be appropriation, available to anyone whose decision merely occurred in him. The author arises in the act, and the structure has a precedent. Fichte reached it in self-consciousness. An I that turns back and takes itself as an object must recognize the object as itself, and the recognition presupposes the self-relation that reflection was to produce; an I produced by a prior act would need someone there to perform it. His answer is the Tathandlung: the acting and what is accomplished are not two terms in sequence. The I does not exist and then posit itself, and the positing does not occur and then yield an I. Agent, act, and the instituted self-relation arise together. For him this is the structure of any self-relation whatever.

The same pattern can be applied to authorship. John exists before the decision, but the author of this particular answer does not sit behind it complete. If he did, the answer would follow from what that finished agent was. Nor can authorship be added afterward, since subsequent appropriation is available even when a decision was not free. In settling the question, John constitutes himself as the author of that answer.

The Tathandlung closes the formal circle and leaves a material question open. Authorship requires a bearer from which an author can arise, and a free act is not creation from nothing. What lies ready belongs to the bearer: a body, a set of dispositions, the grounds for reasoning, the open question. Belonging of that kind requires no act — the history is this organism's past whether or not anything is settled with it. Authorial belonging is established in the settling, which takes up the grounds and answers with them. Nothing had to be produced beforehand; demanding it would restart the regress.

The bearer is matter and the settling is form. Marble admits some shapes and refuses others, and no examination of the block yields the figure that will be cut from it. The bearer fixes whose act this can be and what grounds are available to answer with. What it does not fix is the sufficiency of them. Freedom does not exchange the bearer for a different subject; it gives what was there a form it lacked — the form of the author of this answer.

Constitutivism brings the structure into action theory. For Korsgaard, acting constitutes practical identity: conflicting motives do not compose an agent by themselves, and unity arises when a principle is taken as the ground of action. The resolution does not consist in a motive defeating another in a psychic contest. It is identification. The danger is that a principle strong enough to constitute an author is strong enough to settle the case in advance, leaving the act to execute what was determined beforehand — and then the constituting is a reenactment. Ferrero closes the other threat: the circle of asking who chose to be an agent. Agency cannot be put on hold and assessed from outside, since raising the question is already an exercise of it. No earlier act creating the capacity to act is needed. That establishes the inescapability of the agential position, not the origin of any particular undetermined answer.

The question-settling accounts supply the demarcation the argument has needed since John's headache. Deliberation can be interrupted by fatigue or an external shock, and an event occurs in the agent that ends the process. That event may happen to leave an option viable without settling the question. Hieronymi's willing is the resolution of whether to do a certain thing, and it is what creates answerability: the standing to answer for a position he has taken. The question is where the sufficiency comes from. If a reason's objective weight settled the matter before the act, that is compatibilist determinism with a normative vocabulary. Sufficiency is established in the accepting. Holton adds that a person can form an intention without holding a settled judgment about which option is better, so the decision cannot be identified with whichever evaluative conclusion happened to win.

First-person knowledge gives the difference a positive form. Intentional action is known without observation — a man knows where his limbs are without consulting a sensation in his knee — and for Anscombe practical knowledge is the cause of what it understands, unlike speculative knowledge, which derives from objects. Moran separates attributing a mental state to oneself, which is finding a fact by introspection, from avowing it from the deliberative position, which is answering for the fact and thereby constituting it. Boyle carries this further: reflecting on motives transforms them rather than observing them, so that beliefs become acts of reason. This establishes the form of intentional action, not its source. An intention arising by chance, or an intention produced by causes the agent never sees, can be lived through and avowed from the deliberative position as well. The first person shows what an act is; it does not show that the act was undetermined, and no phenomenology could.

These accounts describe the operation from different angles, and each gives either more or less than the act requires. Fichte's identity of acting and deed dissolves the circle in which an author would have to precede his own constitution, and he takes it as the structure of any self-relation whatever; what is claimed here is a rare event at a particular seam. Korsgaard's identification supplies the product — a practical identity established in acting rather than found before it — and the principle that does the identifying is strong enough to settle the case in advance, which returns the act to execution. Anscombe's practical knowledge gives the operation its form from inside, and the form is available to a determined decision as fully as to an undetermined one. Hieronymi's question-settling supplies the demarcation, and her account of it is compatible with determinism throughout; it holds here only while sufficiency is established in the accepting rather than carried by the weight of a reason.

Set against the bearer, the joint is legible. The bearer furnishes the matter, and the settling gives it the form of someone's answer. The accounts describe form: an operation that closes a question, is known without observation by its performer, establishes sufficiency and brings its author into being in the performance.

The form says nothing yet about whether the act needed an alternative available to it. Frankfurt's cases target the principle that responsibility requires alternative possibilities. A man decides to do something while, unknown to him, a device stands ready to intervene if he begins to decide otherwise. The device never activates, because he reaches the intended decision without its intervention, although no alternative outcome was available. If responsibility required the ability to do otherwise, he would not be responsible, which is the conclusion the case is meant to resist.

Authorship depends on the settling being John's rather than on the availability of alternatives. The device stands unused beside a settling that occurred exactly as it would have occurred without it. Whether the world contained a second open path is a different question from whether this closing was authored, and only the second has been at issue. Freedom is located in sourcehood, and objections concerning alternative possibilities are aimed elsewhere.

The authorship faces its hardest problem when the settling issues in bodily action. The relation between act and author has been called normative and constitutive — and John's hand moved. If the physical state before the settling suffices for the physical transition, then the normative description changes nothing that happens, and calling the event a settlement renames a determined process in approving vocabulary: compatibilism with better manners. If it does not suffice, the settlement is doing physical work, and the question of how a normative relation moves a hand is back. Saying that the same event admits both descriptions does not resolve this, since the two horns differ over whether the physical story is complete.