3 - Unpicking causation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 January 2024
Summary
“The human intellect cannot grasp the full range of causes behind any phenomenon. But the need to discover causes is deeply ingrained in the spirit of man. And so the human intellect ignores the infinite permutations and sheer complexity of all the circumstances surrounding a phenomenon, any one of which could be individually construed as the thing that causes it, latches on to the first and easiest approximation, and says ‘This is the cause!’”
Leo Tolstoy, War and PeaceSome determinists argue that all physical events are not only law-governed but also the inescapable effects of prior events – their causes. Since behaviour must take place in, and make a difference to, the physical world, the idea of actions as a metaphysically privileged category of happenings expressing an agency free from the bondage of causation is therefore fantasy. Even when actions are motivated by “internal events” such as explicit intentions, beliefs, hopes, or the idea of an immediate or distant goal, so the argument continues, they are no less determined from without. Internal events are the effects (and subsequently causes) of external events.
Intentions, reasons, wishes and such-like are simply intermediate (presumably physical) causes located between physical inputs understood as stimuli and physical outputs understood as responses. These intermediaries have either been implanted as biological instincts or “drives”; or they are the consequences of cultural conditioning, the latter being rooted in biology and hence ultimately in the physical world. Even when we do exactly as we want we are not acting freely because we have not chosen the wants that cause our actions. Those wants have a causal ancestry that ultimately lies outside of us.
In short, actions are part of the natural order and are themselves natural phenomena. This is necessary if they are to interact on level terms with the rest of the natural world. The movement of the arm of a person who picks up a stone to throw it is, and must be, as subject to Newton's laws as is the flight of the stone and what happens when the stone falls to the ground.
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- FreedomAn Impossible Reality, pp. 59 - 84Publisher: Agenda PublishingPrint publication year: 2021