In philosophy, an action is an event that an agent performs for a purpose, that is, guided by the person's intention.
Causalist theories, like Donald Davidson's account or standard forms of volitionalism, hold that causal relations between the agent's mental states and the resulting behavior are essential to actions.
[7] Because of its reliance on psychological states and causal relations, this position is considered to be a Humean theory of action.
So the movement of the finger flipping the switch is part of the action as well as the electrons moving through the wire and the light bulb turning on.
[3] A causal chain is wayward if the intention caused its goal to realize but in a very unusual way that was not intended, e.g. because the skills of the agent are not exercised in the way planned.
[11] Davidson addresses this issue by excluding cases of wayward causation from his account since they are not examples of intentional behavior in the strict sense.
[6] Another objection is that mere intentions seem to be insufficient to cause actions, that other additional elements, namely volitions or tryings, are necessary.
For example, as John Searle has pointed out, there seems to be a causal gap between intending to do something and actually doing it, which needs an act of the will to be overcome.
[6] Volitionalists aim to overcome these shortcomings of Davidson's account by including the notion of volition or trying in their theory of actions.
[6][12] But it has been argued that they can be treated as a unified notion since there is no important difference between the two for the theory of action because they play the same explanatory role.
But trying and failing to move the legs is different from intending to do it later or merely wishing to do it: only in the former case does the patient learn that the treatment was unsuccessful.
[3][16] An influential criticism of the volitional explanations of actions is due to Gilbert Ryle, who argued that volitions are either active, in which case the aforementioned regress is inevitable, or they are not, in which case there would be no need to posit them as an explanatory inert "ghost in the machine".
[4] But it has been suggested that this constitutes a false dilemma: that volitions can play an explanatory role without leading to a vicious regress.
John Stuart Mill, for example, avoids this problem by holding that actions are composed of two parts: a volition and the bodily movement corresponding to it.
[6][18] Non-causalist or anti-causalist theories deny that intentions or similar states cause actions.
[19] Because of these problems, most of the arguments for non-causalism are negative: they constitute objections pointing out why causalist theories are unfeasible.
[19][24] Important among them are arguments from wayward causation: that behavior only constitutes an action if it was caused by an intention in the right way, not in any way.
This critique focuses on difficulties causalists have faced in explicitly formulating how to distinguish between proper and wayward causation.
Causalist theories can account for this fact through causal relation: the former but not the latter reason causes the action.
For example, on April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth both pulled the trigger of his gun, fired a shot and killed Abraham Lincoln.
[3] This kind of view has the unintuitive consequence that even the most simple exercises of agency result in a vast number of actions.
[1][4] One way to solve these complications is to hold that basic actions correspond to the most simple commands we can follow.
[26] This position excludes most forms of muscle contractions and chemical processes from the list of basic actions since we usually cannot follow the corresponding commands directly.
[1] One motivation for this position is that volitions are the most direct element in the chain of agency: they cannot fail, unlike bodily actions, whose success is initially uncertain.
[16] Various mental events have been suggested as candidates for non-physical actions, like imagining, judging or remembering.
[16] Mental actions, in the strict sense, are prefatory or catalytic: they consist in preparing the mind for these contents to arise.
Deciding then is the process of picking one of these alternatives and forming an intention to perform it, thereby leading toward an action.
[3][2][4] For example, a pedestrian witnessing a terrible car accident may be morally responsible for calling an ambulance and for providing help directly if possible.
Alva Noë states: 'We move our eyes, head and body in taking in what is around us... [we]: crane our necks, peer, squint, reach for our glasses or draw near to get a better look...'...'Perception is a mode of activity on the part of the whole animal...It cannot be represented in terms of merely passive, and internal, processes...' [38] Some philosophers (e.g. Donald Davidson[39]) have argued that the mental states the agent invokes as justifying his action are physical states that cause the action.
[citation needed] Problems have been raised for this view because the mental states seem to be reduced to mere physical causes.