Candidate No: 276995 Does the event causal view of agency provide a satisfactory view of human agency? The question I am concerned with is whether human agency is satisfactorily explained by a contemporary account of agency which seeks to appeal to event causality. It seems inevitable that human agency will eventually be submitted to naturalistic explanation, an increasingly dominant paradigm on the philosophical scene. According to this doctrine, the world is physical, and phenomena within it can be explained by appeal to causes which are law governed. The account of agency I target is very hospitable to this doctrine. The event causal account of agency is a domain in which Donald Davidson has been highly influential. Since Davidson is a key figure here, I will use him to address the broader concern I have with event causality in thinking of human agency. From here on, I use agency and human agency synonymously. I am aware that since Davidson, there have been many developments in thinking of agency this way, for example the more recent understanding of intention as guiding and sustaining. Alfred Mele, Intention and Intentional Action, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2009). Davidson himself seems to have changed his mind about the role of intention too. Donald Davidson, ‘Intention’, in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). pp. 75-90. For my purposes though, I consider Davidsons early account, because I believe these developments to be peripheral to the core claim I am targeting. The conception of agency I take aim at is not limited to humans, but our theorising often centres on humans as paradigm cases. This is something we can observe from our perspective – and this is telling. I will contend that the event causal view of agency cannot satisfactorily explain human agency. Unacceptable consequences follow once we think of ourselves from an impersonal standpoint – which is what event causality does to agency. More specifically, I argue this through thinking about a set of problems. The first is a fundamental kind of act which the event causal account seems unable to accommodate: our refraining’s from acting. The other is in thinking of rational explanation of an action. What we often invoke in these situations is the role of reflection, which does not feature in an event causal explanation of agency. Davidson’s rational explanation of action seems to yield absurd conclusions without an agents appreciation of their mental states. The Standard Story I will outline what I will call the ‘standard story’ of action. It is often said to begin with Donald Davidson. David Velleman, ‘What Happens When Someone Acts?’, Oxford Journals, Vol. 101, No. 403 (1992), pp. 461-481 (p. 461). His account of action is also a theory of agency. Here we define actions as bodily movements, under a description which is intentional. Donald Davidson, ‘Agency’, in Essays on Actions and Events, ed by Donald Davidson (Oxford University Press Inc: New York, 2001), pp. 43-59 (pp. 49-51). The agent is revealed as one who’s states relate intelligibly to events, such that they are said to rationally explain, and be the cause of, an action. Donald Davidson, ‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’, in Essays on Actions and Events, ed by Donald Davidson (Oxford University Press Inc: New York, 2001), pp. 12-25 (pp. 12-16). Davidson’s claim can be summed up as such, Actions are events – bodily movements – which are brought about, that is caused and rationalised, by the combination of a belief and a desire. Donald Davidson, ‘Agency’. Davidson aims to capture two key aspects of action. On the one hand, he wants to appeal to the sense that we act for reasons, and that there is a rational explanation to be had of our actions. Let us suppose you asked Brutus why he killed Ceasar, and he replied that he believed the old man was no longer fit to rule, and that among other things he desired to rid Rome of him. That you are given this answer is meant, on Brutus part, to explain to you his action. We also get something else, however: the cause. So, the other quite sensible feature Davidson aims to capture, is that we come to know of actions as being caused by the right sorts of things – which for him are mental states. What we thus end up with is a very intuitive claim that the rational explanation of action is also a causal one, and this has earned Davidson’s account the slogan ‘reasons are causes’. To take the first aspect then, we can say that when a person acts for a reason, their reason is both their belief that acting in such and such a manner will bring about a desired end, and the desire itself. Davidson, ‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’, p. 13-16. A reason just is a belief and a desire, therefore. Davidson wants to appeal to the sense that intentional actions are those done for reasons, which are composed of mental states such as desiring and believing. When we say desire, included are all pro-attitudes, from desires to normative sources like moral and aesthetic principles, which are directed towards certain actions. Ibid. To return again to the second aspect of action, that reason explanation is also causal explanation, we also need to explain which reason is the cause of action. The cause cannot only be reasons that the agent can provide, for agents can of course list all number of reasons why they acted. This was something Davidson sought to address. Ibid, p. 18 Davidson wants to know the real reason, or in his terms, the primary reason. Crucial to Davidsons account is that actions are only intentional under a description. Davidson, ‘Agency’, pp. 45-46. When Brutus trips on the floor, attempting to lunge towards Ceasar with the dagger, he does act intentionally, but the description which marks this out is the intentional movement of the legs, not the tripping itself, otherwise what we had aforementioned to be accidental would be purposeful and intended. So far I have sketched the bare bones of Davidson’s view. There is one more thing we need to appreciate: the only action attributable to my agency, he argues, are those which are primitive. Primitive actions those which we need do nothing else to achieve. Joel Feinberg, J, 'Action and Responsibility', in Philosophy in America, ed by M. Black. (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1965), 134-160 (p. 146). Brutus thrusting his arm, or bending his leg are primitive, where opening the door is not, since he must not only move his body, but also the door. Davidson takes this to delimit our actions by proposing they be construe as bodily movements. And herein lies the kernel of its relation to what I will later explain as the event causal theory of action. For Davidson says that all we ever do is move our bodies, that these are the only actions there are. Davidson, ‘Agency’, p. 57. Let us first get clear on the nature of beliefs and desires though, that we may understand these bodily movements of which they are the cause. In doing so, we will clarify a part of the problem. By talking of mental states Davidson means to appeal to something intuitive. By this he means what we ordinarily, in our folk psychology, mean by beliefs and desires. Commenting on Davidson, David Velleman says that mental states are properties of an agent, that is, things that occur within them. Velleman, ‘What Happens When Someone Acts?’, p. 462-463. This is important, and something I will return to later. Note: what we have left out so far is the specific relation mental states have to causes. For the purposes of my argument I will not consider Davidsons more developed account of why mental states are, under different descriptions, rational, and also causal, since this takes us beyond the matter at hand. For a more detailed account of Davidson’s ‘Anomalous Monism’, see: Donald Davidson, ‘Mental Events’, in Essays on Actions and Events, ed by Donald Davidson (Oxford University Press Inc: New York, 2001), pp. 170-187. Suffice it to say that they cause actions. For Davidson, events are explained as unrepeatable spatiotemporal particulars, with essential locations. Donald Davidson, ‘Events as Particulars’, in Essays on Action and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 152-157 (pp. 152-153). While complex, and not something I need to explain in detail, the upshot is that this allows his theory of action to accommodate a physicalist ontology. Giuseppina D’Oro and Constantine Sandis, From Anti-Causalism and Back: A History of the Reasons/Causes Debate, in Reasons and Causes, Ed by Guiseppina Doro and Constantine Sandis (Palgrave Macmillan: England, 2013), pp. 7-48 (pp. 24-26). Davidson’s theory is, thus, very much in keeping with the law governed physical world which science describes. He says that we can understand events by placing them in the context of their causes, where causes make sense of their effects – he takes this to be intuitive. Davidson, ‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’, p. 18. His claim that actions are bodily movements, is a principled stance of event causality in the respect just described. Davidson says as much when he claims that causation is crucial to agency, but that the kind of causation we are concerned about is ordinary causality between events. Davidson, ‘Agency’, p. 51-52. But then, the thrust of my concern here is not in the particularities of Davidson’s whole project, it is the basic claim shared in the event causal view of agency. This claim states that an agent is an entity that has an appropriate instantiation of causal relations between its states, or properties, and events. Markus Schlosser, ‘Agency’, in The Stanford Encyclopaedia pf Philosophy, URL: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/agency/ (Accessed: 1st January 2024). Davidson’s account of intentional action is a species of this, given his adherence to the right causal relations between an agents mental states and events (bodily movements). Next, I will look at some of the motivations that lay behind this account, and address the question of how agency ought to be conceived. What are some of the background commitments that motivate an events-based account of agency, to which Davidson belongs? I think the first thing we can see is a commitment towards naturalism, which while vague, I will define as a commitment towards physicalism. David Papineau, ‘Naturalism’, in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, URL: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/ (Accessed: 1st January 2024). Here, the causality of the physical world, and properties that are said to be instantiated in it, have gradually encroached upon ever more phenomena. It isn’t entirely surprising that we would become subjects of the explanation ourselves. But attitudes aren’t uniform. Davidson’s own view is not straightforwardly naturalistic given his proclivity towards the mental. That being said, he subscribes to a physicalist ontology. Jennifer Hornsby contends that philosophy of human agency can be broadly construe as a polarity between concerns in ethics, and those in the philosophy of mind. Jennifer Hornsby, ‘Agency and Action’, in Agency and Action, ed by John Hyman and Helen Steward (Cambridge University Press: United Kingdom, 2004), pp. 1-23 (p. 1) She says that the aim in philosophy of mind, where mental causation has been a primary concern, is to find a place for agents in a what is taken to be a world with physical workings. The aim in ethics, however, is somewhat orthogonal, with being able to connect our normative commitments to our human capacities for deliberation, being the principal goal. Ibid. This is helpful for seeing the event causal view of agency in context. We can see how understanding agency in keeping with our metaphysical descriptions of ordinary event causality, can be parasitic on our own sense of things, where agents carry distinctive capacities and roles, which do not easily fit into the physical workings of the world. Normativity seems bound up with our personal experience. We can even say that the scientific model which itself lay behind naturalism strives to describe the world impersonally – where our personal perspective is not a part. Our contemporary notions of ‘objective’, seem to find a home here too, so that we can all be sure we are talking about something that is mind independent when we say it exists. Davidsons worry seems well placed. He asks, “what events in the life of a person reveal agency; what are his deeds and doings in contrast to mere happenings in his history[…]?”. Davidson, ‘Agency’, p. 44. Wanting to know what an agent is actually responsible for, amongst all the things that happen in the world, is a sensible concern. We know that Davidson is talking about event causality, however. But he does not identify as the reductivist who wants to do away with folk psychological motivations though. He preserves talk of the mental by keeping our folk psychological commitments to beliefs and desires. But it comes at a cost. I will address this in the next section. There seem to be two irreconcilable facts of our experience, a partition that is at the core of how we think, both of the world and ourselves. Thomas Nagel has said that we occupy two distinct standpoints, an internal and external perspective. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1986), pp. 110-115. Viewed from the inside, our lives present us with what seem like real possibilities to act, and a genuine sense of autonomy. Viewed from the outside, or the external standpoint, where we step away from our personal perspective, we look as though part of the natural order of cause and effect, where the agent and all they do get swept up into it. Ibid. Another way of taking of the external standpoint is in terms of events that we mentioned earlier – actions are part of a chain of events that have nothing do with us, stretching back into the horizonal past, connected by an unbreakable bond of causation. From what Nagel says, we can see why a theory of agency might concede ground to the external objective standpoint, given the difficulty of finding a place for our internal standpoint within it. It may be argued though, that we can still talk of ourselves as agents from the inner standpoint, as this can have instrumental uses. Ultimately, however, there is no metaphysical position from which our sense of agency is grounded. And it is also worth mentioning, that this does not come down to whether or not we are the causes of our actions, as might be the worry of free will. Whether we are determined or not, there is still a threat that our personal standpoint is reducible to physical causes. Moreover, Nagel says that the physical workings of the world need not even be complete for this threat to be posed, since there always remains the possibility of its being so. Ibid, p. 114. So, the question we need to ask ourselves, is what account of agency we think is appropriate for capturing the phenomenon of agency? I argue, alongside Nagel, that an account of agency cannot be given an impersonal description. Ibid, pp.114-118. Agency is a domain which resists an impersonal account. This is to say that the phenomenology is to be taken seriously. And Davidson agrees to an extent, since he speaks of agency in terms of the folk psychological too. I don’t find this surprising given that I think it is constitutive of agency that it is personal. When I say this, I take it that there is a sense in which we know ourselves as agents already, in a personal way – subjectively. For an impersonal description to be possible, that is a description that is mind independent, implies that there is a personal description to be had – not that is it valid. It is certainly possible to be in confusion with respect to the nature of our personal standpoint, but that there is a difference between the world described by science, and our experience of it, is enough to create a tension for us when we understand something like our own agency, which we have a sense of personally. But from the external standpoint it also seems obvious that we are aware of the validity of (some) impersonal descriptions. I do not feel a doctor is lacking in explanatory justification when they describe my limping movements in physiological terms. I don’t think everything about our subjective experience resists an impersonal description. It comes to be in conflict when what we think must be explained in personal terms, such as my capacity to act, is challenged by impersonal terms, like brains and matter, which are law governed events. As stated earlier, Davidson aims to avoid this kind of reduction, but then his account takes the shape of another reduction: the person is reduced to their mental states. When Davidson says mental states cause bodily movements, I can’t help but think this misses something. Do my mental states cause my bodily movements, or do I? Or perhaps he has in mind the identification of mental states with the person? I think not. Perhaps this would be more concrete if there were an example of some deficiency specific to an event causal account, where it became manifestly clear where the agent has been left out. Fortunately, I argue, there is one. Jennifer Hornsby argues for an important aspect of agency which the event causal account struggles to accommodate: someone can do something intentionally without an ensuing action. Horsby, Agency and Action, Listing cases where agents intentionally decide not to do something, she points to a person’s refraining from eating chocolates, letting the telephone ring, and paying no attention to someone. Jennifer Hornsby, Agency and Actions, pp. 3-4. Now the reason there would be no action here, is that for Davidson (and the event causal theory of agency) there are no bodily movements of these not doings, there are no events. Likewise, we can conceive of other examples too, like making a promise or a resolution. But I think Horsby’s point is important for another reason, which bears on her earlier distinction between two different approaches to philosophy of action. Firstly, I anticipate responses from Davidson and the event causalists. One could say in these cases that there is no action, since there is no event of which to speak. No bodily movement occurred. We could even think of it as a failure to act, or an omission. But this is only to say there are lots of things I am not doing, and we are fine with saying these are not actions. It would be absurd to say my not being in Scotland is an action, or my not cooking up an English breakfast. And so too my refraining’s do not map onto failures either, for I seem to be able to fail without ever really refraining from anything. Consider the failed murder attempt that can occur without ever including a refraining from anything. When we talk about refraining from doing something, we aren’t talking about not doing something, or failing. Another response, perhaps more of a threat, is that what seems like non-bodily movement, or a non-event, is actually an event. Yes, we may resist the desire to smoke say, but really what we are doing when resisting smoking, is to walk away from the cigarettes, or do something else akin to my preventing my smoking from taking place. In this respect, we can identify beliefs and desires that cause an action. The reason, we say, is that I desired not to smoke, and I believed that walking away was the means to achieve it. The action was my walking away, leaving the cigarettes on the side. Don’t the causal relations here satisfy the constraint of a legitimate action of which there is an event? Yes, they do. The matter is settled then? Not quite, for if it were how we ordinarily think of refraining, as a matter of doing something else, then they would some have grounds for this response. But as I see it, they do not. Recall, that we are looking to honour the personal standpoint, which means we cannot have an explanation of action that completely violates our common understanding. It feels like when I say no to cigarettes, I find that this is something I can do entirely without body movement at all – without an event. And yet, it seem like something really does happen. In fact, I would go so far as to say that some refraining’s are far more agentic than many of my doings. The question, is what this means about agency? Now it may be obvious to some, that the responses given above do not fit the bill somehow. Restraining is not merely omission, failure to act, or a some other doing of a bodily movement kind. For what we have in mind often, I argue, is something closer to restraint. There are other terms we use too; withhold, resist, forbear. And these are words resemble the kinds of behaviours we often classify as self-controlled or self-disciplined. Now this is not always this case, for sometimes what we might consider refraining’s, can be quite passive, and omission better explains what happens. I can habitually say no to cheese, when offered, since I find that it always upsets my stomach – though I happen to like it. But I say this to point to the fact that refraining has another rather special character which we endorse. Ethics is of course no stranger to talk of these kinds of behaviour. Both Kant and Hegel had central places for restraining ourselves from our desires, and saw this ability as crucial to human freedom. Resisting various temptations is a distinctly human capacity. It is intimately woven into what philosophers have called practical reason. So, we are not unfamiliar to such talk. It seems the reason why it is difficult to integrate this behaviour into events is because it defies an impersonal description. We seem to be talking about capacity to reflect and deliberate. While refraining is an apt example of this capacity in play, it clearly goes beyond refraining. It may be wondered whether we needed to posit the case of an agents refraining in order to argue the case for reflection, but seeing how one of the principle tasks of reflection is to intervene upon beliefs and desires, refraining is a logical function of this capacity. It is therefore well placed to explain what I see as a defect in the event causal account I have given. And here is where the lesser reduction that Davidson makes, of agents to their states, becomes problematic. Hornsby argues that accounts of agency that are events-based leave no place for agents. Hornsby, ‘Agency and Actions’, p. 2. I think she is right. Next, I will attempt to argue why our capacity to reflect is crucial to understanding human agency, and why this cannot be captured by event causality. In cases when we resist a desire, say a desire to smoke, we don’t seem to want to say that another desire won out over the desire to smoke. For if it is merely a battle of forces, then we cannot explain why it seems to us that the strongest desires are sometimes overridden by us. What we want to say is that we intervene on our beliefs and desires in some way. This implies that we have some autonomy from them, which I think we do. If we can make this case, then we can then accommodate for the sense in which we exercise control over them when we refrain from doing something. And part of this is surely what we mean when commend rationality as a virtue. We commonly describe rational persons as people who are self-control. But notice, this is what we say of persons. We thus have another problem for Davidsons account when understanding rational explanation of actions. The problem with mental states causing action, and saying that this provides a rational explanation of the action too, is that we do not find the kind of rationality we attribute to people here. Christine Korsgaard argues that when we are concerned with understanding the rationality of others’ actions, it is not enough to say that beliefs and desires together cause actions. Christine Korsgaard, Self-Constitution (United States: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 62. That a person can be conditioned in absurd ways, while maintaining the presence of beliefs and desires is testament to this. Consider a case: suppose a person is habituated in such a way that when they desire to go to toilet on an airplane, and believe the object before them is a plane airlock, they open the airlock. Here we have a reliable action derived from the presence of beliefs and desires which function as a cause, but an absurd action as a result. Korsgaard says that it is tempting to claim that there is no conceptual link between an absurd action and its corresponding causes. Ibid. A desire to go to the toilet on a plane, mid-flight, by opening the airlock as a means, is conceptually ludicrous. We can agree to this, surely. Assuming there is a perfectly good toilet on board, nothing about the desire to go to toilet on a plane serves to make sense of the ensuing airlock being opened as a means to fulfil that desire. But should there have been an appropriate conceptual connection between the mental states and the action, says Korsgaard, this would not have rendered the agent rational either, since they could also have been habituated to act rationally. Ibid, p. 64. In other words, a person’s action can be intelligible given the requisite mental states that are said to be responsible for the action, but that is not sufficient to mark an agent as rational. One can be acting in accordance with rational principles, but not for the sake of them. A madman can thus act rationally on Davidsons account. So, standing together, the casual efficacy of beliefs and desires is alone not sufficient to judge whether an agent is rational, and nor is the conceptual connection between the mental states and the action. What is at stake, however, is not the conceptual connection between the mental states and the action, says Korsgaard, for this tells us nothing of the person who is said to be the subject of them. Ibid, p. 63. I agree. Actions can intelligibly, that is rationally, be explained by their antecedent mental states, and yet not suffice to warrant a judgment that a person is being rational. This is a problem for Davidson, under his conception of beliefs and desires, but it is also problem for the event causal account. Recall, common to both is the aim to capture the right causal relations that hold between an agent’s states and events. But now we seem to have something of a reductio, if we accept the reasoning just given. For this takes us to an absurd conclusion when judging the rationality of agents. What we need is a person who is in the right relation to their beliefs and desires. Korsgaard suggest that this means having an appropriate recognition of the conceptual relation between a belief and desire. Ibid. And this is something we say of persons. That they exhibit a sensitivity is crucial to their rational capacities. This is where I draw upon the ability we have as human agents to reflect, which can make sense of why there are no bodily movements in many of our refraining’s. It may be wondered whether we needed to posit the case of an agents refraining in order to argue the case for reflection, but seeing how one of the principle tasks of reflection is to intervene upon beliefs and desires, refraining is a logical function of this capacity. It is therefore apt to explain what I see as a defect in the event causal account I have given. I’ll use Korsgaard’s definition of reflection as the capacity we have to become conscious of our own mental states. Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge University Press: UK, 2010), pp. 92-93. This is what allows us to think on them. A capacity she says is intimately bound up with the fact that we are self-conscious, which is what separates us from other animal species. Ibid. We are no stranger to this. It is already part of how we speak and make sense of our behaviour. It thus complies with our folk psychology. Moreover, we are accustomed to its function in matters of refraining – of self-restraint. When we are at pains to resist picking up the bad habit again, we can observe and scrutinise our motivations. Sometimes they win out, sometimes they don’t. But nobody could deny the role of reflection here, the judge who sees before them the testimony of the defendant and the accuser. In stating this, I mean not to say that everyone is equally reflective, only that we all, generally speaking, have this capacity. And like defendants and accusers, our conflicting motives often have a story to tell about each other’s desirability or undesirability. Charles Taylor, ‘What is Human Agency?’, in Human Agency and Language (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1985), pp. 15-44 (p. 15-20). Framing things one way, giving in to gluttony, can render the immediacy of disciple unwarranted. “Next week”, I tell myself. And when gluttony is refrained from, the desire for self-control colours its rival in the mark of threat to our deeper aspirations. Reflection can have deeper motives behind it though. This contrastive, and evaluative, function of reflection has led philosophers like Charles Taylor to think we are necessarily ethical agents, beings who act normatively. Ibid. Taylor argues that we are not simple weighers of our motivations, considering only the desirability of desires, Taylor is responding to Harry Frankfurt’s notion of second-order desires, which on Taylors account, misses the evaluative character of reflection. See: Ibid, p. 15-16; Harry Frankfurt, 'Freedom of the will and the concept of a person', Journal of Philosophy, 67:1 (1971), pp. 5-20. we are strong evaluators. We confer judgments of value on them, seeing them as representing modes of life. Our evaluative terms speak to this, when we characterise a mode of life as noble or base, profound or shallow. We do not just weigh up which object provides more the means of satisfaction, getting drunk with friends, or stuffing my face at a buffet with family, we judge the qualitative worth of the desire itself, questioning what kind of life we engaged in when fulfilling these desires. Taylor, ‘What is Human Agency?’. The fact we make evaluative distinctions as to qualitative worth is something that can only happen from a personal standpoint since it relates to how a person sees themselves. Taylors view brings out the role of reflection as bearing deeply on the normatively ethical. Far from arguing a case here, I am, merely suggesting a further way in which we can think of reflection as constitutive of our agency. But then what of causality? I have now posited the role of reflection, and we can see how it makes sense of rational explanations of action. But it is not clear how this fits into the causes of action. If we think of the phenomenology of our folk psychology, reflection seems causally efficacious. When we reflect, by standing above our perception and desires, so to speak, we have a genuine feeling of being able to intervene through our evaluation of them. And the battle of forces, where the strongest desire wins out, seems shunted by this ability. It seems like we can go beyond this. And if it were true then there would be no normativity, since at bottom all there would be are naturally explainable contingencies. If what we call the normative reduced to desires, then at best it is instrumentally good, at worst, a total fiction. To do justice to the role of reflection then. if we are accepting its central function in agency, we want to say it has a constitutive role in the agency of a person. In order to say this, however, we need to be able to say it is a cause, or at least being directed by the person who is the cause. For my scope here, I could not venture towards an account of agent causation. David Velleman makes a good case for it, and has argued that the reflective process must be guided by a motive. See: David Velleman, ‘What Happens When Someone Acts?’, Oxford Journals, Vol. 101, No. 403 (1992), pp. 461-481. Otherwise it becomes something of a mystery, and open to the charge of epiphenomenalism, where reflection may have no casual efficacy at all. This is a worry. It would mean there is a disconnection between the metaphysics and the phenomenology of action. We would be immured in an illusion of control, entombed in a fiction. We seem to return to Nagel again. From the external standpoint, there is a worry that we get lost in the impersonal, that our experience of agency – our self-understanding, is vacuous, and the reality is that we are strung out across chains of causes whose paths bulldoze straight through our personal sense of things. The prospect of not being able to find an answer here is of profound concern. But all is not lost. We came this far, and the problems with the event causal account of agency, qua Davidson, are real. The disconnection of metaphysics from the phenomenology would be a travesty, but given that we sought an account of agency which was personal – did justice to the phenomenology – we have at least clarified what this would mean. It is only an interesting fact that Davidson himself seemed to begin from the point at which I do too – with phenomenology. But that now we see this halfway house of his is not feasible. For if we are to do real justice to Davidsons intuition, we cannot ignore and leave out the central role of reflection in human agency. Davidson wants to have it both ways, and I don’t think he can. Despite not resolving on how to understand the metaphysics of agency, it is now, at least, clear what our options are. We have come some way from positing Davidson’s event causal account of agency. Specifically, we saw, via Hornsby, that various kind of refraining could only be answered unsatisfactorily. And the reason for this was that it seemed confusing to suggest that our not doings were simply doings of another kind, or could only be made sense of as not doings at all. Davidson needed to show that there were bodily movements for there to be agency. While no doubt, there may be some cases like this, we wanted to capture the special character which refraining’s often take as implying: the capacity to reflect, which I later argue seems bound up with the normative. And I suggested that an account of agency which excludes something as fundamental as our capacity to stand over and above our beliefs and desires, was deficient. But then we saw how this needed showing, and given the commitment of Davidson to action explanation as invoking the intelligible connection between reasons and action, I sided with Korsgaard to show that we could not give a rational explanation of an action on Davidson’s view. This was because, understood as mental states alone, actions could be rendered rational on his account, but belong to no rational agent. Recognising the relation between beliefs and desires is important in our attribution of rationality. I argue, with Korsgaard, that the role of reflection meets this condition. But this can’t be given an impersonal description, even by appeal to mental states. Reflection is something a person does, and therefore this poses a problem for the event causal account. I also suggested a role for reflection as inherently normative, via Charles Taylor, which would make sense of Korsgaard’s claim that rationality requires recognition from the subject themselves, rather than their mental states. After coming this far in my argument, it made sense to question whether reflection has a causal role in agency, which it needs to if we are to say it is constitutive. Whilst I have not resolved the metaphysical question, in connecting this to the phenomenology, I have at least outlined what I take to be the choice we face. Either, we uphold the phenomenology, and the causal role that reflection seems to play. Or we disregard the causal role of reflection and with it the bearing that our ordinary experience has on explanation of action. Either way, the event causal account of agency, which Davidson sits within, is caught in no man’s land, not capturing the phenomenology, but still seeking to rely on it to not completely submit to a fully reductive naturalism. 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