Leaderboard

“We do not need and should not want to have an openness in the flow of reality that consists in the possibility of our making decisions for which we can imagine no conceivable rationale. We do not therefore need the (incompatibilistically construed) power, in respect to each decision made, to have made the opposite decision. But we do need, if there is to be such a thing as agency at all, the general capacity to organize, order, and direct our lives in such a way that we thereby settle the particular details of what happens in those lives at the time at which we act (or decide to do something—for I take it that deciding is a species of acting). Moreover, I maintain, we cannot have this capacity if an action is merely the inevitable event-consequence of some set of antecedent events and states. In that case, there would then be nothing left for anyone to do, for there would be nothing left for anyone to settle at the time of action. Doings would become a mere part of the maelstrom of mere happenings, and agents would disappear from the world, their efficacy ceded to deterministically evolving series of events and states. Actions (including decisions) must be things, therefore, whose occurrence is always non-necessary relative to the totality of their antecedents. What this implies is that they must be exercises of a power that need not have been exercised at the moment or in the precise way that it was in fact exercised. The power to act, as many philosophers have remarked, is a two-way power that: to act or to refrain from acting. That is what makes it special. All sorts of objects have powers, e.g. . . . my heart has the power to pump blood around my body. But none of these things . . . has at the same time, the power not to exercise these other powers, once conditions for their realization are present (for this reason indeed, it is much more natural to speak of these one-way powers being realized than it is to speak of them being exercised). . . . My heart cannot help pumping my blood around my body provided it is working properly. In contrast, the power to act that animals possess is associated essentially and constantly, so I would insist, with a simultaniously-possessed power of refrainment. More will need to be said about this power of refrainment, for its precise characterization is not an easy matter. In particular, it will be essential to avoid any characterization of refrainment according to which it has itself to be a deliberate act; what I shall mean by the power to refrain is something much weaker than this.” (155–56) Let me see now—the power to focus mind or to refrain from focus.