Gappy Action and Murder

Philosophical Studies

Ethical consequences of metaphysical theses are often underexplored. Contemporary metaphysics has recently seen a wonderfully interesting debate which revolves around the topics of diachronic identity and mereology. Specifically, a discussion is underway between the proponents of Three Dimensionalism (i.e., those who maintain that an object persists over time by being wholly present at more than one time) and the proponents of Four Dimensionalism (i.e., those who maintain that an object persists over time by having different temporal parts at different times). Although a substantial literature exists on the alleged advantages, disadvantages, defenses of and objections to Three Dimensionalism and Four Dimensionalism, little work has been directed at exploring the ethical significance of the opposing views. As a contribution in this latter area, the present essay is an attempt to argue for a thesis about the implications of Four Dimensionalism on a pair of specific issues of moral concern, namely, on the question of how to formulate the criterion of moral personhood and on the question of just which individuals satisfy that criterion.

Eliminativists about free will and moral responsibility argue that no action can be free and responsible because in order to be actions, our movements must be caused by features of our character or will. However, either the will is constituted by states that are themselves produced by events outside our control, or it is constituted by our own choices, which must themselves stem from our will in order to be up to us. Thus, any attempt to account for freedom and responsibility seems to either run into an infinite regress or leave the ultimate causes of our actions up to something outside our agency. Compatibilists attempt to respond to this challenge by arguing that we need not have control over our will in order to be free, but only to have control of our actions on the basis of our will. Libertarians, on the other hand, argue that we can be free so long as our choices are caused indeterministically and chosen for reasons. I argue that both approaches ultimately leave the constitution of the will up to non-agential factors because the dominant accounts view all choices—including those that constitute the will—as essentially events caused by other events, leaving no function for agents to perform. In response, I argue that we can avoid eliminativism if we take the will to be irreducible to events such as choices and also our own. Through an examination of recent non-volitionist approaches that allow for responsibility for non-deliberative action, I argue that such accounts presuppose a Heideggerian view of agency on which all action and deliberation occur on the basis of an underlying projection of possibilities into which we are thrown. Heidegger’s account of temporality in turn allows us to own ourselves in the present by retrieving our past as always already chosen in light of our self-projection into the future. Agents are thus self-constituting beings capable of owning themselves and independent of causation by prior events. Freedom and responsibility are therefore irreducible features of agency.

Erkenntnis, 2021

I argue for constraining the nomological possibility space of temporal experiences and endorsing the Succession Requirement for agents. The Succession Requirement holds that the basic structure of temporal experience must be successive for agentive subjects, at least in worlds that are law-like in the same way as ours. I aim to establish the Succession Requirement by showing non-successively experiencing agents are not possible for three main reasons, namely that they (1) fail to stand in the right sort of causal relationship to the outcomes of their actions, (2) exhibit the wrong sort of epistemic status for agency, and (3) lack the requisite agentive mental attitude of intentionality. I conclude that agency is incompatible with non-successive experience and therefore we should view the successive temporal structure of experience as a necessary condition for agency. I also suggest that the Succession Requirement may actually extend beyond my main focus on agency, offering preliminary considerations in favor of seeing successive experience as a precondition for selfhood as well. The consequences of the Succession Requirement are wide-ranging, and I discuss various implications for our understanding of agency, the self, time consciousness, and theology, among other things.

While Aristotle’s account of the voluntary nature of moral formation--that an agent can and should be held responsible for his or her own character formation--seems right, the argument that follows will show how Aristotle’s overall thought needs to be understood as leaving space for the importance of temporal context (i.e. narrative and community) for the formation of character. Additionally, through a brief look at Stanley Hauerwas' work, it will be shown how such a space must be appropriated for character formation within the Christian tradition.

In his Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit argues from the possibility of cases of fission and/or fusion of persons that one must reject identity as what matters for personal survival. Instead Parfit concludes that what matters is “psychological connectedness and/or continuity with the right kind of cause,” or what he calls an R-relation. In this paper, I argue that, if one accepts Parfit’s conclusion, one must accept that R-relations are what matter for moral responsibility as well. Unfortunately, it seems that accepting that the R-relation is what matters for both survival and moral responsibility leads to a contradiction. My goal, however, is not merely to point out a problem in Parfit’s account. Instead, I believe that once we understand the basic intuitions which lead to this contradiction, it is clear that there is no fully satisfactory way to account for what matters with respect to survival and moral responsibility.

NA, 2020

This thesis aims to investigate the connection between causality in action, agency, and teleological structure of intentional action. I will defend in Chapter 2, 3 and 4 re­ spectively the following theses: 1. There is causality in action embodied in our use of the progressive form of what Hornsby (2011) calls “causative verbs”. 2. A proper account of causality in action is indispensable to understanding agency in its ordinary sense, namely a power to transact with extra­corporeal objects. 3. The idea that agency is a power of transaction is deeply related to and strengthened by the fact that teleological structure is essential to intentional actions.

In this paper it is argued that we can have defensible attributions of responsibility without first answering the question whether determinism and free will are compatible. The key to such a defense is a focus on the fact that most actions for which we hold one another responsible are quite ordinary—trespassing traffic regulations, tardiness, or breaking a promise. As we will show, unlike actions that problematize our moral competence — e.g. akratic and ‘moral monster’- like ones—ordinary ‘wrong’ actions often disclose this competence. Hence, no counterfactual assumption is needed to establish that some of us are sometimes responsible for some of the actions we perform.

Philosophical Psychology, 2021

If you expect that your action causes a near effect, you perceive the action and the effect as closer in time than they really are. This phenomenon is called temporal binding and is considered an implicit measure of the sense of agency, namely the sense of being the author of an action or action awareness. Recent studies however show that temporal binding occurs even without the agent executing any action and depends on the capacity to represent one event as the cause of another one. These studies demand the re-examination of the sense of agency, and of temporal binding as its diagnostic tool. I propose a causal view of the sense of agency, according to which action awareness arises when your action is represented as causing an effect. Because representing an action as causing outcomes affects time perception creating the illusion of event proximity, the causal view explains and operationalizes the sense of agency through the connection between causality and time, thus overcoming the indeterminacy of previous accounts. The causal view can pave the way to novel experimental perspectives in development and evolution, and stimulate new thinking on the relationship between subjectivity, causal cognition, and time perception.

Studia Philosophica Wratislaviensia, 2022

The aim of this paper is to analyze the basis for the moral obligation to remember. As the moral relation to the past is primarily a matter of shared identity, the kind of obligation in question splits into two related issues, namely, that of political, state-oriented and state-organized memory on which the political identity rests and that of memory labour grounded in social identities based in shared, time-extended projects. Drawing upon tensions between these two, I discuss time control and the accumulation of identity as central to memory labour and, referring to John Zerzan's critique of symbolical roots of power, pinpoint the moral basis of such an accumulation. On the basis of this, I argue for nesting the duty to remember in acknowledging the agent's recognition of the relatedness and dependency of their agency and possibilities of flourishing which can be obtained thanks to adjusting the field of the virtue of practical wisdom so that it includes members of the time-extended community.