Action and Bodily Movement

Human beings are agents: We have the capacity to act, which involves the capacity to cause and to prevent events. Indeed, to perform an action of a particular kind is to cause (or prevent) an event of a particular kind: To kill someone is to cause their death, and to save their life is to prevent it. Actions are attributed to us as agents on the grounds of the events we cause (or prevent); so an action of killing requires that the agent cause a death, an action of breaking a window requires that the agent cause an event of a window's breaking, and so on.

It may be thought that the capacity to act goes beyond the capacity to cause or prevent events, for acting is sometimes causing or preventing processes or states of affairs or bringing objects into existence; for example, bringing it about that a top is spinning or that a door is closed, or bringing a painting into existence. Even in such cases, however, the initiation of the process, the coming about of the state of affairs, and the object's coming into existence are events that one causes (or prevents). Therefore, we can broadly characterize our capacity to act as the capacity we have to cause or prevent events. (In what follows, and for ease of exposition, the entry shall talk mainly about causing events, although most of what is said applies to preventing events also.)

This entry explores actions that involve bodily movements. It asks whether the relationship between an action that involves a motion of the body and that motion of the body is one of identity, cause and effect, or something else. It explores the different problems that arise for those various answers if one conceives of actions themselves as events, and suggests that one solution is to abandon the view that actions are events that cause other events in favor of the view that they are causings of events but not themselves events.