Focusing on George Read’s theory of agent causation, this course philosophically explores the question of whether human free will is a true cause of causation, and discusses the relationship between physical events and human will.
Suppose a red ball hits a stationary white ball, causing the white ball to move. Hume lays out three requirements for a causal relationship between the event of the red ball hitting the white ball and the event of the white ball moving. The cause must precede the effect in time, the cause and effect must follow each other in space and time, and there must be an “invariant union” between the cause and effect. Homeostatic coupling means that if two balls move and collide in the same way under similar circumstances, they will behave in the same way. This concept is consistent with our everyday experience, and we often infer causality when we see similar results under similar conditions.
However, George Read believed that even when Hume’s three conditions are met, such as in the example above, causation is not established. He believed that only an agent with free will can be the cause. This is a view that goes beyond the relationship between mere physical events, and that true causation only occurs when human will and action are involved.
In actor-causation theory, George Read characterized causes as entities that have “ambivalent capacities” and are responsible for their changes. An ambivalent capacity is an active ability to produce or not produce change, and an agent is an entity that possesses the capacity to produce an outcome, can exercise that capacity, and can be held accountable for that change. George Read argues that the true cause is the actor. According to him, when a red ball hits a white ball, the white ball can only move, not not move, so the red ball cannot be an agent.
In the view of empiricist George Read, the only agents within the scope of observation are humans. If a person rolls a red ball to make a white ball move, and the white ball moves, then the person is an agent and the movement of the white ball is an outcome. George Read believed that for an effect to occur, the agent must be ambivalent, and the agent’s motivations must be in constant conjunction. George Read saw volition as an event in the mind. This emphasized that the human will is a special capacity that transcends simple physical laws of causation.
In this regard, it can be argued that a will that is coupled to the exercise of an ambivalent faculty that produces an outcome is a manifestation of another ambivalent faculty that requires another will. In response to this argument, George Read has argued that an intrinsic activity of the mind, such as motivation, is indistinguishable from the exercise of the agent’s ambivalent faculty, the “causing of motivation,” and the result, the motivation itself. This suggests that in the case of causing a will, the exercise of the agent’s faculty is itself a will and does not require another will. However, a counter-argument to George Read’s view that volition and event are always conjoined could be that the cause of the event is the volition, not the agent. In response, George Read supported his theory by arguing that an invariant union alone does not justify causal necessity.
George Read also had to deal with the problem of ‘chance causes’. At the time, some philosophers, influenced by medieval philosophy, believed that only God was the true cause of events, including human behavior, and that agents were merely chance causes. An opportunistic cause is something that appears to be a cause in everyday life but is not actually a true cause. For example, when a person is cured of an illness through prayer, the prayer itself did not cause the illness, but God did. George Read rejected this position from an empiricist perspective, arguing that God cannot be the true cause of an event because all we can experience are the motivations and actions of agents, and divine intervention in an action is something that cannot be experienced. George Read emphasized the implications of human agency by arguing that it is ultimately up to the agent to make decisions. In doing so, he emphasized the importance of human free will and responsibility, making it clear that humans are not simply passive beings driven by external factors.
In conclusion, George Read’s theory of agentic causation provides a philosophical perspective that emphasizes human free will and responsibility, moving away from a view of causation as simply a physical chain of events. It provides a framework for a deeper understanding of the causal relationships we experience in our daily lives, and it forces us to reconsider the importance of human behavior and moral responsibility.
