Replies to My Critics

I argue in Action, Knowledge, and Will (henceforth AKW) that in order to make progress in the philosophy of action, we need to distinguish between four aspects or dimensions of human agency, which were traditionally combined in the idea of a will: the physical dimension, which we think and reason about by means of concepts such as event and cause; the psychological dimension, where the relevant concepts include desire and intention; the intellectual dimension, where they include knowledge and reason; and the ethical dimension, involving voluntariness and choice. Jennifer Hornsby says her comments are about ‘what some might think of as a fifth dimension’ of human agency, ‘the metaphysical’. In fact they are concerned with the concepts I discuss under the ‘physical’ heading. The names I give to the dimensions of agency are of course all optional: ‘conative’ would do as well as ‘psychological’, ‘intellectual’ could be replaced by ‘rational’, and so on. But there is no need to postulate a metaphysical dimension of human agency in addition to the physical, even if there are non-physical agents—e.g. souls or, more plausibly, institutions—because the same group or family of concepts would be included under both headings. These four dimensions of individual human agency are not the only ones that matter to philosophy. On the contrary, the social and political dimensions of agency are just as important as the ones I examine in AKW. But the latter are the ones that were combined or amalgamated in the concept of the will—I refer here to the will of an individual: the ‘general’ will is another matter—and the result of amalgamating them was that profoundly different problems about human agency were confused with each other, or assumed to have the same solution. For example, consider the following two questions. First, what makes a change in my body, such as a movement of a limb, attributable to me personally as the agent? And