Action and Responsibility (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)

Sneddon, Andrew

ISBN 10: 1402039964 / ISBN 13: 9781402039966

Published by Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated, U.S.A., 2005

About this Item

198p.

Seller Inventory # 030422

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Action and Responsibility (Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy)
• Publisher: Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated, U.S.A.
• Publication Date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1402039964
• ISBN 13: 9781402039966
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition
• Condition: As New
• Seller catalogs:
  • Philosophy

About this title

Synopsis

This book is an exploration of what it takes for an event to count as an action. I first became interested in this topic nearly a decade ago while working on a different topic. I kept coming across philosophers making claims about the nature of action that seemed false or at least dubious to me. As a consequence I turned to the philosophy of action directly, to get to the heart of the matter. I have wrestled with this territory ever since. I hope that, with this book, I have finally earned the intuitions that put me at odds with the philosophers I was originally reading. This book develops ideas in Part Two of my doctoral dissertation, which I wrote at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. I loved being at Queen’s, for both professional and personal reasons. My thanks go to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support as a doctoral candidate. Steve Leighton and Ronald de Sousa were readers for my dissertation. They provided some early and invaluable challenges to the ideas developed here. My deepest debt of gratitude is owed to David Bakhurst, my supervisor. I learned a lot from David; this book would not be the same without his help.

From the Back Cover

What makes an event count as an action? Typical answers appeal to the way in which the event was produced: e.g., perhaps an arm movement is an action when caused by mental states (in particular ways), but not when caused in other ways. Andrew Sneddon argues that this type of answer, which he calls "productionism", is methodologically and substantially mistaken. In particular, productionist answers to this question tend to be either individualistic or foundationalist, or both, without explicit defence. Instead, Sneddon offers an externalist, anti-foundationalist account of what makes an event count as an action, which he calls neo-ascriptivism, after the work of H.L.A. Hart. Specifically, Sneddon argues that our practices of attributing moral responsibility to each other are at least partly constitutive of events as actions.