Agency, Attention, and Choice

Abstract

In trying to understand what human beings are and what they do, one of the most fundamental and useful distinctions is between things which happen to us and things which happen because of us, between what we do and what is done to us, between ourselves as agents and ourselves as patients. A third distinction is also sometimes required. Sometimes we need to think of ourselves as transeunt or intermediate causes, as links in an extended chain of causes and effects which originates before us, passes through us, and ends beyond us. Many philosophers of deterministic persuasion have attempted to erode away the concept of agency by insisting that all that men do and all that they are can be explained as the consequence of causal conditions which lie ultimately in our heredity and environment and which have operated upon us and within us to make us exactly what we are and to make us do exactly what we do, so that in the final analysis all that you or I do is merely the outcome of that which is done to us. Determinists want to insist that at best we are only transeunt causes.¹