Taylor, R. (1974). " Freedom and Determinism". In Metaphysics, second edition. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Taylor proposes the agency-theory as a better fit for human freedom (unlike soft-determinism), and is a denial of determinism with respect to human actions.
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Taylor explains the theory as
“The only conception of action that accords with our data is one according to which men… are sometimes, but of course not always, self-determining beings; that is beings which are sometimes causes of their own behaviour.”
There is a notion of self determinism = humans are capable of determining their own actions without causal influence or causal necessitation from the outside
The difference between the agency theory and soft-determinism is that the person/agent is the cause of free human behaviour, not some internal state of the person. For soft-determinism, there is always some causal background that forces the inner states resulting in actions, but in the agency theory, the agent is a kind of originator of their own self-determined actions.
The agency theory fits with Taylor’s two datas:
- it is up to me = as a free agent, I initiate some of my actions, and so it is reasonable to say that my free actions are “up to me”
- the theory makes room for deliberation as it suggests that i initiate some of my actions under conditions that do not determinate the particular action. Given that there are open options, then there is some scope for deliberating between what those options are.
Metaphysical presuppositions
- free agent = “a person, or a self, who is not merely a collection of things or events, but a substance and a self-moving being.”
here, substance = something with independent existence, capable of standing on its own, of being on its own terms.
- Agent-causation = there must be a special kind of causality associated with persons or selves. The free agent must cause an event to occur without anything causing him to do so (no causal background). Unlike ordinary Causality, the agent is NOT a necessitating cause. This means that the agent has the capacity to initiate one of several possible outcomes = I caused it, but i could have done otherwise.
“This conception of causation of events by beings or substances [i.e. persons, selves] that are not events is, in fact, so different than the usual philosophical conception of a cause that it should not even bear the same name, for ‘being a cause’ ordinarily just means ‘being an antecedent sufficient condition or set of conditions.’ Instead, then, of speaking of agents as causing heir own acts, it would perhaps be better to use another word entirely, and say, for instance, that they originate them, initiate them, or simply that they perform them.”
Agent-causation is unlike ordinary causation as there is no causal background; free actions belong to the agent and to nothing else.
Critiques of Agency theory
The agency theory only works if we accept a special kind of self that isn’t just physical or experiential. We need an entity that can be genuine author of actions, not reducible to body/brain, mind/experience. If humans were just physical beings, then our actions would be fixed by causal necessity that the material world is.
Agent-causation permits humans (agents) a special kind of power that nothing else has; it is exclusive to human beings and human conduct.
The only reason to accept these ideas of special self-hood and agent-causation is to find some kind of coherent account of human freedom. It could be said that it might be easier to deny freedom all together.
Question that arises: is it really reasonable to treat human behaviour as exceptional and immune from the causal influences we find in the rest of nature?