QuestionsAre we free?An agent can be the cause of his acts
Are we free?Free will

An agent can be the cause of his acts

Agent causation (Reid)

Thomas Reid 1710 · 1796We are the true authors of our acts: an agent can be the cause of what it does.
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What it claims

In our deliberate decisions, we are free: we have a power over the determinations of our own will, without them being the necessary result of what happens in us or around us.

Why

We are naturally convinced that we cause our own decisions, and nothing has shown that this conviction deceives us.

The same idea through history
Thomas Reid1788Reid holds that freedom is a power over the determinations of one's own will: if the person causes his decision, he is free. He fights on two fronts, against Hobbes (who reduces freedom to acting as one wills) and against Hume and Priestley (for whom causing is only following regularly).
Roderick Chisholm1964In his lecture "Human Freedom and the Self", Roderick Chisholm takes up the idea afresh: each of us, when we act, would be a "prime mover unmoved", causing certain events without anything causing us to cause them.
In short

"An agent can be the cause of his acts" is an argument by Thomas Reid (Essays on the Active Powers of Man, 1788, Essay IV, 1788) on the question "Are we free?" (answer: free will). Its claim: In our deliberate decisions, we are free: we have a power over the determinations of our own will, without them being the necessary result of what happens in us or around us. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the conclusion does follow from its 5 premises. AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 4 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Essays on the Active Powers of Man, 1788, Essay IV
Valid

When a stone rolls, we say something pushed it. When you decide to raise your hand, who or what causes that decision? For many philosophers, it is your motives, your character, your past. Thomas Reid, an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, defends another idea: the cause of your decision is you. A person is not just one link in a chain of events: she has a power, which she exerts or not. Reid does not claim to explain it in detail. He holds that this is what we all believe when we act, and that we have no good reason to be told we are mistaken.

P1Every change has an efficient cause, that is, a being that had the power to produce it. That being is either the thing that changes itself, or another being.
P2The determination of the will (deciding to do this or that) is such a change, an effect. Its cause is therefore either the person herself or some other being.
P3We have, by our constitution, a natural conviction that we act freely, that is, that we are the cause of our decisions. This conviction is very early, universal, and necessary in most of our reasoned actions.
P4We should trust our natural faculties as long as it is not proved that they deceive us: if one of them were deceptive, we would have no reason to trust any. So, as long as it is not refuted, the conviction that we are the cause of our decisions rules out that another being is their cause.
P5 · implicit premiseThis conviction has not been refuted: neither the regularity with which our motives precede our acts, nor the idea that causing is only being regularly followed by an effect, proves that our decisions are necessitated.
P6If the person is the cause of the determination of his own will, he is free in that action, and it is justly imputed to him.
Therefore, in our deliberate decisions, we are free: we have a power over the determinations of our own will, without them being the necessary result of what happens in us or around us.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, one can accept everything and still hold that the conviction of being free is an illusion, like the impression that the Sun is close by. Then the cause of our decisions is not us in Reid's sense but circumstances. That is what Priestley and Spinoza say.
The argument is valid. P1 and P2 say the decision has a cause: the person or another being. P3, P4 and P5 rule out the second possibility. The person remains, and P6 draws freedom from that. The weak points are P1 (what is an "efficient" cause?), P3 and P4 (is a natural conviction enough?), and P5 (has the conviction really been refuted?).
Analogy. When you push a door, you feel that you push, and that the door does not open by itself. Reid says: this feeling of exerting a power is our only source for understanding what "causing" means. We then extend it to things. For Reid, it would be odd to deny it precisely where we feel it directly, in our own decisions.

Objections

4

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

David Hume 1748 · attacks premise 1

A cause can be defined only by what we observe: an object followed by another, such that all the objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second. We never see a power in things, only events that follow one another. An "efficient cause" that would be more than that is not an idea we can have.

Reid replies
Thomas Reid
Reid notes that this idea of a cause is Hume's and that it seems adopted by Priestley. He answers that theory ought to stoop to fact, not fact to theory. Anyone who understands the language knows that neither priority, nor constant conjunction, nor both together, imply efficiency. He quotes Cicero: what precedes something is not to be counted its cause, but what precedes it efficiently.
David Hume 1748 · Hume's text, earlier than Reid (our juxtaposition)
In the section on liberty and necessity, Hume writes that the conjunction between motives and voluntary actions is as regular and uniform as that between cause and effect in any part of nature. For him, this regularity is acknowledged by all mankind.
The debate goes on (our summary) Reid relies on the ordinary use of the word "cause" and on our experience of voluntary effort. Hume would answer that ordinary use is exactly what analysis must correct. They agree on one point: a power of this kind cannot be observed from outside. Philosophers today are still divided about what "causing" means and whether there is a causation proper to agents.
Joseph Priestley (quoted by Reid) 1778 · attacks premise 3

Reid quotes a defender of necessity (we think it is Priestley, see the source note): we first refer our actions to ourselves. These associations get so confirmed that they are never entirely obliterated. Common language and feelings are therefore adapted to a first view of things that is limited, imperfect, or rather erroneous.

Reid replies
Thomas Reid
If any one of our natural faculties is fallacious, there is no reason to trust any of them, for he that made one made all.
The debate goes on (our summary) Reid's argument supposes a Creator who does not deceive, which many readers today do not accept as a starting point. An opponent will say that our senses themselves sometimes deceive us (Spinoza compares the error about freedom with the error about the distance of the Sun), and that we then correct the illusion without condemning all perception. The debate remains open.
Thomas Hobbes 1654 · attacks premise 6

Reid reports a line of reasoning he first attributes to Hobbes: freedom consists only in being able to act as we will. To say we have power to will an action is to say we may will it if we will. That would suppose the will determined by a prior will, and that one by another, without end, which is absurd.

Reid replies
Thomas Reid
Reid answers that this reasoning rests on a definition of liberty totally different from his own, and therefore does not apply to moral liberty as he has defined it.
Thomas Reid
To say that what depends on the will is in a man's power, but the will itself is not in his power, is to say that the end is in his power but the means necessary to that end are not, which is a contradiction.
The debate goes on (our summary) Reid changes the definition of liberty to escape the regress. Compatibilists will say he does not answer the question (what makes the will choose as it chooses?). That is exactly the modern objection that follows.
Peter van Inwagen (reporting the two standard objections) 2009 · attacks premise 2

Even if there is agent causation and the event "Jane becomes the cause of her decision to speak" occurred, how could that event be up to Jane? If it is not up to her, then it was not up to her whether to speak or stay silent. And if one adds that Jane is the cause of being the cause, a regress begins.

Reid replies
Defenders of agent causation (reply reported by van Inwagen) 2009 · "Standard" reply (2009)
To the question "what does one add by saying Jane is the cause of her decision?", the standard reply is: "I don't know how to answer your question. But that is because causation is a mystery, and not because there is any special mystery about agent causation." The same question could be asked about causation between events.
Peter van Inwagen 2009
Van Inwagen does not decide. He writes that he has no clear sense of what is going on in this debate because he does not understand agent causation, or does not think he understands it. He adds that this is not an argument against its existence.
The debate goes on (our summary) This objection is not Reid's (he does not discuss it in this form): it has become the central difficulty for agent-causation theories since Chisholm. Defenders reply that the event of causing is itself produced by the agent, without a vicious regress. Critics judge that this reply moves the mystery without dissolving it.