The paper considers three questions. First, what is the connection between economics and agency? It is argued that causation and explanation in economics fundamentally depend on agency. So a philosophical understanding of economic explanation must be sensitive to an understanding of agency. Second, what is the connection between agency and causation? A causal view of agency-involving explanation is defended against a number of arguments from the resurgent noncausalist tradition in the literature on agency and action-explanation. If agency is fundamental to (...) economic explanation, it is argued, then so is causation. Third, what is the connection between causal explanation and the natural sciences? It is argued that, though the explanations given in economics and other social sciences are causal explanations, they are different in kind from the causal explanations of the natural sciences. On the one hand, then, the causal explanations of the social sciences are irreducible to those found in the natural sciences. On the other hand, the causal relations described by the social sciences are not completely autonomous; they do not float free of, or operate independently from, the causal relations charted by the natural sciences. (shrink)

What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent's reason for doing what he did? We may call such explanations rationalizations, and say that the reason rationalizes the action. In this paper I want to defend the ancient - and common-sense - position that rationalization is a species of ordinary causal explanation. The defense no doubt requires some redeployment, but not more or less complete abandonment of the position, as (...) urged by many recent writers. (shrink)

This essay challenges the widely accepted principle that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. The author considers situations in which there are sufficient conditions for a certain choice or action to be performed by someone, So that it is impossible for the person to choose or to do otherwise, But in which these conditions do not in any way bring it about that the person chooses or acts as he (...) does. In such situations the person may well be morally responsible for what he chooses or does despite his inability to choose or to do otherwise. Finally the author considers certain suggestions for revising the principle he rejects or for replacing it with a principle of an altogether different kind. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Pierluigi Barrotta argues that Mises ‘ended up by defending an epistemological tenet very far from Kant's’, concluding that ‘Mises's apriorism cannot be vindicated through Kant's epistemology’. In contrast, I shall argue that certain of Mises's arguments can be reconstructed in Kantian terms, and thus the distance between Mises and Kant is not as extreme as Barrotta's argument may appear to suggest. Specifically, I shall argue that Mises, like Kant, seeks to establish the a priori nature of (...) the category of causality. To this extent at least, Mises's apriorism can be vindicated through Kant's epistemology. (shrink)

This paper first distinguishes three alternative views that adherents to both incompatibilism and PAP may take as to what constitutes an agent''s determining or controlling her action (if it''s not the action''s being deterministically caused by antecedent events): the indeterministic-causation view, the agent-causation view, and "simple indeterminism." The bulk of the paper focusses on the dispute between simple indeterminism - the view that the occurrence of a simple mental event is determined by its subject if it possesses the "actish" phenomenal (...) quality and is undetermined by antecedent events - and Timothy O''Connor''s agent-causation view. It defends simple indeterminism against O''Connor''s objections to it and offers objections to O''Connor''s view. (shrink)

The present paper investigates the question of whether right-libertarians must accept easements by necessity. Since easements by necessity limit the property rights of the owner of the servient tenement, they apparently conflict with the libertarian homestead principle, according to which the person who first mixes his labor with the unowned land acquires absolute ownership thereof. As we demonstrate in the paper, however, the homestead principle understood in such an absolutist way generates contradictions within the set of rights distributed on its (...) basis. In order to avoid such contradictions, easements by necessity must be incorporated into the libertarian theory of property rights and the homestead principle must be truncated accordingly. (shrink)

:Proponents of behavioural policies seek to justify them as ‘evidence-based’. Yet they typically fail to show through which mechanisms these policies operate. This paper shows – at the hand of examples from economics and psychology – that without sufficient mechanistic evidence, one often cannot determine whether a given policy in its target environment will be effective, robust, persistent or welfare-improving. Because these properties are important for justification, policies that lack sufficient support from mechanistic evidence should not be called ‘evidence-based’.

In his recent paper in the Journal of Economic Methodology, Tobias Henschen puts forth a manipulationist definition of macroeconomic causality that strives for adequacy. As the notion of ‘adequacy’...

Agent-causal accounts of free will face two problems. First, such a view needs an account of rational free action, that is, of acting for reasons when one acts freely. And second, an intelligible explication of causation by an agent is required. This paper addresses both of these problems. Free actions are seen as caused both by prior events and by agents. Reasons (or their mental representations) can then be seen as figuring causally when one freely acts for reasons. It is (...) suggested that agent causation can be given a non-reductive theoretical definition, as on some views event causation is. (shrink)

Current debates between behavioural and orthodox economists indicate that the role and epistemological status of first principles is a particularly pressing problem in economics. As an alleged paragon of extreme apriorism, the methodology of Austrian economics in Mises’ tradition is often dismissed as untenable in the light of modern philosophy. In particular, the defence of the so-called fundamental axiom of praxeology—“Man acts.”—by means of pure intuition is almost unanimously rejected. However, in recently resurfacing debates, the extremeness of Mises’ epistemological position (...) has been called into question. Rather than directly engaging in these exegetical discussions, this paper aims to substantiate the possibility and plausibility of conventionalist defences of praxeology per se. The proposed shift includes settling for an analytic fundamental axiom and acknowledging the prima facie tenability of other research programs than praxeology. Since conventionalist praxeology is only moderately aprioristic, mainstream economists and philosophers might be more likely to engage in fruitful discussions with those Austrian scholars who elaborate pragmatic arguments for praxeology instead of invoking pure intuition. (shrink)

There is something extreme about Ludwig von Mises’s methodological apriorism, namely, his epistemological justification of the a priori element of economic theory. His critics have long recognized and attacked the extremeness of Mises’s epistemology of a priori knowledge. However, several of his defenders have neglected what is extreme about Mises’s apriorism. Thus, the argument is directed less against Mises than against those contributions to the secondary literature that assert his methodological moderation while overlooking what the most prominent critics have found (...) extreme about Mises’s apriorism. Defending Mises as a merely moderate apriorist because he held only a narrow part of the foundation of economics to be a priori is a straw-man defense against criticisms of his apriorism as epistemologically extreme. (shrink)

This paper explores the link between the case for indeterminism in an epistemological fashion and methodological individualism in the thought of two defenders of both stances: Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek. The relation between these issues has not received much attention before and even less so with regard to these two thinkers. First, Popper’s defence of indeterminism from an epistemic viewpoint and Hayek’s views about the indeterminism of action are studied. Second, their positions about methodological individualism are considered. Finally, several (...) comparative questions are aired. (shrink)

‘Causation’ covers a variety of dependent relationships between and among objects and events. The axiom concerning the unicity of reality has been thought to warrant the assumption that causal relationships of social phenomena, including economics, share common properties with corporeal objects, that, in short, agency is a form of causation. This paper defends the opposite view, to wit, that causation based on the properties and powers of corporeal objects is unlike causation based on agency. Whereas causation among the former is (...) a function of the properties and powers of the objects at play, agency ‘causation’ is the product of human intentionality. Any theory of agency must account for free will even where, as in the case of rule based roles, the instantiation of free will is qualified. An agent’s action may, of course, set in motion a causal law by instantiating the properties of the object producing the intended effect, and the agent will be responsible for the consequences, but the discharge of the bullet is the result of the properties and powers of the gun and the bullet and not of the agent. The profound ontological difference between causation and agency cannot be overcome with resort to epistemological, logical or linguistic considerations.In economic and social life the agent relies not on the causal properties of corporeal objects, but on her action authorised by social rules. The causal properties and powers of objects are fundamentally different from the causal powers of rules, because, unlike the former, the latter are designed for the achievement of an intended result and cannot operate without intentional application. The proper study of economics is not the study of the properties of objects contrived by economic theory, but the nature of purposeful human action. (shrink)

In this short paper, we investigate the problems with the employment of the notion of freedom and voluntariness in libertarianism. We pretend to demonstrate that these two, as conceived of by libertarians, figure in as the main issue when it comes to justifying its major institutions, say: bequeathing, gifts, transactions (or what they label as “voluntary transfer”). The difficulty here boils down to the fact that a purely rights-based idea of freedom and voluntariness, the pretentions of Nozick notwithstanding, cannot do (...) alone, since it is the consideration whether we do something (e.g. bequeath, donate etc.) voluntarily (or freely) (in a non-moralized sense) that could account for the rights redistribution. Therefore, it seems that – at least sometimes – the notion of voluntariness (or freedom) is prior to the notion of rights. (shrink)

For those who maintain that free will is incompatible with causal determinism, a persistent problem is to give a coherent characterization of action that is neither determined by prior events nor random, arbitrary, lucky or in some way insufficiently under the control of the agent to count as free action. One approach—that of Roderick Chisholm and others—is to say that a third alternative is for an action to be caused by an agent in a way that is not reducible to (...) event causal terms. A different approach than the Chisholmian appeal to primitive substance causation is one that, instead, involves causal relations purely among events. This paper presents a particular event-causal indeterminist account of free action, describing both its attractions and recent objections to it, and then proposes a revised version, with the aim of supporting the plausibility of an event-causal indeterminist approach to free will. (shrink)