Abstract

Three claims are widely held and individually plausible, but jointly inconsistent: (1) Negative actions (intentional omissions, refrainments, etc.) are genuine actions; (2) All actions are events; (3) Some, and perhaps all, negative actions aren't events, but absences thereof (when I omit to raise my arm, no omission-event occurs; what happens is just that no arm-raising occurs). Drawing on resources from metaphysics and the philosophy of language, I argue that (3) is false. Negative actions are events, just as ordinary actions are. Moreover, each token negative action is identical to a token positive event, so we can adopt this realist view of negative actions without adding metaphysically negative entities (absences, negative states of affairs) to our ontology.