Omissions as Events and Actions

Journal of the American Philosophical Association 4 (1):33-48 (2018)
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Abstract

We take ourselves to be able to omit to perform certain actions and to be at times responsible for these omissions. Moreover, omissions seem to have effects and to be manifestations of our agency. So, it is natural to think that omissions must be events. However, very few people writing on this topic have been willing to argue that omissions are events. Such a view is taken to face three significant challenges: (i) omissions are thought to be somehow problematically negative, (ii) it is unclear where the event of an omission would be located, and (iii) if we accept any omissions as events, it seems like there would be far too much causation involving them. In this paper, I develop a novel view of omissions as events and as actions that provides answers to these challenges.

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Kenneth Silver
Trinity College, Dublin

References found in this work

Actions, Reasons, and Causes.Donald Davidson - 1963 - Journal of Philosophy 60 (23):685.
Word and Object.Willard Van Orman Quine - 1960 - Les Etudes Philosophiques 17 (2):278-279.
Contrastive causation.Jonathan Schaffer - 2005 - Philosophical Review 114 (3):327-358.
Causing and Nothingness.Helen Beebee - 2004 - In John Collins, Ned Hall & Laurie Paul (eds.), Causation and Counterfactuals. MIT Press. pp. 291--308.
Causation by disconnection.Jonathan Schaffer - 2000 - Philosophy of Science 67 (2):285-300.

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