Reasons and causes: does the reason for which an agent acts explain the action in the same sense that causes explain their effects?

Donald Davidson, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Reasons for action are causes. A primary reason for an action is a pair consisting of a pro-attitude toward some feature of the action and a belief that the action has that feature. When an agent acts for a reason, that reason caused the action; the reason is not merely a description of the action under which it makes sense. Rationalization — the retrospective attribution of reasons that make an action intelligible — is causal explanation: it is the identification of the mental events that caused the action.¹²³ Only if the reason caused the action in the right way does it explain rather than merely fit the action.⁴⁵

Sources

1. 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 causal explanation. The defence no doubt requires some redeployment, but it does not seem necessary to abandon the position, as has been urged by many recent writers.

   Intention and Action, pp. 13–14

2. Now it is possible both to reformulate the claim that rationalizations are causal explanations and to give structure to the argument by stating two theses about primary reasons: 1. In order to understand how a reason of any kind rationalizes an action it is necessary and sufficient that we see, at least in essential outline, how to construct a primary reason. 1 Actions, Reasons, and Causes 2.

   Intention and Action, p. 14

3. Second, the reasons an agent has for acting must, if they are to explain the action, be the reasons on which he acted; the reasons must have played a causal role in the occurrence of the action. These two conditions on reason explanations are both necessary, but they are not sufficient, since some causal relations between belief-desire pairs and actions do not give reason explanations.

   Problems of Rationality, p. 194

4. 'I knew I ought to return it', 'The paper said it was going to snow', 'You stepped on my toes', all, in appropriate reason-giving contexts, perform this familiar dual function. The justifying role of a reason, giving this interpretation, depends upon the explanatory role, but the converse does not hold.

   Intention and Action, pp. 17–18

5. H. Feigl and M. Scriven (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1956); Alasdair Maclntyre, The Unconscious (Routledge, London, 1958); R. S. Peters, The Concept of Motivation (Routledge, London, 1958); Charles Taylor, The Explanation of Behaviour (Routledge, London, 1965).

   Problems of Rationality, p. 194

Where the argument is made

• 'Actions, Reasons, and Causes' (1963, in Essays on Actions and Events, OUP 2001) — the founding paper
• 'Freedom to Act' (1973, in Essays) on freedom and action
• 'Intending' (1978, in Essays) on the logical form of intention-statements
• essays on weakness of will and acting against one's better judgment in Problems of Rationality (OUP 2004)

How the argument was received

The anti-causalist consensus of mid-century analytic philosophy — that reason-explanations are not causal because reasons stand in logical rather than contingent relations to actions, because intentional descriptions and causal descriptions are conceptually independent — is mistaken. The logical independence of descriptions does not imply the factual independence of what is described. The same event can be a mental event under an intentional description and a physical event under a physical description; the causal relation holds between events as particulars, not between descriptions. Wayward causal chain cases — the nervous climber, the golfer whose anxious belief causes an unintended movement — identify the form the causal condition must take, not a refutation of the causal thesis.