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Philosophy of Action
This book offers an accessible and inclusive overview of the major debates
in the philosophy of action. It covers the distinct approaches taken by
Donald Davidson, G.E.M. Anscombe, and numerous others to answering
questions like “what are intentional actions?” and “how do reasons explain
actions?” Further topics include intention, practical knowledge, weakness
and strength of will, self-governance, and collective agency. With
introductions, conclusions, and annotated suggested reading lists for each of
the ten chapters, it is an ideal introduction for advanced undergraduates as
well as any philosopher seeking a primer on these issues.

Sarah K. Paul is Associate Professor of Philosophy at New York

University Abu Dhabi and Global Network Associate Professor of
Philosophy at New York University.
Routledge Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy
Series editor: Paul K. Moser, Loyola University of Chicago

This innovative, well-structured series is for students who have already done an introductory course
in philosophy. Each book introduces a core general subject in contemporary philosophy and offers
students an accessible but substantial transition from introductory to higher-level college work in that
subject. The series is accessible to non-specialists and each book clearly motivates and expounds the
problems and positions introduced. An orientating chapter briefly introduces its topic and reminds
readers of any crucial material they need to have retained from a typical introductory course.
Considerable attention is given to explaining the central philosophical problems of a subject and the
main competing solutions and arguments for those solutions. The primary aim is to educate students
in the main problems, positions and arguments of contemporary philosophy rather than to convince
students of a single position.

Recently Published Volumes:

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4th Edition
Alex Rosenberg and Lee McIntyre

Philosophy of Western Music

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Walter Hopp

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John MacFarlane

Philosophy of Action
Sarah K. Paul

For a full list of published Routledge Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy, please visit:
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Philosophy of Action

A Contemporary Introduction

Sarah K. Paul
First published 2021
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2021 Taylor & Francis

The right of Sarah K. Paul to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by
any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
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A catalog record for this title has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-138-64273-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-64274-4 (pbk)
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Contents
Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: What Is the Philosophy of Action?

2 What Is the Problem of Action?
2.1 Activity and Passivity
2.2 Goal-Directedness
2.3 Attributability
2.4 “Actish” Phenomenal Quality
2.5 Voluntary Action
2.6 Rational Action, or Acting for Reasons
2.7 Practical Knowledge
2.8 Intentional Action
2.9 Intention
2.10 Autonomy, Identification, and Self-Governance
2.11 Further Choice Points
2.11a Which Cases Are Paradigmatic?
2.11b Questions About Action: Conceptual or Ontological?
2.12 Conclusion
Suggested Reading
3 Action Explanation
3.1 Guises of Rationalizing Explanation
3.2 Reasons for Action: Motivating vs. Normative
3.3 More on the “Why?” Question
3.4 Action Explanation: Four Views
3.4a The Rational Interpretation View
3.4b The Causal Theory of Action Explanation
3.4c Teleological Realism
3.4d Naïve Action Theory
3.5 Arational Action
Summary
Suggested Reading
4 The Ontology of Action
4.1 Which Things in the World Can Be Actions?
4.2 Under a Description
4.3 Basic Actions
4.3a Bodily Movements
4.3b Volitions
4.3c Beyond the Body
4.4 The Accordion Effect
4.5 How Many Actions?
4.6 The Causal Theory of Action
4.6a Objection 1: Deviant Causal Chains, Redux
4.6b Objection 2: The Disappearing Agent
4.7 Alternatives to the Causal Theory
4.7a Quietism
4.7b Agent-Causation and Causal Powers
4.7c Formal Causation
4.7d An “Actish” Phenomenal Quality
4.8 Omissions
4.9 Mental Actions
Summary
Suggested Reading
5 Intention
5.1 Methodological Priority: Present or Future?
5.2 Goal States and Plan States
5.3 Reductive Accounts of Intention
5.3a Predominant Desire
5.3b Predominant Desire Plus Belief
5.3c Evaluative Judgment
5.4 Plan States and Plan Rationality
5.5 Cognitivism About Intention
5.6 A Distinctively Practical Attitude
5.7 Intending and Intentional Action
Summary
Suggested Reading
6 Practical Knowledge
6.1 What Do We Mean by “Practical Knowledge?”
6.1a Knowledge Without Observation
6.1b Knowledge Without Inference
6.1c Mistakes Are in the Performance, Not the Judgment
6.1d The Cause of What It Understands
6.1e Contradicted by Interference
6.2 The Scope and Object of Practical Knowledge
6.3 Accounts of Practical Knowledge
6.3a Cognitivism About Intention
6.3b Imperfective Knowledge
6.3c The Inferential Account
Summary
Suggested Reading
7 Does Action Have a Constitutive Aim?
7.1 The Guise of the Good
7.2 The Aim of Self-Understanding
7.3 The Aim of Self-Constitution
7.4 The Will to Power
7.5 No Constitutive Aim
7.6 Implications for Ethics and Metaethics
Summary
Suggested Reading
8 Identification and Self-Governance
8.1 Frankfurt on Identification
8.2 Watson’s Objection and Platonic Alternative
8.3 Frankfurt Redux: Wholeheartedness
8.4 Bratman on Self-Governing Policies
8.5 Skepticism About Self-Governance: A Genealogical Worry
8.6 Self-Governance and Plan Rationality
Summary
Suggested Reading
 9 Temptation, Weakness, and Strength of Will
9.1 Is Synchronic Akrasia Even Possible?
9.2 A Failure of Reasoning?
9.3 A Divergence Between Evaluation and Motivation?
9.4 Is Akrasia Necessarily Irrational?
9.5 Weakness of Will Over Time
9.6 Self-Control
Summary
Suggested Reading
10 Collective Agency
10.1 Questions and Constraints
10.2 Group Agents
10.3 Collective Intentions
10.3a Tuomela and Miller
10.3b Searle
10.3c Bratman
10.3d Velleman
10.3e Gilbert
10.4 Acting Together
Summary
Suggested Reading
11 Concluding Thoughts

Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
When I first arrived at graduate school to study philosophy, I didn’t know
what the philosophy of action was. I certainly didn’t go with the intention of
making any kind of intensive study of it. That I ended up becoming
captivated by the topic and writing a dissertation on it is entirely due to the
boundless enthusiasm and inexhaustible patience of Michael Bratman.
These debates came alive when I saw them through his eyes, and as did the
idea that I might one day be able to contribute something to the discussion.
Much of what is in this book I learned from Michael, though he cannot be
blamed for my errors and oversights. I am profoundly grateful for his
support over the years, and fundamentally this book is for him.
I was subsequently welcomed into the community of philosophers of
action by many people, but there are some I’d like specially to thank.
Kieran Setiya, Luca Ferrero, Sergio Tenenbaum, and Sarah Buss all in
various ways made me feel included and part of the conversation. Matthias
Haase invited me to be a part of a “Netzwerk” of people interested in
agency from all over Europe as well as the U.S. Participating in those
meetings introduced me to a lot of wonderful people and greatly broadened
my understanding of the variety of approaches one could take to these
questions. And Matty Silverstein did the same by including me in his
terrific series of workshops on “Normativity and Practical Reasoning.”
My first tenure-track job was at the University of Wisconsin – Madison,
and I owe that institution and my dear colleagues there a great deal. I agreed
to write this book largely because Larry Shapiro told me to, and as my
mentor, his thoughtful advice never erred. As my friend, I don’t know about
the advice, but Larry and Steve Nadler tolerantly let me air my frustrations
with the writing process during our long runs around the arboretum. Elliott
Sober, Russ Shafer-Landau, Mike Titelbaum, Alan Sidelle, and James
Messina were also sources of great help and support. Much of this book
was written with the aid of very generous research funding from the
University of Wisconsin, including the Vilas Associates Award and Vilas
Early Career Investigator Award.
Many thanks are also due to the students who took my undergraduate
courses and graduate seminars in the philosophy of action over the years.
There are too many to mention, but their creative examples and acute
observations infuse what I have written here. Special thanks to Megan
Fritts, Camila Hernandez Flowerman, and Ben Schwan for help with some
of the research that contributed to this book.
The chapter on self-control was written with the support of a grant from
the Philosophy and Science of Self-Control project directed by Al Mele and
funded by the Templeton Foundation. I learned a great deal about the topic
from the other researchers who were part of that project, and I’m grateful to
Al for the support. The grant was for work done in collaboration with
Jennifer Morton, who has been my dearest friend, sounding-board,
advocate, and critic since we met in graduate school many years ago. The
book was finally finished while at New York University Abu Dhabi, and
I’m very grateful for the generous research funding and great colleagues
that I’ve found here.
Thanks also to my parents, Lowell and Sheila, and my husband, Bas. Bas
is a true partner and co-parent without whose help and perspective I
couldn’t do much of anything. I can’t say my daughter Ivy specifically
helped much with finishing this book, but the delay was completely worth
it. I’m grateful to Aneena Noor, without whose help with childcare I could
not have finished this book during a pandemic. Thanks also to my editor,
Andy Beck, for his patience with me when the book took much longer to
write than I thought it would.
Finally, for specific comments on the manuscript, I’m deeply indebted to
David Velleman, Kieran Setiya, Sergio Tenenbaum, Luca Ferrero, Matty
Silverstein, Mikayla Kelly, Michael Bratman, Jennifer Morton, Larry
Shapiro, Sarah Buss, and (especially) an anonymous reader for Routledge.
This book is far better because of their generosity.
1 Introduction
What Is the Philosophy of Action?
In a bizarre incident that became the subject matter of Palsgraf v. Long
Island Railroad Co., a man is running to catch a departing train. A platform
guard shoves him toward the train from behind while a member of the
train’s crew pulls him into the car. In the process, the man drops the
package he is carrying. The package turns out to contain fireworks, which
explode and cause a heavy scale 10 feet away to topple over onto Helen
Palsgraf, a woman who is standing on the platform. She suffers injuries as a
result.
This case involves a number of people doing things, both intentionally
and by accident. To understand what happened, as the court must try to do
in adjudicating the suit, a variety of questions must be answered. Why did
the platform guard shove the traveler? Was his intention to help him catch
the train, or did he do it out of malice? Did the traveler drop the package on
purpose, expecting it to explode, or did he merely lose his grip on it? Is it
right to say that injuring Palsgraf was something the platform guard did, or
something the traveler did? Or was her injury nobody’s doing, and simply
the result of bad luck? The philosophy of action aims to understand
precisely what questions like these are asking and how we might go about
answering them.
To isolate exactly what we are interested in, it will be helpful to first
explain what the topic is not, at least for the purposes of this book. First, the
problem of action is not the same as the ethical problem of how we ought to
act, or what we should be blamed and praised for. Palsgraf certainly raises
questions about whether the guard and the traveler acted as they should
have and whether they are to blame for the injuries they caused. These,
however, are separate subject matters. Our first task is to identify what it is
we are referring to when we ask whether someone acted ethically, or what
she ought to do. As G.E.M. Anscombe famously wrote, “… it is not
profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside
at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology …” (1958,
1). It may turn out in the end that ethics and the philosophy of action are
intertwined, perhaps because rational agency consists in pursuing the Good
or in doing what one takes to be morally required. But such insights should
be the conclusion of our investigation and not premises in it.
Second, Anscombe’s admonition that we do philosophy of psychology
might wrongly suggest that we are interested in the so-called “mind–body
problem” or the problem of mental causation. These labels refer to thorny
issues about how to understand the relationship between the mind, revealed
to us from within as consisting of conscious thoughts and experiences, and
the physical body, as revealed to us by empirical investigation. How could
the conscious experience of seeing orange be nothing more than some
neural activity in the brain? And how could it not be, if having such
experiences can have bodily consequences such as uttering the sentence
“What a beautiful shade of orange!” More generally, it seems that we can
give physical explanations and mental explanations of the very same bodily
event. When the guard’s arm stretches out toward the traveler, we can
explain what happened in terms of neural signals and muscle contractions,
or we can clarify that he wanted to help the traveler and believed that
pushing him at that moment was the way to do it. How, if at all, can these
two kinds of explanations be reconciled?
The answers to these questions will be a crucial part of the complete
story of what happens when an embodied agent moves herself. But before
we can assess whether there is actually a direct conflict between physical
and mental explanations, we must answer the question of whether an
agent’s raising his arm is really the same thing as an arm’s rising. That is,
are actions identical to bodily movements, or are they in a different
category altogether? If they are not identical, then perhaps the two
explanatory frameworks are not in conflict. Further, even if we solved the
problem of understanding how the mind is related to physical states of the
world, we would still face the puzzle of locating agency within that psycho-
physical activity. Knowing exactly what a desire is in physical terms, and
how desires cause the body to move, does not answer the question of
whether a desire’s causing a bodily movement amounts to an agent acting.
For that, we need to do some philosophy of action.
Third, the problem of action is not the same as the problem of free will.
As traditionally conceived, that question concerns whether we can be said
to act freely if determinism is true, in the sense of freedom that many
philosophers take to be required for moral responsibility. Can we ever be
held accountable for what we do if our actions are preordained, either by
the physical laws of nature or by the omniscience of a divine being? If the
guard freely chose to push the traveler, and is legitimately blameworthy or
praiseworthy for his choice or deed, must it have been genuinely possible
for him to have chosen instead not to push? And if so, how could the
existence of this alternative path be consistent with the rest of what we
understand about the universe?
These questions are certainly relevant to our conception of ourselves and
other beings as agents, and there is nothing wrong with using the label
“philosophy of action” in a way that includes philosophical work on free
will. However, this book will largely set such questions aside. On the
narrower conception of the topic that is our focus, the central puzzles are
both prior to and independent of our investigation into free will. They are
prior because the question of whether our actions are free, and whether
alternative possible courses of action are ever available to us, presupposes a
grasp of what an action is. They are independent because the interest is in
what it is to act, whether or not it turns out that we have the capacity to act
freely in the sense relevant to moral responsibility. In other words, even if
we were to conclude that we have no free will, we would still be agents
who spend our waking hours engaged in (unfree) actions of various kinds,
and this would still be a phenomenon worth trying to understand.
Having trimmed back the hedges of surrounding issues, we are in a better
position to think about the basic phenomenon of doing something. We will
attempt to state the central questions more precisely in Chapter 2, but for
now we can start with some intuitions. Think of all the things you have
done just today. Perhaps you turned off your alarm, made coffee, spilled
some on your shirt, arrived late to class, and spent some time fantasizing
about lunch. “Doings” can be contrasted, first, with mere “happenings.”
Turning off your alarm was something that you did – you made it happen –
but being awakened by it is something that happened to you. What exactly
is the difference between making something happen and having something
happen to you? Second, not everything you do is something you do
intentionally, or as we more commonly say, “on purpose.” Spilling coffee
on your shirt was presumably not something that you meant to do, whereas
making the coffee was intentional. Similarly, while arriving to class and
arriving late to class seem to be one and the same event, we can assume that
you intentionally went to class but did not intentionally arrive late. But what
does it mean to do something intentionally or not, and how can the same
event of your arriving to class at 9:23am be both an intentional action of
yours and something you did unintentionally?
We assume that you intentionally went to class but did not intentionally
arrive late because agents like us normally act in light of what we have
good reason to do, or what it would make sense for us to do. There are
many things to be said in favor of going to class, but not many in favor of
being late. This suggests that whether or not your action was intentional is
connected to whether you saw it as desirable, worth doing, or at least
intelligible. That said, we do not always choose to do what we take to be the
best thing to do. It seems perfectly possible to decide to sleep in and be late
to class even though you sincerely believe that being punctual is more
important than 15 more minutes of sleep. What on earth is going on when
we intentionally do one thing while at the same time believing that another
available option is substantially better? Another interesting feature of agents
like us, and one that can be of use in combating this kind of weak-willed
action, is that we do not always simply make up our minds in the moment
about what to do. We sometimes deliberate in advance and plan ahead for
what to do later, thereby forming intentions for the future. “Tonight,” you
might think, “I’ll set my alarm 15 minutes earlier so that I’ll be on time to
class tomorrow.”
Some of our actions are mental – fantasizing about lunch – while others
involve far-reaching consequences in the non-mental world. For that matter,
some of the most consequential events we are involved in concern things
that we intentionally don’t do. Stanislav Petrov may have singlehandedly
saved the world from all-out nuclear war when he refused to obey protocol
and did not respond to what turned out to be a false alarm in the Soviet
early warning system. And while singlehanded actions are often of
particular interest to us, a great many of our actions are undertaken together
with other people. We play dodgeball together, write books together, and
participate in the institutions of society together. All these are the kinds of
phenomena we will attempt to understand better in this book.
One way to motivate these puzzles about agency is to compare them to
other well-known philosophical problems. For example, philosophy has
long been occupied with investigating the nature of perception. We seek to
better understand how the conscious mind is connected to the external
world, and perception is one major way in which the mind interfaces with
the world. We wrestle with questions like “How can we be in touch with
objects that are external to our minds through the use of our senses?” and
“Given the possibility of illusion, how can perception give us knowledge of
reality?” Inspired by these questions, we might view action theory as a
counterpart to the philosophy of perception. It is through acting that the
mind interfaces with the world in the other direction, imposing itself on
external reality rather than conforming itself to it. This framing will
generate questions about action that tend toward the metaphysical, focusing
on how agency fits together with the rest of the natural world.
A different contrast can be drawn between action and belief, thereby
framing the topic in a way that will focus our attention on certain normative
questions. Philosophers have long been interested in the question of why we
should or shouldn’t believe certain things – what counts as a sufficient
reason to believe? We attempt to understand what it is to reason well about
what to believe (call this “theoretical” reasoning), so that we can avoid
certain tempting forms of logical error. Think of Sherlock Holmes
reasoning about who might have committed the murder and forming the
belief that it was a one-legged man and his small accomplice, for the reason
that the tracks in the dust indicate these unusual physical features. Viewed
through this lens, the state or activity of believing is defined partly in terms
of its being the conclusion of theoretical reasoning, or a way of responding
to these kinds of reasons. Likewise, we act for reasons and engage in
“practical” reasoning about what to do. Holmes might weigh the options of
revealing his suspicions to the police or pursuing the one-legged man
himself and decide to involve the police for the reason that they have the
fastest boat. If action is the analogue to belief, we might similarly define it
in part as a kind of response to our practical reasons, or as the conclusion of
practical reasoning. From this perspective, action theory can be thought of
as a counterpart to epistemology.
These are two somewhat different ways of situating action theory with
respect to other areas of philosophy. We can motivate the inquiry even
further by thinking about the practical relevance of the kinds of questions it
promises to answer. Often, it is of great importance to us to know whether
something that happened was an intentional action or not. In the Palsgraf
case, much depended on whether the fireworks were set off intentionally or
merely by accident. Other related distinctions come up frequently in legal
settings. The criminal law generally requires that there be a “voluntary act”
in order for a crime to have occurred, for example. Merely planning to rob a
bank is usually not enough to incur criminal liability. In addition, it
distinguishes between acts that are undertaken with intent, with knowledge,
out of recklessness, and out of negligence. It treats certain crimes that are
committed as a result of passion or provocation differently than those
committed with premeditation, but it treats those done in ignorance of the
law and those done with knowledge of their illegality as the same. These all
seem, at least in part, to be an effort to distinguish between different kinds
of action. Philosophers of action aim to determine whether such distinctions
hold up under scrutiny, and to articulate the precise conditions under which
they apply.
There is a rich history of philosophical investigation into agency and
action, reaching back to the very beginning of philosophy as a discipline.
However, action theory was not really considered an autonomous area of
philosophical inquiry as distinguished from ethics, free will, and philosophy
of mind until relatively recently. The groundbreaking work of Anscombe
and Donald Davidson in the mid-to-late twentieth century defined the set of
questions that frame contemporary research on agency. This book aims to
introduce readers to these contemporary debates rather than to offer a
detailed historical perspective.
In spite of being a fairly young field – or perhaps because of it – there is
quite a lot of disagreement about where exactly the philosophy of action
should start and where it aims to end up. The organization of the material
here reflects my perspective on the best way to progress through the topic,
but this is one perspective among many legitimate ones. Nearly all of the
chapters have a serious claim to being the one that should go first, and for
each of those, there are respectable philosophers who would argue that it
should be left out altogether. The goal of Chapter 2 is to lay out the thicket
of overlapping questions, concepts, and phenomena that have been used to
frame the investigation of agency. Close attention to these different starting
points will equip the reader to better understand what follows, since in my
view, many apparently substantive disagreements can be traced back to
divergences in this first step.
 Chapter 3 takes up the idea that the kind of action we should be
interested in – rational or intentional action – is subject to a distinctive kind
of explanation. When we ask why a person acted as he did, the answer can
take the form of providing the person’s reasons for so acting. Suppose we
inquire into why Richie went to D.C. this weekend. If the explanation is
that he boarded the wrong train, thinking it was going to Philadelphia, this
reveals to us that he did not go to D.C. intentionally. “Boarding the wrong
train” is not a reason to go to D.C. But if the explanation is that he went to
see a concert, the implication is that he did go there intentionally. One of
the central debates in the field concerns the nature of this kind of
rationalizing explanation. How exactly does citing a person’s reason
provide illumination of her action?
Chapter 4 turns to the question of what an action is. We learn from
Chapter 3 that actions are the kind of thing that can be given a rationalizing
explanation, but what kind of thing is that? This chapter delves into the
metaphysical details. How are intentional actions related to unintentional
ones? How are actions individuated from one another? Are some actions
“basic,” and if so, which ones? And most importantly, what is it that makes
an event an action?
It is almost irresistible to think that the answer to this last question has
something to do with what the agent of the action had in mind. Chapter 5
therefore shifts the focus to the notion of intention. We commonly speak of
agents as having intentions or acting with certain intentions. What do we
mean by these locutions? We might choose not to take such ways of
speaking literally, viewing them instead as mere figures of speech. But
those who do take them literally generally understand the term “intention”
to refer to a kind of mental state or attitude. The challenge, then, is to
understand what kind of attitude it is and how such attitudes are related to
intentional action.
In a sense, Chapter 6 starts our discussion over. Like Chapter 3, it
explores a phenomenon that many philosophers take to be a criterion of the
kind of action we should be interested in: “practical knowledge.” When we
act intentionally, we normally know what we are doing in a distinctively
first-personal way. For you to know that I am currently writing a book about
agency, you will have to use methods like perception, inference, or
testimony. You might lean over to take a glance at my computer screen or
ask my colleague what I am up to. But I can know that I am writing a book
without waiting to observe what appears on the screen or performing any
kind of conscious inference. Reflecting on the phenomenon of practical
knowledge gives us the opportunity to step back and further assess some of
the proposals we have seen so far. For instance, some theories of intention
seem to offer better explanations of practical knowledge than others. What
we make of this depends on how central to our topic we take practical
knowledge to be.
According to one kind of view, practical knowledge is not only central to
our agency but the goal or “constitutive aim” of acting. The proposal is that
in addition to the various specific purposes we have for doing things,
intentional action itself has a purpose, namely, to afford us knowledge of
ourselves. Other approaches agree that action has a constitutive aim but
deny that this aim is epistemic. One longstanding tradition holds that all
action aims at doing what is best, or at least what is good. Rival accounts
claim that it aims at constituting or unifying the self, or at expressing the
agent’s drive to overcome resistance and expand her power. Against all of
this, there are many who deny that action as such has any particular aim.
Chapter 7 is dedicated to examining these debates.
Chapter 8 draws a distinction between mere intentional action and action
“par excellence.” The thought is that of all the things we go around doing
intentionally or voluntarily, only some of them are truly autonomous. The
latter actions represent what the agent truly wants, or who she truly is, or
what she is fundamentally committed to. To make good on this idea, the
challenge is to specify which elements or structures of the agent’s
psychology truly speak for her, such that the actions that are suitably related
to those elements count as fully autonomous. Is it some special subset of
her desires? Her values or character? The plans and policies she has set for
herself?
The counterpart to fully autonomous action is weak-willed or “akratic”
action. We act weakly when we succumb to temptation or otherwise choose
not to do what we believe would be best. We procrastinate, over-indulge,
cheat on our vows, and work too much. The weak-willed agent is not
ignorant of the considerations that speak against her action, and she does
not act from vice – it is not that she takes the worse action to be the better.
Nor is she straightforwardly compelled to act as she does, in the sense of
having no choice in the matter. Rather, as we might say, she simply fails to
control herself. But how is it even possible to act both intentionally and
weakly, and what would it mean to exercise self-control? This is the central
puzzle of Chapter 9.
Finally, Chapter 10 extends the focus to the case of acting together with
other people. It is commonplace to speak of groups as deciding, intending,
and doing various things. People play Scrabble, get married, elect
presidents, and write laws together. Can we account for “shared” agency
using only those resources mentioned in the first nine chapters? That is, can
we understand it as a matter of individual agents with ordinary intentions
who are each doing their part? Or do we need to introduce new notions like
“group agents” or “group intentions?”
Though my own views on these issues will inevitably come through to
some extent, I do not take myself to be arguing for any particular
conclusions. The seminal texts are difficult enough that one cannot simply
clarify what is going on in them without being somewhat opinionated. But
given the divisions in the field, I will be satisfied if I can help to illuminate
where different thinkers are disagreeing with one another and where they
are talking past one another. My hope is that I have left sufficient room for
readers to form their own views.
2 What Is the Problem of Action?
To begin our investigation into agency and action, we must first try to state
more clearly and precisely what the central questions are. As we will see in
subsequent chapters, there is a potentially bewildering array of different
approaches to understanding what action is, or what it is to be an agent.
This kind of vigorous debate tends to be the case in any area of philosophy,
but the philosophy of action is particularly difficult in this regard. There is
broad disagreement about the questions we should be interested in
addressing and what our starting assumptions should be. To make matters
worse, these disagreements are not always obvious or made explicit by the
various parties in these debates, which can lead to theorists simply talking
past one another.
The problem, I think, is that “action” is a sub-class of a more general
category that we might call “activity” or “behavior.” Any given
philosophical investigation of action must begin with some idea of how this
general category ought to be restricted. And there a variety of interests we
might have in trying to draw these lines. Some think it obvious that our
philosophical interest in action is broadly ethical, and so find ways of
delimiting the topic that emphasize the connection to reason, responsibility,
self-consciousness, and self-understanding. Others think the interesting
puzzles are obviously metaphysical, and so frame the topic in a way that
emphasizes the contrasts between actions and other kinds of events or
occurrences in the world. Still others are interested in behaviors that are the
manifestation of a certain kind of psychology, and so demarcate the topic in
that way. The everyday notion of action is fluid enough to accommodate all
of these purposes, and so we cannot simply rely on our intuitions about the
meaning of the word to clarify what it is we are talking about. Yet for those
of us who have spent significant time thinking about agency from a
particular perspective, it is easy to forget that this is so (and I include
myself in this).
This chapter will attempt to lay out the variety of ways that we might
choose to frame the investigation, with the hope that we will be better able
in subsequent chapters to understand why different theorists have ended up
where they are.
2.1 Activity and Passivity
The most general way to frame the central question is in terms of activity:
what is it to make something happen? Harry Frankfurt seems to pose the
puzzle in this way when he states that “The problem of action is to explicate
the contrast between what an agent does and what merely happens to him”
(1978, 157). Taken at face value, this is a very general metaphysical puzzle
about what it is to be the source of change. Even chemicals and tornados are
agents, understood in this way. It will be helpful here to introduce the
somewhat antiquated term patient to serve as the antonym of “agent.” If an
agent is the source of some change, the patient is the thing that undergoes or
suffers change – the thing that is acted upon.
Most philosophers of action do not take themselves to be investigating
the nature of activity in this very broad and abstract sense that includes
chemicals and tornados. Often, they introduce the term “agent” or “action”
with some implicit restriction in mind. For instance, in Frankfurt’s initial
remarks, only his use of the pronoun “him” rather than “it” makes clear that
he is thinking specifically of human agents, or perhaps a somewhat wider
class of living organisms (though he goes on to make this more explicit by
rephrasing the question in terms of “bodily movements”). To avoid
confusion, it is important for philosophers of action to begin theorizing by
making clear how we intend to restrict the class of agents and activities we
are interested in, and importantly, to defend the choice to restrict the target
in that particular way. Why is the kind of activity we have identified
distinctive and philosophically interesting?
2.2 Goal-Directedness
One possibility is to limit our focus to agency that is purposive or goal-
directed. In philosophy, the phenomenon of goal-directedness is often
referred to using the term teleology, from the Greek “telos.” Whereas the
acid does not have any purpose in corroding the metal, and the tornado does
not have the goal of destroying the village, many actions do occur for the
sake of some goal. This way of approaching the topic will still be quite
inclusive, since most life-forms are capable of goal-directed self-change.
For instance, the young sunflower adjusts itself throughout the day so that it
continually faces the sun or other light source. It does this in order to get
nourishment from light and because this movement facilitates pollination.
What is distinctive about goal-directed self-movement is that it seems to
involve guidance: the flower regulates its position with respect to the
location of the light as it moves throughout the day. Similarly, the spider
uses its capacity to produce silk for the purpose of building a web in a way
that seems to be guided toward catching prey.
If we take the kind of purposive activity exhibited by sunflowers and
spiders as well as human animals to be our starting point, this will help us
to avoid the assumption that agency must involve highly sophisticated
cognitive capacities. Further, there is no doubt that teleology is a
philosophically interesting phenomenon, and thus that there is a rationale
for focusing specifically on what it is to be the source of a change that is
directed at some goal or purpose. However, we might worry that this class
of actions is still too broad. Arguably, the kinds of actions we are interested
in must be performed by an entity that deserves to be called an agent. But
goal-directed activity can take place without being attributable to an agent.
For example, digestion is a process of change that is directed at the goal of
converting food into energy, but we would not generally speak of the
digestive system as an agent.
2.3 Attributability
In light of the foregoing concern, some approaches to framing the problem
of agency emphasize attributability. On this way of thinking about it, it is
essential to being an action that it is attributable to an agent, or to the person
or organism as a whole, rather than to some sub-agential part of her or
process within her. Though we might speak loosely of a person digesting
her food, it is more accurate to say that her gastrointestinal system did the
digesting. Similarly, when we attribute a person’s behavior to instinct, habit,
or to some event occurring in her brain, this is generally a way of saying
that it was not fully an action of hers. In this vein, Christine Korsgaard
writes that
Unity is essential to agency … because an action, unlike other events whose causes in some
way run through an agent, is supposed to be a movement, or an effecting of change, that is
backed by the agent as a whole.
(2014, 193)

And Frankfurt asserts that a central problem in the philosophy of action is

“… to specify when the guidance of behavior is attributable to an agent and
not simply, as when a person’s pupils dilate because the light fades, to some
local process going on within the agent’s body” (1978, 159).
One motivation for this is approach is that one might think attributability
is necessary for, or deeply connected to, accountability. That is, in order to
hold someone responsible for something that happened, it is plausible that
we must first attribute what happened to him. If your professor is lecturing
and hears someone make an objectionable remark, she cannot blame any
particular person in the class until she identifies who it was that said it.
Even then, the student might try to avoid responsibility by claiming “it was
a slip of the tongue,” thereby attributing the apparent offensiveness of the
remark to some part of him rather than conceding that he himself had said
it. As mentioned in Chapter 1, we should not assume at the outset that the
assignment of moral responsibility perfectly tracks the contours of our
agency. That said, there is clearly a deep connection between the two topics,
and it is natural to think that this connection runs in part through the notion
of attributability.
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with Squire Thorneycroft’s pheasant-coops was too much for
hereditary proclivities. He stole eggs, sold them, was detected,
prosecuted, sentenced to a short term of imprisonment, and
disappeared. Miss Belmont herself met him on his discharge from
the jail gates, but he was not to be induced to return. The wild man
was in his brain, and off he had gone, with Parthian shots of
affection, in quest of fun. And for two years she had not seen him
again until to-night, when his scratch of red hair and beard—which
always looked as if he had just pulled his head out of a quickset—
suddenly blew into flame before her. And then there followed a shock
of distress.
“Jim! Why, what’s happened? What’s the matter with you?”
There was no need to specify. The man was obviously going off
his tramp—nearing the turn of the dark road. He was ghastly, and
constantly gave little spasmodic wrenching coughs during the minute
he stood beside her.
“Well,” he gasped, “I dunno. The rot has got into my stummick. I
be all touchwood inside like an old ellum.”
“Will you come and see me?”
“ ’Es. By’m-by.”
“Why not now? Where are you going to sleep?”
He grinned, and coughed, half suffocated, as he backed.
“I’ve got my plans, Missis. You—leave me alone.”
It did not sound gracious. One would not have guessed by it his
design, which was nothing less than a jolly throw against the devil in
the teeth of death. Miss Belmont, a little hurt, but more sad, got into
her fly and was driven home. Arrived there, she sat up an hour
contemplative. She was just preparing to go to bed in the grey dawn,
when she heard the garden-gate click and footsteps rapidly traverse
the path to the front door. Her heart seemed to stop. She stole
trembling into the hall. “Who’s there?” she demanded in a quavering
voice. The answer came, with a clearness which made her start,
through the letter-box.
“Me, Missis—Jim Hurley.”
Amazed, and a little embarrassed, she opened. The man burst,
almost fell in, and, staggering, recovered himself.
 “ ’Ere!” he said, with eager manipulation trying to force something
upon her. “I’ve done ’er! I’ve got it for yer! Take it—make ’aste—
they’re arter me. It’s yourn as by rights, and she’s got to crow on the
wrong side of ’er woundy little mouth.”
But Miss Belmont, with instinctive repulsion, had put her hands
behind her back and retreated before him.
“Jim!” she said sickly. “What have you got? What do you mean? I’ll
take nothing from you.”
“O, go along!” he insisted. His cough was gone. He seemed
animated with a new masterfulness. “Ain’t I in the know? It’s yourn,
anyhow, and”—his eye closed in an ineffable rapture—“I done the
devil out of his own when I heard I be booked to go to him. He’ll pay
me, I reckon; but I don’t care. You take it. It’s your dooty as a good
woman.”
“No, no,” cried Miss Belmont, beating him away with her hands.
“Don’t let me even see it to know. How could you suppose such a
thing? Take it back while you’ve time.”
B’s 33 and 90 wore their list-footed boots; but Jim’s ear was a
practised one. Swiftly summoned, they had raced on his tracks from
the Assembly Rooms. He had known it, and had laboured merely to
keep his start of them by three minutes—two—one. Now, while their
sole was yet on the threshold, he darted into the dining-room and
was under the table at a dive. They had him out and handcuffed, of
course, in a jiffy; and then they stood to explain and expostulate.
“Well, you ain’t a cheeked one neither, Hurley! To run up here of all
places for cover! Don’t you mind him, Miss.” (She stood pale and
shivering. “The shock!” she had murmured confusedly.) “Why,” said
33, “the man was heard by plenty proposing of hisself to visit you;
and looked to your hold kindness to him to take and shelter, is
supposed.”
She found voice to ask: “What’s he done?”
“Done!” said 33. “Why, bless you, Miss! Treating of you as if you
was in collusion, ain’t I?” (She shivered.) “Why, he grabbed a jewel—
a gold button, as I understand—out o’ the buzzim o’ your own late
brother’s good lady as she was a-stepping into her broom, and
bolted with it. It’ll be on ’im now if we’re lucky.”
 “You ain’t then, old cock,” said Jim, with a little hoarse laugh and
choke.
“Chuck it!” said 90, a saturnine man.
“That’s what I done, Kroojer,” said Jim. “You go and ’unt in the
bloomin’ ’edges if you don’t believe me.”
“It’s my duty to tell you,” said 33, “that whatever you says will be
took down in evidence agen you.”
“Not by you,” said Jim. “Why, you can’t spell.”
They carried him off dispassionately, with some rough, kindly
apologies to Miss Belmont for the trouble to which they had put her.
She locked and bolted the door when they were gone; mechanically
saw to the lamps, and went upstairs to bed in a sort of stunned
dream. So she committed herself to the sheets, and so, in a sort of
waking delirium, passed the remaining hours of slumber. She felt as
if the even tenor of her way, her stream of placid days, had been
suddenly dammed by a dead body, the self-destroyed corpse of her
own character. Sometimes she would start from a suffering negation
to feel B 90’s hand upon her shoulder. “What have I done—O! what
have I done?” she would moan in anguish; and B 90 would glower
from under his helmet like a passionless Rhadamanthus—
“What have you done? What but, like our second Henry, meanly,
by inference and innuendo, imposed upon your wretched tool the
responsibility for a deed which you dared not seek to compass by
the open processes of the law. Did you dispute the right ownership of
the button? Then why choose for your confidant an ex-thief and
poacher? No use to say you designed no harm. By the flower be
known the seed. Come along o’ me!”
She rose late, ate no breakfast, and sat awaiting, pinched and
grey, the inevitable ordeal. It opened, early enough, with the advent
of Mrs. John. The little widow came sailing in, with a face of floured
steel. When she saw, the edge of her tongue seemed to whet itself
on her lips. Miss Emma broke out at once in an unendurable cry—
“Inez! You can’t think I was a party to this!”
“Who said so, dear? Though the man was a protégé of yours, and
was known to have remained where he encountered me by your
instructions.”
“It is not true.”
 “Isn’t it? Well, at least, the plan miscarried. Now, give me the
button, and I promise, to the best of my power, to hush the matter
up.”
“I haven’t got it, indeed; O, you must believe me! He told the
policeman himself that he had thrown it away while escaping.”
“Yes, yes. I give him credit for his loyalty to you. But, Emma—you
know I never put much faith in your sanctimoniousness. Don’t be a
fool, and drive me to extremities.”
“You can’t mean it. I blame my covetous heart. I envied you—I
admit it—this dear fetish of our family. But to think me capable of
such a wickedness! O, Inez!”
Then Mrs. John Belmont exploded. I muffle the report. It left Miss
Belmont flaccid and invertebrate, weakly sobbing that she would see
Hurley; would try to get him to identify the exact spot where he had
parted with the bauble; would move heaven and earth to make her
guiltless restitution. Yet all the time, remembering the scene of last
night, she must have known her promise vain. Jim had sought to
thrust no shadow of a fact upon her. He had not thrown the button
away. He alone knew where it now was; but would he so far play into
the hands of her enemy as to tell? She felt faint in the horror of this
doubt; and Mrs. John perceived the horror.
As for her, she was utterly hateful and incredulous. She had
friends, she screamed—one in particular—who would act, and
unmercifully, to see her righted. She hardly refrained from striking
her sister-in-law, as she rushed out in a storm of hysterics.
And at this point I was called in—by Miss Belmont, that is to say.
I found her utterly prostrated—within step of the brink of the final
collapse.
I coaxed her back, foot by foot; won the whole truth from her;
laughed her terrors to scorn, and staked her my professional credit
to have the matter put right, or on the way to right, by our next
meeting.
And I meant it, and was confident. For that very day—though of
this she did not know—I had officially ordered Jim Hurley’s removal
from the cell in which he had been lodged to the County Hospital.
The man was dying, that was the fact; and a fact which he had
known perfectly when he staked at one throw for an easy bed for
himself, and a repayment of his debt to his old benefactress.
He was ensconced in a little ward by himself, when I visited him
and sat down to my task. He cocked an eye at me from a red tangle,
and grinned.
“Now, Hurley,” I said, “I come straight from Miss Emma, by her
authority, to acquaint you with the results of your deed.”
“O!” he answered. “Hev the peelers been a-dirtyin’ of their pore
knees lookin’ for it in the ’edgerows? I ’opes as they found it.”
“You know they couldn’t. You’ve got it yourself.”
“S’elp me, I haven’t!”
Then I informed him, carefully and in detail, of the awful
miscarriage of his intentions. He was patently dumbfounded.
“Well, I’m blowed!” he whispered, quite amazed. “Well, I am
blowed!”
“You must undo this,” I said. “There’s only one way. Where is the
button?”
He gauged me profoundly a moment.
“On a ledge under the table,” he said. Then he thrust out a claw.
“Don’t you go lettin’ ’er ’ave it back,” he said, “or I’ll ’aunt you!”
I considered.
“You must undo what you’ve done,” I repeated. “Don’t you see?
Unless you can prove that it’s been in your possession all the time,
and is now, her character’s gone for ever. Mrs. John will see to that.”
He did not, professionally, lack wits. He understood perfectly.
“You’re ’er friend?” he asked.
I nodded.
“All right,” he said, “you get ’old of it private, and smuggle of it ’ere,
and I’ll manage the rest.”
“But, my good fellow! You’ve been overhauled, I suppose, and
pretty thoroughly. How can you convince—convince, you understand
—that you’ve kept the thing snug through it all?”
“You go and smuggle of it ’ere,” he repeated doggedly.
It needed only a very little manœuvring. I hurried back to Miss
Belmont’s, heard the lady was still confined to her room, forbade the
servant to report me, and claimed the privacy of the dining-room for
the purpose of writing a prescription. The moment I was alone, I
made an excited and perfectly undignified plunge under the table,
found the ledge (the thing, in auctioneer’s parlance, was a “capital
set,” in four leaves), and the button, which in a feverish ecstasy I
pocketed. Then, very well satisfied, I hurried back to Mr. Hurley.
I found him, even in that short interval, changed for the worse; so
much changed, that, in face of his condition, a certain sense of novel
vigour, an overweening confidence in my own importance which had
grown up, and lusty, in me during my return journey, seemed nothing
less than an indecency. However, curiously enough, this mood
began to ebb and sober from the very moment of my handing over
the pièce de conviction to its purloiner. He “palmed” it professionally,
cleared his throat, and took instant command of the occasion. “Now,”
he said, “tell ’em I’ve confessed to you, and let ’em all come.”
His confidence mastered the depression which had overtaken me.
I returned, with fair assurance, to Miss Belmont, who received my
news with a perfect rapture of relief. What she had suffered, poor
good woman, none but herself might know.
“Did he own to you where he had hidden it?” she asked. And
“Yes,” I could answer, perfectly truthfully.
By my advice, she prepared at once to go and fetch her sister-in-
law to the hospital—with a friend, if she desired it—that all might
witness to the details of the restitution.
In the meanwhile I myself paid a visit to the police station, and
thence returned to my post to await the arrival of my company.
It came in about an hour: Miss Belmont, tearfully expectant; Mrs.
John Belmont, shrill and incredulous; an immaculate tall gentleman,
Captain Naylor by name, whose chin was propped on a very high
collar, that he might perpetually sniff the incense of his own
superiority; and, lastly, and officially to the occasion, B 90.
I lost no time in conducting them to the bedside of the patient. He
had rallied wonderfully since our last encounter. He was sitting up
against his pillow, his red hair fluffed out like the aureole of a
dissipated angel, an expression on his face of a quite sanctimonious
relish. I fancy he even winked at me.
“Now, Hurley,” I said gravely, “as one on the threshold of the
grave” (which, nevertheless, I had my doubts about), “speak out and
tell the truth.”
 He cleared his throat, and started at once in a loud voice, as if
repeating a lesson he had set himself—
“ ’Earing as ’ow my rash hact ’ave brought suspicion on a innercent
lady, I ’ereby makes affirmation of the fac’s. I stole the button, and ’id
it in my boot, where it is now.”
“No, it ain’t,” said B 90 suddenly. “Stow that.”
Mr. Hurley smiled pityingly.
“O, ain’t it, sir?” he said. “ ’Ow do you know?”
“Because I searched you myself,” said B 90 shortly.
“The patient, infinitely tolerant, waved his hand.
“ ’E searched me, ladies and gentlemen! Ho, lor! Look at ’im; I only
arsks that—look at ’im! Why, he doesn’t even know as there’s a smut
on his nose at this moment.” (B 90 hastily rubbed that organ, and
remembering himself, lapsed into stolidity once more.) Mr. Hurley
addressed him with exaggerated politeness—“Would you be so
good, sir, as to go and fetch my boots?”
B 90 thought profoundly, and officially, a minute; wheeled
suddenly, withdrew, and returned shortly with the articles, very
massive and muddy, which he laid on the counterpane before the
prisoner. The latter, cherishing the ineffable dénouement,
deliberately took and examined the left one, paused a moment,
smilingly canvassing his company, and then quickly, with an almost
imperceptible wrench and twirl, had unscrewed the heel bodily from
its place and held it out.
“ ’Ere!” he said; and, with his arm extended, sank back in an
invertebrate ecstasy upon his pillow.
The heel was pierced with a tiny compartment on its inner side,
and within the aperture lay the button.
They all saw it, but not as I, who, standing as I did at the bed-
head, and being something of an amateur conjurer myself, was
conscious in a flash of the rascal “passing” the trinket into its
receptacle even as he exposed it.
There followed an exclamation or two, and silence. Then Captain
Naylor said “Haw!” and Miss Belmont, with a gasp, turned a mild
reproachful gaze upon her sister-in-law. But Mrs. John had not the
grace to accept it. She gave a little vexed, covetous laugh, and
stepped forward. “Well,” she said to Miss Emma, “you must go
without it still, dear, it seems.” Then, coldly, to Hurley: “Give it me,
please.”
Now, so far so good; and, though I was enraged with, I could not
combat the decision. But truly I was not prepared for the upshot.
Jim, at Mrs. John’s first movement, had recovered possession of
the button.
“No, you don’t!” he said quite savagely. “I know all about it, and
’tain’t yourn by rights.”
“Jim, Jim,” cried Miss Belmont in great agitation; “it is hers, indeed;
please give it up. You don’t think what you make me suffer!”
But the man was black with a lowering determination.
“ ’Tain’t,” he said. “Keep off, you! I’ve not thrown agen the devil for
nothing. It’s goin’ to be Miss Emma’s or nobody’s.”
“Not mine,” cried the poor lady again. “I don’t want it. Not for
worlds. I wouldn’t take it now!”
And then Mrs. John Belmont, in one discordant explosion of fury,
gave away her case for ever.
“Insolent! Beyond endurance!” she shrieked, and whirled, with a
flaming face, upon her cavalier.
“Archibald! why do you stand grinning there? Why don’t you take it
from him?”
Thus prompted, Archibald, in great confusion, uttered an
inarticulate “Haw!” explained himself in a second and clearer one,
and strode threateningly towards the bed. Watching, with glittering
eyes, the advance, Jim, at the last moment, whipped the button into
his mouth and swallowed it!
*****
The case, as a pathological no less than as a criminological
curiosity, was unique. I will state a few particulars. The button lodged
in the pancreas, in which it was presently detected, comfortably
ensconced, by means of the Röntgen rays. And it is a fact that, from
the moment it settled there—never apparently (I use the emphasis
with a full sense of my responsibility) to be evicted—Mr. Hurley
began to recover, and from recovering to thrive—on anything.
Croton-oil—I give only one instance—was a very cream of
nourishment to him. Galvanic batteries but shook him into the
laughter which makes fat, but without stirring the button. It was
ridiculous to suggest an operation, though the point was long
considered. But in the meanwhile the button had continued piling up
over itself such impenetrable defences of adipose tissue that its very
locality had become conjectural. The question was dropped, only to
give rise to another. How could one any longer detain this luxuriant
man in hospital as an invalid? He was removed, therefore, beaming,
to the police court; received, for some inexplicable reason, a nominal
sentence, dating from the time of his arrest (everything, in fact, was
henceforward to prosper with him), and trundled himself out into the
world, where he disappeared. I have seen him occasionally since at
years-long intervals. He grows ever more sleek and portly, till the
shadows of the three dead Belmonts together would not suffice to
make him a pair of breeches. He has a colossal fortune; he is
respectable, and, of course, respected—a genial monster of
benevolence; and he never fails to remind me, when we meet, of the
time when I could pronounce his life not worth a button.
I have, can only have, one theory. The button, after many cross
adventures, “got home” at last—fatally for Mrs. John Belmont, who
fell into a vicious decline upon its loss, and, tenderly nursed by her
sister-in-law, departed this sphere in an uncertain year of her life.
And, unless the button itself comes to dissolve, Jim, I fear, is
immortal.
 DOG TRUST
There was no reason why Richard Le Shore should not have made
a straightforward appeal for the hand of Miss Molly Tregarthen to her
papa. His credentials—of fortune, condition, and character—were
unexceptionable; the girl’s kind inclinations were confessed; the
father himself was an unexacting, indulgent, and ease-loving
Democritus. It was but a question of those two and of Mr. Dicky, their
favoured, their intimately favoured, guest.
There was no reason, and for the reason that the spirit of
Romance abhors reason; and that was why, without any reason,
Richard persuaded Mollinda to a clandestine engagement, to stolen
interviews, to a belief that love franked by authority was only the
skim-milk of human kindness. At least he chose to persuade himself
that he persuaded her, at all times when he could coax a certain
bewildered honesty in her eyes from dumbly questioning the
necessity of such tactics. In reality he loved that look, as the
sweetest earnest of a sweet quality. It was not her he studied to
deceive, but himself. Incurably eligible, he could never taste but
through make-believe, like the “Marchioness,” the sweet stimulant of
paternal interdiction.
At the end of the season he accompanied father and child to
“Tregarthen.” Here, you may be sure, he had not been twenty-four
hours without making choice for his love’s rendezvous of a little
wood which, approached through a tangled shrubbery, covered the
slopes which ran up from the back of the house to the high beeches
above.
Now Dicky would himself have allowed that everything (desirable)
had shone upon his suit save moonlight. That only, of all poetic
glamours, was yet lacking. And so he prevailed with Molly
Tregarthen to consent to a postprandial trysting among the trees, on
the very evening subsequent to that of his arrival.
He had no difficulty in escaping from papa, the imperturbable
sybarite. Seated in an open window over against shrouded lawns,
and a moon which rose like a bubble in liquid darkness; dreaming
betwixt decanter and cigar-case, papa would not have had his
luminous coma disturbed for anything less than a serious fire. So
Dicky left him, and going up alone to the woods, leaned his back
against a tree and smoked placidly.
It was very quiet, and fragrant, and beautiful there; and presently
the young gentleman lost himself somewhat in reflections. The
moonlight, penetrating the leaves, made of the sward a ghostly Tom
Tiddler’s Ground, which was all mottled with disks of faint gold. What
a soft, fine shower to fall upon the head of his Danae, as she should
come stealing up the alleys of light! Stealing—stealing! There was a
little thrill of ecstasy in the word. How wide her eyes would be, and
how would her bosom rise and fall in the breathlessness of some
phantom guilt!
Quite a nice little debauch of expectation, only—she did not come.
He waited on, desirous, impatient, hungry; and at last, it must be
said, cross. The touch of her hand, her lips, had never seemed so
indispensable to him; but he would not cheapen the virtues of his
own by carrying them back to market to a coquette. If she wanted
them, she knew where to find them. As for him, he was quite placid
and content; in proof of which he threw away his cigar-butt, and
began pacing with a noisy recklessness up and down.
That did not conjure her to him, but it seemed to evoke occasional
responsive rustlings, or the fancy of them, which would bring his
heart into his throat. They were only the stirring of woodland things, it
seemed. He got very angry, resentful, cruel in his thoughts. The
moon, the bubble of light, rose higher and higher—to the very
surface of night, where it floated a little, and then burst. At least, so it
seemed; for, all of a sudden, where it had been was a black cloud,
and drops began to patter on the leaves. Then Richard realized all in
a moment that his tryst had failed, that the moonlight was quenched,
and that it was beginning to rain. With a naughty word or two, he
braced up his loins, left the wood, and descended towards the
house.
As he went down, he heard the stable clock strike twelve. He
startled, and strode faster, faster, until he was fairly scuttling. It was
in vain. The Tregarthens were early people, and, even before he
reached the house, he knew that its every window was blind and
black. The whole family was abed, and he was shut out into the
night.
Twice, and vainly, he made the entire round of the building,
seeking for any loophole to enter by. The rain by then was pelting,
yet he did not dare raise a clatter on the front door, for fear he should
be pistolled from a window. The inmates knew nothing of his
absence, and the Squire held, for a Democritus, strong views on the
subject of undisturbed repose.
Coming to the porch again from his second circuit, and putting a
hand to rest upon one of its columns, he jumped, as if he had
touched a charged battery, to see a figure standing motionless in the
shadow.
“Hullo!” he gasped, in the sudden shock; then rallying, muttered
out in a fury at his own weakness, “Who the devil are you?”
Some faint gleam of moonshine, weltering through the flood,
enlightened him even as he spoke.
“Why, if it ain’t the butler!” he said.
It was the butler. The figure admitted it in a curt word. Le Shore
had already, on the occasions of his two dinners at “Tregarthen,”
noticed this man, and had taken a quite violent exception in his own
conscience to his manner and appearance. He thought he had never
known a leading trust bestowed upon one whose face so expressed
the very moral of acquisitiveness, whose conduct was marked by
such an uncouth inurbanity. Here, if there was any value in biology,
was Bill Sikes in broadcloth.
The tone of the fellow’s answer grated confoundedly on him—he
hardly knew why.
“Are you locked out, like me?” he said, putting violence on himself
to speak civilly.
“Yes, sir,” answered the man; “but for a better reason.”
“What do you mean by that?”
The creature was as thick-set as a bull. He could have broken this
elegant like a stick across his knee. He commanded the situation,
massive and impassive, from his own standpoint.
“Look’ee here, sir,” he said, speaking through a grip of little strong
teeth in a square jaw, “I’m going to tell you what I mean. I’m going to
make no bones about it. You meet Miss Molly fair and open, or you
don’t meet her at all. Do I know what I’m saying? Yes, I do know. She
didn’t come to you to-night—because why? Because I interdicted of
her. That’s it. She might have thought better—or worse—of it, bein’ a
woman, and soft; and that’s why I laid by, watchin’ that no harm
should come of it if she did. But she was wise, and didn’t. I seen you
all the time in the wood, and I tell you this. A word’s got to be
enough. You meet her by fair means, or not at all. Never mind the
Squire there. It’s me that says it. If she admires you, nine stun ten—
which there’s no accounting for tastes—I’m not the one to make
difficulties. But you go like a honest man and ask her straight of her
father. That’s the ticket, and don’t you make no error. Don’t you
flatter your fancy no more with randy-voos in the moonshine. Why, if
ever there’s a light calc’lated to lead a gentleman astray, it’s that. I
say it, and I know. You go to the girl’s father; and, after, we’ll see
what we’ll see.”
He cleared his throat with a quarrelling sound, and came out of the
shadow.
“Now,” said he, “here’s a house you’ve been locked out of, and
you want to get in without disturbin’ of the family—is that it? Very
well, sir; now we understand everything; and step this way, if you
please.”
Almost with the words, he had clawed himself up to a window-sill
of the ground-floor, and was very softly manipulating the sash. Mr. Le
Shore, voiceless, hardly gasping, stood, just conscious of himself, in
an absolute rigor of fury and astonishment. He was “stound,” as
Spenser would have put it. Presently he snapped his eyelids, and
woke aware that Mr. Hissey, standing on the grass, was loweringly
inviting him to enter by way of an opened window. With a shock, he
recovered his nerves of motion, and, stalking to the place, vaulted
stiffly to the sill, and sat thereon like a cavalryman.
“I’ve just a word or two for you, before I—I avail myself of this,” he
said. “You’ve been gadding, and got drunk, I suppose; and this is
your way of trying to make capital of a belated guest. Perhaps the
means you’ve adopted ’ll appear less excellent to you in the sober
morning. As to your method of entry, there’s nothing in it
incompatible with the character I’d already formed of you. But that,
and your quite outrageous insolence, will be made matters for your
master’s consideration to-morrow. I mention this in honour, before I
——” He waved his hand towards the room.
“I could twist your neck with two fingers, here and now,” said the
man.
“Exactly,” said Dicky. “And that’s why I decline to make use of this
window except on the plain understanding.”
The butler cleared his throat again, even with a strange note of
approval in the unseemly sound.
“Mayhap you’ll do,” he said. “Now go to bed, and don’t forgit your
prayers in your disappyntment.”
Mr. Le Shore hissed-in a breath, as though the rain had suddenly
become boiling spray, then tiptoed rigidly to his room.

The opening of the window, framed with creepers, whose shadows

shrank or dilated softly in the muslin curtains, gave on to a soothful
picture of lawn and herbaceous border which, withdrawing to cool
caverns of leafiness under a remote cedar tree, seemed to gather
themselves to a head of prettiest expression in the person of little
Miss Mollinda swinging there in a hammock. Within, at the luncheon-
table, Tregarthen poured himself out a glass of Madeira with a hand
so limp and white in appearance that one would have thought it
incapable of the task of poising the heavy decanter. Here was
delicate seeming only, however. The perpetual sybarite reads an
incorruptible constitution. The white hand held the bottle horizontal,
as steady as a rock, during the minute the indolent, good-humoured
eyes of its owner were directed to those of his visitor.
“My dear good Richard, the man is a burglar.”
He laughed at the other’s expression, filled his glass, sipped at it,
and, hooking his thumbs in his arm-holes, lolled back in his chair.
“I am not justified in the confidence, perhaps. I don’t know.
Anyhow, it is the short way out of a fatiguing explanation. The man is
a burglar—not figuratively, but actually, by breeding, education,
profession—appelez-le comme vous voudrez. He has the stamp of it
so distinctly on him that one need not ask him to produce his
skeleton key.”
“Then I have nothing more to say.”
 “Ah! the devil take the honest thief! Your obvious grievance forces
me to the explanation, after all. My dear boy, I imply nothing, argue
from no premises but such as a long experience of this capital,
troublesome fellow suggest to me. Speaking from these (I may be
wrong), I should conclude that he is somehow in process of
safeguarding, as he thinks, the interests of my girl, to whom he is
quite romantically attached. Honestly, I don’t know to whom I would
rather commit them. Poor motherless child!”
He had, it seemed, no thought of himself as pledged to the task.
‘Himself’ should be a fair one-man’s burden.
“He is very right to be attached to Miss Tregarthen,” muttered Le
Shore dryly, and a little sullenly.
“He is very right indeed,” answered his host; “righter (pardon the
solecism) than you might think. In this excellent rogue is provided
such an illustration of the ‘harmony not understood’ of discords, as
circumstance has ever given to an ennuyé world. The dear creature
has decided to stultify his every instinct for a sentiment. It is the most
interesting psychological phenomenon you can imagine. He has
conceded nothing of his nature but the means to its practical
achievement. Conceive a wolf of his own determination forgoing
blood. Such is this dear, admirable brute. Perfossor parietum
nascitur. He cannot change his spots. To this day, I think, he will
always of choice enter by a window rather than a door; to this day he
regards plate with a most melting look. But for all that, I think I may
swear that at the present moment the tally of my spoons is to an
ounce what it was when he took service with me eighteen years
ago.”
“Your servant for eighteen years!”
“My servant—titularly: in reality, my mentor, my vizier. Dog Trust is
a rather sweetly demoralizing acquisition. He takes the burden of
conscience from one—steals it, in this case, I may say. But then,
after all, he may use his vicegerency to ends so far beyond the moral
grasp of the master he represents, as more than to vindicate that
master in his withdrawal from the vexatious problems of duty.
Through sheer force of affection this admirable George has
mastered himself, and bettered his master in the parental ethics.”
 “Indeed, sir?” (Mr. Dicky spoke very dryly.) “And how does Miss
Tregarthen approve the viziership?”
“As she loves and respects the vizier, Richard. I do not think she
would willingly run counter to his dictates, which, by the way, he
never imposes in a manner to alarm one’s pride. Ah! did you catch
that whiff of scabious? There is a bush of it under the window there.
It always seems to me to embody in itself the whole warmth and
fragrance of summer. My dear fellow, your eyes are relentless
inquisitors. No more wine? Well, I suppose I shall have to tell you
how it came about.”
He sighed, drained his glass, laughed slightly, and smoothed a
stray wisp of hair from his forehead.
“Once,” he said—“it was particularly disagreeable to a person of
my temperament—I was called upon by Fate to suffer the ugly and
sordid experience of a conflagration in my house. You, who are also
a little inclined, I believe, to create for yourself an atmosphere of
romance, to regard the great world only as a quarry, from which to
gather materials most exquisite and most apt to the enrichment of
the hermitage, which it is your design and your delight to build apart
for your soul, will appreciate what were my feelings upon seeing my
fairy fabric doomed to destruction, to positive annihilation, by the
flames. I have never spoken to you of the disaster before. You will
know that I do so now under the mere stress of fitness, as a means
to your proper understanding of George Hissey’s conduct. The
recollection is painful and horrible to a degree.
“The alarm, the escape, the catastrophe were all accomplished in
the dark hours of a winter’s morning. My dear wife (she sleeps,
awaiting my coming, in Elysium) followed me down the stairs and out
of the house at a short interval. She found me devoted to a frantic
endeavour to secure from destruction such of my poor treasures as
were accessible—few enough, alas! though the tears I shed should
have quenched the hate of a Hecla. What had I done with her child?
she cried to me—with our sweet Molly, our little three-year-old babe?
Richard, I felt as stunned as if she, the pretty, gentle mother, had
struck me across the mouth. I could only stare and gasp. She uttered
a heart-shaking scream, and turned to where the servants stood
huddled together in the garden. They were all there, and the two
nurses were crying and moaning and accusing one another. My God!
mad with terror, they had deserted their charge to perish by itself in
the burning house!”
He paused. “Don’t go on, sir, if it distresses you,” said Le Shore
quietly.
“No,” answered Tregarthen. “Like the Ancient Mariner, I must be
quit of it now I have begun. But I will have a glass of wine.”
He poured himself out one, daintily as to the drop on the decanter
lip.
“There followed a fearful scene,” he said. “It was all I could do to
prevent my angel from precipitating herself through the blazing
doorway. The whole building seemed by now a furnace—no
possibility of further salvage from those priceless accumulations—
not, of course, that at such a pass it was to be thought of. I mingled
my tears with my wife’s. I offered half my fortune to any one of the
crowd who would save, and a large reward to any one who would
venture to save, our darling. But it was in vain; and in my heart I
knew it.
“Now, in this extremity of despair, a sudden roar went up from a
hundred throats, and passed on the instant. Richard, a man,
shedding flakes of fire as Venus cast her birth-slough of spray, had
emerged overhead from the sea of flame, and in his arms was our
child. Who was he? Whence did he come? No one knew. Our house
was isolated. The engine from the neighbouring town had not
arrived. He was not a friend, nor a neighbour, nor an employé. It was
only evident that innocence had somehow evolved its champion.
“We watched, stricken, as castaways watch the glimmer of a
remote sail. The figure had broken its way through the skylight in the
roof, only, it might be, to symbolize in the burden it bore the leaping
of a little flame heavenward. The situation was the very sublimity of
tragedy. Beneath those two the roof, sown with a very garden of fire,
dropped at a sickening angle.
“Suddenly, shutting, as it seemed, upon his charge, the man rolled
himself up like a hedgehog, and came bowling down the slope. It
was a terrible and gasping moment. His body, as it whirled, reeled
out a hiss of sparks. The next instant it had bounded over the edge,
and plunged among the smoking bushes beneath.
 “They broke his fall; but it was the verandah awning which in the
first instance saved his life—his, and our dear devoted cherub’s. But
he had never once, through all the stunning vertigo of his descent,
failed to shield the little body which his own enwrapped.
“Now, my dear Richard, comes the strange part. When I was
sufficiently recovered to seek our preserver, I found him sitting
handcuffed, in charge of the local policeman. He was very white,
with two or three ribs broken; but he took it all unconcerned, as being
in the day’s, or the night’s, business. Who was he? Well, here is the
explanation. He was a renowned cracksman, as I think they call it,
who had been operating in the neighbourhood for some weeks past
—the hero of many a shuddering midnight adventure. Without doubt
he had taken his toll of my ‘crib,’ had not circumstance dropped him
ripe into the gaping mouth of the law. He had entered, and was
actually at work, when fire cut the ground, as it were, from under his
feet. Almost before, intensely occupied, he realized his position,
escape by the lower rooms was debarred him. Was ever situation so
dramatic? It was to be compared only with that of a huntsman who,
entering some cave to steal bear cubs, turns to find the dam blocking
his outlet. Still, Mr. Hissey might have escaped, and without
detection, by dropping to the lawn from a back window, had his
burglarious ears not pricked suddenly to the wailing of a child.
“My dear fellow, need I explain further? The child he risked his
own life to rescue was our—I may almost say, at this day, was his
Molly. It was the strangest thing. I did not, as a consequence, quite
see my way to holding him altogether absolved; but my dear,
emotional partner was of a different opinion. We had quite a little
scene about it. In the end she prevailed—with the whole boiling of
the law, too; and the man was sentenced to come up for judgment if
called upon. Then straightway, and by his own desire, she took the
disinfected burglar into her service. It was one of those daring
psychologic essays which may once and again be carried to a
successful issue through the white-hot faith of the experimenter; but
which must not be given authority as a precedent. My wife fairly
redeemed this burglar, by committing, without hesitation, to his loyal
trust the little waif of fire whose destinies he had earned the right to a
voice in. From that day to this, I will say, he has never abused the
faith we reposed in him. On her deathbed, my dear girl (pardon me a
moment, Le Shore), my dear wife most solemnly recommitted her
child to his care. I did not complain, I do not complain now. I, who
make no pretence of competence in the paternal rôle, thank the gods
only for my vizier, who is quite willing to accord me the ritual of
authority, while taking its practical business on his own shoulders.
With a man of my temperament it works; and I am satisfied, if Molly
gives me her respect, that she should give Hissey her duty.”
He ceased, with a little smiling sigh, and lifted a cigarette from a
silver case which lay on the table. Le Shore regarded him steadily.
“Mr. Tregarthen,” said he, “Molly and I are engaged. I should have
told you before.”
The older man did not pause in the act of lighting his cigarette; but
enjoyed an inhalation of smoke before he answered—
“I plead guilty to a suspicion, Richard. I am confident our vizier has
been safeguarding the proprieties. You remember what I said to you
in his excuse just now?”
“I have your sanction, sir?”
“Certainly, as a form. But I am afraid, from the practical side, you
will have to satisfy that same inquisitor.”

“Mr. George Hissey,” said Dicky, “I have papa’s authority to marry

Miss Molly. Now, with your permission, I will relieve you of your
trust.”
“Dicky!” cried the girl reproachfully; and she put her kind young
arms round the ex-burglar’s neck.
“Unless,” said Le Shore, “you care to transfer that to my ‘crib,’ Mr.
Hissey.”
The butler cleared his throat.
“Well, I do care, sir,” he said, hoarsely, nevertheless, “since you
seen fit to cut that moonshinin’ lay, And as to cribs——”
“Molly” said Richard, “there’s papa calling.”
 A MARTYR TO CONSCIENCE
“I have nothing to do with your scruples,” said the magistrate; “the
law is the law, and I am here to administer it.”
Mr. Plumley licked his hand, and stolidly smoothing down his black
hair with it, answered, as if at a distance, being a well-fed, unctuous
man, “too full for sound and foam,” “I’m a conscientious objector.”
“Passive resister!” corrected a friend, a little eager man, among
the audience near him.
“Eh?” said Mr. Plumley immovably, and without a glance in the
direction of the voice, “I said passive resister, didn’t I?”
“Whether you said it or not,” answered the magistrate sharply, “you
look it. I make an order against you for the amount.”
“As man to man——” began Mr. Plumley.
“Not in the least,” said the magistrate; “as debtor to creditor. Stand
down.”
“I shan’t pay it,” said Mr. Plumley, preparing to obey.
“If you say another word, I’ll commit you for contempt,” said the
magistrate. “Stand down, sir!”
Mr. Plumley stood down, with an unspeakable expression—it
might have been of satisfaction—on his huge, stolid face. Arrived at
the floor, he beckoned his little friend to follow him, and heavily left
the court.
He steered—the other acting as his rudder, as it were, and
keeping his position behind—straight for his own domestic shrine,
hight Primrose Villa, semi-detached. It was a beautiful little home for
a widower unencumbered, calculated, like an india-rubber collar, to
afford the maximum of display at a minimum of cost in washing. The
doorsteps were laid with a flaming pattern in tiles; red-aspinalled
flower pots, embellished with little dull glazed shrubs, stood on the
lowest window-sill; the bell-knob was of handsome porcelain, painted
with the gaudiest flowers in miniature. Within, too, it was all furnished
on a like hard principle of lustre—red and yellow oilcloth in the hall,
with marbled paper to match; earthenware-panned mahogany hat-
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