Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Reply to Smart 181
Recall that I rejected the view favoured by Smart, and championed by
Davidson, 7 that action is behaviour caused by antecedent mental states –
‘reasons’. There are two broad categories of considerations against the identification
of reasons with causes: the first is that nothing about the rational
explanation of action requires this identification; the second is that the nature
of action explanation prohibits it. Smart has the latter concern in mind when
he writes that we must distinguish ‘reason’ as cause and ‘reason’ as justification.
He thinks it would be a mistake to pass from the fact that justifying
reasons are normative propositions (e.g. the truth of ‘it is wrong to lie’ is a
‘reason’ not to lie) to the conclusion that they cannot be causes, for what is
cited in explanation of behaviour is not the truth of the proposition but the
agent’s belief in or endorsement of it. I agree this would be a faulty inference,
but it does not feature in my anti-causalist view of reasons. My argument as
presented above (chapter 2, pp. 100ff ) has to do with the difficulty of conceiving
of the relation between beliefs, desires and other mental attitudes and
actions as being a causal one.
It was in response to the question of how the connection between them
should be understood, if not causally, that I introduced the scholastic phrase
‘moved from within’. 8 This troubles Smart because the only relevant ‘inside’
from his point of view is that defined in relation to the skull. It may help if
I explain that the origin of this phrase lies in a contrast marked in Aristotelian
thinking about the movements of objects, between those whose behaviour is
to be explained in terms of forces acting upon them, and those which are
originating sources of movement in their own right. This is not the distinction
between mere behaviour and rational action since there may be internal
principles of non-rational agency. Rather it relates to the issue of whether
some behaviour is expressive of the nature of the thing in question or is an
effect imposed upon it.
Among the things there are, are natural substances, that is, unified subjects
of predication. Such substances have characteristic powers of action and reaction;
and sometimes their names and descriptions indicate these powers.
Thus if we hear that something is an ‘acid’ we know that in certain sorts of
circumstances (which we may not be able to specify) it will exert a corrosive
effect. Similarly if we know that something is an ‘animal’ then we know that
it has organic powers, typically ones of metabolism, growth and reproduction.
In explaining an occurrence by mentioning its agent we are adverting to the
operation of such powers as providing a full and adequate account. It is a
mistake, I believe, to assume that if a substance is cited as the cause of an
event the latter must, as a matter of logic or metaphysics, be due to some
other event or events having taken place literally inside the agent. What it is
to be an agent is to be possessed of certain powers with natural tendencies
to exercise them in appropriate circumstances. Certainly, if such power is