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      Notes

      1 1 See Danto 1981.

      2 2 See Wollheim 2012.

      3 3 These cases are due to James Rachels (see Rachels 1975).

      4 4 It is also possible that, as Wollheim says in the case of art and non-art, it is because killing and letting die differ per se that a particular killing is morally equivalent to a particular letting die. For more on this see Kamm 1996.

      5 5 Danto 1974.

      6 6 Oddly, Danto goes on to say that despite assassination’s “categorical extremity” it is not really “beyond good and evil” and it is not true “that nothing morally useful can be said about political assassination” (Danto 1974, 434–5).

      7 7 Some of what I say here is based on my discussion of torture in Kamm 2011.

      8 8 See Nagel 2012, 74. However, it may rather be true that one of the acts is right even though it wrongs someone. For example, I have argued that even though it is permissible to turn a trolley from five toward one other person, that person may be wronged by our doing this. See, for example, my discussion in Kamm 2016.

      9 9 See Kamm 2011 for additional steps in the argument.

      References

      1 Danto, Arthur C. 1974. “A Logical Portrait of the Assassin.” Social Research 42(3): 426–38.

      2 ––––. 1981. Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

      3 Kamm, F. M. 1996. Morality, Mortality, Vol. 2. New York: Oxford University Press.

      4 ––––. 2011. Ethics for Enemies: Terror, Torture, and War. New York: Oxford University Press.

      5 ––––. 2016. The Trolley Problem Mysteries. New York: Oxford University Press.

      6 Nagel, Thomas . 2012. “War and Massacre.” In Mortal Questions, 53–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

      7 Rachels, James . 1975. “Active and Passive Euthanasia.” The New England Journal of Medicine 292: 78–80.

      8 Wollheim, Richard . 2012. “Danto’s Gallery of Indiscernibles.” In Danto and His Critics, edited by Mark Rollins, 2nd ed., 30–9. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

9 A Normative Perspective on Basic Actions

      CAROL ROVANE

      Are there such things as basic actions? Is the idea of a basic action philosophically important? Arthur Danto’s novel, and deservedly influential, contribution to the philosophy of action is to raise these questions and then to answer them with a most definite yes.

      I want to consider how we should answer these questions if we bring a normative orientation to bear in the philosophical study of agency. Such an orientation has become a familiar fixture of philosophical work on the topic of agency. But I want to situate Danto’s work in relation to a particular elaboration of it that has emerged at Columbia University, where Arthur presided for so long as a senior philosophical figure. This particular normative orientation – which I will characterize as thoroughgoingly normative – governs Isaac Levi’s work on decision theory and rational choice, as well as Akeel Bilgrami’s work on self-knowledge and the metaphysics of agency and value, and also my own work on agent-identity, self-constitution, and the metaphysics of value.

This thoroughgoingly normative orientation invites us to look more closely at aspects of Danto’s views that have not drawn nearly as much philosophical attention as his conception of basic actions, which has enjoyed such enormous influence. The aspects I have in mind concern the agent’s first-person point of view. Although Danto’s scattered remarks about this are fascinating, I do not find in his work a sufficiently elaborated account of three aspects of it: what is epistemically distinctive about the sort of first-personal knowledge that agents possess; what is metaphysically distinctive about the sorts of things that agents know from a first-person point of view; what is a first-person point of view. In what follows, I explore all of these matters, both from Danto’s point of view and from the thoroughgoingly normative point of view of his Columbia colleagues.

      1 What Danto Says about the Agent’s First-Person Point of View

      Let me remind readers how Danto defines basic actions. His initial definition is negative: when we perform a basic action there is nothing else that we do in order to cause it. But he also specifies, more positively, that a basic action is something we do just like that, at will. Two correlative claims about non-basic actions follow: when we perform a non-basic action, there is something else that we do in order to cause it; in such cases, we do one thing, the non-basic thing, by doing another thing, which may or may not be basic.

      Danto claims that each agent has a repertoire of basic actions, which roughly speaking is a set of capacities to perform various kinds of basic actions. He claims further that agents know that they are able to perform the various kinds of basic actions that belong to their repertoires, but they do not know how they are able to perform them. Thus I know that I can raise my arm directly at will, just like that, but I have no idea how I am able to do this.

      It is clear that Danto conceives the sort of knowledge-how in question, which he says agents don’t need in order to perform basic actions, as a kind of practical knowledge – knowledge from which agents act, as opposed to the sort of knowledge about themselves that they might acquire when they view themselves as objects, as scientists might. I take it that, in Danto’s view, agents need to exploit such practical knowledge-how when they perform non-basic actions – to be able to do one thing by doing another involves knowing how to do the one thing by doing the other.

      It is also clear that Danto conceives the sort of knowledge-that which agents possess concerning their repertoire of basic actions – knowledge that they can perform them directly at will – likewise, as practical knowledge. This comes through when he clarifies that such knowledge-that cannot be inductive knowledge. The point is not entirely obvious. After all, we are not born knowing what we can do at will, so how else could we possibly learn this other than through observation and induction? But if we consider the matter more closely, it is easy to see that there is a difficulty for the idea that our practical knowledge is based on induction. In every case, either what we observe is a case of doing something at will, or it is not. If it is, then we must already know that we can do it at will – for you can’t unknowingly do something at will. And yet, if what we observe is not a case of doing something at will, then our observation is not relevant to learning what we can do at will.

      When Danto registers this point about how an agent’s knowledge of its repertoire of basic actions cannot be arrived at inductively, he registers a profound distinction between the first-person point of view from which we act and the third person point of view from which we observe and predict. It may seem as though this is only an epistemic point, about two different ways of knowing – first personal ways and third personal ways. But we shall see that, ultimately, it brings in train a metaphysical point about the nature of what can be known from these two different perspectives.

Descartes famously argued along these lines, from the special nature of first-person knowledge to a metaphysical dualism of mind and body. Most readers of Descartes presume that they find in his work an emphasis on the nature of consciousness as an attribute of an immaterial soul that is distinct from the material body. Danto is no Cartesian. He is interested in agency, not consciousness; and unlike Descartes, who also emphasized agency in his account of the mind, Danto’s interest in agency is an interest in directly embodied agency. Nevertheless, because his conception

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