Outlines of a neo-Humean disjunctivism

Abstract This paper outlines and defends a disjunctive neo-Humean account of action. It seeks to unify and elucidate actions stemming from many disparate causal pathways by relating them to well-understood central, or paradigmatic, cases of action. This also allows the view to deal with many objections to the default version of the Humean theory of motivation ( HTM ) and be metaethically fruitful. The paper first sets out actions that stem from appropriately combined beliefs and pro-attitudes, as per HTM , as features of a central, paradigmatic kind of action. This kind of action involves causing bodily movement events with appropriately combined belief/pro-attitude-pairs: in other words, manifesting these agential abilities. Then kinds of action that involve more than beliefs and pro-attitudes can be accommodated as approximating actions par excellence based on beliefs, pro-attitudes, and additional features. These include actions based on things like irreducible intentions, structural rationality, and the ability to act for normative reasons. Furthermore, kinds of action that involve less than belief/pro-attitude-pairs can be accommodated as they make lesser use of the agential abilities involved in the paradigmatic kind of action. These include actions without movement, actions out of pro-attitudes, and sub-intentional actions – and we can accommodate various kinds of failed actions similarly.