The contours of responsibility: A new model

HAROLD MOORE, ROBERT NEVILLE, AND W I L L I A M SULLIVAN

T H E C O N T O U R S O F R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y : A N E W M O D E L 1

However responsibility might be conceived from a meta-ethical point of view, at the very least it may be assumed to be tied to causation. To be responsible for something is not the same as to cause it; but it is at least to cause it, or to be obliged to cause it. The agents to be held responsible for an evaluable effect are not responsible merely because they are its causes; but they are not responsible unless they are at least its causes. Furthermore, it probably may be taken for granted, and will be for the duration of this paper, that the kind of causation involved is allied with control; an agent, to be responsible, must have some kind of control over his effects, and some kind of control over what he does about it. If a nonhuman thing or a social arrangement is responsible, it is because its causative power is subject to

alteration and control somewhere. Now, apart from meta-ethical considerations about the nature of responsi-

bility, a society includes in its general moral orientation a conception of the contours of responsibility, the general patterns of causation relating responsible agents to their environment and their effects. In an astrologically oriented or animistic society the contours of responsibility operative in deliberation, jurisprudence, and so forth, are different in obvious ways from those found, say, in a scientific society. The latter, for instance, would be very little inclined to trace responsibility to nonphysical causes or to assert connections that could not in general be verified by experiment.

Western thought at the present time is rather scientific concerning the contours of responsibility. Yet there seems also to be something amiss. The suddenly discovered problems of environmental pollution indicate the contours habitually assumed for individual and social activity are too narrow, neglecting important causative effects of human actions on the environment. Closer examination of the treatment of social problems indicates the contours assumed for economic activity should have been broadened to take into account psychological, political and cultural effects, and so forth.

Our point is not to complain about the state of scientific knowledge.

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THE CONTOURS OF RESPONSIBILITY: A NEW MODEL

In many cases there are well-established theories tracing lines of causation through the various domains. And where there are no such theories, scientists feel the strong need to develop them. Witness the ground swell of enthusiasm for ecological studies and interdisciplinary programs. Our point is rather about the conceptions and instincts a society has about the causal connections relevant to moral action and responsibility. In what areas will a person look in tracing the consequences of alternative actions ? What range will he take his actions to have ? What kinds of things are held responsible for bad states of affairs - - individuals, institutions, chance ? Such conceptions and instincts about the contours of responsibility are usually the submerged underpinning of a society's customary morals, legal system, and even of the direction of rewarded scientific research projects.

Our thesis in general is that the model of the contours of responsibility emerging through the development of western society has outlived its plausibility. It has been undermined by the very science it fostered, especially in ecological matters. And the unwarranted separations it has suggested between human affairs and natural ones, between the objects of one disci- pline and those of others, make it a clear and present danger to society. It seems clear in the popular as well as academic press that some new model is being sought, usually deriving from themes of biological ecology. This paper addresses that problem.

The first section will introduce the historical dimension of the problem of models for the contours of responsibility. The aim is not merely to point up the historical force of our present dilemma; that is apparent enough by itself. Rather the aim is to give a sense of historical scale to the role such models play. The academic habit of precision regarding the formulation of problems often prohibits raising problems having to do with factors generally characteristic of whole stretches of world history. The second will then consider a model that of "action theory," for the contours of responsibility typical of the kind of thinking we believe constitutes the present problem. Academic "action theory" is only one way of representing the conceptions and instincts of western society up to now; but it is typical. The third section will present an abstract scheme for the contours of responsibility which, properly interpreted and made popular, would be more appropriate to the problems of our world. Throughout the sections, the relation between human action and the natural environment will be the focal point of the contours of responsibility.

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HAROLD MOORE, ROBERT NEVILLE, AND WILLIAM SULLIVAN

I. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Because we are interested in the way a society conceives the causative contours of responsibility rather than in its scientific conceptions of causation, the relevant point of examination is the society's ethos. A social ethos, albeit vague, contains many values and beliefs not directly relevant to the contours of responsibility. But the ethos shapes beliefs and values as to what things are important to be taken into account in framing the contours of responsibility.

What is the connection between a society's dominant ethos regarding the contours of responsibility and the relation it prescribes to the natural environment ? The ways human groups have related to the surrounding world have varied. The moral imperatives of most societies have included a code of ecological as well as social conduct, regulating environmental interaction. An ethos either legitimates the ecological conduct of a dominant form of social organization or represents a challenge to that form of organization from a dissident group. The dynamic connections between technology, social organization and conscious decision-making, on the one hand, and the physical environment, may be schematically represented by this diagramY

Cultural Order (World view and Ethos) --~ Control 4 (filtered through ethos)

4 Technology and Social Organization

4 Natural Environment

This diagram will be superseded by a more sophisticated model in Section III.

In human history the growth of human needs, imagination, and the development of productive techniques have triggered changes in social organization and the cultural order, including the ethos according to which responsibility for action is assigned. 3 Mankind, at least in the developed countries, has now reached a greater degree of environmental control than ever before. Simultaneously, man has never been more estranged from his world, as the threat of planetary eco-collapse chillingly indicates. The dominant ethoi of past and contemporary society cannot provide adequate solutions to the ecological dilemmas we face. In fact, the old world views constitute part of the problem.

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Ecological Conduct : Historical Outline

To provide evidence for this contention we will examine three types of ethos in broad outline, noting the relationship between interaction with the evironment and stated ecological attitudes.

A. Traditional (Pre-Urban) Cultures

Evidence for discussing traditional cultures comes from two sources : anthro- pological study of existing societies outside the orbit of urban civilization, and inferences drawn from archeology and study of rural peoples within urban-controlled areas, such as peasant groups. Recognizing the highly generalized nature of statements about traditional cultures, available evidence suggests that at least three points are characteristic of these societies as a whole. Traditional societies are based on a simple level of hunting or agricultural technology. In addition, population is relatively small. These two factors tend to limit the extent of division of labor which in turn makes possible the third characteristic : relatively homogeneous cultures in which kinship structures constitute the dominant forms of relationship. ~

There are also important common traits in the cultural sphere including ecological conduct. Traditional peoples often interpret themselves in a unified view of the cosmos within which man and nature are understood as interrelated components of one system? Man's relationship to nature is understood as one of mutuality, not exploitation. The human and natural worlds are bound together in a single moral order. Economic life and relations with the environment are strongly regulated by custom. Patterns o,f production and consumption are usually stable. The low level of technique plus the conservation of traditional life tend to keep economic activity a static aspect of society, not its developing center. 6 In societies in which all the members share a common ethos, human actions toward nature are morally guided and bound by the traditional world view. 7 The tendency to link man and nature through an elaborate system of moral responsibility is a particular characteristic of traditional societies.

B. Classical Cultures, East and West

The rise of city culture, the so-called urban revolution, shattered the unity of the traditional world views. Although little is known concretely about the transition from pre-urban to urban society, the general conditions and

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consequences of the change are clear. Urbanization was a worldwide phenom- enon. It grew up autonomously in the Levant, the Indus Valley, China and, somewhat later, in Middle and South America. As was the case with traditional societies, although the character of the urban societies varied from case to case, there were generic characteristics shared by urban societies which find correlations in the dominant cultures these societies developed.

The kind of society produced by the urban revolution was one in which control of religious, economic and social activity moved out of the small communities of traditional society to the centralized points of administration and exchange, the cities. The urban revolution was carried out on the basis of improved agricultural technique, a growth of population, and large-scale cooperative or regimented organization of land and labor resources. New techniques of production increased the division and specialization of labor, especially among artisans who lived in the cities. One result was a surplus of subsistence goods which could be systematically organized to support new groups in the city who directed social and economic activity as a special prerogative. The appearance of sharp divisions between producing and directing classes along with diversification of labor skills beyond what any one individual could master created diversification and differentiation of roles far beyond what has existed in traditional society. Full-time cultural specialists appeared in religion, art, science, etc. As the civilized order developed and expanded, these cultural specialists searched for new, more comprehensive views of man and environment appropriate to the new situation. 8

The new urban societies were complex, woven of many cultural strands. Where traditional societies had emphasized relations of mutual duty and responsibility, the new order emphasized hierarchy of command, the proper grading of duties and responsibilities among basically unequal participants. The dominant culture in civilized societies correlated closely with their social divisions into subordinate and ruling orders and the unequal division of power. In their notions of ecological conduct urban cultures tended to project the same Sorts of moral imperatives : exploitation of the land, the principles of hierarchy and the existence of the lower for the sake of the higher. Urban cultures were based on agricultural technique and management exploiting resources for the sake of ruling groups in the cities. However, the degree of exploitation was checked by the slow development of technology, the resistance of subservient populations, and the difficulties of

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coordinating such activity over large areas. The order achieved was pre- carious. The system of imperative coordination often had difficulties and sometimes broke down altogether, as in the Persian and Roman Empires in the West and Imperial China in the East. This problem was reflected in their world views as well. Human activity did not always succeed within the natural order. There was the tendency to overreach itself, as the empires did, with disastrous consequences. Hence the search for principles of order which could guarantee stable exploitation without the danger of excess and collapse.

The world views developed by the high cultures all postulated a relatively fixed, intelligible order of nature whose parts functioned in a fixed, hierarchical relation to each other. In each case the human social structure was understood as part of the cosmic order and responsibility was assigned to the "objective" criterion of this order. Ecological conduct, though regulated in principle, constituted a problem for these societies. As noted above, urban society was based on the exploitation of natural and human resources. Its growth depended on continued exploitation. In such a situation economic activity could not be efficiently regulated by custom. Either a market mechanism or the force of coercion was used to increase production, which meant increased exploitation. The period of urban development resulted in vast ecological changes and often damage to the environment over the urban-controlled areas of the planet. None of the classical ethoi was able to effect a balance between the unstable situation of exploitation and the "natural order" they eulogized. Because the classical ethoi did not realistically relate social and natural processes they ultimately failed to harmonize human needs and environmental processes once the pace of technical development enabled systematic exploitation to expand rapidly.

C. Western Evolutionary Humanism

If the first four thousand years of urban development marked a slow and faltering development of environmental (and social) exploitation by civilized societies, the period since 1500 A. D. has been a time of explosive advance. The locus of this development until the beginning of the present century has been the European West. A growing population, rapidly accelerating technological development, coupled with the rise of the urban bourgeoisie, led to the creation of a new kind of social organization: European industrial capitalism.

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Along with a more complex division of labor and a money economy, this society propagated a rationalized attitude toward life compounded of classical and Judaeo-Christian elements. The view of nature developed in the industrial West was in part a Judaeo-Christian borrowing : nature exists for man's use and exploitation? Under the impact of industrial expansion the classical cultures of both East and West have proven inadequate for integrating the new technology and social patterns into the old world views. The modern humanist tradition in the West has been at least in part an effort to construct an adequate world view from which a new system of moral imperatives could be derived.

Industrial society pushed economic relations to the fore and emphasized the expansion of resource exploitation. This fed back upon and encouraged technological change. The basis of the new society was rapidly expanding industry. The old ethoi based on closed order and organic relations were far less applicable to the ecological behavior of industrial capitalism than they had been to the pre-industrial urban society. The new humanism developed in the West sought to account for rapid change and to reconcile the new industry with traditional values rather than reassessing society's relationship with the environment. The new humanism extended the "subdue the earth" policy, urging curtailment of exploitation only on economic or social grounds.

Liberalism and Marxism, the dominant branches of the new evolutionary humanism, centered their attention upon resolving the social tensions built up through increased exploitation of human labor and the commodity market. Marxism marks the culmination of this effort to interpret industri- alism in the perspective of humanist values of rational control and individual freedom. It emphasized the interaction between the productive apparatus of a society, including technology and the forms of social organization as the central dynamic of the modern period. Like Liberalism, Marxian theory urges a solution to the problem of human relations within industrial capitalist society. It is a program for removing the destructive aspects of the new technology, the market, division of labor and class exploitation by abolishing private property, the basis of class domination, and substituting democratic planning for the market.

But a flaw in the Marxian synthesis, as in the main strands of humanism in the West, is the lack of a systematic scheme for relating the functions of human and environmental processes. Classical Marxism does not provide any

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adequate basis for making judgments in this sphere. Marx points in the direction of "a humanism which is a naturalism" as do the Pragmatists, James and Dewey, both products of the Liberal tradition. But the theoretical development of such an ecological science is lacking. 1'~ If an ecologically relevant ethos is to be developed allowing us to assign priorities and responsibilities in the ecological sphere, we need a new model of the contours of responsibility.

II. "ACTION THEORY"

However much Marxism is a final flower of the Humanist tradition, it has not itself emphasized the problem of responsibility and its contours. The Liberal tradition, by contrast, has focused a great deal of attention on that problem. In order not to leave our criticism of recent beliefs regarding the contours of responsibility on the level of mere historical generalization, we shall examine briefly, therefore, the philosophical case made by a represen- tative of the Liberal tradition, namely, action theory. In the criticisms made we shall reject what has been the dominant concept of the contours of responsibility based on agent-cause model of causation. Action theorists are not the only philosophical representatives of Liberalism, but they are a significant, perhaps dominant, group at the present time and in many respects are typical. We do not take our argument against them to have exhaustive force against all the schools of Liberalism; but we shall not object if people want to slide into that inference.

In current "action theory" ~1 the criteria for ascribing responsibility to an agent for the performance (or perhaps avoidance) of a particular action are usually expressed as variants on the following two propositions.

1. "X" is responsible for an action if and only if "he could have done otherwise."

2. To assert that "X" could have done otherwise means that he would have done otherwise, if he had chosen to do otherwise.

The general defense of (2) is that (2) is a conceptual truth within the framework of categories that can loosely be termed the framework of ordinary discourse. To underwrite the claim that (2) is in fact a conceptual truth, appeal is usually made to a particular model of agency. Consequently a crucial notion for the ascription of responsibility, according to "action theory," is the model of agency. We will briefly sketch the position and our

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reasons for rejecting it. Then we will consider the claim (2) is prime facie conceptual truth of ordinary language.

A. Agency

A fundamental tenet of the action theory of agency is the claim that motives, reasons, intentions and the like are not causally connected with human action. There is certainly a relation between human action and the reasons and intentions of an agent. And whatever the relation might be, it is certainly akin to causal connection. But there is a fundamental logical difference between ordinary causation and the kind of 'causation' that might exist between an action and reasons for the performance of an action by an agent.

Causal connection is contingent connection. But if there is only a contingent connection between the intention of an agent and the agent's action, then the agent cannot be free; and consequently cannot be responsible; therefore the connection cannot be merely causal. On the other hand, if the agent is not in control of his actions, then he is not free, and control is like causation. It is true there is an existential independence between a reason and action; actions cannot be reasoned into existence. However, barring external restraint and upon examination of the great majority of cases in ordinary discourse, there must be a logical, non-contingent relation between reason or intention and action.

Now what leads action theory to refer to the employment of terms in ordinary discourse ? The defense of the move is that ordinary language is correct philosophical language. There are certainly substantive differences between the classical defenses of this position (Malcolm's, for example) and the positions of the action theorists. However, no other conceptual frame of reference is ever taken seriously by the action theorists. In action theory, it is crucial to discover what conceptual features of ordinary language distinguish real human action from, say, bodily movement. Any empirical or scientific study of the systematic relationships that might exist between a human agent and conditional features of his environment is purely secon- dary, nonessential analysis.

Given the foregoing, what is the paradigm case of a human action in the framework of ordinary discourse ? It is of the form :

3. If an agent is in state A, he will have a reason to do B.

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This is not to say that an agent can never be wrong when pressed for the "reason" for which he may have performed a given action. At times, for example, a psychologist might be able to supply the real reason. But in the great majority of cases in ordinary discourse, the reasons given by the agent that "account for" his action must be given primary conceptual weight. This claim manifests the contingency of the position of the action theorist on the appeal to ordinary discourse. Suppose one were to deny that there were, in fact, a logical, non-contingent tie between the actions and intentions of an agent. Suppose the appeal to the psychologist became the norm and not the exception. The resultant state of affairs would be simply inconceiva- ble. At the very least, it could be claimed that the idea of an agent and consequently the concept of human action would lose any determinate sense.

The very meaning of the term 'agent' is conceptually tied to the concepts of reasonability and accountability. An agent, as opposed to a mechanism, is one who both consciously intervenes in the existential order and is able to account for the different forms that intervention might take. This is a conceptual truth, because agents in the conceptual frame of ordinary language are rational. An appeal to causal explanation (scientific explanation) is at best otiose; and at the worst undermines the conceptual legitimacy of ordinary language.

It is not asserted that every case of human action entails reference to a conscious intention. Rather, on the action theory model, accountability and responsibility are contingent on the identification of an agent, who in the large majority of cases, knows what he is about.

B. The Agent

Motives, reasons and intentions are not causes for action theory. On the contrary, it is a conceptual truth that I, as an active agent, am the cause of my own actions. And 'T ' am not identical with any state or process. Properly construed, the assertion that 'T ' is identical with any state or process is nonsensical. The existence of human action makes the identity hypothesis tenuous at best.

Men are responsible only for human action. And the distinction between action and bodily movement is contingent on the identification of the agent. For example :

4. My arm went up. 5. I raised my arm.

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(4) is mere bodily movement. A W number of purely physical states of affairs could have precipitated (4). Only (5) counts as real human action. But (5) contains reference to the 'owner' of the activity. The reference to an agent is conceptually tied to the meaning of human action. An act is human only if it belongs to someone.

Our concept of identifying reference also necessitates the inclusion of the agent. An action can be described in terms of spatial coordinates, in terms of microphysical particles; in short, in a variety of ways. But we can never describe the fact that it is my arm unless reference is made to me. This is another conceptual truth. But it is a conceptual truth of a particular kind; it is a fundamental truth in the conceptual frame of ordinary discourse. The concept of "my" is a primitive concept. 12 "My" and the agent to which it is conceptually tied cannot be defined in terms of anything else. The notion of an agent is one of a bare particular, according to action theory. Nothing

else can be said about it.

C. Difficulties

We reject the theory of agency, and consequently the theory of responsibility that has been constructed on the position, because the agent as described in the context of contemporary action theory is a fiction. The agents in action theory are abstract 'logical' 'operators.'

Reflection on concrete experience renders a different description of agency. An agent is one who is inexorably contingent on the environment as a condition for its very existence. The definition of 'agent' - - divorced from reference to the experiential matrix that is its home - - is a mistake. Are the concepts of 'agent' and 'environment' logically separable ? The answer is affirmative. But the importance to be assigned to the fact of logical separa-

bility is precisely what is being questioned. For while the two concepts might be logically independent, they are existentially dependent. I f this is true, then an action theorist distorts what is actually the case. By focusing on a set of abstractions - - the alleged conceptual truths of ordinary discourse - - features necessary to the intelligibility of existence as an agent are ignored. I f the agent and consequently human action (and, incidentally, the very framework of ordinary discourse:) are contingent on the environment for their very being, then the construction of a theory of human action not making reference to the conditional features of the environment is a mistake.

An action theorist might object that we have confused the very issues we

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separated in our introduction, namely, those of meta-ethics and those of the contours of responsibility. He might say the action theory description of an agent is meta-ethical and tree whatever the conception of the contours of responsibility. Our point, however, is that the meta-ethical concerns with defining moral agency are not independent of problems of the contours of responsibility. More particularly, the fact that an agent's action should (from the standpoint for instance of ecological concerns) be defined in terms of the relation between the agent and the sociophysical environment makes it inappropriate to say the identity between agent and action is a conceptual truth. The relation between agent and environment is a matter of empirical theory, not a conceptual truth in any language but the hypothetical one of theory. Therefore the meta-ethical definition of agency must make reference to some empirical theory of the relation of the agent to the environment. There may be a logical independence of the meta-ethical question from the empirical beliefs about the contours of responsibility. Indeed there must be if it is possible to describe the causal structures of the contours of responsibility without giving a meta-ethical definition of responsibility : this is what we shall do in Part III. But there is an existential dependence of the meta- ethical problem on the empirical theory of causative contours. A meta- ethical theory of agency not defining the way an agent is or possesses his actions in terms of his existence in an environment simply is inappropriate.

But what of the alleged primacy of the conceptual truths of ordinary discourse ? What of the clarity attained by the appeal to ordinary language ? The significant point to note at this juncture is that no appeal to any particular method, guarantees, in a priori fashion, that clarity will be attained. If this is true, then the appeal to ordinary language rests on, not conceptual truth, but empirical generalization. And at this level, it will be easy to show that the appeal to ordinary language, as the ultimate court of philosophical appeal, must be transcended. For example, in Part III it will be argued that the single-agent approach to responsibility is simply inappropriate for the coming technological age. Clarity (alleged) is no virtue when bought at the price of experiential sensitivity.

Perhaps a different approach can be forged by focusing on experience. It has been asserted that agency is contingent on the location of an agent within an environmental context. The entire emphasis, then, in assigning responsibility ought to be shifted. In vacuo discourse concerning the "self" as the self-moving source of all activity is no longer appropriate. Action and

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its attendant motives are not the prime movers in the new model. The structure of the desired paradigm can be formulated in the following

manner:

6. The action of an agent is not determined by its individuating components; but rather by the entire set of patterns of which the agent is a part.

A new criterion for ascribing responsibility can also be formulated.

7. An agent is responsible for an action to the degree that he is a real member of the entire set of patterns of which he is a part.

These moves are in general contradiction to the dassical Western liberal tradition in social philosophy with its emphasis on individualism. But, given current social conditions, a new modal is needed.

To this point, only suggestions have been made. In the next section, the underlying philosophical structure that underwrites these suggestions will be

explored manifesting the positive content implicit so far.

I I I . AN ECOLOGICAL MODEL OF AGENCY

In the sections above we indicated the lack of and need for an understanding of the contours of human responsibility superseding the models characteristic of the humanist tradition. In the second section we examined as a candidate, and rejected, the approach of "action theories" of agency because they make no essential reference to the sociophysicaI environment. In this section we shall propose a model of agency specifically tying responsible action to the

environment, la The presentation of the model will have four parts :

A. The field of .existents. B. Agents. C. Environments. D. Responsibility.

A. The Field of Existents

An existent, according to the model, is an occasio.n of experience. Prescinding from all distinguishing characteristics of special kinds of existents, an existent is a happening. The general structure of an occasion is the coming to be of an experience of a world of other occasions. 14

That the occasion is an experience means it is a definite, individual, experience of a world, a world that could have been experienced any number

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of other ways. To be definite means to be determinate and to have position. To be determinate is to exhibit a specific set o,f characters; any possible character is either determinately included or determinately excluded. The occasion can be vague with respect to the role it can play in the experience of future occasions. To have position means, from the standpoint of the occasion, to have a spatiotemporal perspective on the world; all other occasions, groups of occasions, and their characters are positioned in the experience of the experient occasion as before, with, or after it, as nearer or farther, and as being in a matrix of directions having its center in the place of the experient occasion. From the standpoint of other occasions experiencing the positioned occasion in question, its position means it has a place in a spatiotemporal continuum connecting it with all other occasions experienced.

That an occasion is the experience of a world is explained both in terms of what the world is apart from its being experienced in this occasion and in terms of what it is insofar as it is so experienced. Concerning the world outside the experience of the occasion, the only occasions that could be directly experienced are actual ones, that is, occasions that have already happened. An occasion that is only now happening lacks, by definition of "now happening," a definite character and position possible to be experienced by another occasion. The completed, actual occasions that could be directly experienced by an occasion can only be in its past. After the occasion itself has completely happened it can be experienced in turn by other occasions; these are its future. It is always possible for an occasion to influence its future, because the future must be able to experience it; whether the influence is felt in the future, however, depends on what the future does with its possible experience of the influencing occasion. All occasions in the world of an experiencing occasion that are neither experiencable by it nor can themselves experience it are contemporary with it. Contemporaries can directly experience much of the same past and can be experienced together by much the same future; but they do not directly experience or influence each other. Each occasion experiences itself as having a position with contemporaries and a future by extrapolating what these might be from the common past; this fact constitutes the causal dominance o.f the past. Such experience need not be conscious.

In terms of the way an occasion's world functions in its own experience, the content and structure of the world are limited by the unique character

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of the occasion. In the first place, only those completed occasions can function in the experience that possibly can be made to cohere in the final harmony of the definite occasion; occasions that cannot potentially be made to cohere can never be in that occasion's world. In the second place, although the diverse past occasions are each experienced individually, the experience of them all together in one definite experience requires that they be selectively interpreted regarding what importance each will have in the final definition of the total experience, and what aspects of them will be carried through the process of harmonization to function in the final definite character of the occasion.

The process of harmonization requires decisions regarding the selections. Past occasions can be decisively excluded, represented by other occasions, reduced to abstract characters, grouped with other occasions according to a common character, represented only by that character, etc. The togetherness of past occasions in an experient occasion is in virtue of a coherent pattern relating them. An occasion is said to be complete when its pattern o,f experience is completely definite; the process of its coming to be is the development of increasingly more definite patterns, beginning with a pattern definite only in that the past occasions it contains are compatible for definite synthesis. In order to attain spatiotemporal position, an occasion must construct patterns, taking accounts of contemporaries and a future, even if the only form of taking them into account is excluding them from

contributing determinate characteristics. Following Whitehead, the experience of an occasion in the world of an

experient occasion is termed a prehension. There are as many prehensions in an occasion as there are occasions it experiences. These prehensions of separate occasions must be brought to the unified harmony of a definite experience. This means they have special characteristics in virtue of the way they are related to each other in this experient occasion; such special characteristics are called the subjective form of the prehension. The same thing can be experienced by two different occasions, but the experience of it will have a different subjective form for each experient occasion. The definite experience of an occasion can be analyzed into the objective data experienced and the subjective form peculiar to the experient occasion in virtue of which it experiences all its objective world together.

This model of an occasion is intended to be absolutely general for any existent, far more general than the language of "experience" connotes. This

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is a greater difficulty for cosmo,logical concerns than for the moral concerns of this paper. But it should be recognized that electrons, rocks, flowers, cows and people are all occasions or groups of occasions. Intelligent occasions are those complex enough to originate elaborate novel patterns of harmony not found directly in what they experience; these can change radically and be sensitive to a wide, actual world. Brute occasions virtually repeat patterns of contiguous previous occasions, exhibiting negligible novelty and excluding most occasions from their world.

The point of this general statement of the model is to represent existents as being enmeshed in a world of other occasions prehending them and being prehended by them; continuities of various sorts are constituted by acts of prehension.

B. Agents

An agent to whom responsibility can be assigned is to be conceived as a special kind of group of occasions. In the next section on the environment we shall discuss how an agent is part of the environment. Here we shall attend to the unity peculiar to an agent and to the nature of acting.

An agent is an enduring individual, that is, a being whose individual identity endures through a temporal series of occasions. The endurance is called "contingent" when (1) an identifying pattern is repeated in each occasion of the series, and (2) the reason the identifying pattern is in any member of the series is because it is prehended positively from some antecedent member of the series. Two occasions are not in the same contingent enduring object, even if they share a common feature, if the later did not derive that feature from the earlier, deriving it instead from some other occasion. Contingent endurance is contingent because whether the identifying pattern is exemplified in any member of the series but also on the idiosyncratic subjective form of the prehending occasion.

Essential endurance, by contrast, obtains when the subjective form determining the exhibition of the identifying pattern in any occasion derives not only idiosyncratically from that occasion but also from past and future occasions in the enduring series. The derivation o,f subjective form, therefore, in any member of an essentially enduring series is threefold : from the past, from the present occasion becoming, and from the future. Elements of subjective form derive from the past as inherited characteristics of harmonizing given data from the actual world. They derive from the

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present (an awkward turn of phrase !) as novel forms of decision regarding harmonization. They derive from the future as feelings of value the present occasion prizes in some successor occasion, determining it to comport itself a certain way so as to influence its future. ~'5

An agent is an essentially enduring individual. That he derives subjective form from his past occasions means that in any present he is identical with his past not merely by prehending it but also because it is part of his subjective form to prehend his past so. This is the basis of responsibility for past actions and commitments. That an agent derives subjective form from the present means he is in those respects free from determination by the past; free will is associated with this essential aspect of being an agent. That he derives part of his subjective form from the future means he determines his present not only with regard to present felt values but with regard to anticipated future ones. The moral aspects of anticipation, however, are not limited to values anticipated for future occasions belonging to the individual's own life but extend also to all the occasions affected by his action.

A human agent is a very complex, essentially enduring individual, inter- preting much of his past, present and future in conscious terms of moral evaluation. There is no need to say, however, that responsibility for one's past and future be limited to these elements of which one is conscious; consciousness, rather, is important because of the sophistication it gives deliberation.

Any occasion in the life of an agent may be prehended by future occasions, either those belonging to or those outside of the life of the agent; the possibility of being prehended extends throughout the whole future environment. The possibilities of being prehended constitute the occasion's potential influence; how it is prehended in fact constitutes its actual influence. A matter of influence is to be called the agent's action when there is a general law or regularity of nature determining that when state A is exhibited in an agent's occasion, state B regularly is exhibited in a future occasion. Not all influence need be an instance of such regularity; where there is no regularity there is no possibility of control of the influence by the agent, and therefore no responsibility. Another limitation to control consists in the fact that future occasions must appropriate what is given according to its own subjective form and may in fact prehend it negatively, i.e., exclude it; an agent cannot control, and is therefore not responsible for,

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what lies in the free control of future occasions. An action, in the defined sense however, does involve regularity and control, and the agent is responsible for it.

An action extends in its effects not to just one future occasion to which the agent is related by a regularity, but to all future occasions related to the agent by regularity. In an ordered environment, therefore, the effects of a single initiation of action may extend to nearly every future occasion. Not all actions are intentional; an action is intention if the agent comports himself into state A for the sake of effecting state B. Where actions have many effects, it is rare that more than a few are intended, simply because it is very difficult to think of many effects. But as men's understanding of the regularities of their environments increases, it becomes possible to intend a wider range. Responsibility, however, if not criminal liability, extends to all actions, not only intentional ones.

C. Environments

Our model has been presented so far with the deceptive simplification of conceiving an agent as a single strand of occasions relative to which all other occasions are external environment. This must be made more realistic in two ways.

First, the heart (or mind or soul) of an enduring human agent is significant not so much for its repetition of the same pattern but fo~ its wild ability to change, in adaptation of feeling and intention, to changing circumstances. There is, of course, an underlying repetition of an identifying pattern within which the mental variations take place; this is necessary to say the thoughts are all those of the same person.

Second, since maintaining continuity and variation at once is a very complicated matter, the individual mind is likely to require a stable neigh- borhood of surrounding occasions reinforcing it at every moment and mediating the influence of the more remote occasions so as not to disrupt the continuity of the living thought. In other words, a moral agent requires a body. Consider the following "likely story" as illustrative of this.

An actual occasion is prehended with a physical prehension. The formative elements of that actual occasion, over and above the physical prehensions constituting its own beginning, are its novel elements. As these novel elements appear in the occasion, before the occasion has become completely definite as a new physical fact, the process of its coming to be can be

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called following Whitehead, "mentality." The prehension of an incomplete phase o.f an occasion has some element of mentality as its object, and can be called a hybrid physical prehension. Viewed as a series of accomplished facts, a man's mind or soul is a series of brain states. But each brain state is an occasion dominated by a hybrid physical prehension of some previous brain state. So the conscious elements in thinking are prehensions of previous thinking and the processive feel of all the present moments, as it were, is the feel of living thoughts. But the stable organic structure of the brain is required for this flow of variant consciousness. And the stable organic structure of the body is required for the brain, and so on. There is no clear distinction between one's body and the environment outside it. But an individual with his body can be considered an organism in a larger environment; the rather tight organic connections between parts of the body can for most practical purposes be distinguished from the rather looser organic connections of the body with things in the environment.

An environment itself can be given a fo,rmal interpretation. The category our model suggests as the most important is that of an ecosystem. An ecosystem is defined as a set of actual occasions (1) such that any member determines its own subjective form with reference to definiteness in a pattern integrating all the members. Put loosely, the occasions take part in inter- active processes and determine themselves with respect to the interactions. The reference to definiteness in (2) means each occasion has a perspective on some part of the pattern integrating the whole, not necessarily that it prebends all members of the whole (since it may not in any way anticipate remote future members or even the remote contours of the integrative pattern).

An obvious example of an ecosystem would be a set of enduring individuals interacting and sustaining each other through a period of time; each occasion in each individual would have definiteness not only with respect to the pattern of the containing individual but also with respect to the functions of the individual relative to the other individuals. Another kind of ecosystem would be a cyclical chain of events like water evaporating into the atmosphere, condensing, falling as rain, evaporating, etc. Food cycles, oxygen and carbon dioxide cycles a~d other systems outlined by scientific ecologists would also be examples of ecosystems as defined by our model.

It should be stressed that whether nature is or is not organized according to ecosystems is an empirical matter. Or more precisely, the degrees and

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respects in which nature is organized into ecosystems is a matter of empirical analysis. It seems likely, however, that most occasions are members of several ecosystems; it is also likely that occasions with some spontaneity in part transcend any and all of their ecosystems. One of the problems with men is that they so easily upset the ecosystems necessary for their own continuance.

A member of an ecosystem is dependent on its place in that system to be what it is; this is trivially true because of the definition of membership in terms of the subjective form of each member; b u t i t is a crucial empirical matter to determine whether the membership is important or trivial.

An ecosystem is itself said to be dependent on another ecosystem when the possibility of its members prehending its pattern rests on the possibility of their prehending the pattern or part of the pattern of the other ecosystem. The ecosystem of foxes and rabbits, for instance, depends on the ecosystem of sun, rain, water table, etc. Ecosystems are interdependent if members of each are dependent on prehending the patterns of the others. If two or more ecosystems are interdependent in all respects they are simply parts of a larger ecosystem. An occasion (or enduring individual) can be in one ecosystem with respect to part of its definiteness, in another with respect to other parts of its definiteness. Rabbits are food for foxes in one cycle; they eat grass that holds water for the soil in another; if the fox-rabbit cycle sustains too large a population of rabbits the ground cover may be eaten away, changing the moisture cycle.

An ecosystem is said to be indifferent to another ecosystem if the latter can change without affecting the former. The ecosystem, for instance, whereby the earth sustains and holds its atmosphere is probably indifferent to whether the AAUP or AFT represents teachers in the economic ecosystem of American universities. The relation between two ecosystems is said to be indifferent-dependent when one is indifferent to the second but the second is dependent on the first. Because. the economic ecosystem of American universities depends on the earth's, atmosphere, but not vice versa,

the relation is one of indifference-independence. An occasion can be in two ecosystems related indifferent-dependent.

Regularities of influence between occasions, that is, causal lines, are not confined to one ecosystem. Occasions, including human actions, can have regularly determined effects in ecosystems quite remote from any in which the causal occasion participates. On the other hand, an effect produced in an occasion that changes the whole ecosystem of which it is a member must be

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construed in terms of the whole system. This is true whether the effect is in an ecosystem of which the agent cause is also a member or in one quite remote. The chief moral of our analysis of the model so far is that, to the extent the environment of an agent is organized into ecosystems the important thing to understand about his actions are the effects on the influenced ecosystems. A second moral to be drawn shortly is that no occasion is completely the effect of any other one occasion, but of the whole actual world of the effect-occasion, especially its own ecosystems.

We have spoken of ecosystems with illustrations from natural science, as if all ecosystems were physical. But many of the interesting ecosystems for human beings are social. Furthermore, one of the complaints we made above about the humanist tradition is that it has neglected the connection of social and physical processes. Our model can now be made specific with

respect to these distinctions. Consider first a semiotic ecosystem, a system of potential or actual

meanings such that the meaning of any one member sign depends on its definite position in the pattern of the system; a member sign may be indeterminate with respect to many other signs in the system, but its own determinateness, such as it is, depends on a definite place in the system's pattern. 16 One can say of a sign in a semiotic ecosystem that its meaning- fulness depends on the presumption of that universe of discourse, and if the sign is also in some other semiotic ecosystem its meaning is different there. A general semiotic ecosystem like a language can be very vague; that is, member sign requires for its clear interpretation not only the identification of its semiotic ecosystem but also other signs and circumstances; the word "vague" in the first clause of this sentence is a member of the English ecosystem, but the second clause was necessary to specify what it means when applied to semiotic ecosystems, lr A specific semiotic ecosystem, such as that of quantum mechanics in contrast to that of Newtonian mechanics, can be adopted for specific purposes, and clarity of meaning within the ecosystem required specific acknowledgment of the adoption.

A sign itself must be resident in an occasion to be real; it is resident as a "mental" entity in the process of the occasion's happening. The occasion as it is happening interprets its world with the sign; a subsequent occasion can prehend the sign in the completed occasion with a hybrid physical prehension. If a sign is meaningful, that is, if it is a genuine social sign,

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there must be a group of occasions together exhibiting (in hybrid physical prehensions of them) the pattern of the semiotic .ecosystem to which the meaningful sign belongs. Those other occasions themselves belong to many ecosystems; but they belong to the same social ecosystem if they bear signs in the same semiotic ecosystem. For a man to say something in English, he must belong to a social ecosystem of English speakers; for a present-day man to speak Ugaritic he must at least belong to a complex social ecosystem of scholars and documents whereby the language semiotic ecosystem of Ugarit is interpreted.

Language speakers do not constitute the only kind of social ecosystem. The reason so many philosophers have tended to think so is because the signs in a language speaking occasion are usually those intended by the occasion itself, that is, functioning in its own mental process. In a semiotic ecosystem, however, there are at least three kinds of signs: indexes, connected physically in the occasion with what they stand for; icons, which are signs only to an interpreter in the same semiotic ecosystem by virtue of their similarity to their object; and symbols, which are signs only to an interpreter in the same semiotic ecosystem by virtue of their role in the pattern of the ecosystem. Not all signs, therefore, must be resident in occasions with significant mentality; a street sign, for instance, is not. But all signs must be interpretable by hybrid physical prehensions of their definite position in the pattern of the semiotic ecosystem; the pattern itself is exhibited to hybrid physical prehensions in the group of occasions in the social ecosystem.

Social ecosystems are illustrated in cultural traditions, social institutions, habits of interpretation and a variety of other systems of events, artifacts and language games. If academic departments are divided according to realistic lines, there should be families of economic social ecosystems, psychological social ecosystems, political social ecosystems, and so forth; if it is true as many daim that the departments are divided unrealistically, this only proves that the real social ecosystems are other than what we had believed. If a department deals with an indifferent social ecosystem, it can ignore the other departments. But most social ecosystems are dependent on others in many ways.

A social ecosystem is a group of physical occasions, patterned by the semiotic ecosystem it exhibits to hybrid physical prehension. Each of its members, being a physical occasion, belongs to a variety of physical

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ecosystems. The nature of any occasion, then, is to be interpreted not only in terms of its own determinate character and position, but also in terms of the ecosystems to which it belongs. The occasions influenced by an antecedent occasion are likewise not to be interpreted solely in terms of the way they are influenced but also in terms of the way their influenced character alters the ecosystems, social and physical, to which they belong.

It is perhaps a danger to think, on the basis of the formal rationality of the ecosystem model, that the environment is perfectly ordered according to it. In empirical fact, the order of the universe may be quite incomplete. It surely is the case that most important occasions are involved in a variety of different ecosystems, in different respects, and in ways that have various degrees of importance. For many purposes, the important things to understand about an occasion might have little to do with the ecosystems to which

it belongs. Furthermore, since an occasion can be prehended by any later occasion, not necessarily those limited to ecosystems of which it is a member, lines of influence are to be traced from one ecosystem to another according

to whatever regularities are discovered to obtain. The force of the present analysis, however, is to focus attention in moral

deliberation precisely on the effects of actions on the ecosystems they touch. We are not in a position to apply this model to the problem of the contours

of responsibility.

D. Responsibility

In our attempt to discern the contours of responsibility in a way consonant

with our contemporary problems and resources we have sketched out a model Of the formal relation of an agent to his environment. In this section we shall draw out some morals this model, if plausible, has for responsibility.

What an agent can be held responsible for. An agent can be held responsible for his actions. An action is the whole range of influences his nature as an occasion might have that are connected to him by regularities. He is not responsible for influences not regularly connected with the nature his occasion exhibits, because he cannot control them. Nor is an agent responsible for the use to which influenced occasions put his influence

within the limits of the latter's freedom. The identification of an agent's action requires an understanding of the

interrelations of all the ecosystems whose members might be affected by the action. Such identification is called for both in deliberation and in

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judgment of the action, and therefore it is doubly important to revise our patterns of thinking to make such understanding thorough, clear and relevant.

It has been characteristic of the linear thinking of most of the western tradition to identify the effects of an agent's action with some occasion or set of occasions. The problem of responsibility has thus falsely been construed as that of whether the agent is the author of the effected occasion; this is allied to the implicit western metaphysical view that a cause produces its effect. Our model has offered an alternative metaphysical view, namely, that an occasion produces itself as a definite individual experience of given actual occasions; an occasion causes another only in the sense of providing something to be experienced. Therefore an agent is responsible only for influences, that is, what he gives to be experienced, not for what the self-producing influenced occasion does with the influence.

The cause-effect model of most western thinking has also distracted attention from the breadth and depth of influence for which an agent should be held responsible. The attempt to find an occasion for which the agent is responsible, rather than influences permeating the whole environment of occasions, has led thinkers to stop tracing responsibility when the influence of other factors than the agent becomes apparent; this has made our moral thinking shallow. The same mistake has made moral thinking narrow by neglecting the way influence on one occasion may alter the ecosystems, social and physical, of which that occasion is a member. The wrong model of action has led to great confusion concerning consequences.

It will surely be argued that our model requires too much sophistication in understanding the ecostructure of the environment. Whereas General Motors and Dupont might be held responsible for knowing the range of their influences, common people cannot be. But considering the scale of history in which this paper is set, this expectation is not unreasonable. The conception of responsibility in linearly-oriented, urban societies requires a sophistication regarding causal laws far beyond that possible in primitive pre-urban societies. There is no reason in principle why the moral view of the universe proper for the emerging technological society would not have a sophistication based on thinking in terms of ecosystems. This affirmation of progress in understanding the causal base of the contours of responsibility is in no way a commitment to the view that men are making progress in the moral quality of their choices; if men know the better and choose the worse

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the only effect of greater sophistication is greater control over evil consequences.

What can be held responsible for a condition. Responsibility for an occasion is to be divided between the sources of influence experienced by the occasions and the free decisions the occasion itself makes in coming to a unified, definite, individual identity. Because it seems that only human beings have significant degrees of the latter, responsibility is usually to be assigned to the sources of influences presented to the occasions to be experienced. ResponsibiIity must, according to our model, be assigned to all the previous occasions influencing the occasion in question. It should be apparent that the most massive sources of influence on an occasion are the ecosystems of which he is a member. Most particular occasions influence other occasions through the mediation of common ecosystems. There may be some regularities, of course, that are not parts of ecosystems, and responsi-

bilities also must be traced through these. But by and large it is true that a given influence is to be traced to a whole ecosystem of occasions; this is especially true of social influences on people.

It is important to recognize that, insofar as an occasion is conditioned by antecedents, all its influencing antecedents are responsible. Just as the western view of linear causation has inclined us to look for a single

individual as the effect authored by a cause, so it has indined us to look for single authors. But the model we have presented suggests a further moral : the specific elements of influence should be traced to a large range

of specific responsible agents and ecosystems. Consider the case of a hoodlum from a slum brought to trial for some

anti-social act. He is of course to be held responsible himself for choosing that act over the other alternatives available to him. But the meaning of each act within the range of his alternatives depends on the semiotic character of some social ecosystem. For him to make a meaningful act is for him to adopt that ecosystem, at least to the extent it is implied in the act; the range of his socially meaningful alternatives is limited by the social ecosystems that are live options for him. Even to do nothing, to refrain from acting, is humanly meaningful only so long as it has a place in some social ecosystem.

Now suppose further that no "socially acceptable" acts are to be found in the social ecosystems that are living options for the man. Suppose, for instance, that he can opt for a criminal act, one investing in the drug

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THE CONTOURS OF R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y : A NEW MODEL

culture, an act of withdrawal from society leading to family desertion, alcohol or addiction, or an act that involves acceptance of the larger society's view that slum people, including the agent, are somehow repre- hensible. The last act might be "socially acceptable" but it involves the agent's rejection of himself. Left with the first three alternatives., although the man is responsible for whi& one he chooses, the antecedent conditions in the various ecosystems of which the man is a member are responsible for his bad range of choices. Whatever the man chooses, and with these alternatives he is more likely just to fall into one thing or another, the more important judgment of responsibility - - moral or legal - - assigns blame to the antecedents. It is a fair plea of the man to his accusers. What live option would you rather have had me choose ?

Is it impossible to assign responsibility for bad conditions to agents This is often the conclusion drawn from arguments like the last one. Or else it is said everyone is responsible and, after suitable public lamentation, the matter is forgotten; witness the reception of presidential commission reports on disorders, education, etc.

Our model would suggest the following. First, suppose there is an ecosystem itself at fault; for instance, suppose there is an ecosystem of a "slum mentality" limiting the man to the alternatives listed above (in reality there are likely to be many ecosystems at fault in a case like this). Now the guilty ecosystem itself is the product of choices made by the occasions within it, and where these occasions are people they are responsible, in a morally culpable sense, for the guilty ecosystem. But then the range of choices open to these people may itself in turn have been determined by antecedent conditions, including ecosystems. Although it is sometimes possible to find specific individuals who freely chose to create or enhance a guilty social ecosystem, this is rare in such a highly integrated society as ours. One can argue that everyone who profits from "the system" is guilty of its evil results; but the significance of this depends on what the alternatives are for the members of the system. In practical affairs the best remedy may be to institute measures to change the ecosystem as a whole without assigning blame to any individual members.

Second, being more or less conscious of the social ecosystems in which they live, human beings can be held responsible for the otherwise live options they foreclose within the set ecosystematic conditions. Most morally interesting states of affairs or acts are not to be reduced to mechanical

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functionings of a confluence of ecosystems in the accused occasion. If a crowd fleeing a darkened theater tramples someone to death, the man who yelled "fire" can be held responsible; to some degree if there is in fact a fire then his responsibility for that death must be weighed against his responsibility for saving the rest of the audience. Or if the anti-social act in the first example happens to involve dope, the pusher can be held partially responsible. Of course, the pusher and the man who yelled "fire" may themselves be determined by ecosystems allowing no alternative; but

this is another matter. The limit of responsibility to be assigned to an agent operating in a

complex environment of ecosystems is directly related to the limits of his

own control. The discussion of responsibility here has not been specified as to kind,

for instance moral or legal responsibility. Our presumptive viewpoint has been that of an omniscient diety who in fact knows the real causal connections. It should be remarked, however, that both morality, in the popular sense, and the legal system are themselves social ecosystems. They should be judged in terms of their good and bad effects as other ecosystems are. Sometimes it seems fitting to limit responsibility only to actions that are intended; this tends to be so when punishments are involved. In cases of liability, intentions are less relevant. It is a crucial problem for both law and morality to determine how much knowledge of effects of action a person

should be held responsible for having.

The aim of Part III has been to present an abstract conceptual scheme or model of how a human agent can have effects on his environment, and how the structure of the environment can be traced to the responsibility of agents. The model is an hypothesis to be considered as a whole, allowing, of course, for qualifications of the whole. It is not a set of conclusions from antecedent

premises; its worth can only be seen in consequent application.

IV. CONCLUSIONS

To summarize this paper backwards, we have presented a formal model of action in an environment. The fundamental units of the model are occasions o,f experience, and the fundamental groupings of occasions are agents and ecosystems. We characterized the membership of agents in

4,8


ecosystems, and the influences agents can have. With this model we were able to say what the limits of a given agent's actions might be, in formal terms, and also what range of things can be assigned responsibility for any given condition. Because of the description of agency in terms of interaction with the environment, this model is able to circumvent the difficulty pointed out in Part II regarding action theory. It should be noted, however, that the model has not treated the meta-ethical problems of justifying obligation, duty, and responsibility. The model only assumes that, however those are to be conceived, responsibility follows iines of causation as qualified by control.

The character of the model is such that, at least generally, it satisfies the need for a conception of the contours of responsibility appropriate for the emerging technological age. To move from general satisfaction, which may mean no more than what whets the interest of the authors, to more specific satisfaction requires two kinds of transformations of the model.

First, the model must be made public. This means it must be expressed in various terms, with various interpretations relative to concrete situations, suitable for appropriation by the mass of people deliberating according to the contours of responsibility. In its present form the model is so abstract as to be accessible only to academics, and perhaps not to all of them.

Second, except in a very general way, it is difficult to tell whether the model will in fact serve to articulate the responsibilities in the coming world. After all, reference to ecological problems and interdisciplinary study makes only the barest suggestion of plausibility. What is needed is a careful specification of the categories of agents, ecosystems, and so forth, to the institutions of law and politics, economics, psychology, medicine and physics, war and peace, and all the other spheres of life in which we expect we have responsibilities. It may not be that our model allows for the articulation in each case of what is really important. If it does distort importance, that is good reason to reject it. But if in fact it can be made specific with respect to all these areas, and in such a form that enlightens rather than beclouds, it will provide a formally general conception of the contours of responsibility.

The problem of testing the worth of the model in each of these realms is further complicated by the fact that the realms to which it can be made specific do not sit still. The same forces of change undermining the older conceptions of the contours of responsibility are also undermining the older conceptions of morals, law, politics, and so forth. Although it is never the

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H A R O L D M O O R E , R O B E R T N E V I L L E , A N D W I L L I A M S U L L I V A N

case that an emergent culture is new in all respects, there is nothing in the

emergent culture that is not new in some respects. So our probations of the

model must be extra-tentative. But this does not mean they are any less

interesting.

N O T E S

1 This paper is the product of the joint discussions and writing of the three authors. Responsibility for the initial drafts was divided as follows : Section I, Dr. Sullivan (Fordham University); Section II, Dr. Moore (Notre Dame University); Section III, Dr. Neville (Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences). 2 The theme of this diagram is developed with reference to modern industrial planning for technology by Theodore J. Gordon in "The Feedback Between Technology and Values," in Values and the Future, ed. by Kurt Baler and Nicholas Rescher (New York : The Free Press,

~969). 3 An interpretation of world history illustrating this thesis, if it i~ not obvious, is W.H. McNeill 's The Rise of the West. This volume also illustrates many of the historical points made below, a,s well as the problems of evidence involved in making general statements about

societies. 4 See V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (New York : New American Library, I951), pp.

8~-85. 5 The unity of man, earth and heaven has been a continuing thesis in Indian and Chinese thought, especially the latter. But the unity had become a problem by the time these societies formalized their traditions in literature. See, for the nearest examples of pre-urban thought, the songs from the Chinese Book of Odes dating from the Shang dynasty, or the earliest

Vedic hymns, especially those to vishnu. 6 Nevertheless there is great variety among traditional economic institutions, many of which are "exploitative" of resources. See Melville J. Herskevitts, Economic Anthropology (New York: Norton, I952) and Paul Radin, The World of Primitive Man (New York : Schuman, ~953), esp.

pp. Io5-I36. 7 Robert Redfield, The Primitive World and Its Transformations (Ithaca : Cornell University

Press, 1953 ), pp. lo5-Io8. 8 See Childe, op. cit., pp. 18I-I85. 0 This claim has occasioned much controversy. It is of course true many strains of Old Testament Hebrew religion emphasize man 's stewardship of the earth, and the neo-platonic strain in Christianity has often bordered on nature-mysticism (ironically enough, since it also emphasizes the hierarchy of being). But what the modern period has singled out for emphasis in the Judeao-Christian tradition, constituting it a tradition in contrast to others, is the theme of nature's instrumentality for man. 10 James engaged in very little discussion of the environment. But it is significant that Dewey, for whom the natural environment was of utmost importance, did not stress the quality of the natural environment in connection with that of the social environment; there is little in his ethical theory, formally considered, that would have prevented this added emphasis. 11 Use of the class term "action theory" is best regarded as denoting a family resemblance among certain positions. It is not to be assumed that there are no points of substantive disagreement among those who can be termed action theorists. The position to be sketched is primarily Richard Taylor's in Action and Purpose (Englewood Cliffs : Prentice Hall, 1966). 12 See Peter Frederick Strawson, Individuals (London : Methuen, I959). It is not being asserted that Strawson is an action theorist. But many, if not all, action theorists either pre- suppose or could get along very well with a Strawsonian descriptive ontology.

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13 The model is put forward as a tentative hypothesis about the most important factors and connections concerning human action and the environment. As an hypothesis its worth can be judged in the long run only through seeing whether it enlightens the whole range of problems connected with action and the environment, problems most of which are not addressed here. The only claim made here is that the hypothesis is valuable for dealing with the issues raised in the previous two sections. Our model derives most of its terms and basic concepts from Whitehead's discussion of actual occasions, nexuses, and societies in Process and Reality. Two important modifications of his theory are made, however. First, the doctrine of agency in our model supplements Whitehead's account of enduring individuals by distinguishing essential endurance, characteristic of moral agents, from conditional endurance, charaCteristic of things with no moral relations to their past and future. Second, Whitehead's model is made specific with respect to distinctions within the social environment, in the ordinary sense of social. 14 The meaning of "Coming to be" is an ontological matter not concerning us here. See Neville's articles "Whitehead on the One and the Many," Southern Journal of Philosophy VII/4 (Winter, I967-7o), and "Genetic Succession, Time, and Becoming," forthcoming in the 7ournat of Process Studies. 15 The distinction between essential and contingent endurance differs from Whitehead in articulating a distinction many people have felt between integral, temporally extended individuals and merely coherent developing complexes whose unity over time is not a matter of their own integrity. 16 The term "semiot ic" was given philosophical currency by Charles S. Pelrce, and the present use of it has been constructed with an eye to mapping his semiotic theory onto the cosmological model. ~7 For a detailed analysis of this use of the term "vague , " see The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1934) 5.448-9.

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