On Newsnight on Tuesday night, Faisal Bodi said that Tony Blair, in his capacity as participant in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, was 'directly responsible' for the London bombings. On any plausible conception of what direct responsibility amounts to, of course, this cannot possibly be true; nor could the much more common claim that he is primarily responsible (implicit in the title of John Pilger's recent New Statesman article, 'Blair's Bombs'). That could only be true if Blair was a responsible agent in a way that the bombers were not: the view seems to be that if one is provoked into doing something awful, the primary responsibility lies with the provoker. Blair is responsible for the bombings, they say, because if he hadn't gone along with the Iraq war the bombings wouldn't have happened. But no one will deny that if the bombers hadn't blown people up in London, there would not have been the appalling recent increase in attacks on mosques. So the same reasoning determines that the primary responsibility for the increase in attacks lies not with the Islamophobic thugs who carry them out, but with the bombers; a proposition Blair's critics are unlikely to concede. Many of them are presumably inclined to hold him responsible for the mosque attacks as well. But then if we are supposed to go back three stages along the chain of provocation, Blair cannot have been responsible for the bombings after all: that honour must belong to whoever provoked him: Saddam Hussein, perhaps? With such critics, one gets the sense not just that Blair (and Bush) are as a matter of fact responsible for nearly everything bad that happens in this arena, which is already implausible enough, but that these leaders have a special metaphysical status: only they can be responsible. Everyone else is just a pawn in their game. Thus the claim that Blair is directly or primarily responsible for the bombings rests on a paranoid fantasy.
Many others, of very various political outlooks, have been more restrained than Bodi and Pilger, and claimed only that Blair is indirectly (and not primarily) responsible; and many of these people also think that Blair, or the fact of the Iraq war, are among the causes of the bombings. Whether he was indirectly responsible cannot be determined, I believe, independently of whether he was right to participate in the invasion and occupation. But to say that he, or the fact of the war, contributed causally to the bombings is fundamentally inconsistent with what is presupposed in our ordinary ways of talking about human action. To show this, I must make some of the relevant presuppositions explicit.
There is a crucial difference, which we all recognize from the first-person perspective, between doing something, and events in our minds (like a sudden sense of dejà vu) or bodily motions (like spasms) that just happen to us. We are the authors of our actions; our actions originate with us. This is all that is meant by the claim that agents are causes of their actions. Some philosophers talk as though this thought is a novel philosophical view, called 'the theory of agent-causation', and 'scientifically-minded' philosophers have criticized it as unintelligible on the grounds that only events can be real causes. But what gets called agent-causation is not so much a bold philosophical thesis as a mere expression of what we all take for granted in our everyday ways of talking about human action: 'I did that'; 'Why did you do that?'; etc.
It is also presupposed, in our ordinary ways of talking about action, that our actions are free: what I do is up to me, and for any action I do, I could have refrained from doing it. This is presupposed both in our practice of holding each other responsible and, again from the first-person perspective, in deliberation. There would be no point in trying to figure out which of a range of actions to do if my choice were not really open or if I am not really the author of my actions; deliberation then would have no real efficacy. It follows from this that an agent's being the cause of an action cannot be understood purely in terms of the causal power of events going on in the agent's mind or body. Such events presumably must have causes of their own in earlier events; the action can be accounted for without reference to the agent as a cause: agent-causation would then be best understood as a special case of event-causation, in a way that rules out our being really free.
If this is true - which is to say, if what is presupposed in our ordinary talk about human action is true - then human actions cannot be thought of as mere events in a causal chain of further events. This is expressed in the traditional legal doctrine of novus actus interveniens, according to which a human action cuts short the chain of causally-connected events consequent upon any previous action. For the cause of a human action is not an event at all, but an agent: a person, a human being. If I tempt you with ice-cream knowing that you will renege on your diet as a result, am I partly responsible for your making a pig of yourself? Absolutely. Did I cause you to pig out? Not at all. That could only be true if there were a chain of causally-connected events, beginning with my tempting you and ending with you pigging out. But this is inconsistent with the presuppositions enumerated above: there is no way of understanding your pigging-out, consistently with those presuppositions, in terms of event-causation. That would be to view you as a mere mechanism rather than as a responsible agent. This simply shows that we are responsible for more than we cause. One may bear some responsibility for someone else's action (through temptation, incitement, predictably enraging someone, etc), even though, so long as the other person remains the author of her actions, one is not causally connected with the action or its consequences. Whether or not Bush and Blair bear any blame for the bombings, they cannot be said, on this view, to have contributed causally to them. And as Norm has rightly pointed out, even if Blair foresaw this sort of thing as an all-but-inevitable consequence of his policies, he cannot even be held partly responsible for the bombings unless those policies were wrong (or unnecessary) for other reasons. Of course, all those who attribute responsibility to Blair believe that those policies were wrong for other reasons, but make themselves look foolish by failing to realize that that belief is presupposed in their condemnations of Blair for the London attacks.
Most will agree that Blair's participation in the war raised the probability that some people would perpetrate something like the bombings. This has been particularly loudly insisted upon by those opposed to his participation. But why? Nothing follows concerning Blair's responsibility. Many think that Blair must be partly responsible, because he is a knowing cause, and we're responsible for what we knowingly cause. But if what everyone thinks and says about human action is true, he cannot have been a cause of the bombings (even though he raised the probability that they would occur) since the bombings were free acts. This doesn't show that he's not partly responsible, but additional premises would be needed for that. Among these premises is the claim that Blair was wrong (for other reasons) to participate in the war. But that is precisely what is denied by most of those who deny that Blair is responsible for the bombings. And even one who thinks that Blair was wrong to participate in the war may consistently maintain that he bears no responsibility for the bombings. The fact of the bombings sheds no light on the legitimacy or otherwise of the war. Opponents of the war should stop pretending that it does.
I should emphasize that I have not tried to show that what is presupposed in our ordinary thought and talk about human action is true. But if it turned out false, that would be a disaster; and we would very likely find it impossible to lead recognizably human lives consistent with such a realization. Furthermore, I believe that we are firmly entitled to believe these presuppositions in the absence of any demonstration (from science, for example) that they are false; I also believe that no such demonstration has been given or is in prospect.
Note: These reflections on human action derive largely from Aristotle, Aquinas and Kant. There are excellent recent presentations of these ideas in Alan Donagan, The Theory of Morality (chapter 2), and Richard Taylor, Action and Purpose.
(James Doyle)