Common constitution and the sources of an act

Dependence does not make a participant disappear. The question is which kind of authorship is being claimed. Being constituted within reality, exercising a received power, authoring a particular judgment and authoring the whole basis of that power are distinct relations. This chapter separates them before deriving any exclusion. Its strongest conclusions retain the premises that carry them, while its positive account locates understanding and action in the person’s realized organization.

2 Common constitution and the sources of an act

2.1 Dependence, exercise and authorship

Three dependence claims and two authorship questions must be distinguished. A person’s existence can depend on constituting reality. Their capacities can depend on embodied organization, development and environment. A particular exercise can itself be an occurrence within that constitution. Ultimate authorship asks whether the person authored the enabling and authorizing basis of those capacities. Present authorship asks whether this exercise is the person’s decision, including, on a libertarian account, whether the person settles an open alternative. The first three relations do not by themselves decide either authorship question.

An unchosen ability can be genuinely exercised. A writer authors a chapter without first authoring language or the capacity to write. Similarly, a person may assess reasons, commit to an intention and execute an action without producing every condition that makes assessment possible. Local causal control concerns callable effects under actual operations and resources. Evaluative self-governance concerns the operative use of considerations in assessing alternatives and revising rules. Historical ownership concerns the process by which the operative organization was acquired, including persuasion, deception, coercion, bypass and later reassessment. Agency is therefore not interchangeable with moral responsibility, which introduces additional questions about answerability, desert and justified responses.

Common constitution has a substantive explanatory use when it prevents a mistaken competition. If the person is a realized organization, the organization’s assessment need not occur somewhere else while the person watches. The person’s understanding is the relevant organized activity. This does not make every internal event an intentional action. Reflex, compulsion, accident, assessment and commitment still require differentiation. Under the realized account, their differences are located in the organization and its relations. Whether those relations exhaust a proposed irreducible personal cause remains a further question.

This is an immanent account of action, not an argument for ubiquitous causal connection. A common constituting reality could include dynamically isolated factors. Nor does the claim that parts depend on a whole prove that the whole is ontologically prior in Schaffer’s stronger sense. Priority monism is a close philosophical comparison, with its own grounding commitments (Schaffer 2010, 35-37, 51-55). Constitution should not receive consequences merely because the word “whole” makes them sound natural.

2.2 Four routes to a stronger exclusion

The first possible route invokes the completeness of the whole. A complete actual occurrence includes the decision, so fixing that occurrence fixes the decision within it. This does not show that fixing the temporally prior occurrence fixes its successor. In schematic notation, $a=d(g_{\rm actual})$ does not entail $a=f(g_{\rm prior})$.

Example 2.1 (An entirely constituted but open exercise). A nominated carrier has states $g_*,g_0,g_1$. From $g_*$ the transition reaches $g_0$ with probability $p$ and $g_1$ with probability $1-p$, where $0\lt p\lt 1$. Personal existence and availability of the capacity are represented by constant functions equal to one. The actual action is $a(g_i)=i$. Every actual action and capacity is represented within the carrier; the prior state permits two actions. A Dirac transition instead makes the same constitution scheme deterministic.

The example tests an implication, not a proposed state space of the unknown ground. Adding a primitive interpretation that the dependent person activates the selected transition, or withholding that interpretation, leaves the displayed laws unchanged. The written premises therefore have not excluded agent causation. They do not prove that every such interpretation is coherent either. Their role is to locate the missing argument.

The second route moves from dependence of a power to dependence of each exercise. It is correct that an exercise requires its power and conditions. It does not follow that those conditions antecedently necessitate the exercise or that exercising an unchosen power cannot be present authorship. The strongest embedded agent-causal rival grants physical composition and unchosen reasons while claiming a nonstructural personal power of activation. O’Connor’s inspected author draft explicitly distinguishes physically composed agents from causally reducible ones and separates propensity-conferring reasons from activation (O’Connor 2010, draft pp. 6-7, 20-22, 29-31). The rival is inside reality, not an independent visitor to it.

The third route strengthens constitution to a claim about token causal relations:

Token-causal constitution.

In the nominated regime, the initiating and controlling relations are fully constituted by the causal relations of the independently specified realized organization. No further irreducible agent-to-act initiating relation supplements that realization, whether or not its effect is the same token event.

This premise conflicts with an ontologically distinctive agent-causal addition. Its consequence is substantive but follows from the stronger causal premise, not from oneness alone. It permits stochastic realized dynamics. A probability law, covariance of mental and physical descriptions, or physical composition does not establish the premise. An event-causal libertarian can also accept the realized organization while denying deterministic evolution; whether indeterministic efforts supply authorship requires a further account of control and attribution, not merely a random seed.

The fourth route asks what a realized explanation can earn through scientific adequacy. A mechanism that identifies acquisition, retention, assessment and installation routes can predict the effects of cutting and restoring them, changing task contexts and imposing deadlines. Such predictions supply evidence of operational adequacy within the declared regime. They are stronger evidence than fitting intact behavior alone. If an additional selector changes no admitted law, those data provide no preference for its addition. This supports using the adequate realized model without the extra mechanism. It does not prove that every metaphysical interpretation of the same exercise is false.

For probability laws, $\operatorname{TV}(P,Q)=\sup_A|P(A)-Q(A)|$. In the finite constructions it equals $\tfrac12\sum_z|P(z)-Q(z)|$.

Proposition 2.2 (Bounded residual contrast). Let $P_i$ be actual complete transcript laws and $Q_i$ registered comparison laws for interventions $i=0,1$, with $\operatorname{TV}(P_i,Q_i)\leq\epsilon_i$. For any fixed measurable score $0\leq f\leq1$,

$$\left|(\mathbb E_{P_1}f-\mathbb E_{P_0}f)-(\mathbb E_{Q_1}f-\mathbb E_{Q_0}f)\right| \leq\epsilon_0+\epsilon_1.$$

Proof. Each expectation error is at most its total-variation distance. Apply the triangle inequality to their difference. ◻

This standard probability bound supplies an operational constraint, not an ontology detector. An observable additional contrast larger than the budget contradicts the conformance premises; an unobservable activation predicate is not bounded by it. Uniform joint-history instrument bounds later provide one route to the $\epsilon_i$. Evidence for the realized model’s causal adequacy is consequently regime-relative and revisable; it does not establish token-causal constitution against an activation interpretation with the same laws. Shared constitution supplies the interpretation of whose realized activity this is, while mechanism and intervention evidence supply the explanation of how it occurs.

2.3 What evidence for a realized account can establish

The strongest dependent agent-causal rival accepts that the person’s body, reasoning and powers are constituted within reality. It does not require an external visitor or a person who first chose the reasons presently moving them. O’Connor permits physically composed agents whose personal causal powers are compositionally irreducible, and distinguishes an unchosen motivational basis from direct settlement of a particular intention (O’Connor 2010, draft pp. 6-7, 20-22). A fair comparison must therefore ask whether the realized account explains settlement, rather than treating the rival’s acceptance of received capacities as its defeat.

Two distinctions prevent the comparison from becoming verbal. The identity of an act does not settle the identity or grounding of its causal relations. A rival may identify the bodily and intentional event while holding it to be irreducibly agent-caused. It need not posit a second physical event. Conversely, personal explanation can remain irreducible as an explanation without adding an irreducible initiating relation. Reasons, commitments and historical ownership can explain why conduct is this person’s action while its causation is realized through the nominated organization. Token-causal constitution concerns the constitution of initiating relations, not the elimination of personal explanation or merely the counting of event tokens.

The realizer must be nominated independently of the conclusion. Its states, inputs, retained records and operations cannot be defined as whatever already excludes agent causation. The recognition construction supplies a limited nomination: an acquired model, assessment, separate write route, archive and fresh action. Cutting and restoring these routes has declared effects. This account can fail its tests before we decide whether it exhausts every metaphysical fact about a person’s activity.

There are then three comparisons. An account that gives the same realized process a personal, reasons-based explanation can be compatible with token-causal constitution. An account that adds a basic personal initiating relation disputes that constitution even if the effect is the same event. If that addition changes an admitted intervention law, the models can disagree about complete transcripts. If it leaves every such law unchanged, those intervention data cannot decide between them. The classification concerns claimed relations and consequences, rather than terminology.

The last case gives the rival its strongest reply. Objective propensities may structure a person’s choices while leaving it to that person to activate the power on an occasion. O’Connor expressly denies that matching propensity frequencies makes token activation redundant (O’Connor 2010, draft pp. 29-31). Accurate frequencies do not answer that objection: an exact stochastic distribution does not itself identify what, if anything, settles an individual outcome. Likewise, placing a random variable in a representation does not prove that the represented process lacks a personal cause.

Even agreement under all admitted interventions establishes an evidential limit, not the truth of either interpretation. Let $P_i,Q_i$ be complete transcript laws for the realized model and its rival under admitted protocol $i$, including its retained records, stopping rule and adaptive interventions. If $P_i=Q_i$ throughout the declared family, every measurable transcript statistic has the same distribution under both. A decision rule using only those transcripts therefore receives identical likelihoods. This elementary consequence of equal measures applies the existing identifiability distinction; it is not a new no-agent-causation theorem. Enlarging the family may break agreement but requires newly justified operations and access. Agreement within one family is not agreement under every metaphysically possible counterfactual.

Positive support for the realized account is consequently comparative. Successful predictions of intact conduct, read disruption, failed installation, compensatory support and fresh action earn operational adequacy over a tested contract. Explaining those contrasts through the same independently identified organization gives the account unity. It does not need a new selector to repair each result. If a rival adds an initiating relation while accepting those explanations and contributing no further explanatory or predictive achievement, economy favors using the realized account. This is a reasoned preference conditional on the agreed explanatory task, not a deduction from an unconditional law of parsimony.

The irreducible-settler theorist can dispute that the task is complete. Perhaps only a primitive personal relation, the theorist argues, explains the difference between controlled resolution and a fortunate stochastic occurrence. The response is to require that achievement to be articulated: what does the relation explain, how does it belong to the person, and why does it supply the disputed control? Merely naming it does not answer Brennan’s demand for an account of the chooser’s activity (Brennan 2007, 215-17). Conversely, insisting that only a measurable frequency difference could count as explanation would assume too much against the rival. The comparison concerns causal, semantic and modal explanation together. Our finite results explain acquisition, assessment and installation without resolving every proposed primitive relation.

Attribution supplies no shortcut either. On the realized account the deciding participant is the organized person, not an executive component isolated from its support. Ismael’s whole-company analogy locates judgment in that organization (Ismael 2016, 82; pp. 107-108). Appropriate attribution still requires relevant reasons, capacities, histories and an absence of pertinent bypass or coercion. These conditions give a positive account of this act’s ownership; they do not establish authorship of every condition enabling the owner to exist.

2.4 Why self-revision does not create its entire authorization basis

The inherited non-origination argument concerns a different ambition. Suppose ultimate self-authorization requires that an exercise’s relevant authorizing conditions were themselves established by a qualifying exercise. Suppose also that required prior authorization is well founded, with no infinite descending chain or self-authorizing cycle. These are philosophical premises about ultimate authorization, not a demand placed on every ordinary rational judgment.

Proposition 2.3 (Inherited authorization obstruction). If $\prec$ is well founded on a set $E$ and $Q\subseteq E$ satisfies

$$e\in Q\ \Longrightarrow\ \exists d\in Q\quad d\prec e,$$

then $Q=\varnothing$.

Proof. A nonempty $Q$ has a $\prec$-minimal member. Its required predecessor in $Q$ contradicts minimality. ◻

The formal core is inherited from the control monograph’s Appendix C.4, in dialogue with Strawson’s Basic Argument (Rodgers 2026j; Strawson 1994). It shows why repeated self-forming choices cannot upgrade received enabling conditions into ultimately self-established ones under those premises. Its least premises do not include common ground, physicalism or determinism. An infinite authorization descent or a primitive self-authorizing cycle rejects well-foundedness; invoking one does not satisfy the displayed argument. Whether either supplies a coherent alternative account is philosophical work beyond the contradiction.

The inheritance requirement has force against the claim to be the final author of one’s whole source-making capacity. If that capacity’s authorizing basis remains unchosen, the stronger achievement has not been supplied. It has no comparable automatic force against authorship of a particular decision. A person need not create the truth of a reason before acting on it. Strawson’s further conclusion about ultimate moral responsibility requires a responsibility-transfer premise, contested by compatibilists and acknowledged as contested in his discussion (Strawson 1994, 16-17). The present result does not settle that normative dispute.

Spinoza and Schopenhauer clarify why these distinctions matter. In the supplied Ethics, Part I, necessitation draws on Axiom III and the modal-causal argument of Propositions 16 and 26-32, not bare substance unity (Spinoza 1997). Schopenhauer eventually locates freedom in intelligible character, despite his necessitating account of action (Schopenhauer 1985, ch. V, pp. 96-99). Neither is simply an authority for denying every serious form of freedom. Their arguments help expose what additional claims a stronger conclusion requires.

2.5 The cumulative argument and constituted participation

The central conclusion survives without treating comparison as deductive exclusion. Common constitution rules out an individual whose being is wholly independent of the reality constituting it. Inherited authorization addresses a different ambition: ultimate authorship of the relevant enabling and authorizing basis. If each qualifying authorization requires an earlier qualifying authorization and that dependency is well founded, no ultimately self-authorizing exercise exists. These are not conditions imposed on ordinary decisions. They explicate the stronger source-of-the-source achievement being tested.

Complete-history ontology adds that the actual decision and its making belong within one actual history. It does not show that the prior part uniquely entails the decision. Appropriate prior-data uniqueness supplies that further exclusion in its physical regime; token-causal constitution would additionally exclude the nominated irreducible initiating relation. An embedded settler can reject either stronger claim without acquiring authorship of its entire unchosen basis. The paper thus has a stable central result and a separately identified stronger exclusion claim, rather than one conclusion that falls with every disputed premise.

The remaining authorship is substantive. Deciding a particular question can form a judgment through an organization able to consider reasons, retain commitments and carry assessment into action. Its enabling conditions need not be self-created for that activity to belong to it. Ismael expressly accepts the absence of self-creation all the way down while defending such self-governance (Ismael 2016, 204 n. 16). A dependent agent-causal theory can defend some of this positive account too. The dispute concerns the constitution of settlement, not whether reflection and commitment occur.

Recognition now has a precise role. A disposition can claim unconditional priority because it allegedly expresses an independently originating author. Rejecting that justification removes only that entitlement. Evidence, care, practical identity or a warranted commitment may still support retaining the disposition. Understanding can change the grounds and operation of authority without loss of memory or indiscriminate removal of constraints. The finite construction makes one such relation inspectable through acquisition, assessment, installation and retention. It does not encode a metaphysical doctrine in a bit and call its alteration insight.

The result is consequential participation through a changed relation to one’s constitution. Common reality is not a second personal controller; it is the reality in which the person’s inquiry and action are realized. A complete history can include an earlier recommendation, its later examination and subsequent warranted retention or revision. The negative limit concerns ultimate independent authorship. The positive achievement concerns how a received but real participant understands and governs some of its activity.

Constitutive physicalism and some other monisms can offer the same noncompetitive explanation. Shared ground alone has no unique operational prediction over them. Shadow Theory adds a provisional awareness interpretation of experiential presence, with separate occurrence laws still owed. Pluralism can explain interacting personal organizations while disputing their ultimate grounding; embedded strong emergence can share common ground while disputing token-causal constitution. The comparison concerns explanatory architecture and irreducible powers. The finite results below cannot decide it merely by working successfully.

2.6 One physical bearer and the priority of the whole

Schaffer’s Spacetime the one substance supplies a stronger comparison than a generic appeal to monism. Its central claim identifies material objects with spacetime regions bearing fundamental properties. His starting substantivalism is already a claim about fundamentality: the relevant spacetime entities are not grounded in anything deeper. The question is then whether material occupants constitute an additional fundamental kind (Schaffer 2009, 131-34). This starting point matters for Shadow Theory. If physical spacetime is a manifestation or operational readout of an unknown ground, then it is not fundamental in Schaffer’s stipulated sense. The present account can accept an identification within the physical description while withholding the identification of ultimate ground with spacetime. That is a qualification of his proposal, rather than his conclusion under another name.

Schaffer explicitly distinguishes supersubstantivalism from priority monism (Schaffer 2009, 133 n. 5). One concerns whether matter needs another fundamental bearer; the other concerns whether the whole cosmos is prior to its proper parts. His preferred package connects them through the additional premise that the entire manifold is prior to its subregions. He supports this premise through globally constituted topological and geometric features, and, under metric essentialism or moderate structural realism, individuation through position in the whole. His plane and cylinder can match locally while differing globally. The package also requires perdurance and unrestricted composition for regions. He expressly permits disagreement with these connecting premises, and observes that a constitution view need not transfer either persistence conditions or priority from constituting matter to constituted objects (Schaffer 2009, 135-37).

The argument therefore deserves engagement at its strongest point. Spacetime already supplies a bearer for properties. A second substratum appears redundant unless it earns its place. Moreover, shape and parthood of a body systematically match those of its region. Material objects materialize somewhere, exclude competing exact occupants, and occupy one region over their complete careers. Identity explains this harmony without independently imposing each occupancy constraint. A rival that merely repeats the ordinary distinction between what and where leaves that explanatory challenge unanswered. Schaffer’s replies to modal difference and empty regions are also substantive: counterpart comparisons can vary with conceptualization, and a region with zero stress-energy need not lack a physical bearer (Schaffer 2009, 137-46).

His two physical arguments reinforce this proposal. General relativistic models describe metric and stress-energy fields on a manifold, rather than listing independent bodies in fundamental occupancy relations. Quantum field theory likewise motivates treating particles through field excitation rather than as additional localizable occupants. These considerations support a parsimonious interpretation of physical structure. They do not, by the syntax of the equations alone, determine metaphysical grounding. Nor does the failure of local intrinsic descriptions to fix global topology establish whole-to-part dependence: a relational pluralist can put relata and their relations together in the fundamental base. The disagreement concerns which base best explains the organization, rather than whether the organization exists.

For agency, the positive lesson is that realized activity need not belong to an alien substratum acting instead of the person. An organized material process can be the person’s understanding and action. But neither this identification nor whole-priority establishes deterministic evolution, excludes a dependent irreducible initiating power, or selects a phenomenal subject. Physical bearers, temporal ontology, causal sufficiency and psychophysical constitution remain different claims.

The distinction also sharpens the source-readout comparison. A Lorentz transformation is an invertible redescription of nominated spacetime events. A many-to-one operational readout can instead omit distinctions relevant to an independently specified target. Both involve perspectives, but only the latter entails a loss of accessible discrimination under its stated map. Identifying a body’s organized activity with physical organization does not make that map injective, or establish that its nominated source exhausts the unknown ground. Nor does a four-dimensional physical bearer determine the boundary of an experiencing episode. A physical “observer” in Putnam’s argument need not be conscious; treating physical systems as eligible does not turn their coordinate frames into phenomenal subjects. The constitution of a complete occurrence still requires its own organizational and psychophysical justification.