Agency and Causal Explanation in Economics

It is quite difficult to make sense of an event without having a notion as to why and how it happened. Indeed, we often have an anxious sense of doubt and uncertainty about something that we know has happened if we have no or only an inadequate idea of the circumstances bringing it about. As Elizabeth Anscombe recollected in the first two sentences of her introduction to Volume II of her collected papers,1 ‘My first strenuous interest in philosophy was in the topic of causality. I didn’t know that what I was interested in belonged to philosophy’. Causality and – as some of the papers in this volume argue – agency are with us even when we are not aware of it, so much so that the questions of the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ not only affect what we know but also are quite fundamental to judgements; no system of morality, no ethical norm can do without them, and even aesthetics cannot lack some conception of the agent. Causation and agency, therefore, affect and permeate all of philosophy ranging from metaphysics through epistemology and ethics all the way to aesthetics.