ABSTRACT
The contrast between rational and merely natural capacities is clearest in the case of technological capacities. Like technological capacities, second-natural capacities are products of our rational natures, but in a different way; second-natural capacities are the result of an education. We seem to have wound up at some distance from the event-causal theories that the common acceptation of 'causal theory of action' encompasses: basic actions understood as the exercise of capacities to do something straight off not only involve no commitment to event-causal theories, they are prima facie inimical to them. The author will call the sort of capacity answering Lavin's characterization technological, because in it a technique is exploited. It's tempting to identify acts done without deliberation-call them fluent actions-with basic actions. The fluent/non-fluent distinction is useful, and the observation that there are fluent actions that have a deliberative structure is important.
