Act Individuation: An Experimental Approach

Accounts of act individuation have attempted to capture peoples’ pre-theoretic intuitions. Donald Davidson has argued that
a multitude of action descriptions designate only one act, while Alvin Goldman has averred that each action description refers
to a distinct act. Following on recent empirical studies, I subject these accounts of act individuation to experimentation.
The data indicate that people distinguish between actions differently depending upon the moral valence of the outcomes. Thus,
the assumption that a single account of act individuation applies invariantly seems mistaken.