Omissions: Agency, Metaphysics, and Responsibility, by Randolph Clarke.

Abstract

Although philosophers are often quick to look to omissions to provide difficult cases and counterexamples, we rarely consider just what omissions are on their own. And what little work there is on the nature of omissions tends to focus solely on what omissions are and not how what they are should influence our theories in other subfields. This book does a wonderful job bridging this gap. It begins by carefully considering what view of omissions we should have, and then, once the theory is in hand, it spans out to consider how we should think about adjacent issues in the philosophy of action and law. In the first two chapters, Clarke argues for a disjunctive view of omissions. Most of our omissions are simply a matter of our not performing certain actions (e.g. my not picking a friend up from the airport after promising to do so). That is, most omissions are absences of action. Now, it is a further matter just what absences are, but Clarke argues for the reasonable position that they are nothing at all — that there is no thing that is an absence. So, since most omissions are absences of action, most omissions are nothing at all.