What happens when someone acts? A familiar answer goes like this. There is something that the agent wants, and there is an action that he believes conducive to its attainment. His desire for the end, and his belief in the action as a means, justify taking the action, and they jointly cause an intention to take it, which in turn causes the corresponding movements of the agent's body. Provided that these causal processes take their normal course, the agent's movements consummate an action, and his motivating desire and belief constitute his reasons for acting. This story is widely accepted as a satisfactory account of human action-or at least, as an account that will be satisfactory once it is completed by a definition of what's normal in the relevant causal processes. The story is widely credited to Donald Davidson's Essays on Actions and Events (1980), but I do not wish to become embroiled in questions of exegesis.2 I shall therefore refer to it simply as the standard story of human action. I think that the standard story is flawed in several respects. The flaw that will concern me in this paper is that the story fails to include an agent-or, more precisely, fails to cast the agent in his proper role.3 In this story, reasons cause an intention, and an intention causes bodily movements, but nobody-that is, no person-does anything. Psychological and physiological events take place inside a person, but the person serves merely as the arena for these events: he takes no active part.4