In this chapter, I consider whether we can solve the problem of negative action by insisting that intentional omissions, refrainments, and the like aren’t really actions at all, but ‘mere manifestations of agency’. I argue that the distinction between actions and mere manifestations of agency is more difficult to draw than it may appear, and that drawing such a distinction requires us to abandon plausible claims about the relations between powers and their manifestations, and between intentional behaviour and practical reasons. We must find some other solution to the problem.

I consider a range of objections to the identity of negative actions and positive events, which have appeared in the recent literature. Most of these objections are appeals to Leibniz’s Law: they attempt to show that a certain negative action can’t be identical to a certain positive event, because these entities have different properties (e.g. different spatiotemporal locations, modal profiles, or causal roles). I show that these objections rely on confusions (e.g. between the things we do and our particular doings of them, or between action sentences and nominals which purport to denote particular doings). Thus, we can (and in the light of the previous chapters, we should) identify negative actions with positive events.