Likewise, there may not be any agenty dust in the universe. But if your implied conclusion is that there are no agents in the universe, then your conclusion is false.
This. I call the inference “no X at the microlevel, therefore, no such thing as X” the Cherry Pion fallacy. (As in, no cherry pions, implies no cherry pie.) Of course more broadly speaking it’s an instance of the fallacy of composition, but, this variety seems to be more tempting than most, so it merits its own moniker.
It’s a shame. The OP begins with some great questions, and goes on to consider relevant observations like
When we are sad, we haven’t attributed the cause of the inciting event to an agent; the cause is situational, beyond human control. When we are angry, we’ve attributed the cause of the event to the actions of another agent.
But from there, the obvious move is one of charitable interpretation, saying, Hey! Responsibility is declared in these sorts of situations, when an agent has caused an event that wouldn’t have happened without her, so maybe, “responsibility” means something like “the agent caused an event that wouldn’t have happened without her”. Then one could find counterexamples to this first formulation, and come up with a new formulation that got the new (and old) examples right … and so on.
The OP has explicitly denied committing the cherry pion fallacy here. I confess, though, that I’m not sure what point the OP is making by observing that grinding the universe to dust would not produce agenty dust. I can see two non-cherry-pion-fallacy-y things they might be saying—“agency doesn’t live at the microlevel, so stop looking at the microlevel for things you need to look further up for” and “agency doesn’t live at the microlevel, but it’s produced by the microlevel, so let’s understand that and build up from there”—but I don’t see how to fit either of them into what comes before and after what the OP says about agenty dust. Gram_Stone, would you care to do some inferential-gap bridging?
This. I call the inference “no X at the microlevel, therefore, no such thing as X” the Cherry Pion fallacy. (As in, no cherry pions, implies no cherry pie.) Of course more broadly speaking it’s an instance of the fallacy of composition, but, this variety seems to be more tempting than most, so it merits its own moniker.
It’s a shame. The OP begins with some great questions, and goes on to consider relevant observations like
But from there, the obvious move is one of charitable interpretation, saying, Hey! Responsibility is declared in these sorts of situations, when an agent has caused an event that wouldn’t have happened without her, so maybe, “responsibility” means something like “the agent caused an event that wouldn’t have happened without her”. Then one could find counterexamples to this first formulation, and come up with a new formulation that got the new (and old) examples right … and so on.
The OP has explicitly denied committing the cherry pion fallacy here. I confess, though, that I’m not sure what point the OP is making by observing that grinding the universe to dust would not produce agenty dust. I can see two non-cherry-pion-fallacy-y things they might be saying—“agency doesn’t live at the microlevel, so stop looking at the microlevel for things you need to look further up for” and “agency doesn’t live at the microlevel, but it’s produced by the microlevel, so let’s understand that and build up from there”—but I don’t see how to fit either of them into what comes before and after what the OP says about agenty dust. Gram_Stone, would you care to do some inferential-gap bridging?