Performing an action even acting unfreely is exercising active control over what one does; acting freely is exercising an especially valuable variety of such control.
But the "can" here seems to be just a matter of chance: Elena actually exercises active control one way, and there remains, until she does, a chance that she will exercise such control a different way.
Might the actish feel of some occurrence itself constitute that event's activeness, or the agent's exercise of active control?
However, where intentionality is divorced from an appropriate causal production, it does not seem that it can, by itself, even partly constitute the exercise of active control.
On the view of agency in play here, Elena's decision is an exercise of active control in virtue of being caused by prior mental events, such as her recognizing certain reasons.
Other proponents of noncausal theories of intentional action (e.g., Pink 2004: ch. 8) likewise take the exercise of active control to be an ontologically fundamental or irreducible thing.
McCann (1998: 180) holds that an agent's exercise of active control has two aspects: any basic action is a spontaneous, creative undertaking on the part of the agent, and it is intrinsically intentional.
But this indeterministic picture seems to give us just an actual exercise of active control of a sort we could have on a deterministic picture, plus the chance that this same kind of control would be exercised differently, in making the alternative decision.
An assessor-blinded randomized controlled multicenter trial examined the effects of progressive resistance group exercise compared with an active control group.
A total of 130 women with FM (age 22 64 years, symptom duration 0 35 years) were included in this assessor-blinded randomized controlled multi-center trial examining the effects of progressive resistance group exercise compared with an active control group.
