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Human Acts
Acts are termed human when they are proper to man as man; when, on the contrary,
they are elicited by man, but not proper to him as a rational agent, they are
called acts of man .
NATURE
St. Thomas and the scholastics in general regard only the free and deliberate acts of
the will as human. Their view is grounded on psychological analysis. A free act is
voluntary, that is, it proceeds from the willwith the apprehension of the end sought,
or, in other words, is put forth by the will solicited by the goodness of the object as
presented to it by the understanding. Free acts, moreover, proceed from the will's
PROPERTIES
Human acts are imputable to man so as to involve his responsibility, for the
very reason that he puts them forth deliberatively and with self-determination. They
are, moreover, not subject to physical laws which necessitate the agent, but to
a law which lays the will under obligation without interfering with his freedom of
choice. Besides, they are moral. For a moral act is one that is freely elicited with
the knowledge of its conformity with or difformity from, the law of
practical reason proximately and the law of God ultimately. But whenever an act is
elicited with full deliberation, its relationship to the law of reason is adverted to.
Hence human acts are either morally good or morally bad, and their goodness or
badness is imputed to man. And as, in consequence, they are worthy of praise or
blame, so man, who elicits them, is regarded as virtuous or wicked, innocent or
guilty, deserving of reward or punishment. Upon the freedom of the human act,
therefore, rest imputability and morality, man's moral character, his ability to pursue
his ultimate end not of necessity and compulsion, but of his own will and choice; in a
word, his entire dignity and preeminence in this visible universe.
RECENT VIEWS
Recent philosophic speculation discards free will conceived as capability of selfdetermination. The mainreason advanced against it is its apparent incompatibility
with the law of causation. Instead of indeterminism, determinism is now most widely
accepted. According to the latter, every act of the will is ofnecessity determined by
the character of the agent and the motives which render the action desirable.
Character, consisting of individual dispositions and habits, is either inherited from
ancestors or acquired by past activity; motives arise from the pleasurableness or
unpleasurableness of the action and its object, or from the external environment.
Many determinists drop freedom, imputability, and responsibility, as inconsistent with
their theory. To them, therefore, the human act cannot be anything else than
thevoluntary act. But there are other determinists who still admit the freedom of will.
In their opinion a free action is that which "flows from the universe of the character of
the agent." And as "character is the constitution of Self as a whole", they define
freedom as "the control proceeding from the Self as a whole, and determining the
Self as a whole." We find freedom also defined as a state in which man wills only in
conformity with his true, unchanged, and untrammelled personality. In like manner
Kant, though in his "Critique of Pure Reason" he advocates determinism,
nevertheless in his "Fundamental Metaphysics of Morals " admits the freedom of the
will, conceiving it as independence of external causes. The will, he maintains, is a
causality proper to rational beings, and freedom is its endowment enabling it to act
without being determined from without, just as natural necessity is the need proper
to irrational creatures of being determined to action by external influence. He adds,
however, in explanation, that the will must act according to unchangeable laws as
else it would be an absurdity. Free acts thus characterised are termed human by
these determinists, because they proceed from man's reason and personality. But
plainly they are not human in the scholastic acceptation, nor in the full and proper
sense. They are not such, because they are not under the dominion of man. True
freedom, which makes man master of his actions, must be conceived
as immunity from all necessitation to act. So it was understood by the scholastics.
They defined it as immunity from both intrinsic and extrinsic necessitation. Not so the
determinists. According to them it involves immunity from extrinsic, but not from
intrinsic, necessitation. Human acts, therefore, as also imputability and responsibility,
are not the same thing in the old and in the new schools.
So it comes to pass, that, while nowadays in ethics and law the very same scientific
terms are employed as in former ages, they no longer have the same meaning as in
the past nor the same in Catholic as in non-Catholic literature.
HUMAN ACTSIntroduction
Human persons intelligent and free
HOW?
by freely choosing to shape our lives and actions in accord with thetruth
by making
good moral choices
properly enlightened by
knowledge
supplied by the
intellect
Therefore,
Human acts are those acts which proceed from a deliberate freewill
HUMAN ACTS THE CONCERN OF MORALITY
only human acts are moral acts = it is only with human acts that
man isresponsible for his actionsREASON AND FREEDOM
makes man a moral subject
REASONHuman acts are either in agreement or in disagreement with the
dictates ofreason
dictates of reason
- shared consciousness of prudent people about the manner ofaction or behaviorNorm of morality which is the standard by which actions are judged as
good or evil
FREEDOMmakes man a moral subject- when man acts in deliberate manner --- he is the
father of his acts
=
the
will has a
fixed inclination
to the good the will can only choose something badwhen it is
presented under its good aspects
= it is due to the disordered disposition ofthe will with respect to its last end, and
themeans leading to it = there lies theculpability of the choice
2
ACTS OF MAN
- those acts which man performs without being master of them through hisintellect
and will = therefore, they are not voluntary
EXAMPLES OF ACTS OF MAN
human acts
when they are performed with malice,or when we are directed by the will, when we
look at something or arouseourselves
Acts of persons
without the proper use of reason
children or insanepersons
Acts of people
asleep
or under the influence of
hypnosis
,
alcohol
or other
drugs
.- however, there may still be some degree of control by the will- but there is indirect
responsibility if the cause of the loss of control isvoluntary
Primo-primi acts
reflex and nearly instantaneous reactions without time for theintellect or will to
intervene
Potentiality[edit]
Potentiality and potency are translations of the Ancient
Greek word dunamis () as it is used by Aristotle as a concept contrasting
with actuality. Its Latin translation is "potentia", root of the English word potential,
and used by some scholars instead of the Greek or English variants.
Dunamis is an ordinary Greek word for possibility or capability. Depending on
context, it could be translated "potency", "potential", "capacity", "ability", "power",
"capability", "strength", "possibility", "force" and is the root of modern English words
"dynamic", "dynamite", and "dynamo".[5] In early modern philosophy, English authors
like Hobbes andLocke used the English word "power" as their translation of
Latin potentia.[6]
In his philosophy, Aristotle distinguished two meanings of the word dunamis.
According to his understanding of nature there was both a weak sense of potential,
meaning simply that something "might chance to happen or not to happen", and a
stronger sense, to indicate how something could be done well. For example,
"sometimes we say that those who can merely take a walk, or speak, without doing it
as well as they intended, cannot speak or walk". This stronger sense is mainly said
of the potentials of living things, although it is also sometimes used for things like
musical instruments.[7]
Throughout his works, Aristotle clearly distinguishes things that are stable or
persistent, with their own strong natural tendency to a specific type of change, from
things that appear to occur by chance. He treats these as having a different and
more real existence. "Natures which persist" are said by him to be one of the causes
of all things, while natures that do not persist, "might often be slandered as not being
at all by one who fixes his thinking sternly upon it as upon a criminal". The potencies
which persist in a particular material are one way of describing "the nature itself" of
that material, an innate source of motion and rest within that material. In terms of
Aristotle's theory of four causes, a material's non-accidental potential, is the material
cause of the things that can come to be from that material, and one part of how we
can understand the substance(ousia, sometimes translated as "thinghood") of any
separate thing. (As emphasized by Aristotle, this requires his distinction
between accidental causes and natural causes.)[8]According to Aristotle, when we
refer to the nature of a thing, we are referring to the form, shape or look of a thing,
which was already present as a potential, an innate tendency to change, in that
material before it achieved that form, but things show what they are more fully, as a
real thing, when they are "fully at work".[9]
Actuality[edit]
Sachs therefore proposed a complex neologism of his own, "being-at-work-stayingthe-same".[17] Another translation in recent years is "being-at-an-end" (which Sachs
has also used).[2]
Entelecheia, as can be seen by its derivation, is a kind of completeness, whereas
"the end and completion of any genuine being is its being-at-work" (energeia).
The entelecheiais a continuous being-at-work (energeia) when something is doing
its complete "work". For this reason, the meanings of the two words converge, and
they both depend upon the idea that every thing's "thinghood" is a kind of work, or in
other words a specific way of being in motion. All things that exist now, and not just
potentially, are beings-at-work, and all of them have a tendency towards being-atwork in a particular way that would be their proper and "complete" way.[17]
Sachs explains the convergence of energeia and entelecheia as follows, and uses
the word actuality to describe the overlap between them:[2]
Just as energeia extends to entelecheia because it is the activity which makes a
thing what it is, entelecheia extends to energeia because it is the end or perfection
which has being only in, through, and during activity.