HUMAN ACTS
Man's actions taken collectively are called behavior or conduct. Behaviour is more of a psychological word and is applied even to animals, whereas conduct has a strictly ethical meaning and is exclusively human. Conduct consists of acts, but not of all or any acts a man can perform' It is customary to all the kind of acts constituting conduct human acts, Making this expression a technical term with an exact and restricted meaning' St. Thomas puts it as follows: of actions done by man those alone are properly called human which are proper to man as man.
Now man differs from irrational animals in this that he is master of his actions. wherefore those actions alone are properly called human of which man is master. Now man is master of his actions through his reason and will, whence too the free will is defined as the faculty will and reason. Therefore those actions are properly called human which proceed from a deliberate will. And if any other actions are found in man, they can be called actions of a man, but not properly human actions, since they are not proper to man as man.
Hence there are two kinds of acts: 1. A human act (actus humanus) is one of which man is master, one that is consciously controlled and deliberately willed, so that the agent is held responsible for it. These human acts constitute human conduct and form the subject matter of ethics. 2. An act of a man (Actus hominis) is one which a man happens to perform, but he is not master of it, for he has not consciously controlled it, has not deliberately willed it, and for it he is not held responsible. Such are acts done in infancy, sleep, delirium, insanity, or fits of abstraction; they have no ethical significance and do not constitute human conduct. Note carefully that the distinction here is not between acts of the rational order and those of the sentient or vegetative order.
It is true that rational acts, such as thinking and willing, are proper to man in the sense that he alone can do them, whereas sentient and vegetative acts, such as eating, sleeping, walking, growing, are actions that man has in common with other beings. This is how psychology classifies them to understand human nature; but ethics tries to explain human conduct, and its whole question is whether man is master of his acts or not, be they of the rational, sentient, or vegetative order.
Man is the only creature in this world who can think, but if his thoughts simply run along by association without his conscious direction and control, such thoughts are only acts of a man, not human acts, even though they are of the rational order. On the other hand, eating and sleeping are by their nature merely animal acts that man does in common with brutes, but they become human acts if the man does them knowingly and willingly. To put food in the mouth while in a distracted state of mind is an act of a man, but to determine deliberately to eat this food is a human act. To be overcome by drowsiness and fall asleep is an act of a man, but to go to bed intentionally for the purpose of sleeping is a human act. Hence, though it is impossible to have a human act unless it is guided by intellect and will, the act itself so guided can be of any sort. In other words, a human act can be either physical or mental in nature provided it is deliberately willed.
COMMANDED ACTS
The will can control not only its own acts but the acts of other faculties as well. By the will we make decisions but rely on other faculties to carry them out. By the will we decide to walk, but the will cannot do the walking; it must command the muscles of the legs to carry out the decision by performing the act. By the will we decide to think, but the will cannot do the thinking; it commands the intellect, the faculty of understanding, to turn its attention to this thought rather than that. The will can command itself, as when it decides to reach a decision now or to put it off till later. St. Thomas speaks, as we have done, of acts commanded by the will, but command itself (imperium), he makes an act issued by the intellect, but moved thereto by a previous act of the will, the act of choice, and coming before the next act of the will, the act of use.
When we speak of the will commanding, we are only using a short expression for the whole process. The will can command, then, both external bodily acts and internal mental acts. I decide to study, and this decision is the act of the will itself. I take out my book, turn to the lesson, bend my eyes on the page; these are external bodily acts commanded by the will. I focus my mind on the matter, understand what I am reading, fix it in my memory; these are internal mental acts commanded by the will. Thus, study is a mixed act involving the use of the eyes in reading and of the intellect in understanding, both under command of the will. Which of these is the human act? It might seem that only the act of the will itself, the act which the will as a faculty performs or elicits, the so-called elicited act of the will, is the human act. In the strictest sense this is true, for it is in the will that choice and consent reside, and it is these that give an act its specifically human character.
Hence if a man decides to do something with clear consent of his will, but is prevented by circumstances from carrying out his decision, he is responsible for this con-sent. Thus a man can be guilty of murder in intent although he never gets the chance to carry it out. But commanded acts share in the consent of the will that commands them. Man's will is his controlling faculty and he is held responsible for all that he controls through his will, both for the internal acts of the will itself and for the acts of other faculties that the will commands. Both are human acts, but the former are so in a stricter sense.
ETHICAL CONSTITUTION OF THE HUMAN ACT
After this brief survey of the psychological background of the human act, we must now determine the properties which characterize it from the ethical standpoint. A human act, or human conduct, has three qualities: ( I ) Knowledge • (2) Voluntariness (3) Freedom Of these voluntariness is the one which essentially constitutes the act a human act.
Knowledge is an essential prerequisite without which the act cannot be voluntary. Freedom is connoted in nearly all our human acts and ordinarily follows from the fact that the act is voluntary. Knowledge Conduct springs from a motive and is directed to an end. The will is a blind faculty, a faculty of striving and not of knowing, and cannot act unless enlightened by the intellect. (The intellect proposes the good and the will tends toward it. Also, the end cannot be attained without the use of suitable means, and the will, being blind, cannot see the suitability of these means. So the intellect is needed, not only to propose the end to be attained, but also to pass judgment on the fitness of the means to the end and to devise a course of conduct that will efficiently lead to the end) The intellect must think this all out before presenting it to the will for its decision.
The activity of the intellect is especially apparent in the process of de-liberation, where the motives for and against cannot be weighed unless they are known. There must also be advertence to what one is about, a focus-sing of attention on the acts being done so that a man is conscious or aware of his acts. Advertence is impossible without a certain amount of reflection, by which the mind turns back and looks at itself acting. The person both knows that he knows and knows that he wills. Advertence and reflection occur in varying degrees, thereby affecting the human character of the act. An act is a human act only insofar as it is known. Any part or circumstance of the act that the doer does not advert to is not attributable to him. This works both ways: a man who willfully kills another without knowing that the victim is his father commits murder but not parricide; a man who steals money not knowing that it is counterfeit is morally guilty of theft, though he gets no profit out of it.
Voluntariness
To have a human act, it is not sufficient that it be guided by knowl-edge; it must also be willed. An act which comes from both knowledge and will is called voluntary, an adjective formed from the Latin word for will. A voluntary act is a willed act, one that neither is forced on a person from without nor arises spontaneously from within. After much groping about, Aristotle suggests the following definition: Since that which is done under compulsion or by reason of ignorance is involuntary, the voluntary would seem to be that of which..the moving principle is in the agent himself, he being aware of the particular circum-stances of the action! Aristotle thus grants voluntariness to acts done by children and animals. He recognizes that sensation is knowledge and sense appetite is an inner principle of action; besides, the Greek words for voluntary and for will are not etymologically connected like the Latin voluntarium and voluntas. While not wishing to contradict Aristotle, St. Thomas points out that ani-mals' actions can be called voluntary only in an analogous and participated sense (like our modern use of the term animal intelligence), and that the voluntary agent must know not merely the circumstances of the act, but the end to which it leads.
St. Thomas puts his definition in these terms: It is of the nature of a voluntary act that its principle be within the agent, together with some knowledge of the end.* Throughout his whole discussion it is evident that the inner principle referred to is the will. Hence his definition may be amended thus: A volun-tary act is one which proceeds from the will with a knowledge of the end. Voluntariness is one of our simplest and most familiar notions. We should not take the impression that there is anything recondite or mysteri-ous about it. A voluntary act is simply a willed act, one in which the agent knows what he is about to do and wills to do it.; The difficulty is that some of the words we commonly use to indicate this kind of act have certain connotations we do not wish to stress.
We say that a person acts willingly, willfully, intentionally, deliberately, or voluntarily; these all mean the same in the present context. To act willingly one does not have to act gladly and eagerly; to act willfully it is not necessary to be wayward or obstinate; to act intentionally does not require that one act vigorously or ostenta-tiously; to act deliberately there is no need of acting slowly and pains-takingly; to act voluntarily it is not necessary to volunteer or freely offer oneself for some work. The English words often have these shades of meaning, but we use them simply in the sense that a person knowingly wills what he does.
Freedom
Freedom (in the sense of free will, as we take it here) is the ability, when all requisites for acting are present, of either acting or not acting, of doing this or doing that. Ordinarily all voluntary acts are free acts, but the concepts are not the same. A free act supposes two or more eligible alternatives, at least the alternatives of acting or not acting. If only one is possible, yet that is what the person would knowingly and willingly take were choice offered, his act would be voluntary without being free. Such an act would proceed from the will with a knowledge of the end (voluntary), yet one would be unable to refuse it (not free). Does this ever happen? Only in one case: when man is confronted with the perfect good. This is so overwhelmingly good-that there can be no motive for 'refusing it, and man cannot act without a motive.
In this life the desire for happiness in general is of this type, as is the actual possession of God in the next life. But for all practical purposes voluntariness and freedom coincide, and in our study we can neglect the slight distinction between them. Though every free act is voluntary, and &very voluntary act except the one mentioned above is free, these two words have a different flavour. Voluntary emphasizes the strength with which the will knowingly adheres to the good proposed and pursues its aim. Free emphasizes the fact that the will is choosing this alternative at the very moment when it could be choosing the opposite. Hence strong emotion is said to increase voluntariness but diminish freedom; if the emotion becomes so strong that the man does not know what he is doing, he cannot will, and both voluntariness and freedom are destroyed.
We might put actions done by men on five levels. Violent acts are imposed from without and the subject is more properly said to be acted on than to act. Automatic acts come from within but are not guided by knowledge, as in reflexes and secretions. Spontaneous acts, if we distinguish them from automatic, come from within and are guided by knowledge, but not by knowledge of the end as end; such are acts of sensation, intellection, and the first uncontrolled movements of the appetites. Voluntary acts come from the will guided by knowledge of the end as end. Free acts are voluntary acts in which there is the factor of choice. Only the last two types of acts can be human acts.
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