En el artículo se examinan los dos intentos de Aristóteles por explicar el fenómeno de las acciones voluntarias e involuntarias: Ética Eudemia (EE) II 6-9 y Ética Nicomaquea (EN) III 1. Entre ambos tratamientos hay muchas coincidencias, pero también diferencias sustantivas, tanto en la caracterización de las acciones involuntarias como en la estrategia argumentativa general y la definición de lo voluntario. El artículo procura dar cuenta de dichas diferencias de contenido en función de la estrategia metodológica general por la que (...) opta Aristóteles en uno y otro caso. The article examines Aristotle's two attempts to explain the phenomena of voluntary and involuntary actions: Eudemian Ethics (EE) II 6-9 and Nicomachean Ethics (EN) III 1. Though there are notorious coincidences, there are also substantial differences between them in the characterization of involuntary actions, in the general argumentative strategy, and in the definition of voluntary actions. The paper endeavors to account for these material differences on the basis of the general methodological strategy used by Aristotle in each case. (shrink)

The conscious awareness of voluntary action is associated with systematic changes in time perception: The interval between actions and outcomes is experienced as compressed in time. Although this temporal binding is thought to result from voluntary movement and provides a window to the sense of agency, recent studies challenge this idea by demonstrating binding in involuntary movement. We offer a potential account for these findings by proposing that binding between involuntary actions and effects can occur when self-causation (...) is implied. Participants made temporal judgements concerning a key press and a tone, while they learned to consider themselves as the cause of the effect or not. Results showed that implied self-causation increased temporal binding. Since intrinsic motor cues of movement were absent, these results suggest that sensory evidence about the key press caused binding in retrospect and in line with the participant’s sense of being an agent. (shrink)

This paper is a semantic analysis of ‘experienced action’ constructions in Umpithamu, a Paman language from Cape York Peninsula (Australia). The basic argument is that these constructions are related to the better-attested category of experiencer object constructions (e.g. Evans, Non-nominative subjects 1: 69–192, 2004), which in Umpithamu describe involuntary experience of bodily processes. Experienced action constructions extend the feature of ‘involuntary experience’ from processes within the body to actions originating outside the body, and thus provide a (...) semantically marked alternative for standard transitive clauses. The constructions are typologically interesting because they show the need to identify different loci of experiential semantics in a construction, and they help to clarify the status of control for human Undergoers within semantic typologies of reduced transitivity. (shrink)

Involuntary commitment links the healthcare, public health, and legislative systems to act as a “carceral health-service.” While masquerading as more humane and medicalized, such coercive modalities nevertheless further reinforce the systems, structures, practices, and policies of structural oppression and white supremacy. We argue that due to involuntary commitment’s inextricable connection to the carceral system, and a longer history of violent social control, this legal framework cannot and must not be held out as a viable alternative to the criminal (...) legal system responses to behavioral and mental health challenges. Instead, this article proposes true alternatives to incarceration that are centered on liberation that seeks to shrink the carceral system’s grasp on individuals’ and communities’ lives. In this, we draw inspiration from street-level praxis and action theory emanating from grassroots organizations and community organizers across the country under a Public Health Abolition framework. (shrink)

In this dissertation I take exception with a widely held philosophical doctrine, according to which agents are only blameworthy for the bad actions they have chosen to bring about. My argument strategy is to present cases in which agents are blamed for involuntary actions that are not in any way connected to their culpable and voluntary choices. These failures correspond, I suggest, to occasions of culpable ignorance where agents have been negligent or careless. More specifically, I claim that violations (...) of natural duties of respect and consideration, and certain acquired role-type duties, are blamed ;-.ithout any voluntary consent. If my examples are persuasive, then the point is reached where a normative principle of 'voluntary consent' does not in fact coincide with people's actual practices and 'considered judgements'. In the final sections of the dissertation, I argue against the plausibility of keeping the principle and revising our judgements. (shrink)

Richard Swinburne argues that belief is a necessary but not sufficient condition for faith, and he also argues that, while faith is voluntary, belief is involuntary. This essay is concerned with the tension arising from the involuntary aspect of faith, the Christian doctrine that human beings have an obligation to exercise faith, and the moral claim that people are only responsible for actions where they have the ability to do otherwise. Put more concisely, the problem concerns the coherence (...) of the following claims: (1) one cannot have faith, (2) one has an obligation to have faith, and (3) ought implies can. To solve this dilemma, I offer three solutions that I believe have the philosophical resources to demonstrate the consistency of these claims. Thus, I defend the claim that it is logically possible for a person to be culpable for an involuntary failure to have faith in God. (shrink)

Participants were asked to carry out a series of simple tasks while following mental control instructions. In advance of each task, they either suppressed thoughts of their intention to perform the task, concentrated on such thoughts, or monitored their thoughts without trying to change them. Suppression resulted in reduced reports of intentionality as compared to monitoring, and as compared to concentration. There was a weak trend for suppression to enhance reported intentionality for a repetition of the action carried out (...) after suppression instructions had been discontinued. (shrink)

This paper is a discussion of Aristotle’s account of actions that come about because of ignorance as found in his Nicomachean Ethics 3.1. I argue that such actions do not originate in the agent, bu...

It is sometimes said that reasoning, thought and judgement essentially involve action. It is sometimes said that they involve spontaneity, where spontaneity is taken to be connected in some constitutive way with action-intentional, voluntary and indeed free action. There is, however, a fundamental respect in which reason, thought and judgement neither are nor can be a matter of action; and any spontaneity they involve can be connected with freedom only when the word 'freedom' is used in (...) the Spinozan-Kantian sense according to which freedom is a matter of 'rational necessitation', determination by reason. (shrink)

Intentional action involves both a series of neural events in the motor areas of the brain, and also a distinctive conscious experience that ''I'' am the author of the action. This paper investigates some possible ways in which these neural and phenomenal events may be related. Recent models of motor prediction are relevant to the conscious experience of action as well as to its neural control. Such models depend critically on matching the actual consequences of a movement (...) against its internally predicted effects. However, it remains unclear whether our conscious experience of action depends on a precise matching process, or a retrospective inference that ''I'' must have been responsible for a particular event. We report an experiment in which normal subjects judged the perceived time of either intentional actions, involuntary movements, or subsequent effects (auditory tones) of these. We found that the subject's intention to produce the auditory tone produced an intentional binding between the perceived times of the subject's action and the tone. However, if the intention was interrupted by an imposed involuntary movement, followed by the identical tone, no such binding occurred. The phenomenology of intentional action requires an appropriate predictive link between intentions and effects, rather than a retrospective inference that ''I'' caused the effect. (shrink)

This book focuses on the connection between action and verbal communication, exploring topics such as the mechanisms of language processing, action processing, voluntary and involuntary actions, knowledge of language and assertion. Communication modelling and aspects of communicative actions are considered, along with cognitive requirements for nonverbal and verbal communicative action. Contributions from expert authors are organised into three parts in this book, focussing on language in communication, action and bodily awareness, and sensorimotor interaction and language (...) acquisition. Readers will discover various methods that have been employed in investigations presented here, including neurological experiment, computational modeling, and logical and philosophical analysis. These diverse expert perspectives shed light on the extent to which a mechanism for processing actions also facilitates the processing of language, and the authors' work prompts further interdisciplinary investigation of the relationship between language and action. This book is written for readers from different academic backgrounds; from graduate students to established academics in disciplines ranging from neuroscience to psychology, philosophy, linguistics and beyond. Earlier versions of the selected essays in this book were presented at the 2013 IEAS Conference on Language and Action, held in Taipei, Taiwan. (shrink)

It is sometimes said that reasoning, thought and judgment essentially involve action. It is sometimes said that they involve spontaneity, where spontaneity is taken to be connected in some constitutive way with action—intentional, voluntary and indeed free action. There is, however, a fundamental respect in which reason, thought and judgment neither are nor can be a matter of action. Any spontaneity that reason, thought and judgment involve can be connected with freedom only when the word 'freedom' (...) is used in the Spinozan-Kantian sense according to which freedom is a matter of 'rational necessitation', determination by reason. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Actions and the Criminal Law Objects or Conditions of Criminal Responsibility? Actions and (Voluntary) Acts Abandoning the Act Requirement? An Action Presumption? References.

The main objective of this paper is to describe how quality of care may be improved during an involuntary admission process of patients suffering from Korsakoff's syndrome. It presents an empirically grounded analysis with different perspectives on ‘doing good’ during this process. Family carers', healthcare professionals' and legal professionals' ways of understanding and ordering this problematic situation appear very different. This could prevent patients from getting the proper care they need, with risk of more suffering and quality of life (...) below the minimum acceptable. All this possibly lead to immoral dehumanizing situations. Firstly, the background of our empirical study is sketched. Secondly, the different perspectives on ‘doing good’ are summarized and compared. Thirdly, the tensions arising from the different conceptualizations of autonomy and different types of responsibilities of the actors are clarified. A common ‘doing good’ during involuntary admission necessitates removal of any tensions within the relational network by weighing and balancing the different perspectives on autonomy and the resulting responsibilities. With this in mind, we propose a renewed time/action table for involuntary admission, which tends to address all patients' needs at the right time. The solution presented might help healthcare professionals, who are squeezed in between patients, family carers, legal professionals and overall rules, to create practices in which patients suffering from Korsakoff's syndrome can maintain their dignity and receive the care they need. Earlier interventions, timely and adequate diagnosis, and diminishment of tensions between the different actors by fine‐tuning their paradigmatic frameworks are suggested to be part of a solution. (shrink)

Nova Scotia’s recently updated Involuntary Psychiatric Treatment Act signii cantly updated mental health law in the province in many respects. However, s.39 of the Act deviates from this record in that it contains a clause that permits overriding the competent prior wishes of involuntarily committed psychiatric patients. This is problematic because it displaces established Canadian common law and legislation on advance directives for psychiatric patients but not other patients, suggesting possible discrimination The paper explores whether s.39 might survive challenge (...) under s.15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as either an ai rmative action program under s.15 of the Charter or as an overriding societal concern under s.1 of the Charter. (shrink)

The article focuses on the in-between of the voluntary and the involuntary in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self. From the triad of passivity, through the intentional act, the author analyzes the empty place in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of voluntary actions that can appear to be involuntary, such as actions motivated by passions but which nonetheless remain in the self’s responsibility and in the domain of forgiveness. In Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, character belongs to the realm of sameness and the absolute (...) class='Hi'>involuntary. The author thus emphasizes the possible ways in which we may work on our character and the problems of equating narrative identity with the self and identity. The story of our life cannot be reduced to our lived story nor to our narrative identity, since it also involves involuntary events that do not necessarily say much about who the self is. (shrink)

Many philosophers categorise judgment as a type of action. On the face of it, this claim is at odds with the seeming fact that judging a certain proposition is not something you can do voluntarily. I argue that we can resolve this tension by recognising a category of non-voluntary action. An action can be non-voluntary without being involuntary. The notion of non-voluntary action is developed by appeal to the claim that judging has truth as a (...) constitutive goal. This claim, when combined with a conception of judging as a way of settling a question, explains both why judging is genuinely agential, and why it is nevertheless non-voluntary. (shrink)

Is the reason that majorities exert an undue influence on the actions of individuals revealed through changes in subjective experience? Using an adaptation of the response interference paradigm in which participants are trained to introspect on their own experience of conscious conflict, two studies reported here show that the mere act of recalling counter-majority stances or opinions is associated with stronger subjective effects than recalling stances or opinions that coincide with majorities. Thus, an intention to conform to a majority seems (...) to interfere with people’s recall of their own stance or opinion. These results provide novel evidence for recent yet under-supported suggestions that majorities can influence individuals even when it is improper or illogical because human social cognition is primarily and involuntarily cooperative at the implicit level. (shrink)

This Article doDespite obvious differences in the Aristotelian and Stoic theories of responsibility, there is surprisingly a deeper structural similarity between the two. The most obvious difference is that Aristotle is (apparently) a libertarian and the Stoics are determinists. Aristotle holds adults responsible for all our "voluntary" actions, which are defined by two criteria: the "origin" or cause of the action must be "in us" and we must be aware of what we are doing. An "involuntary" action, (...) for which we are not responsible, is one that fails to meet either one of these two criteria. Aristotle is a libertarian insofar as he insists that all voluntary actions are "in our power" to perform or not. As determinists the Stoics cannot admit this sort of freedom, but they still consider the agent to be a vital link in the chain of events, so they redefine what is "in our power" as what comes about "through us." The terminology is different, but I argue that these actions, for which the Stoics hold us responsible, are in fact coextensive with Aristotle's voluntary actions. An "impression" is the first necessary condition for action, and is a sort of visual image of the object stimulating one to act. The right sort of impression activates the agent's "impulse," an internal movement of soul or mind, which is the direct cause of action. But impulse is always accompanied by "assent," which is the mind's affirming the truth of the proposition that we ought to go after the object stimulating our impulse. Thus, since assent is a necessary condition for action, we always act knowing what we are doing. This means that all actions caused by our own impulse and assent are by Aristotle's criteria voluntary, where impulse provides the internal origin of the action and assent provides the awareness of what is being done. I conclude that the Stoic and Aristotelian classes of what one is responsible for are coextensive, their criteria defining responsible actions are nearly identical, and the only substantial difference is that Aristotle claims such actions are in our power to do or not do while the Stoics say that such actions are necessitated (by our internal nature as well as external factors). es not have an abstract. (shrink)

We describe and report on results of employing a new method for analyzing lay conceptions of intentional and unintentional action. Instead of asking people for their conceptual intuitions with regard to construed scenarios, we asked our participants to come up with their own scenarios and to explain why these are examples of intentional or unintentional actions. By way of content analysis, we extracted contexts and components that people associated with these action types. Our participants associated unintentional actions predominantly (...) with bad outcomes for all persons involved and linked intentional actions more strongly to positive outcomes, especially concerning the agent. People’s conceptions of intentional action seem to involve more aspects than commonly assumed in philosophical models of intentional action that solely stress the importance of intentions, desires, and beliefs. The additional aspects include decisions and thoughts about the action. In addition, we found that the criteria that participants generated for unintentional actions are not a mere inversion of those used in explanations for intentional actions. Associations between involuntariness and unintentional action seem to be stronger than associations between aspects of voluntariness and intentional action. (shrink)

Little attention has recently been paid to Aquinas's analyses of mixed actions, which constitute a significant sort of border line cases between the voluntary and the involuntary. A textual inconsi...

In Eth. Nic. V 8, Aristotle provides a classification of damages an agent may do, establishing degrees of culpability. In doing so, Aristotle recalls what he said about voluntary and involuntary actions in the preceding books about voluntary and involuntary actions. In this paper, I defend the thesis according to which the Eudemian account on voluntariness is consistent with the classification of damages Aristotle provides in Eth. Nic. V 8, arguing that one of Aristotle’s concerns in dealing with (...) voluntariness is the legal practices of his time, which we can regard as strongly linked to his discussion on moral responsibility. Thereby, I challenge David Charles’ view that the account of voluntariness featured in the book on justice differs both from the Nicomachean account and the Eudemian one. (shrink)

A seminal work on the unconscious and its mechanisms. Examines the interaction between voluntary (conscious) and involuntary (unconscious) human control mechanisms in terms of dissociation of divided consciousness. Delineates a neodissociation interpretation that recognizes historical roots without requiring commitment. Presents a wide range of data on possession states, fugues, multiple personalities, amnesia, dreams, hallucinations, automatic writing, and aggressions.

I examine Galen Strawson's recent work on mental action in his paper, 'Mental Ballistics or The Involuntariness of Spontaneity'. I argue that his account of mental action is too restrictive. I offer a means of testing tokens of mental activity types to determine if they are actional. The upshot is that a good deal more mental activity than Strawson admits is actional.

In recent decades, it has been argued that the modern concept of forgiveness is absent from Aristotle’s conception of συγγνώμη as it appears in his Rhetoric and Nicomachean Ethics. In this paper, I argue that Aristotle’s view is more modern than it might appear. I defend the idea that Aristotle’s treatment of συγγνώμη, when seen in conjunction with his theory of ethical decision, involuntary action, and character alteration, commits him to a cognitive and emotional theory of forgiveness that (...) is both well-grounded and thoroughly modern. I go on to claim that Aristotle’s view of συγγνώμη helps to solve at least four controversial problems about the nature of forgiveness raised by modern philosophers: how one can forgive a wrong without condoning it, whether forgiveness is a duty, whether moral luck requires us to forgive more widely, and whether forgiveness ought to be unconditional. (shrink)

The article examines Aristotle’s two attempts to explain the phenomena of voluntary and involuntary actions: Eudemian Ethics (EE) II 6-9 and Nicomachean Ethics (EN) III 1. Though there are notorious coincidences, there are also substantial differences between them in the characterization of involuntary actions, in the general argumentative strategy, and in the definition of voluntary actions. The paper endeavors to account for these material differences on the basis of the general methodological strategy used by Aristotle in each case.