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2 - Voluntary acts and responsible agents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2010

Bernard Williams
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

Voluntary acts

Particular actions may have various things wrong with them. I shall be concerned only with people's actions and not with things that happen to people; and I shall not be concerned with the question of where that line itself should be drawn. Everyone will agree that it is something that happens to a person if he is thrown through a window by others, even if he asked them to do it, or (differently) asked for it. But if the doctor strikes my knee with his little hammer and my leg moves, some would say that this was a reflex action of mine, as opposed, for instance, to peristaltic movements of the gut, which are reflex changes that happen to me. For the present purpose, I shall move the frontier of action one stage further out than the reflex: action must manifest some degree of control. That still leaves room for actions done in a variety of untypical states.

The agent may be asleep, yet the language, not just of action, but of purposive action, be appropriate beyond dispute:

  1. – … Lo you, here she comes! This her very guise; and, upon my life, fast asleep. Observe her; stand close …

  2. – You see, her eyes are open.

  3. – Ay but their sense is shut.

  4. – What is it that she does now? Look, how she rubs her hands.

  5. – It is an accustom'd action with her, to seem thus washing her hands. I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour.

Type
Chapter
Information
Making Sense of Humanity
And Other Philosophical Papers 1982–1993
, pp. 22 - 34
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1995

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