HUMAN ACT. - In a broad sense, any activity of man can be called human. In a proper and narrow sense, the term h. a. is reserved to indicate those acts that depend on the free determination of the will and of which man can truly be called dominus. Only these are moral and susceptible of merit and punishment.
In human activity three aspects or kinds of elements can be considered: the psychological elements, the moral ones, and the supernatural ones.
I. PSYCHOLOGICAL ELEMENTS
The human act is a voluntary and deliberate act. Insofar as it is voluntary, it is, in its originality, irreducible to impulses, instincts and any other movement of the sensitive appetite, and it stands opposed to every form of coercion. Insofar as it is deliberate, it is distinguished both from the spontaneous acts of the will itself, determined solely by its natural tendency toward the good (undeliberate desires, hopes, fears, affections, etc.), and from those that derive from a necessity intrinsic to the willing itself. Therefore not every act of the will can be called free, and hence human, in the sense indicated above. Indeed, the deliberate will is, at least ordinarily, preceded and conditioned by spontaneous willing, in which the undeliberate attraction to or complacency in the good is realized, before this good is freely accepted and willed. The will, moreover, by its very intrinsic constitution and natural tendency, is necessitated by the good and by happiness, considered in their absoluteness, since it is impossible not to will one's own happiness, and the will cannot will anything except what presents itself as fitting for the subject, whatever the concrete object in which its act terminates. It follows that there can be no deliberation concerning the end, that is, concerning absolute value considered in its abstract indeterminacy, and that freedom bears essentially upon particular values, and also upon absolute values, but ones known imperfectly and indirectly, in such a way that they can be, as it were, aligned in human experience with the other values and thus be the object of determination and of choice. For this reason, in the present life, in which it is not granted to see God, but He is known only abstractly and by analogy, the will is free to tend toward Him and to reject Him (v. LIBERTÀ).
An essential condition for an action to be deliberate is the presence of the object in the subject's consciousness, and advertence to the action by which it is pursued: we cannot will without knowing what we will, and we cannot will freely without being masters, and therefore conscious, of the act we perform. Depending, therefore, on the greater or lesser intensity of this consciousness, and on the greater or lesser clarity with which the object occupies its field, the human act is more or less voluntary. In the language of modern psychology, when the object occupies the center of consciousness, there is attention, which on the other hand does not take place when it is at the margins of consciousness. But attention itself can be more or less intense, just as its scope can be more or less extensive and its duration can vary. Furthermore, for the human act to be free, it is not required that one have a reflexive consciousness of it, but it suffices that it be adverted to in an immediate manner in the very awareness one has of the object in which it terminates. Indeed, given the natural limits of human consciousness, reflection on the human act diminishes attention to its objective content.
In the free act it is necessary to distinguish the cause from the motives of the willing, that is, the subjective cause from the objective one. The subjective cause of the willing is the free will itself, and the reason for this freedom is its active indifference, due to the fact that the will is not determined to act except by the absolute good. The objective cause or motive of the willing is not solely the delight that accompanies acting, as some modern psychologists have held, but any "good" known and evaluated by the subject as its own good. The deliberative process consists in the comparison of motives and finally in the definitive choice of one of them. This process is analyzed and described differently by the ancient Scholastics and by modern psychologists, nor is the difference always merely nominal and formal, sometimes reaching the very substance and originality of the voluntary human act, whose intrinsic and immediate principles are to be sought, at the moment of intention and deliberation, in the intellect and the will, while in the order of execution other elements may also be added, determined, directed and informed by the former. According to St. Thomas (Sum. Theol., 1ª - 2ªe, q. 11), the knowledge and evaluation of the good, the practical judgment on its pursuability and feasibility, the evaluation and concrete search for the means suited to attaining it, the determination to will (imperium) and the direction of the other faculties, called upon to execute what has been deliberated, are proper to the intellect. To the will, on the other hand, belong the complacency in the known good, the efficacious intention of attaining it, the determination to employ the appropriate means and the choice of those means, the application of the other faculties to the execution of the command, and the fruition of the good attained. Naturally such human acts, though distinct, are not separated from one another, conditioning one another and sometimes interpenetrating in the unity of the volitional and deliberative process. This process, moreover, in the living concreteness of spiritual life, takes on different developments, contents, forms and expressions, whose classification, though certainly useful for the purposes of a correct ethical evaluation of human activity, cannot claim to exhaust, even under this particular aspect, its rich and complex variety.
Thus moralists are accustomed to distinguish the voluntary act: 1st into perfect and imperfect, depending on whether full advertence and full consent of the will are present or instead lacking; 2nd into voluntary simpliciter such, or only secundum quid, depending on whether it is a matter of efficacious will or of a merely inefficacious velleity; 3rd into actual voluntary (if it proceeds from the present deliberation of the will), virtual (if the action is performed by virtue of a previous deliberation, which therefore persists in its effect) or habitual (when it is a matter only of a previous will not retracted, but which exercises no actual influence on the action); 4th into positive or negative voluntary, depending on whether it terminates in an action or in an omission; 5th into explicit or implicit voluntary, depending on whether the object is explicitly or only implicitly willed, or whether a determinate act is implicitly contained in another explicitly performed (thus the resolve not to sin is implicitly contained in the act of contrition); 6th into voluntary in itself, in which the intention of the will directly terminates, and voluntary in its cause, if it is a matter of an effect not intended, but permitted as an indirect result of an action directly willed; 7th into voluntary propter se or propter aliud, depending on whether it is a matter of a thing willed as an end or as a simple means; 8th into voluntary expressed, tacit and presumed, with regard to its external manifestation and knowledge, depending on whether the will is either manifested by a sign, or legitimately inferred from silence, or only presumed on the basis of certain indications.
In this classification, moreover exemplary and incomplete, the first distinction, concerning the greater or lesser perfection of the voluntariness of the act, interests the moralist in a particular way and has a fundamental importance in the evaluation of the actions we perform, considered in their subjective aspect.
The factors that can influence this qualification of the human act are various: some direct and immediate, others indirect and remote.
The direct and immediate factors are: ignorance, the passions, violence and fear.
Ignorance, to which error and inadvertence can be traced in this context, may bear upon either the law (both as to its existence and as to its content), or upon the penalty, or upon some one of the factual elements of the action that is performed. Its effect upon the voluntariness of the act and upon responsibility is naturally proportionate, not only to the extent of the limits that derive from it for the field of consciousness, but also to the nature of the cause from which it proceeds and to its particular efficacy in relation to the action performed. Thus, if one cannot be responsible for what is done as a result of invincible and inculpable ignorance, responsibility does not cease when the ignorance is due either to culpable negligence or to a direct will to ignore (ignorantia affectata). Indeed, in the latter case, if that will is determined by a formal contempt for the law, the imputability is certainly greater. In other cases, however, it is more or less attenuated, according to the degree of negligence or fault (v. IGNORANZA).
Passion, understood here to mean any movement or impulse of the sensitive appetite, in its broadest meaning, certainly constitutes one of the elements that most easily affect the voluntary human act. If it precedes the determination of the will (passio antecedens), it tends, through its attractive and repulsive force, to diminish the evaluative indifference of the judgment and, consequently, the very freedom that finds its root in that judgment; indeed, sometimes its vehemence can be such as to prevent any possibility of comparison between the particular good and the absolute good, and thus to remove freedom entirely. If, on the other hand, the passion follows the voluntary act by redundancy (passio consequens per simplicem redundantiam), it does not affect that act, but is rather an index of the intensity of the will. If, finally, it is directly aroused by the will (passio consequens per directam excitationem), far from diminishing the voluntariness of the act, it is placed at its service, thus extending its zone of influence and efficacy. Naturally, in the living and fluid process of human activity, whose individual moments we consider separately, out of logical necessity, these various aspects of passion may be found together, conditioning one another (v. CONCUPISCENZA, PASSIONE).
Nothing is more contrary to the spontaneity and freedom of the act than violence. This, however, cannot reach the will, and for it to be absolute it is necessary that there be lacking any external connivance and any internal consent on the part of the one who suffers it (v. VIOLENZA).
Fear, on the other hand, although it can influence the determination of the will and can even conflict with the various moral freedoms that man enjoys, does not oppose psychological freedom except when and to the extent that it becomes passion. For this reason an action performed out of fear is simply voluntary, although most of the time it is accompanied by an internal repugnance and an ineffective contrariety, unless this too is rejected by the very efficacy of fear: such, for example, is the fear of hell, as a motive for sorrow for sins (v. TIMORE).
The factors that influence indirectly and remotely the voluntariness of the human act are: habit, propensities and tendencies, and diseases of the spirit.
Habit can help as it can harm the freedom of the will. For this reason one must distinguish first of all the habits that concern external activities, which tend through their mechanism to diminish attention, from those that reach the spiritual faculties and facilitate their action, without thereby diminishing voluntariness and freedom: the virtues too are habits (v. ABITO, ABITUDINE). One can say, therefore, in principle, that habits diminish the voluntariness of the human act to the extent that they hinder attention and influence tendencies and passions.
Likewise the propensities and tendencies, which can be either natural or acquired and depend both on temperament and on contracted habits, influence the voluntary act by determining impulses and stimulating the passions (v. TEMPERAMENTO). On the other hand, each person's temperament is in intimate connection with his entire activity, and affects, among other things, its tone and its particular coloring. But it, if it can sometimes incline to virtue and to vice, is never the determining or in any case primary cause of them.
No differently, the so-called diseases of the spirit, to the extent that they influence perception, consciousness, ideation, judgment, the instincts, in the sphere of the emotions and in that of motor expressions, likewise influence the voluntariness and imputability of the actions performed as a consequence of such disturbances. Naturally the ethical judgment, already difficult under the normal conditions in which human activity unfolds, becomes far more difficult in these cases, both because of the indefinable variety of the phenomena and of the physiognomy of the psychopathic personality, and because of the difficulty, which is often a true impossibility, of defining the limits between illness and normality, and, in the sick themselves, between moments and elements of rationality and moments and elements of irrationality or of instinct and of uncontrollable impulses. Not to mention that sometimes (as, for example, in morphinomania, in cocainomania and in alcoholism) the cause of the disturbances can be voluntary, and therefore the actions that depend on them can be imputable in their cause (v. INFERMITÀ MENTALI).
II. MORAL ELEMENTS
Authors do not agree concerning the metaphysical essence of morality, its constitutive norm and its foundation (v. MORALITY). Nevertheless, Catholic philosophers and theologians all agree on the following points: 1) that the moral value of the human act depends on its ethical norm; 2) that there are human acts intrinsically good and others intrinsically evil, independently of any positive law; 3) that the ethical norm of human activity is intimately connected with the nature and order of man and of other things and depends on the eternal law of God. Morality can be considered either in its objective aspect or in its subjective aspect. In order for the objective morality of the human act to pass into the action as it is performed by the subject, it is necessary that it be present in the subject's consciousness. But, whereas for the malice of the object to be contracted it suffices that it be known, the good, in order to become subjective, must also be willed: no one can become good in spite of himself or independently of his good will.
Moreover, since goodness consists in the adequation of the act to its ethical norm, and evil in the deviation from it, human activity can be called simpliciter good only when all its elements possess in themselves that conformity.
However, not every defect substantially corrupts the morality of the action, although it is disputed whether one and the same human act can be at once good and evil.
The elements from which the human act derives its morality (sources of morality) are the object and the circumstances. Naturally, both the one and the others must be considered, not in their material content, but in their ethical content, that is, with attention to their particular relation to the norm of morality. From the object the act derives its primary and specific morality. Circumstances can either add to the human act a new moral species (in the theft of a sacred thing, the specific malice of theft is joined by that of sacrilege), or they can modify only accidentally the essential morality of the human act.
Among all the circumstances, particular prominence is taken by the end for which one wills and acts (finis operantis). This end, no differently from the other circumstances, when it differs from the end to which the action is intrinsically ordered (finis operis), can affect its morality in various ways. However, the goodness of the end does not purify the human act of its possible intrinsic malice (the end does not justify the means); whereas its malice, at least in the case in which it is the sole and total motive of the action, necessarily empties the human act of all its objective goodness. It is, on the other hand, disputed what its negative efficacy is when it is only a partial motive of the action.
Likewise, there is no uniformity of judgment among authors concerning the moral value of the human act willed and performed for the pleasure that derives from it and is connected with it. Where this is understood, in its natural instrumentality, as a simple stimulus to act, no Catholic author would dare to condemn it, just as no one dares to justify it when it is willed as the sole and ultimate end of one's action. Many, however, further hold that it is not unlawful to act for a pleasure recognized as honorable, since even if in the case at hand the explicit reference to a further end is lacking, the implicit recognition of one's subordination to the ethical norm is not lacking, and therefore neither is the implicit will to tend to the end to which it is ordered. Others, on the contrary, more rigid, condemn the action in such a case, while for others it would be outside the sphere of morality, that is, it would be a morally indifferent action.
The problem, therefore, is connected in part with the other one concerning the scope of morality. No human act is moral if it is not voluntary and free; but can it be said reciprocally that every voluntary and free human act, considered in its concreteness, is either good or evil? Many think so, not deeming possible an absolute extraneousness of the human act from the moral order, at least by reason of the end to which it is ordered by the subject; while others do not find such a hypothesis impossible. The first opinion, assigning identical boundaries to freedom and to morality, seems better founded and more logical.
The moral value of the human act resides formally in the will, that is, in good and evil willing. The external act, therefore, has no ethical value except insofar as it expresses and reflects the act of the will from which it derives. This, however, does not mean that it has no value and influence in the moral order; for, besides its objective value which determines the very moral qualification of the interior act (to will to give alms is good, because almsgiving is good; to will to kill is evil, because homicide is a sin), it, at the very moment of execution, constitutes the matter of the voluntary act, and can therefore nourish the will itself, thus influencing the increase of merit or demerit.
On the same plane of execution it is necessary to distinguish the action that we perform from the effects that depend on it. If these are willed or constitute the natural term of our action considered in its concreteness, they are imputable to us. If, on the other hand, they follow accidentally from our activity, as the product of a twofold concurrent activity, ours and that of another agent, whether natural or free, they are not always imputable to us, but only if, besides having been foreseen, even if confusedly, they can and must be prevented by us, and there exists no proportionate reason by which they may lawfully be permitted by us.
III. SUPERNATURAL ELEMENTS OF THE HUMAN ACT
The human act becomes supernatural when it is performed with the help of Grace (v.). Such help can also be granted to one who does not possess sanctifying Grace, and it can elevate to the supernatural order not only deliberate human acts but also the indeliberate movements of the intellect and the will: for it is in these that the invitation and the stimulus of prevenient grace are realized.
On the other hand, only the free human act is meritorious, and for merit to be, as the theologians say, de condigno, friendship with God is required (v. MERIT).
The meritorious human act is therefore at the summit of human activity in this life: it sums up in itself all the other characteristics of the human act (voluntariness, freedom, morality), elevates it to a higher plane, and enables it to attain thus its ultimate end, and together with it its full meaning: every action is, in fact, essentially finalistic.
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Antonio Lanza