ATTO UMANO. — In the broad sense, any human activity may be called human. In the proper and restricted sense, the term a. u. is reserved for acts that depend on the free determination of the will and of which man may truly be said to be dominus. Only these are moral and capable of merit and punishment.
In human activity, three aspects or kinds of elements may be considered: psychological, moral, and supernatural elements.
I. PSYCHOLOGICAL ELEMENTS
The h. a. is a voluntary and deliberate act. As voluntary, it is, in its originality, irreducible to impulses, instincts, and every other movement of the sensitive appetite, and is opposed to every form of coercion. As deliberate, it is distinguished both from the spontaneous acts of the same will, determined solely by its natural tendency toward the good (indeliberate desires, hopes, fears, affections, etc.), and from those arising from an intrinsic necessity of willing itself. Therefore, not every act of the will can be called free, and consequently human, in the sense indicated above. Indeed, deliberate willing is, at least ordinarily, preceded and conditioned by spontaneous willing, in which the indeliberate attraction to, or complacency in, the good is realized before it is freely accepted and willed. Moreover, by its own intrinsic constitution and natural tendency, willing 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 can will only what presents itself as suitable to 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 essentially concerns particular values, and also absolute values insofar as they are imperfectly and indirectly known, in such a way that they can, in human experience, be placed alongside other values and thus become objects of determination and choice. For this reason, in the present life, in which it is not given us to see God, but only to know him abstractly and analogically, the will is free to tend toward him or 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 awareness of 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. Accordingly, depending on the greater or lesser intensity of this consciousness, and on the greater or lesser clarity with which the object occupies its field, the h. a. is more or less voluntary. In the language of modern psychology, when the object occupies the center of consciousness, there is attention, whereas attention does not occur when the object lies at its margins. But attention itself may be more or less intense, just as its scope may be more or less extensive and its duration may vary. Moreover, for the h. a. to be free, it is not necessary that there be a reflective consciousness of it; it is enough that it be immediately apprehended in the very awareness one has of the object toward which it is directed. Indeed, given the natural limits of human consciousness, reflection on the h. a. diminishes attention to its objective content.
In the free act, it is necessary to distinguish the cause from the motives of willing, that is, the subjective cause from the objective one. The subjective cause of willing is free will itself, and the reason for this freedom is its active indifference, due to the fact that the will is determined to act only by the absolute good. The objective cause, or motive, of willing is not merely the pleasure accompanying action, as some modern psychologists have held, but any “good” known and evaluated by the subject as his own good. The deliberative process consists in comparing the motives and finally making a definitive choice among 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: at times it touches upon the very substance and originality of the voluntary h. a., whose intrinsic and immediate principles must be sought, at the moment of intention and deliberation, in the intellect and the will, whereas 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), knowledge and evaluation of the good, practical judgment concerning its attainability and feasibility, the evaluation and concrete investigation of the means suited to attaining it, the determination to will it (imperium), and the direction of the other faculties called upon to carry out what has been deliberated belong properly to the intellect. To the will, on the other hand, belong complacency in the known good, the effective 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 enjoyment of the good attained. Naturally, these h. a., although distinct, are not separate from one another; they condition one another and at times interpenetrate within 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; its classification, although certainly useful for the purpose of a correct ethical evaluation of human activity, cannot claim to exhaust, even from this particular standpoint, its rich and complex variety.
Thus moralists customarily distinguish voluntary action: 1º into perfect and imperfect, depending on whether full awareness and full consent of the will are present or lacking; 2º into voluntary simpliciter or only secundum quid, depending on whether it involves effective willing or merely an ineffective wish; 3º into actual voluntary action (if it proceeds from the will’s present deliberation), virtual voluntary action (if the action is performed by virtue of a prior deliberation, which consequently persists in its effect), or habitual voluntary action (when there is merely a prior and unretracted act of willing that exercises no actual influence on the action); 4º into positive or negative voluntary action, depending on whether it terminates in an action or an omission; 5º into explicit or implicit voluntary action, depending on whether the object is explicitly or only implicitly willed, or whether a determinate act is implicitly contained in another explicitly performed act (thus the purpose of not sinning is implicitly contained in the act of contrition); 6º into voluntary in itself, toward which the will’s intention is directly directed, and voluntary in its cause, when it concerns an effect not intended but permitted as the indirect result of a directly willed action; 7º into voluntary propter se or propter aliud, depending on whether something is willed as an end or as a mere means; 8º into expressed, tacit, and presumed voluntary action, with regard to its external manifestation and knowledge, depending on whether the will is manifested by a sign, legitimately inferred from silence, or merely presumed from the existence of certain indications.
This classification, which is in any case illustrative and incomplete, includes, as its first distinction, the distinction concerning the greater or lesser perfection of the act’s voluntariness. This is of particular interest to the moralist and is of fundamental importance in evaluating the actions we perform, considered in their subjective aspect.
The factors that can influence this qualification of the h. a. are various: some direct and immediate, others indirect and remote.
The direct and immediate factors are: ignorance, passions, violence, and fear.
Ignorance, to which error and inadvertence may here be reduced, may concern either the law (whether its existence or its content), or the penalty, or one of the factual elements of the action being performed. Its effect on the voluntariness of the act and on responsibility is naturally proportionate not only to the extent of the limits it imposes on the field of consciousness, but also to the nature of the cause from which it proceeds and to its particular efficacy with regard to the action performed. Thus, although one cannot be held 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 remain ignorant (ignorantia affectata). Indeed, in the latter case, if that will is determined by formal contempt for the law, imputability is certainly greater. In the other cases, it is more or less attenuated, according to the degree of negligence or guilt (v. IGNORANZA).
Passion, understood here as signifying any movement or impulse of the sensitive appetite, in its broadest sense, certainly constitutes one of the elements most readily affecting the voluntary a. u. If it precedes the determination of the will (passio antecedens), it tends, through its attractive and abstractive force, to diminish the evaluative indifference of judgment and, consequently, the very freedom that finds its root in it; indeed, its vehemence may sometimes be such as to prevent any possibility of comparison between the particular good and the absolute good, and thus to remove freedom altogether. If, on the other hand, passion follows the voluntary act through mere redundancy (passio consequens per simplicem redundantium), it does not affect the act, but is rather an indication of the intensity of willing. Finally, if 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, thereby extending its sphere of influence and efficacy. Naturally, in the vital and fluid process of human activity, whose individual moments we consider separately for logical reasons, these various aspects of passion may occur together, conditioning one another (v. 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 resolved, it is necessary that there be neither any external connivance nor any internal consent on the part of the one who suffers it (v. VIOLENZA).
Fear, on the other hand, although it may influence the determination of the will and may also conflict with the various moral freedoms enjoyed by man, does not oppose psychological freedom except when and insofar as it becomes passion. For this reason, an action performed through fear is simply voluntary, although most often it is accompanied by an inner repugnance and ineffective resistance, unless this too is overcome by the very efficacy of fear: such, for example, is the fear of hell as a motive for sorrow over sins (v. TIMORE).
The factors that influence the voluntariness of the a. u. indirectly and remotely are: habit, propensities and tendencies, and disorders of the spirit.
Habit may benefit or harm freedom of willing. It is therefore necessary first of all to distinguish habits affecting external activities, which through their mechanical character tend to diminish attention, from those that reach the spiritual faculties and facilitate their activity without thereby diminishing voluntariness and freedom: virtues too are habits (v. ABITO, ABITUDINE). It may therefore be said, as a matter of principle, that habits diminish the voluntariness of the a. u. insofar as they impede attention and influence tendencies and passions.
Likewise, propensities and tendencies, which may be either natural or acquired and may depend both on temperament and on contracted habits, influence the voluntary by determining impulses and stimulating passions (v. TEMPERAMENTO). On the other hand, each person’s temperament is intimately connected with all his activity and affects, among other things, its tone and particular coloration. Yet although it may sometimes incline one toward virtue or vice, it is never their determining or, in any case, primary cause.
Similarly, the so-called disorders of the spirit, insofar as they affect perception, consciousness, ideation, judgment, instinct, the sphere of emotions, and that of motor expressions, likewise affect the voluntariness and imputability of actions performed as a consequence of such disturbances. Naturally, 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 features of the psychopathic personality, and because of the difficulty—which is often a genuine impossibility—of defining the boundaries between illness and normality and, in the patients themselves, between moments and elements of rationality and moments and elements of irrationality or of instinct and uncontrollable impulses. Not to mention that sometimes (as, for example, in morphinomania, cocaine addiction, and alcoholism) the cause of the disturbances may be voluntary, and consequently the actions dependent upon them may be imputable in causa (v. MENTALI).
II. MORAL ELEMENTS
Authors do not agree on the metaphysical essence of morality, its constitutive norm, or its foundation (v. MORALITÀ). 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 some human acts are intrinsically good and others intrinsically evil, independently of any positive law; 3) that the ethical norm of human action is intimately connected with the nature and order of man and of other things, and depends on the eternal law of God. Morality may be considered either in its objective aspect or in its subjective aspect. For the objective morality of the human act to pass into the action as it is posited by the subject, it is necessary that it be present in the subject’s consciousness. But whereas knowledge of the malice of the object suffices for one to contract it, for good to become subjective it must also be willed: no one can become good against his will or independently of his good will.Moreover, since goodness consists in the conformity of the act to its ethical norm, and evil in deviation from it, human activity can be called simpliciter good only when all its elements possess this conformity in themselves.
Nevertheless, not every defect substantially corrupts the morality of the action, although it is disputed whether one and the same human act can at once be 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 object and the circumstances 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. The object gives the act its primary and specific morality. The circumstances may either add a new moral species to the human act (in the theft of a sacred object, the specific malice of theft is joined by that of sacrilege), or merely modify accidentally the essential morality of the human act.
Among all the circumstances, particular importance belongs to the end for which one wills and acts (finis operantis). Like the other circumstances, when it differs from the end to which the action is intrinsically ordered (finis operis), it can affect its morality in various ways. Nevertheless, the goodness of the end does not purify the human act of any intrinsic malice it may possess (the end does not justify the means); whereas its malice, at least when it is the sole and complete motive of the action, necessarily empties the human act of all objective goodness. It is disputed, however, what negative efficacy it has when it is only a partial motive of the action.
Likewise, authors do not judge uniformly concerning the moral value of the human act willed and performed for the pleasure deriving from it and connected with II. When this is understood, in its natural instrumentality, as a simple stimulus to act, no Catholic author would dare condemn it, just as no one dares justify it when it is willed as the sole and ultimate end of one’s action. Many, however, also think that it is not illicit to act for a pleasure recognized as honest, since, even if in this case there is no explicit reference to a further end, there remains the implicit recognition of one’s subordination to the ethical norm, and hence the implicit will to tend toward the end to which it is ordered. Others, more rigorous, condemn the action in such a case, while for still others it would lie outside the sphere of morality, that is, it would be a morally indifferent action.
The problem is therefore connected in part with the other concerning the scope of morality. No human act is moral unless it is voluntary and free; but can it conversely be said that every voluntary and free human act, considered in its concreteness, is either good or evil? Many think so, since they do not regard an absolute extraneousness of the human act from the moral order as possible, at least by virtue of the end to which it is ordered by the subject; others, however, do not find this hypothesis impossible. The first opinion, assigning identical boundaries to freedom and morality, seems better founded and more logical.
The moral value of the human act formally resides in the will, that is, in good and evil willing. The external act, therefore, has ethical value only insofar as it expresses and reflects the act of the will from which it derives. This does not, however, mean that it has no value or influence whatsoever 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), at the very moment of execution it constitutes the matter of the voluntary act, and can consequently nourish the will itself, thus influencing the increase of merit or demerit.
On the same level of execution it is necessary to distinguish the action we perform from the effects that depend on II. 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 indistinctly, they can and ought to have been prevented by us, and there is no proportionate reason for which they may lawfully be permitted by us.
III. SUPERNATURAL ELEMENTS OF THE HUMAN ACT
The human act becomes supernatural when it is Grace (v.). Such help may also be granted to one who does not possess sanctifying Grace, and may elevate to the supernatural order not only deliberate human acts, but also the non-deliberate movements of the intellect and the will: for it is in these that the invitation and prompting of prevenient grace are realized.On the other hand, only the free human act is meritorious, and for merit to be, as theologians say, de condigno, friendship with God is required (v. MERITO).
The meritorious human act is therefore at the summit of human activity in this life: it encompasses within itself all the other characteristics of the human act (voluntariness, freedom, morality), raises it to a higher plane, and enables it thus to attain its ultimate end, together with its full meaning: every action is, indeed, essentially directed towards an end.