Professional Documents
Culture Documents
A. The Nature of Human Acts
A. The Nature of Human Acts
B.1. Good
when human acts are in harmony with the dictates of right reason
B.2. Evil
when human acts are in opposition with the dictates of right reason
B.3. Indifferent
when they stand in no positive relation to the dictates of reason
III. Constituents of the Human Acts
1. Knowledge
A human act proceeds from the deliberate will; it requires deliberation.
Deliberation means advertence, or knowledge in intellect of what one is
about and what this means. Deliberation means knowledge.
Thus, no human act is possible without knowledge.
2. Freedom
A human act is an act determined (elicited or commanded) by the will and
by nothing else.
It is an act that is under control of the will, an act that the will can do or leave
undone.
Such an act is called a free act, thus, every human act must be free.
3. Voluntariness
A human act to be voluntary, or must have voluntariness, simply means it
must be a will-act.
This is to say that there must be both knowledge and freedom in the agent or
the doer of the action.