REACTION PAPER

ON THE
HUMAN ACTS AND ACTS OF MAN

JUSTINE BUSTILLO VERSO

BSOA-1

MS. JOSIEMAR N. BANAYBANAY

INSTRUCTOR
Abstract
Human acts are those acts that proceed from a deliberate free will. A man is
fully responsible with the consequences of his acts. Human acts are action
done intentionally, free, and deliberate of a person. These are action that a
man properly masters for he does them with full knowledge and of his own will.
Thus, it involves man’s responsibility and accountability as the result of
his/her actions. Example of human acts is like in decision-making in material
things, like choosing what birthday gift to buy for your mother, and doing
things with reason like you decided to enter law school to help those
underprivileged people to have a voice in our justice system. However, human
acts can be good or evil. The morality depends on the object. Thus, if you
decided to steal just to have a birthday gift for your mother then you have the
accountability for your action.
Acts of man are instinctive, such as physiology in nature. These are actions
done under the circumstances of ignorance, passion, fear, violence, and habits.
Acts that are performed by Men without being master of them through his
intellect and will, therefore acts of man are involuntary actions. Acts of man
are acts shared in common by man and animals. Acts done as a result of fear,
such as the “flight and fight response.” The fight-or-flight response is a
physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event,
attack, or threat to survival. Actions done under ignorance or habit, for
example a man is under the influence of alcohol tend to do things that he
regrets doing the following day.
Introduction
In our everyday living we are not aware of the things we usually do. We always
have this justification in ourselves that we do things out of ignorance and
passion, that we just do things but we don’t mean it. There are might actions
that we do out of our free will, but most of the time we do acts voluntarily. God
made us superior among all his creation. We can make decisions and we are
responsible for those decisions that we make. Qualitatively the human brain
may be very slightly superior and animals do not have the potential of mind
that god gave only to man. And, although man’s body is made of clay, he is
simply part of nature.

Body
An act that is performed only by a human being and thus is proper to man. Not
every act that a human being does is a distinctively human act. Some acts that
human beings do are performed also by animals, e.g., vegetative acts and acts
of perception and of emotion. When a human being does such acts, they are
called acts of man but not human acts. Acts of man, therefore, are acts shared
in common by man and other animals, whereas human acts are proper to
human beings. What makes an act performed by a human being distinctively a
human act is that it is voluntary in character, that is, an act in some way
under the control or direction of the will, which is proper to man. One can
therefore identify the human act with the voluntary act. A voluntary act
proceeds either from the will itself—for example, an act of love or of choice—or
from some other human power that can in some way be moved by the will,
whether an act of the intellect, of sense cognition, or of emotion; even an act of
some bodily member as commanded by the will can be a voluntary act. A moral
analysis of the human act analyzes the human act in relation to the good that
is sought and insofar as all acts are moved to their ends by the will. A
psychological consideration of the human act distinguishes the internal and
external principles of the human act, treats the notion of human freedom, and
analyzes the human act into its component parts. This article deals with the
human act primarily in its psychological aspect, which a moral analysis must
presuppose.
Result
Intellect. As a power of the human soul, the intellect is the principle of all intellectual acts of knowing.
The human intellect is either speculative or practical, a difference deriving from the end to which
knowledge is ordered (see cognition speculative-practical). If the end in view is the consideration of
truth itself, the intellect is speculative in its mode of knowing. Thus, through acts of understanding and
reasoning man arrives at scientific knowledge, when possible, or at something less than truth and
certainty—opinion, for example. If the end in view is operation or action of some kind, then the intellect
is practical in its knowing, as in the making of works of art or in judgments of prudence in regard to
actions one is to perform. And just as in speculative knowing ordered to arriving at truth where there
are first principles grasped by the special habit of understanding, from which true and necessary
conclusions follow, so in practical knowing there are the primary practical principles grasped by the
special habit of synderesis, enabling man to know the common precepts in regard to good and evil
action.

Discussion
As is evident from experience, the common good is the end or purpose of all
law, and without an understanding of what the common good properly is, the
nature and function of law in directing human acts cannot be appreciated. A
common good is clearly distinct from a private good, the latter being the good of
one person only, to the exclusion of its being possessed by any other. A
common good is distinct also from a collective good, which, though possessed
by all of a group, is not really participated in by the members of the group; as
divided up, a collective good becomes respectively private goods of the
members, as in the manner in which a man's estate is divided up among his
inheritors. Principles of human acts, virtue is the primary means of directing
man to the good of human happiness. Other means by which he is ordered to
leading the good life are law and grace, both of which may be referred to as
extrinsic principles of human action. It is now necessary to distinguish
between a voluntary act and a free act; for although every free act is necessarily
a voluntary act, not every voluntary act is strictly a free act. A free act, most
properly speaking, is an act of choice. There are occasions, however, when it
makes sense to say that man has no choice and that what he wills to do he
must will to do. Such acts are voluntary in that they still proceed from the will
as a principle, but they are not free, at least in the usual and proper sense of
the term.