Volutary and Involuntary Actions

Virtue is concerned with the regulation of feelings and actions.

Praise and blame arise upon such as are voluntary, while for the involuntary allowance is made, and sometimes compassion is excited,

We must distinguish between what is voluntary and what involuntary.

This is certainly useful for legislators, with respect to the assigning of honours and punishments.

An action is either voluntary or involuntary at the time of doing it.

Involuntary actions are of two kinds:

1. Done on compulsion

This is when the origination is external to the agent. In it, the agent contributes nothing. This is like wind blowing you anywhere, or men having power over your person.

2. Done by ignorance.

Actions are not automatically totally voluntary or involuntary when they are done from:

• fear of greater evils, or
• some honourable motive

For instance, if you were ordered to commit a crime by a despot who held your parents hostage, and they would die if you refused to do it.

A similar question arises with respect to cases of throwing goods overboard in a storm.

No man throws away his property willingly. But when it is needed for his own and his shipmates’ safety anyone would do it.

Such actions are of a mixed kind, but are most like voluntary actions.

They are choice-worthy when they are being done. The object of the action must refer to the actual occasion.

In such a case, the man acts voluntarily because it rests with himself.

Even if such actions are voluntary,in the abstract perhaps they are involuntary because no one would choose any of such things in and by itself.

For such actions men sometimes are even praised. For example, when they endure any disgrace or pain to secure great and honourable equivalents.

Likewise, when they are blamed, it shows a base mind to endure things very disgraceful for no honourable object, or for a trifling one.

For some again no praise is given, but allowance is made; as where a man does what he should not by reason of such things as overstrain the powers of human nature, or pass the limits of human endurance.

Some acts perhaps there are for which compulsion cannot be pleaded, but a man should rather suffer the worst and die; how absurd, for instance, are the pleas of compulsion with which Alcmaeon in Euripides’ play excuses his matricide!

But it is difficult sometimes to decide:

• what kind of thing should be chosen
• what should be endured
• much moreso to abide by one’s decisions

In general:

• the alternatives are painful
• the actions required are base

And so praise or blame is awarded according as persons have been compelled or not.

What kind of actions then are to be called compulsory?

We could say that simply and abstractedly whenever:

• the cause is external
• the agent contributes nothing.
• the acts are in themselves such as one would not wish but choice-worthy at the present time and in preference to such and such things
• the origination rests with the agent, the actions are in themselves involuntary but at the given time and in preference to such and such things voluntary

They are more like voluntary than involuntary because the actions consist of little voluntary details.

But what kind of things should one choose?

A person could say that pleasant and honourable things exert a compulsive force since they are external and do compel.

If so, then every action is on compulsion because these are universal motives of action.

Again, they who act on compulsion and against their will do so with pain; but they who act by reason of what is pleasant or honourable act with pleasure.

It is truly absurd for a man to attribute his actions to external things instead of to his own capacity for being easily caught by them;[1] or, again, to ascribe the honourable to himself, and the base ones to pleasure.

So then that seems to be compulsory “whose origination is from without, the party compelled contributing nothing.”