Voluntary, Involuntary, and Beyond

And relevant ethical problems we can uncover.

Intuitively, I have always understood “involuntary” to be precisely the same as “not voluntary.” I also imagine you and most readers have a similar understanding. But surprisingly, there are some prominent thinkers who find this not to be the case. In the fourth century BC Aristotle wrote Nicomachean Ethics, wherein he described their disparities in regards to culpability. And two millennia later, around 2019, Pamela Hieronymi wrote "Agency and Responsibility," in which she describes agency as both voluntary and involuntary. Let us explore what they found and what it tells us about moral responsibility and agency.

Aristotle

Aristotle dives into the relationship between voluntary action and moral responsibility in the third chapter of his famed Nicomachean Ethics. At first, he mentions that many actions are a mix of voluntary and involuntary, like coerced ones. This is not what I mean as beyond voluntary and involuntary. Instead, Aristotle explicitly lays out the distinction in regards to actions made out of ignorance. An example he gives for such an action is wounding someone with a spear that was supposed to have a covered blade. I voluntarily struck them but I did not voluntarily wound them.

Aristotle cuts to the chase on his definitions regarding voluntary and its corresponding terms without much explanation. Plato’s foremost student primarily relies on moral intuition, but not unreasonably I might add. He therefore gives the following condition for an act being not voluntary:

An action is not voluntary if done by reason of ignorance.

Within the next sentence he elucidates his proposed nature of involuntary actions:

An action that is not voluntary owing to ignorance is only involuntary if it causes harm.

Hereby, we have been given a blueprint for option beyond voluntary and involuntary by Aristotle’s definitions. By following his rules, we can construct an action that is not voluntary whilst also not being involuntary. I will produce two examples that will aid in our discovery later down the path.

First, let us suppose that I resented you because I thought you had talked bad about my friend Alice behind my back when, in fact, you had not. This would not be voluntary via my ignorance, but then let us further add that my resentment towards you was proper because you bad mouthed my other friend Bob who I hold to a similar esteem. Therefore, because of my ignorant resentment, I was able to properly judge you for bad mouthing my friend. This action would therefore still be not voluntary while also not being involuntary because it provided some benefit.

Next, let us instead suppose that I was trying to accomplish some medicinal research. Late one night in the back of my laboratory, I discovered a groundbreaking innovation irrelevant to my field of study. This action would both be not voluntary because I was instead trying to do medicinal research whilst also not being involuntary due to the general benefit reaped.

Thus, we have an Aristotelian ethical framework for an action beyond voluntary and involuntary. He argues that actions made out of ignorance whilst being neutral or beneficial deserve this unusual categorization as being neither voluntary nor involuntary. Now, let us jump forward in time to our modern philosopher who has her own distinct approach.

Pamela Hieronymi

Philosopher Hieronymi lays out her alternative to the dichotomy in “Agency and Responsibility” which relies on many ideas laid out by P. F. Strawson. Strawson, in “Freedom and Resentment,” introduces the term reactive attitudes. A reactive attitude is when one reacts to another when they perceive the other as a moral agent. For instance, you would not have a reactive attitude towards a dog (instead Strawson calls this sort of attitude an objective one). You would have a reactive attitude toward yourself when you feel you have done wrong and towards others when they harm you or others. Examples of reactive attitudes include, but are not excluded to, guilt, resentment, and judgment.

Hieronymi employs her paper to take these reactive attitudes in quite a few directions, yet the only relevant path today is the one toward voluntariness. She first claims that reactive attitudes are not voluntary in that we cannot adopt them at will. We can not simply choose to resent someone for hurting us, we just do. Yet, they are also not involuntary actions like a hangover (her example). This would remove and misunderstand the agency of the reactor. Thereby, her exception is exemplified by (but not necessarily excluded to) reactive attitudes.

But the idea is not just left there, Hieronymi goes on to supply further rigor to this viewpoint through a definition of what it means to be voluntary. She puts it as follows:

An activity is voluntary if it reveals your take on what is all-things-considered worth doing.

But critically, Hieronymi thinks voluntariness is constrained to these surface level attitudes towards behavior. An action is voluntary if it shows what one thinks is worth doing, but then she adds an additional stipulation as follows:

An activity can not be voluntary if it reveals something deeper like what you think to be “true, important, wonderful, admirable, offensive, contemptible, etc.”

Since the author does not explicitly apply this definition to reactive attitudes, it is our task to resume the philosophizing. The task seems trivial prima facie, but the devil is in the details. Let us first inquire if there are any reactive attitudes that are voluntary. The answer is clearly yes, for when I resent someone for harming me I am saying that act is not worth doing. But here Hieronymi’s caveat stops us in our tracks, does this resentment not also reveal what I find to be admirable, offensive, and so on? This would mean that resentment is both voluntary and non-voluntary; such argumentation also applies to all other forms of reactive attitudes. This is where her thesis that reactive attitudes do not fit in the binary becomes evident¹. Whilst this is interesting, what is relevant for our thesis is that it is possible for there to be an action that is both voluntary and involuntary under Hieronymi's framework.

The Overlap Between Two Disparate Views

We can clearly see two advocacies for exceptions to the voluntary vs. involuntary dichotomy, yet the connection remains unclear. Let us try and make some progress in that endeavor. For ease, let us call these exceptions as pseudo-voluntary with there being Aristotelian and Hieronymian variants of this concept. We will refer to Aristotelian pseudo-voluntary actions as sub-voluntary because they are neither voluntary nor involuntary whilst their Hieronymian counterparts will be super-voluntary because they are both.

The summarized qualifications for Aristotle’s example of a pseudo-voluntary action are as follows:

An Aristotelian sub-voluntary action, assuming it is made in ignorance, is one that does not cause harm.

And then for Hieronymi’s example of a pseudo-voluntary actions, they are qualified this way:

A Hieronymian super-voluntary action is one that reveals your take on what is all-things-considered worth doing and also something deeper like what you think to be “true, important, wonderful, admirable, offensive, contemptible, etc.”

Let us then explore sub-voluntary and super-voluntary actions in turn to see if either framework has overlap. The first thing to note is that Aristotle’s pseudo-voluntary actions are restricted to ones made out of ignorance. There are no Aristotelian super-voluntary actions because his second qualifier only applies to actions made out of ignorance. Therefore, even if we were to take into account the set of actions Aristotle determines to be voluntary, we would then lose access to his odd qualifier for what makes them involuntary. Under Aristotle, once actions are made with full knowledge “voluntary” once again becomes the proper and complete antonym of “involuntary.” We can then see that Aristotle and Hieronymi have no agreement over super-voluntary actions, but what about sub-voluntary ones?

Hieronymi’s qualifiers are much more flexible in this way, so it is quite trivial to construct Hieronymian sub-voluntary actions. Their definition can be determined to be such that it reveals neither your take on what is all-things-considered worth doing nor something deeper like what you think to be “true, important, wonderful, admirable, offensive, contemptible, etc.” Or in simpler terms:

A Hieronymian sub-voluntary action is one that shows nothing about your take on the world.²

This begs the question, do Hieronymi and Aristotle agree on what constitutes a sub-voluntary action? We must then consider how one’s “take on the world” is revealed or kept hidden by ignorant actions. I think the answer is that actions made out of ignorance clearly do not reveal any surface or deeper truth about the agent’s views, assuming complete ignorance in the relevant areas. One may contend with this point by imagining an example where an ignorant action accidentally aligns with the agent’s views. For instance, the initial medicinal research story shows me not voluntarily doing something I perceive as good. Yet in this example, I did not purposely do this act thus my behavior was not shaped by my take on the world. Therefore, all ignorant actions are sub-voluntary under Hieronymi’s framework.

This leads to a fascinating debacle: Aristotle has another requirement for the sub-voluntary status with that being the lack of harm. I would contend that this is an extraneous addition on Aristotle’s part that is hard to translate into Hieronymi’s view. Therefore, let us end the search for commonality there and answer the next question. Why do they agree on non-harmful sub-voluntary actions and what can we learn from that?

An Idea Two Millennia in the Making

Aristotle and Hieronymi have both uncovered the same concept from different epochs with distinct approaches. This alone should pique our interest in what they agreed upon, that being sub-voluntary actions. Or in other words, actions that are neither voluntary nor involuntary. We will call this combined class simply sub-voluntary actions defined as follows:

Sub-voluntary actions are those made out of ignorance and do not cause harm. By virtue of them being out of ignorance and not causing harm, these do not reveal any takes on the world possessed by the agent.

So why do they concur on this odd concept? The most apparent commonality between these views is the requirement of no purposiveness in the agent while also lacking any form of regret. The conceptions behind these terms will hopefully become apparent in the following applications to each view. Under Aristotle’s view, this purposiveness is lacking because of the ignorance, i.e. “I didn’t do that on purpose.” For him, there is also no regret given the lack of harm.

As for Hieronymi, there could not be any purposiveness because the agent did not take an action that represents any of their purposes. Yet this is not complete, what about actions that cause harm? Is the agent not having some take on the world where they must decide how culpable they should be for their ignorance? I find this to be evidently true when there is harm, but clouded otherwise. Therefore, we can at the very least say that there could be no take on the world when the action is both ignorant and not harmful. Whilst for the lack of regret, that is because the agent does not feel (and is not accurately) represented by said action. Thus we can see purposiveness and regret unify their frameworks as follows:

Sub-voluntary actions are those that lack purposiveness and regret.

Thus we have arrived at the critical question, does this unified conception of pseudo-voluntary conceptions make any intuitive sense? Both philosophers have been shown to agree on it, but ought we too? Let us first dive deeper into the connection between regret and the existence of harm in Aristotle’s view. I think this is a biconditional relation; this means that the existence of harm would create regret. Let us think about what happens when an ignorant action causes harm. Then while the agent will not feel regret for the action in and of itself, they will feel regret towards their past actions (or lack thereof) that allowed the ignorance. Aristotle says as much when he discusses agents being, at least partially, responsible for their ignorance. This helps us construct a tidy bridge toward Hieronymi.

If there was harm, then we could then use similar argumentation to show that the ignorant action without regret does show some form of take on the world wherein that agent thinks it is acceptable to have been ignorant. That is why we must have an absence of harm. And I think that is the very intuition worth having, that there is a morally confounding class of actions that have many of the properties aforementioned. These sub-voluntary actions are due to ignorance and do not cause harm; they lack causal purposiveness and do not have regret as an effect. These are instances where a lack of information is not harmful and I find it compelling that these sorts of actions are confusing enough to possess no clean application of the concept of voluntariness.

Voluntary, Involuntary, and Beyond

This moral confusion becomes clear in the following question: when my ignorance causes some benefit, does ignorance become a virtue? And thus we have accomplished our goal of outlining this class of non-voluntary actions introduced by two great philosophers. As for the question, that will not be answered here as that deserves its own focused attention. It also makes one wonder about whether information is always helpful and whether we should always seek it. We also only analyzed their common views on sub-voluntary actions whilst leaving untouched Hieronymi’s super-voluntary reactive attitudes.

But that is it for now, so if y’all have any ideas let me know. I hope y’all enjoyed reading and please leave any critiques below!

1. Assuming her definitions, of course.

2. This is Hieronymi’s term, but she uses it in a rather colloquial way. She uses it to roughly mean what one thinks about how things ought to be.