Self-Determination and Personal Identity: A Note on the Prenormative Roots of Moral Action

Action and Self - Determination

Practical life and human action are meant to exceed the realm of natural, economical, and technical causation. Certainly an action may be completely subordinate to and determined by a knowledge of causes. Not only because it is always possible (in principle) to trace the psycho-physical adventures of a determined intention and a course of action. In addition, a "cause" is often also invoked when we want to understand or to orientate an action in its full meaning, beyond its psycho-physical dimension. In fact, it is sometimes believed that the question about practical life amounts to the question about the causes to which one must adhere to solve dilemmas that are raised in everyday existence. In such cases, however, the action is not entirely left to itself and is not pure or self-determined action but is determined by the object or state of affairs to be produced. A self-determining action, on the contrary, must be conceived as separated from external causes, even final causes (intentions, values, etc.). As paradoxically as it may appear, it is action without causes. It engenders noncaused events. Such events do not conform to rules for the production of a determined object or state of affairs. They are not technical objects.¹ Action, by definition, cannot be compared with the knowledge about an object to be produced. Action, in fact, must be situated in a realm of absolute, radical nonknowledge. I should not know what must be done if I—and not a given law, or another (human or divine) will—shall be responsible of my own action.

An action emerges in a situation in which there are no given causalities—natural, technical, or divine. There are no rules to follow. If there were such rules, or such given causalities, the action would not be radically separated from knowledge, and therefore it would not be, properly speaking, an action. Above all, it would not be entirely self-determined: one could refer to some external mechanism or alien will as what is responsible for the action that ensues. The action would only have the meaning and the value of the rule that is followed, and it would be in itself or by itself meaningless (save as a mean for an end).

An essential characteristic of self-determination is that it must occur if challenged or by situations in which there is no room for not deciding, or not acting. There is no way to escape the situation other than by deciding and acting. Even if decision and action sought to reject their own conditions (viz., by conforming to the production of some given good according to given rules), this would only be done thanks to one's own constitutive self-determining capacity to decide and to act. It would be the decision of not taking decisions. Self-determination consists in being delivered to the task of deciding by oneself a course of action to respond to a situation that is defined by its unconformity to any rule. We are compelled to decide, to create a course of action. As Christine Korsgaard—who in any case is only interested in actions that conform to reason and law or normativity, that is, so-called moral or practical actions, which precisely is, according to my argument, what stops being true decision and action—states, "the necessity of choosing and acting is not causal, logical, or rational necessity. It is our plight: the simple inexorable fact of the human condition" (Korsgaard 2009, 2). It is an inexorable fact of the human condition because, as we shall see, it is incommensurable with all possible legality and normativity. One does not choose it, one suffers it, and one cannot escape it, even though we are free not to confront it, not to assume it, to turn a blind eye, to follow an advice or a precept, to blame one's own personality, or the personality of the father or the mother, or the circumstances.

If a situation is truly...