Austin's Account of Action

448 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY content to establish a contrary position, namely, the affirmation of the complete sufficiency of man's religious and moral capacities such as he is endowed with them by nature, In other words, the framework of this particular controversy may also have impelled the author to stop his dialectic one step short. But if Diderot actually was the author of the pamphlet, may we not also infer that he must have been in some sort of deistic phase at the time, or at least that he had not yet achieved total liberation from religious inhibitions, the one he wrote about with such excitement while dreaming of free love in Tahiti? Actually, such conclusions would be highly speculative at present. Until more can be said about the manner in which Diderot came to free himself from Christianity, one must be content to supplement the approach chosen by Professor Spink. WALTERE. REX University of California, Berkeley AUSTIN'S ACCOUNT OF ACTION In his Lectures on Jurisprudence John Austin gives the following account of human actions: Certain movements of our bodies follow invariablyand immediately' our wishes or desires for those same movements.... These antecedent wishes and these consequent movements, are human volitions and acts (strictly and properly so called) .... Our desires of those bodily movements which immediately follow our desires of them, are therefore the onlyobjects which can be styled volitions; or (if you like the expression better) which can be styled acts of the will.... And as these are the only volitions; so are the bodily movements, by which they are immediately followed, the only acts or actions (properly so called) .... Most of the names which seem to be names of acts, are names of acts, coupled with certain of their consequences. For example, IfI kill you with a gun or pistol, I shoot you: And the long train of incidents which are denoted by that brief expression, are considered (or spoken of) as if they constituted an act, perpetrated by me. In truth, the only parts of the train which are my act or acts, are the muscularmotionsby which I raise the weapon; point it at yourhead or body, and pull the trigger. These I will. The contact of the flintand steel; the ignitionof the powder, the flight of the ball towards your body, the wound and subsequent death, with the numberless incidents included in these, are consequences of the act which I will. I will not those consequences, although I may intend them. 1 This passage was discussed at some length by Eric D'Arcy in Human Acts and H. L. A. Hart in his paper "Acts of Will and Responsibility.''2 Since then it has come to play a rather special role in philosophical discussions of action: several writers have used it as a standard example of the kind of theory which treats an action as a bodily movement preceded by a volition.3 Some philosophers have, of course, objected to any theory which explains action in terms of a mental antecedent such as a desire or volition followed by the corresponding Thirded., 2 vols. (London:JohnMurray, 1863),vol. 2, Lecture 18, pp. 81-85. 2HumanActs (Oxford:ClarendonPress, 1963),pp. 4-10, 97-98; "Actsof Willand Responsibdlty,"Jubilee Lectures of the Facultyof Law, Umversityof Sheffield (London:Stevensand Sons, 1960),reprintedin Hart, PunishmentandResponsibility(Oxford:ClarendonPress, 1968).pp. 90-112 (pagereferencesare to the latter). 3A R. White, The Philosophyof Action (London-OxfordUmversityPress, 1968), p 5; W. F R Hardie, NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 449 bodily movement, because they believe that the alleged causes are not logically distinct from the alleged effects? If this were correct, it would constitute a strong objection to Austin's theory; but, since it has been argued very plausibly that this kind of criticism is misguided: I shall ignore it and concentrate on the specific points that have been made against Austin. Hart raises two major objections against doctrines such as Austin's. The first (pp. 99-101) is that, although many of the jurisprudential writers who have been influenced by Austin's account of action assume that it applies to omissions just as much as to voluntary acts, omissions cannot in fact be fitted...