Levels of willicng and not willing

1. What’s the difference between willing and not willing?

WILLING – Ready, eager, or prepared to do something.
NOT WILLING – Obviously, it is the opposite of willing. That means there’s no eagerness to do
something.
2. What’s the meaning of not willing to do something and willing not to do something?
NOT WILLING TO DO SOMETHING
There’s no act of will and therefore no voluntariness.
WILLING NOT TO DO SOMETHING
There’s an act of will, an act of deliberate omission or refusal, and this is quite voluntary.
 Hence, voluntariness can be positive or negative.
 Some writers reserve the word involuntary for what happens against our will and
nonvoluntary for what we have no attitude toward, but this usage is not consistently
observed.

Four levels of intention

1. Actual/Active Intention - Is one that a person is conscious of at the moment he or she performed the
intended action. The person pays attention not merely to what he or she is doing, but also to the fact of
here and now willing it.

2. Virtual Intention - Is one that was once made and continuous to influence the act now being done,
but it is not present in the person’s consciousness at the moment of performing the act.

3. Unrevoked Intention - Is one that was once made and not retracted, but it does not influence the
performance of the act intended at present.

4. Interpretative/Presumed Intention - Is one that has not been made but presumably would have been
made if the person were aware of the circumstances.

Modifiers of responsibility

 Voluntariness is said to be complete or perfect if the agent has full knowledge and full consent.
It is diminished or imperfect if there is something wanting in the agent’s knowledge or consent
or both, provided he or she has both in some significant degree.
 Degree of the agent’s self control.

5 main modifiers

1. Ignorance, affecting the knowledge

2. Strong Emotion, affecting the consent of the will

3. Intellectual Fear, opposing to the will a contrary wish

4. Force, actual use of physical compulsion

5. Habit, a tendency acquired by repetition

1. Ignorance

We are interested in ignorance only to the degree that lack of knowledge affects the voluntariness of a
human act so as to make the act less a human act.

The only ignorance an agent ought not to have, an ignorance that ought not to exist.

3 KINDS OF IGNORANCE

1. Ignorance that can be overcome by acquiring the requisite knowledge is called vincible ignorance.

2. Ignorance that cannot be overcome because the requisite knowledge cannot be acquired it is called
invincible ignorance.

3. Ignorance deliberately cultivated in order to avoid knowing what ought to be known is called affected
or studied ignorance.

These 3 kinds of ignorance can be looked at as three degrees of lack of knowledge thereby affecting the
agent’s voluntariness and so his or her responsibility.

1. INVINCIBLE IGNORANCE PRELCUDES RESPONSIBILITY. Knowledge is requisite for voluntariness, and in

the case of invincible ignorance this knowledge is simply unobtainable.

A person can be invincibly ignorant for one of 2 reasons.

Being unaware of his or her ignorance, the person does not know there is any knowledge to be acquired
or;

Being aware of his or her ignorance, person’s efforts to obtain the knowledge are of no avail.

2. VINCIBLE IGNORANCE DOES NOT PRELCUDES RESPONSIBILITY., BUT LESSENS IT. A person knows that
he or she is ignorant and that the knowledge is obtainable.

3. AFFECTED IGNORANCE IN A WAY LESSENS, IN A WAY INCREASES, RESPONSIBILITY. Such ignorance

lessens’ responsibility, as does all lack of knowledge, since the person does not see clearly the full
import of what he or she is doing.

2. Strong Emotion

- Increases the force of the willed act, but to the degree such emotion lessens voluntariness it also
lessens responsibility, and so the act is to that degree less a human.

Antecedent Emotion
When such emotion is generated before the will can act.

Involuntary

Consequent Emotion

A kind of deliberately aroused emotion which we generate after and as a result of our own choice.

Voluntary

- Very Strong or violent antecedent emotion may preclude responsibility

- Very strong or violent antecedent emotion usually lessens responsibility.

- Strong or violent consequent emotion does not lessen responsibility but may increase it.

3. Fear

- Is the emotion that apprehends impending evil and manifests itself in the desire to get away, avoid or
escape as far as possible from the impending threat.

Intellectual fear does not preclude responsibility.

Intellectual fear lessens responsibility.

4. Force

- Force, violence or compulsion is physical power used to make someone do something against his or
her will.

*Victim of force without giving a consent – no responsibility

*Victim of force by giving consent

Reduced responsibility

*Victim of force who wants to do what he or she is forced to do

Not truly a victim of force and has complete responsibility.

*Have not done the act without being forced – nearly complete responsibility.

5. Habit

- We may define habit as a constant way of acting acquired by repetition of the same act.

We may set out deliberately to acquire a habit.

We may not intend to acquire a habit for its own sake but voluntarily perform acts that we know are
habit forming.

We may discover that we have unintentionally acquired habit, either because we did not realize that we
had done the same thing in the same way so often , or because it did not occur to us that such action
were habit forming.

An act is DIRECTLY VOLUNTARY if it is willed either as an end or as a means.

An act is INDIRECTLY VOLUNTARY if it is the intended but foreseen consequence of something else that
is directly voluntary.

Additional modifiers

Principle of Double Effect

Helps us resolve some of the moral complexity of our lives.

It says that it is morally allowable to perform an act that has an evil effect under the following
conditions:

1. The act to be done must be good in itself or at least indifferent. This is evident, for if the act is
evil of itself, evil would be chosen directly, either as an end or as a means to an end, and there
could be no question of merely permitting or tolerating it.
2. The good intended must not be obtained by means of the evil effect. The evil must be only an
incidental by-product and not an actual factor in the accomplishment of the good.
3. The effect must not be intended for itself but only permitted. The bad effect may be of its own
nature merely a by-product of the act performed, but if the agent wants this bad effect, he or
she makes it directly voluntary by willing it
4. There must be a proportionately grave reason for permitting the evil effect. Though we are not
obliged to prevent evil, we are obliged to prevent a serious evil by a small sacrifice of our own
good

Responsibility to the act of others

Only the person who knowingly and willingly does an act can be responsible for it. In this sense,
no one can be responsible for the acts of another person. But we are responsible each for our own acts
insofar as we knowingly and willingly intend to permit them to affect another person as incentives to
good or evil.

Occasion of evil

It is any word or deed tending to lead, entice, or allure another person into wrong doing. It may
be only given, or only taken, or both given and taken, so that the question of responsibility may arise
on either side or on both.
Cooperation in evil

Cooperation in another’s evil deed may occur by joining that person in the actual performance of the act
or by supplying him or her with the means for performing it.

Formal cooperation – all the cooperators share completely in the responsibility of the act.

Material cooperation – there is nothing wrong in what I do or in what I intend, but there is a bad
circumstance that may otherwise innocent act aids others in their wrong doing.

The amount of evil my cooperation helps others to do.

The amount of evil that will happen to me if I refuse to cooperate.

The closeness of my cooperative act to the other’s evil act.

Cooperation may be proximate or remote, depending on how close it comes to the actual evil deed of
the principal agent.