Keeping Politics Personal

What is a noun? “A person, place, or thing.” What is an adjective? “A word that describes a noun.” What is a verb? “An action word.” Does this sound familiar from your days of rote learning of basic grammar? Now, how about this question: if a verb is an action word, then what is an action?

In The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says:

Now the origin of action (the efficient, not the final cause) is choice, and the origin of choice is appetition and purposive reasoning. Hence choice necessarily involves not only intellect and thought, but a certain moral state; for good conduct and its contrary necessarily involve thought and character.

Thomas Aquinas affirms Aristotle’s definition that action involves a combination of intellect and will. Because only human persons are endowed with the capacity to reason and with free will, only a person who knowingly orders his action to a purposive end can be legitimately said to act.

Aquinas discusses the primacy of will and gives an example to differentiate between human action and both natural instinct and animal behaviour:

Consent, properly speaking, is not in irrational animals. The reason of this is that consent implies an application of the appetitive movement to something as to be done. Now to apply the appetitive movement to the doing of something, belongs to the subject in whose power it is to move the appetite: thus to touch a stone is an action suitable to a stick, but to apply the stick so that it touch the stone, belongs to one who has the power of moving the stick. But irrational animals have not the command of the appetitive movement; for this is in them through natural instinct. Hence in the irrational animal, there is indeed the movement of the appetite, but it does not apply that movement to some particular thing. And hence it is that the irrational animal is not properly said to consent: this is proper to the rational nature, which has the command of the appetitive movement, and is able to apply or not to apply it to this or that thing.

Classical philosophers especially emphasized the distinction between human action and animal behaviour. Now, it seems necessary to distinguish human action not only from animals, but also from systems and organizations.

Among political scientists, there seems to be a tendency to personify non-persons, while, at the same time, dehumanizing actual persons. This is an especially common temptation for international relations theorists. States, governments, international organizations, agencies, departments, programs, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, non-governmental organizations, corporations, etc. do not act. Only human persons act. Action is important because it denotes intellect and will. Only when we recognize that actions are what human persons (and only human persons) do, can we assign moral responsibility to the persons acting within these larger organizations. Otherwise, individual persons are shielded from responsibility within a bureaucracy and among the masses within a system.

Ludwig von Mises stresses the individual nature of action saying: “All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.”

This semester I encourage you to be sensitive to instances where persons (whether they are your professors, friends, the authors of your textbooks, etc.) assign human characteristics and agency to non-persons. Similarly, be attentive to when these same persons dehumanize actual persons. Verbs are action words. The kind of action with which political scientists are concerned is human action and the study of this action requires keeping an emphasis on persons, not abstractions.