Intentional Is Not Voluntary: An Epistemic Approach

Abstract

While concepts such as intentional action, action done for reasons, or expressive action have been the focus of much contemporary work in the philosophy of action, the concept of voluntary action has not received as much attention in the last century. So much so that the current bibliography about voluntariness is rather scarce. An interesting exception can be found in the recent work of John Hyman (2013, 2015, 2016), whose account of voluntariness is remarkably aimed at rejecting what I will call the Intentional-Voluntary Sufficiency Thesis (IVST henceforth): IVST. For any act-description A and any agent S, if S A-s intentionally then S also A-s voluntarily. Hyman’s main argument against IVST concerns cases of action done under compulsion that falls short of total control over the agent. The argument goes as follows. If S consents to A-ing because she is compelled to do it by a sufficiently grave threat, then S does not A voluntarily although she A-s