In my blog two weeks ago, I argued that waiting – if it is not a waiting that happens to you, because, for instance, you are in a lift that suddenly stops and you need help – is an action, albeit one of a special kind. A reader of my blogs commented that we can call this waiting a negative action (or act). Actions like walking, riding, or driving away can be called then positive actions. It’s a good point. However, I prefer to speak of active and passive actions, since actions like waiting give you the feeling that you are doing nothing and so that you are passive, while “real” actions like walking etc. suggest that you are actively involved.
Negative or passive actions are certainly not exceptional. Known passive actions in philosophy are omitting and allowing. Let’s take allowing. Most philosophers see it as an action, and if it is (and I think it is), this has deep consequences for our moral responsibility. Why? The difference between doing and allowing is sometimes described by saying that doing is making things happen and allowing is letting things happen. I think that the difference is more general than only between doing and allowing and that it applies also to the distinction between active and passive actions. Generally speaking, an active action can be described as making things happen, and a passive action as letting things happen. Then, allowing is a passive action, as said. However, the distinction just defined implies that both active and passive actions are actions. When I kick the ball and break the window, I caused the window to break. It is something I did, but was it an action by me? For it is not what I wanted to do. It was an accident. And much is happening in the world around me and we often don’t know what is happening. Can we say then that we allow these things to happen? No, of course. We can only say that we allow something to happen if we know (or could know) about it and are able to intervene (see my last blog). Therefore, I want to describe an active action as intentionally making things happen, and a passive action as intentionally letting things happen. This definition makes clear why we are responsible for what we allow. It’s not because we let things happen as such but because we let them happen intentionally, which implies that we had the explicit possibility to intervene. In a way, this is also so when we are waiting, but in this case the question of responsibility seldom matters.
I want to mention yet another difference between active and passive actions. An action can succeed or fail. I think that it is clear when it succeeds: The intended result is achieved by one’s doings, no matter whether the action was active or passive: Both the action and the result are there. However, things are more complicated in case an action fails. Basically, an action fails if it is not there, or if the result is not achieved, although the action has been performed. Again, this is clear for active actions. (In fact, it’s more complicated for “practical actions” in the sense of Aristotle, but I’ll ignore this here) But how about passive actions? If we haven’t waited, or haven’t allowed, can we say then that these actions failed? Usually, we see it as a success if we didn’t need to wait, as much as when what we were waiting for happened. Also, in case we do not allow something to happen, it’s not simply that our consent is absent (in the sense that an active action failed, for example like not being able to buy a book because it was out of stock), but we have taken another decision (note that the question is discussed here from the perspective of the person who does or doesn’t give the consent; not from the perspective of the person who needs the consent). And in case what we were waiting for didn’t happen, we waited in vain, and so our waiting was without a result, indeed. Nevertheless, we waited (although the active action “buying a book” didn’t take place, in case the book was not in stock). Similarly, if we allowed something to happen, but in the end what we allowed didn’t take place, then nevertheless we did allow it.
I leave it at these sketchy remarks but much more can be said about it.
