In order to drill home this point it is profitable to take a...

In order to drill home this point it is profitable to take a look at Christine Korsgaard’s Locke Lectures which open with a statement to the effect that “ Human beings are condemned to choice and action”.[^42] This statement is part of Korsgaard’s ambitious project of showing how “we human beings constitute our own personal or practical identities - and at the same time our own agency - through action itself. We make ourselves the authors of our actions, by the way that we act”.

Clearly, when Korsgaard says “through action” she means “through intentional action”. Indeed, she points out that to call a movement a twitch, or a slip, is at once to deny that it is an action and to assign it to some part of you that is less than the whole: the twitch to your eyebrow, or the slip, more problematically, to your tongue.

For a movement to be my action, for it to be expressive of myself in the way that an action must be, it must result from my entire nature working as an integrated whole. Twitches are not actions because they do not express our selfhood in any meaningful way. Slips are more problematic precisely because slips of the tongue can in some cases be actions, though except in rare and contrived cases, unintended actions.

It is however precisely intentions which constitute our selfhood; and it is intentions, too, which constitute the principal grounds for blameworthiness of our actions. According to Korsgaard “ there is no you prior to your choices and actions, because your identity is in a quite literal way constituted by your choices and actions”. And then Korsgaard adds: The identity of a person, of an agent, is not the same as the identity of the human animal on which the person normally supervenes.

Human beings differ from the other animals in an important way. Because we are self-conscious, and choose our actions deliberately, we are each faced with the task of constructing a peculiar, individual kind of identity - personal or practical identity - that the other animals lack. It is this sort of identity that makes sense of our practice of holding people responsible, and of the kinds of personal relationships that depend on that practice.

What distinguishes our identity from that of animals is, in other words, our capacity to act intentionally; our capacity to act intentionally is of course wholly dependent upon our more fundamental capacity to form intentions.