ABSTRACT
The general framework of this chapter’s considerations is the thirteenth-century debate about free choice (liberum arbitrium), in which one can identify an intellectualist and a voluntarist approach. This debate emerged in the wake of the reception of Aristotle’s ethics and psychology, causing a kind of “psychological turn” in accounts of human freedom, which is visible in the interest of both parties in the description and causal analysis of human action. A prominent borderline case in action theory is incontinent action against one’s better knowledge, which Aristotle called akrasia. The author uses the different ways in which voluntarist authors around 1277 discussed this phenomenon to highlight a significant development in voluntarism in this era. The general thesis of this chapter is that the handling of incontinent action shows a remarkable radicalization in voluntarist authors; in particular, the focus on incontinent actions undergoes a shift from Aristotelian akrasia to clear-eyed wrongdoing, which cannot be explained within this psychological framework. This development is traced by looking at Walter of Bruges, Henry of Ghent, the 1277 condemnation, William de la Mare, and Peter Olivi. The author also discusses how far Olivi’s explanation of incontinent actions ultimately leads to a moral externalism about practical reasoning.
