Theme: Free will and determinism
09 Explain and illustrate the distinction between an action and a mere bodily movement.
(15 marks)
The distinction between an action and a mere bodily movement is will. The body has many movements that are autonomic, you don't have to think about or decide to do them. Whereas an action is autonomous relates to something you consider and decide to do, so they are connected to our free will. Even instantaneous decisions, like the impulse to rescue someone in an emergency, are connected to our free will and are not autonomic. So whilst autonomic movements would include things such as your heart beat, digestion, blinking and sweating, actions would include things like deciding to burn a book. Actions that require free will can have external conditions that can restrain you, but having the ability to overlook them and act on your decisions according to the determination of your will are what makes them actions and not mere bodily movements. It can be considered though that actions contain bodily movements, for example, the decision to lift up your arm is an action but contains the bodily movement of your arm. But the argument of physicalism can be made which is the idea that everything described as mental activity can be reduced to physical events and that, ontologically, mind states are just neural activity and electrochemical signals in the brain. So, if this is the case, surely actions are determined by the natural laws of sciences and not