The act of will in which the person resolves upon a particular possibility of action. The decision presupposes cognition of the good (judgment) and freedom of the will (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 245 ff.).
The decision is a personal act in the full sense: in it the person realizes itself as a free, self-determining being. Thomas Aquinas analyzes the decision (electio) as an act of the will that follows upon a preceding judgment of reason — the will chooses what reason has recognized as good. Yet the will is not mechanically determined by what is recognized: the person can also decide against the recognized good, which grounds the possibility of the morally bad act.
Wojtyła emphasizes the phenomenological dimension of the decision. In the “I act” the person experiences itself as the author of its deed. This experience of authorship (suppositum) reveals the self-determination (autodeterminatio) of the person. In every decision the person determines not only what it does, but also who it becomes. The third dimension of personhood — moral perfection or failure — realizes itself precisely in the decision.
The decision stands at the center of responsibility. Only because the person decides freely can the act be imputed to it. The free will is here not a mere faculty of freedom of choice (libertas indifferentiae), but the capacity of the person to determine itself toward the good or toward the bad. The personalist norm gives the decision its ultimate measure. The person ought to decide in such a way that the other is never used merely as a means.
Every decision has an intention — an orientation toward an end (finis operantis). The moral quality of the decision is measured by the appropriateness of the intention to the object of the act and to the circumstances.
Ontological classification:
- Superordinate concept: personal act
Chapter assignment: Chapter 4: What Is Human Personhood? (German)
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 13 (On choice — electio as an act of the will). Transl. Fathers of the English Dominican Province.
- Wojtyła, Karol (1969): Osoba i czyn. Kraków (English: The Acting Person, transl. Andrzej Potocki. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979). (Self-determination and the experience of authorship)