The Politics of Acts and Actions

Filed under: by: Irami

I'm a fan of Orwell's essay, Politics and the English Language. I haven't Orwell's wit or clarity, but I do believe there is something dubious about the way moral theorists use the term "action."

Act strikes me as so much the more the elegant noun that I'm led to believe there is a reason we privilege action rather than act. I think the difference may be a matter of aspect. If you don't know about aspect, then you've never studied Russian or Greek, and you have no place in this world. Or you can look here to recover your dignity.

To make a latin verb into an English noun, we often add -tion. I try to avoid words that end in -tion because the presence of a -tion often indicates a latent passive construction(ha!) lurking about. Mixed results. In addition to making the verb "act" into a noun, the -tion bears, on the sly I believe, a completed aspect, but I think the word "act" retains a progressive aspect. Why does this matter? Well, if I'm a good utilitarian who is tallying and building based off of consequences, I need to worry about completed acts so that I can assign them a number and get on with calculating good. If an act is still progressing, with its results rippling forth, and if all political acts are incomplete, then assigning them a number based on their consequences becomes an even greater feat of careless imagination.

The results of acts are unpredictable and always revealing themselves. The results of actions, while possibly unpredictable, are fixed. Actions have at least stopped metastasizing and screwing up my utilitarian calculus, whereas the consequences of acts are still bodying forth into the world, offending my attempts to devise a consequentialist practical theory.

I'm an act man. I'll leave the actions to the scientists. That's all.