almost all our actions, or even, in a sense, absolutely all those, which properly deserve to be called “ours,” are “voluntary” in this sense: so that the use of this special name is unnecessary: we might, instead, talk simply of “our actions.” And it is, I think, true that almost all the actions, of which we should generally think, when we talk of “our actions,” are of this nature; and even that, in some contexts, when we talk of “human actions,” we do refer exclusively to actions of this sort. But in other contexts such a way of speaking would be misleading. It is quite certain that both our bodies and our minds constantly do things, which we certainly could not have prevented, by merely willing just beforehand that they should not be done; and some, at least, of these things, which our bodies and minds do, would in certain contexts be called actions of ours. There would therefore be some risk of confusion if we were to speak of “human actions” generally, when we mean only actions which are “voluntary” in the sense I have defined. It is better, therefore, to give some special name to
