Person and the ‘Ought’

In human experience, namely the experience of a being that within the natural world manifests the possession of certain properties which are not shared by other beings, the perspective of action emerges as an original and irreducible datum.

is so intrinsically, so to speak, and it in no way implies that the agent is capable of pre­senting the goal to himself in order to attain it. The agent simply follows an internal dis­position. This can be modified and improved over time by accidental interventions from the outside world (...) This is why goal-seeking behaviour is often found in machines, plants, and animals, without for all that implying that they actually intend to achieve the goal. Such behaviour forms part of their mode of being; it does not correspond to some ‘ought’.

Without reference to an ideal standard, human action would not be adequately understood, since every other attempt to give an account of it would show its inev­itable inappropriateness: this applies in particular to that order of discourse which merely describes it in terms of physical causality, expunging the whole dimension of the will and freedom. Agazzi objects to this type of reduction through the recov­ery of the notion of ‘tendency to an ideal perfection’ rather than through direct criticism of materialist or deterministic models. He notes:

The term ideal, which seems to indicate only the nonmaterial nature of the model, actu­ally implies more: a reference to something unconditioned and absolute, able to inspire any particular human activity in a manner above and beyond the desire to achieve purely pragmatic ends (Agazzi 2004b: 100).

As long as we strictly adhere to the instrumental or conditional model of the rela­tionship between actions and purposes we will not be able to single out the real leap between being and the ought that underlies human action. Only through the perception of an intrinsic and unconditional prescriptivity, through the recognition of the existence of an absolute value that practice embodies and witnesses—i.e., an end in itself—is it possible to provide with sense the question of human action and its original normativity. Incidentally we can observe that today several studies in the theory of action dedicated to the relationship between freedom and deter­minism fail to break the deadlock, because they are largely confined to a condi­tional formalization; hence, to escape this deadlock, in some cases they look with favour on the indeterminist models. In this way, however, they appear to be unable to get rid of the conceptual framework they intend to deny. The intrinsic value and the extent of the autonomy of human action cannot be upheld just by holding that it is either uncertain and unpredictable, or, on the other hand, deterministic.

The perspective of the ought, therefore, according to Agazzi is something that we can ascertain as an empirical fact, but it is not limited to the empirical evi­dence: it refers to a criterion that in itself does not belong to experience but to a ‘metaphysical’ level; an ideal of perfection, never fully realized, a general require­ment of normativity which is present in all aspects of human agency (individual and social) inducing “persons to respond with specific rules, i.e. with concrete informa­tion, to the instances of the ought which are present at each of these levels” (Agazzi 1987: 334). Requirements of the ought taking the form of instances of values to which the freedom of man accedes by virtue of their ideal validity. Also the analy­sis of legal norms, in particular those that move from the consideration of human rights, shows that the sphere of duty is connatural and primordial. Such rights reflect the perception of absoluteness, the reference of human persons to what is intention­ally grasped and conceived as an end in itself, and to which they feel fully engaged. Duty has an absolute character, since “man acts according to duties and is capable of absolute commitment to them” (Agazzi 1996: 50). Agazzi claims that, because of this commitment, the dignity of the person “receives its specifically axiological connotation, for this commitment is by no means a simple logical consequence of rationality” (Agazzi 1996: 50). We could say that dignity is not a practical result, the outcome of a practical inference, the product of reasoning or the result of a cor­rect choice of means. Dignity is axiologically prior and manifests itself in natural law and in the framework of duty as a moral duty to do good and avoid evil. Agazzi explains this concept in a very enlightening way in his essay on Maritain:

The correct way is that of remaining faithful to an ontological notion of person, according to what a person is by nature: an entity which is able to possess (...) properties, but which does not change its nature for the fact of being deprived of them or not being yet able to show or to exercise them, or no more able to do this or that other thing. It is in virtue of this ontological nature, and of what it ought to manifest if it were fully expanded, that we have the duty of respecting any person, and to provide it with the maximal possibilities of expressing the full richness of what is implicit in its nature. This is why we have always spoken of the capability of persons to commit themselves in an absolute way, as a founda­tion for personal dignity and human rights (Agazzi 1996: 53).

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