Human Action

Human action is purposeful behaviour i.e. the employment of scarce means towards the attainment of chosen ends. This "primordial" fact^[1] that man engages in human action cannot be cohrently denied. The distinctive and crucial feature in the study of man, is the concept of action.

Man has free will, but what are the implications of that? What inferences can we make from the fact that man acts? The method that was devoloped to answer these questions, by the Austrian School of Economics, is Praxeology. Dubbed "the general science of human action," it rests entirely on the epistemic axiom that man acts; Praxeology is a science that starts with an idea that man's actions are conscious and directed then spins out by verbal deduction the logical implications of that fact. That man acts both presupposes free will and implies almost all of epistemology itself.

Human action refers to a subset of actions that can be taken by an organism of a conceptual consciousness. Namely, they are the actions that are caused by man’s fundamental choice of focus or drift. Human action is sharply distingushible from those observed movements which, from the point of view of man, are non-volitional or non-purposeful behaviors. These include all the observed movements of inorganic matter and those types of human behavior that are purely reflex, that are simply involuntary responses to certain stimuli, such as a yawn, sneeze, or a knee jerk reaction. While these are all still actions in the metaphysical sense, as they were caused by the human body, they were not caused by the choice to focus or drift, and are irrelevant to the field of Praxeology.

Human Action, on the other hand, can be meaningfully interpreted by other men, for it is guided by a certain purpose that the actor has in view. The purpose of a man's action is his end. The desire to achieve this end is the man's motive for instituting the action.

Man’s free will comes from his ability to focus – or selective awareness; this is the root of human action. Whenever man chooses some course of action, he must first be aware of the ‘why?’ In particular, he must focus on a particular end to be satisfied. To validate this, we need merely to introspect our own thought processes.

Take a man who takes the action of brushing his teeth. Why did he do it? Perhaps to keep his teeth clean. Notice that without first focusing on this end, he would never actually brush his teeth. Note that one need not always have the end of keeping their teeth clean in order to brush their teeth; the point is merely that there must be some end in mind. This end can be even simpler than the previous example (e.g., he enjoys the feeling of brushing his teeth).^[2]

The fact that men act by virtue of being men is indisputable and incontrovertible. To argue otherwise would be absurd, as the act of arguing itself is a demonstration of purposeful behavior. The individual who denies human action still engages in it, not as inorganic or plant matter but wholly as a man. There is no need to dive into the complex issue of animal behavior, ranging from simple organisms to higher primates, which may sit on the fence between purely reflexive and motivated behavior. For our purposes, we can generally understand animal behavior to the extent that we(man) can attribute understandable motives to them, rather than just observing them.

It is this fundamental truth, this axiom of Human Action, that forms the key to our study. The entire realm of Praxeology and its best-developed subdivision, economics, is based on an analysis of the necessary logical implications of this concept such as time preference, the formation of capital, the nature of exchange, etc. All economic phenomena ultimately stem from the actions of individuals, each seeking to achieve their highest valued ends in the face of scarce means.