The vast majority of the literature on responsibility tends to associate the idea of control with intentional action. This seems intuitive and natural. ‘Intentional action’ describes bodily movements executed because of and guided by reasons for action. How else, indeed, can a rational agent control their bodily movements? Disagreements among theorists arise, however, on the characterization of ‘reasons for actions’. On the standard account of action, reasons for action are a binomial of beliefs and desires construed as mental states.1 On a more sophisticated account of the standard view, reasons for actions involve plans that direct us and result in ways of self-governance.2 On the classical tradition of action, reasons for actions track good-making characteristics or values.

Inadvertent actions in relation to legal and moral responsibility have been represented as puzzling on many occasions. In this chapter, I aim to show they are puzzling for different reasons than those usually proposed. Before I do this it is important to clarify some assumptions and presuppositions. First, the chapter presupposes that intentional action constitutes the paradigm of action . Second, it presupposes that intention and intentional actions run parallel to practical reason, and that the first-person perspective is the primary perspective to explain intentional action. Inadvertent actions seem to be an important challenge to this conception and this study aims to pave the way for thinking about negligence in the context of the first-person perspective. The aim of the chapter is modest in the sense that it neither offers an account of negligence, nor a criticism of the views that have been advanced in the literature, but identifies a puzzle that arises in the context of actions from the first-person perspective and gestures towards a possible methodology for thinking about negligent actions. I see this as a necessary and preliminary task before engaging with the nature of negligent acts and responsibility for negligence.

Rodriguez-Blanco clarifies John Finnis’s objection to legal positivism in the shape of Hart’s theory, namely, that it is unstable because it uses the notion of an internal point of view, which does not have sufficient discriminatory power to distinguish between good and less good legal norms, between rational and non-rational court decisions, etc. Finnis’s view is that understanding a human action in law involves understanding what the point of the action is, that such understanding requires use of the Aristotelian focal meaning (or central case) methodology, that Hart’s internal point of view does not involve focal meaning and therefore cannot be used to understand the point of human actions, and that Hart’s theory is thus unstable. Rodriguez-Blanco argues that Anglophone legal philosophers’ focus in the past fifty years on Dworkin’s critique of Hart’s legal positivism has meant that they missed an opportunity to learn, through Finnis’s critique of Hart’s theory, about the philosophy of practical reason and the theory of action, and to contribute significantly to debates about normative questions, the nature of law and its relation to agency, reasons for action, and goodness.