The first part (sections 2–4) of the article outlines the “traditions” and their elaborations: the intentional causalist concept of action, an associated empirical theory of action and standard concepts of responsibility and compatibilist freedom of decision, as well as the challenges for them.
In contrast, the aim of this article is to discuss individual unconscious influences on our behavior separately with respect to what extent they require changes in traditional conceptualizations. Such considerations have led to a lively debate, which, however, suffers from generalizations that lump all these unconscious phenomena together. However, since this makes up the largest part of the behavior which is generally regarded as action, intentionality, yet agency, responsibility and even compatibilist freedom of decision for the largest part of our behavior may be threatened. Recent psychological and neurophysiological research has added to this a number of phenomena (the “new unconscious”) in which behavior is completely unconscious or in which the decision or its execution is influenced by unconscious factors: priming, automatic behavior, habitualized behavior, actions based on plain unconscious deliberations, intrusion of information from the dorsal pathway, etc. Such actions might not be intentional, and perhaps not even actions in the narrow sense, we would not be responsible for them and freedom of decision would be missing.
Freud already assumed that many of our decisions are influenced by dynamically unconscious motives or that we even perform unconscious actions based on completely unconscious considerations. According to many criteria, agency, intentionality, responsibility and freedom of decision, require conscious decisions.
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