Election

Choice. Of the twelve stages this is the one everything else is arranged around, and the one we usually mean when we say a person acted freely.

Election presupposes counsel — Aquinas defines it as the choosing of what deliberation has proposed — but it is not deliberation’s automatic output. The intellect judges; the will elects; and the gap between those two, narrow as it is, is where freedom lives. A person can know the better and choose the worse, which is a scandal for tidy theories of action and an obvious fact of experience.

It is worth noticing how much has to be in place before this famous moment arrives. Seven stages precede it. A choice made well is mostly the accumulated quality of the apprehending, wishing, judging, intending, deliberating and consenting that led to it. Which is a consoling thought when a decision feels hard: the work that makes decisions easy is done long before them.

In Actus Humani

Election is the moment you commit an act to a day and mean it. The app keeps no record of choices you deliberated over and declined — but your estimates and your logged time will quietly tell you, later, whether the ones you made were good.