Persons as the Cause of Their Own Action: Karol Wojtyla on Efficacy

In contemporary philosophy, the discussion regarding causation is very advanced. In this article I will limit my analyses to the kind of causation connected with the human being. Moreover, I plan to concentrate on a very select set of proposals. Basically, I intend to present Karol Wojtyla's understanding of efficacy and undertake a critical assessment thereof. In order to do so, similar proposals by Max Scheler and Immanuel Kant - with whom Wojtyla was in critical dialogue - will be outlined. Scheler and Kant represent certain models of human causation that are typical of continental philosophy, as well as ethics and ethical action. In his later works, Wojtyla also considered this topic in a wider context when he was sketching a picture of the acting person. For this reason, we will also focus on this extended version of personal causality. At the centre of interest is the dilemma: how do human beings become the cause of their own actions and what consequences stem from this. Karol Wojtyla treats the human being as a person. Human causation is thus a personal causation. Because of his personalistic approach, causation is turned into something more, namely into efficacy. This present contribution is an attempt at grasping all the complexities of the latter in a dialectical comparison with the phenomenological, Kantian, and Thomistic approaches.