Volition

Two operations are named and the second is the more common. The conscious will can initiate an action, and it can intercept an action already initiated by the emotional will and allow or deny its execution, which means most of what volition does is veto rather than origination. That fits the framework's account of the two wills, since the emotional will is motivated solely by potential anima gain or loss and acts on that motive continuously, so what the conscious will mostly has to do is decide which of those impulses proceeds. Marsh is careful that this is not universal. Some living beings, including humans in some states, are incapable of the emotional responses in question or have a sublated will, and predatory behaviour is an emotional response governed by an emotional will, with consciousness often no more involved in the decision to act than it is in a reflex. That places a great deal of harmful behaviour outside volition rather than inside it, which is a claim about mechanism rather than an excuse, since her remedies are structural throughout. The relation to seductive coercion is where the term does its most important work, since coercion through emotional attraction and repulsion operates on the emotional will and therefore below the level at which volition intervenes. That is why she treats seduction as a form of coercion rather than as its alternative, and why the subject gets a book of its own alongside will.

Volition is studied in psychology and neuroscience through the initiation and inhibition of action, with Libet's experiments on readiness potentials preceding conscious intention prompting decades of argument about free will, and later work emphasizing the veto function that Libet himself called free won't, which is remarkably close to Marsh's interception clause. Philosophy of action distinguishes willing from desiring and debates the nature of intention. Marsh's account converges with the veto reading and grounds it differently, in a division between two wills with different motives rather than in the timing of neural events.