The utterance of the will as subjective, or moral, is action. Action contains the determinations set forth: α) to be known by me, in its externality, as mine; β) the essential relation to the concept, as an ought; and γ) the relation to the will of others.
Only the utterance of the moral will is action. The existence that the will gives itself in formal right is in an immediate thing, is itself immediate, and has, for itself, at first no explicit relation to the concept — which is not yet set over against the subjective will, is not distinguished from it — nor any positive relation to the will of others; the commandment of right is, according to its basic determination, only a prohibition (§ 38). Contract and wrong, it is true, begin to have a relation to the will of others — but the agreement that comes about in contract is grounded in arbitrariness; and the essential relation therein to the will of the other is, as a matter of right, the negative one — to retain my property (as regards its value) and to leave to the other what is his. The aspect of crime, on the other hand, as coming from the subjective will and according to the manner in which it has its existence therein, first comes under consideration here. — The judicial action (actio), as not imputable to me according to its content, which is determined by prescriptions, contains only some moments of moral action proper, and indeed in an external manner; to be moral action proper is therefore a side distinct from action as judicial.

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