Ascribing such duties potentially infringes the liberty persons otherwise enjoy to act and refrain from acting as they see fit so long as they do not affirmatively harm others.
However, in recent years, they tend to refrain from acts this extreme.
Another distinction exists between a command addressed by legislation to the citizen, requiring him to act or to refrain from acting in a certain way, and a direction addressed to the administrative authorities.
They allow us to compartmentalise, to be conscious of the issues when there is little that we can do about them, and to forget them at the moment when we have the capacity to act (or to refrain from acting).
The Dutch neuroscientist Dick Swaab, who calls free will "an illusion", does so by endorsing the definition of free will by Joseph L Price (a scientist, not a philosopher) as "the ability to choose to act or refrain from action without extrinsic or intrinsic constraints".
The surgeons said that overtreatment occurred because it is easier to act than refrain from action, and that it was difficult to refuse the patients' wishes.
More unusually, Mr Obama found himself in control of a mini-summit of European leaders at the G20 meeting in Cannes as he tried, and failed, to persuade Germany to strengthen the euro-zone firewall.Mr Obama's America has urged European countries to act more boldly, refrain from throwing Greece out of the euro and move towards deeper integration.
China expressed regret over the rocket launch, and called on all sides to act cautiously and refrain from steps that might raise tensions in the region.
China expressed regret over the launch and called on all sides to act cautiously and refrain from steps that might raise tension.
It doesn't follow that the agent wouldn't have refrained from acting maliciously if she had chosen not to act maliciously.
To defuse pressure to act, they also notoriously refrained from labeling the slaughter "genocide".
