Aristotle claims that we are responsible for our characters and contributes much towards explaining how this is the case.
Aristotle says that it is necessary for those examining virtue to define the voluntary and involuntary (Nic. Eth. 3.1, 1109b30-34). This is because the voluntary (τὸ ἑκούσιον) in actions and passions gives rise to praise and blame, whereas the involuntary (τὸ ακούσιον) gives rise to sympathetic understanding and sometimes even pity. Since human beings are praised for virtue and blamed for vice, it would seem then that virtue and vice are voluntary. Aristotle defines the involuntary as that which comes about as a result of force or an account of ignorance (1109b35- 1110a1). ‘Force’ here is used in a strong sense. That which is forced is something whose origin (ἀρχὴ) is completely external to the person forced. Aristotle describes this as something “to which the person who is acting or undergoing something contributes nothing” and gives the example of a wind carrying someone off somewhere (1110a1-4).
What does he mean by ἀρχὴ and what does he mean by contributing nothing? For Aristotle, nature is (in varying senses) a principle of change and rest in all things, and living organisms are (in varying senses) self-movers, at least inasmuch as one part can move another part. However, animals are self-movers in an even stronger sense than plants, and humans in an even stronger sense than other animals. Aristotle says in the De Anima that the soul is a cause and principle in three ways, as formal, final, and also efficient or moving cause (De Anima II.4, 415b8-12), and that, in animals, the soul can initiate motion “through some sort of choice and reasoning”[1] (ibid I.3, 406b24-25). It is properly the initiator of motion (κίνησις) because it itself does not undergo κίνησις. He very strongly rejects the view that the soul is moved in this sense (it cannot undergo locomotion, alteration in quality, or change in size). So, the efficient origin or principle of motion can be found in the animal itself.
However, the bodies of animals are susceptible to κινήσεις from external movers, such as the wind. However, in the case of the sailors throwing cargo overboard, they themselves are the efficient origin of that action. They themselves choose to execute this action, given the circumstances. Their souls initiate this motion. What is it in the soul that initiates motion? It is clear that some form of knowledge and some form of appetition or desire are involved. It seems to me that what Aristotle means by ‘contributing nothing’ is that the one acting involuntarily does not initiate the action and that his appetite or desire contributes nothing. I say ‘appetite or desire’ because one might very well know what is going on when his hand is forcibly used by somebody else’s hand to strike someone but not desire it at all. But clearly, if he in no way desires the action, it cannot be him who is initiating the action. However, appetition or desire requires some form of cognition. One cannot desire something which one does not know in some way. This is why ignorance can be a cause of involuntariness. If somebody stabs his own son, thinking it to be an enemy, the action of killing his son was not voluntary. Or if someone gives a drink in order to save somebody, but the drink ends up killing them, then he was involuntarily the cause of the drinker’s death (Nic. Eth. 3.1, 1111a11-14). Aristotle says that “what is voluntary would seem to be something whose origin is in the person himself, who knows the particulars that constitute the action” (1111a22-24). An action will originate from an animal insofar as the animal is the efficient cause of its own action because its appetite aims at the action as a good (the final cause), which is presented by a cognitive faculty (whether sensible or rational). Therefore, I would conclude that something is voluntary if it accords with elicited appetition. This also helps us to see why the noble and the pleasant do not force (11110b9-17). The noble and the pleasant are final causes, not efficient causes. They do not push against the appetite that seeks them but are precisely what the appetite that seeks them desires.
It might be asked whether voluntariness is sufficient for praise and blame. Given the above, even infants and non-rational animals are capable of voluntary action. Do we praise and blame infants and non-rational animals? I sometimes get angry with my dogs and tell them off, and I sometimes praise them when they obey and behave well. Sometimes they are punished for their correction and rewarded to encourage good behaviour. This is to rectify their appetite so that they are obedient and loyal, which is pleasing to me. However, I am aware that the sort of praise and blame due to rational agents are not due to them. My dogs once destroyed somebody’s car in order to get to a rabbit inside the bonnet. This caused frustration, but they were not taken to court, and they were not thought of as wicked and unjust. If a human being had done this, things would have been different. We do not hold non-rational animals as morally responsible for their characters, even though we may be pleased or displeased with these characters.
Aristotle can help us to explain this. He says that choice (προαίρεσις) is voluntary but is not identical with the voluntary. Rather, the voluntary is wider in scope, “for both children and the other animals share in what is voluntary but not in choice” (3.2, 1111b6-9). Just before this, he says that we should define choice because it “seems to belong very much to virtue and to distinguish people’s characters more than actions do” (1111b5-6). Earlier in the Nicomachean Ethics, he had said that virtue was a habit marked by choice (ἕξις προαιρετική; 2.6, 1106b36).
He also says many times, such as in 2.1, 2.3, and 3.5, that, while habits do dispose towards certain actions, those habits were originally produced by the very sort of actions which those habits dispose us to repeat. Hence, “by living loosely, people are themselves the causes of their becoming such a sort and of their being unjust and licentious” (3.5, 1114a4-5). As well as committing bad actions, people are also responsible for refraining from good ones which would have prevented culpable ignorance. Thus, as well as punishing those whose ignorance results from a bad action like getting drunk, lawgivers also punish “those who are ignorant of anything in the laws which people ought to know and which it is not difficult to know,” for “whenever people seem to be ignorant through carelessness...they are in control of taking the appropriate care” (1113b30-1114a3). He links explicitly becoming the sort of person we are with choice in 3.2: “it is by choosing the good or bad things that we are of a certain sort, not by opining about them” (1112a1-2).
When Aristotle says that virtues, vices, acting, and not acting are “up to us” because “where there may be a “no,” there may also be a “yes”” (1113b6-8), what does he mean by this? Is he attributing freedom of action to the human agent? He very clearly is. Consider the comparison he makes to the sick person who ignores his doctor: “At one time, then, it was possible for him not to be sick; but in letting himself go, it is no longer possible” (1114a16-17). If it is possible that he did not get sick, then it is possible that he did not choose to ignore his doctor. Therefore, he was not somehow necessitated to ignore his doctor. If where there is a “no”, there may also be a “yes”, then there really must be a possibility for the agent to choose either.
If the agent was really necessitated to only choose one option, then Aristotle’s statement is false. In what act can there simultaneously be a possibility for both a “no” and a “yes”? The answer seems to be choice.
However, many modern scholars have insisted that Aristotle does not believe in free choice between alternatives. For example, Bobzien says that Aristotle’s προαίρεσις “is nothing like an act of deciding or an act of choice between alternatives. Nor is it (or is it issued from) a faculty for causally undetermined choice or decision, or of free will...nor is there any decision- making faculty such as a will in the agent that determines which way the judgment will go.”[2] I firmly disagree with this. In fact, in De Anima 3.9 (432b), Aristotle explicitly says that there is ὄρεξις in all three parts of the soul (nutritive, sensitive, rational). Appetite (ὄρεξις) in the nutritive or vegetative part of the soul would be appetite in a much lower and analogous sense. The plant has a certain form and the immanent actions of the plant tend towards the perfection, preservation, and replication of that form. This directedness is a sort of natural appetite, but it is entirely unconscious. However, in the non-rational animals, there is a level of consciousness. They can receive the forms of things without their matter according to the manner of sense- perception. Therefore, they can have a desire for the things whose forms they receive and, therefore, who they perceive. This is desire or appetite in a stricter sense because it follows from a form of knowledge. Humans, possessors of νοῦς, have a much higher kind of knowledge. They can abstract and understand the essences of things.
Aristotle indicates in the De Anima passage that there is a form of appetition corresponding to this rational knowledge of man. Now, while in that passage, Aristotle explicitly locates βούλεσις in the rational part of the soul, and, in Nic. Eth. 3.3, he denies that προαίρεσις is βούλεσις, this need not necessarily mean that Aristotle did not see προαίρεσις as being an act of the rational appetite. In fact, in 6.2 (1139b4-5), Aristotle says that choice is either intellect influenced by appetite (ὀρεκτικὸς νοῦς) or appetite influenced by intellect (ὄρεξις διανοητική). The latter description seems to make more sense and that this is the preference of Aristotle himself is indicated by his definition of choice in 3.3 as “deliberative appetite (βουλευτικὴ ὄρεξις) for things that are up to us” (1113a10-11). When he denies that choice is ἐπιθυμία (usually used to mean sensible desire) or θυμος, he does so because these are shared also by οἱ ἀλόγοι (1111b10-13). This shows that Aristotle sees choice is only an act of rational animals capable of using reason. When he denies that προαίρεσις is βούλεσις, he does so on the basis that the latter is about ends, while the former is about means. This does not mean that they are acts of a separate faculty. In fact, he says that they are closely related. Also, the means that can be chosen are limited by the bounds of the ends already willed. Furthermore, it seems what was the object of προαίρεσις can subsequently be the object of βούλεσις in the sense in Nic. Eth. 3.2-4. Some means are desired for other means and not all ends are the final end.
It is also suitable that choice be for Aristotle an act of the rational appetite rather than reason itself (ie. of the will rather than the intellect) because, as he says when contrasting choice and opinion, the object of opinion is the true and we speak of true and false opinions, whereas the object of choice is the good and we speak of good and bad choices (3.2, 1111b3-4). It is clear by how he contrasts choice and opinion that choice is an act of (rational) appetite rather than the intellect: “we choose to take or to avoid one of these sorts of things, but we opine about what is, or to whom or in what manner it is advantageous, and we really do not opine about taking or avoiding them. Choice is also praised more for being directed at what it ought to...whereas opinion is praised for how true it is.” He explicitly distinguishes choice from even opinions about good and bad things, and he even goes so far as to say that “the same people do not seem both to choose and to opine what is best; rather, some opine what is better, yet, on account of their vice, they choose what they ought not” (1112a8-11).
We praise and blame an agent with reason and rational appetite in a very different way from any analogous way of praising and blaming anything else. This is because, while even non- rational animals are the origin of their acts, they act according to their natural instinct and learned behaviour, neither of which they are morally responsible for. They are not responsible for the latter because they are not capable of rational choice, which, in humans, determines their virtues and vices, and because, without reason, one cannot have a grasp of the intelligible καλόν or intelligible shamefulness. For example, if one willingly departs from the noble in order to pursue a pleasure of the senses, one is susceptible to a much more serious kind of blame. Humans are not merely determined by natural instinct because we have a rational appetite which is only necessitated towards its general object, the intelligible good, and the complete good as final end (the broadest meaning of εὐδαιμονία). That Aristotle would not see it as otherwise necessitated is evidenced by Metaphysics θ.2, which treats of rational potencies, which are capacities for contraries. The rational appetite is not determined to either contrary nor moved of necessity, as irrational potencies are. Aristotle explains this on the basis that, in intellectual knowledge, the same λόγος makes clear both the positive thing and its lack. Although Aristotle’s foundations of the understanding of the rational appetite are not as developed or emphasised as they are by St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, in their treatments of the liberum arbitrium voluntatis, Aristotle presents us a sound basis by which we can praise and blame human beings as being morally responsible for their acts and habits.
[1] διὰ προαιρέσεώς τινος καὶ νοήσεως. It can be noted that he often uses words that more properly refer to rational human beings but can be used analogously in reference to non-rational animals. Other examples include φρόνιμος and διάνοια.
[2] S. Bobzien, “Choice and Moral Responsibility (NE iii 1-5)” in Polansky (ed.) Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Cambridge, 2014, 94
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