Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Volume 57 by Victor Caston;

Author:Victor Caston; [Caston, Victor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192591425
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2019-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

Virtue and Goals of Actions in Aristotle’s Ethical Treatises

Hendrik Lorenz

The present paper focuses on Aristotle’s claim in the Eudemian Ethics that the virtues of character are ‘states to do with decision’ (προαιρετικαὶ ἕξεις), by which he means that they are somehow responsible for decisions.1 In the paper’s first two sections, I explicate the way in which he thinks the character-virtues contribute to the correctness of the virtuous person’s decisions. In two subsequent sections, I then articulate two philosophical objections to the picture that will have emerged. I defend Aristotle against the first objection. In articulating the second objection, I rely on texts from the Nicomachean Ethics and the De motu animalium that John Cooper’s work on Aristotle’s moral psychology has greatly illuminated. I will argue that the second objection cannot be answered in a satisfactory way, and that it identifies a philosophical weakness in the moral psychology of the Eudemian Ethics.

I should say at the outset that in discussing Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics in my first two sections, I attempt to limit myself, as much as seems reasonably possible, to materials presented in the Eudemian Ethics. Like many others, I believe that the Eudemian Ethics preserves for us a stage of Aristotle’s thought in ethics that is earlier than the Nicomachean Ethics.2 If so, we should not assume that the ideas presented in the earlier work are always in agreement with those of the later work. I happen to think that the Eudemian Ethics conception of character-virtue is different from the Nicomachean Ethics conception, in that on the Eudemian Ethics conception character-virtue is a non-rational state, whereas on the Nicomachean Ethics conception it is in part a rational state, which includes the capacity to deliberate well about how to accomplish situation-specific goals.3 Many scholars of Aristotle’s ethics disagree with this.4 But to make progress on the issue, one thing we need to do is to look closely at the extant books that are uncontroversially Eudemian—those are Books 1–3, and 7 and 8—and see whether we are in a position to reconstruct a Eudemian conception of character-virtue. The present paper is an attempt to reconstruct and evaluate this conception.

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