Boulnois sums up the results of the investigation into Aristotelian ethical proairesis (resolution, or “choice”) and the ambiguities of freedom as follows.
“Is it necessary to say that this resolution is free? Does it include a choice? The concept of choice assumes the existence of an alternative, followed by the pursuit of one of its terms and the eviction of the other. And certainly, when there are many means, relating the one that appears best to the end pursued implies a choice. But on the one hand, as we have seen, it is always a matter of a generic capacity, common to many agents. And on the other hand, Aristotle never makes the concept of freedom intervene in relation to the question of choice, or even that of willingness” (Généalogie de la liberté, p. 153, my translation throughout, emphasis in original throughout).
We only deliberate about or between definite alternatives, under definite conditions that we weakly “know” or deem to be applicable. This is not a wide open field, but a piece of topography with blurry details that deliberation will bring into better focus. In the domain of human actions, this kind of relative and comparative practical judgment (phronesis) is so essential that without it, there can only be anarchy or tyranny, and no ethics.
If we are honest with ourselves, we must recognize that even our best conclusions must in principle remain open to Socratic questioning. We are not the sole judge of our endeavors; our success in any endeavor depends partly on the judgment of others. Even the tyrant who denies reciprocity wants his authority to be recognized by others (only he does not return the favor).
“Nonetheless, Aristotle knows and uses the concept of freedom (eleutheria). But this pertains to politics and not to the theory of action. It indicates not the source of action, but its end. Eleutheros designates the human in a free condition, as opposed to the slave, but also one who is able to exercise political liberties, and who can, in a regime that permits it, be considered a full citizen. Moreover, the free human is also the one who breaks free of all political activity, to lead the life of a private citizen devoted to study” (ibid).
“The correspondence between the city and free humans is assured by an education adapted to each political regime, to allow them to become virtuous citizens. In effect democracies, which should be based on free humans, suffer a sophistical definition of freedom — as if freedom ‘consisted in doing whatever we want’, and as if the laws were for the human a kind of slavery, when they are ‘her salvation’. What is proper to the free human is to act in conformity with an order, necessarily; it is slaves who behave ‘randomly’, in a contingent manner” (pp. 153-154).
This and other matter-of-fact references to social inequality in Aristotle are commonly taken as evidence that he condones such inequality, or even aims to defend it. While our sensibilities might prefer it if he passionately denounced all such inequalities, Aristotle himself was by birth Macedonian and therefore deemed not a citizen of Athens. Unlike Plato, he had no wealthy and connected native family to help protect him from persecution. Socrates had been executed for speaking too candidly, and even Plato was forced into exile, so Aristotle did not have full freedom of speech. Nonetheless, in such cases he typically not only makes it explicit that he is referring to a (mere) matter of fact and not a norm, but also mentions a possible doubt, even though he does not develop it.
“We cannot exclude reflection on action from the concept of freedom, for this is its horizon. Ethics has for its task the formation of free humans in the city. Simply put, the (demagogic) definition of freedom as the ability to do whatever we want is precisely that against which the whole Aristotelian doctrine of virtue is constructed. On the contrary, it is following an ethical education, in exercising her resolution, that the human can acquire the surety of judgment and the pleasure in the good that characterize the free human. Indeed freedom is not the beginning, but the journey’s destination” (p. 154).
“Thus we can return to our initial inquiry.”
“For Aristotle, the problem of knowing whether a will acts freely or in a determined manner does not arise. Freedom and slavery are two modes of social existence of the human. The place of freedom is not the will, but in acting well. It is a matter of orienting ourselves to the good by virtue. — For him there is no question of will. Despite the Latin translation, hekousion (willing) does not mean ‘voluntary’ (voluntarium); it is rather the mode of our action, barring the cases of constraint and ignorance. Proairesis does not signify ‘free arbitration’ (liberum arbitrium), but decision, resolution. The stakes of this interpretation are much more fundamental than a problem of translation. It is the global hermeneutics allowing action to be elucidated that is radically different; willing action is that where ‘the principle is in us’; we are ’causes’, which is to say ‘responsible’. Freedom is the ethical horizon of our action, and not the metaphysical attribute of a will that Aristotle never envisaged” (ibid).
Proairesis is the rational outcome of a deliberation, not an arbitrary choice. Even the English terms “willing” and “voluntary” have an obvious etymological connection with “will” or voluntas that reflects the earlier Latin translations. But a closer look at how Aristotle uses the concepts that the later tradition calls by these names confirms what Boulnois is saying here — they have nothing to do with a radically undetermined metaphysical will.
“We have established six essential points.”
“1. An agent is responsible for her actions if she acts spontaneously, without constraint and without ignorance, that is to say she is not moved from the exterior and knows the sense of her actions. This spontaneity signifies that she is also master of not executing them” (pp. 154-155).
Boulnois’s French has contrainte, hence the English “constraint” here. But constraint, as a negative term, only narrows our options. Aristotle’s examples for this more specifically involve coercion (threats against one’s children, etc.) or extraordinary circumstance (throwing valuables overboard in a storm in hopes of keeping the ship from sinking) that positively push us to do something in particular that we would not do otherwise. For Aristotle, we are exempt from blame in this case precisely because the determination of the action in this case is not “from us”, but from coercion or extraordinary circumstance.
The term “master” to my ear suggests a total control, which is not Aristotle’s or Boulnois’s intent. The point here is the simpler one that the agent is able both to do and to not do various particular things. In the special context of the ideal sage discussed by the Stoics there really is total control, but the Stoics are careful not to assert that we have total control. But the Western theological mainstream claims that we through our “will” do have a strange kind of total control that gives us the whole responsibility for our inevitable sin, while God retains total control over the grace needed to overcome it.
A symmetrical practical ability to do or not do various particular things is what for Aristotle distinguishes a “rational” or discursively enabled capability of a being “having logos” from a purely “natural” capability, like that of fire to heat things. Fire has no ability to “heat or not heat”, but I as a discursively enabled being am capable of deliberating as well as simply doing. It is this discursively enabled practical ability to deliberate that for Aristotle gives me the ability to walk over there or not walk over there, or to raise a controversial point or not raise it.
“2. Willing action is that which ‘we cannot refer back to other points of departure than those that are found in us’. A contrario, this opens the way to a casuistics of excuses (constraint and ignorance). But it is not a question of starting from the agent to find in her a first principle of the triggering of action” (p. 155).
Both terms in the phrase “casuistics of excuses” seem to have negative connotations, but perhaps this is misleading. I see no such negative aspect applied to the criterion of willingness elsewhere in the larger argument.
“3. It is possible to analyze human action without postulating a central instance of arbitration, and without inscribing it in a physical determinism whose fabric it would need to tear apart. Ethics is thinkable without a theory of the will” (ibid).
Ethics in the first instance applies to the actions of the whole human being.
“4. Ethical action does not necessarily require a freedom of choice. It depends on a resolution (proairesis), which refers above all to a dimension of anticipation, and does not always imply a choice. Ethics is thinkable without a doctrine of free arbitration” (ibid).
This is a gentle understatement. Ethical judgment and ethical action are precisely not arbitrary.
“5. Resolution presupposes a process of deliberation by the agent: it at least implicitly evaluates the reasons for doing x rather than nothing; what she will do is not immediately obvious to her. That is to say that there are, for her, a multitude of options and of reasons for acting. But a) these options are only possible epistemically (she believes them possible, but they are not always really accessible). And b) these reasons for acting are not uncontrolled impulses; they refer to an ethical ideal that the agent pursues principally” (ibid).
In all practical matters, we deliberate and act with less than perfect knowledge.
“6. A stranger to the metaphysical problem of free arbitration, freedom is ethical in its essence; it consists in the ability to act well; it is only acquired at the end of an education in virtue, and an apprenticeship in moral discernment. Action is in effect evaluated morally not by what it produces, but by the virtue to which it bears witness” (pp. 154-155).
In ethical deliberation we are concerned with free and sincere inquiry into what we should do. For judgments about virtue, patterns of activity are more important than punctual acts. Character consists in such patterns of activity. Character is also more important overall than the consequences of particular acts. Ethics is ultimately about who we are, that is to say what kind of beings we are. But I also think that what our acts truly are includes what their consequences are, so I would not exclude consequences as Boulnois seems to do here.
“The good only appears in truth to one who investigates it with rigor, in a correct discernment. The one who is able to perceive it is the virtuous, the man of the good. All thought about action is situated in the horizon of the good, and freedom is nothing other than liberation from the bad” (pp. 155-156).
The negative freedoms that matter for ethics are freedom from coercion, freedom from ignorance, and freedom from automatically following our immediate impulses. There is no need to claim that we are somehow completely exempt from causality.
“Fundamentally, freedom does not reside in a subjective power of self-determination. The (real) possibility of acting otherwise is not essential to it. It is not necessary to presuppose an autonomy of the will that is detached from all exterior determination. Nonetheless, as the Politics attests, Aristotle deploys a thought of freedom, which consists in ordering one’s actions to live in a virtuous way, in the context of a city itself ordered by laws — quite the contrary of the subjective arbitrariness that consists in doing what we want. And the fact that our action is necessarily determined by our desires does not reduce its ethical value. For what is truly worthy of praise and blame is virtue, that is to say the faculty of not being able to do otherwise than to take pleasure in the good. The key to ethics resides in the moral education provided for by the legislator, and not in the contingency of choice. It is ethics that founds freedom, and not freedom that founds ethics” (p. 156).
Positive freedom is the ability to act well.
Aristotle is the source of our idea of a “government of laws, not of men”. The aim of this is precisely to provide safeguards against subjective arbitrariness.
“It is here that the finitude of the human as agent reveals all its significance. We are on a finite plane, in the sublunary world where contingency reigns. And even if we admit that causes are sequenced in a necessary system of the world (which Aristotle refuses to do), we do not know the system (which is why apparent options or epistemic possibilities are sufficient for the agent, whether they are real or not). What’s more, if we could know it, it would not push us to act, because it would not be desirable. Just as the idea of the Good is useless because it does not move our desire and does not motivate our action, the idea that there is a sequence of causes and effects changes nothing in our way of living. Whether the world is determinist or undetermined, we have the same obligation: to act well, in conformity to virtue, amid the contingencies of the world of humans” (ibid).
This is an extremely important insight. Ethics does not depend on any metaphysical truth, knowledge, or assumption. Acting well only to requires us to be sincere, fair, reasonable, and kind in our dealings with appearances.
“On the plane of finite existence, no one knows if they have accomplished the action that is best absolutely. Similarly, in their reflections on our moral lack of power, Aristotle and Ovid speak of that which is ‘better’ (comparative) and not of that which is ‘the best’ (superlative). For this it would be necessary to possess all the elements that would allow us to judge for ourselves; but this information is given to us little by little, in the course of our journey. If I take a path, it is in following this path that its obstacles, its accidents, its advantages and its inconveniences are unveiled. But I do not know if another path offers more dangers, encumbrances, or advantages (and I can only run through them all afterwards, indeed in other conditions). The only way to know absolutely which path is best is to take two paths at once, which is impossible. — At least without recourse to an omniscient observer. Only such a one can see two paths at once. Only such a one can know which is the best in itself. It is thus that the God of metaphysics makes ethics enter another dimension, in which it will no longer be thought starting from finitude” (pp. 156-157).
(See also Willingness, Deliberation, Choice.)
The Postmodern Peripatetic 