Blame and Blamelessness

Ethics for Aristotle is primarily concerned with ethos (dispositions to act in particular ways, associated with character and culture), and only secondarily with particular actions. Particular actions are mainly addressed in a higher-order way, through discussions of practical judgment and responsibility. We should try raise people to have good character, and we should generally trust people with good character to do the right thing.

For Aristotle, perfection is always perfection according to a kind, and perfection according to a kind is understood in such a way as to be actually achievable. The Greeks in general had a concept of blamelessness that was considered to be achievable. The world could do with a lot less blame; we should learn from this.

I would say you are blameless if you have done all that is within your power (and you are a hero if you in a meaningful way actually take responsibility for things that are beyond your power). If you really act from a disposition to recognize others as independent of yourself and your wishes — as one would a friend — and are reasonably attentive to circumstances, then you cannot reasonably be faulted for your actions, and your conduct will be blameless. If one has been well socialized, being blameless is not really all that hard.

A blameless person can be wrong, and can even do things for which apology is appropriate (because of an actual bad effect, not any blameworthiness). But if you consistently recognize others as independent of your wishes and take reasonable care that your words and deeds are appropriate to the situation, then you are blameless.

I think the practical import of this stands even on the basis of Brandom’s innovations (see Rethinking Responsibility; Expansive Agency; Brandomian Forgiveness). Adding back in a responsibility for unintended consequences that is shared with many others and whose failures are forgiven should not negate what I am calling blamelessness.

I also think that blaming in general serves no constructive practical purpose. To blame someone is basically to say they deserve punishment. Punishments resemble vengeance; they may be deemed justified in some circumstances, but we should not fool ourselves that they are constructive. Punishment per se does not improve anyone’s ethos. Either someone really gets the message that they did something wrong — in which case there is no need for punishment — or they don’t, in which case it is unlikely that punishment will change that. I don’t pretend to have a general solution for crime in society or for misbehavior of children, but I distrust the impulse to punish. Fear of punishment sometimes prevents bad behavior, and sometimes behavior is what counts, but fear has nothing to do with moral improvement.

Free Will and Determinism

Free will and determinism both represent overly strong claims when applied in an unqualified way. I’ve already written a bit about the evils of voluntarism.

Aristotle’s “cause” or aitia can be any kind of reason why something is the way it is, and a way that something is typically has multiple reasons of different kinds. The modern notion of cause, by contrast, is intended to provide a single, complete explanation of why an event does or does not occur. The modern notion, unlike the Aristotelian one, is univocal. (See also Equivocal Determination.)

In the reception of Aristotle, historically too much attention was paid to the identity of the underlying “something”, as contrasted to the way something is, emphasized by Aristotle himself — to the point where the standard Latin translation for ousia (Aristotle’s main word for a way of being) came to be substantia or “substance” (something standing under). By contrast, the central books of Aristotle’s Metaphysics start from the notion of something persisting through a change and ask what that is, but in addressing that question eventually reverse the order of explanation, and argue that what can best be said to be underlying just is a way that something is actively what it is. An ousia may be expressed in speech as a simple noun, but this is only a kind of shorthand that can always be unpacked into something like an adverbial expression.

In general, Aristotle suggests that we should value ends more than origins. How something turns out is much more important than where it came from.

Already in Neoplatonism, there was a decidedly non-Aristotelian turn toward putting higher value on origins than results, based on the idea that the One was the origin of everything, and nobler than everything. For monotheistic theologians, it was obvious that God as origin was superior to creation.

Aristotle ends up suggesting that what are translated as “efficient” causes — the direct means by which change is triggered or effectuated, which would include mechanical cases like the classic bumping billiard balls — are not what is most fundamental in making things the way they are. By contrast, the Latin medievals made the efficient cause the root of all others, also applying it to God’s activity of creation from nothing.

Common early modern notions of causality started from this medieval reversal of Aristotle, assuming that efficient causes of the billiard-ball variety came first in the order of explanation. This was related to a widespread anti-Aristotelian privileging of immediacy. Kant and Hegel later developed strong critiques of the privileging of immediacy, but this aspect of their thought was not adequately understood and highlighted until recently. A reduction of all causes to allegedly immediate causes is an error common to both voluntarism and determinism.

Descartes developed a bottom-up explanatory model, starting from simple mechanical causes. This was good for science at a certain stage of development, but bad for philosophy. I would not wish to say that bottom-up explanations have no use (in delimited contexts, they most certainly do). I mean only that it is a delusion to think that nothing else is required, or that they can provide an absolute starting point.

In ethics, Aristotle’s notion of character is a nice relief from the seesaw of free will and determinism. Character is an acquired disposition to act in certain ways. The character of an individual resembles the culture of a community, and the same word (ethos) is used for both. We acquire it gradually over time, from an accumulation of our actions and things that have happened to us. Due to the contributing role of our actions in successive layers of character formation, we are in a broad way accountable for our disposition. On the other hand, it makes little sense to blame someone for acting in accordance with their disposition.

Reasonableness

How reasonable we are in acting in our lives is largely a matter of our emotional constitution. Our character is the result of many choices we have made, and many things that have happened to us. Character is not something we are born with; it is acquired, by living a life.

A life of reason as a moral goal has little to do with applying logic to situations in a calculating way. Reasonableness has to do with not being unreasonable — i.e., not behaving in ways that are unreasonable from the point of view of others. This is largely a matter of what might be called emotional intelligence.

A cornerstone of this is recognition of other people as independent from us and our wishes. Aristotle pointed out that mutual recognition of this sort is one of the defining marks of true friendship or love. Hegel made mutual recognition a general goal.

However, our ability to participate in mutual recognition here and now comes back again to our emotional state and our acquired emotional constitution. (See also Interpretive Charity; Practical Judgment; More Difference, Less Conflict.)

Freedom and Free Will

Plato and Aristotle got along perfectly well with what many people think was no concept of a separate “will” at all. Aristotle nonetheless develops a nuanced account of deliberation and choice, which should have made it plain for all time that no extravagant assumptions are necessary to provide a basis for morality. All that is required for ethical development is that there be things within our power, not that we can somehow magically escape from all determination.

Curiously, the notion of a “freedom of indifference” emerged in Stoicism, generally thought to be a haven of determinism. The Stoic sage is claimed to be completely indifferent and unaffected by passions, therefore completely free. Some monotheistic theologians later applied an even stronger version of this to God. God in this view is absolutely free to do absolutely any arbitrary thing. Some even claimed that because man is in the image of God, man too is supernaturally exempt from any constraint on the will. Descartes claimed that the physical world was wholly determined, but that the human soul is by the grace of God wholly free. (See also Arbitrariness, Inflation.)

Others thought we are free when we are guided by reason. This view takes different shapes, from that of Aquinas to that of Spinoza.

Kant introduced another kind of freedom, based on taking responsibility. Where I decide to take responsibility, I am free in that sense, with no need for a supernatural power. I can take responsibility for things that are by no means fully within my control. Kant unfortunately confuses the matter by talking about freedom as a novel form of causality, while denying that this makes any gap in Newtonian physical causality. (See also Kantian Freedom; Kantian Will; Freedom Through Deliberation?; Beauty, Deautomatization; Phenomenology of Will.)

Hegel too reproduced some voluntarist-sounding rhetoric, but his version of freedom is a combination of both the reason and responsibility views with absence of slavery or oppression. (See also Independence, Freedom.)

Confusion continued into the 20th century notably with Sartre, who claimed that man is free even in prison, and attacked so-called structuralism for allegedly undermining said freedom.

Freedom as reason, freedom as responsibility, freedom as absence of slavery and oppression are all things we should want. As for the rest, see the Appendix to Book 1 of Spinoza’s Ethics (though unfortunately Spinoza is unfair to Aristotle in treating all teleology as supernatural in origin). (See also Subject; God and the Soul; Influence.)

Brandom explicitly mentions theological voluntarism as associated with what he calls the “subordination-obedience model” of normativity. (See also Voluntarism.)

God and the Soul

In the tradition, monotheistic notions of God and the soul were read into Plato and Aristotle. Just using the word “God” or “soul” in later times immediately invoked strong connotations from a monotheistic background that were very different from Plato and Aristotle’s context.

Plato’s dialogues do famously talk about immortality of the soul, but the notion there has neither the very strong unity nor the strong personal identity attributed to the soul in the monotheistic religions. In the Republic, the unity of the soul is likened to that of a city, and elsewhere there is talk of reincarnation. (See also Plato on the Soul.)

Aristotle’s notion of soul is biological (way of life of a living body), not metaphysical. He specifically says the soul is not like the pilot of a ship, and that memory (which Locke made the basis of personal identity) depends on the body. (See also Parts of the Soul; Aristotelian Subjectivity.)

Plato and Aristotle speak of theos or theoi (the divine or god, or gods) as good, as intellect, and as in a state of perfect happiness. Most of what Plato says is in his poetic mode. Aristotle is extremely circumspect.

There is no creation from nothing in Plato, and no creation at all in Aristotle. There is some kind of providence, but it is very general, for Aristotle clearly applying only to the order of the cosmos and not to particular events. Plato’s dialogues speak of divine inspiration, but also compare it to a kind of madness. Aristotle says philosophy begins in wonder, and that the delight we take in the senses shows that man by nature desires to know. Both emphasize the eternity of the divine and the divinity of the order of nature. There is no concept of any special intervention in the order of nature.

I believe Plato and Aristotle would likely have endorsed Leibniz’s critique of the consequences of attributing an unconstrained, counterfactually omnipotent will to God. Leibniz said this was a theological disaster that made of God an arbitrary tyrant. (See also Euthyphro; Tyranny; Fragility of the Good.)

Theological and anthropological voluntarism have a long history. Philo of Alexandria, early Augustine, al-Ghazali, the Franciscan theologians, and Descartes all contributed. Spinoza and Leibniz spoke well on this subject. (See also Psyche, Subjectivity; Theology.)

The Word “Rationalism”

Typical connotations of the word “rationalism” seem very unfortunate to me. Rationalism ought to mean something like just giving pride of place to reason (inference). Instead, it is usually taken to refer primarily to what I would regard as aberrant historical versions that carry unrelated and even antithetical baggage. I have in mind particularly Cartesianism and Wolffianism, both of which make dubious claims based on allegedly self-evident contentful truths.

At most, I think something called “rationalism” should recognize self-evidence only in a narrow formal domain, and I think even that is arguable. Otherwise, reason works from evidence, not self-evidence.

Although he did use the unfortunate phrase “evident from itself”, Spinoza was much more careful. He thought most of what the Cartesians and Wolffians claimed on the basis of self-evidence was not even true. Leibniz was a great explorer, and proposed not one but quite a few differently detailed systems at different times. (See also Enlightenment.)

The Ancients and the Moderns

The mature Hegel’s generalizations about the ancient world — discussed at length by Brandom and Pippin — remains a lingering puzzle for me. I would think, given Hegel’s deep appreciation for Plato, and even more so Aristotle, that Hegel would have recognized that Plato and Aristotle regarded normative statuses as anything but unproblematically given. But Hegel repeatedly imputes a naive, precritical attitude resembling that of the Consciousness chapter of the Phenomenology to the ancient world as a whole, apparently including Plato and Aristotle.

Talk about subjects and objects is distinctively modern, due mainly to Kant and Hegel. I want to say it is due to shallow readings of Kant and Hegel. I think not only Hegel but even Kant already wanted to overcome this dichotomy. I would argue that the transcendental in Kant is a third kind that is neither subjective nor objective, and that some of Plato and Aristotle’s discussions of form and its knowability were already at something like this level.

Kant famously criticizes the kind of realism that takes objects as unproblematically available to be known (“dogmatism”), without ever seeming to clearly recognize that the greatest philosophers of the ancient world would never have wanted to defend it. See separate post “The Epistemic Modesty of Plato and Aristotle”.

Even Robert Pippin, a very close reader of Hegel who pays considerable attention to his affinities to Aristotle, seems to join the chorus when it comes to the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. (See also Hegel on the Ancients; Enlightenment; Heroism and Magnanimity; Modernity Clarified; Alienation, Modernity; Modernity, Again.)

Plato and Aristotle Were Inferentialists

In the context of modern philosophy, Brandom has developed an important contrast between representationalism and inferentialism. Representationalism says that representation comes before inference in the order of explanation, and inferentialism says that inference comes first.

Plato was very pessimistic about the potential of representation, as witnessed by the dialogues’ discussions of “imitation”, and the treatment of writing in Phaedrus. By contrast, inference or reasoning is presented as the main way to truth in the dialogues. Inference — and not representation — is what is primarily appealed to in the validation or invalidation of assertions. (See also Dialogue; Platonic Truth.)

Aristotle was less pessimistic about representation, but even more concerned with inference. He was the great originator of the world’s first developed logic, which was in fact centered on inference rather than truth values. While taking pioneering steps toward formalization, he also devoted much attention to definition, meanings of terms, and their distinctions and ambiguities in concrete usage (see Aristotelian Semantics; Aristotelian Demonstration). Aristotle distinguishes between inference based on the fact, which is a kind of formal inference, and inference based on the meaning, which is the material inference of Sellars and Brandom, also known to medieval logicians. Further, Aristotle’s elementary criteria for truth and falsity depend on material inference (see Aristotelian Propositions).

The kind of representation Brandom is particularly concerned with, which he attributes to Descartes, is based on isomorphism rather than resemblance. As an aside, I tend to think there was a notion of isomorphism in the ancient world, though it is a little hard to separate from resemblance. Euclid talked about similar triangles, which are technically an example of both. Aristotle would certainly say that resemblance is “said in many ways”, one of which could be isomorphism. I think given the opportunity he would say, for instance, that individual concretely uttered words are at some level isomorphic to whatever meanings those words turn out to have in some context. The words do not resemble their meanings. (See also Historiography, Inferentialism; Inferentialism vs Mentalism;.)

Aristotle and Mathematics

Aristotle wrote near the very beginning of the golden age of Greek mathematics. He criticized the mathematics of his day (arithmetic and geometry) as being useful but insufficiently abstract, which was a very valid point at the time. In particular, it did not offer much support for showing the intelligibility of becoming, which was his main goal in the Physics. He also took a strong stand against Pythagorean superstition, which at the time was hard to separate from enthusiasm for mathematics.

We do not know how Aristotle would have responded to category theory or homotopy type theory, or even algebra or calculus. But given the nature of his criticism, it seems extremely questionable to simply assume he would not have welcomed such advances. (See also The Animal’s Leg Joint.)

Western Philosophy

I used to regard claims about the uniqueness of Western philosophy as ethnocentric. Some undoubtedly are. But there is something special about the Greek legacy — particularly Plato and Aristotle — that does set it apart from anything that came before. Greece gave the human race the idea of reason, which led not only to modern mathematics and natural science but also to ethics based on reason rather than authority.

On the other hand, there is no simple continuity from Greece to the modern West. During what corresponded to the early middle ages in Europe, the Islamic world and South and East Asia were much more sophisticated. There was also much more continuity of Greek learning of all sorts in the East. The bourgeoisie of the Italian Renaissance invented for themselves a much more direct descent from classical Greece than history actually supports.

Jonathan Israel’s trilogy on the Enlightenment and Frederick Beiser’s The Fate of Reason show that mainstream thinkers of the Enlightenment still put many limits on the application of reason in touchy areas like religion and politics. Plato and Aristotle did not.