Ethical Resolution

“Resolution” is Olivier Boulnois’s recommended translation for what I have still been calling the “choice” associated with deliberation in Aristotle’s ethics.

I am slowly pulling together resources for a larger project that aims to recover a positive view of the core of classical — and especially Aristotelian — ethics, and in particular to show that it has untapped value for the cause of human emancipation.

To even get off the ground, such a project must be able both to seriously respond to widespread global critiques of “Western metaphysics”, and more specifically to show how classical ethics can help rather than hinder the advancement of democratic and anti-elitist concerns.

In this setting, Boulnois’s recent large book Généalogie de la liberté (2021) develops a tremendously important analysis of the historical and linguistic dimensions relevant to evaluation of claims about human free will. Boulnois’s work meticulously traces the evolution of related concepts, through many twists and turns. The result is a gripping account of how later views of free will relate — or not — to Aristotle’s way of approaching these matters in the Nicomachean Ethics and elsewhere. This is a rather extreme example of how translation always involves some measure of interpretation. It shows how artifice, invention, and radical interpolations can come to appear natural.

This post will start with the concluding paragraph of Boulnois’s first chapter on Aristotle (chapter 4), then cover roughly the first third of his reading of the Nicomachean Ethics in chapter 5 — not because his initial framing and background discussions are not very interesting, but because I want to get right to the main historical part, and specifically to his positive account of how Aristotle develops a rich, robust, and widely admired ethics without ever appealing to a metaphysical concept of free will. (Particularly in the part addressed here, Boulnois will also make a number of forward references, to illustrate the ways in which Aristotle’s account is transformed in the later tradition. This first part focuses on questions of vocabulary and translation, which are necessarily a bit technical, but very important; the upcoming parts 2 and 3 will be more “philosophical”.)

“The Aristotelian definition of imputability is strictly ethical, and not metaphysical: an agent is responsible for her action if she is not coerced and she does not act in ignorance. It matters little whether or not she has the possibility of acting otherwise. We consider that she is responsible for her action because she acted spontaneously, and because she should have acted otherwise. It is not necessary to presuppose a metaphysical concept (the will), or to attribute to it a property (autonomy) detached from all exterior determinism” (p. 132; emphasis in original throughout; my translation throughout; female pronouns and substitution of “human” for “man” my interpolation).

Aristotle’s beautifully simple notion of ethical responsibility became overlaid with complications in the later tradition. While the motivation for these complications is usually claimed to be ethical, careful historical interpretation tells a different story.

“Is free will proper to the human? All of medieval and modern reflection on action rests on this thesis. Thus Thomas Aquinas declares: ‘As [Greek church father] John of Damascus says, the human is made in the image of God, and “image” signifies intellectually, free by his power of arbitration (liberum arbitrio), and having power in virtue of himself (per se potestativum)‘. Like God, the human is the principle of her works; in the image of God, she possesses a will, a free arbitration and a power by herself. Descartes concentrates this image in the will: ‘it is principally due to this infinite will that is in us that we can say that we are created in his image’. This ‘Christian’ definition of what is proper to the human takes in a metaphysical reflection: the expression of John of Damascus, which Burgundio of Pisa had translated to Latin by liberum arbitrio and per se potestivum, is the Greek term autexousion, the key concept of the Stoic theory of action. But to understand its signification, it is appropriate to inquire into its origin” (p. 133).

It turns out that the term autexousion (self-possessed, or one who is self-possessed) does not appear at all in Aristotle. It has a prominent role in Epictetus, and seems to have originated in late Stoicism. Following the typical Stoic pattern of moral absolutism, it would be said that the sage has self-possession in an unqualified way, and that those who do not have it in an unqualified way do not have it at all. But for Aristotle, in all matters of this sort, it is the relative cases that occur in real life that matter.

Burgundio of Pisa made the first Latin translation of the Nicomachean Ethics in the 12th century. He also translated the Greek church fathers John of Damascus, Nemesius, and John Chrysostom. It appears that Burgundio deliberately sought to harmonize his translation of Aristotle with the work of these theologians. Boulnois notes that Nemesius explicitly discusses Aristotle, and John discusses Nemesius at length. But this is only one part of a much longer story.

“The concept of proairesis [resolution or ‘choice’] is analyzed for the first time in book III of the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle there evokes diverse ways of attaining the good: 1) ‘that which depends on us’ (eph’ hemin); 2) ‘voluntary’ (hekousion) action; 3) ‘resolution’ (proairesis); 4) moral virtue (arete ethike). These four conditions are four degrees of description of action. To be deserving of praise, an action must be virtuous; to be virtuous, it must be resolved (decided); to be resolved, it must be voluntary and depend on us (eph’ hemin). That is to say, what we have the power to do or not do is primordial, and present at all the levels of analysis. Far from flourishing in a liberty of indifference, this common condition is our way of pursuing the good, and it is deployed according to four modes” (ibid).

In Aristotle, the focus of resolution is on ethical ways of acting. For the theologians, a capability for free arbitration is innate in the soul, and this is what is meant when it is said that the soul is created in the image of God.

I am deliberately using the odd-sounding literal translation “free arbitration” here for libre arbitre, which is standardly rendered as “free will”. Arbitre generally means arbitrator, not will. The presumption is that the will acts as an arbitrator. I would argue that what makes a good arbitration good is necessarily not arbitrary.

The explicit mention of arbitration here has to do with the liberty of indifference that is attributed to the will in the Western Christian theological tradition. The Latin libero arbitrio from which the French is derived is Augustine’s own shortening of his original phrase libero arbitrio voluntatis, which is something like “free arbitration by the will”.

“First of all, is it necessary to follow the translation of Burgundio? Does proairesis really signify ‘free arbitration’ [free will, libre arbitre]? The term [proairesis] appears in Greek in the epoch of Demosthenes, but it is Aristotle who first makes a technical use of it. It has been translated to French in multiple ways: ‘free arbitration’ [free will, libre arbitre] (B. Saint-Hilaire), ‘preferential choice’ [choix preferentiel] (J. Tricot), ‘decision’ [decision] (R. A. Gauthier and R. Bodeus). But these translations are themselves conditioned by the Latin translations of the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, of which the Middle Ages knew several versions” (p. 134).

My own brief early treatment of this part of Aristotle used the term “choice”, following Sachs’s translation, but explicitly presented it as nonarbitrary, as it seems to me Sachs does as well.

“What are the principles that guided the first translation by Burgundio in the 12th century? The first translation, the Ethica vetus, translates proairesis by voluntas in book II; in book III, it sometimes preserves proairesis in transliteration, but it also renders it by ‘anticipated judgment’ (preiudicium), later by ‘choice’ (electio), and finally by eligentia (choice that is realized progressively), a term that Burgundio employs from then on constantly. In effect, after having used voluntas in book II, he cannot retain it in book III: this book contains in effect the concepts of ‘willing’ or ‘against one’s will’ (hekousion, akousion), which are translated by ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’, which would be redundant with voluntas; he thus hesitates between three possibilities: conserving the Greek term, expressing the idea of anticipated judgment, expressing the idea of progressive choice — and finally follows this last decision. From then on, the Latin term voluntas translates boulesis (‘wish’), the traditional translation since Cicero), but also proairesis (in book I), and again willing action (under the form of the adjective voluntarium, ‘voluntary’). The translation of Burgundio thus concentrates different ethical concepts in the single term of will” (pp. 134-135).

Translating several different Aristotelian terms by one trivially makes the one term that much more widely used, increasing its apparent prominence in the text. At the same time it blunts the kind of nuanced distinctions that Aristotle thrives upon. It imposes unity on what is multiple on its face. In doing so, it deliberately introduces the very same kind of equivocation that Aristotle works to extricate us from in his signature move of pointing out things “said in many ways”.

Even more significantly, we see adjectives, verbs, and nouns in predicate position transformed into a separate quasi-substance (“the will”) within the soul, to which acts are attributed. These acts of willing, unlike the ethical actions considered by Aristotle, are posited as completely internal to the soul. By contrast, the Aristotelian “resolution” that Boulnois aims to recover has an outward-facing aspect and an intrinsic relation to what the later tradition calls “external” action, insofar as it is measured by what we discernably do and don’t do.

The whole notion of punctual actions internal to the soul is a creative invention of the theologians, that is now so familiar to us that it seems natural. Indeed the whole idea of a sharp, categorical distinction between internal and external in the human only emerges in stages, mediated by Stoicism and middle Platonism. It only attains the full force familiar to us in early Christian theology.

Aristotle is in general much more interested in activities than in punctual actions or events. Unlike an action-as-event, an activity can be inwardly directed. But meanwhile he attributes actions-as-events to the whole human being active in the world, not to the soul alone. For Aristotle, the soul is not so much a cause of events as a source or place of meaning.

“The translation of Grosseteste continues a solution envisaged by Burgundio, but imposes it in a coherent and homogeneous way: it always renders proairesis by electio. But the inconvenience of this translation appears in book II, where ‘willing’ action, rendered by ‘voluntary’ (voluntarium) is distinguished from proairesis, rendered by ‘choice’ (electio). It is thus necessary to say that ‘children and other animals have in common the voluntary, but not choice (electio). A strange ‘voluntary’, without will or choice!” (p. 135).

As it is presented in Aristotle’s text though, the distinction between proairesis and “willingness” or “voluntariness” does not seem strange at all — at least, as long as we do not reify will into an independent faculty superior to intellect and desire, and then attribute the willingness or voluntariness to the will rather than to the action. I too have previously hesitated over the English terms “voluntary” and “willing” due to their obvious etymology, but the way the corresponding terms are used in the Aristotelian text seems clear enough. (To further round out a self-contained dossier on these matters, some time soon I will transcribe more of Sachs’s translation, which I continue to greatly admire.)

Boulnois continues, “It is thus Burgundio who traced the rut into which all the medieval and modern translations have not ceased to fall. But must we understand, like him, proairesis as a ‘choice’? And why does he effect this concentration on will? Here it is necessary to inquire after its hermeneutic horizon: we also owe to him the translations of the De natura hominis of Nemesius of Emesa and the treatise On the orthodox faith of John of Damascus, the one and the other meditating on the vocabulary of free arbitration. There is here a historic point of intersection: John relies on Nemesius, who himself cites Aristotle; thus Burgundio translated three works, and each time understood proairesis as a choice and an arbitration” (pp. 135-136).

There is no concentration on will in Aristotle, because in Aristotle there is no separate faculty of will. A definite “will” can be attributed to a whole human being, but he never speaks of an indefinite will over and above the instances of definite will.

“For Nemesius of Emesa, proairesis precedes every action; it is itself associated with the logos; it depends on our judgment. This is a decisive mutation: in Aristotle, practical reason is not a ‘deliberation’ anterior to action, it is its very logic; in Nemesius, proairesis precedes actions; it has become a full-fledged faculty, itself in our power and depending on our judgment: proairesis becomes that which, by nature, depends on us, before any action. Nemesius associates this interiorization with Christianity; he cites Matthew 5:28: ‘He who looks at a woman with desire has committed adultery in his heart’. Thus it comes to be that a faculty of acting has an interior faculty of deciding resolutely for ourselves — a free arbitration” (p. 136).

The decisive mutation he attributes to Nemesius is the interiorization mentioned here. As will be confirmed shortly, Boulnois does not at all mean to reject deliberation. Rather, he is recalling that for Aristotle, the sin qua non of practical reasoning is that it directly issues in action (which is why we call it “practical”). Converting it into something that can be purely interior radically changes the meaning.

In any case, faculty psychology is another later development that has been read into Aristotle in hindsight. It is of course common for translators to take their intended audience’s preconceptions into account, but here the preconception gets in the way of understanding the text.

“In its turn, the work of John culminates in a reflection on the union between the human will and the divine will in Christ. John of Damascus describes the functioning of this psychic union: after the wish regarding the end comes deliberation, in which proairesis is like an epilogue. Thus there exist two appetitive faculties: boulesis (wish?) is concerned with the end, while proairesis is concerned with the means, and arbitrates among them to attain the end: ‘proairesis consists in effect in a taking (hairesthai) and picking (eklegesthai) between two objects, one more than the other’. It is clear that John interprets proairesis as a preferential choice: we take one object in preference to the other. It was logical that this interpretation is incorporated in the translation; Burgundio here translates proairesis by electio: ‘Choice (electio) consists in choosing between two objects and wishing for one more than the other’. Prohairesis has become a choice. It remains oriented toward its end, and is placed structurally in the orbit of the will (since boulesis is a form of willing, thelesis). — But it is precisely this interpretation that inspires Burgundio’s translation of the Nicomachean Ethics. It remains subject to competition from the concepts of voluntas and of premeditated judgment; this precisely confirms that the complex of translations, despite the attempts at emancipation in book III, remains dominated by the primacy of will” (pp. 136-137).

“With the translation of proairesis by ‘choice’, the key concept of Aristotelian ethics is integrated into the semantic field of will. The Burgundian point of intersection, which gathers Aristotle, Nemesius, and John together in the same bundle of translations, constitutes a second beginning of proairesis as free arbitration in the 12th century” (p. 137).

The way I have been rationalizing continued use of “choice” for the past year is by emphasizing the way in which deliberation is said to determine choice in the Aristotelian text. I did not at all construe it as an Augustinian “free choice of the will”. But still, this nonstandard use could be confusing to readers of the English.

“But apart from the interpretation of John and Burgundio, what does Aristotle want to say? The root hairesis is associated with the verb haireo: to seize, take, or capture. Hairesis signifies first of all a taking. From this the sense of ‘taking a position’, ‘choice’, ‘option’ (and derivatively the sense of philosophical position, then a religious sect, ‘heresy’). — But what does the prefix pro signify? Either ‘in advance of’, or ‘in place of’. The term can thus signify ‘to take in advance’ or ‘to take in preference to another thing’. Preliminary anticipation or preferential choice, which sense is to be admitted?” (ibid).

This suggests a nice, unexpected connection with the Kantian “taking” of things as thus-and-such.

“In Plato, the verb prohaireo (proelometha) has the sense of a premeditation more than that of a choice: ‘If we have nothing else at hand, do you want us to take up weaving?’ Here, precisely, no choice is possible; this does not prevent deciding in advance what we will take up. — In Demosthenes, the expression serves to claim a line of political conduct; accused, the orator assumes responsibility for the account: ‘these events, which my proairesis and my politics have produced’. Here the term has the sense of a deliberate intention, or of a political project — of resolution; Demosthenes thus aligns himself as an engaged and clear-seeing actor in the uncertain setting of political action. Proairesis designates the line of conduct he has intentionally followed, his decision: ‘the proairesis of one who deliberates is manifested in his very thought’. Demosthenes underlines that we do not deliberate about the past; only the present and the future require a deliberation. It is necessary to judge the plans he has formed in the context of the urgency of the moment: ‘Misfortunes were threatening; others were present; examine the proairesis of my government, and do not calumny the events’. The same applies after the fact: ‘If today someone can see a course better than mine, or, more generally, another possible course outside of those I had for proairesis (prohailomen), I consider myself culpable.’ When Demosthenes defends his decision, it is to underline that he could not have acted otherwise, that there was no other possible alternative. But what matters is to undertake a project, to courageously make a resolution for the future” (pp. 137-138).

I found this part particularly clear and helpful. Here proairesis seems to connote proactive, rational commitment and intention.

“The task of the orator in the context of the city is to discern ‘events from their birth, to foresee them, and to announce them in advance (prolegein) to the other citizens’. Proairesis is thus indisputably the capacity to project into the future. Political action only has meaning if it is cognizant of possible events in advance, in the decisive instant, and if it proposes a project. The first quality of a citizen is ‘when he exercises power, to firmly conserve for the city the proairesis of nobility and preeminence’; it is clearly a matter of a global design to be maintained through time, of a resolution. Even if indirectly proairesis often involves the possibility of making choices, the pro of proairesis in Demosthenes designates first of all an anticipation; if hairesis designates a knowledge, proairesis is an anticipative knowledge, a resolution” (p. 138).

“But in what sense does Aristotle use proairesis? As we have seen, for Aristotle human action is a particular case of the movement of animals. But what is proper to the human comes from discourse (logos). It is this difference that allows her to deliberate, to determine a practical conclusion. In the same way that desire is the principle of movement, proairesis is the principle of properly human action. Thus Aristotle defines proairesis as a kind of desire joined with deliberation (with discourse). Thus practical reasoning distinguishes action from movement” (pp. 138-139).

This principle that guides properly human action, as distinct from other bodily movement, is thus associated by Aristotle with the language and discursive thought that distinguish humans from other animals. Properly human “desire joined with deliberation and discourse” distinguishes properly human action from other animal movements, which are born of desire alone. For Aristotle, ethics is not about the training of a presumed will that decides, but rather about acting well in a rich and multifarious sense.

“Translation is not everything, and all solutions have a contingent aspect. But it is necessary to adopt one. Three possibilities are offered to us: choice, intention, resolution. Which to retain? — After having characterized proairesis as concerning actions done willingly, Aristotle adds that it is concerned with what we have ‘deliberated about beforehand (probouloumenon)’, since it ‘is accompanied by speech and by thought’; otherwise, ‘according to its name itself, it seems to signify that which is taken before (or more than) something else’. Here again, pro can have two senses: ‘before’ and ‘more than’. In the first case, it is necessary to understand ‘what we decide to take before something else’. In the second case, it is necessary to understand ‘what we decide to take more than something else’. But the second case is a particular case of the first; to take something more than something else is to prioritize it, to prefer it (praeferre is to prioritize). And especially, the parallel with ‘deliberated beforehand’ (indisputably temporal) encourages understanding ‘that which is known in advance’. The concept of resolution expresses this idea fairly well. When an agent has deliberated, he fixes in advance his intention on a project that guides his action: he resolves” (p. 139).

With this temporal argument, we are getting to the heart of the matter. Aware that he is arguing against a received view that is itself relatively plausible, Boulnois recalls that serious translation (or even, I would add, serious reading) must often recognize that interpretations of a text are debatable. Then it becomes a matter of considering multiple points of evidence, to obtain a well-rounded point of view. It is perfectly possible to sustain a general line of argument even if one of these is conceded. But conversely, arguments are strengthened when they converge from several directions.

In the next chapter, he will argue that it was not until Boethius (480-524 CE) that the interpretation of proairesis in ethics came to be read in light of Aristotle’s entirely separate discussion of future contingents in On Interpretation. Boethius’s reading makes good sense if we accept the radical departure of Alexander of Aphrodisias (flourished around 200 CE) from Aristotle in his polemic against Stoic fate. Alexander’s “libertarian” reading is presupposed by the much later arguments of Duns Scotus (d. 1308 CE) for a definitely non-Aristotelian radical contingency of everything due to the dependence of everything on the will of God. But in another upcoming chapter, Boulnois will systematically dismantle the argument of Alexander, highlighting its implicit dependence on the Stoic view it opposes, which anticipates Avicenna’s un-Aristotelian notion that efficient causality comes before purpose and meaning in the understanding of things.

Boulnois quotes from Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics, which covers much of the same territory as the better-known Nicomachean Ethics. Here I have more or less substituted the English of The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, p. 1942, while leaving proairesis in Greek as Boulnois does: “Since then [proairesis] is neither opinion nor wish singly, nor yet both (for no one [has proairesis] suddenly, though he thinks he ought to act, and wishes, suddenly), it must be compounded of both, for both are found in a man [who has a proairesis]” (ibid).

He provocatively recalls the root meaning of hairesis (a taking or seizing), in order to argue that proairesis is not just preferring one thing to another, but necessarily includes a duration of time and a forward-looking element. (I have previously read this as a non-arbitrary preference grounded in reasons; this is still available as a fall-back position if we do not accept the whole of Boulnois’s argument.) He argues that the interpretation of proairesis as “choice” is fatally flawed, because in in common speech choice need not depend on deliberation, but according to Aristotle proairesis does. Proairesis is therefore more than just a choice.

“To have a proairesis, it is necessary to have an opinion on the action to be taken and to wish it, but this does not suffice: proairesis presupposes a duration, and first of all that of deliberation. But what does proairesis mean here? Aristotle explains: ‘proairesis is a seizing (hairesis), not absolutely, but of one thing in view of another (pros heteron). But this cannot occur without examination or deliberation. This is why proairesis concerns a deliberative opinion.’ The accent is put on the relation to the end. It is a matter of an intentional decision. Proairesis is indeed more than a choice: one can choose without deliberating. It is more than a decision, because we can decide in an instant. What the time of deliberation entails is the anticipative seizing of the relation between the end and the means. It is a matter of an ‘anticipation’ (pro-hairesis). We can speak of an ‘anticipative seizing’ or of an ‘intentional aiming’ in the measure that it aims at the future. — But the most rigorous translation seems to be ‘resolution’; resolution integrates many constitutive elements of proairesis; it takes time to be formed, it aims at the future, it implies an intention from which it will not let itself be diverted, and it can be the result of a deliberation. This is why it has an incontestable ethical dimension” (pp. 139-140).

“Resolution introduces the logos and time. If animals and children are already capable of acting willingly, their impulsion is characterized by suddenness; while proairesis presupposes a premeditation, a preliminary deliberation, and a hierarchization of priorities. The object of our resolution is initially the object of our desire, insofar as this results from a deliberation (and does not determine it). It is resolution that makes us good or bad, because it is it that triggers this kind of action more than any other: the greater the good we are reaching for, the stronger the resolution that leads us to it” (pp. 140-141).

“With Aristotle, we are indeed far from the medieval and modern interpretation, which speaks of choice (electio). Certainly every choice presupposes a resolution, but resolution is a more fundamental concept than choice” (p. 141).

Voluntarism

I think most people understand believing in free will simply as believing that humans are able to make genuine choices. This is entirely unobjectionable.

It is a very different matter to claim that the will is innately unconditionally free. That is what I call voluntarism, and “free will in the strong sense”.

This is different from the way the term “voluntarism” is used in the secondary literature on medieval philosophy. There it means the view that there is a separate faculty for choosing that is called will, and that this will is prior to intellect, in the sense of being able to overrule what our intellect tells us is true or right. In this view, will governs intellect rather than being governed by it. It is in this sense, for example, that Aquinas is called an “intellectualist” and not a voluntarist, because he holds that the will is governed by intellect, even though he also defends liberum arbitrium, or free will in the strong sense. (There is a separate question about how to understand complex views like this, which include contrasting elements. My simple answer is that we should give them the benefit of the doubt.)

Leaving aside the expanded concept of responsibility that Brandom recommends in A Spirit of Trust, I hold that moral responsibility is well explained by Aristotle. Aristotle says we are responsible for all “willing” actions, but not for “unwilling” ones. It really is no harder than that.

In ordinary life, without any philosophy, we already distinguish willing actions from unwilling or unintended ones that happen as a result of coercion or ignorance. These distinctions of willingness from unwillingness apply at the level of particular actions. Some things we do willingly, others we do not.

This distinction between willing and unwilling could not even possibly be a matter of metaphysical or anthropological truth, because metaphysical and anthropological conclusions are both too general to support this kind of distinction. A metaphysical or anthropological account could only give us ways of generalizing about action or human action as such. But we do not have responsibility in particular cases because of some general metaphysical or anthropological truth. Rather, we have responsibility in particular cases because of what is true in those cases.

We should notice that Aristotle’s whole discussion of willing and unwilling actions — and of choice — not only does not assume, but does not even mention a separate faculty called “will”, unless this has been introduced by a translator. Moreover, meaningful discussion of any definite will or intent revolves around its particular content, not its source. Meanwhile, the source of choice is well described by Aristotle as “either intellect fused with desire, or desire fused with thinking, and such a source is a human being” (Nicomachean Ethics, Sachs tr., p.104; see also Free Will in Aristotle?)

People should be broadly forgiven for having been brought up with the pervasive inflated language about free will, even though a more precise analysis shows it is not really needed to explain or justify the claim we want to defend: that humans are able to make genuine choices.

This is true especially because there is a whole family of old (largely 19th-century) clichés about free will and determinism that tend to force discussion of these topics into very narrow channels. “Free will” and “determinism” are commonly taken to be two opposite extremes. Either everything is determined in advance, or nothing is. Then we are told that in order to avoid the evils of a total determinism, the only alternative is to believe that we are not determined at all. This is a false dichotomy.

Historically, it was Augustine who coined the original Latin term liberum arbitrium, and he is often credited with originating the notion of what I call “free will in the strong sense”. Boulnois mentions the commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias (2nd-3rd century CE) as an important precursor.

Theological voluntarism is closely bound up what I have called strong omnipotence, for which the earliest source I know is Philo of Alexandria (1st century BCE to 1st CE). Some form of omnipotence is at least verbally affirmed by nearly all later authorities in all three monotheistic traditions. It is even more pervasive than free will in the strong sense. But again, most of those same authorities make other statements which seem to indicate that they do not at all mean really to endorse the extreme consequences that follow from strong omnipotence, or from free will in the strong sense. We should apply a good measure of interpretive charity in these cases.

Ethics and the Dogma of Free Will

The last post treated Olivier Boulnois’s discussion of ethical deliberation and proairesis or “resolution” (which I formerly called “choice”) in Aristotle, which grounds Boulnois’s “genealogy of freedom”. Here are a few highlights of his discussion of how the very un-Aristotelian notion of free will emerged in the later tradition, along with parts of his conclusion.

Elsewhere I have used the common translation of Latin liberum arbitrium as “free will”, but more literally it is something like “free arbitration”, which is what a free will is characteristically supposed to do. In the context of this “archaeological” discussion where the terms appear side by side, the distinction matters.

Frequently, talk about will is fraught with ambiguity. Good will — and more generally, definite will as intent subject to interpretation — is a completely different thing from the indeterminate will conceived as a power of decision ex nihilo that is being criticized here, but the two are often mixed together.

“Voluntas did not always mean will, if we understand by that a directing principle of the powers of the soul, trigger of action and repose, and capable of contraries. The word is attested in classical Latin, in the sense of ‘favor’, ‘good disposition’ ” (Généalogie de la liberté, p. 254, my translation throughout). “[The Greek boulesis], which Cicero translated as voluntas, designates a sage emotion, a rational desire, the superior form that desire takes when the [Stoic] sage is no longer subject to passions” (ibid).

In the Stoics, we can see the beginning of an evolution toward modern concepts of will. But the Stoic usage properly applies only to the ideal of the Stoic sage. It is not yet a faculty of the soul that all humans are supposed to have.

According to Boulnois, the next major step was taken by Alexander of Aphrodisias, in late 2nd to early 3rd century CE. Standing near the beginning of the Greek Aristotelian commentary tradition, Alexander is the most historically influential of the Greek commentators. Relevant here are his arguments against Stoic determinism, in the non-commentary treatise On Fate.

“Is it necessary to define freedom as freedom of the will, or free arbitration? The problem of free arbitration, understood as a completely undetermined power to resolve [or choose], arises from Alexander of Aphrodisias, in a metaphysical rereading of Aristotle. In effect, Alexander is responding to a non-Aristotelian problematic, that of [Stoic] determinism. To do this, he establishes a connection between the concept of proairesis and the rejection of the cosmic determinism of the Stoics, thus giving birth to a ‘libertarian’ interpretation of decision, indeed to the concept of (undetermined) free choice. Where Aristotle affirms that we generically have the capacity to act or to not act, Alexander holds that we singularly, in each conjuncture, have the possibility to act or not, and to act otherwise. This is to say that proairesis becomes a faculty of choice independent of the state of the world — a free arbitration. And it is this concept, called ‘Aristotelian’ by Heidegger but in fact Alexandrian, that imposes itself, as well in [the early Augustine of the Treatise on Free Will] as in scholasticism, up to Descartes. It becomes necessary for this to consider not only action, but an interior power of choice. Free arbitration thus becomes free arbitration of the will” (p. 472, emphasis in original).

“In inventing a libertarian conception of action, Alexander [of Aphrodisias] founds an ethic centered on the capacity to choose for oneself a thing or its contrary, without depending on a preceding cause” (p. 248).

“The concept of free arbitration had already received its certificate of nobility from [the early Christian theologian] Origen…. But he implied no metaphysical thesis on determinism and indeterminism. It is Augustine who submits the concept of free arbitration to this problematic, and discovers the power of the will, in his Treatise on Free Will” (p. 253).

“But it is Augustine who made [voluntas] the founding concept of Western ethics, in joining it to that of free arbitration (liberum arbitrium). He made it the free arbitration of the will” (p. 255, emphasis in original).

“The Treatise on Free Will was at first conceived as a treatise on the good, in which Augustine demonstrated the divine goodness and the origin of evil, in opposition to the Manicheans. But to exonerate God, it was necessary to make the human will responsible for evil” (p. 256).

“The association of the will proper and free arbitration … suggests that the key of the fault [of original sin] resides in a power of choice belonging to the will. Evil does not come from nature, but from that will, in its exercise of choice…. Thus the first occurrence of [the phrase] free arbitration appeared at a crucial moment of reflection on the origin of evil” (p. 257, emphasis in original). “It is the human who is culpable, and God is innocent” (p. 259). “Willing is always in our power; in this consists our freedom” (p. 260).

“Augustine inherits the turn made by Alexander of Aphrodisias. Freedom of action has become a freedom of choice. And the power of choice is identified at once with the principle of assent to representations and the triggering principle of action: the will. Instead of a casuistry, instead of founding responsibility in the meeting of our beliefs and our desires, on the one hand, and on the circumstances of action, on the other, Augustine prefers to construct a unique and hidden inner principle, which is situated in an invisible part of the human (her soul); this principle is will, endowed with a free arbitration” (ibid).

Also influential in this context was the late 5th to early 6th century CE Roman Christian philosopher Boethius.

“In Aristotle, the problem of willing action and that of prescience of the future are totally disjoint. The first is treated in a reflection on ethical responsibility, the second in the framework of a logico-linguistic analysis of statements about the future” (p. 159). But “Boethius elaborates what will become the key argument: if the future is necessarily determined, free arbitration perishes, along with all moral responsibility” (ibid).

In the high middle ages, such arguments were developed to a fine pitch by the Latin scholastics. This turns out to be interrelated with the scholastic turn away from Aristotle’s own very innovative meta-ethical emphasis on the primacy of explanation by final causes, to a new privileging of a transformed notion of efficient cause that is closer to early modern mechanism than it is to Aristotle.

” ‘The final cause is not productive. That is why health is not productive, except metaphorically’ ” (p. 116). “At the end of the 13th century, Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus understood this passage in an absolute manner. They deduced that the final cause produces nothing, that it is not really a cause” (p. 117). Henry of Ghent wrote, ‘The good that is known, insofar as it is represented in the intellect, moves the will only in a metaphorical way’ ” (quoted, p. 117, emphasis in original).

Though highly sophisticated and genuinely original, this scholastic devaluation of the final cause completely undoes what Aristotle himself highlights as his most important accomplishment in first philosophy (the detailed working out of a unique “final causes first” way of thinking and understanding, which orients itself through a hermeneutics of “that for the sake of which”). The scholastic reversal of Aristotle’s distinctive emphasis on final causes (in favor of putting a transformed notion of efficient causality first) puts a value-neutral notion of sheer power in top position in place of the good at the origin of things. Not only the first cause but also human agency are re-visioned in terms of this creative misreading of efficient causality as not just the means by which ends are achieved, but as a primordial value-neutral driving impulse, or (in the case of God) a value-neutral supreme power of creation from nothing. In philosophical anthropology, this is accompanied by a devaluation of Aristotelian teleological “intellect” in favor of the new voluntaristic notion of will, as the human analogue of creation from nothing.

“For Henry and Scotus, our passage means that the intellect and its object do not move the will…. But this interpretation, which reduces finality to the conjunction of a representation and a subjective will, is a hazardous extrapolation: Aristotle speaks here only of the need to distinguish between a productive cause and a final cause (the aim pursued is not the efficient cause of movement). And all the rest of his thought implies a teleology, that is to say a motion by a final cause, even for the beings that have no representation” (ibid).

“The will ceases to be simply the excellence of good humans (as with the Stoics). It implies a mentalist theory and a causal theory of action. — 1) Mentalist: because all action is explained as the exterior deployment of a mental state…. –2 ) Causal: the will is the cause of action…. Action becomes the effect of the will” (pp. 260-261, emphasis in original).

“At first, the fundamental definition of freedom is strictly ethical. It consists in the absence of constraint and of ignorance, independent of any metaphysical position on determinism or causal indeterminacy” (p. 473). “For at the origin, in Aristotle, [desire and logos or discourse] are clearly distinct…. The aporia arises when in an articulation that is not ontologically clarified, we confuse desire and the logos in the concept of ‘will’ (since the Stoics and Augustine). Successfully to rethink this articulation is the challenge and the task of an ethics. This imposes on us the task of destroying this metaphysical confusion that obstructs the philosophy of action” (p. 475).

The reference to “destruction” might sound a bit shocking, but it refers back to Boulnois’s methodological preliminaries. There, he said

“In the element of thought, destruction and construction are one sole and same act…. My approach is a form of ‘discursive dissolution’: through dissolution, we approach the resolution of the problem.”

“To solve: resolve, destroy. Here it is not simply a matter of ‘deconstruction’…. Can we again philosophize after analytic philosophy? If the analytical method has a virtue, it is to conduct a rational reflection on problems, and to accept that they can have a solution” (p. 20, emphasis in original).

“It is undoubtedly impossible to give a complete analytic interpretation of the problem of freedom. It is likewise impossible to give a complete history of the diverse statements responding to the question. But paradoxically, what is impossible separately becomes possible conjointly.”

“I will reconstruct the principal sources of the doctrine of freedom, and of its intrinsic aporia. I attach myself particularly to the work of Aristotle….”

“When Aristotle affirms that an action ‘accomplished willingly engenders praise and blame, while an action accomplished unwillingly only engenders compassion (suggnome) and perhaps pity’; when Descartes declares that the freedom of indifference is ‘the positive faculty of determining oneself for one or the other of two contraries, that is to say to pursue or to flee, to affirm or to deny’; when Nietzsche demands, apropos of the eternal return: ‘do you will that again and innumerable times again?’, not only does it not concern the same thesis, but above all it does not concern the same question” (pp. 20-21, emphasis in original).

He devotes a whole subsection of the introduction to “the legitimacy of the middle age” as a field of scholarly endeavor.

“In studying the middle ages, we indeed study the hidden face of our history…. To choose the long path, which passes through the Middle Age, is to choose multiplicity and discontinuity” (p. 22).

“[T]here are not two eternal conceptions, one determinist, the other libertarian…. an alternative of which both terms were unknown to Aristotle, who envisaged neither free arbitration (but solely willingness) nor determinism (but only cause and responsibility)” (p. 23).

“This study supposes that we first research the origin and the structure of the question of free arbitration, then we examine the sense of action from Aristotle, as well as its obliteration under a theory of free arbitration” (ibid).

In the conclusion, he says

“The problem of free arbitration, or of the freedom of the will, is a metaphysical artifact for two reasons:”

“1. The will was introduced by the commentators on Aristotle through a complex series of translations and projections, such that rational desire (boulesis) became a will, which renders the primordial sense of action and of practical reason incomprehensible.”

“2. Freedom is not essentially a power of the soul, but a social and ethical aptitude.”

“To go further in the elucidation of the problem of freedom, it is necessary to destroy the concept of will, as the mental and causal principle of human actions. As Wittgenstein well saw, for this it is necessary to confront a radical analysis of action without reproducing this term (anachronistic in relation to Aristotle). For the idea of an interior principle, capable of contraries and cause of action, not only conceals an internal contradiction, but is a fiction that occults the different levels of action in which we are responsible.”

“We have given an account of the actions of which we are the authors. To be responsible for an action, it is necessary to be a cause. This signifies that the agent has the power to act, and for Aristotle, this is a bivalent power, to act or not to act in general. Aristotle never says that, in some precise conjuncture, given the beliefs and representations of the agent, she must have the power to do a thing and its contrary, and to not do what she does. For that is not the question: that is not what makes ethical responsibility; we are responsible for actions of which we are generically the origin; action depends on us, it is ours, when we are not constrained by an exterior force. That is also why we cannot excuse ourselves (exclude ourselves from the cause), by arguing that faulty action was necessarily brought about by our desires…. For our desires are part of us, and our action is not imputable to another…. To speak of a ‘weakness of the will’, is precisely to render the phenomenon incomprehensible” (pp. 175-176, emphasis in original).

“It is only through confusion with the problematic of future contingents that the metaphysical question of the contingency of choice emerged…. For Aristotle never claimed that our capacity to act or to not act now depends uniquely on us” (p. 477, emphasis in original).

“Free arbitration becomes the condition of responsibility, which makes free arbitration a necessary but indemonstrable condition of ethics. — This argument has a double inconvenience: first of all, it requires the admission of an indemonstrable principle; then, in making free arbitration the condition of morality, it prevents us from seeing the converse, that ethical orientation is constitutive of its concept” (p. 478).

“Fundamentally, freedom does not reside in a subjective power to determine oneself. Neither the term ‘will’ nor its functions exist at the origin, in Aristotle: we find neither a power that centralizes the other faculties of the soul, nor a principle of assent at the source of action….. It is ethics that founds freedom, and not freedom that founds ethics” (p. 479, emphasis in original).

“Freedom is not a postulate of practical reason; it is practical reason. And the human is not born free, but she may become so” (p. 481).

Very Different Kinds of “Will”

Two radically different things are both called “will”. One is a definite orientation and effort toward this end rather than that, analogous to a kind of desire. The other is supposed to be a power of decision independent of deliberation.

I don’t believe that there is or could be such a thing as decision with absolutely no deliberation. What we have is an ability to deliberate, and to choose between alternatives based on that deliberation (see also What We Really Want). Neither deliberation nor decision could apply to an eternal being, because these necessarily involve time and change.

Kinds of Reason

As Aristotle might remind us, “reason” is said in many ways. All forms of reason are potentially valuable, but there is a very important distinction between what I’ve been calling the ethical reason that is intimately involved with who we are, and other forms that are more like tools we can use. Also, ethical reason relies on concrete judgments of things, rather than formal manipulations.

In some ways — in terms of the role I see it playing — ethical reason is more like what some people have called “will”. I prefer to avoid the term “will” because it is too often associated with an arbitrary power of decision. I do very much think of ethical reason as the thing in us that ultimately decides things large and small, but the kind of decision involved is always at least implicitly ethical (concerning what we “should” do), and therefore by no means arbitrary.

Common complaints against “reason” concern what I would call what I would call a usurpation of the place of ethical reason by the tool-like kinds of reason, or claims made on their behalf. Contrary to the claims of a certain ill-conceived modernity, tool-like reason can aid us in utilitarian calculations that may help inform decisions, but cannot by itself provide an adequate basis for decision, which is always ultimately ethical.

Whereas tool-like reason aims at precision, ethical reason is maximally inclusive in what it takes takes into account. This inclusiveness is its strong point, but at the same time makes it especially fallible. Due to the fact that we are situated beings in the world, there is no such thing as an infallible decisionmaking process we could use. Aristotle already pointed out that ethical reason is less precise than other forms. Tool-like reason achieves its precision by excluding considerations that ethical reason cannot ignore.

Because of this, concrete realizations of ethical reason can be better or worse. In general, human beings are called rational animals not because we are perfectly rational, but because we have the capability for reason. Especially in the case of ethical reason, that capability is always a matter of degrees. We all use it all the time, and do better or worse. We can also learn or be inspired to do better than we did before.

Ricoeurian Choice

Part 1 of Ricoeur’s Freedom and Nature is devoted to a rich discussion of choice. He says that to will is to think (p. 41), and that deciding is a kind of judging (p. 43). But also “I project my own self into the action to be done. Prior to all reflection about the self which I project, the myself summons itself… it becomes committed…. Prereflexive self-imputation is active, not observational” (p. 59; emphasis in original).

He develops at length how the interdependence of the voluntary and the involuntary can be seen in processes of choice. “The circle of ethics and practice repeats the more basic circle of motive and decision” (p. 77). Motives partially determine us in certain directions, but in deciding we choose which motives to put first. Deciding involves a combination of analysis and judgment with creativity and risk.

We should not think of a decision as an atomic act coming from nowhere. Hesitation and indecision are valid moments of a genuine process of considering alternatives, and this has implications for the self as well. “[T]his inchoate, problematic mode of myself must be grasped as it presents itself. We have no right to substitute for it the image of the triumphant self which is invariably one” (p. 140). The ambiguity inherent in our embodiment means that our decisions cannot be simply governed by a present totality of inclinations or an evident hierarchy of values (p. 143).

Neither an intellectualist approach that tries to reduce decision to air-tight determination from reasons nor a voluntarist one that turns decision into a creation from nothing is valid. “A living dialectic constantly brings us back from one aspect of choice to the other: choice as the peak of previous growth and as the surge of novelty” (p. 164; emphasis in original). “Thus we must say simultaneously that ‘choice follows from the final practical judgment’ and ‘a practical judgment is final when choice irrupts‘” (p. 181; emphasis in original). “Determination of the act and indetermination of the power do not actually represent two separate moments” (p. 186). (For more on the same book, see Phenomenology of Will; Ricoeur on Embodiment; Voluntary Action; Consent?. In general, see also Fallible Humanity; Ricoeurian Ethics; Oneself as Another; Choice, Deliberation; Practical Judgment; Potentiality, Actuality; Brandomian Choice.)

Next in this series: Ricoeur on Embodiment