Aristotle on Moral Responsibility. - book reviews

Mind, Jan, 1996 by T.D.J. Chappell

Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publishers, 1993. Pp. 210. H/b 40.00.

Two equal and opposite responses to Aristotle's ethics, both typical of modem moral philosophy, both presuppose the truth of some famous remarks made by Elizabeth Anscombe:

If someone professes to be expounding Aristotle and talks in a modem

fashion about "moral" such-and-such, he must be very imperceptive

if he does not constantly feel like someone whose jaws have

somehow got out of alignment: the jaws don't come together in a

proper bite. (Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy", Philosophy,

33, 1958)

The first response to the yawning gap which Anscombe sees between Aristotle and modem moralists is to conclude that it shows that Aristotle must have been doing moral philosophy the wrong way. This option seems to be commonly, if largely tacitly, taken by utilitarians--at least when they are not engaged in heroic attempts to recruit Aristotle to their own forces.

The other response is to conclude instead that we modems must be doing moral philosophy the wrong way. This of course was Anscombe's own conclusion. Today positions significantly like hers are being elaborated by several writers, in particular Bernard Williams in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy and in papers, before and since, on moral responsibility.

Meyer's new book is a response to Williams' and others' insistence on keeping Anscombe's gap open. She concentrates specifically on the gap as it is supposed to appear in the case of what Aristotle says or fails to say on the subject of moral responsibility.

So which of our two responses to Anscombe's gap does Meyer display? Neither. Instead she denies the gap. Of course she admits that between Aristotle and us there are some differences of approach to moral questions, and specifically to the question of moral responsibility. But these are not (in her view) so wide and so important that impasse is inevitable, or the gap unbridgeable. "The project of this book" (she tells us, p. 3) "is to argue, on the contrary, that Aristotle's concerns and aims in his various discussions of voluntariness are precisely those of a theorist of moral responsibility"--in the modem sense of that phrase.

Meyer gives a catalogue of the difficulties in the way of her project--the very difficulties, of course, that prompted the original postulation of what I have been calling Anscombe's gap. She sees four main problems (pp. 2-3):

1. If Aristotle "thinks that praise and blame are justified not on the basis

of the agent's merit or desert, but rather on the basis of their contribution

to the formation and control of the agent's character", then

"Aristotle's concern with the conditions of [praise and blame] is not

a concern with moral responsibility."

2. According to Aristotle, some agents (children and animals) are voluntary

but not responsible: so how can what Aristotle means by voluntariness

be a sufficient condition of responsibility?

3. Aristotle's "unreflective compilation of `commonsense' criteria" for

imputability seems at best merely an account of what is not involuntary

rather than of that is voluntary, and at worst "hopelessly aporetic

and disjointed".

4. Aristotle allegedly fails to address "the question of whether causal

determinism precludes our actions being up to us in the way that

moral responsibility requires". Do Meyer's responses to problems (1)--(4) succeed in showing that Anscombe's gap is not an important obstacle to seeing Aristotle as a theorist of moral responsibility in the modem sense?

First, her response to (3). Meyer argues in her chapter 3 that Aristotle's discussion of the voluntary does have a structure: a "dialectical" one, which deliberately generates conflicts and then solves them. This view, for which she argues by a detailed exegesis of Aristotle that I will not discuss here, is surely correct. Aristotle's discussion of voluntariness is neither inchoate, nor inconclusive, nor merely negative, nor unreflective; the adjective "dialectical" is easily justified as a description of Aristotle's technique by his own words in NE 1145b3 ff.

Meyer then makes an impressive specific case for her general thesis, that Aristotle's discussion of voluntariness is a good and useful one. Her general thesis too is important, though one may wonder who it needs defending against. Has any important recent writer on Aristotle seriously disagreed with it? I was unconvinced by Meyer's own account of who her targets are. Not Kenny for one, whose overall verdict on Aristotle's theory of the will in Aristotle Theory of the Will is highly favourable, despite his specific criticisms of NE. Not Austin either, despite Meyer's suggestion (p. 87 n. 1; p. 14 n. 6) that his view in "A Plea for Excuses" was that Aristotle's account of the voluntary was "unreflective" in this way. (Meyer misses Austin's point, which is that a properly reflective account of imputability ought to be, or begin as, a compilation of commonsense criteria of what is not involuntary.

Meyer's answer to (2) is simply to admit that voluntariness is not a sufficient condition of responsibility: only voluntary actions which arise from a character are responsible, and children and animals have no characters because they have no stable conception of eudaimonia (p. 28). Her answer to (4) is that Aristotelian agents are "free", in the sense that matters, if and only if their actions result from their characters (chapter 6). And her answer to (1) is that, although for Aristotle the justifications of our practices of punishment and reward are (as Jean Roberts argues, in an article in Ancient Philosophy 1989 to which Meyer rightly gives an important place in her discussion) prospective rather than retrospective, this is not true of our attitudes of praise and blame, which "are justified retrospectively: based on the causal relation between the state of character that is the focus of the praise or blame and the good or bad activities it produces" (Meyer, p. 134).