Aristotle on Moral Responsibility. - book reviews

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

Second, she distinguishes between full and qualified responsibility for character, and claims that Aristotle makes a case only in favour of there being qualified responsibility for character. This claim is more convincing; but it has the feel of a concession to the view Meyer wants to disagree with--that Aristotle does believe that responsibility for character is fundamental. Moreover it is a concession that those who hold that view, me for example, might want to exploit. "Of course" (I might say) "it would be crazy of Aristotle to demand complete responsibility for character, if that entails thinking that people can change their dispositions as easily and as quickly as they can change their clothes. But one can (pace Williams) reasonably demand something rather less than that--the possibility of being led by reflection upon one's life to the thought that one's life needs drastic change, however difficult that will be; and the possibility of acting in some way--however small--to bring about such change. What is more, one can also reasonably demand that such reflection and the resulting change be basic to the moral life, and basic to other forms of responsibility." Now how much more than this could there be to any feasible account of unqualified responsibility for character as fundamental to all sorts of responsibility?

Third comes her most effective gambit: in her short final chapter she argues for a view about efficient causation. For Aristotle, what makes my actions free from causal determination is the fact that they derive from my character, which is itself the underived first principle of those actions in the same sort of sense as, to take the Physics' stock example, the art of building is the underived first principle of a given edifice: "the agent's states of character ... constitute the causal power Aristotle takes to be essential to the self-mover" (p. 154).

If this perceptive suggestion of Meyer's is right--which is not entirely unlikely--then it may also not be entirely surprising if Aristotle has no important role in his theory for an account of responsibility for character. However, we might then wonder if Aristotle is right to shrug off that question so easily. How will he now answer the objection that everything in his view is compatible with the truth of causal determinism? Meyer, as a compatibilist, would presumably resist the idea that this is an objection; but in any case, she also invokes Aristotle's distinction between accidental and natural causes. On her view, the sort of things that determinists might fasten on as the determining causes of my actions will all, in Aristotle's terms, only be accidental causes of those actions; it is my character which is their natural cause, and this sort of cause is supposedly not undermined by deterministic considerations.

This, of course, may simply lead a determined determinist to question Aristotle's distinction between accidental and natural causes. I shall leave that debate to be pursued elsewhere; however it goes, one may still point out that, on this front, Meyer's account of how Aristotle avoids the problems often claimed to follow from determinism, without depending fundamentally on responsibility for character, at any rate puts up a good fight.