TERENCE IRWIN

VICE AND REASON (Received 23 December 1999; accepted 18 September 2000)

ABSTRACT. Aristotle’s account of vice presents a puzzle: (1) Vicious people must be guided by reason, since they act on decision (prohairesis), not on their non-rational desires. (2) And yet they cannot be guided by reason, since they are said to pay attention to their non-rational part and not to live in accordance with reason. We can understand the conception of vice the reconciles these two claims, once we examine Aristotle’s account of (a) the pursuit of the fine and of the expedient; (b) the connexion between vice and the pursuit of pleasure; (c) the particular kind of regret to which the vicious person is subject. KEY WORDS: Aristotle, character, decision (prohairesis), ethics, fine, pleasure, reason, regret, self-love, vice

1. D IFFICULTIES ABOUT V ICE

Aristotle has less to say about vice than about virtue and incontinence. While he describes the various components of the psychic state that is present in each of the different virtues of character, he has less to say about what the different vices have in common.1 Moreover, his remarks about vice present us with some puzzles. Some of these puzzles concern the relation of vice to the tripartition of the soul. They lead us to ask how seriously Aristotle takes this tripartition, and what role it plays in his moral psychology. Other puzzles concern Aristotle’s remarks about how the vicious person feels, thinks, and chooses. These raise further questions, because they seem difficult to apply to vice as a whole. Some critics who have examined these remarks about the vicious person have concluded that Aristotle vacillates between incompatible 1 The sparseness of his account becomes especially clear when we compare the relevant parts of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae (ST) with the corresponding parts of the Ethics. Aquinas sees that to understand sin, we must distinguish its different sources. The three that he discusses are passion, ignorance, and deliberate badness (certa malitia). Deliberate badness is the characteristic attitude of the vicious person (It is not confined to the vicious person; see Aquinas, ST 1–2 q71 a4; q78 a2–3). We might reasonably ask, then, whether Aristotle has any plausible account of an attitude that corresponds to deliberate badness, as Aquinas conceives it. Much of what I will say to expound Aristotle is adapted from Aquinas, but I do not intend to discuss Aquinas here.

The Journal of Ethics 5: 73–97, 2001. © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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views of vice. He seems to appeal, in different places, to the vicious person’s ignorance of the good and to his indifference to the good that he knows. Moreover, sometimes he seems to distinguish the vicious person from the incontinent, but sometimes he seems to confuse them.2 We might respond to the accusations of inconsistency by arguing that Aristotle does not believe in any one thing called “vice” of which a general account can be given. Perhaps all that the different vices have in common is their failure to be virtues. The virtues lie in a mean: perhaps vices are simply various ways of failing to hit this mean, and perhaps they fail in such different ways that it is pointless to look for a general account of vice that is parallel to our account of virtue. Some of Aristotle’s remarks about vice make it difficult to decide how far we are to generalize. Most of his brief comments about vice describe it as kakia or mochthêria, and apply kakos, mochthêros, or phaulos to the vicious person. I cannot find any interesting difference, for our present purposes, in the use of these terms.3 His most detailed comments on vicious people are comments on intemperate, akolastoi, people, and it is difficult to say how far they ought to be applied to other sorts of vice. I will assume that Aristotle means to offer a general analysis of vice parallel to his general analysis of virtue of character, and I will try to fill in some of the details of this analysis. This is the best way to decide whether he even intends to offer such an analysis, and whether one ought to offer one.

2. A G AP IN A RISTOTLE ’ S M ORAL P SYCHOLOGY ?

We ought to begin with Aristotle’s general remarks connecting the human function with his account of virtue of character. In Nicomachean Ethics (EN), I 7 he argues that human happiness consists in “some life of action (praktikê) of what has reason. And of this one [has reason] as obedient to 2 A vigorous statement of some of these objections to Aristotle is presented by Jean Hampton, “The Nature of Immorality,” in E.F. Paul, F.D. Miller and J. Paul (eds.), Foundations of Moral and Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 22–44, at pp. 29–31. A more carefully defended statement of the view that Aristotle is inconsistent appears in Julia Annas, “Plato and Aristotle on Friendship and Altruism,” Mind 86 (1977), pp. 532–554. Her argument is criticized by Sarah Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 177n41. 3 See Nicomachean Ethics (hereinafter cited as EN) 1166b6, 12, 1168a31, 1169a15, 1110b28, 30, 1113b7, 14 (the clearest sign of the equivalence of agathos / epieikês and of kakos and phaulos), 1115a13. In discussing vice in general, Aristotle mentions adikia and akolasia as salient examples, 1114a5. I cite the EN from the edition of I. Bywater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892).

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reason,4 the other as having reason and thinking” (1098b3–5). In speaking of “what has reason” (or “the thing that has reason,” to logon echon) Aristotle refers to a part or parts of the soul. This description might be applied to an “obedient” part and to an inherently rational part. The following remarks show that he intends both relations to reason to characterize the activity that is essential to happiness; for he speaks of “activity of the soul in accordance with reason or not without reason” (1098a7–8), and then of “activity of the soul and actions with reason” (1098a14).5 “Not without reason” and “with reason” include the indirect rationality of the obedient part as well as the direct rationality of the inherently rational part.6 In EN I 13, Aristotle explains why the human function, understood as “activity in accordance with reason” and “activity in accordance with virtue,” must involve both the inherently rational and the obedient part. Activity in accordance with virtue is good activity in accordance with reason, and this good activity is the full realization of the human function that is essential to happiness. Since the human soul includes an obedient part as well as an inherently rational part, the human function is fulfilled well only when each part carries out its proper function. The proper function of each part is essential for the sort of virtue that we need for the rational activity that achieves the human good. Aristotle connects these general claims about the human soul and its relation to reason with more specific claims about the virtues of character. He argues that the division between the inherently rational and the obedient parts allows us to capture a division between virtue, continence, and incontinence: For in the continent and the incontinent person we praise their reason, and the [part] of the soul that has reason, because it exhorts them correctly and towards the best things; but they evidently also have in them some other thing, by nature something apart from7 reason, fighting against reason and opposing it. . . . 4 This phrase is deleted by some editors. 5 I reject Bywater’s deletion of the passage anthrôpou de . . .. ei d’houtô, 1098a12–14.

See his note in his edition, and his Contributions to the Textual Criticism of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1892), p. 24f. The point I have made about the transition from kata logon ê ouk aneu logou to meta logou is one of a number of indications that Bywater is wrong to say that this passage is a mere duplicate. 6 This use of meta logou as broader than kata logon, and as equivalent to ouk aneu logou, reappears in 1144b26–8, if we accept Hardie’s and Smith’s interpretation. See W.F.R. Hardie, Aristotle’s Ethical Theory, ed. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 237–239, and J.A. Smith, “Aristotelica,” Classical Quarterly 14 (1920), pp. 16–22. Their interpretation is strongly supported by the context of this passage, and by our passage in I 7. 7 Or perhaps “against.”

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However, this also appears, as we said, to share in reason. At any rate, in the continent person it obeys reason; and in the temperate and the brave person it presumably listens still better to reason, since there it agrees8 with reason in everything. (EN, 1102b14–28)

This passage makes it clear that the indirectly rational “obedient” part would be more correctly called the “potentially obedient” part, since it does not automatically obey the inherently rational part. In the incontinent person, the disobedience of the potentially obedient part causes actions that violate the instructions of the inherently rational part. In the continent person, the potentially obedient part obeys. In the temperate or brave person, the potentially obedient part “listens better” to the inherently rational part, because it agrees with reason; we may say that in this case it is “receptive” to reason. This passage, then, suggests that virtue is distinguished by the receptivity of the non-rational (but indirectly rational, and potentially obedient) part to the rational (i.e., inherently rational) part of the soul. The different virtues of character, according to Aristotle, are different forms of this receptivity to reason (EN, 1103a1–10). They are virtues of the nonrational part, since they consist not only in a state of the inherently rational part, but also in the receptivity of the non-rational part to the reason present in the inherently rational part. I have gone over this relatively familiar division in I 13 to make clear both its importance and its incompleteness. It is important because it clarifies and defends the claims that Aristotle introduces in the function argument, and forms our expectation that the account of the virtues will further clarify and defend the function argument. It is incomplete, because Aristotle mentions only three conditions of the two parts of the soul – virtue, continence, and incontinence. He says nothing about the role of the rational and non-rational parts in vice.

3. V IRTUE , V ICE AND THE M EAN

The doctrine of the mean continues the clarification of the function argument (EN, 1106a14–24). Virtue of character does not consist in freedom from rational control for the non-rational part, nor in continence, nor in suppression of the non-rational part (apatheia, EN, 1106b24–6). It consists in the right degree and direction of non-rational desire, receptive to the rational part. The controlling function of the rational part is implied in the account of a virtue as a “state that decides, lying in a mean relative to us, a mean 8 We might (less plausibly) take panta as the subject of homophônei.

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defined by reason,9 by the reason by which the prudent person would define it” (EN, 1106b36–1107a2). Here, as in the function argument, Aristotle presents a formula that needs to be explained. In the following books, he explains decision (prohairesis) and prudence (phronêsis), and thereby makes it clear that the doctrine of the mean is supposed to incorporate the controlling and directive role that he ascribed to the rational part in I 13. A decision depends on a wish (boulêsis), a desire of the rational part, and on deliberation. The task of prudence is to deliberate and to grasp the right end (EN, 1142b33). Prudence is necessary for virtue of character, because it is necessary for the right decision. When Aristotle introduces the different virtues of character, he also introduces the corresponding vices (kakiai) of excess and defect. All of these fail to achieve the mean in the different passions and actions relevant to the virtues. This general description might be taken to apply to continence and incontinence. For the continent person misses the mean in passions, though he grasps the right action and acts correctly, while the incontinent person also grasps the right action, but has the wrong passions and the wrong action. Nothing in Book II shows us clearly that the different vices are not different kinds of incontinence. In Book III, however, Aristotle describes the blameworthy aspects of vice in ways that distinguish it from incontinence. The bad (mochthêros) person does not know what he ought to do and avoid, and this is the error because of which people become unjust and vicious (kakoi) in general (EN, 1110b28–30). This blameworthy ignorance is also called “universal ignorance” and “ignorance in the decision” (EN, 1110b31–3). Once we have made ourselves vicious by voluntarily acting badly, we have the wrong conception of the end (EN, 1114a31–b3). These descriptions do not fit the incontinent person (EN, 1111a13–14). The different vices, then, cannot be different forms of incontinence; but Aristotle has not related them to his claims in I 13 about the rational and the non-rational part. The discussion of injustice in Book V confirms the division between vice and incontinence. Voluntary acts of injustice (adikein) do not make us unjust, if they are the result of passions. The vice of injustice involves acts of injustice on a decision (EN, 1135b19–27, 1136a1–5).10 In Book VII, Aristotle recognizes this division, in explicitly separating vice from incontinence (EN, 1145a15–17). He implies that his description of the different 9 A good case can be made for understanding logos as “rational standard,” and hence for understanding kata ton orthon logon as “in accordance with the correct rational standard” rather than “in accordance with correct reason.” As far as I can see, this issue does not affect my main claims. 10 In EN, 1135b20, mê probouleusas de is not quite accurate, in the light of 1142b18–20.

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excesses and defects opposed to the virtues refers to vices, not to forms of incontinence (EN, 1145a34–6).11 The discussion of incontinence in Book VII repeats this division, and clarifies it for the specific vice of intemperance (akolasia). The vicious person is similar to the virtuous and the continent person, and different from the incontinent person, because he acts on his decision (EN, 1146b19–24, 1148a4–11, 1150a16–22, 1151a5–10, 1152a5–6). When he acts, he “thinks it right” (oiomenos dein) to do what he actually does. In the vicious person the two parts of the soul agree in accepting the guidance of the rational part. If the non-rational part were not subordinate to the rational part, the only function for the rational part would be purely technical and instrumental deliberation about ways to satisfy desires of the non-rational part; such deliberation would not result in decisions. If that were the only function of the rational part, the vicious person could not act on decision; for decision rests on wish (boulêsis), a desire of the rational part. Aristotle’s discussion of the incontinent person’s purely technical deliberation confirms the view that the vicious person must be controlled by the rational part. For incontinents sometimes deliberate about how to fulfill their misguided non-rational desire (epithumia), and their deliberation fixes on the incontinent action they perform. None the less, they act on appetite (epithumia) rather than on wish and decision (EN, 1111b13–15, 1142b17–20). The vicious person must differ from the incontinent in being controlled by the rational part and, therefore, acting on wish and decision. This feature of the vicious person explains why he is not subject to the incontinent’s regret and changing of mind (EN, 1150a21–2, 1150b29– 36). Incontinent people regret their past action in so far as they recognize they acted against the correct decision that they made before they acted incontinently and that they still recognize as correct. Vicious people are not subject to this regret, because they do not act against their decision. And so the vicious person seems to be exactly similar to the virtuous person in his relation to practical reason and non-rational desire; each of them can equally be said to follow reason. The only difference between them is that one has good ends and the other has bad ends; but this difference cannot be expressed simply by saying that one is guided by reason and the other is not. Apparently, we cannot identify virtue with control by reason. If we now look back to Book I, we can see why this is an unsatisfactory result for Aristotle. He claims that acting correctly in accordance with 11 Since Book VII is a book common to the Eudemian Ethics and the EN the reference

to what has been said before may be a reference to the former work.

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reason is acting in accordance with virtue, and that in the virtuous person the rational and non-rational parts agree, under the control of the rational part. These claims about virtue and reason make it clear (in outline) how the virtues are supposed to fulfill the human function of living in accordance with reason. After reading Book VII, however, we may well suppose that the vicious person fulfills the human function just as well; for he also has the non-rational part of his soul obeying the rational part (since he is not incontinent) and agreeing with the rational part (since he is not merely continent). This all seems to follow from the fact that he acts on his decision. Why, then, does the vicious person differ from the virtuous person? We might understand the difference in either of two ways: (1) In each of them, the rational part functions equally well, but they differ because it begins from different ends, and so its deliberation reaches different conclusions. The difference between the virtuous and the vicious person results from a difference in their non-rational desires and aims.12 (2) The rational part functions differently, because the virtuous person deliberates correctly and the vicious person goes wrong in deliberation. Each of them asks the same questions and answers them by rational deliberation; but their answers are different. Both answers undermine Aristotle’s claims in Book I about reason and virtue. We need not try to find reasons for preferring one answer over the other. For both conflict with further evidence that we must now consider.

4. V ICE AND N ON -R ATIONAL D ESIRE

Despite these claims that the vicious person acts on decision, and is therefore not incontinent, Aristotle also maintains that vice results from the domination of non-rational appetite over rational desire. According to IX 4, vicious people suffer from the internal conflict and self-hatred that is normally ascribed to incontinents (EN, 1166b6–13). Here virtue seems to be control by the rational part, and the vicious person seems to lack this control. Similarly, the vicious person lives in accordance with his passions, and gratifies the non-rational part of the soul (EN, 1168b19–21, 1169a3–6). Only the virtuous person is free, or nearly free, of regret (EN, 1166a27–9, 1166b22–5). 12 The first answer conflicts with Aristotle’s discussion of good deliberation (euboulia). He does not allow good deliberation to anyone except the prudent person, who also grasps the right end (EN, 1142b29–33). He does not agree, then, that goodness of deliberation can be assessed purely instrumentally, without reference to the end involved.

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The claim that the vicious person lives in accordance with his passions recalls Aristotle’s comment that young people live in accordance with their passions, and so are not appropriate students of moral philosophy. Other people are so immature that they are no different from the young on this point (EN, 1095a6–8). This does not seem a helpful way to understand vices. Vices would apparently not be as bad as they are if vicious people were simply unable to restrain urges for immediate gratification. The insidious, corrupt, ruthless, and malevolent aspects of vice are difficult to understand if we do not admit that vices may include the sort of foresight, planning, and self-restraint that are needed to carry out long-term aims. These passages in Book IX seem to overlook the possibility that Aristotle normally exploits in his description of vice – the possibility of a harmonious soul, guided by practical reason towards the wrong ends. Since the vicious person acts on his decision and rational wish, and is therefore controlled by the rational part, it is difficult to see how he can be prone to the sort of conflict that seems to require subjection to the non- rational part. We cannot safely dismiss these passages in Book IX, however. At the end of IX 4 Aristotle claims that the bad effects of vice give us a good reason for avoiding vice and for trying to be virtuous. In IX 8 he argues that the virtuous person has correct self-love and that vicious people have misguided self-love because they gratify their non-rational parts. These arguments belong to Aristotle’s larger argument to show that virtue is rationally preferable to vice, because it is control by reason rather than by passion.13 I have pointed out that he presents this argument in outline in Book I, in connecting the function argument with his account of virtue. If, then, Aristotle’s different remarks about vice belong to a coherent position, he must be entitled to claim that the vicious person is controlled in one way by the rational part (since he acts on his decision), but is controlled in another way by the non-rational part (since he lives according to passion). We must now try to understand control by the non- rational part.

5. T YPES OF D ECISION

The vicious person acts on his decision, which expresses his rational wish, and hence his conception of happiness.14 Hence he acts on his concep13 I have discussed this further in Aristotle’s First Principles (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1988), Section 203. 14 This claim about prohairesis and boulêsis, in which I follow G.E.M. Anscombe, “Thought and Action in Aristotle,” in Collected Papers, I (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981),

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tion of happiness and his view about what is best overall.15 To find how he differs from the virtuous person, we must consider how he forms his conception of happiness and how he expresses it in his decision. Before he expounds the doctrine of the mean, Aristotle makes clear one necessary condition for finding the mean. The virtuous person decides on the virtuous action for its own sake (EN, 1105a31–2). Hence, if we reach the mean, we have found by deliberation that virtuous action is choiceworthy for its own sake. This must be understood in the claim that virtue is a state that decides. Good fighters who are moved by anger have not achieved the mean, because they do not fight “because of the fine (kalon) or as reason [prescribes], but because of passion” (EN, 1117a7–9). To achieve the mean in actions and passions is to act and to be affected “as one ought” (hôs dei). To act as one ought is to act “for the sake of the fine” (EN, 1120a23–9, 1121a1–4). Acting for the sake of the fine is a common feature of the virtues (EN, 1121b5–6).16 To regard actions as fine is to recognize them as distinctively actions (praxeis) rather than productions (poiêseis). Production has its end outside it, but in action “acting well itself is [the] end” (EN, 1140a6–7). For present purposes, we may take these claims to express the same feature of virtuous people’s attitude to their virtuous actions. Virtuous pp. 66–77, is not indisputable. It is disputed by David Charles, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action (London: Duckworth, 1984), p. 151. 15 This does not by itself show that he has any articulate or explicit conception of happiness. Should we, then, infer that the vicious person’s error consists in his failure to form an explicit conception of happiness? It is unlikely that Aristotle means us to infer this. He does not seem to take the absence of an explicit conception of happiness to be a necessary condition for vice. In his discussion of self-love, he mentions people who take any non-instrumental concern for the good of others to conflict with one’s own good (EN, 1168a29–35). The fact that such questions can be raised suggests that Aristotle thinks people could reject the other-regarding virtues on the basis of a conception of their happiness that includes this judgment about concern for others. In Politics, VII 1, he suggests that very few people would think the virtues have no place in happiness; they dispute about the relative importance of external goods, since most people think they can get by with just a little virtue, and ought to pursue a high level of other goods (1323a27–38). Apparently, then, we can reach this level of explicitness about happiness, and still form views that encourage the vices. 16 In Aristotle’s First Principles, Section 237, I say more about the fine. What I say has been criticized by Kelly Rogers, “Aristotle’s Conception of to kalon,” Ancient Philosophy 13 (1993), pp. 355–371, and by John Cooper, “Reason, Moral Virtue, and Moral Value,” in M. Frede and G. Striker (eds.), Rationality in Greek Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 81–114, esp. pp. 102–112. Rogers and Cooper add further helpful discussion on other aspects of the fine. In this paper I do not rely on the connexion between the fine and the common good (though it seems to me to make some of Aristotle’s contrasts between virtue and vice more plausible), but on the connexion between the fine and reason (which is perhaps under-estimated by Rogers and Cooper).

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people need not have the explicit thought that this action is virtuous or that it is fine. They have in mind the properties that make it fine and virtuous, and they take these as a sufficient reason, apart from any further efficientcausal results, for choosing the action. In brief, the virtuous person decides on virtuous action on principle.17 The vicious person does not decide on virtuous actions for their own sake and because they are fine. Nor does he decide on vicious actions for this reason. The fact that avoiding danger involves betraying a worthwhile cause because of unjustified fear is what makes it vicious, but this feature of it is not what makes it appealing to a vicious person. He does not choose the vicious action on principle. Hence he does not choose vicious action for its own sake or regard it as fine or to be chosen for the sake of the fine. Similarly, he does not avoid virtuous action because it violates his principles, but only because it interferes with his ends or does not promote them. This difference between the virtuous and the vicious person, however, does not show that the vicious person altogether fails to decide on actions because they are fine. Does the irascible person decide on revenge because it is fine and because it would be shameful (aischron) not to retaliate? Or are people unjust because they decide on power over others because it is finer than justice? This might seem to be the outlook of Callicles and Thrasymachus, as Plato presents them. In that case, virtuous and vicious people agree18 in deciding on actions because they are fine; they simply differ about which actions these are. Aristotle disagrees. For in contrasting good self-love with bad, he seems to imply that only the virtuous person cares about the fine: It is clear, then, this [sc. understanding, nous], or this above all, is what each person is, and that the decent person most of all likes this. Hence he most of all is a self-lover, but of a different kind from the one is reproached, differing from him as much as living in accordance with reason differs from [living] in accordance with passion, and desiring19 the fine rather than the thing that seems to be advantageous. (EN, 1169a2–6)

Immediately afterwards (in EN, 1169a6–18, especially 15–18) Aristotle makes it clear that he intends “desiring the fine” to mean that what the 17 This is a bit too brief. I am not saying that only virtuous people can desire or choose

virtuous actions because they are fine (to say so would be inconsistent with, e.g., EN, 1116a28–9, 1179b29–31), but that only virtuous people decide, on the basis of a correct prohairesis, on virtuous actions for their own sake because they are fine. 18 Or perhaps I should say “may agree.” Perhaps not every vice involves choice of actions because they are fine; but if some involve it, or do not exclude it, choice of actions because they are fine cannot be a distinguishing mark of virtue. 19 I read oregesthai tou kalou.

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virtuous person desires is in fact fine, not merely that the virtuous person’s desire is guided by a conception of the fine. Is the vicious person guided by a mistaken conception of what is fine? If Aristotle meant to say that, we would expect him to say that the virtuous person aims at what is (in fact) fine and the vicious person only aims at what appears fine.20 Instead, he says the vicious person desires what seems advantageous. He does not concede that the vicious person desires what is in fact advantageous for him, or that he desires what seems fine. Here, then, the virtuous decision rests on a correct conception of the fine, whereas the vicious decision rests on an incorrect conception of advantage. This is not a completely satisfactory contrast. For the vicious person cannot be guided simply by a conception of advantage; the advantageous is instrumentally valuable for some external end (as Aristotle says about poiêsis), and so it must depend on some end that is not itself regarded as merely advantageous, but is desired for its own sake. We still need to understand how, in Aristotle’s view, the vicious person conceives this end, if he does not conceive it as fine. Before we try to answer this question, we may find it helpful to notice how closely Aristotle connects the contrast between concern for the fine and concern for advantage with the contrast between living in accordance with reason and living in accordance with passion. He does not suggest that these two contrasts might pick out different sorts of people. On the contrary, he suggests that living in accordance with reason requires aiming at the fine; if it did not, he would destroy his argument to show that the self-love of the person who lives according to reason will result in fine actions that promote the common good. This connexion between reason and the fine, and between passion and advantage, may well puzzle us. We might, indeed, expect the reverse connexion. A brave action, for instance, often seems to require a fearless and self-sacrificing outlook indifferent to rational calculation. This is how Aristotle himself sometimes describes the opposition between reason and concern for the fine. In the Rhetoric, he takes concern for the fine to be especially characteristic of youth, and to be especially exemplified by Achilles. Rational concern is characteristic of older people who think about advantage.21 This connexion between reason and calculation of advantage is developed at length in Plato’s Phaedrus (238b7–c4), and then rejected.22 20 Cf. EN, III 4 (though this chapter is not free of difficulty). 21 See Rhetoric, 1390a15–17, 1358b38–1359a5. 22 I have discussed the Phaedrus in Plato’s Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1995), Section 208.

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In his discussion of self-love, Aristotle has the same connexion in mind, and agrees with Plato in rejecting it. EN agrees with the Rhetoric in saying that the young are prone to act without rational reflexion; but it does not suggest that the generous, uncalculating impulses of the young embody concern for the fine. Virtuous actions resulting simply from shame and a sense of honour do not result from any decision in favour of the fine as such.23 Has Aristotle any good reason to suppose that concern for the fine is somehow especially characteristic of guidance by rational desire? This is one of the occasions when we find that a major issue about the interpretation of the EN turns on our views about Aristotle’s conception of the fine, on which he says even less than he says about vice. But perhaps he says enough to clarify his conception of vice.

6. P URSUING THE F INE

In a rather cryptic passage in Metaphysics XII, Aristotle appears to say that what is fine is the primary object of rational desire (boulêsis), and that the conviction that something is fine is logically prior to our having a desire (orexis) for it; we have a desire for it because it seems fine, but it is false that it seems fine because we have a desire for it (1072a25–30). Since I do not understand this passage very well, I would not want to rely on it too heavily. But it is reasonable to extract the suggestion that pursuit of the fine as such rests on the belief that there is something valuable about this action (for instance) apart from the fact that it appeals to us, or appears to be a means to something that appeals to us. This claim about desire for the fine exploits a familiar feature of desire for the good. Both Plato and Aristotle distinguish desires of the rational part from desires of the appetitive part by claiming that a rational desire is “gooddependent,” because it attaches itself to this or that specific object only on the assumption that the object is good all things considered. Desires may depend on beliefs about the good, however, if they depend on a conception of the good that simply identifies the good with the satisfaction of good-independent desires. We impose a stronger condition on desires if we insist that they must be thoroughly good-dependent, so that even the ultimate ends that form our conception of the good are based on a conviction about value that is prior to desire. At no point in forming our conception of the good do we take for granted some object of desire that simply appeals to us independently of any prior conviction of its value. 23 See EN, 1116a17–29, and cf. 1117a4–9, 1128b16–31.

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Aristotle suggests that rational desire for the fine is thoroughly gooddependent. The demand to choose virtuous action because it is fine is more stringent than the demand to pursue it non-instrumentally. For we might have an attachment to virtuous action that is both non-instrumental and non-rational; we stick to it even when we gain no further instrumental benefit from it, but we do not stick to it because we have some rational conviction about what makes it worth sticking to in these circumstances. The virtuous person’s choices, however, rest on convictions about the good that have formed his views about the goals that are worth choosing.24 We may doubt whether thoroughly good-dependent desires are possible. This doubt opens a familiar question about whether there can be deliberation about ends that is not simply deliberation about means to prior ends that are simply taken for granted without deliberation. Let us put aside this question, and suppose that Aristotle believes in thoroughly good-dependent desires. Does this belief help to explain his views about vice?

7. P URSUING THE E XPEDIENT WITHOUT THE F INE

The vicious person, as Aristotle conceives him, lacks the convictions that guide virtuous people in their choice of ends. His ends strike him as worth pursuing because they appeal to him, not the other way round. Hence he does not pursue vicious actions for their own sake or because they are fine. This is why Aristotle believes that the vicious person desires what seems advantageous, rather than the fine (EN, 1169a3–6). He does not mean that the virtuous person never cares about advantage, or that the vicious person cares about nothing else. Both attitudes would make the agent’s choices incoherent; the virtuous person cannot achieve the fine without aiming at what is advantageous for getting it, and the vicious person has no reasonable conception of advantage apart from what is advantageous for his ends. The difference is more clearly captured by saying that the vicious person regards advantage as the only concern of practical reason, since he believes that his inclinations are beyond rational criticism, and that practical reason can only serve his inclinations. The 24 In requiring a virtuous person’s aims to be thoroughly good-dependent, Aristotle does

not imply that the content of our non-rational desires and inclinations is irrelevant to virtue. He includes our initial desires, preferences, and aspirations among the starting points for the reflexion that produces a correct conception of the good; but he does not take a conception of the good to provide simply a strategy for the satisfaction of our pre-reflective desires.

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virtuous person, by contrast, believes that discovery of the fine is a proper function of practical reason. If this is the difference between concern for advantage and concern for the fine, we can see why Aristotle identifies these two concerns with a life in accordance with passion and a life in accordance with reason. The contrast between passion and reason does not, as in Book I, distinguish young or immature people who act on immediate impulse from mature people who can restrain impulse by rational reflexion. Rather, it distinguishes those who form an end on the basis of inclination from those who form an end on the basis of judgments about its value. This difference between virtuous and vicious people still allows the vicious person to have a conception of virtues and of fine action. He can see, for instance, that it is good for him, given his inclinations, to cultivate some aspects of bravery and temperance (as Aristotle understands them) so that he can execute his longer-term aims. He can also regard some actions and traits of personality as fine, because they are admirable in their own right apart from any belief about their effects; perhaps, for instance, he takes this view of someone who displays his power and wealth in magnificent actions (as the vicious person conceives them). Still, even though the vicious person recognizes fine actions, he does not take the virtuous person’s attitude to them, because he does not decide on actions because they are fine. To decide is to choose on the basis of one’s conception of happiness; to decide on something because it is fine is to choose it for itself because of its value apart from one’s own inclinations. The virtuous person conceives happiness as constituted by actions chosen for their value apart from inclination. Since this is not the vicious person’s conception of happiness, he does not decide on actions because they are fine.25

8. V ICE AND P LEASURE

In trying to capture Aristotle’s intended division between virtuous and vicious people, I have developed some of his remarks beyond anything he says. If I have developed them correctly, we ought to be able to explain remarks about vice that would otherwise be difficult to explain. To explain 25 A related contrast between virtuous and vicious people is developed by Nancy

Sherman, The Fabric of Character (Oxford: Oxford Unviersity Press, 1989), pp. 113–117. She argues that the vicious person does not give the same role to praxis, as opposed to poiêsis, in his life as the virtuous person gives it. She correctly says that vicious actions do not constitute their own ends in the way that virtuous actions constitute their own ends. I am trying to explain what further feature of the vicious person explains this fact.

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them is not necessarily to agree with them, since Aristotle may have misunderstood or exaggerated some of his own views about vice; but we ought at least to make a misunderstanding or exaggeration intelligible. Some remarks on the content of the vicious person’s decision raise difficulties. Aristotle claims: (1) The vicious person is one who believes it is always right to pursue the pleasure at hand (EN, 1146b22–4). (2) He pursues excesses of pleasure “because of decision, because of themselves and because of nothing else resulting from them” (EN, 1150a19–21). These two conditions do not, at first sight, seem exactly the same, or even clearly consistent. The first is a surprising description of a decision, if a decision expresses one’s conception of what is good, all things considered. For we would expect “all things considered” to include consideration of present and future; a decision seems to be an expression of someone’s rational desire, not an expression of an impulse towards a short-term pleasure. How, then, can Aristotle claim that the vicious person pursues the pleasure “at hand,” which seems to be short-term pleasure? We can make sense of the claim if we suppose that the vicious person has a minimal decision. His policy in life, we may say, is to follow the prospect of immediate pleasure, whatever the cost. This is still a decision that considers present and future. But it is a degenerate decision; the agent believes that the cost of forgoing a present pleasure is never warranted by future gains. This is such an unreasonable attitude that we might well wonder why Aristotle would attribute it to a vicious person. Even if it might be one source of vicious action, why should it be essential to vice, or even to intemperance? Some vicious people seem to act on self-interested calculations that involve some postponement of pleasure. If Aristotle’s account does not take account of such people, it seems hopelessly narrow. Moreover, if the vicious person pursues short-term pleasure, how can he pursue excesses of pleasure in his decision? For a policy of pursuing excesses should apparently make him willing to forgo a smaller short-term pleasure for a larger longer-term pleasure. The first condition suggests that the vicious person will drink a little too much every night before driving home. The second suggests that he will forgo these small pleasures in order to get really drunk once a week (if this seems pleasanter). Callicles in the Gorgias illustrates this feature of vice, and specifically of intemperance. He advises us to pursue maximum pleasure by expanding our appetites and then satisfying them. This policy must be pursued over time and it must involve the deferral of some short-term gratification. A conception of vice ought not to exclude this Calliclean policy. To resolve this difficulty, we must consider the sense of “the pleasant thing at hand” (to paron hêdu). “At hand” might refer to temporal present-

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ness, but it might also mean “available,” “open,” so that the vicious person tries to get all the pleasure that is available. This description of the vicious person is equivalent to the description of him as seeking “excesses” of pleasure. These are excessive from the virtuous person’s point of view, since the vicious person pursues more than he should pursue of certain types of pleasure. They are also excesses from the vicious person’s point of view, since they exceed the pleasures he would get from other courses of action. Even if this is what Aristotle means by “the pleasant thing at hand,” why should the vicious person be especially concerned with pleasure? The descriptions of the vicious decision recall the first of the three lives that are presented as unsuccessful candidates for happiness. Aristotle suggests that those who devote themselves to pleasure choose the life of grazing animals, because they devote themselves to unrestrained physical gratification (EN, 1095b19–20). He has often been criticized for maintaining this connexion between the pursuit of pleasure, a purely animal existence, and gross physical gratification; some believe that in maintaining this connexion he contradicts his own more careful discussion of pleasure in Books VII and X. The same questions arise about his comments on vice. Even the vice of intemperance does not seem the same as a tendency to unrestrained gratification. This tendency seems an even less plausible mark of vice in general. It would be foolish of Aristotle to rely on the fact that vicious people take pleasure in achieving the ends that they aim at; for that is equally true of virtuous people. It would be equally unhelpful to point out that vicious people regard the prospect of pleasure as a reason for their actions; that is also true of virtuous people. He must mean that vicious people are in some way hedonists, that they identify their good with their pleasure. But why should we suppose that vicious people take this particular theoretical position about the ultimate source of value? Why not say that the vindictive and spiteful person wants superiority over his enemies, rather than simply the pleasure resulting from this superiority? Many vicious people seem to violate the requirements of virtue for some good that they over-value in the circumstances, without aiming specifically at pleasure. The coward’s reason for acting on his fear of danger need not be that he finds the fear unpleasant; he may simply not care enough about the good that he will jeopardize if he faces the danger. Why should Aristotle represent this outlook as pursuit of pleasure?26 26 We cannot remove this difficulty by saying that Aristotle is concerned only with the

specific vice of intemperance. Even if we say this about Book VII, where he is concerned

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The claim about vice is more defensible if it rests on the contrast we have examined between guidance by reason and guidance by the passions. The vicious person prefers one action over another simply because it appeals to him, not because of some further conviction about its value. One way to express this attitude to our actions is to say that we do them simply for the pleasure of it. Aristotle expresses this fact by saying that the vicious person thinks he should always pursue the pleasant thing that is available. This would be misleading if it meant that the vicious person is in principle less likely than other people to forgo immediate pleasure for some strategic reason. Nothing about vice seems to make a vicious person indifferent to strategic considerations. On the contrary, we might expect a vicious person to think more strategically, in some ways, than a virtuous person, since he is free of the moral constraints that limit the virtuous person’s strategic efficiency. Aristotle is not being misleading, however, if he means that the vicious person settles his ends by consulting his preferences and inclinations, and does not try to educate his preferences and inclinations by consideration of what is worth pursuing.

9. T HE V ICIOUS P ERSON ’ S R EGRET

The way in which vicious people form their decisions on the basis of inclination may also help to explain Aristotle’s surprising claim that vicious people are especially prone to psychic conflict, and in particular to regret (EN, 1166a29).27 This feature is meant to show that because vicious people are controlled by the non-rational part, they lack the appropriate sort of self-love. It is easy to object that this description of a vicious person really applies only to an incontinent person. Apparently a hardened vicious person may be quite content with his life. We expect Aristotle to agree with this, given that he distinguishes the harmony in the vicious person from the conflict in the incontinent person. Why, then, does he claim that the vicious person suffers regret that the virtuous person avoids? Virtuous people suffer the regret that simply involves wishing that something different had happened. Since they care about external goods, they have reason to wish that things had turned out better than they actually did. Similarly, they have reason to regret their actions, to the extent with incontinence versus intemperance, we cannot say it about Book IX; for the description of vice in general claims that vicious people aim at pleasure (EN, 1166b6–11). 27 I will use “regret” simply to represent metameleia, without implying that this is always the most appropriate English rendering.

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of wishing that they had, for instance, known enough to do something different. Indeed, we might say that in so far as they care more than vicious people care about the good of other people, they must have more potential occasions for regret. A different sort of regret often results from blaming oneself for what one did or decided to do. I may regret that I did not know the crucial fact that would have changed my decision; but I have a different sort of regret if I believe I ought to have known this fact, or that I ought to have decided differently in the light of what I did know. This latter attitude to one’s past actions is often called “remorse,” as opposed to mere regret. In Aristotle’s view, virtuous people are free of remorse. If they are really virtuous, they have nothing to blame or to reproach themselves for, and they not prone to blame themselves falsely (cf. EN, 1128b16–31). Any genuine occasion for blame would also be a mark of incomplete virtue. It is difficult, however, to see why the vicious person should be prone to blame himself for what he did, and hence prone to remorse. If he is really vicious, he does not care that what he did was vicious. Why, then, should he blame himself for having done it? If he is hardened in vice, he is surely not prone to be ashamed of what he has done. It is difficult to see, then, why such people should be expected to hate themselves, and, in extreme cases, to hate and flee life.28 One might defend Aristotle by pointing out that being vicious does not involve doing one’s best to follow a particular standard, in the way that being virtuous involves doing one’s best. Being a virtuous person involves doing one’s best to identify and to carry out the brave or just course of action; hence one cannot be just while also being grossly lazy or negligent in the pursuit of justice; hence a virtuous person will have no occasion to blame himself for being negligent or lazy in the pursuit of justice. Being vicious, by contrast, does not involve doing one’s best to avoid being virtuous, or doing one’s best to pursue the vicious course of action. Hence, being a vicious person is consistent with being careless or inattentive or lazy in choosing one’s actions in the light of one’s conception of the good, and a vicious person might well blame himself for this. Not all vicious people need be like this, however; and so Aristotle does not seem justified in claiming that vicious people are all full of regret, if he means that they are full of remorse and self-reproach. We can understand Aristotle’s claim better if we recall that the vicious person does not care about his ends except in so far as they fulfill his inclinations. This attitude gives him a basis for regret that the virtuous 28 In EN, 1166b12–13 I read pepraktai, dia tên mochthêrian misousi te kai pheuogousi

to zên, following one ms.

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person lacks. More exactly, the virtuous person has a reason that the vicious person lacks for not regretting his past choice. The virtuous person attaches value to acting on a non-strategic conviction about what is best, apart from its usefulness in fulfilling his inclinations; and so he will not regret having acted on that conviction. On the contrary, he will be satisfied with himself, since he has done what he rationally cares most about doing. The vicious person lacks this reason for self-satisfaction; for he does not care about acting on any non-strategic conviction. The fact that he has acted on such a conviction is not a source of satisfaction; hence he has no retrospective satisfaction opposing his dissatisfaction at how things turned out. The frustration of his inclinations is an undefeated reason for regret about his past actions. The vicious person, then, lacks a particular basis for self-satisfaction29 (or, as Aristotle puts it, self-love) that is available to the virtuous person. Aristotle is right to say that the vicious person is subject to regret that the virtuous person avoids. This is not a sufficient reason for preferring to be a virtuous person, if the basis of this self-satisfaction is not appropriate. When we say that someone is “self-satisfied” in a bad sense, we mean that they are more satisfied than they have any reason to be. If I am wrongly self-satisfied with being F, I may be wrong either because I am not F, or because being F is not good enough to justify my satisfaction in it. If the virtuous person is wrong to be satisfied with having acted on his non-strategic conviction, he deludes himself in taking this satisfaction to outweigh the failures he has suffered from a strategic point of view. Can Aristotle explain why the virtuous person is right to attach such importance to acting on his nonstrategic convictions?

10. T HE I NSTABILITY OF THE V ICIOUS P ERSON

Our account of the vicious person’s regret suggests that he has an attitude to himself and to his future that differs from the attitude of the virtuous person. The vicious person conceives himself as nothing more than a sequence of appetites and satisfactions; he takes his good to depend on what he happens to want at a particular time. While he exercises practical reason to the extent of taking measures to secure his future satisfaction, his reason for this is not the virtuous person’s reason. His concern for his future depends on the persistence of the same desires and appetites; and 29 My non-pejorative use of “self-satisfaction” is partly derived from T.H. Green,

Prolegomena to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1882), Section 154.

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since he does not adopt these for a reason, but just treats them as desires that he happens to have, he has no particular reason to be concerned about a future self that (for all he knows) may have changed quite significantly. Hence he has less concern for his future self than the virtuous person has; and the sort of concern that he has is based on different sorts of beliefs about himself. The virtuous person forms his state of character on principle, but this is not how the vicious person forms his state of character. Indeed, he does not actively form his state of character at all; he drifts into certain ways, and forms strategies that are not themselves his rational ends. Vice differs from virtue because the virtuous person answers a question that the vicious person does not even ask. The virtuous person has asked what sort of person he ought to be, and how he should conceive himself as a rational agent with an extended life. The recognition of an extended life is necessary for having a conception of one’s happiness; and so it is not peculiar to the virtuous person. But the view that one ought to be a certain sort of person, or that some aspects of oneself deserve to be developed more than others, is an evaluative judgment that the vicious person does not make; one has a conception of virtue in so far as one makes this evaluative judgment. To make such a judgment is to admit that the actual desires and aims that happen to strike us are not beyond criticism or evaluation. The vicious person sees no reason to try to answer these questions or to act on the answers. Why does the vicious person disagree with the virtuous person on this point? In thinking about the self, we may attend either to the aims it actually has or to the ways it is capable of forming and organizing its aims. The vicious person attends more to the first aspect of the self (the actual aims), and regards the second as primarily a way to satisfy the first. The virtuous person attends more to the second aspect of the self (the way it forms aims), and regards the first as raw material to be organized by the second. This is one defensible element in Aristotle’s easily-misunderstood claim that the vicious person prefers the animal, non-human, non-rational outlook to the outlook of practical reason. This claim would be quite false, if it denied that the vicious person can have a perfectly rational, coherent plan for his life; but it is true, if it refers to the sort of self whose aims he thinks ought to be satisfied. This way of describing the vicious person may suggest that his position is consistent, even if it is mistaken; for even if he is wrong about the nature of the self, he may appear to form a consistent plan on the basis of his error. But perhaps we ought not to suggest this. For the vicious person cannot give the same reason for minimally prudent self-concern that the virtuous person can give.

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Self-concern both protects the present self against future circumstances and protects the future self against present circumstances: (1) Sometimes I ensure now that I will carry out my present plan even though I will be averse to it in the future; I do this when I “burn my bridges” and prevent myself now from acting later on my later fears, or when I now throw away the key to the cupboard containing the whisky I will want later on. (2) Sometimes I ensure now that I will be able to carry out my future aim, even though I do not feel like it at present. I do this when I get a tooth filled, or I reluctantly try to re-learn French before visiting France. Both a virtuous person and a vicious person may display these two forms of self-concern, but they cannot give exactly the same reasons for them. The virtuous person provides for the satisfaction of her present and her future desires because she takes these desires to express goals that embody her non-strategic convictions, or some reasonable modification of them; she has some reason to make it easier to satisfy these desires and more difficult to satisfy any impulses that might arise in conflict with these non-strategic convictions. The vicious person, however, cannot be moved by this consideration; in her view, her future desires will simply result from the impulses that arise then, just as her present desires result from the impulses that arise now. A vicious person has no basis for claiming that it is sometimes better to protect the present self against the future self, and sometimes better to protect the future self against the present self. Hence the vicious person cannot justify the specific forms of self-concern that the virtuous person can justify. It does not follow that the vicious person will be less self-concerned than the virtuous person. For I may happen to prefer my future without decaying teeth over the nearer future without a painful filling, and I may happen to prefer the future that includes the frustration of my future desire for the whisky over the future that includes the satisfaction of that desire. But if I have the outlook of the vicious person, I have no reason for this self-concern in any particular case; my self-concern is as much a mere inclination as is my preference for any other end. If I have the outlook of the vicious person, and I take myself to have some reason for self-concern in these cases, I am being inconsistent. This point about self-concern is simply the future-directed parallel to the point we considered previously about regret. The virtuous person has a basis for self-satisfaction in looking back at past choices. The same basis for self-satisfaction guides the virtuous person’s attitude to her future self, since she regards the future self as the product of rational non-strategic convictions. The vicious person has no reason for satisfaction in either her past decisions or in the future self that will be formed by present decisions,

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or in the present self that both looks back on the past and decides about the future. In these ways Aristotle is right to claim that vicious people lack an important aspect of self-love, and are liable to self-hatred. Since they form rational plans, they are capable of disapproving of themselves when they violate them, but, since the rational plans are themselves unstable devices for satisfying changing inclinations, they are liable to frustration. If A has some of the attitudes of friendship towards B, but A is vicious, A may find it useful to borrow money from B without repaying it, even driving B to destitution; once A sees what has happened to B, A may be angry at himself for what he has done to B. Since A’s rational plans simply follow the comparative strength of A’s inclinations at different times, nothing about A’s character protects A from choosing actions that he will later hate himself for having done. A’s self-hatred is the sort of hatred that we direct at an opponent who has frustrated our current aims. These features of vicious people result from their refusing to form their rational decisions by consideration of what is fine; hence, Aristotle is entitled to treat them as essential to vice. He need not rely on the assumption (true or false) that vicious people always have some residual respect for morality that is the source of their disapproval of themselves. On the contrary, the less their respect for the outlook guided by considerations of the fine, the more liable they are to self-hatred. 11. T HE A DEQUACY OF A RISTOTLE ’ S ACCOUNT

Is this a correct account of vice and of why it is bad for us? This is not a very precise question. We must admit at once that it is not a plausible account of every way in which a person’s character may be defective. Apart from incontinence, or gross lack of insight or understanding, we may well suppose that people can find self-satisfaction, but find it in the wrong things. We may be especially doubtful about Aristotle’s account if we attend to the apparent variety of vices. His account works best for vices that primarily involve the lack of concerns that are required of the virtuous person. Cowardice, intemperance, and sloth might plausibly be understood as following one’s inclinations and failing to raise some evaluative questions about them. But it is more difficult to accept this analysis for greed, or vindictiveness, or the desire for power and domination. In these cases, one might say, vicious people may well have taken the evaluative point of view that Aristotle requires virtuous people to take towards their desires; their mistake is that they have come out with the wrong answers about the aims

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that are really worth pursuing. Why should their desires not be thoroughly good-dependent? An Aristotelian answer to this question has to maintain that we cannot in fact meet the demand for our aims to be thoroughly pervaded by rational evaluation without coming out in favour of the virtues, as Aristotle conceives them. Though it may seem possible to form a thoroughly good-dependent system of warped and misguided aims, it turns out to be impossible once we try it. In particular, we cannot have our aims thoroughly good-dependent and pervaded by rational evaluation while being indifferent to the good of others. To decide whether this answer is defensible, we need to consider aspects of Aristotle’s theory that I will not go into here. In suggesting this answer, I do not mean to imply that everyone disagrees with the virtuous person is vicious. Aristotle’s account of vice should be judged as an account of blameworthy moral error; vice involves the rejection of the outlook of the virtuous person, as opposed to the acceptance of an erroneous account of what that outlook is. Aristotle is right to suggest that when we consider vicious people – cowardly, or intemperate, or unjust people – we are not thinking of people who simply have alternative conceptions of virtue. Vicious people not only do not raise, but also refuse to raise, the questions that a virtuous person raises; for they believe practical reason cannot answer these questions, and that therefore they are free to follow their inclinations. This is why they are blameworthy, as opposed to being simply mistaken.30 He is justified in supposing that these people are different from merely incontinent people, or from people who raise the right questions and give the wrong answers. Could someone have the attitude to non-strategic convictions that Aristotle attributes to the vicious person, while still doing the actions expected of a virtuous person? Aristotle assumes that if we confine ourselves to purely strategic aims, we will tend to violate the demands of the virtues; but need this be so? Might we not find, because of temperament or upbringing, that we care enough about prudence, altruism, and justice that we face dangers, keep our promises, control our appetites, do one good turn in return for another, perform spontaneous acts of beneficence, and so on? This objection is especially worth considering because it reflects an attitude to virtue that might reasonably be attributed, with some reservations, to some “sentimentalist” theorists, including Francis Hutcheson and David Hume. According to such theorists, nothing about the nature of one’s 30 Aristotle calls this error “ignorance about expedient things,” “ignorance in the

decision,” and “universal ignorance,” 1110b27–33. I will not discuss his reasons for taking it to be blameworthy error.

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commitment to one’s ends and goals distinguishes virtuous from vicious people; more specifically, no judgments about the non-strategic value of our ends apart from our inclinations distinguish virtue from vice. We have no reason to prefer the inclinations that direct us to virtue over those that would direct us to vice; we simply have a reason, given our inclinations, for preferring virtuous actions over vicious actions. If our impulses and inclinations had been different, then we would have turned out vicious rather than virtuous. But why, we may ask, should this limitation of our commitment to virtue be found unwelcome? This objection to an Aristotelian conception of the difference between virtue and vice raises several wide-ranging questions. Instead of trying to take them up, I will simply point out why we might be inclined to agree with Aristotle’s view that our rational commitment to virtue ought not to be limited by reference to a particular set of inclinations. We do not normally suppose that our aims are simply based on impulses; we are responsive to the kinds of prudential reasoning that rest, as I have suggested, on non-strategic convictions. To accept the outlook that Aristotle describes as acting for the sake of the fine is to believe that we have a reason to reject a change in our attitude that would give us aims that we now repudiate. Aristotle appeals to counterfactual choices to make clear what we value and why we value it. He insists that no one would choose to have the mentality of a child even if we could enjoy the greatest pleasures that a child would enjoy (EN, 1174b1–4). This counterfactual choice shows that we do not value only pleasure for its own sake. A similar counterfactual choice helps to explain what is involved in acting for the sake of the fine. If we agree with virtuous people, we accept our ultimate ends as fine,31 and hence as resting on some further reason beyond the fact that they happen to be our ends. We believe we would still have a reason to be brave and just, even if we could be cowardly and unjust and satisfy all the aims we would have in that condition. This view implies that our ultimate aims are non-arbitrary, and therefore defensible apart from the fact that they are the aims we accept. Aristotle maintains that virtuous people correctly regard their aims as fine, and hence defensible apart from the fact that they are actually pursued. To be vicious is to reject this critical attitude to one’s inclinations and to accept one’s inclinations without criticism. We regularly assume that our convictions about ultimate ends are nonarbitrary and defensible in the way that Aristotle tries to explain. This assumption is quite entrenched in our conception of our ends; we ought to 31 They are ultimate in so far as they are worthy of choice apart from their contribution to

any end outside them. They are subordinate, though not purely instrumental, to happiness.

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give it up only in the face of quite cogent objections. Aristotle’s account of vice seeks to capture the assumption that our convictions are non-arbitrary. I have tried to make it clear why his account is both provocative, in ways that leave it open to objection, and appealing, in ways that invite defence.32 Sage School of Philosophy Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853-3201 USA E-mail: [email protected]

32 I read versions of this paper in Oxford, Pittsburgh, and Princeton. I especially

remember helpful comments by David Charles, Steven Quevedo, Jennifer Whiting, Susan Meyer, Victor Caston, John Cooper, and Michael Frede.