Remember back in book three when
Aristotle distinguished voluntary,
involuntary, and non-voluntary actions and then
he further subdivided the voluntary
into the chosen and non-chosen, where choice is
a matter of deliberation? And
remember in
the previous section of book five
when Aristotle took pains to distinguish just and unjust acts from acts done
justly and unjustly (the latter depends on the motives of the actor, the
former just on the nature of the act itself)?
In the eighth section of the fifth book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle begins to tie these threads together.
For a person to act justly or unjustly, that person must do a just or unjust
act voluntarily: that is, under his or her own power and with
awareness of what he or she is doing. Unforeseen acts are not voluntary: for
instance, stepping on a cat’s tail that you didn’t realize was in your path
is not a voluntary act, even though all of your contributions to that act
(placing your feet where you did) were voluntary. Compelled acts are also not
voluntary: if you grab your little brother’s hand and slap his face with it
and say “stop hitting yourself” you’re not fooling anybody. Also not
voluntary are those acts that aren’t in your power to begin with (for
instance, growing old).
But even doing a just or unjust act voluntarily is not sufficient to make the
act one that is done justly or unjustly. A person may voluntarily do a just
act incidentally — for instance doing a just thing, but doing it from motives
other than justice (for instance, fear of retribution). For an act to be done
justly, it must be done voluntarily and be motivated by a just character.
There is also the distinction between chosen and unchosen acts to account
for. This results in the following chart of unjust acts between individuals:
Table of Unjust Acts
| description of unjust acts |
nature of unjust acts |
|---|
| done from ignorance of the nature of the act (therefore involuntary) and that cause an unforeseeable injury |
“misadventures” or “accidents” |
| done from ignorance of the nature of the act (therefore involuntary), that cause a foreseeable injury, but that do not imply vice |
“mistakes” |
| done with knowledge of the nature of the act (therefore voluntary), but not chosen, that is: not done with premeditation (but perhaps from passion or anger) |
“injustices” |
| both voluntary and chosen |
“acting unjustly and viciously” |
So, for instance, if you’re cleaning your rifle and it goes off unexpectedly,
wounding someone, this is an accident. If you’re firing your rifle, thinking
you’re aiming at the enemy, but you’re actually shooting at an ally, then you
have made a mistake. If you get carried away by rumors of an armistice and
fire your rifle into the air in celebration before thinking through the wisdom
of such an act, and a stray bullet strikes someone, you have committed an
injustice. But if you stake someone out and deliberately assassinate them,
you are acting unjustly and viciously.
Which is all well-and-good for the clear-cut cases, but what about the ones
in the gray areas?
The other morning, while my sweetie was in the shower, I absent-mindedly
turned on the kitchen faucet. Now, I know that turning on the kitchen
faucet while someone is in the shower causes the shower temperature to
take a sudden and unpleasant lurch in one direction or the other. I wasn’t
intending to give my sweetie such a shock, but my action in turning the knob
was voluntary, the negative consequences were absolutely foreseeable, and
I wasn’t acting out of some sort of sudden flood of passion. It was simple,
absent-minded thoughtlessness. I was thinking about something else and acting
as though on auto-pilot; I chose, but I did not really deliberate, at least
not as I should have. Was I acting viciously, did I commit an injustice, or
did I just make a mistake?
When we originally covered the voluntary/involuntary distinction, I asked
where taxpaying would fit into that scheme. I thought it would probably be
categorized as voluntary, but with Aristotle’s caveat that it might be called
involuntary in the sense that it isn’t the sort of thing a person would do
spontaneously (that is, absent the law that requires it and the punishments
that induce it).
Is it also chosen and deliberate? Taxpaying doesn’t spring from spontaneous
passions, so, if that’s the criteria, then yes it’s a chosen act. But some
people don’t really deliberate about taxpaying at all — to them it’s either
accepted almost as a feature of the natural world (in the rainy season we
open umbrellas; in tax season we file tax returns), or it’s actually disguised
(paycheck withholding, taxes added to the prices of goods or hidden in the
fine print on your phone bill). They pay taxes like I turn faucet knobs
before my morning coffee kicks in. To what extent such ignorance or
disengagement changes the nature of the act is something that Aristotle has
not yet addressed head-on. I think that habitual ignorance or
disengagement probably constitutes a state-of-character, that is, in this
case: a vice.
Perhaps we need a new virtue for this. Using Aristotle’s template, I might
call this virtue “mindful responsibility” and define it as an ownership of
your actions and a wise anticipation of their effects on the world. The
opposing vices would be, on the one hand, irresponsibility (carelessness of
the effects of your actions) or denial of agency (unwillingness to hold
yourself responsible for the decisions you make), and on the other hand,
something like delusions-of-reference (in which you morbidly feel yourself to
be responsible for things wholly outside of your control) or exaggeration (in
which you overestimate the effects of acts you were responsible for in
comparison to acts in general).
But back to Aristotle:
He says that one of the reasons why acts proceeding spontaneously from anger
are not considered vicious in the same way that premeditated acts may be is
that in the case of anger there is some dispute over whether the act is one
of righteous retribution or of injustice. The person who is angered doesn’t
dispute that he or she is striking out with intention to harm, but feels
justified in doing so to rectify an earlier wrong.
In contrast, if you choose deliberately to cause harm and
then follow this up by actually committing an act of injustice, you are an
unjust person. And this is also true of justice: by choosing deliberately to
behave justly, you exhibit the qualities of a just person; if you just happen
to behave justly, you are not necessarily just.
Aristotle next briefly addresses the issue of excusability. Mistakes
made in ignorance and from ignorance, he says, are excusable. But those
done in ignorance but not from ignorance (“owing to a passion which is
neither natural nor such as man is liable to”) are not excusable. Well, what
does that mean?
Back in book three, Aristotle
discussed the difference between acting in ignorance and acting
by reason of ignorance. Someone who is drunk or in a rage, for
instance, may be acting in ignorance. Someone who is unaware or
misinformed about some crucial aspect of the action he or she is performing
(is the gun loaded? is there a cat on the path?) is acting from
ignorance. It looks at first like he’s isolating two cases:
Table of Acts
| from ignorance | not from ignorance |
|---|
| in ignorance | excusable | not excusable |
|---|
| not in ignorance | ? | ? |
|---|
So it seems like he’s really just saying that doing something “in ignorance”
is no excuse; it’s only doing something “from ignorance” that makes it
excusable. But what about this “owing to a passion which is neither natural
nor such as man is liable to” phrase? That seems to change the picture, as
he’s already said that anger is among the “passions necessary or natural to
man.” So it looks more like the situation is like this:
Table of Acts
| from ignorance | not from ignorance |
|---|
| in ignorance thanks to a passion necessary or natural to man, like anger | excusable | excusable |
|---|
| in ignorance thanks to a passion neither natural nor such as man is liable to | excusable | not excusable |
|---|
| not in ignorance | ? | ? |
|---|
This raises the question of which passions are necessary and natural and of
the sort that man is liable to, but Aristotle doesn’t answer that question
here. Among the translators:
- Hatch suggests that Aristotle is distinguishing between the passions
resulting from core human needs, such as fear, pain, or hunger, and those
that are “some merely luxurious craving, as, for instance, to drink wine
of fine bouquet or to eat partridge.”
- Browne categorically says that the human passions are grief, fear, and
pity, and the natural appetites are hunger and thirst, which is
comfortingly definitive but has the disadvantage of not including anger,
which Aristotle mentions in this very chapter as a necessary or natural
human passion.
- Gillies believes that Aristotle is distinguishing between “complete and
habitual ignorance” (pardonable) and “temporary ignorance, occasioned
by the blind impetuosity of passion, either extravagantly excessive in
its degree, or highly improper in its object” (not pardonable).
- Grant says that Aristotle may be alluding to “brutality” as an example
of something that isn’t necessary and natural to man but that can
lead people to behave unjustly as if compelled by a passion. (Aristotle
will discuss brutality as a motivation in book seven.) Stock also seems
to follow this line, discussing someone “who commits an atrocious deed
under the mastery of some abnormal and unnatural passion,” and having his
Aristotle conclude that “you would seek to rid society of him, as you
would of a dangerous wild beast.” Jackson also calls these acts “more
detestable than ordinary vicious acts.”
- Paley says that the passions neither natural nor such as man is liable to
are “bestial or degrading, such as drunkenness”.
- Vincent adds two commas that change the phrase substantially: “all that
[people] do ignorantly, but not through the instrumentality of ignorance,
but through passion, that is, not
natural nor human, are unpardonable,” which makes it sound as though
doing acts ignorantly through passion is itself something that is not
natural nor human, and therefore not excusable.
So clearly there’s not a lot of consensus on how to interpret this.
Multiple translators and commentators
note the tension between this section,
in which Aristotle matter-of-factly calls acts done in and
from ignorance as two varieties of involuntary acts, and
what he said in book three, which was that such acts were not involuntary,
except for those acts that both were done from ignorance and were
then regretted.
Index to the Nicomachean Ethics series
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
