OUGHTS, INTENTIONS, AND ACTS IN ARISTOTLE
A. W. Price
I : PREFACE
Two issues in the logical grammar of talk about acts are commonly discussed apart, and yet
clearly invite parallel resolutions. Though different arguments may apply to the two, it is natural
to treat them analogously. Two sentential schemata within which we speak of acts are the
following:
(1) A intends to φ.
(2) A ought to φ.
How to interpret each of these schemata is debatable, and in parallel ways. We can ask whether
the intention or the necessity attaches to a proposition. (1) might then be construed as follows:
(1a) A intends that he φ.1
Likewise, (2) might be read so:
(2a) It ought to be that A φ.
In terms of truth, (1a) takes the truth of ‘I φ’ to be intended by A: he intends it to become true
that he φ’s. (2a) takes the truth of ‘A φ’s’ to be fitting or appropriate (which may be a matter of
propriety, or of desirability, or whatever): it is appropriate for it to become true that A φ’s.
However, in each case there is an alternative way of reading the sentence. We may propose
instead that (1) should be taken as it stands, which might, in quasi-English, be rendered so:
(1b) A intends φ’ing.
Here what A intends is an act (the act of φ’ing). What identifies this act as an act of his own is
not the addition of some specification to the content of his intention, but the absence of any
specification. It is supposed that A’s intentions are by default intentions simply to act – though
he may on occasion form an intention that he (or another) act.
Likewise, we may propose that (2) should, at least in most contexts, be taken as it stands,
perhaps glossed by the following paraphrase:
1
Note that the ‘he’ here is self-referential, which captures that the intention is de re. Less happy would be the
paraphrase ‘A intends that A φ’, which is de dicto, with both ‘A’s signifying the referent of ‘A’; for it can be true that
A intends to φ, even if he falsely believes that he is not the referent of ‘A’. Admittedly, there is then room for a
thesis that (1a) is not an alternative to (1b) below, but reducible to it; cf. Lewis (1979). Against that, as will become
clear (in § IV), I suppose that (1a), but not (1b), can be analysed as ‘A intends to bring it about (or else let it happen)
that he φ’s.’ Which differentiates them.
1
(2b) It befits (or boots) A to φ.
(2b) relates φ’ing to A by a relation of fittingness (or benefit). It evidently raises questions about
how φ’ing befits A – for what purpose, or from what point of view, and the like.
As it happens, each of these issues has been prominently raised in print recently.2 The
grammar of oughts, at least, has been a topic through the history of philosophy (to generalize
from the Stoics, and St Anselm). Here I shall focus on Aristotle, who has been neglected in this
connection. The reasons for this run in parallel: he either lacks, or fails to focus upon, both our
concept of intention, and the concept signalled by the English ‘ought’. However, this is not to
say that he lacks any concept of intention, or any term (or construction) that on occasion is best
rendered by ‘ought’. He has two relevant terms, prohairesis (most often translated by ‘choice’,
sometimes by ‘decision’), and dei (which most often means ‘must’, but at times seems to mean a
weaker ‘should’ or ‘ought to’). Moreover, what I have presented as an issue about oughts
equally concerns practical necessity: does ‘A must φ’ (in its practical use) mean ‘It is necessary
that A φ’, or ‘It is necessary for A to φ’? And prohairesis may well be a form of intention, and
relate to acts as intentions centrally do, even if not all the acts that we count as intended count for
Aristotle as chosen (in his sense). Hence no conceptual deficiency precludes him from facing
our pair of issues. Whether he sees either as an issue is unclear: one can’t say that he discusses
either. Yet he takes a line in each case, and parallel ones: in effect, he prefers (1b) to (1a), and
(2b) to (2a). My first task here is to substantiate this claim; my second is to try to explain what
motivates his preferences, and how they are of a piece.
II : THE NATURE AND CONTENT OF A PROHAIRESIS
Any general account of Aristotelian prohairesis needs to air points of consensus, and points of
contention. After that, I shall turn to its relation to intention, and to its logical grammar.
Aristotle characterizes prohairesis as ‘desire of things in one’s power reached through
deliberation’ (Nicomachean Ethics [EN] III.3 1113a10-11, Eudemian Ethics [EE] II.10
1226b17).3 We need additionally to understand that this deliberation (bouleusis) is for the sake
of acting well; for the acratic agent can ‘deliberate’, even correctly (AE B.9 1142b18-20), and yet
he does not act on a prohairesis (C.8 1151a6-7).4 And whereas deliberation is initiated by a
wish, or boulēsis, for a goal (EN III.2 1111b26, III.4 1113a15) that one thinks good (AE A.9
1136b7-8, Rhetoric I.10 1369a2-4), it is only concluded by identifying an option not just as
good, but as best (EN III.3 1112b17). Hence the resultant prohairesis is a desire that is decisive
(1113a4-5) in being resolved between different desirabilia. Thus the very term prohaireton
indicates a thing ‘selected before other things’ (pro heterōn haireton, III.2 1112a16-17).5 A
2
On intentions, Madden (2011); on oughts, Schroeder (2011).
In translating the EN I use Ross with modifications.
4
I follow Anthony Kenny in referring to the common books (EN V-VII = EE IV-VI) as AE A-C.
5
Unfortunately it is not explicit here what the prefix pro- signifies. A rival suggestion is that, being chosen as a
means to a wished-for goal, the object of choice comes – conceptually in realization, though not temporally within
deliberation – before the object of wish. (Cf. Aquinas, ST qu. 18 art. 7: ‘Finis est postremum in executione, sed est
primum in intentione rationis.’) Against that I would cite less the explicit Magna Moralia [MM] I.17 1189a 12-16
than the implicit EE II.10 1226b7-17, which connect three things: choice, deliberation, and a selection between
alternatives.
3
2
prohairesis is a corollary of a verdictive judgement that identifies some option in context as both
practicable and to be put into practice.
Less clear is where to locate prohairesis within Aristotle’s psycho-topography. Within the
human soul, he distinguishes a stratum that is inherently rational from another that, though
shared generically with the beasts, becomes derivatively rational through a kind of obedience to
the logos (EN I.13 1102b13-1103a3). (We may call it sub-rational.) This contains what he calls
‘the appetitive and, to generalize, the desiring element’ (to d’epithumētikon kai holōs orektikon,
1102b30); yet it is debated whether this phrase connotes not only appetite, and any other species
of non-rational desire such as anger, but also boulēsis and prohairesis (as kai holōs surely
suggests it does, cf. DA I.5 411a28). Interpreters generally suppose that, being a corollary of
judgements of a certain kind that follows upon them not contingently but automatically,
prohairesis belongs with judgement within the highest stratum of the human soul. However, I
believe that more than a single phrase makes this questionable.6 It is a recurrent thesis that
ethical virtue, or ēthikē aretē, is a condition of the sub-rational soul (EN I.13 1103a3-7, III.10
1117b23-4, AE B.1 1138b35-1139a6, EE II.1 1220a10-11, II.4 1221b27-34, VIII.1 1246b33).
Now we are told that ethical virtue is a state that is operative in choices: it is a hexis prohairetikē
(EN II.6 1106b36, AE B.2 1139a22-3, EE II.10 1227b8; cf. EN II.5 1106a3-4, III.2 1111b5-6).
Which would seem to imply that a prohairesis is a corollary within a lower stratum of the soul of
a judgement within a higher stratum.
Yet it may be wisest not to press the question, but to follow Aristotle’s lead when he calls
prohairesis indifferently ‘intelligence qualified by desire’ (orektikos nous) or ‘desire qualified by
thought’ (orexis dianoētikē, AE B.2 1139b4-5).7 Of course, this may just serve to emphasize
how closely related, within the rational soul, are reason and rational desire. Yet there is an
alternative possibility, which is less easy but also evidenced. Aristotle is open to the suggestion
that the two strata, rational and sub-rational, differ in definition without being separable in nature
– perhaps just like the convex and the concave (EN I.13 1102a28-32, EE II.1 1219b32-6).8 It
6
Cf. Price (1995: 191-2, n. 9); also n. 29 below. It is difficult to follow Brown (2009: 211) and Pearson (2012: 109)
in reading a remark (1102b26-7) that the desiring element of the continent agent ‘obeys’ the logos as indicating not
that he retains good wishes and choices, but merely that his appetites lose out in a play of forces (for which cf. DA
III.11 434a12-14); for obedience is here associated with harmony (b28) and respect (b32). As Buridan comments,
‘If anyone, conquered in war, was being led forcibly into prison … we would not say that he was obeying the man
who led him’ (QEAN 1.21).
Standardly in Aristotle orexis is generic; for a list of references, see Price (1995: 189, n. 2). Mention of to
orektikon at DA II.3 414a32 is followed at b2 by a division of orexis into the three species of appetite, anger, and
wish. At EE II.1 1220a1-2, where reasoning is said to govern ‘desires and affections’ (orexeis and pathēmata), the
phrase may be a hendiadys, signifying affective, i.e. non-rational, desires. Yet an unqualified orexis is most likely
generic, subsuming rational desire, at II.4 1221b28-32, which can hardly be emphasizing, after distinguishing a soulpart whose function is to grasp truth, that non-rational desire is not to be assigned to it. At DA III.7 431a13-14, to
orektikon is plainly generic, since it is parallel to to pheuktikon (cf. the opposities ‘pursue’ and ‘flee’ at a 9-10); yet
it is said to differ only definitionally, and not ontologically, from the perceptual faculty, which certainly belongs
within the lower stratum.
Most explicit in placing wish within the non-rational soul is Politics [Pol.] VII.15 1334b17-25. This passage is
curious in ascribing wish even to new-born children. This cannot be the full-grown wish that is a corollary of
practical judgement; however, it may intelligibly connect with AE B.13 1144b1-14 on a virtue of character that is
natural and inborn, and therefore tends towards good ends, though as yet without intelligence.
7
I am grateful to Anthony Kenny for pressing me on this. For these two phrases I prefer his translation (2011),
which is intelligible, to Ross’s more literal ‘desiderative reason’ and ‘ratiocinative desire’ (preserved in Brown,
2009).
8
Someone who has always made much of this is John McDowell (as in 1996: 27-8).
3
confirms this that, although doxa (opinion) and phantasia (imagination) belong within different
strata of the soul (EE VII.2 1235b28-9), it is his standard view that a man cannot occurrently
entertain any doxa without an accompanying phantasma (DA III.7 431a16-17, 431b2, III.8
432a7-14; De Memoria 1 449b31-450a1). In DA III.7, thinking (noein) is said to differ from
perceiving, but in part to seem to be phantasia (427b27-8). Yet AE B.11 cryptically identify a
kind of perception with intelligence: we read that the particulars that lead to the apprehension of
a practical end are grasped by a perception that can be identified with nous (1143b4-5). Quite
what Aristotle has in mind here is uncertain. It makes sense to suppose that he is thinking, for
example, of perceiving that someone is in trouble and needs help. Such a perceiving at once
involves an imagining (here of helping) and imports a believing (here, seeing is believing) – even
though, as just cited, believing and imagining are officially held apart within the soul.9 If it is
within this border territory that prohairesis is to be found, we may expect of Aristotle an
awareness that its complex reality bursts the bounds of an abstract partitioning. If we want to
respect the evidence that places all orexeis within the derivatively rational soul, this would seem
to be the best way of accommodating it – and, indeed, of reconciling it with any conflicting
evidence there may be.10
How does any of this – boulēsis, bouleusis, and prohairesis – connect with the concept of
intention? A preliminary issue is whether Aristotle himself possessed the concept. Good
evidence that he did comes in the Rhetoric’s association of anger and revenge:
Every occurrence of anger must be accompanied by a certain pleasure, that which arises from the
expectation (elpis) of taking revenge; for it is pleasant to expect to achieve what one aims at (hōn
ephietai), and no one aims at things that appear impossible for him (II.2 1378b1-4).
Whether Aristotle even has a word here for ‘intend’, viz. ephiesthai, is made unclear by
uncertainties about the concept of intention: if I aim at φ’ing, believing that I may succeed but
without expecting that I shall, do I thereby intend to φ? If so, ephiesthai amounts here to
intending; if not, the concept of intention is present, though no one word signifies it. In either
case, it seems that the pleasure that he here implausibly ascribes to all instances of anger is a
pleasure that specifically attaches to an intention (either just because it is an intention, or in cases
where intention is fortified by expectation). In singling out this case, Aristotle deploys a concept
of intention directed towards a goal, even if it is not one that he ever takes as a topic.
Wish itself is far from intention. This is clear in the following distinction between wish and
choice:
Choice cannot relate to things impossible; and if anyone said he chose them he would be thought
silly; but there may be wish even for impossible things, e.g. for immortality. And wish may relate to
things that could in no way be brought about by one’s own efforts, e.g. that a particular actor or
athlete should win in a competition; but no one chooses such things, but only the things that he
thinks could be brought about by his own efforts (EN III.2 1111b20-6).
9
I discuss this in Price (2011: 223-6), though without making precisely the present point.
For this evidence, see Price (1995: 192, n. 10); for another reason why Aristotle may be uncertain, cf. (1995: ch. 3
§ 3). At DA III.9 432b3-7 I take Aristotle not to be expressing his own views, but to be drawing implausible
implications from any Platonic attempt ‘to posit separate parts of the soul’ (b2-3, my italics); he objects that this
‘splits up’ the faculty of desire – and is problematic for the imagination also (a31-b3). It is Platonic partition that,
segregating a non-rational part (or parts) from a rational one, makes it impossible for a species of desire both to
belong with other species of desire within the derivatively rational soul, and to be always obedient to rational
judgement.
10
4
However, what continues relates wish to a kind of intention:
Wish relates rather to the end, choice to the means; for instance, we wish to be healthy, but we
choose the acts that will make us healthy, and we wish to be happy, and say we do, but we cannot
well say we choose to be so; for choice is always about the things in our power (b26-30).
Wish itself is clearly insufficient for making some good into an end, either of deliberation or of
action. Yet it ceases to be idle when it sets off a stretch of deliberation (bouleusis) and search
(zētēsis): ‘We deliberate about things that are in our power and can be done’ (III.3 1112a30);
once deliberating, ‘if we come on an impossibility, we give up the search’ (b24-5). As is stated
in the De Anima, there is a kind of nous ‘that calculates for the sake of something and is
practical’ (III.10 433a14).11 Such thinking starts from a provisional intention to achieve a goal –
provisional in that the goal may turn out to be unachievable, or not acceptably achievable.12 It is
when wish supplies such an intention that it becomes ‘a starting-point of practical nous’
(433a16).
Deliberating connects doubly with intention, being intended to achieve a goal through action
that is itself intentional. When the deliberating is for the sake of acting well, the agent is looking
for an act that he can choose, in Aristotle’s restricted sense. In so deliberating, the agent gives
thought in order to identify a means to a given end for him to choose and enact. It is not, as
Anselm Müller has emphasized (1982: 166), that he has first to give thought about how to give
thought in a way that will be practical: that would risk a regress, even if the preliminary thinking
were determinate enough to be useful, and yet not too determinate to anticipate the content of
practical thinking proper. Aristotle is conceiving of deliberation as a mode of intentional activity
that is fully rational, but not itself the product of some prior stretch of deliberation.
I have made two proposals: Aristotelian wish or boulēsis has to become a provisional
intending before it can prompt bouleusis or deliberation; and Aristotelian deliberation is itself an
intentional activity directed towards intentional action. If it results in a prohairesis, this will
constitute the formation of a restrictedly rational variety of intention. Just how rationality in
deliberation relates to rational action is debated. The evidence is that Aristotle requires any
prohairesis to be preceded by an actual episode of bouleusis.13 Most philosophical interpreters
find this hard to stomach, and prefer to count as acting on choice an agent who can sincerely give
reasons that he need not have rehearsed to himself. More conservatively, it helps a little, but not
much, to suggest that he may on occasion have performed some relevant deliberation well in
advance. It may help more to emphasize that some of his premises may well be implicit (cf.
DMA 7 701a25-8), and that, so long as he is rightly oriented, a very little thinking can count as
thinking for the sake of acting well. (We may imagine the self-consciously heroic hero of EN
IX.8 advancing against the approaching enemy without saying to himself much more than, say,
‘Here they come’; we may construe this as the visible tip of a rational iceberg.) We can thus
recognize Aristotle’s view of prohairesis as a conception of how intention can be rational that is
pre-Wittgensteinian, but not readily refutable.
11
Cf. also Pol. VII.3 1325b18-19: there are thoughts that ‘occur for the sake of the results of action’.
The former danger was explicit at EN III.3 1112b24-5. I speculatively interpret the second as implicit at AE B.9
1142b31-3: if it is good deliberation that settles the goal, this may be because it establishes that a presumptively
desirable end is desirably achievable in context (Price, 2011: 226-8).
13
EN III.2.1112a15-16, III.3 1113a11-12, AE A.8 1135b19-25, EE II.4 1224a4, II.10 1226b6-9, 14-15, 32-6.
12
5
Aristotle has things of interest to say about rational intending that we might apply to
intending in general. Striking here are remarks he makes about the grammar of choosing:
We choose to get or avoid something good or bad, but we have opinions about what a thing is or
whom it is good for or how it is good for him; we can hardly be said to opine to get or avoid
anything. And choice is praised rather for being of what it should be, or being made correctly,
opinion for being formed truly (EN III.2 1112a3-7).14
Significantly, Aristotle’s distinction holds better of English grammar than of Greek. We can’t
say, e.g., ‘I think to be well today’, meaning that I think that I am well; but Greek words for
thinking typically permit just such a construction.15 It appears that he is not just playing the
grammarian; what he is up to is less transparent, and more interesting. It will merit our attention.
III : PRACTICAL OUGHTS AND EUDAIMONIA
Take a schema for a pair of practical premises from DA III.11 (434a18-19):
Such-and-such a man must do such-and-such a thing.
I am such-and-such a man, and this is such-and-such a thing.16
Though Aristotle is silent about the conclusion, a proposition that certainly follows logically
(though it makes no use of the last clause) is ‘I must do such-and-such a thing’ – which I shall
write as ‘I must ψ.’ Does this mean that it is necessary that I ψ, or that it is necessary for me to
ψ? As we saw, these are different. For Aristotle, the central case must be this: I must in order
thereby to , where ’ing is a way – perhaps the only way – in which I can here and now act
well. Since acting well is my ultimate goal as agent, the necessity clearly exists for me, and it is
most natural to read ‘I must ψ’ as stating just that, within a construction that predicates having to
ψ of me.
To make it plainer that the necessity governs a predicate, Aristotle can use verbal
terminations in -teon; the gerund that results governs a subject in the dative. These are recurrent
in De Motu Animalium [DMA] 7, our richest source for examples of practical syllogisms: ‘Every
man should take walks’ (panti badisteon anthrōpōi, 701a13); ‘No man should take walks’ (a1415); ‘I should make something good’ (a16-17); ‘What I need, I should make’ (a18-19); ‘I should
drink’ (a32). One could imagine a context in which walks were prescribed for the sake of
cobblers: in that context, we might say ‘It is necessary that every man take walks’, thereby
stating a desideratum that exists for cobblers. But it is not just in certain contexts that panti
badisteon anthrōpōi addresses the interests of any agent of a given kind – as becomes explicit
within the variant that Aristotle then slips in, evidently with no change of perspective, ‘Taking
14
In construing 1112a5-6, I follow Stewart, Ackrill, Rowe, and Pakaluk against Ross and Taylor (as is certainly
preferable if it is possible).
15
This is true of oiesthai, nomizein, hēgeisthai; cf. Mastronarde (1993: 150, 175). LSJ cite from Aeschylus
(Supplices 60) an equivalent use of doxazein not with an infinitive, but a participle.
16
Kraut (2006) has argued of the EN that the Greek dei is better translated by ‘should’ or ‘ought’. I think that this
may be true within certain contexts (see Price, 2011: 240 n. 60). It is immaterial to my concerns here. To leave
things open, and not in order to assert any difference in meaning, I here render dei by ‘must’, but gerunds by
‘should’.
6
walks is good for a man’ (a27). Elsewhere, he offers as a major premise, ‘Every man is
benefited by dry food’ (AE C.3 1147a5-6). Though this is not itself deontic, it is indicative that it
has in mind not someone unspecified who is benefited by a man’s eating dry food, but a man
who is benefited by eating dry food. What it implies is that eating dry food is incumbent on
every man – which is just what ‘Every man should eat dry food’ is most naturally interpreted as
asserting.
The concept of its being right (or wrong) of an agent to act in a certain way is deployed
once in the Topics (II.11 115b22-35). Here Aristotle states that it is fine without qualification to
honour the gods, but only fine for the Triballoi to sacrifice one’s father, comparing the fact that it
benefits a man to take a drug when he is ill.17 The relativism may surprise us; it would be rash to
apply it to the ethical conception of the fine (to kalon) that is central, if elusive, in Aristotle’s
ethics. Yet the grammar is plain. It is no more fine from the point of view of the universe, say,
if a Triballos sacrifices his father than it is healthy for the universe if a patient takes a drug;
rather, it is fine of a Triballos to act so, just as it is good for a patient to take the drug.
Deontically, we have ‘He ought to sacrifice his father’, and ‘He ought to take a drug’, which are
both to be interpreted as statements about what befits (or boots) an agent.
This construction connects with what Müller (1977) long ago discussed as ‘Democritus’
Maxim’ (B 45), roughly ‘It is worse to do wrong than to be wronged.’ This is most familiar to us
from early Plato (e.g., Crito 49b, Gorgias 469c), but is also explicit in Aristotle: ‘Acting unjustly
is the worse [of acting unjustly and being unjustly treated], for it involves vice and is
blameworthy’ (AE A.11 1138a31-2). This at once becomes incoherent if it is interpreted as
claiming, about each agent, that it is impersonally worse that he should wrong anyone else than
that anyone else should wrong him. (It can hardly be true of anyone, and could not be true of
everyone, that what he gives counts more in the impartial scales of human welfare, for better or
worse, than what he receives.) Evidently, the thought is rather that, morally speaking, it is better
for him, or from his point of view, to be a victim than a villain. It is morally necessary for him to
avoid wrong-doing – though it may not be necessary for many purposes, and can hardly be
morally necessary for anyone else, that he do so.
Such an attitude respects the integrity of individual agency, and is central and essential to
morality as we know it. Plausibly, indeed, no way of thinking that fails to feature it can count as
moral. Of course, tensions arise. No man views his world simply through moral spectacles.
Aristotle acknowledges that, for others than the eager heroes of EN IX.8, death in battle is a
mixed pleasure: ‘Death and wounds will be painful to the brave man and against his will, but he
will face them because it is noble to do so or base not to’ (III.9 1117b7-9). Even within the
moral sphere, there may arise dilemmas (say, like that of Agamemnon at Aulis) that are not
disarmed by acknowledging blithely that ‘all such questions are hard (are they not?) to decide
with precision’ (IX.2 1164b27-8).
Morality, of course, is only part of the material of deliberation. Aristotle presents mature
agents as deliberating, ultimately, for the sake of eudaimonia, which he glosses popularly as
living and acting well (I.4 1095a19-20), but explicates himself as good rational activity (I.7
17
Cf. James Fennimore Cooper, The Deerslayer, ch. 3: ‘A white man’s gifts are christianized, while a red skin’s are
more for the wilderness. Thus it would be a great offence for a white man to scalp the dead, whereas it’s a signal
virtue in an Indian. Then, ag’in, a white man cannot amboosh women and children in war, while a red skin may.
’Tis cruel work I’ll allow, but for them it’s lawful work, while for us it would be a grievous sin.’
7
1098a12-17).18 This goal is not exhausted by the moral obligations that, defining varieties of
wrong-doing, are at once a field for the application of Democritus’ Maxim, nor even by what we
would view as moral considerations. The minimal structure of his theory leaves open the criteria
that define circumstances and opportunities as practically relevant. It also leaves unsettled how
these criteria operate, and whether, for example, there are side-constraints that restrict the pursuit
of individual desiderata. However, Aristotle accepts Democritus’ Maxim, as also certain
absolute prohibitions.19 Such aspects of his theory help exclude plainly unacceptable
implications of his own view that certain activities not of an ethical nature, notably theoretical
contemplation, are of incommensurable value. This doesn’t imply that it is right to leave a friend
stranded at the station if this will allow one time for a little more mathematics; for breaking one’s
word counts as wrong-doing, and so plunges one in a state of kakodaimonia that trumps any
incremental elements of eudaimonia, even if these are inherently of the highest grade.
Yet much work is achieved by the structure itself. Within Aristotle’s ethical theory,
practical judgements prescriptive of action must be centrally of the following form: A (an agent)
must in order thereby to , where he needs to in order to act well. Since acting well is A’s
ultimate goal as agent, the necessity clearly exists for him. Here we find a connection between a
point of logical grammar, and eudaimonism as an ethical perspective. The personally
responsible agent has a special and overriding concern that is focused upon what it is necessary
for him to do in order to be acting well, and cannot be deflected upon what it is necessary for
others to do in order to be acting well. Acting well is an agent’s ultimate end in such a sense that
he neither acts well for the sake of anything further, nor could sacrifice acting well to some yet
more imperative end. As an abstract achievement, it is unimprovable. This does not mean that,
whenever a man succeeds in acting well, he can be assured that, in that respect, his life couldn’t
have gone better. Aristotle can’t mean this when he remarks that the good agent has nothing to
regret (IX.4 1166a29). Yet he is subject to contingency in that there must be no impediments
that preclude his acting finely, even if he acts wisely. (Thus one is cannot be acting well in
imposing a punishment; Pol. VII.13 1332a7-21.) Not that one could enhance acting well by
adding some additional feature to it. It is rather that any feature that enhances an action that is an
instance of acting well further contributes to its being that. An act’s status as a way of acting
well emerges out of the relevant considerations that help, or do not hinder, its being well worth
doing.
Practical necessities come of what is requisite for an agent if he is to act well (or else to act
well in a certain way).20 It is not that he can identify a state of affairs, his own acting well, that
he is bound to pursue because it is impersonally imperative – in which case it would prescribe
pursuit by others as well. No state of affairs of which he is the protagonist can have that
universal status. If he is sane, he cannot suppose that, viewed impersonally (from the point of
view of the universe, as it were), it matters more that he should do what is necessary than that
anyone else should. Rather, acting well is crucial for him; it stands before him as an ultimate if
abstract goal that itself can be neither enhanced nor outweighed. To appreciate this in one’s own
18
On interpretation of this, see Price (2011: ch. A 2). Whether not faring, but acting, well must be equally the final
goal even of morally defective agents is another question. It may be their natural goal without becoming the focus
of their actual deliberations; see Price (2011: 39-40). If Aristotle’s account is not idealizing, it is selective in focus.
19
EN II.6 1107a10-11, on which see Price (2011: 207-8).
20
Exceptional is a statement (in a textually uncertain sentence) ‘He thinks he must (dei) both be healthy and act
well’ (EE II.10 1226a14-15). We can make sense of this: acting well is not optional as an end of action, rather as
being healthy is not optional as an end of dieting (or of taking therapeutic walks). Yet what I must do is standardly
an act that is necessary for acting well (perhaps in a certain way).
8
case is to be aware of one’s personal responsibility as one agent among others; it is not to detect
an impersonal demand that applies to all agents – though all agents are subject to an equivalent
demand in their own case.
This first-personal aspect of ethical eudaimonism demands a conception of practical
necessities that link not an agent’s actions to some universal desideratum, but ways of acting to
an agent.
IV : PROHAIRESIS AND ACTION
Effective deliberation for the sake of acting well leads the agent to a practical judgement (that,
here and now, he must ψ), that has as a corollary a choice (to ψ). More fully, a choice has a dual
content, to ψ for the sake of φ’ing (EE II.11 1227b36-7), where φ’ing is a goal both specific
enough to allow for a calculation of ways and means, and sufficiently worthwhile, in context, to
constitute a way of acting well – which is the ultimate end of deliberation, choice, and action.21
An object of wish, say φ’ing, becomes a target of thinking what to choose when the agent starts
to deliberate with the provisional intention of finding and intentionally enacting a way of φ’ing
that is also, and at least in part thereby, a way of acting well. He may discover as he proceeds
that there is no ψ’ing, practicable in context, by which he can φ, or φ acceptably; then he must
think through another way of acting well.
What is the grammar of wishing (boulesthai)? Aristotle permits it to be varied: I may have a
wish of, or for, something impossible, such as immortality (EN III.2 1111b22-3); or I may wish
that some actor or athlete win, which may be possible, but not through my own agency (b24); or
I may wish to be healthy or happy (b27-9). Can we press a question like that which has already
arisen about choice: can I have a wish to φ that is not a wish that I φ? A general reason for
supposing that I can is derivable from reflections of Bernard Williams about imagination: I can
more easily wish, say, to have been a member of Plato’s Academy than that I should have been a
member; for, knowing that I am Anthony Price, I cannot coherently imagine myself there, while I
may have at least a coherent (if scrappy) idea of the charms of being there.22 Aristotle may have
this in mind when he writes vaguely of a wish ‘of immortality’ (1111b23). Death is as natural
and necessary for animals as generation (On Youth, Old Age 23(17) 478b22-6); so I cannot
conceive of being immortal while remaining human, and yet I can – as perhaps we all do – have
a vague and idle wish to be immortal.
Yet the matter becomes clearer once an object of wish has become an end of deliberation.
Take the wish to be eudaimōn (EN 1111b28) that may be general, or focused upon a particular
context of action. I may take it as my goal that I live and act well by trying to bring that about,
like the young Hippocrates of Plato’s Protagoras, who wishes to take the sophist as his teacher,
so that he may thereafter achieve eudaimonia (313a6-b2). That doesn’t yield a choice to ψ as
itself an instance of acting well. The point appears to generalize: to have as my goal that I φ is to
aim to bring it about (or let it happen) that I φ; but aiming at this need not amount to aiming to φ
21
Cf. Analytica Posteriora I.24 85b27-35. In EE II.10 Aristotle instances the conveying of goods as a reason for
walking, remarking ‘Those who have no target before them are not in a position to deliberate’ (1226b28-30).
22
Cf. Williams (1973). I am given pause by the title of an Edwardian song, ‘I wish I were a daisy.’ If that merits
attention, it may indicate one of two possibilities: (i) the pronoun ‘I’ refers, but connotes no essence, either specific
or individual (cf. Vendler, 1984); (ii) a mere wish can be blatantly incoherent.
9
intentionally by and in doing something or other.23 Yet it is the last that is ideally directed
towards a resultant choice to ψ, wherein ψ’ing is chosen for its own sake as an instance of acting
well (cf. II.4 1105a28-32). To prepare unequivocally for that we rather need to start with a wish
to φ.
As we saw earlier (end of § II), Aristotle is explicit that a choice is, for instance, a choice to
ψ, and not a choice that I ψ. He distinguishes choice from belief in two ways that must connect
(III.2 1112a3-7):
(a) I make a choice to ψ, but have a belief not to ψ, but about (e.g.) whether it is beneficial to
ψ.
(b) A choice can be correct, while a belief can be true.
Taken on its own, (a) might be making a simple contrast in onus of match: if a belief fails to fit
reality, it is faulty for that reason; if reality fails to fit a choice, it is defective in that respect. Yet
(b) allows choices to be correct or incorrect, not just effective or ineffective. In Aristotle’s view,
a choice to ψ is correct if it is true that, on that occasion, one must ψ in order to be acting well (or
to be acting well in a certain way).
(a)’s contrast between choosing to ψ, and having a belief whether it is good to ψ, is
somewhat oblique. Behind it lie two more direct contrasts: between choosing to ψ and believing
myself to be about to ψ, and between choosing whether to ψ and having a belief about whether I
shall ψ. Even so, Aristotle’s consideration of options is incomplete. It is pity that Greek lacks a
construction of the form ‘I choose that I ψ’, a predicate that presents an embedded proposition,
but as the content of a choice and not a belief, and with a mood rather subjunctive than
indicative. Such a schema would serve for drawing the contrast (b) as well as Aristotle’s ‘I
choose to ψ’: its suggestion of the subjunctive presents the content of an intentional state, but in
a mode that admits neither truth nor falsity.24 Is it excluded by Aristotle by a contingency of
Greek, or for some substantive reason? No answer is explicit is his text.
However, I believe that we may be able to place his preferred construction (‘I choose to ψ’)
within certain features of his account of how thought generates action. Here we meet in Aristotle
two alternative ways of relating the two, of which one segregates acting from thinking, whereas
the other (which is what I wish to explore) allows them to overlap. The Metaphysics [Met.]
presents the former in terms of production (poiēsis): ‘Of the processes of generation, the one part
is called thinking, namely that which proceeds from the starting-point and the form, and the other
is called production, namely that which proceeds from the end-point of the thinking’ (Z.7
1032b15-17). The De Anima speaks similarly of action: ‘The object of desire is the startingpoint for the practical intellect, and the final step is the starting-point for action’ (3. 10, 433a1517, tr. Hamlyn). Yet Aristotle appears to telescope this final stage when, in the DMA, he
identifies practical conclusion and action: ‘Here [sc. within practical thinking] the conclusion
23
Imagine that my local council has neglected to clean up snow on the pavement outside my house; so I repeatedly
walk along it in the hope of slipping, and then suing them. I thus intend that I slip, but not to slip, since what I have
in mind is slipping unintentionally.
24
In § I, I allowed myself the form of words ‘A intends it to become true that he φ’s’, but without asking how we are
to understand what comes between ‘A intends’ and ‘that he φ’s’. Even there the whole content of the intention
(which is that it become true that …) is not a candidate for truth, though there is an embedded proposition that is a
candidate.
10
which results from the two premises is the action’ (7, 701a11-13).25 A slightly later passage
heightens the paradox by identifying with action a conclusion that is not the end-point of
thinking:
I need a covering; a cloak is a covering. I need a cloak. What I need, I should make; I need a cloak.
I should make a cloak. And the conclusion, the “I should make a cloak”, is an action. And he acts
from a starting-point. If there is to be a cloak, there must necessarily be this first, and if this, this.
And this he does at once. Now, that the action is the conclusion is clear (a17-23).
To make sense of this, we must suppose that Aristotle can permit himself to place the inception
of action earlier than we might expect. The agent can count as acting once he infers ‘I should
make a cloak’, even though he only starts to move once he has further concluded that he needs,
more specifically, at once to do ‘this’ (whatever it may be).26
Both thought and movement belong within action. We have in any case to note that, when
movement starts, thought commonly continues. As Peter Strawson (1974: 172) urged years ago
against any attempt to separate out mental and bodily components within a typically human
activity such as writing a letter, ‘Writing a letter is essentially not something that a mind does or
something that a body does, but something that a person does.’ Writing a letter, like (I hope)
giving a paper, involves a continuing mental engagement with a bodily process. There are cases
when one loses control: Aristotle cites throwing a stone, where it was in one’s power not to
throw it, but is not in one’s power to stop it (EN III.5 1114a17-19). In other cases, he writes,
‘We are masters of our actions from their origin to their termination, if we know the particulars’
(b31-2). Here exercising care and intelligence continues through the execution, through a period
of time, of a judgement that both initiates action and sustains it.27
To understand DMA 701a17-23, we need not just to extend thought through action, but also
to bring action forward into thought. Once the agent has decided that he has to make a cloak, his
further calculations are part of putting his decision into effect; he has discarded any uncertainty
as to whether making a covering is indeed what he ought to be doing now. (It may yet be
prevented or interrupted; but he has set aside the possibilities of its turning out to have always
been either impracticable or inadvisable.) Hence we can view further thought about how to
make a cloak, like later attention to its making, as aspects of a unified psycho-physical process
that constitutes an action. In Aristotle’s conception of change, making a cloak is an actuality that
realizes a capacity to bestow the form of a specific kind of covering upon some appropriate
matter; part of what the capacity enables one to do is to give expert and effective thought to how
to make a cloak – and one can start to exercise this aspect of the capacity before one’s hands are
actually at work.28
25
I take over Nussbaum’s translations. 701a12-13 might instead be translated ‘The conclusion from two premises
becomes the action’; in defence of her translation, see Nussbaum (1978: 342-3).
26
It is, of course, only once actual movement begins that we can apply Aristotle’s doctrine of the identity of acting
upon and being acted upon (as in teaching and learning, Physics III.3).
27
McDowell (2010: 422) writes, ‘Going on intentionally doing something cannot be equated with drawing a
conclusion from some practical reasoning, any more than going on believing something can be equated with
drawing a conclusion from some theoretical reasoning.’ However, the equation is rather between persisting in
action, and continuing to accept a theoretical conclusion.
28
Imagine the following scenario. Looking in at my friend’s house, I see him bent over his desk, doing some
drawings and making some calculations. He looks up, and says in a preoccupied tone, ‘Come back later – I’m
making a new style of cloak.’ In such a case, reflection is part of action. Such a conception is indicated at AE B.4
11
How does this help finding a role for choice, and interpreting the grammar of choice? We
have seen that a choice is a corollary of a practical judgement that is intimately linked to an
action. If the judgement itself connects an agent to an act by a relation of necessity for a goal, it
aptly yields a choice that equally connects an agent to an act: the judgement, and the resultant
desire, are then of a piece. Reason and desire take on a unity if we view both practical
necessities and practical desires as centrally relating agents simply to acts. Further, the
derivation of choice from judgement cannot, for Aristotle, be an idle corollary – at least if I am
right to suppose that choice is a link between the rational and sub-rational parts of the soul. The
lower stratum of the soul is responsible for a variety of functions: desire, perception,
imagination, memory, passion – and locomotion.29 If (as DA III.10 emphasizes) it is only
through its relation to desire that intellect can cause motion, this is because it is only through
desire that intellect connects with man’s locomotive capacity. This, for Aristotle, is why thought
without desire must be idle. It is through its connection to choice (or the like) that thought
becomes an aspect of action.
An ancillary point arises from Aristotle’s general philosophy of mind. Within his
hylomorphic account of the soul, the making of a choice possesses matter as well as form: as I
choose, my body is already at work (even if invisibly from outside). Aristotle’s formula for
anger – ‘a certain movement of a body of such and such a kind, or a part of potentiality of it, as a
result of this thing and for the sake of that’ (DA I.1 403a26-7) – is highly generic, and must apply
to choice also. A final choice to do a ‘this’ (a thing that the agent can do just like that, with no
further thought) is itself the motion of an inner lever (cf. the mechanics of III.10 433b19-27): it is
psycho-physical in nature as in effect. Such choosing is the inception of movement.
Yet what should we say of the relation between judgement and action? The thesis ‘The
conclusion is an action’ is condensed, and demands explication. It was always subject to the
qualification that a conclusion may fail to be an action through incapacity or interference: a more
cautious statement is that action follows on the premises when the agent ‘is able and not held
back’ (AE C.3 1147a30-1, cf. DMA 7 701a16).30 How is it that, if nothing interferes, judging
that I should make a cloak already embarks me upon making one? Once my hands are at work
putting it together, I am clearly engaged in the act of making a cloak. Yet judging that I should
do an act sounds nothing like doing it. Here the entry of choice may make a real difference.
Judging that I should make a cloak brings with it, in the right context, choosing to make one.
This may well require giving further thought to the means: ‘If there is to be cloak, there must
necessarily be this first, and if this, this’ (DMA 701a21-2). Such productive thinking starts from
a choice much as practical thinking starts from a wish (cf. DA III.10 433a13-20, AE B.2 1139b14). Strikingly, Aristotle places the former within ‘acting from a starting-point’ (DMA 701a20-1).
The choosing, the calculating, and the manipulating all fall within the action of making a cloak.
1140a10-13, where coming-to-be, and exercising a craft, and reflecting how something may come about, are all
equally things with which each craft is concerned.
29
Here I agree with Whiting (2002: § 4). Against her view, which goes with an unusual reading (2002: 174-5, n.
44) of EN I.13 1103a1-3, that practical reason belongs to the same stratum, cf. EE VII.2 1235b28-9 (cited earlier).
30
Ideally, Aristotle would have distinguished two degrees of interference: one makes the judgement at once idle, so
that no cloak-making even begins; the other interrupts a cloak-making, so that the agent turns out to have been
making a cloak though not to have made one. Interference that is effective and evident must cancel or suspend the
practical conclusion.
12
Perhaps this permits him to view the action as also, though derivatively, taking in the judgement
that is inseparable from the choice.31
If this is right, it remains true that choice and action are more intimately connected than
action and judgement. If the content of this choice is precisely an act of ψ’ing, then choice is
correlative to execution: one and the same act is both chosen, and carried out. This parallelism
makes it apt that the grammar of choosing (‘I choose to ψ’) should be of a kind with the grammar
of doing (‘What I do is to ψ’). An act must be the kind of thing to be carried out, and also to be
chosen, both falling within the action of an agent.32
V : ACTION WITHOUT PROHAIRESIS
While prohairesis is central to Aristotle’s account of action, there are varieties of action that we
would count as intentional but he would not conceive as chosen (in his sense).
One debated case must qualify the relation either of action to choice, or of choice to
deliberation:
It is thought the mark of a braver man to be fearless and undisturbed in sudden alarms than to be so
in those that are foreseen; for it must have proceeded more from a state of character, because less
from preparation; acts that are foreseen may be chosen by calculation and a logos, but sudden actions
<must occur> in accordance with one’s state of character (EN III.8 1117a17-22).
How to supplement the last clause is unclear and debated (what I have supplied is intended to be
neutral): Aristotle may mean that sudden actions are guided by choices that are in character but
unreasoned, or that they are guided by character without choice or reasoning. I take his standard
view of choice to exclude the first, and require the second.33 If so, such spontaneous actions are
intentional but unchosen.
Another kind of case involves deliberation without choice:
The acratic man and the bad man, if he is clever, will reach as a result of his calculation what he sets
before himself, so that he will have deliberated correctly, but he will have got for himself a great evil
(AE B.9 1142b18-20).
Thus the acratic agent, unlike the vicious one, acts contrary to choice (C.4 1148a4-17), even
when he acts after deliberation. Such deliberation is viewed by Aristotle as defective, since it is
31
Only so can Aristotle count phronēsis as at once an intellectual virtue, and a hexis … praktikē (AE B.6 1140b201); cf. the characterization of epistēmē as a hexis apodeiktikē, i.e. a state that issues in proofs (B.3 1139b31-2). Thus
phronēsis is actualized in action. Quite different, and less bold, is the conception in the mid-4th-century (but pseudoPlatonic) Sisyphus, where the goal of deliberation is not acting, but identifying how best to act (387b3-4, 389b2-3).
32
Thus Aristotle identifies the chosen (prohaireton) with the done (prakton, Met. E.1 1025b24).
33
Of course, this passage is always cited by those who prefer to suppose that Aristotelian choice requires not actual
reflection, but an ability to give reasons. On this, see Price (2011: 213 n., 232 n.). Gibson (unpublished) agrees
with me that deliberation can be brisk and truncated (which makes requiring it less implausible), but takes the logos
and logismos that are there contrasted with an ethical hexis to be not deliberation, but the reassuring calculations that
can come of experience (a9-14). (Here he makes much of a suggestion thrown out long ago by John Cooper, 1975:
7 n.) ta exaiphnēs of 1117a22 can then be the objects of rapid deliberation and choice manifesting true courage.
However, this last suggestion conflicts with EN III.2 1111b9-10 and EE II.8 1224a3-4, which exclude choosing on
the spur of the moment (with the same term, exaiphnēs).
13
not trying to identify how to act well. Action must then be initiated by a mental act that falls
short of being a choice, but relates to action much as choices do. Implicit here is a capacity
wider than the ability to choose, as he conceives that, but analogous in its role.34
Such unchosen actions, whether sudden or calculated, fall within the wide class that
Aristotle counts as ‘voluntary’ (hekousios).35 His discussions of these in the EE and EN, though
different, ultimately focus on negative conditions: what is voluntary is neither forced, nor due to
ignorance of what one is concretely doing (EE II.8 1224a9-13, II.9 1225b1-8; EN III.1 1111a224). To speak broadly, actions that we count as intentional will count for Aristotle as hekousia.
He lacks the thought that one and the same action may be differently classified, as intentional or
unintentional, under different descriptions (as when Oedipus knew he was killing an old man, but
not that he was killing his father); much less happily, we must think, he rather envisages a global
assessment of an action by reference to ‘the most important points’ (EN 1111a15-18). One
might be tempted to ascribe to him, just in this context, a recognition that action can be
intentional without being preceded by the forming of an intention. Yet it is more probable that
what he has in mind is of a piece with what he writes elsewhere about the origins of action: he
must envisage a unified account that has a role for a wider class of ‘volitions’ (as we may call
them) that suffice to make a movement an action, and, in the absence of excusing conditions, a
voluntary action.
For generalizing from prohairesis to a wider notion, closer to our intention, Aristotle had a
term in his repertory of which he could have made more, viz. hormē.36 Choice, as he conceives
it, may deserve to be privileged in an ethical context, since it relates action to what he takes to be
the ultimate goal of fully rational human motivation (viz. acting well). Yet within psychological
explanation it only covers part of the ground.
VI : CONCLUSION
Though Aristotle’s focus is narrower than we might prefer, his account of prohairesis has turned
out to be illuminating in two ways. First, it is felicitously that he identifies what one chooses as
to act. A background wish to act well is translated by deliberation into a choice to act in some
concrete way. Acting as I choose, I do what I choose to do; acting as I ought to act, I act as it
befits me to act. An intention that I φ, like an intention that someone else φ, is more precisely an
intention to bring it about (or else let it happen) that I φ. In some cases, I may bring it about that
I φ simply by ψ’ing, where ψ’ing is a way of φ’ing; but in others, I may bring it about that I φ by
taking preliminary measures that have my φ’ing as a consequence. If I intend that I φ, without
being in a position either directly to intend to φ, or simply to let it happen that I φ, I must directly
intend to take whatever preliminary steps are needed; which is also what, in Aristotle, I may
choose to do.
Secondly, the relation between choice and action that I have unearthed in Aristotle is one
elaboration of what several philosophers have recently explored under the label ‘intention in
action’. Just as, on one persuasive account, intending to φ turns into φ’ing intentionally as φ’ing
34
Klaus Corcilius drew my attention to this.
Lesley Brown focused my mind on this.
36
hormē occurs in this role at Met. Δ.5 1015a27, b2; EN I.13 1102b21, X.9 1180a23; EE II.8 1224a18, 22, 33, b8, 9,
12, VIII.1 1247b18-19, 29, 34, 1248b5-6; also often in the MM.
35
14
starts,37 so, as I read Aristotle, choosing to φ can help to constitute φ’ing ‘voluntarily’ (hekōn) as
φ’ing starts. Such choosing can even count as starting to act (as when I start making a cloak in
my head); and it typically continues to infuse its own execution. Choice is action, when all goes
well, not just in commencing it, and setting it going, but (where it calls for continuing control) in
initiating a state of directed attention that sustains it.
In the case (central to Aristotle) where the agent aims at acting well, it is this intimate
relation between choice and action that permits reason to be practical in the double and unified
sense of being exercised for the sake of acting and of issuing in action. Choice is the hinge that
links reasoning for the sake of acting well to acting: it is a corollary of a practical conclusion,
and the beginning of its realization. Within Aristotle’s moral psychology, rational action
centrally involves choice, and it is by analyzing choice that he displays how reason can be
practical.38
Department of Philosophy,
Birkbeck College, London
[email protected]
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38
This has recently been explored, in a series of lectures, by John McDowell.
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16