Aristotle (2024) Nicomachean Ethics 3.2

Aristotle (2024). Nicomachean Ethics. Second Edition. Translated With Introduction and Notes By C. D. C. Reeve Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company

 

3.2 Deliberate choice

Now that we have made these determinations about the voluntary and the involuntary, the next task is to discuss deliberate choice; for it seems to belong most properly to virtue and to better distinguish people’s characters than their actions do.

Deliberate choice, then, is apparently something voluntary, although not the same as the voluntary (which extends more broadly); for children and other animals share in the voluntary but not in deliberate choice, and sudden actions are voluntary, we say, but are not in accord with deliberate choice.

Those who say that deliberate choice is appetite, spirit, wish, or some sort of belief do not seem to be correct.195 For deliberate choice is not something shared by non-rational creatures, while appetite and spirit are. Also, a per son who lacks self-control acts from appetite but not from deliberate choice, while a person who has self-control does the reverse, acting from delib erate choice but not from appetite. Also, appetite is contrary to deliberate choice but not to appetite.196 Also, appetite is concerned with the pleasant and the painful, while deliberate choice is concerned neither with the pain ful nor with the pleasant. Still less is deliberate choice spirit; for actions done because of spirit seem least of all to be in accord with deliberate choice.

Then again, it is not wish either, although it appears to be a close relative of it; for there is no deliberate choice of impossible things, and if some one were to say he was deliberately choosing them, he would seem silly. But there is wish for impossible things—for example, immortality.197 There is also wish concerning the sorts of things that could never come about through ourselves—for example, that a certain actor or athlete win a vic tory prize. No one, however, deliberately chooses things like that, but things he thinks can come about through him. Further, wish is more for the end, while deliberate choice is of the things that further the end. We wish to be healthy, for example, but we deliberately choose the things through which we will be healthy. We wish to be happy too, and say so, while it is not fit ting to say that we deliberately choose to be happy; for deliberate choice in general seems to be concerned with what is up to us.

Neither, then, would it seem to be belief; for belief seems to be con cerned with all things and no less concerned with eternal ones and impos sible ones than with ones that are up to us. And beliefs are divided into false and true, not into bad and good, while deliberate choices are more divided into bad and good.