Nicomachean Ethics, Book III

Aristotle has spent Books I and II building his account of the good life and the virtues that make it possible. But there is an obvious objection he needs to answer before going further.

Virtues and vices are praised and blamed. We praise a courageous act, we blame a cowardly one. But praise and blame make sense only if the person is responsible for what they did: if the action came from them in some meaningful way, and they could have done otherwise. If someone pushes you, and you knock over a vase, we do not blame you. You did not do it in the relevant sense. The push did.

So before Aristotle can keep going with his account of the virtues, he needs to be clear about when an action belongs to the person who did it. That is the project of Book III, chapters 1 through 5.

His technical distinction is between voluntary and involuntary action. Voluntary action is the kind of action for which we can be praised or blamed. Involuntary action is the kind for which we cannot. The work of these chapters is to say what makes the difference.

An action is voluntary, Aristotle says, when two conditions are met: the action originates in the person (not in some external force), and the person is not ignorant of what they are doing.

Put differently, an action is involuntary if either of two things is true: the action is compelled by some external force, or it is done in ignorance of the relevant circumstances.

These are the two excuses Aristotle recognizes: compulsion and ignorance. Most moral philosophy after Aristotle has accepted some version of this framework, and you can see echoes of it in modern law. We do not prosecute someone for a crime they were physically forced to commit. We do not prosecute someone for an accident they could not have foreseen.

But each of these conditions is more complicated than it first appears, and Aristotle spends most of chapters 1 through 5 working out the complications.

Clear cases of compulsion are easy. If a strong wind blows you off a cliff into someone below, your motion is compelled. You did not do anything, in the morally relevant sense. The wind did.

Harder cases come when the compulsion is partial: you are pressured, but you still make a choice. Aristotle's example involves a ship's captain in a storm who throws cargo overboard to save the ship. Was this voluntary or involuntary? Nobody throws expensive cargo overboard for fun. The captain only did it because the storm threatened the ship. In that sense the action was forced.

Yet nobody actually pushed the captain's arms. He weighed his options and chose. The decision was his, even though he made it under pressure he did not create.

Aristotle's verdict is that this kind of action is voluntary. The captain knew what he was doing, he considered the alternatives, and he chose. The circumstances constrained his options, but the decision was still his. He calls these actions mixed, because they have features of both voluntary and involuntary action, but he insists that they count as voluntary for purposes of responsibility.

The modern parallel is clear. A cashier who hands over money to an armed robber is not simply compelled the way someone blown by wind is compelled. The cashier made a choice. We just think it was an obviously justified one. That is different from saying the choice was not made.

The takeaway is that compulsion, for Aristotle, has to be fairly strict. Pressure, threats, and bad options do not erase responsibility by themselves; they just change what the reasonable response is. True compulsion, the kind that excuses, is when the action does not originate in the agent at all.

Ignorance is the other excuse Aristotle recognizes, but not all ignorance excuses. He distinguishes carefully between two kinds.

Ignorance of the particulars. This is ignorance about the facts of the specific situation. You give your friend a drink that turns out to be poisoned, not knowing it was poisoned. You hit a pedestrian at night who was wearing all black on an unlit road. You sign a document that, unbeknownst to you, transfers your property. In each case you did not know a relevant fact about what you were doing. This kind of ignorance does excuse, on Aristotle's view, at least partly. You did the action involuntarily.

Ignorance of moral principle. This is ignorance about what is right or wrong in general. Someone cheats on a friend and, when confronted, claims they did not know cheating was wrong. Someone tortures an animal and claims they did not know animal cruelty was wrong. This kind of ignorance does not excuse. Aristotle is blunt about it: not knowing what you should have known does not get you off the hook. In fact, being ignorant of what a decent person knows is itself a kind of moral failure.

The distinction matters. The first kind of ignorance is about what is happening in the world; the second is about what is right and wrong. Only the first excuses.

There is one further twist. Aristotle says that ignorance caused by the agent's own state, such as being drunk or enraged, does not excuse either. A drunk driver cannot say "I did not know what I was doing." He did not know because he made himself unable to know. That ignorance is his responsibility, not an exit from it.

The final move in these chapters is Aristotle's account of choice (prohairesis), which is narrower than voluntary action. Not every voluntary action involves choice. A sudden reaction (catching a falling cup, laughing at a joke) is voluntary but not chosen. Choice involves deliberation: weighing options, considering means to ends, arriving at a decision.

Choice, Aristotle says, is deliberated desire. You deliberate about what to do, you arrive at a conclusion, and you desire to act on that conclusion. When you act on that desire, you have chosen.

This matters because character, for Aristotle, is most directly revealed in what we choose, not in what we merely do. Two people might perform the same action, but if one chose it after careful deliberation and the other was carried into it by impulse, their characters are different. Over time, the pattern of our choices shapes who we are.

Here is where Aristotle closes the loop back to Book II. We become just by doing just actions, he said. But now he refines the point: we become just by choosing just actions, reliably, over time. The choices we make are us, in the end. A person's character is the accumulated record of their choices, solidified into a hexis.

This leads to an uncomfortable conclusion that Aristotle does not shy away from. If our choices shape our character, and we are responsible for our choices, then we are responsible for our character. You cannot complain, in middle age, that you are dishonest "by nature." You are dishonest because you have chosen dishonestly for years, and those choices have made you the kind of person who lies. The habits were reversible once. Now they are much harder to change. That does not make you less responsible for them; it makes you more responsible.

This is a bracing view. Aristotle wants to give us more credit for our virtues and more ownership of our vices than we usually give ourselves. The character you have is not something that happened to you. You built it, choice by choice.

Watch this lecture after you have read Book III (chapters 1 through 5) and worked through the material above. It will reinforce Aristotle's account of voluntary action, his treatment of ignorance, and his account of choice.