Stagira and Athens, 384–322 BC

Aristotle

An act is voluntary when its origin is in you and you know what you are doing. Force and ignorance excuse; nothing else does. And since your character is made by what you repeatedly do, you are responsible for that too.

The view

Aristotle did not ask the modern question of whether free will is compatible with determinism; the question had not yet been framed. He asked a practical one, in Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics: when are praise and blame appropriate? His answer distinguishes voluntary acts, which deserve praise or blame, from involuntary ones, which deserve pardon and sometimes pity.

An act is involuntary, he says, if it is done under force or through ignorance. Force means that the origin of the movement is outside you and you contribute nothing, as when a wind carries a ship off course. Ignorance means not knowing the particulars: giving someone a drug you think is medicine when it is poison. Everything else that originates in the agent, done knowingly, is voluntary, and with it Aristotle uses a phrase that echoes through the whole history of this subject: such acts are up to us.

The argument

When the origin of an action is in the agent, it is also up to him whether to do it or not. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III.1, 1110a (our translation)

There are hard cases. A ship's captain in a storm throws the cargo overboard to save the crew. Nobody would choose to do that in itself, yet he chose it in the circumstances, so Aristotle calls such acts "mixed", but more voluntary than not. A man who does harm while drunk acts in ignorance, but he is still to blame, because he was responsible for getting drunk. Sort the cases below.

The last case is the boldest. Someone might say that an unjust person cannot help acting unjustly; that is just how they are. Aristotle replies that they became that way by acting unjustly, again and again, when it was still up to them. States of character are formed by repeated acts, as skill on the lyre is formed by playing. So we are, in part, responsible for our characters too.

Where he meets Dennett

Remarkably closely. Aristotle's account is practical, graded and focused on the conditions that excuse: force, ignorance, and being someone who has not yet formed a character, like a child. Dennett's view keeps all of this. Both think we make ourselves gradually, by what we do, and both think this self-making is enough to ground responsibility without any appeal to uncaused choices. Dennett's comparison between free will and a skill, built by practice and present in degrees, is thoroughly Aristotelian.

Where they part

Scholars disagree about whether Aristotle was a compatibilist, an indeterminist or neither. In On Interpretation he argued that it is not yet true or false that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, and some read this as a commitment to an open future. If so, he wanted more openness than Dennett thought freedom needs. Aristotle also lacked Dennett's evolutionary story: for him, the capacities that make us responsible are part of human nature, fixed by the kind of thing we are, not achievements of natural selection and culture.

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Further reading

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book III, chapters 1–5; translated by Roger Crisp (Cambridge, 2000) or Terence Irwin (Hackett, 3rd edition 2019).
• Susan Sauvé Meyer, Aristotle on Moral Responsibility (Oxford, 2nd edition 2011).
• Aristotle's ethics, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.