A cting and Feeling in Character: Nicomachean Ethics 3.i

Abstract

There is a prevailing tendency to read the first five chapters of Nicomachean Ethics Book 3, and 3.i in particular, as though they were narrowly, and the latter exclusively, concerned with moral and legal responsibility. At least one unfortunate consequence of this is that the ouk hekousion/akousion distinction tends to be ignored or dismissed as unsatisfactory; another is that inadequate accounts are given of acting under necessity (ananke). In this paper I aim to redress the balance by emphasising what I maintain is another concern of Aristotle's 3.i namely what is involved in acting and feeling in character.' As the opening sentence of 3.i reminds us, our topic is excellence of character or virtue that is that we are students of and virtue is concerned with actions and feelings.2 Book 2 has made some general remarks about the ways in which this is so. We become virtuous by doing virtuous actions (2.i) or rather, by doing actions that are in accordance with virtue or which are called just or temperate (2.iv) and vicious by doing vicious ones. The actions that produce virtue and vice also constitute the sphere of their activity, i.e. virtuous people do virtuous actions and vicious people vicious ones (2.ii). The feelings of pleasure and pain that accompany people's actions should be taken as a sign of their dispositions and, quite generally, virtue is concerned with the feelings, viz. with pleasures and pains (2.iii). Virtue operates in the field of actions and feelings, and to each virtue there correspond two vices, from which we may derive the general idea that, given one person with a virtue and two other people