Aristotle as Modern Moral Philosopher

Abstract

We may distinguish two very different ways in which Aristotle figures in contemporary Anglo-American moral philosophizing. Some philosophers find in Aristotle an ethical theory that conceptualizes the subject matter of ethics, and the very questions an ethical theory should aim to answer, in ways that are crucially different from those characteristic of modem moral theories. Other philosophers view Aristotle as essentially toiling in the same philosophical fields as the modems, deploying essentially the same concepts and giving analyses of those concepts that can be compared with, and perhaps preferred to, modem analyses, without undue risk of comparing apples and oranges or of changing the subject. The title of Susan Sauve Meyer's Aristotle on Moral Responsibility' already suggests that she belongs to the second camp, and she makes it clear from the beginning of her work that she sees herself as opposing those who hold (Bernard Williams is foremost in her mind) that there is nothing in ethical theory corresponding to the modern notion of moral responsibility. She aims to show, on the contrary, that Aristotle's concerns and aims in his various discussions of voluntariness are precisely those of a theorist of moral (3). Nevertheless in the course of her masterly execution of this project M. takes care to point out that, on her reconstruction, theory of moral lacks at least one feature that is widely, if not universally, thought to belong to moral responsibility: what M. refers to as responsibility for character. There is little to be gained by debating whether this feature, if it is indeed a central feature of most modem accounts of moral responsibility, is essential to the very concept of moral responsibility, or simply a feature of many modem conceptions of it (to use Rawls's distinction); we may be grateful to M. for undertaking to show that Aristotle has a notion bearing a strong family resemblance to that of moral in the modern sense. M. defends her thesis with a cogently-reasoned argument that draws not only on the three ethical treatises in the Aristotelian corpus (she rightly treats the Magna Moralia as a fairly reliable source of Aristotelian thought, th ough probably not by own hand) but also, and importantly, on discussions of efficient causation in theoretical works. On the basis of these texts M.