The Origins of Responsibility

One. Aristotle: Responsibility as Voluntariness

39 one Aristotle: Responsibility as Voluntariness Situating the Voluntary The prevailing and traditional concept of responsibility designates the capacity of a subject to be the author and the cause of its actions. An action is said to depend on the agent in the position of subjectum, of “subject-cause.” Now the notions of authorship, of agency, indeed of subjectivity , are anything but natural; rather, they are the result of a certain construction (what Nietzsche would call a “fiction” or a “lie”), which can be traced historically in a specific genealogy. One finds in Aristotle’s account of responsibility, under the authority of the “voluntary,” the basic construction of this notion of rational agency as the bedrock of what will become the dominant sense of responsibility in the Western tradition. It has often been emphasized that Aristotle does not propose a unified concept of “the will” in his ethics, such as one finds in modern philosophy, for example in Descartes or in Kant. However, as we will see, he does structure his reflection on responsibility through a reliance on the concepts of the voluntary (hekōn, hekousion) and the involuntary (akōn, akousion). These concepts are further determined in terms of decision (prohairesis) and deliberation (bouleusis) that will establish rational agency as the basis for responsibility. What matters to Aristotle is to secure what he repeatedly refers to as what is “within our power” or “up to us” (eph’ hēmin),1 on the basis of agency as that which is the principle (arkhē) of the act, designated by Aristotle as that which is “in us” (en hēmin). Aristotle’s account of responsibility thus lies in the establish- 40 · the origins of responsibility ment of agency as causal efficiency.2 His task in book III of the Nicomachean Ethics3 is to establish such a power, something like an area of mastery, of what would be up to us or dependent upon us. One should thus stress from the outset that his analyses are not merely descriptive, but clearly have a performative scope4 as they seek to construct, establish, and secure the space of the voluntary and of responsibility. Voluntariness and agency, causality, rationality, and understanding will all be mobilized in this definition. One fundamental assumption indeed governs these analyses, namely that responsibility pertains to the voluntary. Aristotle assumes the identification of responsibility with the voluntary. One is considered responsible if one is acting voluntarily (as well as rationally) and one is considered irresponsible if it can be established that the person was not the voluntary cause of their act, or did not understand the particulars of that act. A significant aspect is the method followed: The whole thrust of the argument consists in isolating the space of what is up to us, that is, in distinguishing andseparatingthevoluntaryfromtheinvoluntary.Aristotleseekstoidentify and differentiate the voluntary from the non- or in-voluntary, thus preventing any confusion or overlap between the two. A sphere will be constituted (the voluntary) by distinguishing it from its opposite (the involuntary ), and this sphere will then be said to be pure of any contamination from its other (under the decisive assumption that one finds remarkably stated in the Eudemian Ethics: “it is impossible for the same man to dothesamethingvoluntarilyandinvoluntarilyatthesametimeinrespect of the same” aspect of the situation).5 This is why Aristotle insists that it is amatterforhimofcompletingthetaskofdistinguishingthevoluntaryand the involuntary, thereby allowing for a definition of responsibility, or rather, of imputability.6 The paradox of such an enterprise is that access to the voluntary, to a definition of the voluntary, occurs through an analysis of what constitutes an involuntary act, and that in this process one often getsstuck,asitwere,inundecidableormixedcasesbetweenthevoluntary and involuntary. Aristotle will then have to decide, in order for there to be any responsibility, that in each instance a mixed act is in the final analysis not mixed, but is in fact voluntary. Another key example of such decisions is his distinction between acting by ignorance (di’agnoian) and acting in ignorance (agnoon). This distinction will also allow Aristotle to reduce an apparently involuntary act into a voluntary act, and at the very least to Aristotle: Responsibility as Voluntariness · 41 make a distinction within mixed acts between voluntary and involuntary elements. Responsibility (hence identified with the voluntary) is thus distinguished from irresponsibility (henceforth identified with the involuntary ), and clearly given priority in the Nicomachean Ethics, as Aristotle seeks to establish responsibility as a sphere of control. However...