Can Aristotle maintain both 1) a doesn't φ voluntarily if a doesn't know that they're φ-ing and 2) a φs voluntarily if the cause of the relevant bodily movements is a desire of the agent? - ThreadSky

severson.bsky.social • 94 days ago

Can Aristotle maintain both

1) a doesn't φ voluntarily if a doesn't know that they're φ-ing

and

2) a φs voluntarily if the cause of the relevant bodily movements is a desire of the agent?

Comments

enzoreds.bsky.social•94 days ago

Freud says no

One could salvage it by adding something like “Desires can’t cause bodily movements unless they’re known to a”.

severson.bsky.social•94 days ago

I don't think that would help: I can know I'm φ-ing because I want to φ, but not know that in φ-ing I'm also ψ-ing (as in the case of Oedipus who knows he's killing the man but doesn't know he's killing his father). 1) and 2) still conflict as to whether I ψ voluntarily.

robb.doering.ai•94 days ago

I mean, they’re not isomorphic, no. But wouldn’t it be kinda weird if they were? If you have two definitions for a term and you insist on logical purity, then you really have two terms in 99% of real-world cases. IMHO

robb.doering.ai•94 days ago

To this very much Aristotle-noob, these seem more like discriminative heuristics than absolute principles. What would be the point of absolute principles for defining “voluntary”, anyway? It doesn’t feel like it would help with law or ethics, since its origin would be necessarily arbitrary

severson.bsky.social•94 days ago

Here's what I think is the worry:

https://bsky.app/profile/severson.bsky.social/post/3lbzyvu43is2i

mikebenchcapon.bsky.social•94 days ago

I don't see how

lukas.blue•94 days ago

Because some desires are unknown to a?

severson.bsky.social•94 days ago

I don't immediately see how that would help.

lukas.blue•94 days ago

Was my guess at why the two statements don't work together.

severson.bsky.social•94 days ago

The difficulty arises, I think, because 1) requires the possibility that a φs voluntarily but doesn't ψ voluntarily even when a's φ-ing is their ψ-ing whereas 2) requires that whether an action is voluntary is independent of how it is described.

severson.bsky.social•94 days ago

I think he's making the same sort of error that Davidson chides people for if they think intentional actions are a class of actions.

stareaskesis.bsky.social•94 days ago

My first thought was Davidson and deviant causal chains. Seems like a problem to me!

mikebenchcapon.bsky.social•94 days ago

This seemed like the most clear-cut source of counterexamples to me

mikebenchcapon.bsky.social•94 days ago

Because it doesn't require the description-sensitivity of voluntariness; you just need to be involuntarily twitching because you want to go to the loo or whatever

severson.bsky.social•94 days ago

But that's a problem if one's looking for something to be a condition for a movement's being an action. Twitching isn't an action, so the question of whether it's voluntary doesn't arise.

severson.bsky.social•94 days ago

Does the problem of deviant causal chains press so much if one's not working with a model of event-causation? Maybe. In any case it was more the combination of 1) and 2) which worried me, though I agree it's 2 that he should give up.

stareaskesis.bsky.social•94 days ago

I was going to say “it depends what you mean by ‘cause’ in 2” so yeah if you’re that bodily movements need to be caused by desires in a certain way maybe no problem, but hard to specify that way without referring to voluntariness, volition, intention, etc

severson.bsky.social•94 days ago

https://bsky.app/profile/severson.bsky.social/post/3lbzyvu43is2i

danharkin.bsky.social•94 days ago

Does he straightforwardly commit himself to (1) though?

severson.bsky.social•94 days ago

Good. Maybe my formulation is too general then. What I wanted to capture was just the requirement that the agent not be ignorant of any of the circumstances of the action (e.g. what they're acting on) and if the agent is ignorant they act involuntarily b

histphilosophy.bsky.social•94 days ago

He does explicitly mention the case of not knowing you are the agent of an action but says this could only happen to an insane person. So I think it probably wouldn't apply as a constraint in the kinds of cases you are interested in?

severson.bsky.social•94 days ago

I don't think so. All I need for the conflict is his allowing e.g. that Merope voluntarily attacks the man but involuntarily attacks her son because she doesn't know there man is her son.

histphilosophy.bsky.social•94 days ago

Oh I see, I misread your first proposition to put the emphasis on not knowing *they* are acting, like, not knowing that they are the agent of this action.

danharkin.bsky.social•94 days ago

On reflection it still looks like there’s a problem even once we’ve refined (1) to rule out drunk driving etc. My drinking the spiked drink looks like it counts as involuntary by (1) and voluntary by (2).

severson.bsky.social•94 days ago

Exactly. I wondered whether someone might try to defend him by appealing to the distinction between proper and accidental causes (though that's not explicitly in the texts).

danharkin.bsky.social•94 days ago

I like it because it parallels his account of chance, meeting so-and-so in the marketplace.

severson.bsky.social•94 days ago

Indeed. So 2) is given as a principle to secure the voluntariness of mixed. So the task would be too find a principled way of restricting its application so that it didn't deliver that someone drank the spiked drink voluntarily.

danharkin.bsky.social•94 days ago

That was one thought I had: my desire to drink the coffee isn’t the proper cause of my getting drugged. Is this just another way of doing the Davidson stuff about switching off the light though?

severson.bsky.social•94 days ago

You could certainly use the formal conditions for a Primary Reason (that the desire and the belief have the right content) to determine what's required for a proper cause.

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