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An Aristotelian Account of Human Agency

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Human Agency and Neural Causes

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Abstract

In Metaphysics Θ, Chapter 2, Aristotle provides what is, perhaps, the first systematic distinction between two-way powers and one-way powers.1 As Stephen Makin observes, Aristotle makes ‘two distinctions among active capacities: that between rational and non-rational capacities (1046a36–1046b4), and that between two-way and one-way capacities (1046b4–7)’. Makin, then, observes that Aristotle claims that the relationship between these two capacities is as follows:

  1. [A]

    If a capacity is rational then it is a two-way capacity.

  2. [B]

    If a capacity is non-rational then it is a one-way capacity.2

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Notes

  1. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Q: Clarendon Aristotle Series, trans. & comm. S. Makin, ed. L. Judson (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), 1046a–1048a

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  2. cf. A. Kenny, Will, Freedom and Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), 123–24.

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  4. Cf. H. Steward, A Metaphysics for Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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  5. Cf. A. Kenny, ‘Freedom, spontaneity and indifference’, in Essays on Freedom of Action, ed. T. Honderich (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 90

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  6. A. Kenny, Freewill and Responsibility (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 25.

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  7. As D.-H. Ruben states: ‘Whenever an agent genuinely acts, on balance he does what he wants. But he may not be acting on an appetite, for he may do what he does out of sense of duty, commitment, loyalty, or whatever. He may not desire (in the appetitive sense) to do what he wants’; D.-H. Ruben, Action and Its Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 102.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Indiana Wesleyan University, USA

    J. D. Runyan

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© 2014 Jason Douglas Runyan

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Runyan, J.D. (2014). An Aristotelian Account of Human Agency. In: Human Agency and Neural Causes. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137329493_4

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