fbpx

But there are decisions that have such significance for our lives, and sometimes the lives of others. (EDITH HALL)

But there are decisions that have such significance for our lives, and sometimes the lives of others. (EDITH HALL)

In affluent societies, we are indeed bombarded incessantly with hundreds of choices about what to eat, wear, buy and watch on television. These require little thought because the consequences are ephemeral. But there are decisions that have such significance for our lives, and sometimes the lives of others, that they deserve a serious investment of time and active reflection.

 

When to settle down with a particular man or woman, whether to get married, whether and when to have children, where to live, whether to have an affair or get divorced, or whom to leave money to in a will. Our decisions may relate to people for whom we are responsible. We need to decide what to name our children, what behavioural boundaries to set, what childcare arrangements we need to put in place, and what school they should attend. Some occupations have repeated decision-making locked into their inherent structure: doctors, judges, politicians and even stockbrokers must daily make choices with enormously significant consequences, and they are equipped to do so by being trained in the decision-making procedures specific to their sphere of competence. But most people have no training in basic decision-making techniques at all.

 

One of the most important decisions of Aristotle’s life was taken when he was a teenager. After his parents’ death he was adopted by his brother-in-law, Proxenus, and between them it was decided that the ideal place for this exceptionally intelligent youth was the best university in the world – Plato’s Athenian Academy. The most brilliant student Plato had ever taught, Aristotle was thus enabled to throw himself into every branch of study available, as well as several in which Plato himself had little interest – the natural sciences. Aristotle developed into the first philosopher to describe in practical terms the best way to make a decision, written in a lively, matter-of-fact manner without complicated jargon. The method entails deliberating competently about all alternative courses of action which may or may not conduce to achieving your goals, attempting to anticipate the consequences of each course of action, and then choosing and sticking to one.

 

The Greek word for the whole process of competent deliberation and decision-making is euboulia: the verb ‘to deliberate’, bouleuesthai, is related to Latin words such as ‘volition’ and the English verb ‘to will’. Euboulia designates the ability both to deliberate for one’s self and to be able to recognise good deliberation and rational decisions in others. It therefore includes soliciting advice from well-chosen advisers. The Greek grasp of deliberation was intimately tied up with a sophisticated understanding of government: if even the most ordinary people are to exercise executive power well, they need to be ‘competent deliberators’. The Greek term deliberate is therefore from exactly the same root as the word for the Athenians’ democratic Council.

 

Deliberative skills need time to improve; they begin as self-consciously applied common sense but blossom into what Aristotle calls ‘practical wisdom’ (phronesis) if applied daily to real situations. It is significant that the historical individual whose phronesis Aristotle singles out for praise is Pericles, the near-legendary Athenian statesman who had led Athens for several decades in the mid-fifth century BCE, being voted into office time and time again. Pericles sustained good decision-making with extraordinary consistency, and the Athenians prospered, allowing them to create great artworks including the buildings of the Acropolis and the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. Pericles’ evolution as statesman showed no signs of slowing down as he advanced in practical wisdom: his career was curtailed only by his death from the plague, a classic example of the kind of random bad luck against which Aristotle, well knew that deliberation can prove no defence at all.

 

Education in moral decision-making procedures makes the world a better place for everyone.

 

The young urgently need education because, as Aristotle warns, deliberation can be fiendishly difficult. There are easy circumstances to know right from wrong; the basically decent person will know intuitively a fair way to apportion money or food or opportunity across groups of people. But, Aristotle says, the exact way to perform that right action is ‘a harder task than to know what medical treatment will produce health’. Ethics are far more fluid and complicated even than human physiology. Ever the doctor’s son, Aristotle adds that even in medicine, actually effecting a cure is far trickier than simply knowing information about ‘honey, wine and hellebore, cautery and surgery’.

 

First, however, we have to define deliberation. For Aristotle, deliberation has a very specific sense. It is not about our final ends – a doctor does not deliberate about her intention, which is obviously to produce health in her patient. It is about choosing the best means to achieve our ends. The doctor deliberates about what course of action and treatment will restore the patient’s health. Analogously, we know happiness is our goal, but deliberate about the means of achieving it – the courses of action which are most likely to secure happiness for ourselves, our loved ones, and our fellow citizens.

 

Aristotle acknowledges that some people are too weak to be able to take full responsibility for the things which necessarily rest with themselves. They are unlikely to be able to learn to deliberate well or to implement deliberated policies. But the bottom line is this: if you want to achieve happiness, you must take responsibility for your own actions and indeed failures to act. ‘Of things which it depends on a person to do or not to do, he is himself the cause, and what he is the cause of depends on himself’, Aristotle writes, asserting that we all have the free will to act as good or bad people. The same person ‘clearly commits voluntarily all the acts that he commits purposely. It is clear, then, that both goodness and badness are voluntary.’

 

This is fundamental to our morality: Aristotle goes so far as to say that ‘it is by a man’s purposive choice that we judge his character – that is, not by what he does but what he does it for’. Aristotle has been struck by an example in a tragedy where Pelias was killed by his daughters. This mythical Greek king was old and infirm. The sorceress Medea persuaded the sisters that the liquid in her cauldron had the power to rejuvenate him. She even proved it empirically by an experiment with a ram. The Peliades deliberated, and decided for the best of filial reasons, backed up by apparent scientific evidence, to cut Pelias into joints and put them in the cauldron. He did not survive. But with deliberation, the daughters of Pelias would have considered what private agenda might be driving Medea (she wanted Pelias’ throne for her husband) and would certainly never have taken advice from her.

 

Aristotle recommends founding your goals, which should be tough but achievable and commensurate with your own abilities and resources, on good intentions. Deliberate systematically about the precise course of action which will achieve them. Compare different courses of action and then choose one (Aristotle’s term for this type of choice, prohairesis, means something more like ‘preference’). Then single-mindedly put those actions into effect. That way lies Aristotle’s idea of true, deep, satisfying and lasting happiness. Because it is self-made it can’t be taken away from you except by random bad luck, such as catching the Athenian plague. Even then your achievements prior to catching the plague are likely to be recognised and also mean that you die a happier person than if you had lived an aimless and undeliberated life.

 

 

 

 

Aristotle’s Way

Edith Hall



Facebook

Instagram

Follow Me on Instagram