The unclear, inconsequential, and Aristotelian agency.
White, Michael J.
The Aristotelian conception of human agency and responsibility
locates agency and responsibility in the exercise of practical reason in
deliberation. A characteristic of such deliberation is that it must
pertain to matters that can be decided either one way or the other. Some
texts of Aristotle suggest an interpretation of deliberation that
appears to yield the paradoxical result that agents are most responsible
for (or act most freely with respect to) choices that are least
determined, to the exclusion of other possible choices, by the practical
reasoning issuing in those choices. This essay explores this strand of
thought in Aristotle. It then proceeds to examine the response to the
"paradox" in a middle-Platonist work, the De Fato of
Pseudo-Plutarch, and in the thought of the eminent twentieth-century
neo-Thomist, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange.