Aristotle’s Account of Voluntary Actions and Agent-Based Determinism

Abstract

In Nicomachean Ethics Book III, Aristotle contends that voluntary actions originate within the agent and are “up to the agent” (eph' hautō) rather than determined by any external event. This has led some interpreters to read Aristotle as implicitly rejecting determinism—the view that every event is necessitated by antecedent causes. In this paper, I argue that this reading is not persuasive. Rather, Aristotle’s account of voluntary action is compatible with a form of determinism, namely agent-based determinism, according to which an action is determined by the agent’s own psychological properties, such as desires, deliberation, and character, rather than by any prior external event. Drawing on Chisholm's notion of immanent causation and Daigle's reformulation of agent-based determinism, I show that Aristotle's voluntary agent is best understood not as an uncaused cause but as an agent whose actions are caused by her own psychological constitution—character and reasoning.