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Reply to Müller: Aristotle on vicious choice

Readers of Aristotle have long been puzzled by the apparent inconsistency between his two main discussions of vice in the Nicomachean Ethics. On the one hand, the Aristotle of Book VII appears to present the vicious person as a ‘principled’ agent who is ‘persuaded’ that vice represents the best way to live (VII.8 1151a13). On the other hand, the Aristotle of Book IX seems to describe the vicious person as a ‘conflicted’ agent who pursues pleasures at the expense of ‘the things that seem good’ to him (IX.4 1166b9). One particularly vivid way of bringing out the inconsistency is to focus on the very different accounts Aristotle gives in the two books of the relationship between the vicious person and the akratic. In Book VII, he emphasizes that ‘akrasia and vice are of different kinds’ (VII.8 1150b35-6). While both the vicious and the akratic ‘pursue bodily pleasures in excess and contrary to right reason’, the vicious person does so because he is ‘persuaded’, whereas the akratic also pursues these pleasures, ‘but not because he is persuaded’ (VII.8 1151a1113). By contrast, in Book IX Aristotle declares that vicious people pursue pleasures rather than the things that seem good to them, ‘as akratic people do’ (IX.4 1166b8). Traditional attempts to resolve the inconsistency have prioritized the Book VII account and sought to weaken or qualify the Book IX account in order to remove its apparent conflicts with Book VII. But none of these attempts has so far met with unqualified success. The starting point for this paper is a radical