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1225b]
[1]
Now the
voluntary seems to be the opposite of the involuntary; and acting with
knowledge of either the person acted on or the instrument or the
result (for sometimes the agent knows that it is his father but does
not intend to kill him but to save him—as the Peliads
1 did—or knows that what he is
offering is a drink but offers it as a love-charm or wine, when really
it is hemlock) seems to be the opposite of acting without knowing the
person acted on, the instrument and the nature of the act, through
ignorance and not by accident. But to act through ignorance of the
act, the means and the person acted on is involuntary action.
Therefore the
opposite is voluntary. It follows then that all the things that a man
does not in ignorance, and through his own agency, when it is in his
power not to do them, are voluntary acts, and it is in this that the
voluntary consists; and all the things that he does in ignorance, and
through being in ignorance, he does involuntarily. But since to understand or
know has two meanings, one being to have the knowledge and the other
to use it, a man who has knowledge but is not using it would in one
case be justly described as acting in ignorance but in another case
unjustly— namely, if his non-employment of the knowledge
were due to carelessness. And similarly one would be blamed for not
having the knowledge, if it were something that was easy or necessary
and his not having it is due to carelessness or pleasure or pain.
These points therefore must be added to our definition. Let this,
then, be our mode of definition
2 about the voluntary and involuntary.
Next let us speak about purposive choice,
3 first raising various difficulties about it.
[20]
For one might doubt to which
class it naturally belongs and in what class it ought to be put, and
whether the voluntary and the purposely chosen are different things or
the same thing. And a
view specially put forward from some quarters, which on inquiry may
seem correct, is that purposive choice is one of two things, either
opinion or appetition; for both are seen to accompany it. Now it is evident that it is
not appetition; for in that case it would be either wish or desire or
passion, since nobody wants to get a thing without having experienced
one of those feelings. Now even animals possess passion and desire,
but they do not have purposive choice. And again, beings that possess
both of these often make choices even without passion and desire; and
while they are experiencing these feelings do not make a choice but
hold out. Again, desire and passion are always accompanied by pain,
but we often make a choice even without pain. But moreover purposive choice
is not the same as wish either; for men wish for some things that they
know to be impossible, for instance to be king of all mankind and to
be immortal, but nobody purposively chooses a thing knowing it to be
impossible, nor in general a thing that, though possible, he does not
think in his own power to do or not to do. So that this much is
clear—a thing purposively chosen must necessarily be
something that rests with oneself.