Aristotle and Plato on Character

Little about Aristotle's chapter on the voluntariness of character (NE iii 5) is uncontroversial.l Some arguments Aristotle deploys are on their face formally invalid; the position he appears to defend has seemed so absufd that commentators have felt obliged to rescue him from it. Thus we find Susan Sauvd Meyer, Randall Curren, and Jean Roberts, amon&others, arguing that despite appearances Aristotle does not believe that we are fully responsible for our characters. I shall argue that Aristotle's position and arguments come into focus only when seen against the background of Plato's !zws. Aristotle's main target in NE iii 5 is Plato's claim that vicious character states, and hence the vicious actions flowing from them, are involuntary. Both Plato and Aristotle assume what I shall call the 'strong link thesis': an act that flows from a character state is voluntary if and only if that character itself is voluntary. Several of Aristotle's arguments, I shall argue, are enthymematic, and require us to supply the strong link thesis as a premise.z If Aristotle holds the strong link thesis, it will be impossible to det-end the very popular reading that has Aristotle endorsing only 'qualified' responsibility fbr character. Although I think whether a given view strikes us as plausible or philosophically defensible is largely irrelevant to the question whether we are justified in attributing that view to a philosopher, I shall argue that the wotlies that have driven previous commentators to defend qualified responsibility are misplaced. In taking Plato's doctrine of the involuntariness of vicious character states to be Aristotle's target, my view differs from some of the most prominent readings of the chapter. Thus Sarah Broadie takes Aristotie to be mainly concerned with arguing against the view that character is innate, while Meyer reads the chapter as focused on the voluntariness of vicious actions.3 Any such strategy will cast the claim that character States are voluntary, and hence states for which we are responsible, as a relatively minor point on which little turns, for Aristotle. The Platonic background, however, explains both the structure and content of many