Deliberation and Practical Reason
David Wiggins
In Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle's Ethics
University of California Press, 1980

"About choice Aristotle remarks at 1111b6-7: 'choice is thought to be most closely bound up with (oikeiotaton) virtue and to discriminate characters better than actions do' .... The only straightforward way to see it as a cardinal or conceptually prominent fact about choice that it accurately or generally distinguishes good from bad character ... is to suppose choice to be a fairly inclusive notion that relates to different specifications of man's *end*. The choices of the bad or self-indulgent man, the mochtheros or akolastos, would seem to be supposed by Aristotle to reveal this man for what he is because they make straightforwardly apparent his *misconceptions of the end*." (WIGGINS-1980a, pp. 222-223) [PSA: the mochtheros and akolastos go wrong in their *commitments*, which are based on their false accounts of highest good achievable in action]

Wiggins distinguishes between two different meanings of the expression 'toward the end': "The first notion, that of a means or instrument or procedure that is causally efficacious in the production of a specific and settled end, has as its clear cases such things as a cloak as a way of covering the body when one is cold, or some drug as a means to alleviate pain. The second notion ... is that of something whose existence counts in itself as the partial or total realization of the end. This is a constituent of the end: cf. Metaphysics 1032b27, Politics 1325b16 and 1338b2-4)." (WIGGINS-1980a, p. 224) [PSA: see also RUSSELL-2009, p. 25]

"He is convinced that the discovery and specification of the end is an intellectual problem, among other things, and belongs to practical wisdom. See 1142b31-33, for instance: 'If excellence in deliberation, euboulia, is one of the traits of men of practical wisdom, we may regard this excellence as correct perception of that which conduces to the end, whereof practical wisdom is a true judgment.' ... The good is the sort of thing which we wish for *because we think it good*, not something we think good because we wish for it." (WIGGINS-1980a, pp. 231)

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