Weakness of Will, Commensurability, and the Objects of Deliberation and Desire
David Wiggins
In Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle's Ethics
University of California Press, 1980

"In the light of the examples Aristotle gives in De Motu Animalium, nothing seems more natural than to describe the first premise of a practical syllogism as *pertaining to the good* ... and to describe the second or minor premise as *pertaining to the possible*... Aristotle calls such patterns of reasoning "syllogisms" because of an analogy that interests him between *deductively concluding or asserting* and *coming to a practical conclusion or acting*. He says that the conclusion of a practical syllogizing is an action. What matters for present purposes is that agents can see in the truth of the minor premise a way of ministering to some concern to which the major affords expression, and that their seeing this explains what they do." (WIGGINS-1980b, p. 248)

"He states explicitly at Politics 1283a3 that the very idea of universal commensurability is absurd. And in the Eudemian Ethics he denies that knowledge and money have a common measure (1243b22-23). Again, there are no signs in the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle's supposing that there is a common measure to assess exhaustively the values of the noble, the useful, and the pleasurable.... What he has to maintain is only that, if eudaimonia is to qualify by the formal criteria of autonomy and completeness, then it must be that wherever a man has to act, he can subsume the question at issue under the question of eudaimonia and discern which course of action is better from that point of view: [quoting DA 434a5-10]." (WIGGINS-1980b, p. 256)

"In the definition of self-sufficiency, we need not take 'lacking in nothing' to mean 'lacking in nothing at all that would be found valuable by anybody pursuing whatever course,' only 'lacking in nothing that a man who had chosen the great good of eudaimonia would regard as worth bothering with.'" (WIGGINS-1980b, p. 257)

END