. Practical Reason. Oxford University Press, 1978. cap. 2, p. 33-45.
(*)From Intention (Basil Blackwell, 1957), pp. 57-63, 65, 70-7, 78-9. Reprinted by
permission of the publishers.
‘PRACTICAL reasoning’, or ‘practical syllogism’, which means the same thing, was one of Aristotle’s best discoveries. But its true character has been obscured. It is commonly supposed to be ordinary reasoning leading to such a conclusion as: ‘I ought to do such-and-such.’ By ‘ordinary reasoning’ I mean the only reasoning ordinarily considered in philosophy: reasoning towards the truth of a proposition, which is supposedly shown to be true by the premisses. Thus: ‘Everyone with money ought to give to a beggar who asks him; this man asking me for money is a beggar; I have money; so I ought to give this man some.’ Here the conclusion is entailed by the premisses. So it is proved by them, unless they are doubtful. Perhaps such premisses never can be certain. Contemplating the accounts given by modern commentators, one might easily wonder why no one has ever pointed out the mince pie syllogism: the peculiarity of this would be that it was about mince pies, and an example would be ‘All mince pies have suet in them—this is a mince pie—therefore etc.’ Certainly ethics is of importance to human beings in a way that mince pies are not; but such importance cannot justify us in speaking of a special sort of reasoning. Everyone takes the practical syllogism to be a proof— granted the premisses and saving their inevitable uncertainty or doubtfulness in application—of a conclusion. This is so whether Aristotle’s own example has been taken:
Dry food suits any human
Such-and-such food is dry
I am human
This is a bit of such-and-such food
yielding the conclusion
This food suits me or whether, adopting a style of treatment suggested by some modern authors, the first premiss is given in an imperative form. We may note that authors always use the term ‘major’ and ‘minor’ of the premisses of practical syllogism: having regard to the definition of these terms, we can see that they have no application to Aristotle’s practical syllogism, though they could be adapted to the imperative form if we assimilate ‘Do!’ to the predicate of a proposition. Consider the following:
Do everything conducive to not having a car crash.
Such-and-such will be conducive to not having a car crash.
Ergo: Do such-and-such
Both this and the Aristotelian example given before would necessitate the conclusion. Someone professing to accept the opening order and the factual premiss in the imperative example must accept its conclusion, just as someone believing the premisses in the categorical example must accept its conclusion. The first example has the advantage of actually being Aristotle’s, apart from the conclusion, but the disadvantage, so far as its being practical is concerned, that though the conclusion is necessitated, nothing seems to follow about doing anything. Many authors have pointed this out, but have usually put it rather vaguely, saying, e.g., that the reasoning does not compel any action; but Aristotle appears to envisage an action as following. The vague accounts that I have mentioned can be given a quite sharp sense. It is obvious that I can decide, on general grounds about colouring and so on, that a certain dress in a shop window would suit me very well, without its following that I can be accused of some kind of inconsistency with what I have decided if I do not thereupon go in and buy it; even if there are no impediments, such as shortage of cash, at all. The syllogism in the imperative form avoids this disadvantage; someone professing to accept the premisses will be inconsistent if, when nothing intervenes to prevent him, he fails to act on the particular order with which the argument ends. But this syllogism suffers from the disadvantage that the first, universal, premiss is an insane one,! which no one could accept for a moment if he thought out what it meant. For there are usually a hundred different and incompatible things conducive to not having a car crash; such as, perhaps, driving into the private gateway immediately on your left and abandoning your car there, and driving into the private gateway immediately on your right and abandoning the car there. The cause of this mischief, though it is not entirely his fault, is Aristotle himself. For he himself distinguished reasoning by subject matter as scientific and practical. ‘Demonstrative’ reasoning was scientific and concerned what is invariable. As if one could not reason about some particular nonnecessary thing that was going to happen except with a view to action! ‘John will drive from Chartres to Paris at an average of sixty m.p.h., he starts around five, Paris is sixty miles from Chartres, therefore he will arrive at about six’—this will not be what Aristotle calls a ‘demonstration’ because, if we ask the question what John will do, that is certainly capable of turning out one way or another. But for all that the reasoning is an argument that something is true. It is not practical reasoning: it has not the form of a calculation what to do, though like any other piece of ‘theoretical’ argument it could play a part in such a calculation. Thus we may accept from Aristotle that practical reasoning is essentially concerned with ‘what is capable of turning out variously’, without thinking that this subject matter is enough to make reasoning about it practical. There is a difference of form between reasoning leading to action and reasoning for the truth of a conclusion. Aristotle however liked to stress the similarity between the kinds of reasoning, saying? that what ‘happens’ is the same in both. There are indeed three types of case. There is the theoretical syllogism and also the idle practical syllogism? which is just a classroom example. In both of these the conclusion is ‘said’ by the mind which infers it. And there is the practical syllogism proper. Here the conclusion is an action whose point is shewn by the premisses, which are now, so to speak, on active service. When Aristotle says that what happens is the same, he seems to mean that it is always the same psychical mechanism by which a conclusion is elicited. He also displays practical syllogisms so as to make them look as parallel as possible to proof syllogisms.
Let us imitate one of his classroom examples, giving it a plausible modern content:
Vitamin X is good for all men over 60
Pigs’ tripes are full of vitamin X
I’m a man over 60
Here’s some pigs’ tripes.
Aristotle seldom states the conclusion of a practical syllogism, and sometimes speaks of it as an action; so we may suppose the man who has been thinking on these lines to take some of the dish that he sees. But there is of course no objection to inventing a form of words by which he accompanies this action, which we may call the conclusion in a verbalized form. We may render it as:
a) So I’ll have some
or (b) So I’d better have some
or (c) So it’d be a good thing for me to have some.
Now certainly no one could be tempted to think of (a) as a proposition entailed by the premisses. But neither are (5) and (c), though at first sight they look roughly similar to the kind of conclusion which commentators usually give:
What’s here is good for me.
But of course in the sense in which this is entailed by the premisses as they intend it to be, this only means: “What’s here is a type of food that is good for me,’ which is far from meaning that I’d better have some. Now the reason why we cannot extract ‘I’d better have some’ from the premisses is not at all that we could not in any case construct premisses which, if assented to, yield this conclusion. For we could, easily. We only need to alter the universal premiss slightly, to:
It is necessary for all men over 60 to eat any food containing Vitamin X that they ever come across
which, with the other premisses would entail the conclusion in the form ‘I’d better have some’ quite satisfactorily. The only objection is that the premiss is insane, as would have been the corresponding variant on Aristotle’s universal premiss:
Every human being needs to eat all the dry food he ever sees.
In short the ‘universality’ of Aristotle’s universal premiss is in the wrong place to yield the conclusion by way of entailment at all. Only negative general premisses can hope to avoid insanity of this sort. Now these, even if accepted as practical premisses, don’t lead to any particular actions (at least, not by themselves or by any formal process) but only to not doing certain things. But what Aristotle meant by practical reasoning certainly included reasoning that led to action, not to omissions. Now a man who goes through such considerations as those about Vitamin X and ends up by taking some of the dish that he sees, saying, e.g., ‘So I suppose I’d better have some’, can certainly be said to be reasoning; on the other hand, it is clear that this is another type of reasoning than reasoning from premisses to a conclusion which they prove. And I think it is even safe to say that (except in, say, doing arithmetic or dancing, i.e. in skills or arts—what Aristotle would call tzyvot) there is no general positive rule of the form ‘Always do X’ or ‘Doing X is always good—required— convenient—, a useful—suitable—etc.—thing’ (where the ‘X’ describes some specific action) which a sane person will accept as a starting-point for reasoning out what to do in a particular case. (Unless, indeed, it is hemmed about by saving clauses like ‘if the circumstances don’t include something that would make it foolish’.) Thus though general considerations, like ‘Vitamin C is good for people’ (which of course is a matter of medical fact) may easily occur to someone who is considering what he is going to eat, considerations of the form ‘Doing such-and-such quite specific things in such-and-such circumstances is always suitable’ are never, if taken strictly, possible at all for a sane person, outside special arts.
But, we may ask, even if we want to follow Aristotle, need we confine the term ‘practical reasoning’ to pieces of practical reasoning which look very parallel to proof-reasonings? For ‘I want a Jersey cow; there are good ones in the Hereford market, so I’ll go there’ would seem to be practical reasoning too. Or ‘If I invite both X and Y, there’ll be a strained atmosphere in view of what X has recently said about Y and how Y feels about it—so I’ll just ask X.’ Or again ‘So-and-so was very pleasant last time we met, so Ill pay him a visit.” Now Aristotle would have remarked that it is mere ‘desire’ in a special sense (én:@vpia) that prompts the action in the last case; the mark of this is that the premiss refers to something merely as pleasant. The point that he is making here is, however, rather alien to us, since we do not make much distinction between one sort of desire and another, and we should say: isn’t it desire in some sense—i.e. wanting—that prompts the action in all the cases? And ‘all cases’, of course, includes ones that have as large an apparatus as one pleases of generalizations about morals, or medicine, or cookery, or methods of stiidy, or methods of getting votes or securing law and order, together with the identification of cases.
This is so, of course, and is a point insisted on by Aristotle himself: the apyn (starting-point) is to d6pextov (the thing wanted). For example, the fact that current school geometry text books all give a faulty proof of the theorem about the base angles of an isosceles triangle will not lead a teacher to discard them or to make a point of disabusing his class, if he does not want to impart only correct geometrical proofs. He will say that it doesn’t matter; the Euclidean proof, Pons Asinorum, is too difficult; in any case Euclid starts (he may say) with the unjustifed assumption that a certain pair of circles will cut; and are you going to suggest worries about the axiom of parallels to school children and try to teach them nonEuclidean geometry? and much else of the sort. All this obscures the essential point, which is that, rightly or wrongly, he does not want to impart only correct geometrical reasoning. It then becomes relevant to ask what he does want to do. Let us suppose that he is reasonably frank and says he wants to keep his job, occupy his time in ‘teaching’, and earn his salary.
But it is misleading to put ‘I want’ into a premiss if we are giving a formal account of practical reasoning. To understand this, we need to realize that not everything that J have described as coming in the range of ‘reasons for acting’ can have a place as a premiss in a practical syllogism. E.g. ‘He killed my father, so I shall kill him’ is not a form of reasoning at all; nor is ‘I admire him so much, I shall sign the petition he is sponsoring.’ The difference is that there is no calculation in these. The conjunction ‘so’ is not necessarily a mark of calculation.
It may be said: ‘if “he was very pleasant … so I shall pay him a visit” can be called reasoning, why not “I admire … so I shall sign’? The answer is that the former is not a piece of reasoning or calculation either, if what it suggests is, e.g., that I am making a return for his pleasantness, have this reason for the kind act of paying a visit; but if the suggestion is: ‘So it will probably be pleasant to see him again, so J shall pay him a visit,’ then it is; and of course it is only under this aspect that ‘desire’ in the restricted sense (ez1@upia) is said to prompt the action. And similarly: ‘I admire … and the best way to express this will be to sign, so I shall sign . . .” is a case of calculating, and if that is the thought we can once again speak of practical reasoning. Of course ‘he was pleasant… How can I make a return? . . . I will visit him’ can occur and so this case assume the form of a calculation. Here a return, under that description, becomes the object of wish; but what is the meaning of ‘a return’? The primitive, spontaneous, form lies behind the formation of the concept ‘return’, which once formed can be made the object of wish; but in the primitive, spontaneous, case the form is ‘he was nice to me—I will visit him’; and similarly with revenge, though once the concept ‘revenge’ exists it can be made the object, as with Hamlet. We must always remember that an object is not what what is aimed at is; the description under which it is aimed at is that under which it is called the object.
Then ‘I want this, so I’ll do it’ is not a form of practical reasoning either. The role of ‘wanting’ in the practical syllogism is quite different from that of a premiss. It is that whatever is described in the proposition that is the starting-point of the argument must be wanted in order for the reasoning to lead to any action. Then the form ‘I want a Jersey cow, they have good ones in the Hereford market, so [ll go there’ was formally misconceived: the practical reasoning should just be given in the form “They have Jersey cows in the Hereford market, so Ill go there.’ Similarly “Dry food’ (whatever Aristotle meant by that; it sounds an odd dietary theory) ‘suits anyone etc., so I’ll have some of this’ is a piece of reasoning which will go on only in someone who wants to eat suitable food. That is to say, it will at any rate terminate in the conclusion only for someone who wants to eat suitable food. Someone free of any such wish might indeed calculate or reason up to the conclusion, but leave that out, or change it to—‘So eating this would be a good idea (if I wanted to eat suitable food).’ Roughly speaking we can say that the reasoning leading up to an action would enable us to infer what the man so reasoning wanted—e.g. that he probably wanted to see, buy, or steal a Jersey cow.
There is a contrast between the two propositions ‘They have some good Jerseys in the Hereford market’ and ‘Dry food suits any man’, supposing that they both occur as practical premisses, i.e. that the man who uses the one sets off for Hereford, and the man who uses the other takes a bit of the dish that he sees, believing it to be a bit of some kind of dry food. In the first case, there can arise the question “What do:you want a Jersey cow for?’ but the question “What do you want suitable food for?’ means, if anything, ‘Do give up thinking about food as suitable or otherwise’—as said, e.g., by someone who prefers people merely to enjoy their food or considers the man hypochondriac.
Are there any further restrictions, besides the ones we have mentioned, on possible objects of wanting, when the idea of the thing that is (in fact) wanted is expressed in the first premiss of a practical syllogism? There are, we may say, no further absolute restrictions, but there are some relative ones. For, as I have remarked, if ‘There are good Jerseys in the Hereford market’ is used as a premiss, then it can be asked “What do you want a Jersey for?’ Let the answer be: ‘A Jersey would suit my needs well’—and it is in fact this or a form of this that Aristotle would accept as first premiss: the reasoning in his chosen form would run: ‘(1) Any farmer with a farm like mine could do with a cow of such-and-such qualities (2) e.g. a Jersey.’ Now there is no room for a further question “What do you want “what you could do with” for?’ That is to say, the premiss now given has characterized the thing wanted as desirable.
But is not anything wantable, or at least any perhaps attainable thing? It will be instructive to anyone who thinks this to approach someone and say: ‘I want a saucer of mud’ or ‘I want a twig of mountain ash.’ He is likely to be asked what for; to which let him reply that he does not want it for anything, he just wants it. It is likely that the other will then perceive that a philosophical example is all that is in question, and will pursue the matter no further; but supposing that he did not realize this, and yet did not dismiss our man as a dull babbling loon, would he not try to find out in what aspect the object desired is desirable? Does it serve as a symbol? Is there something delightful about it? Does the man want to have something to call his own, and no more? Now if the reply is: ‘Philosophers have taught that anything can be an object of desire; so there can be no need for me to characterize these objects as somehow desirable; it merely so happens that I want them,” then this is fair nonsense.
But cannot a man try fo get anything gettable? He can certainly go after objects that he sees, fetch them, and keep them near him; perhaps he then vigorously protects them from removal. But then, this is already beginning to make sense: these are his possessions, he wanted to own them; he may be idiotic, but his ‘wanting’ is recognizable as such. So he can say perhaps ‘I want a saucer of mud.’ Now saying ‘I want’ is often a way to be given something; so when out of the blue someone says ‘I want a pin’ and denies wanting it for anything, let us suppose we give it him and see what he does with it. He takes it, let us say, he smiles and says ‘Thank you. My want is gratified’—but what does he do with the pin? If he puts it down and forgets about it, in what sense was it true to say that he wanted a pin? He used these words, the effect of which was that he was given one; but what reason have we to say he wanted a pin rather than: to see if we would take the trouble to give him one?
It is not a mere matter of what is usual in the way of wants and what is not. It is not at all clear what it meant to say: this man simply wanted a pin. Of course, if he is careful always to carry the pin in his hand thereafter, or at least for a time, we may perhaps say: it seems he really wanted that pin. Then, perhaps, the answer to ‘What do you want it for?’ may be ‘to carry it about with me’, as a man may want a stick. But here again there is further characterization: ‘I don’t feel comfortable without it; it is pleasant to have one’ and so on. To say ‘I merely want this’ without any characterization is to deprive the word of sense; if he insists on ‘having’ the thing, we want to know what ‘having’ amounts to.
Then Aristotle’s terms: ‘should’, ‘suits’, ‘pleasant’ are characterizations of what they apply to as desirable. Such a characterization has the consequence that no further questions ‘what for?’ relating to the characteristic so occurring in a premiss require any answer. We have seen that at least sometimes a description of an object wanted is subject to such a question, i.e. such a question about the description does require an answer. This, then, will by why Aristotle’s forms of the practical syllogism give us such first premisses.
Aristotle gives us a further practical syllogism when he remaiks ‘a man may know that light meats are digestible and wholesome but not know which meats are light’.+ Here the description ‘digestible and wholesome’ might seem not to be a pure desirability-characterization. But since wholesome means good for the health, and health is by definition the good general state of the physical organism, the characterization is adequate for a proper first premiss and does not need to be eked out by, say, ‘health is a human good’ (a tautology).
Let us now consider an actual case where a desirability-characterization gives a final answer to the series of ‘What for?’ questions that arise about an action. In the present state of philosophy, it seems necessary to choose an example which is not obscured by the fact that moral approbation on the part of the writer or reader is called into play; for such approbation is in fact irrelevant to the logical features of practical reasoning; but if it is evoked, it may seem to play a significant part. The Nazis, being pretty well universally execrated, seem to provide us with suitable material. Let us suppose some Nazis caught in a trap in which they are sure to be killed. They have a compound full of Jewish children near them. One of them selects a site and starts setting up a mortar. Why this site?—Any site with such-and-such characteristics will do, and this has them. Why set up the mortar?—It is the best way of killing off the Jewish children. Why kill off the Jewish children?—It befits a Nazi, if he must die, to spend his last hour exterminating Jews. (I am a Nazi, this is my last hour, here are some Jews.) Here we have arrived at a desirability-characterization which makes an end of the questions “What for?”
Aristotle would seem to have held that every action done by a rational agent was capable of having its grounds set forth up to a premiss containing a desirability-characterization; and as we have seen, there is a reasonable ground for this view, wherever there is a calculation of means to ends, or of ways of doing what one wants to do. Of course ‘fun’ is a desirabilitycharacterization too, or ‘pleasant’: ‘Such-and-such a kind of thing is pleasant’ is one of the possible first premisses. But cannot pleasure be taken in anything? It all seems to depend on how the agent feels about it! But can it be taken in anything? Imagine saying ‘I want a pin’ and when asked why, saying ‘For fun’; or ‘Because of the pleasure of it.’ One would be asked to give an account making it at least dimly plausible that there was a pleasure here. Hobbes* believed, perhaps wrongly, that there could be no such thing as pleasure in mere cruelty, simply in another’s suffering; but he was not _so wrong as we are likely to think. He was wrong in suggesting that cruelty had to have an end, but it does have to have a point. To depict this pleasure, people evoke notions of power, or perhaps of getting one’s own back on the world, or perhaps of sexual excitement. No one needs to surround the pleasures of food and drink with such explanations.
Aristotle’s specifications for the action of a rational agent do not cover the case of ‘I just did, for no particular reason.’ But where this answer is genuine, there is no calculation, and therefore no intermediate premisses (like ‘Any site with such-and-such characteristics will be a suitable one for setting up my mortar,’ and “This is the best way to kill off the children’) about which to press the question ‘What for?’ So we may note, as we have done, that this sort of action ‘for no particular reason’ exists, and that here of course there is no desirability-characterization, but that does not show that the demand for a desirability-characterization, wherever there is a purpose at all, is wrong.
With ‘It befits a Nazi, if he must die, to spend his last hour exterminating Jews’ we have then reached a terminus in enquiring into that particular order of reasons to which Aristotle gave the name ‘practical’. Or again: we have reached the prime starting-point and can look no further. (The question ‘Why be a Nazi?’ is not a continuation of this series; it addresses itself to one of the particular premisses.) Any premiss, if it really works as a first premiss in a bit of ‘practical reasoning’, contains a description of something wanted; but with the intermediary premisses, the question “What do you want that for?’ arises—until at last we reach the desirabilitycharacterization, about which ‘What do you want that for?’ does not arise, or if it is asked has not the same point, as we saw in the ‘suitable food’ example.
But in saying this, I do not at all mean to suggest that there is no such thing as taking exception to, or arguing against, the first premiss, or its being made the first premiss. Nor am I thinking of moral dissent from it; I prefer to leave that out of account. But there are other ways of taking exception to, or dissenting from, it. The first is to hold the premiss false; as a dietician might hold false Aristotle’s views on dry food. It does indeed befit a Nazi to exterminate Jews, the objector may say, but there is a Nazi sacrament of dying which is what really befits a Nazi if he is going to die, and has time for it. Or again the objector may deny that it befits a Nazi as such to exterminate Jews at all. However, both these denials would be incorrect, so we may pass quickly onto other forms of demurrer. All of these admit the truth of the proposition, and all but one oppose the desire of what it mentions, namely to do what befits a Nazi in the hour of death. The one that does not oppose it says: ‘Yes, that befits a Nazi, but so equally does such-and-such: why not do something falling under this description instead, namely . . .’ Another says: “To be sure but at this moment I lose all interest in doing what befits a Nazi.’ And yet another says “While that does indeed befit’a Nazi, it is not quite necessary for him to do it. Nazism does not always require a man to strain to the utmost, it is not as inhuman as that: no, it is quite compatible with being a good Nazi to give yourself over to soft and tender thoughts of your home, your family, and your friends, to sing our songs and to drink the healths of those we love.’ If any of these considerations work on him, the particular practical syllogism of our original Nazi fails, though not on account of any falsehood in the premiss, even according to him, nor on account of any fault in his practical calculation.
A (formal) ethical argument against the Nazi might perhaps oppose the notion of ‘What a man ought to do’¢ to the Nazi’s original premiss; setting up a position from which it followed incidentally that it did not befit a man to be a Nazi since a man ought not to do what befits a Nazi. Of course it is merely academic to imagine this; if the man with the moral objection were clever he would adopt one of the three last-mentioned methods of opposing the hero, of which the first one would very likely be the best. But the following (vague) question is often asked in one form or another: if desirability-characterizations are required in the end for purposive action, then must not the ones which relate to human good as such (in contrast with the good of film stars or shopkeepers) be in some obscure way compulsive, if believed? So someone who gets these right must be good; or at least (logically) must take a course within a certain permitted range or be ashamed. Some such idea too lies at the back of the notion that the practical syllogism it ethical.
‘Evil be thou my good’ is often thought to be senseless in some way. Now all that concerns us here is that “What’s the good of it?’ is something that can be asked until a desirability-characterization has been reached and made intelligible. If then the answer to this question at some stage is “The good of it is that it’s bad,’ this need not be unintelligible; one can go on to say ‘And what is the good of its being bad?’ to which the answer might be condemnation of good as impotent, slavish, and inglorious. Then the good of making evil my good is my intact libery in the unsubmissiveness of my will. Bonum est multiplex: good is multiform, and all that is required for our concept of ‘wanting’ is that a man should. see what he wants under the aspect of some good. A collection of bits of bone three inches long, if it is a man’s object, is something we want to hear the praise of before we can understand it as an object; it would be affectation to say ‘One can want anything and I happen to want this,’ and in fact a collector does not talk like that; no one talks like that except in irritation and to make an end of tedious questioning. But when a man aims at health or pleasure, then the enquiry “What’s the good of it?’ is not a sensible one. As for reasons against a man’s making one of them his principal aim; and whether there are orders of human goods, e.g., whether some are greater than others, and whether if this is so a man need ever prefer the greater to the less,? and on pain of what; this question would belong to ethics, if there is such a science. All that I am concerned to argue here is that the fact that some desirability-characterization is required does not have the least tendency to show that any is endowed with some kind of necessity in relation to wanting. But it may still be true that the man who says ‘Evil be thou my good’ in the way that we described is committing errors of thought; this question belongs to ethics.
The conceptual connection between ‘wanting’ (in the sense which we have isolated, for of course we are not speaking of the ‘I want’ of a child who screams for something) and ‘good’ can be compared to the conceptual connection between ‘judgement’ and ‘truth’. Truth is the object of judgement, and good the object of wanting; it does not follow from this either that everything judged must be true, or that everything wanted must be good. But there is a certain contrast between these pairs of concepts too. For you cannot explain truth without introducing as its subject intellect, or judgement, or propositions, in some relation of which to the things known or judged truth consists; ‘truth’ is ascribed to what has the relation, not to the things. With ‘good’ and ‘wanting’ it is the other way round; as we have seen, an account of ‘wanting’ introduces good as its object, and goodness of one sort or another is ascribed primarily to the objects, not to the wanting: one wants a good kettle, but has a true idea of a kettle (as opposed to wanting a kettle well, or having an idea of a true kettle). Goodness is ascribed to wanting in virtue of the goodness (not the actualization) of what is wanted; whereas truth is ascribed immediately to judgements, and in virtue of what actually is the case. But again, the notion of ‘good’ that has to be introduced in an account of wanting is not that of what is really good but of what the agent conceives to be good; what the agent wants would have to be characterizable as good by him, if we may suppose him not to be impeded by inarticulateness. Whereas when we are explaining truth as a predicate of judgements, propositions, or thoughts, we have to speak of a relation to what is really so, not just of what seems so to the judging mind. But on the other hand again, the good (perhaps falsely) conceived by the agent to characterize the thing must really be one of the many forms of good.
It will have become clear that the practical syllogism as such is not an ethical topic. It will be of interest to an ethicist, perhaps, if he takes the rather unconvincing line that a good man is by definition just one who aims wisely at good ends. I call this unconvincing because human goodness suggests virtues among other things, and one does not think of choosing means to ends as obviously the whole of courage, temperance, honesty, and so on. So what can the practical syllogism have to do with ethics? It can only come into ethical studies if a correct philosophical psychology is requisite for a philosophical system of ethics: a view which IJ believe I should maintain if I thought of trying to construct such a system; but which J believe is not generally current. J am not saying that there cannot be any such thing as moral general premisses such as ‘People have a duty of paying their employees promptly,’ or Huckleberry Finn’s conviction, which he failed to make his premiss: “White boys ought to give runaway slaves up’; obviously there can, but it is clear that such general premisses will only occur as premisses of practical reasoning in people who want to do their duty.® The point is very obvious, but has been obscured by the conception of the practical syllogism as of its nature ethical, and thus as a proof about what one ought to do, which somehow naturally culminates in action.
Of course ‘I ought to do this, so Ill do it’ is not a piece of practical reasoning any more than ‘This is nice, so I’ll have some’ is. The mark of practical reasoning is that the thing wanted is at a distance from the immediate action, and the immediate action is calculated as the way of getting or doing or securing the thing wanted. Now it may be at a distance in various ways. For example, ‘resting’ is merely a wider description of what I am perhaps doing in lying on my bed; and acts done to fulfil moral laws will generally be related to positive precepts in this way; whereas getting in the good government is remote in time from the act of pumping, and the replenishment of the house water-supply, while very little distant in time, is at some spatial distance from the act of pumping.
1 No author, of course, has proposed this syllogism. I am indebted for the idea of it, however, to a passage in Mr. R. M. Hare’s book, The Language of Morals, p. 35.
2 De Motu Animalium VII.
3 Ethica Nicomachea, 11472 27-8.
4 Ethica Nicomachea, 1141° 18.
5 Leviathan, Part I, Chap. VI.
6 But is it not perfectly possible to say: ‘At this moment J lose all interest in doing what befits a man”? If Aristotle thought otherwise, he was surely wrong. I suspect that he thought a man could not lack this interest except under the influence of inordinate passion or though ‘boorishness’ (ayporxia), i.e. insensibility.
7 Following Hume, though without his animus, I of course deny that this preference can be as such ‘required by reason’, in any sense.
8 It is worth remarking that the concepts of ‘duty’ and ‘obligation’, and what is now called the ‘moral’ sense of ‘ought’, are survivals from a /aw conception of ethics. The modern sense of ‘moral’ is itself a late derivative from these survivals. None of these notions occur in Aristotle. The idea that actions which are necessary if one is to conform to justice and the other virtues are requirements of divine law was found among the Stoics, and became generally current through Christianity, whose ethical notions come from the Torah.
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