Aristotle And Aristotle: The Nature Of Free Will And Morality

From the beginning of abstract reasoning, human beings have contemplated and debated the nature of both free will and morality. The extent to which one impacts the other has permeated through the centuries as a philosophical and ethical conundrum. Great thinkers of the past have passed the baton to their successors with new tools and methods to examine both free will and moral responsibility and have molded the current day discussion with a immense, diverse dialogues.

As with so much else in contemporary Western culture, Aristotle was the first to contemplate the origins of virtue and what makes a person good. We understand much about what Aristotle thought about the subject through the translation of the ancient Greek. The Greek word ‘hexis’ which Aristotle uses to denote moral virtue, is an condition of action and describes a state in which something must be actively held. In his ‘Ethics’, Aristotle proposes that virtue or goodness manifests itself in action and that an action is good when one holds himself in a stable equilibrium of the soul, in order to choose the action knowingly and for its own sake. He also proposes that moral

This type of idea evolved greatly and influenced later philosophers and writers. In 1962, Peter Strawson argued that no matter the metaphysical characteristics of determinism and free will, the discussion on the issues would never cease as long as people believed in the power of them. In Robert Kane 's 1985 Free Will and Values he proposes that free choices require great effort because the arguments in favor of and against a given decision are equal and balanced, a theory later named ‘The Liberty of Indifference.’ Recently, contemporary philosophers such as Sam Harris propose that a lack of free will does not constitute a lack of moral judgement or justice for immoral