We’ve been looking at alleged cases of the quantifier shift fallacy committed by prominent philosophers. We’ve seen that Aquinas and Locke can both be acquitted of the charge. Let’s now look at the common accusation that Aristotle commits the fallacy in the Nicomachean Ethics. Harry Gensler tells us that “Aristotle argued, ‘Every agent acts for an end, so there must be some (one) end for which every agent acts.’” But what does Aristotle actually say? And need it be interpreted the way Gensler interprets it?
The first relevant passage comes at the very beginning of the Ethics, which in the Ross translation reads as follows:
Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.
Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.
Is Aristotle reasoning here the way Gensler supposes? Is he saying something like “Every action aims at some good; therefore there is some one good at which every action aims?” Notice first that, as with the passages from Aquinas and Locke we’ve considered, there is nothing in this passage that forces us, right off the bat, to interpret it as committing a fallacy. Aristotle doesn’t say exactly what Gensler claims he does, and that raises the question of whether there are other ways to read him. And if there is some at least equally plausible alternative reading that does not involve a fallacy, then the reasonable conclusion to draw is that it is that non-fallacious interpretation which captures what Aristotle (who was, after all, a logician) really meant.
So, are there any such alternative readings? There are several. For example, in his book Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: An Introduction, Michael Pakaluk seems to hold that it is a mistake to read Aristotle as giving an argument here in the first place:
We may take him, instead, to be proposing a definition, rather than arguing that there is some particular good at which all things aim. What Aristotle wishes to claim, in effect, is that “good” should be defined as “aimed at.” To be a good is to be a goal (or an “end”)… His introductory lines are designed not to give a grand argument, but to replace talk of goods with talk of goals. (p. 49)
Since there is no argument, there is no fallacy. Aristotle (on Pakaluk’s reading) is really just telling us how he understands “good.” (I assume Pakaluk doesn’t think Aristotle is even arguing for the aptness of this definition, but just stating it.)
Pakaluk proposes a similar reading of a related passage from Book I, Chapter 2 of the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle writes:
If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good.
Pakaluk comments:
We should understand this not as an argument that there is a best thing, but as a definition of the best thing -- of the condition that would suffice to establish that there is a best thing. (p. 51)
In particular, the best thing, for Aristotle (as Pakaluk understands him), would be whatever goal the highest discipline aims at, if there is a highest discipline. And the highest discipline would be the one for the sake of which other disciplines exist but which itself exists for its own sake rather than for the sake of some yet further discipline. But determining whether there is such a discipline requires a separate discussion.
So, that is one alternative reading. Preferable in my view, though, is the reading suggested by David Oderberg in his article “On an Alleged Fallacy in Aristotle.” Oderberg asks us to consider the following argument:
Every material object has some colour.
Therefore, there is some property, namely being coloured, which every material object has.
As Oderberg notes, this argument
does not fallaciously conclude that there is some colour which every material object has. All it does, as it were, is extract the determinable ‘…is coloured’ which is possessed by every (material) thing which has some determinate colour or other, and show how the possession of the determinable is logically entailed by the possession of one or other determinate. (p. 108)
Now, Oderberg says, consider this parallel argument:
Every art and inquiry etc. aims at some good.
Therefore, there is some property, namely the good, at which every art and inquiry etc. aims.
Here too, Oderberg says, we have an argument that commits no fallacy. Rather, “aiming at a good is to goodness as having a colour is to colouredness” (p. 110). The good or goodness “are different terms denoting the same universal determinable whose instances constitute particular or determinate goods” (Ibid.). And this, Oderberg suggests, is the argument Aristotle is giving.
Moreover, there is nothing in Aristotle’s position that entails that realizing the good or goodness involves pursuing only a single end. As Ralph McInerny writes in Ethica Thomistica:
[Aristotle]is not saying that there is some one end, the same one, of all particular actions. Virtuous activity or living humanly well do not signify one thing because there are different kinds of rational activity and thus different kinds of virtue, and our happiness or perfection or ultimate end is constituted, not by some one virtue, but, to the degree this is possible, by them all. (p. 24)
Of course, all of this raises further questions, and Pakaluk, Oderberg, and McInerny address them in the works linked to above. But this much suffices to show that there is good reason not to attribute a quantifier shift fallacy to Aristotle.
