What guides my action?
“The origin of action – its efficient, not its final cause – is choice, and that of choice is desire and reasoning with a view to an end. This is why choice cannot exist either without reason and intellect or without a moral state; for good action and its opposite cannot exist without a combination of intellect and character.”
Aristotle
It is a common experience to have to share a cake into pieces. It sometimes happens, depending on their temperament, that one’s mother offers one her piece, so that one can have two pieces. In this situation, one must take a decision on what action to take. A baby, who is often subject to hunger, would tend to accept the offer and take his mother’s piece, leaving her with none while he gets to eat two. However, an older and more mature person would have longer hesitation: why would they deserve the piece more than their mother? Is it just to leave their mother to starvation, while they get more than what they need for a healthy nutrition? In this case, it can happen that the older person would refuse the offer, and let their mother eat her piece of cake. This situation, the dilemma it suggests and most importantly the answer both of the categories of people give to it raise multiple questions. What pushes the baby to take his mother’s piece? What pushes the grown-up to neglect the offer? What is the thought-development behind the grown-up’s hesitation? What differentiates the baby from the grown-up in the fundamental principles that guide their thought-process to take their decision?
All of these questions raise a bigger and more general one: what is the principle of my action? A definition of a principle is what guides. The action is what one accomplishes in the world, it is the me in the world. In The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that the principle of my action, its efficient, is choice. The evidence of this statement is validated by the situation of the cake: the action of accepting or neglecting the mother’s offer depends on the choice or decision that one takes, it is therefore one’s choice which guides the action. For this reason, the question of what the principle of my action is becomes what the principle of my choices is.
He later argues that choice’s efficient is desire and reasoning with a view to an end. René Girard defines desire as an external force, which pushes the subject towards a state or an object. What interest us here is that desire is external, therefore the subject has no choice over his desires, he undergoes them. On the other hand, reasoning is a product of the subject’s soul, he is the one who produces it by making use of his faculty of understanding. We can define reason according to Kant’s definition, which is what tends to act morally. As reason is a product of the subject’s soul, it emerges of the subject’s will, while desire, being an external force, is not relative to his will. There seems to appear a conflict between desire and reasoning, between an external force pushes the subject to a state of pleasure, in which the subject satisfies his desire, and between the subject’s will to make use of his reason to act morally. Aristotle’s statement therefore seems paradoxical: is it possible for choice to be guided by two different and conflictual principles?
In this essay, I will first argue that human nature pushes us to take our choices exclusively based or our desires, I will then argue that as humans, it is our reason which is the principle of our choices, and finally, I will argue that people’s choices are commanded either by their desires or by their reason, which are in an eternal conflict to be the action’s principle.
At first glance, it feels natural to say that it is our desires that command our choices. We tend to act with the aim of satisfying them, in the multitude of shapes that they can take. When they are hungry, people will often seek food to satisfy their desire of hunger, in which case the desire will become a pleasure, or a satisfied desire. What we call ambitions in today’s world, are often disguised mimetic desires, a concept invented by René Girard, which is the desire to be like someone else, obtain someone else’s status, or be in someone else’s situation. Little kids who strive to be footballers are almost always inspired by professional football players that they watch on the television. Advertisements make use of this type of desire to push people into buying what they sell, by representing people’s idols like actors which people admire and desire to be like, using the product they sell, to trick them into thinking that they will obtain their status if they buy the said product. Modern society seems to be built around desires and their satisfaction, and a successful life seems to be one in which the person satisfies all of his desires. As Aristotle argues in The Nicomachean Ethics, people will make use of their intellect to find satisfaction of their desires, it will make them take the most efficient decisions in order to achieve their pleasure. The most efficient way to pleasure is often not moral, as intellect and morality are not relative to each other. For this reason, one will not take morality into account when making a choice if the principle of their choice is strictly their desire. This explains why some people can kill each other in order to steal each other’s resources and riches. One who’s principle of choice is his desire to get rich, will choose stealing his rich neighbour, rather than working hard for several years, as this choice would be a quicker and more efficient method to obtain this pleasure. The state in which one’s choices are strictly guided by his desires is often defined as the state of nature. It is the one in which the little kid is, when he decides to take the piece of cake his mother offers him. His principle of action is the only desire to eat, and his intellect presents the choice of accepting his mother’s piece as the most efficient one in order to satisfy it.
However, is it possible for humans as a specie to survive in a state of nature? Desires are infinite. In the case of natural desires, like hunger and thirst, they appear in cycles: as one has digested his food, he will later crave to eat again, once all the nutrients of the food he ate get consumed by his body. People can also desire the same things: in the case of the share of the cake, two members of the family might desire the same piece of cake, because it might be the only one to have a cherry on top of it. In a more extreme situation, people would have to kill each other in order to obtain a piece of land in which they can grow crops to satisfy their desire of hunger, as it could appear as the most efficient action to claim the possession of said territory. For these reasons there quickly appears conflict between people in this state of nature, which seems to be incompatible with the long-lasting survival of the human species, which is disproven by the fact that human’s have been on Earth for thousands of years.
It seems that it is another principle which guides my action, which can be argued to be morality. Kant argues that what makes people human and separates them from the animals is there use of reason. It is therefore reason that guides humans’ actions, or they would not be considered human anymore. As defined by Kant, morality is applied by the use of reason, therefore it is reason which would guide one’s choices according to this hypothesis. Reason is not immaculate, but rather learnt: as if it was immaculate the baby would have chosen to neglect his mother’s offer to take her piece. We therefore need to find a criterion to guide our reason, for the obtention of the morality of the individual’s actions. Kant offers a strong method to know if a choice is moral or not based on his intentionalist view of morality, which is called the Categoric Imperative. It states that in order to act morally, one must act as if the principle of one’s action were to be erected into a universal law of nature. With this method, we can, for example, judge if lying is moral or not. Would it be a good thing for lying to become a universal law of nature? As creatures who naturally live in societies, this law would be at the disadvantage of our specie’s survival: without the assurance that our neighbour is telling the truth, no human relation would be achievable, and society would be governed by mistrust and chaos. Therefore, lying is an immoral action.
This principle is the one commanding the grown-up’s choice to refuse to take his mother’s piece of cake. He considers it immoral to deprive his mother of the satisfaction of her desire of hunger just for the sake of eating a sweat piece of cake and satisfy his desire of sugar.
Multiple objections can however be expressed regarding the vision according to which one’s choices are strictly guided by their reason. One type of desires contradicts this statement: the natural desires. While it is arguable that mimetic desires might not actually be the principle of our choices, it is evident that natural desires are at some point. Natural desires are necessary for the survival of the individual: one does not survive if he does not satisfy his desire to eat or to drink water. A specific natural desire is necessary for the survival of the human species, which is the sexual desire. If humans do not reproduce, there no longer subsist humans on Earth. The fact that humans have been on Earth for thousands of years prove that these natural desires have been satisfied at some point by some human beings, which means that their choice’s principle has, at some point, been a desire. These desires are satisfied independently of whether they are moral or not: I do not choose to eat because it is moral, but rather because it will satisfy my hunger. Therefore, in these cases, it is not morality who is the principle of the choice.
It is also not only desires are who are the only principle of one’s action: when people donate some money to a homeless person they see on the street, it is not for the satisfaction of a desire: it is rather their reason that tells them it is moral to help out the person in need by giving them some money.
The individual’s principle of choice seems to be divided, within a conflict between his intellect that pushes him to satisfy his desires in the most efficient way, and his reason, that pushes him to act morally. How does a human choose between acting according to his reason or his intellect? As people in the world are constantly in motion, it seems that people do have one, or people would not act at all, unable to make a choice. Two completely opposite movements appeared in Ancient Greece to offer a criterion: the hedonists and the stoicists. The hedonists suggested that people shall seek complete satisfaction of their desires, while the stoicists suggested that one should only act according to his reason and try to minimise his desires. These movements appeared as the two limits of a spectrum of criteria, in which each person’s actions in the world are more or less guided by pleasure, and more or less guided by morality.
In conclusion, it is not only the satisfaction of desires nor morality that guides my actions, but rather my position on the spectrum opposing the two conflictual concepts of morality and pleasure, that serves as a criterion for which principle must guide each of my choices.
