A Contemporary Theory of Responsibility: What Aristotle Can Teach us

Abstract

In my thesis, I advance a theory of ethical responsibility based on Aristotle’s discussion of the voluntary in the Nicomachean Ethics. I argue that people are ethically responsible for their actions when they have sufficiently developed the capacity to deliberate and act on decision, in the Aristotelian sense, and as such, can reasonably be held ethically responsible for their voluntary actions. After all, once they have developed the capacity for deliberation and decision, their actions, for the most part, can be said to reflect their relatively stable characters for which they are responsible.