The Ockham Society (Thursday - Week 5, HT26)

Abstract: In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that the perfectly virtuous agent will never experience metemeleia. I argue that this claim is false once the possibility of incommensurable actions is taken seriously. I begin by examining Aristotle’s use of metemeleia throughout the Nicomachean Ethics and the translational difficulty the term presents, given the absence of a precise English equivalent. I argue that, in light of Aristotle’s examples, metemeleia should be understood more broadly than agent-based moral regret. While some scholars have allowed that a virtuous agent may experience regret in cases involving ignorance later corrected, I develop a case that does not depend on ignorance. Instead, I consider situations in which a virtuous agent faces two virtuous but mutually exclusive options and, upon reflection, experiences metemeleia in wishing they had chosen the alternative. I address the objection that a perfectly virtuous agent would not engage in retrospective reflection in a way that generates metemeleia, arguing that Aristotle’s account of virtue requires such agents to be capable of giving good counsel, which itself presupposes reflective engagement with past action. I conclude that this broader interpretation of metemeleia better captures the phenomenology of virtuous choice and is more consistent with Aristotle’s view that virtuous action does not always consist in precisely hitting a mathematical mean.

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