Will (philosophy)
Will, within philosophy, is a faculty of the mind. Will is important as one of the parts of the mind, along with reason and understanding. It is considered central to the field of ethics because of its role in enabling deliberate action.
A recurring question in Western philosophical tradition is about free will—and the related, but more general notion of fate—which asks how the will can truly be free if a person's actions have either natural or divine causes determining them. In turn, this is directly connected to discussions on the nature of freedom and to the problem of evil.
The classical treatment of the ethical importance of will is to be found in the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, in Books III (chapters 1–5), and Book VII (chapters 1–10). These discussions have been a major influence in the development of ethical and legal thinking in Western civilization.
In Book III Aristotle divided actions into three categories instead of two:
It is concerning this third class of actions that there is doubt about whether they should be praised or blamed or condoned in different cases.
Virtue and vice, according to Aristotle, are "up to us". This means that although no one is willingly unhappy, vice by definition always involves actions which were decided upon willingly. Vice comes from bad habits and aiming at the wrong things, not deliberately aiming to be unhappy. The vices then, are voluntary just as the virtues are. He states that people would have to be unconscious not to realize the importance of allowing themselves to live badly, and he dismisses any idea that different people have different innate visions of what is good.
In Book VII, Aristotle discusses self-mastery, or the difference between what people decide to do, and what they actually do. For Aristotle, akrasia, "unrestraint", is distinct from animal-like behavior because it is specific to humans and involves conscious rational thinking about what to do, even though the conclusions of this thinking are not put into practice. When someone behaves in a purely animal-like way, then for better or worse they are not acting based upon any conscious choice.
Aristotle also addresses a few questions raised earlier, on the basis of what he has explained:
Inspired by Islamic philosophers Avicenna and Averroes, Aristotelian philosophy became part of a standard approach to all legal and ethical discussion in Europe by the time of Thomas Aquinas[1] His philosophy can be seen as a synthesis of Aristotle and early Christian doctrine as formulated by Boethius and Augustine of Hippo, although sources such as Maimonides and Plato and the aforementioned Muslim scholars are also cited.
With the use of Scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica makes a structured treatment of the concept of will. A very simple representation of this treatment may look like this:[2]
This is related to the following points on free will:[3]