This is a popular rendition of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics for contemporary readers. Brief, understandable pieces with a short practice to integrate the wisdom into your life. No philosophical background necessary.
After a wonderful dinner party, you find yourself curled up in a ball of pain on your bathroom floor. It must have been that delicious, yet slightly undercooked fish. Your host poisoned you!
Was your host's action voluntary or involuntary? It’s a little confusing. On one hand, there was no external force controlling the host's body or decisions. The host was all smiles and cheery as they served you, lacking the tell tale signs of involuntary action: pain and regret during the moment. But on the other hand, she didn’t want to poison you. She didn’t know what she was doing.
Aristotle decides that this case doesn’t fit well with either the voluntary or involuntary categories, so we’re going to have to make a new one- nonvoluntary.
Nonvoluntary actions are ones where you do something, only to find out you were doing something else (that’s when the feeling of regret usually kicks in). It’s a symptom of ignorance about the particulars of the action.
This type of ignorance isn’t always so easily forgivable. Ignorance of particulars that one could and should have been aware of is a case of negligence, not an honest mistake. For example, looking at your phone while driving can create ignorance about the humans crossing the street. Hurting them would be nonvoluntary, but that doesn’t make it immune from blame.
So the ability to move from being a nonvoluntary agent to a voluntary one and reverse is a choice we make. We can educate ourselves about our actions and their consequences, doing the research before deciding to do them.
In other words, it is a virtue to not be dumb.
It’s not enough to just read.
Manifest this wisdom in your life by doing this practice, or it will slip through your fingers.
It takes less than 5 minutes.
Choose well.
Practice:
Think of an action that you regret having taken, but only regretted after the fact
Notice what things you were ignorant of when that action was taken. Write it down and make sure you are accurate.
See what moves you can do to insure you don’t make this type of mistake again
Re: the practice, it seems the crucial question is to identify how you could have noticed your ignorance ahead of time - and thus, what to be paying attention to now.
Of course I’m always struck by how we can even be wrong in this retrospective analysis. “If only I had cooked the fish properly!” the host might say. But in reality, it might have been the provenance of the fish, not its cooking, that led to the poisoning.