Appendix: The Psychology of Habits In Chapter 1 I have presented a brief analysis of the psychology of habits in Plato and Aristotle to show the congruity between this psychology and the radical behaviorism of B. F. Skinner. This appendix will explain how passages in Aristotle and Seneca that may seem to give causal force to thoughts do not do so in a sense that conflicts operationally with behaviorism. The appendix will also show that the psychology of habits in St Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica is fundamentally consistent with the thinking of both Aristotle and Skinner. In addition, the appendix examines some especially challenging or significant passages in other writers from Aristotle to Shakespeare, and concludes with a list of pas­ sages that depend on the psychology of habits from a number of writers after Aristotle. As indicated in Chapter 1, Aristotle generally says that our habits cause us to act and our thinking controls our action in the sense of guiding it - a view entirely consistent with Skinner's regarding the relation between thought and action. We choose to aim at a virtuous end in a very limited sense: habituation causes us to love virtue, and hence we think of and want to do good (Nicomachean 1140b, 1143b-Sa; cf. Anscombe 62; Shute 75-8; Hardie 37). Beyond this, choice is concerned with the means to attain our end. Aristotle says that in order to be a true choice, a selection of means must be based on deliberation (1111b-13a). In choice (and hence in deliberation), virtue is a characteristic "guided by right reason," which in turn is "determined by practical wisdom" (1144b; see 1144a-Sa). But reason and wisdom as guides depend on the habituated virtue of sophrosyne (temperance or self-control). For Aristotle this habituated virtue is what "'preserves' our 'practical wisdom,"' and if we lose our virtuous habit our thinking will change accordingly (1140b). This is consistent with Skin­ ner's view that reason and wisdom as guides depend on conditioning. Practical wisdom "deals with what is just, noble, and good for man; and it is doing such things that characterize a man as good. But our ability to perform such actions is in no way enhanced by knowing them, since the virtues are characteristics"- are "acquired by habit," according to Martin Ostwald's explanation of "characteristics" here (1143b). The relation of wisdom to virtue is thus that "virtue makes us aim at the right target, and practical wisdom makes us use the right means" (1144a). Aristotle adds 179 180 Shakespeare's Imagined Persons that although he does not believe virtues are "rational principles," "forms of knowledge," as Socrates did, he thinks virtues are characteristics "united with a rational principle" (1144b). This statement is consistent with the behaviorist view that the way we think about what we do is an integral part of what we do and of our characteristic behavior. In their unity, right reason and virtue operate together: right reason, guided by practical wisdom, deliberates a choice of means for a good end which has been chosen because of a habit of virtue. The causal rela­ tion between practical wisdom and virtuous action is quite evidently that between rules and rule-governed behavior in Skinner's theory. We act virtuously because we have been conditioned to do so, and intentions, rules, and plans function as discriminative stimuli to guide our actions (see Chapter 2). In addition, the operations of reason in Aristotle's account of deliberation are of the same sort as Skinner's "covert operations" in mak­ ing decisions.1 But if this is the way Aristotle views the relation between thought and action, what does he mean when he states specifically that thought is a cause of action? We know that for Aristotle action is controlled by the purpose and the thinking which precedes and accompanies any undertak­ ing (e.g. Joachim 12-16). I have explained that in Skinner's theory, too, intentions, rules, and plans may be said to guide and control behavior even though these thoughts are dependent variables with respect to the person's conditioning. Is this all Aristotle means? For the most part in the Nicomachean Ethics the answer is evidently yes, as I have argued. But in one important passage in the Ethics Aristotle may appear to go beyond this view in taking the position that humans are set in motion by thought and that a thought can necessitate action. I want to show that at bottom this has its counterpart in Skinner's idea that a thought can function as a discriminative stimulus to evoke behavior in a way that may virtually "force" a response (Science and Human Behavior 107-13, esp. 112). Now of course there is a conceptual difference, and the issue is whether there is a significant operational difference. Aristotle argues in the Movement of Animals that the conclusion of a practical syllogism necessitates action (Anscombe 64-6), and the passage in question in the Nicomachean Ethics also uses this argument (1147a-b). First Aristotle states the general form of the practical syllogism. A universal that is a current belief is one premise and "the other involves particular facts which fall within the domain of sense perception." If a particular case falls under the universal rule, "the soul is thereupon bound to affirm the conclusion, and if the premises involve action, the soul is bound to perform this act at once." Thus if we believe as a universal that "Every­ thing sweet ought to be tasted" and we know a particular thing is sweet, theP if we are able to taste we are "bound to act accordingly at once." Appendix 181 Aristotle offers this argument as part of a defense of Socrates's view that if we truly know the right thing to do we will do it, and his concern is to elucidate the conduct of the morally weak person, who seems to know the right thing to do but does not do it. Aristotle continues by analyzing a specific example in which a morally weak person has the universal of practical wisdom that sweets should be avoided, and a contradictory universal, based in strong appetites, that all sweets give pleasure. There is also a factual perception that a particu­ lar thing is sweet, and, crucially, "suppose further that the appetite <for pleasure> happens to be present." The result is that although one univer­ sal tells the person to avoid the sweet thing, "appetite, capable as it is of setting in motion each part of our body, drives" the person to eat the sweet: "Thus it turns out that a morally weak man acts under the influ­ ence of some kind of reasoning and opinion, an opinion which is not intrinsically but only incidentally opposed to right reason; for it is not opinion but appetite that is opposed to right reason" (1147a-b). Aristotle adds that "The final premise, consisting as it does in an opinion about an object perceived by the senses, determines our action." The morally weak person "in the grip of emotion" does not have "active possession" of the universal that the sweet should be avoided, or if the person does think of this universal, it is "not in the sense of knowing it, but in the sense of uttering it as a drunken man may utter verses of Empedocles" (1147b). The comparison with drunkenness is literal, for at the start of this passage Aristotle says that "passions actually cause palpable changes in the body" and that "we must attribute to the morally weak a condition similar to that of men who are asleep, mad, or drunk" (1147a). H. H. Joachim, who holds that Aristotle here "insists that all action results from a fusion of feeling (passion) and thinking," explains what is meant in this specific example as follows. The knowledge overcome is not the universal principle that practical wisdom proposes but the "knowledge of a principle in a particular perceptible embodiment. ... And this knowledge is perverted, or fails ... under the stress of temptation, because the temptation itself enforces a vivid recognition of the percept in question as a case of a different major premiss." Hence the morally weak person cannot carry out his or her "good principle" because the percept is seen as a case of the major premise that sweets give pleasure, and experiencing it in this way "is enforced by" desire (228-9). It seems to me that the paradigm underlying Joachim's explanation is fundamentally congruent with Skinner's ideas about prepotency and about the way thought affects action as a discriminative stimulus. The appetites of the morally weak person are not habituated to self-control, and in the example an appetite is strong. The sweet is a stimulus, and in a state of intense desire the response of thinking that eating sweets gives pleasure 182 Shakespeare's Imagined Persons is strongly reinforced. This thought then acts as a discriminative stimulus for eating the sweet. The thought that indulging in such pleasures is bad will tend not to come to mind because it will not be reinforced when the body is in such a physiological state, and because the competing response of thinking that sweets are pleasurable is so strong. Or if the virtuous universal does come to mind, the response to it is minimal: the person utters the words but under the influence of intense desire would not find it reinforcing even to think about what meaning they have ("uttering it as a drunken man may utter verses of Empedocles"). It may be argued in rebuttal that because Skinner believes the action of eating the sweet may occur without any verbalized thought at all, his view is essentially different from Aristotle's.