Nor yet is it skill in Conjecture: for this operates without conscious calculation, and rapidly, whereas deliberating takes a long time, and there is a proverb that execution should be swift but deliberation slow. [3] Again, Deliberative Excellence is not the same as Quickness of mind,2 which is a form of skill in Conjecture.
Nor yet is Deliberative Excellence any form of Opinion.
But inasmuch as a bad deliberator makes mistakes and a good deliberator deliberates correctly,3 it is clear that Deliberative Excellence is some form of correctness; though it is not correctness of Knowledge, nor of Opinion. Correctness cannot be predicated of Knowledge,4 any more than can error, and correctness of Opinion is truth; and also any matter about which one has an opinion has been settled already; [then again Deliberative Excellence necessarily involves conscious calculation. It remains therefore that Deliberative Excellence is correctness in thinking, for thought has not reached the stage of affirmation;]5 for Opinion has passed beyond the stage of investigation and is a form of affirmation, whereas a man deliberating, whether he deliberates well or badly, is investigating and calculating something. [4]
But Deliberative Excellence is a form of correctness in deliberation [so that we have first to investigate what deliberation is, and what object it deals with].6 However, ‘correctness’ in this connection is ambiguous, and plainly it is not every kind of correctness in deliberation that constitutes Deliberative Excellence. A man of deficient self-restraint or a bad man may as a result of calculation arrive at the object he proposes as the right thing to do, so that he will have deliberated correctly,