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Moral Weakness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Donald Evans
Donald Evans
Affiliation:
University College, Cardiff
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Extract

Discussions of moral weakness in recent and even not so recent ethics have generally neglected large areas of the moral life. In some cases, it may be argued, such neglect has been accidental in that the philosopher or philosophers concerned have set out to examine problems thrown up by a class or classes of actions without purporting to present an exhaustive account of moral weakness. In other cases such neglect is pernicious in that if not designed to protect a certain philosophical position it has by the doctrinaire delimitation of the range of examples considered had precisely that effect. This delimitation has often arisen out of unexamined presuppositions as to the nature of moral weakness. They are embodied in the following general framework suggested as an account not of some cases of weakness but of all cases:

In a case of weakness a man does something that he knows or believes he should (ought) not do, or fails to do something that he knows or believes he should do, when the occasion and the opportunity for acting or refraining is present, and when it is in his power, in some significant sense, to act in accordance with his knowledge or belief.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 50 , Issue 193 , July 1975 , pp. 295 - 310
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1975

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References

1 Santas, Gerasimos, ‘Plato's Protagoras and Explanations of Weakness’, Philosophical Review, LXXV, 1966.Google Scholar

2 See also Thalberg, I., ‘Remorse’, Mind, 1963.Google Scholar

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28 Here I am indebted to remarks made by Peter Winch in ‘Moral Integrity’ about the example of Father Sergius.