Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T23:19:50.918Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Moral Weakness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Donald Evans
Donald Evans
Affiliation:
University College, Cardiff
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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

3 Cooper, Neil, ‘Oughts and Wants’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume XLII, 1968.Google Scholar

4 Cooper, Neil, ‘Second Thoughts on Oughts and Wants’, in Weakness of Will, ed. G. W. Mortimore.Google Scholar

5 Hare, R. M., Freedom and Reason, Chapter 5, ‘Backsliding’.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., p. 67.

7 Ibid., pp. 68 and 72.

8 The Language of Morals, p. 127.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., pp. 146 and 147.

9a Freedom and Reason, pp. 73 and 80.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., p. 84.

11 ‘Moral Weakness’, Philosophical Quarterly, XV, 1965.Google Scholar

12 Theodore Dreiser, The ‘Genius’.

13 Freedom and Reason, pp. 68, 75–77.Google Scholar

14 The Language of Morals, p. 129.Google Scholar

15 Freedom and Reason, pp. 76 and 77.Google Scholar

16 The Language of Morals, Chapter 4.

17 I am indebted to Frank O'Connor for this analysis in ‘The Slave's Son’, Kenyan Review, 1963.Google Scholar

18 Freedom and Reason, pp. 78–82.Google Scholar

19 Freedom and Reason, pp. 78 and 79.Google Scholar

20 Weil, Simone, Notebooks, p. 108.Google Scholar

21 Winch, Peter, ‘Moral Integrity’, in his collection Ethics and Action.Google Scholar

22 Freedom and Reason, p. 83.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., p. 79.

24 The Language of Morals, p. 142Google Scholar

25 Ibid., p. 178.

26 Phillips, D. Z., Inaugural Lecture, ‘Some Limits to Moral Endeavour’.Google Scholar

27 Balzac, Honoré de, Old Goriot.Google Scholar

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