Allen Speight

Listening to Reason: The Role of Persuasion in Aristotle's Account of Praise, Blame, and the Voluntary

Aristotle connects praise and blame closely to the voluntary, but the question of how his discussion of these terms should be construed more broadly in the context of a theory of responsibility has been much disputed. There are some well-known difficulties with the coherence of Aristotle’s views in this regard: animals and children, for example, are said to be voluntary agents, but are not held to be responsible; moreover, praise and blame seem to be important for what might be thought to be incompatible purposes—on the one hand, for behavioral improvement and correction (a usually prospective concern) and, on the other hand, for assessment of moral responsibility in terms of what an agent merits or deserves for what he or she has done (a retrospective concern). One of Aristotle’s first examples of the use of praise and blame in the Nicomachean Ethics captures some of the difficulty commentators have found in trying to understand his position. In drawing an analogy to illustrate the difference between parts of the soul, Aristotle comments that “in morally strong and morally weak men we praise (epainoumen) the reason that guides them and the rational element of the soul, because it exhorts them to follow the right path and to do what is best” (NE 1102b13–15). There is, he thus claims, an appetitive part of the soul that

The Narrative Shape of Agency: Three Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives

This essay examines three contemporary approaches to narrative: Galen Strawson’s skeptical attack on narrativity and the responses to it in the work of David Velleman and the late Peter Goldie with an eye to the connection between narrative and agency. It argues for the reverse of Gregory Currie’s recent claim that “narrative is the product of agency”: if we examine agency instead as the product of narrative, it’s possible to trace through the use of narrative examples a critique of many assumptions in what Velleman calls the “standard account of agency.”