Sarah Stroud

Weakness of Will and Practical Irrationality

Introduction 1. Rational Capacities, or: How to Distinguish Recklessness, Weakness, and Compulsion 2. How is Strength of Will Possible? 3. Akrasia, Collective and Individual 4. Emotions and the Intelligibility of Akratic Action 5. Weakness of Will and Practical Judgement 6. Accidie, Evaluation, and Motivation 7. The Work of the Will 8. Choosing Rationally and Choosing Correctly 9. Prudence and the Temporal Structure of Practical Reasons 10. Practical Irrationality and the Structure of Decision Theory 11. Paradoxical Emotion: On sui generis Emotional Irrationality

Epistemic partiality in friendship

Analytic moral philosophers have been taking a renewed interest in friendship in recent years. They have been especially liable to consider friendship in connection with debates over partiality and impartiality in ethics. Many important styles of ethical theory hold up impartiality and equal treatment—under one or another interpretation—as central moral concepts and ideals. Yet friendship and other close relations between persons seem to involve partiality and differential treatment. We care more about what befalls our friends than about what happens to strangers, and we are more motivated to advance our friends’ interests than those of strangers. We seem even to have special responsibilities toward our friends which we don’t have toward strangers. If friendship necessarily involves such partiality, then there is a tension, at least, between the constitutive elements and dispositions of friendship and those of morality: they seem to pull in opposite directions. Contemporary moral theorists have responded to this tension in a variety of ways. Some have sought to bring the apparent partiality of friendship under the wing of a more fundamental impartiality, thus reconciling friendship and the moral. Others have insisted on the primacy of friendship, and partiality, over impartial moral conceptions—

Moral Overridingness and Moral Theory

I begin by proposing and explicating a plausible articulation of the view that morality is overriding. I then argue that it would be desirable for this thesis to be sustained. However, the prospects for its vindication will depend crucially on which moral theory we adopt. I examine some schematic moral theories in order to bring out which are friendly and which unfriendly to moral overridingness. In light of the reasons to hope that the overridingness thesis can be sustained, theories apparently incompatible with it - I argue that consequentialism is one - have a count against them.