Many people who perform paradigmatic examples of acts of supererogation claim that they could not have done otherwise. In this paper I will argue that these self-reports from moral exemplars present a challenge to the traditional view of supererogation as involving agential sacrifice. I will argue that the claims made by moral exemplars are plausibly understood as what Bernard Williams calls a ‘practical necessity’. I will then argue that this makes it implausible to view these acts as involving agential sacrifice.

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

This article examines the moral-theoretic implications of a species of moral incapacity which is frequently acknowledged, but nowhere fully explored, in the extant literature. This is the species ‘moral incapacity of vice,’ comprised of those strict limits to intentional action that manifest a weakness or corruption of moral character. Such incapacities demand closer attention, because they block a prominent line of skepticism about the moral incapacities (skepticism resulting partly from theorists’ heretofore exclusive concern with moral incapacities of virtue). A literary (...) example of moral incapacity of vice is analyzed by means of a Thomistic concept of capital vice. The case blocks moral incapacity skepticism, illustrates that moral incapacities of vice share all of the major criterial (i.e., significant and collectively distinctive) features of moral incapacities of virtue, and brings out the significance of such incapacities for our understanding of character, practical reasoning, and agency. (shrink)

Deliberation issues in decision, and so might be taken as a paradigmatic volitional activity. Character, on the other hand, may appear pre-volitional: the dispositions that constitute it provide the background against which decisions are made. Bernard Williams offers an intriguing picture of how the two may be connected via the concept of practical necessities, which are at once constitutive of character and deliverances of deliberation. Necessities are thus the glue binding character and the will, allowing us to take responsibility for (...) our characters. Intriguing though the picture may be, it did not receive a thorough elaboration in Williams’s work. My aim here is to work out and defend what I take to be the most valuable aspect of Williams’s view of agency: its model of the way character and the will can jointly determine agency through mutual constitution. However, I argue that Williams’s attempt to use this model to ground his attack on Kantian morality does not succeed, because the primacy Williams accords to character over the will cannot yield the appropriate kind of normative authority, even from the perspective of the agent. I urge that we retain Williams’s model of the interaction between character and the will, modified to allow the will an authority that is not derived from the necessity of character. (shrink)