Randall R. Curren

Aristotle’s Politics offers both a broad diagnosis of the hazards of contemporary populism and a broad characterization of actionable remedies, and it does so in conjunction with an ideal of political societies as properly partnerships in living well, characterized by voluntary cooperation, mutual advantage, and civic friendship. The task of this paper is to explain the diagnosis, remedies, and ideals more fully and to illustrate their currency and value in contemporary political analysis. It addresses Aristotle’s views on demagogues and civic friendship, the nature and circumstances of populism in the U.S., and the Aristotelian remedies that may be helpful in strengthening civic friendship today.

This chapter addresses some basic questions about the cultivation of responsibilist intellectual virtue. What is intellectual virtue? How are specific intellectual virtues defined and how do they contribute to intellectual virtue in general? What are the epistemic goods at which intellectual virtue and virtues aim? What justifies education in epistemic virtue, understood as a state of intellectual character? How should the motivational aspect of epistemic character be understood? How can educators cultivate a devotion to epistemic goods for themselves? How can curricula, methods of instruction, and the evaluation of student learning and schools best support and not undermine the cultivation of intellectual virtue?

This work consists of three connected essays on moral agency and responsibility. The first focuses on the Kantian conception of moral agency, in investigating the origins of the notion that moral responsibility presupposes radical freedom, or what Kant calls the freedom of absolute spontaneity. I argue that the need to postulate radical freedom was created by the problem of evil and by an associated difficulty for moral theory, which I call "the problem of moral license." I also attempt to show that Kant adduced no other plausible reasons for thinking that morality depends on our being radically free. ;The second chapter addresses the question of whether Aristotle held the view that there is no moral responsibility without radical responsibility. I argue that he did not hold this view, and that his apparent depiction of how agents control the development of their characters has a rather different purpose from what is commonly supposed. That purpose, I suggest, is to defend an analysis of moral responsibility on which an agent need not have acted voluntarily in order to be responsible, provided the conduct was negligent. ;The third chapter turns to the modern idea of negligence or fault, and recent attempts by legal theorists to revise the principles of tort liability in such a way as to do without the notion of fault altogether. Working from a broadly Aristotelian conception of moral agency, I reject these attempted reformulations on grounds that they are based on a mistaken conception of the relationships between moral responsibility, causal responsibility, and excuses