David Holiday

Folly is an under-explored vice, despite its common occurrence and close relationship to core aspects of practical rationality and the good life. This paper develops an account of folly as a subspecies of imprudence and distinctive source of wrongdoing, with a special focus on its relational, social or inter-personal aspect. Drawing on Rotenstreich’s historically-based account, folly is defined as a form of practical irrationality resulting from closedness to the world. I expand Rotenstreich’s view and depart from him on two key points. First, I argue that folly should be cleanly differentiated from stupidity. Second, I show that the wrong in folly—i.e. the harms it involves intrinsically, as opposed to as a matter of causal consequence—is partly obscured by Rotenstreich’s exclusive focus on the fool as an isolated individual agent. When, instead, we consider folly as a pathology of interpersonal relations, it reveals itself to be a vice which infects and undermines human relationships of love and care, and thus to be a serious threat to living well or human flourishing in almost all of their forms.

Lisa Tessman’s new work is a re-purposing of her earlier academic monograph on moral failure for popular philosophy. It investigates the experiences of moral dilemma and being burdened with a strict moral duty which is impossible to meet. Tessman aims to show that these experiences are veridical, to explain how they arise in us by grounding them in important features of our nature and psychology, and to convince us that the risk of impossible moral binds is one that we should learn to live with. In all of this, she sees herself as recovering experiences of moral impossibility from modern, analytic ethical theory which operates on an over-intellectualized, rationalistic model of agency that takes such experiences to be illusory, incoherent or otherwise mistaken. I summarize the core arguments of the work, offer some friendly critical commentary, and raise some mild concerns about the project as a work in popular philosophy.

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.