Summary: | Moral incapacities are the volitional limits to intentional action which hold as a matter of character. Encounters with moral incapacities are infrequent. We generally confront them only when faced with demands or pressures which force us to confront them, such as: those quandaries we call "tests of character"; and the temptations and vices which prevent us from doing what we know we should. However, when we do meet with them, our experiences of moral impossibility have a characteristic and instructive phenomenology. I offer an account of moral incapacities through close attention to these experiences, the forms of thought and speech surrounding moral incapacities, and the accounts of the phenomenon offered by philosophers such as Bernard Williams and Harry Frankfurt. I claim that moral incapacities are real features of the moral psyche; that they are partly constitutive of character; and that they are a primitive (explanatorily and conceptually basic, irreducible) elements of moral psychology. As well as offering this theoretical account of the phenomenon, I explore its connections with various other elements of moral-psychology, and its broader significance for the practice of ethics, value theory and action theory.
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