Saul Smilansky presents us with a puzzle which, in combination with a small number of premises, is supposed to generate a reversal of Pascal's wager: the wagerer should bet on a secular lifestyle, and reject religion, as the surest way of pleasing God (if God exists). In this article, we argue that the puzzle, once unpacked, isn't particularly puzzling, that the premises aren't true, and that Smilansky's wager is open to both reductio and a reversal of its own.

In Poetics 13, Aristotle claims that the protagonist in the most beautiful tragedies comes to ruin through some kind of ‘failure’—in Greek, ἁμαρτία. There has been notorious disagreement among scholars about the moral responsibility involved in ἁμαρτία. This article defends the old reading of ἁμαρτία as a character flaw, but with an important modification: rather than explaining the hero's weakness as general weakness of will (ἀκρασία), it argues that the tragic hero is blinded by temper (θυμός) or by a pursuit for fine, good and desirable things—that is, by what may be labelled ‘qualified’ weakness of will. The upshot is that ἁμαρτία ends up as being less blameworthy than ‘proper’ ἀκρασία, but still explains why morally outstanding people are unsuitable for the most beautiful tragedies.

Being incoherent is often viewed as a paradigm kind of irrationality. Numerous authors attempt to explain the distinct-seeming failure of incoherence by positing a set of requirements of structural rationality. I argue that the notion of coherence that structural requirements are meant to capture is very slippery, and that intuitive judgments – in particular, a charge of a distinct, blatant kind of irrationality – are very imperfectly correlated with respecting the canon of structural requirements. I outline an alternative strategy for explaining our patterns of normative disapproval, one appealing to feasible dispositions to conform to substantive, non-structural norms. A wide range of paradigmatic cases of incoherence, I will argue, involve manifesting problematic dispositions, dispositions that manifest across a range of cases as blatant-seeming normative failures.

This essay provides a novel argument for impurism, the view that certain non-truth-relevant factors can make a difference to a belief's epistemic standing. I argue that purists, unlike impurists, are forced to claim that certain ‘high-stakes’ cases rationally require agents to be akratic. Akrasia is one of the paradigmatic forms of irrationality. So purists, in virtue of calling akrasia rationally mandatory in a range of cases with no obvious precedent, take on a serious theoretical cost. By focusing on akrasia, and on the nature of the normative judgments involved therein, impurists gain a powerful new way to frame a core challenge for purism. They also gain insight about the way in which impurism is true: my argument motivates the claim that there is moral encroachment in epistemology.

This article has three parts. The first two explore contemporary philosopher Bonnie Kent's important contributions to the role of the weakness of the will in actions of the morally incontinent in Thomas Aquinas treatment of human action. While Kent's treatment gives many important insights, nevertheless, she fails to recognize that the weakness of the will does in fact have role in the actions of the morally incontinent. Kent is correct that, for Aquinas, the passions cause the incontinent act to act as such. She fails, however, to recognize that the role of the passions does not exclude the weakness of the will as a cause, and even a principal cause. The third part takes up the criticisms of Gary Watson to which Kent's remarks were meant as a reply and shows that even with the causative role of the weak will, Aquinas' account does not fall prey to Watson's criticisms.

Many philosophers have thought that human beings do or pursue only what we see as good. These “guise-of-the-good” views face powerful challenges and counterexamples, such as akratic action, in which we do what we ourselves believe we ought not do. I propose a new way for guise-of-the-good views to address this central counterexample by appealing to conflicting beliefs. I then answer concerns that this appeal is insufficiently explanatory, attributes too much conflict, leaves out an essential asymmetry in action against one’s “better” judgment, attributes systematic error about one’s own beliefs, and is too implausible.

Just as the existence of practical akrasia has been treated as important evidence for the existence of our practical agency, the alleged absence of epistemic akrasia—cases in which a believer believes some proposition contrary to her considered judgments about what she has most reason to believe—has recently been marshaled as grounds for skepticism about the existence of similar forms of epistemic agency. In this paper, I defend the existence of epistemic agency against such objections. Rather than argue against the impossibility of epistemic akrasia, I argue that the impossibility of epistemic akrasia is actually compatible with the existence of epistemic agency. The crucial mistake, I argue, is that skeptics about epistemic agency are failing to distinguish carefully between differences in the structure of believing and acting and differences in the structure of normative reasons to believe and normative reasons to act. I show that once these ‘environmental’ differences are properly distinguished, we can see that absence of epistemic akrasia provides no reason to doubt that practical and epistemic agency are on a par with one another.