Susan Wolf on Character and Agency

Join Susan Wolf, Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Emerita at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a Howison Lecture on Character and Agency.

This lecture rejects a philosophically prominent account that identifies a person’s character with the set of dispositions and traits that reflect and express the individual’s values as being both too narrow and too vague. One’s character may well include features of oneself that one does not endorse or even know about. And endorsing a value and acting to express it may be too shallow to constitute an aspect of one’s character if it is not reflective of or responsive to the exercise of an active intelligence. Changing the way we understand character to incorporate these proposals will also lead to the recognition of an important sense of agency that has less to do with actions and intentions than we are accustomed to think.