AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

There have been several attempts to defend the Ethical Narrativity Thesis (ENT), that is, the claim that people ought to develop and live according to a self-narrative because it is essential to living well or flourishing. Existing arguments for the ENT have several weaknesses, some rely on an excessively narrow view of flourishing, one sets the threshold for self-narrative so low that the concept is rendered trivial, others only promote a limited ENT whereby self-narratives enable valuable kinds of emotional experience but don’t influence agency. I put forward a novel argument for the ENT that avoids these weaknesses. I claim that self-narratives provide a powerful and irreplicable means of diachronically stabilising intentions because they are ideally suited to anticipating, constructing, and shaping our perspectives over time. As such, self-narration is a valuable tool for achieving self-governance. My view entails that people who don’t self-narrate are relatively vulnerable to failures of self-governance due to temptation and the cognitive burden of deliberation. Self-governance is a necessary (but insufficient) condition for flourishing so people who self-narrate will, ceteris paribus, flourish more than those who do not.