Plato and Kant advance a “Constitutional Model” of the soul, in which reason and passion have different

functional roles in the generation of motivation, as opposed to Hume's “Combat Model” in which they
are portrayed as independent sources of motivation struggling for control. The Constitutional Model
makes it possible to explain what makes an action different from an event. What makes an action
attributable to a person and therefore what makes it an action, is that it issues from the person's
constitution and therefore from the person as a whole, rather than from some force working on or in
the person. This implies an account of what makes an action good: it is chosen in a way that unifies the
person into a constitutional system. Platonic justice and Kant's categorical imperative are shown to be
normative standards for action because they are internal standards of action.

Keywords: action, categorical imperative, combat, constitution, internal standard, justice, Kant,
passion, Plato, reason

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