Tag Archives: moral psychology

being judgmental: imprudent and vicious

Peo­ple seem to like to claim that they aren’t judg­men­tal. Espe­cially the hip, young, urban, lib­eral peo­ple who I encounter reg­u­larly. What’s wrong with being judg­men­tal, any­way? There are at least two aspects to it, I think which maybe get con­flated. On the one hand, some­times the bad­ness of being judg­men­tal gets explained some­thing like

states of character vs. virtues

Ok, one last bit for now on the sit­u­a­tion­ism stuff (con­tin­ued from here, here, and here). I think a main source of con­fu­sion is the dis­tinc­tion between what empir­i­cal claims virtue ethi­cists make, imply, or are com­mit­ted to, and what their nor­ma­tive claims are. Here’s my inter­pre­ta­tion of at least part of the story: Empir­i­cal Claim:

skepticism about moral character

The other day, my buddy Adam over at Sophist­pun­dit wrote about Char­ac­ter. I was not sur­prised that, being an econ­o­mist and some kind of Humean virtue ethi­cist, he thinks that moral­ity mostly con­cerns what kind of peo­ple we are, and that actions are sig­nals to other peo­ple, pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion about what we’re like. Adam claims that

tv violence

Last night, I watched an extremely vio­lent movie, “King­dom of Heaven” (2005, direc­tor Rid­ley Scott). This reminded me of a debate which sur­faces in the media from time to time over vio­lence on tele­vi­sion: whether it should be restricted from minors, whether it should be pro­duced in the first place, whether watch­ing it is bad