Drawing on arguments in Doris (2002, 2022) [Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Character Trouble: Undisciplined Essays on Moral Agency and Personality. Oxford: Oxford University Press], this essay argues that good character is typically an insufficient “bulwark” against misconduct in military organizations, for two reasons: (1) the situational sensitivity of behavior and (2) the relatively small effect sizes associated with personality variables. Additionally, what is known about moral development and education gives limited reason to think (...) organizations are likely to have much success in inculcating reliably good character in their members. Instead, military organizations concerned to reduce misconduct should focus on developing organizational cultures structured by carefully crafted and assiduously enforced moral rules. (shrink)

Drawing on arguments in Doris (2002, 2022) [Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Character Trouble: Undisciplined Essays on Moral Agency and Personality. Oxford: Oxford University Press], this essay argues that good character is typically an insufficient “bulwark” against misconduct in military organizations, for two reasons: (1) the situational sensitivity of behavior and (2) the relatively small effect sizes associated with personality variables. Additionally, what is known about moral development and education gives limited reason to think (...) organizations are likely to have much success in inculcating reliably good character in their members. Instead, military organizations concerned to reduce misconduct should focus on developing organizational cultures structured by carefully crafted and assiduously enforced moral rules. (shrink)

Frank Jackson, Michael Smith, and Philip Pettit contend in their 2000 paper that an argument from supervenience deals a fatal blow to shapeless moral particularism, the view that the moral is shapeless with respect to the natural. A decade has passed since the Canberrans advanced their highly influential supervenience argument. Yet, there has not been any compelling counter-argument against it, as far as I can see. My aim in this paper is to fill in this void and defend SMP against (...) the Canberrans’ supervenience argument. Such being the case, I will firstly re-construct the Canberrans’ supervenience argument in detail and push it as far as it can go. In fact, I will defend it against a number of existing objections respectively from Garfield, Dancy, and McDowell. Next, I will argue, however, that the supervenience argument, despite its initial plausibility, has one major pitfall: it hinges on an overly permissive conception of ‘shape’ such that it does not generate the right kind of moral principles the shapeless moral particularists are concerned to refute. I thus conclude that the seemingly scathing supervenience argument turns out to be toothless against SMP. Although this would not prove SMP to be right, for it might attract criticisms from other fronts, yet, until they come up, SMP, contrary to prevalent conceptions, remains alive and kicking. (shrink)