Moral Character, Moral Agency and the Genres of the Representation of Others

Abstract

This article is an Address given in San Antonio, Texas where some ways of approaching conversations that highlight people’s moral character in relation to the Problem that harasses them are discussed. Several stories are offered to help reflect on people’s ability to see themselves as worthy of their own respect and the respect of others. Such moral respect not only allows what we might call “moral agency” but also allows us to exercise it more freely. Conversations about people’s “wonderfulness” and conversations that begin with virtues, not problems, are ways to subvert the dominant representations that the problem offers. It is about recovering people’s lives from everything that stripped them of what I will call “their moral character”. Possibly, in tune with what has been called the preferred identity, people prefer to be represented in terms of their moral character, their moral virtues. This also has to be made manifest in what we call counter-documents and a set of therapeutic letters is offered to exemplify this. Perhaps the present article can be seen as a counter document, where the need to rescue the moral virtues of people is made manifest, even before speaking of problems.