The Case against Character Reading Response

               After reading The Case against Character by Kwame Anthony Appiah, a strange feeling came up to me. I feel like a virtuous person is the most powerful person in the world, to an extend that they may be too powerful. Since virtue is a character, so every single decision and action that a virtuous person made is virtuous too. In that case, the people surrounded the virtuous person are forced to get along with the virtuous person and support all the decisions he made, because if the people refuse to do so, then that shows that they are vicious.

              As Appiah mentioned in his writing, "people were much less likely to help someone..." (Appiah 405), there are not many virtuous men exist in reality. People always tend to have some minor vices. Therefore in a norm society, the virtuous people are actually pressuring the crowd. The crowd may have to put themselves on a performance or give up their original intention of how to do things. The existence of virtue threatened the freedom of choice. To be "honest", the virtuous men expected too much on the normal people like you and me. They want us to be like them and dislike, disapprove of, despise, and pity those who succeed by wrongful attributions. Yes, it is very contradictory. Since we are not perfect, so we are forced to hate ourselves and rebel our inner thoughts. Although this may sound a little bit crooked, but unfortunately, this is what happening to us in daily life.