tion. If a person of good character commits a wrongful action, it can be minimized as an accident or lapse of judgement for which the perpetrator does not deserve harsh punishment. A wrongful action is committed in line with a bad character so it cannot be similarly explained away. Bad character suggests that the wrongful action was intentional, thus the person committing the action is more responsible and deserves a severe sentence. Before detailing some key pitfalls of character theory that will inform a more sustained reading of Medea, I would like to briefly recast the play in terms we have established thus far. Fletcher’s focus on “desert” is particularly pertinent. As I showed earlier, critics and scholars have struggled to explain (or simply objected to) the “off-ness” of Medea’s conclusion: her miraculous escape from punishment for unspeakable actions. Fletcher’s language, and the logic of character theory, allows us to critically frame the audience’s discomfort. In its simplest formulation, the play’s ending is unsatisfying to many audience members because they feel Medea deserves punishment. Her escape would not be confounding, or not as confounding, if they understood her to be a “good character.” She is guilty of egregious wrongdoing that, in their interpretation, aligns with her “bad character.” Medea’s avoidance of punishment is inconsistent with her desert, and the play’s conclusion therefore enacts an injustice. For all its intuitive appeal, however, Character Theory is not without its detractors. Ekow Yankah, for example, argues that character is an inappropriate basis by which to gauge desert. For him, Character Theory has an “empirical issue,” which is to say that it relies on criminal actions as evidence of bad character (1033). The problem, he argues, is that past actions are insufficient “empirical evidence” of character. Character is complicated. A person’s actions do not tell us everything we need to know about their character to confidently assign punishment on their basis. Moreover, the constancy of character – Lacey’s “settled disposition” – that character theory assumes, is questionable. There is no clear way to measure how much or even what kind of past actions should factor into the present evaluation of a person’s character. There are no satisfactory guidelines to decide when or under what circumstances past actions lose relevance. Another problem for Character Theory, according to Yankah, are assumptions about character that are based not only on past actions, but also on reductive and derogatory stereotypes (1036). While such biases are not legitimated by character theory, it cannot guarantee that implicit biases will not interfere with judgements about a person’s character. So, for example, the stereotypes that women are overly emotional or that immigrants are lazy may have a determining effect in character judgements of a particular woman or a particular immigrant (1036). In summary, according to Yankah, Character Theory falls short on two main fronts. The first is that the relationship between character and action, 32
33 Publizr Home