Abstract

My main thesis is that the exercise of power in many major social institutions affects the power of individuals to take responsibility for their own character. The social institutions I focus on include the family, education, religion, the military, and business. ;I begin, first, by developing a theory of power which identifies three morally relevant aspects of power: the development and possession of human capacities, the exercise of power over others, and the tactics people employ to establish and maintain power over others; and, second, by examining the concept of responsibility for character. Because taking responsibility for one's character requires cultivating preferences for character traits, if exercising power over individuals with respect to dispositional desires is a function of many institutional power relations, then the exercise of institutional power is a major factor governing the power of people to take responsibility for their characters. ;I argue that the common institutional practice of wielding power for the purpose of convincing people that they should want to be a certain kind of person, particularly with regard to psychological habits concerning obedience, independence, and respect, not only affects the capacity of individuals to take responsibility for their characters, but also may produce detrimental effects on both powerful and subordinate parties. I offer, for example, an analysis of Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments to illustrate how commonplace institutional power practices may lead to moral disasters like the Holocaust by affecting attitudes regarding obedience. In addition, I show that a society may best defend itself against this type of moral failure by requiring its social institutions to encourage taking responsibility for character. ;In the last chapter, I explore some implications of my argument that the exercise of institutional power should facilitate, or at least not hinder, the power of individuals to take responsibility for their characters