In recent years, much uncertainty and outright scepticism surrounds the notion of character. In the arts—painting, the novel, drama, film—the notion of character has receded into the background. The loss of character is especially conspicuous in those artistic forms in which it traditionally occupied centre-stage: drama, the novel, films. The withdrawal of character from the arts has in fact become a topic of debate in the theory and criticism of the arts. In the arts themselves, the difficulty, if not the (...) impossibility, of attaining character is a common subject. Since ordinary sentiments are readily reflected in the fine arts, it is natural to suspect that character is not held in high regard in everyday life. Even if we take a dim view of the suggestion that the arts mirror ordinary sentiments with little distortion, a decline in the importance of character is evident in other humane disciplines: history is a striking example. Indeed, if we attend to our major social institutions—the family, the courts, the bureaucracy—it would be difficult to point to any in which the question of character is more than a peripheral concern. Indeed, it appears that the appraisal of character is of central concern in modern society only when the individual is in some way beyond the pale: in institutions of punishment, rehabilitation, mental health. (shrink)

THE existence of a common bond is an essential characteristic of fraternal relations. It is a necessary condition of fraternity that the parties to the relation share something. The sense of bond that is a defining feature of fraternity does not lie in the sharing of goods by agents. If we share a hammer, a road, an office, a house, a market, a postman, a view of a lake, there is some common good that we each use, but we need (...) not thereby have anything in common. Though we would be using the same good, our desires, interests, sentiments, and aims may be completely distinct and mutually independent. In these cases, the relation is essentially between an agent and a good, and it is only incidentally that other agents bear the same relation to the good. The bond constitutive of fraternity must involve a share in features that are intrinsic to the agents themselves. (shrink)