In a critique of Stevens's "sometimes eccentric" jurisprudence, Robert Nagel of the University of Colorado Law School described Stevens as a man with an "ambitious moral agenda" who often disregarded established legal doctrine in what could be viewed as the "overconfident imposition of highly debatable personal preferences".
Just as the "rarity response" appears to make concessions regarding the ambitions of its moral psychology, a more empirically ambitious moral psychology may require concessions regarding the normative elements of the virtue ethics tradition.
Certainly, most of the rest of the cast — which includes Patrick Page as a boyish Henry VIII, the talented Jeremy Strong as an ambitious moral-chameleon and the newcomer Hannah Cabell as More's devoted, scholarly daughter — doesn't give Mr. Langella much of a run for the limelight.
Moral Minds is full of fascinating reports on psychological experiments, few of which offer any obvious support for Hauser's ambitious claims about moral grammar.
Moss is drawn to intelligent oddballs, characters who are deeply moral, ambitious, and willing to be perceived as uptight or difficult in order to get what they want.
If you are a woman with a small bust (less than 34 inches), the first impression someone is likely to have of you is that you are relatively intelligent, competent, ambitious, modest and moral, but if you have a big bust (37 inches or more), you will be perceived — at least at first glance — as being unintelligent, incompetent, lazy, immodest and immoral (Journal of Social Psychology, 1980).
This is an ambitious work with a moral imperative.
Madeleine is entirely believable as the ambitious, beautiful and mostly moral young woman slightly out of step with the freedoms of her time.
Benjamin Friedman — a Harvard professor and the author of the ambitious economic history "The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth" — told me that he would put global competition and technological change at the top of his list of causes, with the education slowdown (which, he noted, interacted with technological change) and cultural norms not far behind.
The critical heirs of modernism, including postmodernists, inherit this ambitious effort — the modernist moral project.
Another way to try and improve utilitarianism in response to Williams's argument is to advance a less ambitious form of utilitarian moral theory.
