By contrast, the value of a virtuous action depends on the agent, who must act with knowledge and deliberately choose the action for itself; finally, the action must come from a fixed disposition of character.
For example, we have listed honesty as a potential attribute without distinguishing between truth-telling, as a behaviour, and authenticity as a virtuous disposition of character.
But if I can see a place or a person; if, in words and sentences, I can build one piece of the world, or show something in the manner and disposition of characters in their lives; and if I understand that my characters are both me and not me, that their places are mine and theirs equally, then a story can begin.
Hume highlights two sources that contribute to differences of sentiment among qualified critics: basic dispositions of character, and moral differences arising from cultural differences (SOT, 280).
Values make a causal difference, but, given Nietzsche's epiphenomenalism about consciousness (discussed, above, in 1.1), they do not make this difference because of free, conscious choices individuals make to adopt certain moral rules or cultivate certain dispositions of character.
Yet a philosopher reluctant to talk about "man as he ought to be" is plainly ill-suited to the task of developing a normative ethics, understood as systematic and theoretical guidance for how to live, whether that guidance comes in the form of rules for behavior or dispositions of character to be cultivated.
In particular, eighteenth-century spectator- and judgment-centered moral theories gave the emotions a double role for our moral judgments: insofar as they represent the enduring dispositions of character expressed in actions, they are the objects of moral evaluations; but they also generate the judgments themselves.
If a virtue is a 'disposition of character which instantiates or promotes responsiveness to one or more basic goods', then theistic faith qualifies since it is 'a responsiveness to practical hope and truth', provided theistic faith-claims are indeed true (Chappell 1996, 27).
But the disposition of that case was not immediately known.
The disposition of that case was unclear last night.
The disposition of Byers' case remains unclear.
