Jacob Smith

In this essay, I will attempt a critique of the Badiouan formulation of the event by asking if Badiou’s theory, as formulated in Being and Event, explains the phenomenon of the scientific revolution. While Badiou remains relatively cryptic about the status of science in Being and Event and does not refer to any scientific revolutions explicitly, there are several reasons why it might seem problematic if they are not to be included within his theory of the event. After all, they are called revolutions and the historical narrative surrounding them typically develops, much like the Badiouan event, with the understanding that the scientific revolutions of any given period are foundational for understanding the culture that proceeds from them. In a word, scientific revolutions are taken to be necessary for understanding the structure of the culture responsible for them. Thus it seems like any theory of the event should explain and account for the revolutions of science. In order to test the compatibility of the Badiouan theory of the event with the phenomenon of the scientific revolution I will turn to Thomas Kuhn’s work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and will ultimately conclude that the two works are not reconcilable: the Badiouan theory of the event does not explain or account for scientific revolutions in the way the Kuhn understands them. The two theories are, in fact, structurally opposed in several ways. This has potentially dramatic consequences for Badiou’s theory if two propositions can be established as true: a theory of the event should account for the phenomenon of the scientific revolution and Kuhn offers a better structural explanation of the scientific revolution than Badiou. If these two propositions are true then a fairly significant failure of Badiou’s theory of the event, as it is expressed in Being and Event, is exposed.

Many jurisdictions prohibit or severely restrict the use of evidence about a defendant’s character to prove legal culpability. Situationists, who argue that conduct is largely determined by situational features rather than by character, can easily defend this prohibition. According to situationism, character evidence is misleading or paltry. Proscriptions on character evidence seem harder to justify, however, on virtue ethical accounts. It appears that excluding character evidence either denies the centrality of character for explaining conduct—the situationist position—or omits probative evidence. Situationism is, after all, presented as antithetical to virtue ethics. This essay provides a virtue ethical defense of character evidence exclusion rules. We show that existing virtue ethical rebuttals to situationism themselves support prohibitions on character evidence; even if behavior arises from stable character traits, character evidence should be prohibited. In building our case, we provide a taxonomy of kinds of character judgment and reconcile the ubiquity and reasonableness of character judgments in ordinary life with the epistemic legitimacy of character evidence prohibitions in law.