Take for example concepts like courage, diligence and laziness. These concepts are considered thick concepts because they have both a descriptive component and a moral component. To be courageous is most often meant* not only to claim that the person undertook a great risk, but that it was morally praiseworthy. So the thick concept is often naturally modeled as a conjunction of a descriptive claim and a descriptive claim.
However, this isn’t the only way to understand these concepts. An alternate would be along the following lines: Imagine D+M>=10 with D>=3 and M>=3. So there would be a minimal amount that the descriptive claim has to fit and a minimal amount the moral claim has to fit and a minimal total. This doesn’t seem like an unreasonable model of how thick concepts might apply.
Alternatively, there might be an additional requirement that the satisfaction of the moral component is sufficiently related to the descriptive component. For example, suppose in order to be diligent you need to work hard in such a way that the hard work causes the action to be praiseworthy. Then consider the following situation. I bake you a cake and this action is praiseworthy because you really enjoy it. However, it would have been much easier for me to have bought you a cake—including the effort to earn the money—and you would actually have been happier had I done so. Further, assume that I knew all of this in advance. In this case, can we really say that you’ve demonstrated the virtue of diligence?
Maybe the best way to think about this is Wittgensteinian: that thick concepts only make sense from within a particular form of life and are not so easily reduced to their components as we might think.
Thick and Thin Concepts
Take for example concepts like courage, diligence and laziness. These concepts are considered thick concepts because they have both a descriptive component and a moral component. To be courageous is most often meant* not only to claim that the person undertook a great risk, but that it was morally praiseworthy. So the thick concept is often naturally modeled as a conjunction of a descriptive claim and a descriptive claim.
However, this isn’t the only way to understand these concepts. An alternate would be along the following lines: Imagine D+M>=10 with D>=3 and M>=3. So there would be a minimal amount that the descriptive claim has to fit and a minimal amount the moral claim has to fit and a minimal total. This doesn’t seem like an unreasonable model of how thick concepts might apply.
Alternatively, there might be an additional requirement that the satisfaction of the moral component is sufficiently related to the descriptive component. For example, suppose in order to be diligent you need to work hard in such a way that the hard work causes the action to be praiseworthy. Then consider the following situation. I bake you a cake and this action is praiseworthy because you really enjoy it. However, it would have been much easier for me to have bought you a cake—including the effort to earn the money—and you would actually have been happier had I done so. Further, assume that I knew all of this in advance. In this case, can we really say that you’ve demonstrated the virtue of diligence?
Maybe the best way to think about this is Wittgensteinian: that thick concepts only make sense from within a particular form of life and are not so easily reduced to their components as we might think.
* This isn’t always the case though.