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你怎么知道自己的道德特点呢？你可以试着给自己贴上一个标签看是否符合：“懒惰”“混蛋”“靠不住”——这真的是我吗？正如瓦泽尔和其他人格心理学家的研究表明，这可能不是一个很有启发性的方法。我怀疑，更有效的方法是从第一人称反思（我是什么样的人？）转向第二人称描述（告诉我，我是什么样的人？）与其反省，不如试着倾听。理想的情况是，你的生活中会有一些人非常了解你，他们正直，关心你的性格，可以坦率而充满爱心地把你的缺点暴露出来，并坚持让你正视它们。给他们这样做的空间，做好让自己失望的准备吧。
如果做得足够好，这种第二人称方法可以很好地处理懒惰和不可靠等特征，尤其是当它们的范围受到限制时：在X方面懒惰，在Y方面不靠谱。但正如我上面所说的，混蛋特质并不是那么容易驾驭的，因为如果一个人足够混蛋，他就不能以正确的方式去倾听。至少在这个特定的话题上（他们对你的批评），你的批评者是愚蠢的。你会认为他们无法欣赏你的观点——尽管实际上是你无法欣赏他们的观点。
想要了解一个人究竟有多混蛋，无论是直接的自我反思（第一人称）还是与亲密的批评家交谈都不是最好的办法。最好是以旁观者的视角：普遍观察周围的人。你的所到之处是否都围绕着笨蛋、无聊屁民、无名之辈、敌人、傻瓜以及混蛋？而你是唯一一个有能、有智之士？换言之，是否觉得我开篇描述的场景似曾相识？
How can you know your own moral character? You can try a label on for size: ‘lazy’, ‘jerk’, ‘unreliable’ – is that really me? As the work of Vazire and other personality psychologists suggests, this might not be a very illuminating approach. More effective, I suspect, is to shift from first-person reflection (what am I like?) to second-person description (tell me, what am I like?). Instead of introspection, try listening. Ideally, you will have a few people in your life who know you intimately, have integrity, and are concerned about your character. They can frankly and lovingly hold your flaws up to the light and insist that you look at them. Give them the space to do this, and prepare to be disappointed in yourself.
Done well enough, this second-person approach could work fairly well for traits such as laziness and unreliability, especially if their scope is restricted: laziness-about-X, unreliability-about-Y. But as I suggested above, jerkitude is not so tractable, since if one is far enough gone, one can’t listen in the right way. Your critics are fools, at least on this particular topic (their critique of you). They can’t appreciate your perspective, you think – though really it’s that you can’t appreciate theirs.
To discover one’s degree of jerkitude, the best approach might be neither (first-person) direct reflection upon yourself nor (second-person) conversation with intimate critics, but rather something more third-person: looking in general at other people. Everywhere you turn, are you surrounded by fools, by boring nonentities, by faceless masses and foes and suckers and, indeed, jerks? Are you the only competent, reasonable person to be found? In other words, how familiar was the vision of the world I described at the beginning of this essay?
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