Rap and Moral Character Essay Example

Rap and Moral Character In the article Rap and Moral Character by Wesley Cragg and Christine Koggel, the subject of concern is the consequences of listening to rap music and the effects on moral behaviour. The author suggests that rap and moral character are linked and that due to the natural context of rap, it promotes violence, crass materialism, crime, and is misogynistic and therefore corrupts a person’s moral character. Based on their claims, the authors take the position that rap should be censured – morally. In this paper, I will examine the authors’ claims, their reasoning, and their use of concepts. By doing so, I will be able to demonstrate that their thesis (rap corrupts moral character and deserves moral censure) is unjust and unsupported. First, I will analyze their claims to show that they are relevant and can be cautiously accepted but insufficient to prove the thesis. Secondly, I will examine their reasoning to point out flaws and fallacious reasoning. Then I will proceed to evaluate their use of concepts.

Many claims were made in this article. However, many of them were only used to illustrate and to explain matters regarding rap and morality. With that being said, there are about seven claims left that were used to support the authors’ position/thesis of ‘Rap promotes violence, crass materialism, street crime, is misogynistic, and therefore it corrupts moral character and deservers moral censure’. Almost all of the seven claims were empirical (a factual claim that is either true or false and needs to be verified through experience, experiments, correlations, and theoretical explanations). However, the authors never provided any type of verification for their empirical claims that they have made. For example, the claim ‘Rap glorifies crass materialism by any means’ is an empirical claim. This claim may seem to be acceptable but without any proof through evidence, one may have a hard time accepting it due to the fact that there are raps