Character 9781472574244, 9781472574237, 9781474261838, 9781472574251

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The experiments
The debate
The book
Part 1 Character and action in virtue ethics
Chapter 1 Virtues as character traits
Introduction
Normativity
Voluntariness
Rationality
Consistency
Robustness
Integration
Conclusion
Further reading
Chapter 2 Acting against character
Introduction
Involuntary action
Ignorance
Unendurable force
Tragic dilemmas
Conclusion
Further reading
Part 2 Traits and behavior in psychology
Chapter 3 Six classic experiments
Introduction
The traditional trait concept in psychology
Hartshorne and May 1928
Darley and Batson 1973
Isen and Levin 1972
Latané and Darley 1968
Haney et al. 1973
Milgram 1974
Conclusion
Further reading
Chapter 4 Reconstructing traits in psychology
Introduction
Idiographic traits
CAPS theory
Aggregation
Longitudinal studies
Conclusion
Further reading
Part 3 Understanding the virtue ethics-situationism debate
Chapter 5 The varieties of situationist challenge
Introduction
Inconsistency
Error theory
Indeterminacy
Dependence
Dissociation
Conclusion
Further reading
Chapter 6 How not to defend virtue ethics
Introduction
Direct responses
Indirect responses
Conclusion
Further reading
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Character

BLOOMSBURY ETHICS SERIES Bloomsbury Ethics is a series of books written to help students explore, engage with and master key topics in contemporary ethics and moral philosophy. Autonomy, Andrew Sneddon Intuitionism, David Kaspar Moral Realism, Kevin DeLapp Reasons, Eric Wiland Virtue Ethics, Nafsika Athanassoulis Ethics without Intention, Ezio Di Nucci Character, Jay R. Elliott Trust, Ethics and Human Reason, Olli Lagerspetz Value Theory, Francesco Orsi

Series Editors: Thom Brooks is professor of law at Durham Law School. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Moral Philosophy and runs a popular political philosophy blog called The Brooks Blog. Simon Kirchin is reader in philosophy at the University of Kent, UK. He is president of the British Society for Ethical Theory and coeditor of Arguing About Metaethics (Routledge, 2006).

Bloomsbury Ethics Series

Character Jay R. Elliott

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Jay R. Elliott, 2017 Jay R. Elliott has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 9781472574244 ePDF: 9781472574251 ePub: 9781472574268 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: Bloomsbury Ethics Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

Acknowledgments  vi

Introduction 1

Part One  Character and action in virtue ethics 15 1 Virtues as character traits 17 2 Acting against character 39

Part Two Traits and behavior in psychology 59 3 Six classic experiments 61 4 Reconstructing traits in psychology 92

Part Three  Understanding the virtue ethics-situationism debate 109 5 The varieties of situationist challenge 111 6 How not to defend virtue ethics 139 Notes  163 Bibliography  180 Index  190

Acknowledgments

The original impetus for this book came from a conversation with Adina Roskies. Many of my ideas about virtue ethics were developed while I was a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago: for the inspiration of those ideas I am indebted to Rachel Barney, Daniel Brudney, Myles Burnyeat, James Conant, Arnold Davidson, John Haugeland, Jonathan Lear, Elijah Millgram, Martha Nussbaum, Gabriel Richardson Lear, and Candace Vogler. In Chicago, I also benefitted from conversations with Nat Hansen about the possibilities (and pitfalls) of connecting philosophy with empirical research in the social sciences. While I was a postdoc at Yale University, I received helpful orientation to much of the psychological material I discuss here from Tamar Szabó Gendler and Paul Bloom. As I was working on the book, my thinking was enriched by conversations with Norton Batkin, Stephen Darwall, Sonny Elizondo, Joshua Greene, Garry Hagberg, Verity Harte, Shelly Kagan, Kristin Lane, Eric Mandelbaum, Barbara Sattler, Lisa Tessman, and Ken Winkler. Earlier versions of some of the arguments contained in the book were presented in talks at Auburn University, Dartmouth College, Temple University, the University of Chicago, Utah State University, and Yale. I am indebted to my audiences on those occasions. I am grateful to the series editors, Thom Brooks and Simon Kirchin, for believing in this project from an early stage and for supporting it as it developed. I received many helpful suggestions on drafts from Erica Holberg and Daniel Harris as well as from two anonymous referees for Bloomsbury Academic. Ted Laport provided essential help in compiling and organizing the bibliography. Zed Adams read the entire manuscript and proposed many changes, large and small, that have improved it immensely. My greatest debt is to Christa and Myles: this book is dedicated to them.

Introduction The experiments In the spring of 1962, dozens of ordinary residents of New Haven, Connecticut, electrocuted a man to death. They were not executioners, and the man had committed no crime. They were regular people like you and me—manual laborers, factory workers, salesmen, and professors. They had volunteered to take part in a psychological study of memory and learning conducted at Yale University. When the volunteers arrived at the laboratory, they were greeted by an experimenter dressed in a lab coat, who introduced them to another man, apparently a volunteer like themselves. The experimenter explained that one of them would play the role of “teacher,” the other that of “learner.” The goal of the experiment was to test whether punishing the learner with electric shocks would improve his memory. The teacher’s job was to ask the learner a series of questions and to give him a brief electric shock if he gave a wrong answer, using a specially designed machine called a “shock generator.” The teacher was also instructed to increase the voltage of the shock for every wrong answer the learner gave. The learner gave many wrong answers and the teacher had to give him increasingly powerful shocks. At first, he simply cried out in pain. He explained to the teacher and the experimenter that he had a heart condition. He worried that the shocks might be seriously harming him. As the voltage of the shocks increased, the learner’s cries and protests became more frantic and desperate. He said repeatedly that he no longer wished to participate in the experiment. He demanded that the experiment be discontinued. If the teacher expressed any discomfort or confusion, the experimenter simply instructed him or her, in a calm but firm voice, to continue. This experiment was repeated through many trials. In 65 percent

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of those trials, the teacher continued to obey the experimenter and to shock the learner, even to the point of administering the very highest level of shock—450 volts—despite the fact that by then the learner had stopped responding altogether, leading the teacher to conclude that he had been seriously injured or killed.1 In reality, the learner was not harmed: in fact, he received no shocks at all. He was a confederate of the psychologist, and his cries and protests were played from a recording. The real subject of the experiment was the teacher, not the learner, and the real aim of the experiment was to investigate obedience, not memory. The study I’ve just described was part of a series of infamous experimental studies of obedience conducted by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s.2 When we hear about the results of Milgram’s experiments, we are naturally inclined to think that there must be something terribly wrong with the obedient subjects. Of course, Milgram’s subjects did not really harm the learner, but the vast majority believed that they were harming him and were willing to do so.3 How, we might ask, could a decent person go on administering shocks to the learner when he is crying out in pain, refuses to continue with the experiment, or has even stopped responding altogether? The Milgram experiment is well known and has been widely discussed. It has often been taken to show that most people are either closet sadists or unthinking sheep. Yet, we should pause and reflect before accepting too quickly the idea that there is something deeply wrong with the obedient subjects. Remember that they were not recruited from the ranks of criminals or psychopaths, but were perfectly ordinary people with normal jobs, who presumably have normal friends and families. Can they really be as terrible as their actions make them seem? Again, consider that, since most subjects were fully obedient, if you or I had taken part in the experiment, we would probably have been fully obedient as well. Are you prepared to conclude that you are probably a moral monster, too? You may be inclined to say that you know yourself well and that you would not be among those who were fully obedient. But don’t be so sure. Prior to carrying out his studies, Milgram conducted surveys of psychiatrists and laypeople in which he asked them to predict how they would perform. None of them predicted that he or she would be fully obedient. Many expressed confidence that they “couldn’t hurt a perfect stranger” and that they would respect

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the learner’s wishes “the moment [he] insists he wants to leave the experiment.”4 Yet, this is not how Milgram’s actual subjects behaved in the laboratory: most were fully obedient and continued to shock the learner well past the point when he refused to continue. We can conclude that most of those surveyed by Milgram were wrong about how they would have performed, had they actually taken part in the experiments. These results show that we should not to be too confident even about ourselves: experiments like Milgram’s suggest that we may know less about ourselves than we would like to think. The Milgram experiment is not an isolated example. Other experiments have shown similarly surprising instances of discrepancy between expected and observed behavior. To take a few noteworthy examples, researchers have found that honest behavior in some situations is a poor predictor of honest behavior in other, even slightly different, situations;5 that our willingness to help a stranger is surprisingly subject to small differences of mood or context;6 that our sense of the gravity of an emergency is unconsciously affected by other people’s reactions to it;7 and that mentally healthy young people can quickly devolve into sadistic “guards” in a prison simulation.8 These results raise a series of profound ethical and philosophical questions: Are some people “good” and others “bad”? Might any of us be capable of committing the most terrible crimes if placed in the wrong situation? Do our actions really reflect our deeply held moral beliefs and values? How reliable are we in assessing our own motives and controlling our own behavior?

The debate These questions have been at the center of one of the most heated philosophical controversies of recent years: the debate over what role, if any, the concept of character should play in ethics. On the one side, virtue ethicists have been arguing since the 1950s that ideals of character and character development should play a central role in ethical thinking.9 In making this argument, they have sought to critique the modern philosophical traditions of utilitarianism and Kantianism, in which character typically played a secondary role, if any, and they have sought to revive ideas from older ethical traditions, in particular from Aristotle. At the core of virtue ethics

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is the idea that ethical reflection should go beyond the evaluation of particular actions or states of affairs to include a more holistic evaluation of persons or lives as ethically good or bad. According to virtue ethics, the key to acting well is to become a virtuous person, where a virtuous person is one who lives her life in accordance with certain deeply held moral values. Virtue ethicists recognize that becoming virtuous is difficult and that many of us may never fully achieve it. But they argue that the ideal of virtue should be at the center of our ethical theorizing and that we should strive to think, feel, and act like a virtuous person as much as we can. Virtue ethicists have often argued that one of the great advantages of their approach is that it can furnish ethical theory with a richer and more lifelike psychology than rival theories. They tend to emphasize the essential role of emotion, a sense of self, and personal relationships in ethical life, in ways that they see as making their theory more realistic than utilitarianism or Kantianism. Aristotle himself argued that a student of ethics must know “about what pertains to the soul,”10 where by “soul” he meant something like what we would call the human “mind” or “psyche.” He went on to fill his ethical works with detailed discussions of such topics as the nature of pleasure, the relationship between reason and desire, and the distinction between voluntary and involuntary action. At the same time, virtue ethicists have rarely sought to ground their claims to psychological realism in a discussion of experimental studies such as Milgram’s. Instead, they have usually based those claims on appeals to common sense and their readers’ selfconsciousness. They have also sometimes appealed to works of fiction or poetry that they take to be paradigmatic instances of engaged reflection on the moral life as it is actually lived.11 On the other side of the debate are philosophical “situationists,” who have been arguing since the 1990s that the claims of virtue ethics should be assessed in light of the experimental literature in psychology, and that consideration of this literature reveals that the psychology underlying virtue ethics is deeply flawed. They derive the label “situationism” from psychology, where a large body of experimental results (including those mentioned above) has been taken to show that human behavior is shaped to a surprising degree by external “situational” factors rather than by internal dispositions or traits.12 Psychologists have long cited these results as evidence against certain theories of character and personality. The

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philosophical situationists (hereafter “situationists” for short) argue that there are fundamental similarities between these psychological theories and the idea of character at work in virtue ethics and have sought to extend this line of critique beyond psychology and into the realm of moral philosophy. The debate between virtue ethicists and situationists is one instance of a wider phenomenon: the increasing interest among moral philosophers in connecting work in their discipline with empirical research in psychology and related fields.13 This development was pioneered in the early 1990s by Owen Flanagan, who influentially proposed what he called the “Principle of Minimal Psychological Realism.” Flanagan’s principle holds that “when constructing a moral theory or projecting a moral ideal” one should “make sure . . . that the character, decision processing, and behavior prescribed are possible . . . for creatures like us.”14 Flanagan’s point was that philosophers’ normative ideals won’t be worth very much if it turns out that the creatures to whom they are addressed—human beings—simply can’t live up to them. Flanagan took his principle to represent a basic criterion of adequacy for any moral theory, and on this basis he urged philosophers to take a greater interest in empirical evidence concerning what is and is not psychologically realistic for human beings. Flanagan’s call for philosophers to engage with empirical work has not been universally accepted. In the early stages of the virtue ethics-situationism debate, some virtue ethicists were dismissive of the idea that empirical work in psychology should substantively constrain ethical theorizing. But as the debate has progressed, one of its happier outcomes has been an increasing recognition by all sides of the need for sustained and careful attention to psychological material. In particular, virtue ethicists have come to recognize that the task of explaining the observed behavior in the classic situationist experiments is a philosophically significant and fruitful one for virtue ethics. Some have even made use of one or another aspect of recent psychological theory in crafting their defenses of virtue ethics. At the same time, it has also become increasingly clear that any use of this empirical material must respect certain fundamental differences between psychology and philosophy. These two disciplines have developed largely independently of one another since the late nineteenth century and thus have acquired

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significantly different histories, problems, concepts, and methods. For their part, situationists have come to recognize that the use of complex, theory-laden concepts such as “character” in philosophy may not be precisely the same as it is in psychology, and that the forms of argument and evidence deployed in other disciplines may not have a simple or straightforward application to philosophical debates. In what follows, I will argue that at least some situationists do have a compelling case to make in arguing that the results of psychological studies cast doubt on the concept of character as used by virtue ethicists. But they have not succeeded in making that case by presenting the argument against character as a fait accompli from psychology that simply needs to be brought to the attention of philosophers. The case against the virtue ethicists’ conception of character can only be made by examining the unique contours of that conception in detail and demonstrating precisely how it is undermined by the empirical results. Flanagan’s principle is intended to be “minimal,” and it will be helpful at this point to appreciate two senses in which this is true. First, the principle only rules out ethical ideals that turn out to be radically at odds with our nature. It does not rule out ideals that are just extremely difficult or extremely costly.15 It need not even rule out ideals that only a few people would ever actually achieve, provided that they were at least possible for all those “like us.”16 This isn’t to say that Flanagan’s principle does not rule out anything: he makes a plausible case that it rules out, for example, act utilitarianism, on the grounds that a consistent act-utilitarian standpoint would simply make unbearable demands on a human agent’s capacities for sympathy and attention.17 But aside from extreme views like this, Flanagan’s principle might leave a great variety of theoretical positions open as viable options. Second, we should keep in mind that whether certain modes of thought or action are “possible” for human beings is not a fixed target, but varies a great deal depending on one’s upbringing and cultural environment. History teaches us that many things that seemed to earlier generations to be psychologically impossible— such as the idea that people of different religions could live peacefully together, or that men and women could enter into egalitarian rather than hierarchical marriages—have turned out to be possible.18 In applying Flanagan’s principle, we should be wary of declaring something impossible too readily, considering how

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powerfully human psychological capacities can be altered and even transformed by the advent of new modes of acculturation or new forms of social interaction. Flanagan himself was relatively optimistic about virtue ethics.19 But situationists have subsequently argued that results such as Milgram’s cast serious doubt on whether virtue ethics can actually meet Flanagan’s minimal standard. The words of caution above remind us, however, that anyone who wants to argue that virtue ethics violates Flanagan’s principle will have to make quite a strong case. They will need to show, not only that virtue is rare or difficult, but that in some way the psychological structures posited by virtue ethics just aren’t realistic possibilities for human beings. At the center of the debate is a deep moral and philosophical question: How do human beings come to behave well and avoid acting badly? In the virtue ethicists’ view, we act well and avoid acting badly by cultivating good character. Their hope is that by practicing the right values and attitudes we can shape our lives around consistent patterns of morally good action. From the situationists’ point of view, this project looks doomed: our real behavior is simply too fragmentary, and our real motives too opaque, to make the task of character cultivation anything but a misguided fantasy. We would be much better off, they argue, if we put less trust in character and more in the cultivation of relationships and institutions that can prevent destructive situations like Milgram’s from arising. There is much more at stake in this philosophical debate than simply the success or failure of a certain theory. Part of the special power and resonance of the debate is that it taps into an ambivalence about the notion of character that lies deep within many modern societies. On the one hand, there is a side to our moral and political culture that celebrates ideals of character and character development. Conservative cultural critics such as David Brooks have long argued that a renewed commitment to the project of building character has the power to address much of what ails the modern world.20 In Brooks’s view, our neglect of the traditional task of cultivating character is at the root of many of the superficial and unsatisfying aspects of modern life. He urges us to return to moral traditions that prize character and a rich “inner life,” as an alternative and a counterweight to the status-obsessed world of business, politics, celebrity, and social media.

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Conservative calls for a return to a traditional morality of character have been a recurrent feature of the cultural landscape for decades. A more surprising development has been the recent emergence of a progressive case for character, epitomized by journalist Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. Tough surveys a range of current theoretical and practical projects in a variety of fields from economics to psychology to education, all centered on the idea that a child’s success in school, and subsequently in adult life, is dependent to a surprising degree on her development of certain “non-cognitive” traits, such as “the ability to delay gratification” and “the tendency to follow through on a plan.”21 Progressives like Tough seek to promote these character traits, not as the key to a rich inner life, but rather as instrumental to success in school and beyond, especially for poor children from disadvantaged backgrounds. According to Tough, and many of those in the movement he chronicles, imparting these skills to children is an essential part of preparing them to escape from persistent cycles of poverty. On the other hand, we also live in a culture that has come to see the design of institutions, rather than the personal morality of individuals, as the crucial factor shaping social and political life. The psychological experiments at the heart of the debate are part of a wider ongoing argument about the precise lessons we should take away from many of history’s worst atrocities, particularly the mass campaigns of genocide carried out during the twentieth century. These concerns were central for Milgram himself, whose research was inspired by the participation of thousands of Germans in the Nazi genocide program.22 In the decades since the Second World War, journalists and historians, as well as psychologists, have been drawn to the mystery of how—as the title of a book on torture in democratic societies has it—“ordinary people” can commit such “unspeakable acts.”23 Situationist philosophers have argued that virtue ethics cannot make sense of how thousands of ordinary people of seemingly “good character” can so easily become complicit in war crimes and acts of genocide, and that a situationist perspective provides a more realistic outlook on the causes of largescale wrongdoing.24 The virtue ethics-situationism debate reflects our deeper cultural ambivalence about notions of character; as a result, its stakes are much higher than those of a mere academic squabble.

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Each side is animated by concrete and practical ideas about where evil comes from and how to prevent it. Keeping this broader context in mind will help the reader to appreciate the real-world implications of the debate and the connections between theoretical and practical issues.

The book I wrote this book out of a sense of simultaneous gratitude and frustration regarding both sides of the debate. My academic training is in virtue ethics, and I continue to find virtue-based approaches to ethics deeply thought-provoking. But I have also long suspected that contemporary virtue ethicists tend to water down their tradition by seeking to make virtue less difficult and more conformable to modern sensibilities. This suspicion has been borne out by the course of the debate, in which one of the most prominent—but, I will argue, least successful strategies—has been to accommodate the situationist challenge by lowering our standards for virtue. At the same time, I have been grateful to the situationists for drawing the attention of virtue ethicists to the empirical work discussed in this book, which constitutes a treasure trove of material for moral reflection. This material profoundly challenges our tendency to ascribe virtues to people too readily, on the basis of insufficient evidence, and in particular to confuse facility in navigating everyday life with virtue. At a deeper level, the studies raise real doubts about whether the psychological structures posited by virtue ethics are realistic possibilities for human beings. But the situationists have often done a surprisingly poor job of making these arguments, in large part because they failed to approach their opponents’ position with adequate sympathy and care. As a result, they have generally underestimated the resources that virtue ethicists have at their disposal for answering the challenge, and so have not fully entitled themselves to their critical claims. At a more general level, I have also often found myself frustrated by the tone of the debate, which, especially in its early stages, was frequently marked by condescension on both sides, perhaps even more so than is usual in philosophical arguments. Some virtue ethicists have been dismissive of the idea that the relatively novel empirical material could have any important bearing on their

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millennia-old tradition. Situationists have equally often dismissed virtue ethicists as backward and scientifically illiterate. As a result, the real interest of the debate has been obscured, and the tone of many contributions has been hostile or defensive in ways that have impeded intellectual progress. With all of this in mind, the aim of the book is to provide a clear and accessible orientation to the debate that can overcome some of the rancor and encourage a more sympathetic understanding on both sides. I will defend certain conclusions about which positions within the debate represent promising possibilities that are worth continuing to explore. But the primary purpose of the book is not to defend a particular position within the debate so much as to advance the debate as a whole, by giving readers a clearer and more comprehensive account than has heretofore been available of its sources, its stakes, and its progress. The book can be thought of as having three main aims, corresponding to three different audiences for whom it is intended. First, for those who might be tempted to engage in the debate themselves, it is meant to constitute a prologue to any future contribution that might move the debate forward. Second, for those working in neighboring areas of philosophy, it provides a window into the debate and a useful orientation toward specific topics they might wish to explore further. Third, for those who are simply curious about virtue ethics or moral psychology, it gives an in-depth exploration of one particular body of literature that illustrates some of the characteristic features of these two active fields of contemporary philosophical research. The book argues for four main conclusions regarding the progress and current state of the debate. The first conclusion is that the situationist challenge is in fact many distinct challenges, some of which are more difficult for virtue ethicists to answer than others. I argue that some of the most widely discussed versions of the challenge do not in fact present the deepest difficulties for virtue ethics, and that the most profound version has fully emerged only relatively recently, in part as a result of refinements brought on by the course of the debate itself. In particular, I argue that versions of the challenge focused on arguing that human behavior is inconsistent across situations are less successful, and that more powerful versions focus instead on arguing that behavior is not strongly integrated with agents’ conscious beliefs and values.

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My second conclusion is that experimental evidence matters and should continue to matter to virtue ethics. In response to the situationist challenge, some virtue ethicists have argued that empirical evidence of the sort brought forth by the experiments is simply irrelevant to their project, or is in principle incapable of undermining their commitments. I take this response to be deeply mistaken. It runs contrary to the reasonable recommendation at work in Flanagan’s principle, which tells us to make sure that our moral ideals are realistic possibilities for human beings. I argue that it also goes against the spirit of virtue ethics itself, insofar as that tradition aspires to ground its account of the virtues in a theory of human nature. By dismissing any form of challenge based on empirical evidence about human psychology, recent virtue ethicists have compromised their tradition’s long-standing commitment to ethical naturalism. My third conclusion is that none of the many forms of response so far developed on behalf of virtue ethics have succeeded. This is in large part because they have not yet sufficiently grappled with the full strength of the situationist challenge, and in particular with the version of the challenge that focuses on integration rather than on consistency. Recently many virtue ethicists have sought to bolster their responses to the challenge by pointing out that the evidence favored by situationists represents only one side of current thinking in psychology and that many contemporary approaches in psychology are more favorable to the idea of character or personality traits. My fourth conclusion is that these attempts to draw on aspects of current psychology in order to support virtue ethics have not succeeded. Philosophers who draw on this work are correct that the situationists have often given a one-sided and simplistic account of the current state of thinking in psychology. But those who invoke psychological work on traits to support virtue ethics themselves run the risk of giving a distorted representation of psychology, in their case by failing to recognize the deep differences between virtues and psychological traits. These conclusions leave open the following possibilities about where the debate should go from here: one, that the project of virtue ethics can, through some further elaboration and clarification, be successfully defended from the challenge; two, that the situationist challenge ultimately shows that the entire project of virtue theory is fundamentally untenable; or three—an intermediate possibility—that

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an alternative version of virtue theory might be able to both withstand the challenge and preserve some aspects of the virtue tradition.25 The book unfolds in three main parts, containing of two chapters each: the first part introduces the tradition of virtue ethics within philosophy; the second part provides an overview of the empirical study of traits and behavior in psychology; and the third part brings the previous two together and examines the course of the recent virtue ethics-situationism debate in detail. The first part (Chapters 1 and 2) provides the reader with essential orientation to the aspects of virtue ethics that are most significant for the debate, both as targets of criticism by situationists and as resources for virtue ethicists in response. These chapters draw primarily on the founding ideas of the virtue ethics tradition as expounded by Aristotle, who has been by far the most important source for recent virtue ethics. Chapter 1 provides an overview of how the virtues are understood as character traits in virtue ethics, including the ways in which they shape the virtuous person’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. (Like all of the chapters, chapter 1 ends with suggestions for further reading that highlight essential resources the reader can draw on to explore for herself the issues raised in the chapter.) Chapter 2 clarifies the complex relationship between virtue and action in virtue ethics by describing three specific ways in which virtue ethicists have been willing to allow that a virtuous person can act contrary to her character. These chapters are essential for the discussion later in the book, when we come to consider the expectations that virtue ethicists have for how a virtuous person will behave in particular situations, and therefore how one might go about testing the claims of virtue ethics experimentally. The second part (Chapters 3 and 4) focuses on the other essential form of background for the debate, which is the empirical study of traits and behavior as it developed within social and personality psychology over the course of the twentieth century. Chapter 3 begins with a brief comparison between the concept of character as it appears in virtue ethics and the concept of a character or personality trait as it has traditionally been discussed by psychologists. It then takes up the challenge to the traditional psychological concept presented by six classic experiments, including Milgram’s and others, which suggest that behavior is shaped by “situational” factors in surprising ways. These experiments and their proper interpretation have been a topic of debate not only in

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psychology but in philosophy as well, and so an acquaintance with their designs, methods, aims, and results is essential for a proper assessment of the philosophical arguments. Chapter 4 discusses four main strategies that psychologists have developed, in the wake of the classic experiments, for understanding traits and their impact on behavior. This chapter sets up one of the central questions for the last part of the book, which is whether these psychologists’ strategies for responding to the experiments can be adopted by virtue ethicists, given the profound differences between the virtue ethicist’s concept of character and standard conceptions of traits among psychologists. The third part (Chapters 5 and 6) draws on the work of the previous two parts to approach the question at the center of the philosophical debate: Is virtue ethics substantially undermined by empirical work in psychology, and if so, how? Chapter 5 provides the reader with an overview of the various versions of the situationist challenge, including discussion of the specific commitments of virtue ethics they engage with and the distinct ways that they deploy the empirical material from psychology. This chapter completes the argument for my first conclusion, which is that the situationist challenge is in reality many challenges, some of which raise deeper difficulties for virtue ethics than others. The final chapter, Chapter 6, furnishes the reader with a taxonomy of the main modes of response to the situationists so far developed by virtue ethicists, with an emphasis both on the ways in which they draw on traditional themes in virtue ethics and on the various approaches they take toward the empirical evidence. This chapter completes the argument for my second, third, and fourth conclusions: no response on behalf of virtue ethics has yet succeeded, and in particular responses that attempt to draw on psychological trait theory, or to insulate virtue ethics from empirical scrutiny, both fail. Beyond these conclusions, the book also implicitly makes two subsidiary points of method. The first is the importance of engaging with empirical material in depth and breadth. I approach the experimental literature that has been at the center of the debate in a rather unusual way, by reading it closely, with philosophical attention to the nuances of the authors’ arguments. I avoid the mere presentation of results or the authors’ conclusions from their results, and I emphasize questions of interpretation and issues of experimental methodology. The virtue ethics-situationism debate

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has been hampered by a tendency to read psychological literature rather superficially, as well as by a tendency to focus excessively on a few experiments or on particular research traditions to the exclusion of other relevant ones. In the overwhelming majority of contributions to the debate, when philosophers discuss experiments in any detail at all, they talk about the same five or six experiments, all of which are now decades old. I, too, am fascinated by these experiments and discuss them in detail. But I also aim to give the reader a fuller and more up-to-date picture, by describing several major subsequent developments in relevant areas of psychology, including profound debates among psychologists about how exactly the results of the classic experiments are to be interpreted. Philosophers’ increasing interest in connecting their problems and concerns with empirical work in other disciplines is all to the good. But as they continue to do so, they should also become increasingly thoughtful and careful about how to make these connections in a way that does justice to the internal complexity of those disciplines. My second point of method has to do with how we can best learn from philosophical debates. Often in philosophy, we approach debates as partisans, concerned to secure victory for the side we happen to favor. This has been the usual approach in the virtue ethics-situationism debate, as in most debates within contemporary philosophy. But this is not the approach I have taken in this book. Rather than attempting to settle the debate in favor of one or another side, this book aims to do something both more feasible and more useful: to offer a careful and comprehensive survey of the debate, with a view to bringing out its essential outlines: what motivates each side; which argumentative moves have propelled it forward; why it eludes any simple resolution; and where it is likely to go in the future. In opposition to the familiar model of philosophical debate as warfare, I intend this book to exemplify an alternative model of the debate as conversation, in which there will of course be lively disagreement, but in which each side also builds on the contributions of the other in order to arrive at a deeper level of understanding than either could have on its own.

Part one

Character and action in virtue ethics

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Chapter one

Virtues as character traits Introduction This chapter introduces the distinctive conception of character at work in virtue ethics. Virtue ethicists understand the virtues to be character traits, but they conceive of character in a quite specific way, and it is essential to grasp the precise contours of this conception in order to properly understand and assess their views.1 This chapter provides the essential groundwork for the following chapters, which are concerned with the question of whether the virtues, as conceived in virtue ethics, represent realistic moral ideals for human beings. The primary source for my account is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. This text has had by far the broadest and deepest influence on recent work in virtue ethics, where a diverse range of writers has turned to it again and again as the canonical account. Moreover, many discussions in contemporary virtue ethics assume that readers are already deeply familiar with the details of Aristotle’s arguments. For these reasons, my introduction to the concept of character in virtue ethics will take the form of an exposition of Aristotle’s fundamental ideas. Contemporary virtue ethicists do not accept everything that Aristotle says, and they differ among themselves over which aspects of Aristotle’s work are most valuable. The features of Aristotle’s position that I survey here are the ones that virtue ethicists have generally agreed are essential starting points for contemporary work on virtue.

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The chapter contains six main sections, each one corresponding to a primary feature of the virtues as they are traditionally understood. These features are: normativity, voluntariness, rationality, consistency, robustness, and integration. My aim is to show how these features jointly give rise to the distinctive conception of the virtues found in virtue ethics. In discussing these features, I am particularly concerned to bring out three overall points that will prove significant for the argument to come. First, the ideal represented by the virtues in virtue ethics is extraordinarily demanding. Virtuous people are expected not just to consistently behave in certain ways, but also to exhibit a highly sophisticated form of practical rationality, along with an unusual degree of selfknowledge and self-control. Second, these demanding ideals give rise to quite specific empirical expectations: a genuinely virtuous person, according to virtue ethics, will have a robust disposition to behave in certain ways and not others, and in particular to adhere to her moral principles even when it is very difficult or costly for her to do so. Finally, the ideals of virtue ethics are grounded in a particular theoretical account of human nature: this account assumes that human action is typically organized around consistent dispositions that agents possess toward broad areas of characteristic human concern, and is typically the product of agents’ rational deliberation on the basis of their beliefs and desires. In all of these ways, virtue ethics can be seen as open to assessment in terms of the psychological realism of its ideal.

Normativity In the virtue ethics tradition, the virtues appear in the first instance as normative ideals: as standards to which we should aspire, and in the light of which we should assess one another and ourselves. The primary purpose of virtue discourse is not to describe what people are actually like; indeed, a virtue ethicist can accept that very few people, if any, have ever fully attained the virtues. Rather, the aim of virtue ethics is to put forward a conception of how people ought to be. Normative reflection in the virtue ethics tradition, however, takes a distinctive form that closely connects it with certain descriptive commitments. In virtue ethics, normative thought is meant to be

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grounded in an underlying conception of human nature.2 Virtue ethicists posit a form of natural normativity, in which human nature is seen as containing within itself certain norms. Virtue ethicists do not regard these norms as natural in the sense of “inevitable,” and they are well aware that people do not always conform to them. Nor do they regard them as natural in the sense of “innate.” In fact, they emphasize that it takes a great deal of hard work and practice for us to fully inhabit them. Rather, for virtue ethicists the virtues represent natural norms in the sense that they constitute the completion or fulfillment of our nature. Thus they might compare them to, for example, the acquisition of language: we say that speaking is something natural for humans, but this does not mean that all human beings learn to speak (some never do), nor does it mean that human beings know how to speak at birth. Rather, acquiring a language is part of the process of becoming fully human, of maturing into human adulthood. Virtue ethicists hold that the possession of the virtues is more rare and difficult than the possession of a language, but this analogy is helpful for understanding the sense in which they regard the virtues as natural. At the core of the virtue ethics tradition lies the idea that we can understand what human beings ought to be like by coming to understand more fully what human beings fundamentally are. The account of human nature in virtue ethics is teleological, where this means that human nature is not understood as something given and fixed, but rather represents a kind of goal that we as human beings should strive to realize. Thinking about how human beings ought to be, from this perspective, is thinking about what the internal goals of human life are and how we can best achieve them. Aristotle presents his theory of human nature in terms of what he calls the human “soul.” For Aristotle, the human soul is not an entity separate from the body, but is simply the distinctive mode of life that characterizes human beings. He proposes to get at the nature of the human soul by reflecting on the fundamental differences between the human mode of life and those of other living things.3 According to Aristotle, a living thing’s mode of life is defined above all by its characteristic activity, by what it does. Plants, for example, take in nourishment from the environment, grow, and reproduce. Animals do all of this, and in addition they engage in sensation, desire, and local movement. These are the characteristic activities in which plant and animal life are manifested. Human life also involves these

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activities, but it is distinguished from mere plant or animal life by the fact that it involves reason. Unlike plants and animals, human beings do not simply live according to their needs or instincts; they also have the ability to organize their lives according to an understanding of their own needs, values, and possibilities. Aristotle argues that our overall purpose in life is simply to fully realize our distinctively human nature. That means providing for our needs, in the way that plants do. It also means finding our way around our environment through sensation and desire, as animals do. But it also means taking up the uniquely human task of living according to reason. It is against this background of thought about human nature and the goals of human life that virtue ethicists introduce the virtues. According to virtue ethics, the virtues are simply those qualities that we need in order to act well in accordance with our nature. As Aristotle puts it, since human life “consists in activity of the soul and actions in accordance with reason,” the virtues will be those qualities that allow us to “carry these out well and admirably, since each thing is completed well in accordance with its appropriate virtue.”4 For Aristotle, the term “virtue” has a broad application in which it can refer to the proper “excellence” of any number of things, such as an animal, tool, or body part. He speaks, for example, of the “virtue” of the eye, meaning the good condition that allows it to see well.5 In this broad sense, “virtue” does not have the distinctively moral connotation that we associate with the word. In the tradition that derives from Aristotle, the term acquires moral significance because of the kind of creatures human beings are, and the kind of excellence that is appropriate to them. Since we are creatures whose nature is to live and act according to our reason, our virtues will be qualities that allow us to act and reason well. According to this conception, the virtues can be compared in a certain way to skills. Skill in a particular pursuit does not define the goal of that pursuit; rather, it takes the goal for granted and enables the possessor of the skill to achieve the goal effectively. Being skilled in a given pursuit is simply a matter of having the abilities that make one well suited to achieve the goal of that pursuit, whatever it happens to be. Thus in playing the lyre, for example, the goal is to play it well and beautifully, and the skill of lyre playing is simply the ability to do this. Aristotle suggests that being virtuous is like being skilled, only not in a specific area, but in the whole of human life: in

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being human, our goal is to realize our nature, and the virtues are simply the qualities that allow us to achieve this goal most fully.6 Thus, the most fundamental account of the virtues in virtue ethics is that they are qualities that allow us to fully realize our nature as rational agents. Aristotle and the virtue ethicists who follow him assume that the virtues so defined will turn out to be essentially the same as those valorized by earlier Greek philosophy and literature, such as justice, courage, temperance (understood as moderation in bodily appetites), and wisdom. But they aspire to give their own account of how exactly these qualities should be understood and why they are valuable. The following five sections draw out specific features of the virtues that illuminate how virtue ethicists think of them as realizing our rational nature.

Voluntariness Aristotle, and the virtue ethics tradition following him, holds that our nature is realized in action. Thus as a first approximation of their view, we might say that the virtues are simply habits of acting in certain ways. For example, we might say that the virtue of courage consists in performing courageous actions, such as facing the enemy in battle, or that the virtue of justice consists in performing just actions, such as returning property one has borrowed. This initial characterization of the virtues is a good start, though ultimately incomplete. Virtue ethicists do think of the virtues as expressing themselves in action, and they do hold up certain types of behavior as paradigms of virtuous conduct. But they will go on to argue that a virtuous person is marked out not only by what she does, but also by why she does it. The virtue ethicists’ ideal of good character involves not only certain modes of acting, but also certain corresponding modes of thinking and feeling that motivate and explain why the virtuous person acts the way she does. The connection between virtues and certain characteristic modes of action is particularly clear in Aristotle’s thought about the acquisition of the virtues. He insists that we acquire them by habituation, through practicing the relevant types of actions. As he puts it: It is by acting in a certain way in our dealings with other men that some people become just, and others unjust; and it

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is by acting in a certain way in frightening situations and by becoming accustomed to feel fear or confidence that some become courageous and others cowards. The same is true in the case of the appetites and of anger; some become temperate and calm, others intemperate and angry, in each case by repeatedly conducting themselves in the corresponding manner. In sum, each state arises from the corresponding activities.7 Aristotle connects the virtues of character with particular types of situations and modes of response to those situations: courage, for example, has to do with situations of danger, and involves standing fast in such situations. He argues that we acquire the virtues by practicing the relevant modes of response, to the point that they become habitual. But Aristotle would reject the idea that the virtues are nothing other than habits of acting in certain ways. For in his view, the virtues are not merely habits of acting, but more fundamentally habits of feeling and thinking. According to virtue ethics, the virtues are essentially voluntary states, where this means that they shape not just what the agent does, but also what he desires. Indeed, virtue ethicists in a sense prioritize the agent’s desires over his actions, since what is essential for virtue is not just that the agent performs a certain type of action, but that he performs it because he wants to. This means that the account of habituation that Aristotle gave above is incomplete. Habituation into virtue must be a habituation into feeling certain desires just as much as doing certain actions. We might be forced, involuntarily, to do virtuous actions; but we would not thereby become virtuous people. We can only become virtuous people, in Aristotle’s view, by learning to do such actions voluntarily. The virtuous person is not merely one who does certain actions, but one who does them in a certain way and on certain grounds. Aristotle makes this point by drawing a fundamental distinction between doing a virtuous action and acting as a virtuous person does. Here is how he frames the distinction: Actions are called just and temperate when they are of the sort that the just or the temperate person would do. But the person who does them is not just and temperate, unless he also does them in the manner that just and temperate people do.8

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A person might do the actions typical of a certain virtue without possessing that virtue: for example, he might return an article of another person’s property which he has borrowed, which is an action typical of justice, without thereby showing himself to be just. He might even have a habit of doing such actions, without being just, if his habit is merely one of doing those actions, not a habit of doing them as a just person would. We can approach the nature of the virtues by getting clearer about what is distinctive in the way a virtuous person does virtuous actions. One of the typical ways virtue ethicists bring this out is in terms of pleasure, as when Aristotle writes: We must regard the pleasure or pain a person takes in what he does as an indication of his states of character. For one who abstains from bodily pleasures and takes pleasure in doing so is temperate, but one who finds this burdensome is intemperate, and one who persists in the face of danger and enjoys doing so, or at least does not find it painful, is courageous, but one who does find it painful is a coward.9 Notice that the distinction being drawn here between different characters, for example, the courageous person and the coward, is not primarily a difference in what they do. In the scenario Aristotle is imagining, both are facing danger. The difference between the two is that the courageous person finds it pleasant, or not painful to do so, while the coward finds it painful. In the same way, virtue ethicists would say that a person who would really like to keep another’s property for herself and returns it only out of fear of punishment, does what the just person does, but not as the just person does it, since she finds returning the other person’s property to be painful rather than pleasant. Becoming a virtuous person requires learning to feel pleasure and pain in the right way, toward the right objects, and on the right occasions. Aristotle insists that in order to become virtuous “we need to have been brought up in a particular way right from childhood . . . to feel pain and pleasure in the things we ought to.”10 If we practice virtuous actions in the right way, we not only become accustomed to doing them, we also discover the kind of pleasure there is to be had in doing them.11As we learn to take pleasure in the right things, we learn not just to do virtuous actions, but to do them in a virtuous way. We learn to face the enemy, for example, because

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it is admirable to do so, and not because we will be punished if we do not.12 In this sense, we can say that the virtues are understood to be voluntary states, where this means that they not only produce action, but produce it under the direction and control of sources of motivation that are internal to the agent.

Rationality Pleasure in doing virtuous actions is essential for virtue, but it is not sufficient. According to virtue ethics, pleasure is a motive adult human beings share with children and animals, but the virtues are meant to represent the mature fulfillment of our distinctively human nature. As we saw above, virtue ethicists hold that human nature is essentially rational. In order for the virtues to represent the full achievement of human nature, they will thus need to also manifest our rationality, and indeed to do so in a particularly excellent form. Aristotle captures this idea of virtue as a rational achievement through the concept of “choice.” As he understands the term, choice is not equivalent to just any kind of preference or desire, but necessarily involves reason. In this sense, the sphere of choice is a narrower one within the larger sphere of what is voluntary. As Aristotle puts it: “Choice is something voluntary, but not the same as the voluntary, for the voluntary ranges more widely. Children and all animals share in the voluntary, but not in choice.”13 Drawing on this notion of choice, we can complete our account of the difference between doing a virtuous action and acting as a virtuous person. We saw above that a virtuous person must not only do virtuous actions, but also take pleasure in doing them. In addition, a virtuous person must not only take pleasure in doing those actions, but also choose to do them.14 The mark of choice in this sense is deliberate decision: in order to act on choice, the agent must not merely desire to act as he does, but deliberately decide to do so on the basis of reasons.15 The idea that the virtuous agent must deliberately decide on virtuous actions can sound misleading, if it is taken to imply that he must first go through some moments of conscious deliberating on each occasion of action. Virtue ethicists recognize that we often need to act quickly in a crisis, when there may be no time (or it may be counterproductive) to deliberate about what to do.

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In fact, Aristotle himself insists that actions taken on the spur of the moment can be more revealing of character than those that are thought out in advance. As he puts it, with reference to the virtue of courage in particular, “it seems to be more characteristic of a courageous person to be unafraid and at ease in unforeseen fearful situations than to be so in those that are foreseen; in the former case, one acts more from character, because less from preparation.”16 Aristotle recognizes that a virtuous person may not have time to deliberate on each occasion where virtuous action is called for. But that does not mean that his quick actions in unforeseen difficulties are not chosen. They are chosen, in the sense that they flow from reasons the agent grasps, and which he could articulate if asked. In contrasting “character” with “preparation,” Aristotle means rather to bring out how deeply internalized the courageous person’s reasons need to be: while one who is not courageous may need to step back and prepare himself to act courageously in a difficult situation, for instance by reminding himself that he will be punished if he does not, a courageous person’s deeply held values already urge him toward the action, and thus he can be counted on to act courageously even in unforeseen circumstances. The virtue ethics tradition understands the rationality of the virtuous person to go beyond just any kind of deliberation. We can see this in two specific ways. First, the deliberation of the virtuous person goes beyond mere instrumental reasoning, in that it does not consist simply in deliberating about how best to achieve what he happens to desire. One might try to think of the virtuous person simply as one who takes pleasure in the right things and who is effective in finding means to achieve them. But this is not the view of Aristotle or the virtue ethics tradition. According to this tradition, the notion of choice that characterizes the virtuous person’s action brings with it not only instrumental reasoning, but also a form of deliberation about which ends one ought to pursue.17 As Aristotle puts it, the deliberation at work in choice involves choosing one thing “before others,”18 that is, not simply pursuing whatever one happens to desire, but also reflecting on which objects of one’s desire to prefer over others. In choosing, we choose not merely something we happen to find good, but rather “that which we most of all recognize as good.”19 Thus, in acting on choice the virtuous person deliberates not merely about how to get what he wants but also about what he should want. He expresses his rationality by finding

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instrumental means to his ends, but even more so by discriminating among the ends and forming a general judgment about which he thinks the best.20 Second, the virtuous person must not only form this general judgment about which ends to prefer, but must also be skilled at discerning the line of conduct that will be most in keeping with it in particular cases. The importance of this second point can be brought out by the contrast between the virtuous and the weak-willed person. In virtue ethics, the weak-willed person is one who forms an accurate judgment about what is all-things-considered best, but does not act according to it, and pursues something he happens to desire instead.21 A weak-willed agent may know, for example, that he ought not overindulge in sweets, but will nonetheless eat a whole cake by himself, because he so enjoys its delicious taste. According to virtue ethics, weakness of will is not a temporary aberration on the part of a virtuous person; rather, it is incompatible with being a virtuous person at all.22 The weak-willed person is like a virtuous person in the general judgment that he endorses: both will agree with the general claim that one ought not overindulge in sweets. But according to virtue ethics, endorsing general ethical judgments, even true ones, is not sufficient to make one a virtuous person. A virtuous person must also see clearly what his general judgments require in each case. The problem with the weak-willed person is that he does not successfully consider how all the beliefs he holds might be relevant to the case; in our example, he fails to bring to bear his reflectively endorsed belief about not overindulging in sweets. By failing to consider this, he falls short of the stronger conception of rationality represented by the virtuous person.23 The virtuous person is more fully rational, because he acts not only in pursuit of some desire or another, but with sensitivity to the full range of his beliefs and desires and an accurate insight into their bearing on the case at hand. To see the importance of this nuanced sensitivity, note that according to virtue ethics there is nothing wrong per se with the pursuit of pleasure or the enjoyment of sweets. Aristotle puts this point by saying that the end which the weak-willed person ends up pursuing is “not in itself opposed [to correct reason], but only as it happens in this case,”24 that is, only in the way that the agent treats it as decisive, to the exclusion of other considerations. In order to balance the genuine value of pleasure against the dangers of excess, the virtuous person needs to have a

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complex rational capacity to reliably tell the difference between the cases in which it is appropriate to pursue, for example, the pleasure of sweets, and those in which it is not.25 In sum, the rationality of the virtuous person goes beyond mere instrumental deliberation in two ways, both of which make the rational ideal in virtue ethics particularly demanding. First, the virtuous person must assess his ends in order to determine which of them he should prefer to others: he must form a general judgment about what he regards as good “most of all.” Second, he must discern clearly and faithfully what that judgment calls for in each case. With the idea that the virtuous person exhibits rationality in this demanding sense, we have completed our initial account of the difference between doing a virtuous action and doing it as a virtuous person would: we have seen that the virtuous person does the virtuous action both with pleasure and from choice.26 The following three sections build on this account in order to take in a wider view, in which we will see how the virtuous person’s actions, pleasures and choices are part of the distinctive overall shape that she gives to her life.

Consistency As we have seen, according to virtue ethics the virtuous person is not simply one who performs a virtuous action, but one who performs that action in a particular way, in accordance with both her reason and her desire. In addition, the virtuous person not only acts this way on one or even many occasions; rather, she acts this way consistently, where this means that her actions constitute a tightly woven and highly unified pattern held together by certain underlying attitudes. What defines the virtuous person is not just how she acts on particular occasions, but the way in which she regards her actions as part of this larger pattern. By discerning and following this pattern, she gives a certain shape not just to her actions but to her life as a whole. Virtue ethicists have typically held that there is a certain finite range of basic spheres of human concern: among these spheres are the appetite for bodily pleasures; the vulnerability of the human body to injury and death; the use of money and wealth; the sense of honor and esteem; friendship and other relations of intimacy;

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cooperation in social and political institutions and traditions; and the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and truth. They take these spheres to define the context of operation for the various virtues. Thus, temperance operates in the sphere of bodily pleasures, courage in the sphere of bodily vulnerability, and so on.27 Each virtue defines a certain consistent attitude toward matters in its sphere, one that makes its possessor excellent in handling those matters. For the virtuous person, events in his life are seen as instances of larger patterns having to do with pleasure, danger, honor, and so on; handling those events well is crucially a matter of understanding how they fit into these larger patterns. Virtue ethicists have traditionally described the relation between each virtue and its sphere by saying that it represents a “mean”—that is, a moderate or intermediate attitude—within that sphere. Thus Aristotle writes that, for example, “concerning fear and confidence, courage is the mean” and “concerning pleasures and pains . . . the mean is temperance.”28 In each case, the idea is that the virtuous person steers a kind of middle course between two vicious extremes: on the one hand, a “deficient” state in which one fails to appreciate the full value of the sphere in question, and, on the other hand, an “excessive” state in which one rates it too highly. Thus, in the sphere of bodily pleasures, for example, the deficient state is represented by the “insensible” person who does not enjoy them enough, whereas the excessive state is represented by the rather more common case of the “intemperate” person who enjoys them too much.29 The doctrine of the mean helps to illuminate the central place of the ideal of consistency in virtue ethics. For the underlying idea at work in the doctrine is that human life is organized according to certain basic spheres of concern, and that the virtuous person succeeds by taking the right attitude toward each of these spheres. Virtue ethicists expect that, by and large, we do form consistent attitudes toward these spheres. That is why they find it helpful to describe the virtues by contrast with other instances of consistent attitudes within each sphere. They regard these other attitudes as flawed and mistaken, but they are consistent attitudes toward the sphere in question nonetheless: just as temperance, for example, is a general attitude toward bodily pleasures, so is intemperance. The content of the attitudes is different, but the underlying tendency to recognize a unified sphere of concern in this area and to form a characteristic attitude toward it is the same.30

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The virtuous person is consistent in that she discerns patterns among the various situations that arise in her life in terms of certain basic concerns, and she responds to those situations on the basis of characteristic attitudes that she has developed toward those concerns. This kind of consistency needs to be sharply distinguished from consistency in stereotyped behaviors. Someone might be consistently disposed toward giving, for example, in the sense that in any situation he looks for ways to satisfy the wants and needs of others. His behavior would exhibit a pattern across a broad range of situations, and in that sense it would involve a kind of consistency. This is not the consistency of the virtuous person, according to virtue ethics. In describing the virtue of generosity, Aristotle insists that the generous person will give only “to the right people, in the right amounts, at the right time.”31 On this conception, the virtuous person need not be consistent in performing a certain type of behavior, for example, giving. Rather, he is consistent in his responsiveness to certain considerations, in this case considerations about what makes it appropriate to give. Giving only when it is appropriate to do so may involve sensitivity to a plurality of different kinds of considerations, such as the absolute need of the recipient, his situation relative to others, his relationship to the giver, or the form that the gift should take. It might be appropriate to give more to those in greater need, or to give more to those with whom one stands in a closer relationship, or to limit one’s gifts so as not to embarrass those who cannot give as much in return. Thus the generous person may give to one person and not to another, without being inconsistent. Since she is keeping track of all of these considerations and their interactions, her behavior will not be reliably correlated with the presence of any single factor, and as a result it may appear inconsistent. But she is consistent at a deeper level. If we were to appreciate all of the factors to which she is sensitive and the precise weight that she gives them, then we would see the consistency in her actions. In this way, the role of consistency in virtue ethics has to be understood in the context of the virtue ethicist’s commitment to the idea that the virtues are rational states, and not mere habits of acting or feeling. Because generosity, for example, is a rational state manifested in choice, it does not consist simply in a habit of giving or of taking pleasure in giving. Rather, it expresses the agent’s judgment regarding what is good “most of all.” Giving may be the

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best thing to do in some cases, but not in others. Since the virtuous person is good at discerning what is best in any given situation, he will accordingly give where it is best to do so, but not where it is not. His behavior can appear inconsistent, but we can see that it is not once we understand the range of factors that go into his assessment of when, where, and how he ought to give.

Robustness The consistency of the virtues is closely related to a further aspect, their robustness. In being consistent, the virtuous person not only consistently attends to certain concerns, but also consistently treats them as having a certain weight in his deliberations. This consistency in weighting emerges particularly clearly in cases where virtuous action can be quite dangerous or costly for the virtuous person. The robustness of the virtues means that the virtuous person’s allegiance to a particular set of values is expected to hold up in the face of what might otherwise be enticing temptations or intimidating threats. Indeed, virtue ethicists have traditionally held that certain values carry extraordinarily great weight, so that a virtuous person will be prepared even to die rather than to abandon them. According to virtue ethics, certain modes of action are simply ruled out for the virtuous person. As Aristotle puts it: Some [actions] have names that immediately connote baseness, such as . . . adultery, theft, murder. All these, and others of the same sort, are called base in themselves, and not the excess or deficiency of them. Nor is there any correct way to do such things; doing them is always an error. In these sorts of actions, there is no such thing as doing it well or badly, for example committing adultery with the right woman, or at the right time, or in the right way. Simply to do any of them is to go wrong.32 In Aristotle’s view, some descriptions of an action, if they are true, are such as to in themselves rule out that course of action for the virtuous person: among these descriptions are adultery, theft, and murder. The virtuous person will not do a “moderate” amount of these, but rather none of them at all. It belongs to the mean of virtue, not to engage in these things more or less than other people, but to eschew them altogether.33

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Performing actions of this sort on even a single occasion will have the effect of revealing that the agent is not virtuous. Virtue is supposed to be sufficiently robust that it can insure the agent against ever performing these types of actions, no matter what temptations or threats might be applied. In this way, we can see that ascriptions of virtue in virtue ethics underwrite very strong empirical predictions: if I am a virtuous person, I will never do certain sorts of actions; conversely, if I perform any of the actions in question, then whatever my previous life or conduct have been like, I reveal myself not to be a virtuous person after all. This concept of robustness can seem extreme, but it flows from what we have already seen about the rational character of the virtues: since the virtuous agent is marked by the fact that he sticks by his understanding of what is best, he must necessarily do so even in the face of strong contrary pressures. Unless those pressures have the effect of leading him to rationally revise his judgment about what is best, he cannot allow himself to be swayed by them.34 The robustness of the virtues is perhaps most obviously illustrated by the case of courage, since it belongs to the very nature of courage to make the agent stand fast in the face of danger. Aristotle holds that the paradigm case of a courageous person is a soldier prepared to face death in battle.35 He acknowledges that, even for the courageous person, the prospect of death is fearful.36 But he insists that nonetheless “he will persist for the sake of what is admirable.”37 Aristotle even goes so far as to claim that the virtuous person has more to lose by dying than others: “The more he possesses virtue as a whole and the happier he is,” he writes, “the more pain he will feel in the face of death” since “for such a person life is especially worth living.”38 All the same, Aristotle insists that he will be “no less courageous” since, as a virtuous person, “he chooses what is admirable in war” even at the cost of his life.39 The ideal of robustness is naturally connected with courage, but virtue ethicists take it to apply to the other virtues as well. Philippa Foot, for example, has argued that the virtue of justice might equally require its possessor to sacrifice his life. She writes: If a man is just it follows that he will be prepared, in the event of very evil circumstances, even to face death rather than to act unjustly—for instance in getting an innocent man convicted of a crime of which he has been accused. . . . He could not have it both ways and while possessing the virtue of justice hold himself ready

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to be unjust should any great advantage accrue. The man who has the virtue of justice is not ready to do certain things, and if he is too easily tempted, we shall say that he was ready after all.40 In Foot’s view, it belongs to the very nature of the virtue of justice that a just person is simply “not ready to do certain things,” regardless of what it might cost him. One who has truly acquired the virtue of justice, and who has thereby come to feel the full weight of certain considerations—in Foot’s example, the weight of the consideration that one ought not get an innocent man convicted of a crime—will be prepared to die rather than to contravene them. If a person is tempted, even in this very difficult situation, to condemn an innocent man, then we can only conclude, according to Foot, that he was not a just person after all. To be tempted to do this, even when one’s life is at stake, is to be “too easily tempted.” Foot writes that the just person cannot “have it both ways,” where I take it she means that he cannot, on the one hand, be just in circumstances where that is advantageous to him, but on the other hand, be free to make use of injustice if that becomes advantageous instead. Of course, she is aware that a person could act justly where it was advantageous and cease to do so when it was not. Her point is that such a person would not be just, since being just involves not simply doing certain actions, but doing them out of a consistent and robust attachment to a particular set of values. In this sense, we can see robustness as being closely tied to the fact that, as we saw above, according to virtue ethics, a virtue is not a mere regularity in behavior, but also a deeply habituated set of beliefs and desires. It is the presumed strength of the virtuous person’s attachment to these beliefs and desires that underwrites the strong predictive power associated with ascriptions of virtue in the virtue ethics tradition. The robustness of the virtues is deeply connected to virtue ethicists’ sense of how the virtues are meant to perfect human nature. Foot nicely brings this point out through the idea that the virtues are “corrective,” where this means that their value lies precisely in the ways in which they allow us to overcome temptation or make up for deficiencies in motivation.41 She illustrates the idea with some examples: One may say that it is only because fear and the desire for pleasure often operate as temptations that courage and temperance exist

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as virtues at all. As things are we often want to run away not only where that is the right thing to do but also where we should stand firm; and we want pleasure not only where we should seek pleasure but also where we should not. If human nature had been different, there would have been no need of a corrective disposition in either place, as fear and pleasure would have been good guides to conduct throughout life.42 According to this corrective conception of the virtues, human beings are thought of as having both certain fundamental needs and as suffering from certain fundamental forms of weakness that impede their ability to meet those needs. We need to stand firm in defense of certain causes, for example, but fear tempts us to run away. The point of a virtue such as courage, then, is to “correct” our motivations in ways that allow us to overcome these weaknesses. In becoming a courageous person, one internalizes the value of standing firm where this is needed and thereby overcomes the temptation to run away. From this point of view, the inability of the just person to act unjustly, even where it would be advantageous for him to do so, turns out to be essential to the value of justice as a virtue. Human beings need justice, on the corrective conception, precisely because they will be tempted to set aside the importance of protecting the innocent in the name of saving their own skin; the virtue of justice prevents this by strengthening our respect for the rights and dignity of other people, to the point where we will consistently feel the full weight of those considerations, and thus recognize that not even the cause of saving oneself can justify a gross violation of the rights of others. According to virtue ethics, virtue is robust in the sense that the virtuous person has internalized, at a very deep level, certain norms and attitudes that give a specific coherent shape to her beliefs, desires, and actions. But the fact that these norms are internalized does not mean that they can be expected to function appropriately in just any wider context. Virtue ethicists have traditionally assumed that the operation of the virtues requires certain “external goods,” whether as instruments in the performance of virtuous actions, or as the characteristic context in which the virtues are to be displayed.43 Just as a lyre player cannot be altogether successful unless he has a decent lyre to play, so the virtuous person cannot exercise his virtues adequately unless he has instruments such as

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“friends, wealth, and political power.”44 The traditional context for the operation of the virtues is provided by the stable institutional structures of the family and the state: thus Aristotle names “heads of household and statesmen”45 as paradigmatic examples of virtuous people. Further, virtue ethicists think of the practice of the virtues as typically taking place in the context of friendship, since virtuous people will naturally find their own activities reflected and extended by the company of likeminded friends.46 The virtuous person will need this sort of context in order to give his virtues their proper expression. As long as this kind of context is present, he should be able to count on his internalized standards to make him consistently act well.

Integration According to virtue ethics, the virtuous person is characterized by certain habits of belief, desire and, action. These habits are not simply a loose collection of psychological tendencies, but are deeply connected: the virtuous person is thought of as exhibiting a profound integration between her actions, beliefs, and desires. She is expected to display a high degree of psychic organization and integrity: her beliefs and desires both urge her in the same direction, so that she wants what she believes she ought to want, and she believes she ought to want what she wants. Furthermore, her actions follow accordingly: her conscious, reflectively endorsed beliefs and desires have effective control over her actions, even in difficult or unforeseen situations. The idea of integration thus brings together all of the features of the virtues that we have seen so far. The virtuous agent must not merely act well, but act well consistently in the face of strong contrary pressures. She is able to do so, according to virtue ethics, because she is guided by deeply habituated desires and acutely sensitive judgments. In the virtue ethics tradition, this ideal is perhaps most clearly articulated in the case of the temperate person, whose appetites for bodily pleasures “are always in harmony with reason.”47 Here is how Aristotle describes the temperate person: He does not enjoy the things that the intemperate person enjoys most—in fact, they are unpleasant to him—nor, in general, those

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pleasures that one ought not enjoy, or any kind to excess. . . . But those pleasures that are conducive to health or good condition he desires in a moderate way and as he ought, and he desires all other pleasures as well, as long as they do not impede health or good condition, run contrary to what is admirable, or go beyond his means. For to do that would be to love these pleasures more than they are worth. The temperate person is not like this, but as correct reason prescribes.48 The crucial point about the temperate person is that he is not simply one who has certain true beliefs about what pleasures he should enjoy, nor even one who has those beliefs and wishes to act on them. Rather, he does not even feel pleasures that he ought not. The sorts of overindulgence that appeal to the vicious, intemperate person simply do not appeal to him. In this way, the temperate person illustrates how demanding the ideal of psychic integration is in virtue ethics. One way of bringing out the importance of integration is through the contrast between the truly temperate and the merely self-controlled person. Like the temperate person and the weakwilled person, the self-controlled person has the correct general beliefs about bodily pleasures. Unlike the weak-willed, however, the self-controlled person succeeds in acting according to those beliefs. In this respect, he more closely resembles the temperate person. But nonetheless, virtue ethicists insist that temperance and self-control are not the same: for unlike the temperate person, whose desires are in harmony with his judgments, the self-controlled person succeeds in acting well only after an internal struggle against recalcitrant “strong and base appetites.”49 Aristotle is happy to acknowledge that self-control is “good and praiseworthy.”50 But he is also emphatic about the deep difference between mere self-control and genuine virtue. Insofar as the self-controlled person does what the virtuous person does, but only with pain and difficulty, he cannot act as the virtuous person does. The role of integration in virtue ethics is illustrated in an even more striking way by the case of the weak-willed person. The virtue ethicist’s conception of the weak-willed reveals that integration functions not merely as an ideal in virtue ethics, but also as a more fundamental psychological claim about how human action works.51 According to virtue ethics, the weak-willed person goes

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wrong in his actions because he fails in both his desires and his reasoning. In this sense, his case illustrates in a negative manner the deep connection that virtue ethics presumes between action, belief, and desire. The weak-willed person gives in to a bad desire, and this bad desire provides the end in his weak-willed action. But, as we have seen, he at the same time fails in his reasoning, because he does not adequately bring his general convictions to bear on the particular case. According to virtue ethics, weakness of will necessarily involves both bad desires and intellectual error working together. What the weak-willed person pursues, he at the same time sees as good, although it is not in fact in keeping with what he “most of all” thinks of as good. In this way, even the weak-willed person can be seen as possessing a kind of integration, since his desires go wrong only in collusion with his erring reason. While going against his considered beliefs, the weak-willed person still exhibits a certain fundamental unity between reason and desire: he still pursues what seems good to him, even though it would seem better to him to have done otherwise if he had drawn out the full implications of his beliefs in this case. The virtue ethicist’s conception of the weak-willed person thus reveals that integration between belief, desire, and action is understood to be a basic feature of human psychology in virtue ethics. The virtuous person possesses this integration in its excellent form, in the sense that his desires and actions are in harmony with the full implications of his considered beliefs. But in this respect, too, he merely represents the perfected version of the psychology that belongs to human nature as such.

Conclusion In virtue ethics, the concept of character has primarily a normative function: its purpose is to advance an ideal of how human beings ought to think, feel, and act. The purpose of this ideal is not to describe the actual course of anyone’s life. But we have seen in this chapter that this ideal at the same time involves a rich descriptive content. First, it provides us with a detailed picture of the virtuous person, as one who consistently acts well, holds robust moral values, engages in excellent practical reasoning and displays a high degree of integration between his beliefs, desires, and actions.

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Second, virtue ethics leads us to expect quite specific behavior from the virtuous person, even where that behavior is profoundly difficult or costly for him. A person who fails to act virtuously, even in unfavorable circumstances like these, will have given strong empirical evidence for the claim that he is not virtuous, whatever other admirable attributes he may have. Third, we have seen that the virtue ethicist’s ideal is meant to have a natural basis, in the sense that the virtuous person is thought of as fully realizing and perfecting the natural tendencies and capacities of human psychology. In this sense, virtue ethics commits itself not just to a normative ethical theory, but also to a descriptive theory of human psychology. In particular, we have seen that virtue ethicists hold that human beings are characteristically rational creatures who tend to organize their lives according to consistent attitudes and to govern their actions in accordance with their beliefs and desires. These descriptive claims are part of the recent appeal of virtue ethics: it seems to uphold high moral standards while also grounding those standards in human nature. As we shall see in the chapters to follow, however, these descriptive commitments also impose significant limitations on the kinds of responses available to virtue ethicists in the face of contrary empirical evidence.

Further reading The reader interested in the themes of this chapter is encouraged above all to study Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. This text is by far the most important source, not only for my account but also for contemporary virtue ethics generally. That said, Aristotle’s thinking, and his prose, can often be tough going, especially for beginners. One helpful way in is to read the Nicomachean Ethics alongside texts that represent some of the other ancient lines of thought to which Aristotle was concerned to respond. In particular, Aristotle often takes care to compare and contrast his arguments with positions he attributes to Socrates: versions of many of the relevant arguments can be found in Plato’s dialogues, especially 1997a and 1997b. Useful orientation to specific topics in the Nicomachean Ethics can also be had from recent scholarly literature: see the essays collected in Rorty 1980, Sherman 1999, Kraut 2006, and Polansky 2014. The most widely influential sources for recent virtue ethics are the essays

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collected in Anscombe 1981, Foot 2002, and McDowell 1998. Other landmarks of the tradition include Geach  1967 and 1977, Murdoch 1970, MacIntyre 1984, and Williams 1985 and 1993. For accessible overviews of some of the central themes and problems of the tradition, see Annas 1993 and 2011, Athanassoulis 2013, and Hursthouse 1999. These writers do not hold all the same views, but, taken together, their writings give the reader a fair survey of the essential questions and debates that have shaped recent virtue ethics. A broader perspective, including work by critics of virtue ethics, can be had from the essays in Crisp and Slote 1997.

Chapter two

Acting against character Introduction The previous chapter furnished us with a basic picture of the virtuous person according to virtue ethics: she has good aims and desires, takes pleasure in the right things, and reasons effectively in the light of her considered moral convictions. As a result, she consistently acts well in response to the moral demands of diverse situations. This picture might give us a relatively simple view of the relationship between the virtuous person’s character and her actions: the virtuous person always performs actions in keeping with her character and never performs ones that are at odds with it. This simple view is right in the essentials: as we saw in Chapter 1, the virtue ethicist’s expectations for consistency and robustness on  the part of the virtuous person are extremely high. But nonetheless, there are certain ways in which virtue ethicists have wanted to insist that the relation between the virtuous person’s character and her action can sometimes be more complex. In particular, they have acknowledged that it is sometimes possible for a virtuous person to act in ways that do not reflect her character. This chapter introduces some of the more significant complications in this area and explains how virtue ethics aims to acknowledge them, while at the same time retaining the basic picture of the virtuous person presented in Chapter 1. Virtue ethicists have not always been as careful as they should be regarding this topic. They have sometimes been tempted to appeal, in a rather loose way, to the idea that the virtuous person can sometimes act against her character and that we should not

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make too much of unvirtuous behavior on her part now and then. Rosalind Hursthouse, for example, writes that virtuous people can be expected to act out of character in various “everyday ways,” for  example, “when they are exhausted, dazed with grief, ill, drunk, (through no serious fault of their own, we must suppose), shell-shocked, and so on.”1 This is a rather mixed list of cases, and virtue ethicists should be a bit more skeptical about at least some of them. When it comes to the fairly routine circumstances of being exhausted, grieving, ill, or drunk, it seems more in keeping with virtue ethicists’ general commitments to think that it is part of being a virtuous person to know how to handle such situations well. It may be that in such cases the virtuous person would not act just as she would in other situations: she may normally be quite witty, for example, but probably not much inclined to make jokes when grieving. But that is not acting out of character, in the sense of acting contrary to her virtue, since it belongs to a virtuous person precisely to know when jokes are and are not appropriate. Recall that according to virtue ethics, virtue is not a mere regularity in behavior but a complex sensitivity to the varying relevance of a wide range of factors in different situations. When the virtuous person becomes more somber in grief, it follows that she is in fact acting in character, in the sense of acting as her virtue guides her to do. Everyday conceptions of character allow for genuinely uncharacteristic behavior in cases like the ones Hursthouse mentions. In ordinary conversation, we might write off someone’s unusual behavior by saying that he was acting out of character because he was, for example, tired or ill. But this everyday readiness to dismiss behavior as out of character may simply show that commonsense conceptions of character are a good deal looser than those associated with virtue ethics. If our commonsense conceptions treat character as merely a broad generalization about an individual’s behavioral tendencies, or as a sort of average overall tone in her behavior, then they can happily admit exceptions like those mentioned by Hursthouse. But as we have seen in the previous chapter, the conception of the virtuous person’s character in virtue ethics is much more demanding than this, and so the possibility of uncharacteristic action will have to be introduced more carefully, if it is going to be compatible with the deep commitments of virtue ethics. In order to get a better sense of how the possibility of a virtuous person’s acting against her character is consistent with the ideals of

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virtue ethics, we should begin with a reminder about how exactly character and action are supposed to be connected according to virtue ethics. What we saw in Chapter 1 is that this connection essentially goes by way of the notion of voluntariness: virtues operate in the first instance on an agent’s desires, thereby leading him to make certain choices and to execute corresponding actions. So, if there is to be room for a notion of uncharacteristic action in virtue ethics, it must in some way involve qualifying the connection between action and voluntariness. Here again, the essential starting point is Aristotle, who devotes an extended discussion in the Nicomachean Ethics to the question of when exactly an action can and cannot be called voluntary. Aristotle holds that this discussion is essential to the ethical question of praise and blame, since only voluntary actions can be praised or blamed.2 But it is equally essential to the topic of virtue, since only voluntary actions will properly express an agent’s virtue.3 By the same token, only if a virtuous person’s action is in some respect involuntary can a virtue ethicist say that it fails to manifest her character. This chapter unfolds in four main sections. In the first, I give a brief introduction to the concept of the involuntary in virtue ethics, focusing on Aristotle’s discussion. This introduction yields three central examples of involuntary action, which I discuss in detail in the sections that follow. The first deals with involuntariness due to ignorance; the second with involuntariness due to the limits of human endurance; and the third with involuntariness due to tragic dilemma. In my handling each of these cases, I emphasize two essential points. First, acknowledging the possibility of these ways of acting out of character helps to make the ideal of virtue ethics more realistic than my discussion in the previous chapter might have suggested, if taken alone. But, second, these examples also bring out how limited the scope for action outside of character is in virtue ethics, and therefore, they also serve to underscore just how demanding its ideal really is.

Involuntary action Aristotle provides two general conditions under which an action is involuntary: when it happens “by force” or “through ignorance.”4 Take first the idea of involuntariness due to force. If an agent did a

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certain thing, but only because he was externally compelled, then virtue ethicists do not take the action as revealing of his character. Thus, suppose that I am not supposed to be on your land. Now I am carried there by a “wind” or by “powerful people.”5 In such a case, although I am now on your land, I am not there as a result of my choice or desire, and so my presence there is no reflection on my character. These actions seem clearly involuntary, insofar as in them “the cause is external and the one who is forced contributes nothing.”6 Some cases of involuntariness through force are more ambiguous, as when an agent is forced into a situation he would not wish to be in, but in which he still has to make a choice. In Aristotle’s canonical example, suppose that sailors in a storm at sea choose to throw their cargo overboard in the hopes of saving the ship.7 Did they throw away the cargo voluntarily? They chose to throw it away; but at the same time they did not wish to. This example illustrates the possibility of what Aristotle calls “mixed” actions, which seem voluntary in some respects and involuntary in others. On reflection, it seems clear that almost every human action is to some degree mixed in this sense, insofar as almost every choice and decision we make is constrained by a context of limited options and incomplete control. In light of this fact, it becomes an important task for a virtue ethicist to say exactly when an agent was “forced” in such a way as to make his action involuntary and so render it out of character. The idea of involuntariness due to ignorance is also initially intuitive: if I perform a certain action, but without knowing what I am thereby doing, then the action seems involuntary. Suppose, to take a famous example of Bernard Williams’s that I drink gasoline, mistaking it for gin.8 In such a case, I cannot be said to drink the gasoline voluntarily; indeed, I had no desire to do so. This much seems clear. But things quickly get more complicated. Notice that I did drink this stuff voluntarily; this was what I wanted to do, although of course under a mistaken impression about what the stuff in question was. Here too, we find that an action cannot always simply be pronounced “voluntary” or “involuntary” absolutely: it may be voluntary in one respect, but not in another. Thus, it takes work for a virtue ethicist to determine precisely when ignorance can render an action against character. I turn to this topic in the next section, before returning to the case of involuntariness due to force in the subsequent sections.

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It is essential to keep these cases of involuntary action separate from the phenomenon of weakness of will, as we discussed it in the previous chapter. For Aristotle and the virtue ethics tradition, a person who exhibits weakness of will is not acting involuntarily.9 As we saw in Chapter 1, it is impossible for a genuinely temperate person to exhibit weakness of will. Truly virtuous character, according to virtue ethics, requires not merely good judgments, but also harmonious desires and effective action. Agents who engage in weak-willed actions do not act against their temperate character; rather, they reveal themselves to lack that kind of character altogether. Insofar as the weak-willed agent acts on his appetite, his action is still seen as voluntary, even if it is not in keeping with his considered judgments about what he ought to do. This contrast helps to bring out the point that truly uncharacteristic action needs to be involuntary and not just against the agent’s best judgment. Before we approach the cases of involuntariness due to ignorance and to force in more detail, it is important to remove two possible misunderstandings about the place of the topic of involuntary action in virtue ethics. First, one might wonder whether involuntary actions can really count as actions at all, whether agents should feel ownership of them in any sense. If agents cannot be praised or blamed for things they do involuntarily, as Aristotle insists, then it might seem as if these supposed “actions” simply are not relevant to us. Certainly Aristotle means to hold that not everything we bring about in some way or another is an action of ours: his favorite example of this is the operation of what he calls the “nutritive capacity” in such natural functions as breathing, digestion, and growth. These operations, he insists, have “no share in human virtue.”10 Even though we are the subjects of the relevant verbs—we say “I breathe” or “I am growing”—these are not really actions of ours. Insofar as involuntary actions don’t correspond to our choices and desires, one might be tempted to dismiss them in an analogous way, as merely natural events with no bearing on ethical questions. But it is a noteworthy feature of virtue ethics that it has not traditionally taken this austere position. Aristotle suggests that the whole point of calling certain actions “involuntary,” as opposed to merely “non-voluntary,” is that they occasion a certain appropriate regret in the agent.11 In involuntary action, the agent did not choose or desire what happened; but if it goes against his wishes, for example, if someone is hurt whom he did not wish to hurt, then

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he should feel some degree of regret, not just at what happened, but at what he did. Williams introduced the term “agent-regret” to cover this distinctive kind of feeling, which goes beyond merely regretting what happened, as a spectator might do, to express an acknowledgment that what happened, though not desired by the agent, is nonetheless something he did and for which he feels a certain responsibility.12 As Williams puts it, this sort of regret expresses the agent’s sense that “there is something special about the agent’s relation to this happening, something that cannot be eliminated merely by the consideration that it was not his fault.”13 In all of the cases to be discussed below, I take it that a virtue ethicist would say that the involuntary actions in question would be appropriate objects of agent-regret in this sense, and to that extent they count not just as things the agent brought about in some way or another, but as actions of his. As a second, related point, it should be clear that, even if involuntary actions do not in themselves reflect the virtuous person’s character, questions of character quickly arise around them. Virtue ethicists have often held that feeling appropriate regret at what one did involuntarily is itself a mark of the virtuous person.14 Hursthouse brings this out by noting that even where the virtuous person will do something shameful, she will not do it as a vicious person would: rather, as Hursthouse puts it, “she acts with immense regret and pain, instead of indifferently or gladly.”15 The role of the virtuous person’s character here may go even beyond the immediate context of the action, to affect her whole attitude toward the situation, including how she responds to it afterward, for example, by making an apology or offering compensation, to the extent that this is possible. Even if involuntary bad actions do not show that the agent lacks virtue, a virtue ethicist will say that certain responses to them—detachment, disavowal of responsibility, or indifference toward the suffering that results—can reveal serious character flaws.

Ignorance The starting point for Aristotle’s discussion of involuntariness due to ignorance is the thought that ignorance sometimes makes action involuntary and sometimes does not. On the one hand, he wants to acknowledge that ignorance regarding the “circumstances of the action or what it is concerned with”16 can in some cases render

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it involuntary. People whose actions turn out badly because of ignorance of this sort can sometimes be appropriate objects of “pity and pardon”17 as opposed to blame or punishment. In these cases, we do not see the resulting action as casting doubt on the agent’s virtue. On the other hand, Aristotle insists that “every wicked person is ignorant of what he ought to do and what he ought to avoid,”18 and that this sort of ignorance in no sense tends to make action involuntary: if it did, then wicked acts would not be blameworthy. The problem for virtue ethicists is to give a clear explanation of the difference between the two kinds of ignorance at work here and to explain why one makes action involuntary and the other does not. In order to illustrate what he has in mind by ignorance of an action’s circumstances, Aristotle gives a series of examples: Someone could be ignorant of what he is doing, for example those who say that they “did not know it was a secret,” as Aeschylus said of the mysteries, or that “he meant only to demonstrate it but let it off,” as someone said about the catapult. Again, someone might believe that his son was an enemy, as did Merope, or that a pointed spear was covered, or that a stone was pumice. Or a drink intended to save someone might kill him. Or someone meaning only to touch a person, as in sparring, might strike him.19 In these kinds of cases, Aristotle says, the agent “is thought to have acted involuntarily.”20 To appreciate what he has in mind, consider the case of the agent who kills someone with a drink intended to save him. We can imagine that the case is, for example, one in which a layperson who is not very knowledgeable about medicines gives a sick person a drug, meaning to help him, but because of some unforeseen circumstance (perhaps having to do with the nature of the drug or the patient’s condition) it kills him instead. This is a case of involuntary killing. The agent killed the patient, but not on account of any choice or desire to do so. In other respects, of course, the action was voluntary: the agent wanted to help the patient, and for that purpose gave him this drug. So the action, considered as an instance of attempted medical treatment, was perfectly voluntary. But since the agent did not know that what he was doing would kill the patient, his killing him was involuntary. The important contrast here is with the case of a voluntary killer, who intentionally gives someone a lethal dose of a drug, perhaps to gain an inheritance. The voluntary killer’s action does reflect his character accurately: we can

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say that he is the sort of person who kills. But the involuntary killer’s action may not reflect his character: his action, considered as an act of killing, need not correspond to the sort of person he is. Virtue ethicists want to insist that ignorance of circumstances, as in the examples given above, is essentially different from the kind of ignorance they take to be characteristic of the vicious person. Aristotle does not give us a parallel set of examples to illustrate the ignorance of the vicious, but we can take as an illustration of vicious ignorance a belief that he elsewhere describes as characteristic of one kind of vicious person: in his discussion of intemperance, he claims that the intemperate person acts on the belief that “one ought to pursue the present pleasure.”21 Aristotle regards this belief as false, at least when it is put thus baldly, without any qualification about the source of the pleasure or the circumstances of its pursuit. He holds that one ought to moderate one’s appetite for pleasure and to avoid indulging it to excess. Virtue ethicists want to insist that the ignorance characteristic of vicious people, as in the case of false beliefs like this, does not make their corresponding actions involuntary. But it is not immediately clear why not. If the person who acts in ignorance of circumstances deserves pity and pardon rather than blame, why should we not equally pity and pardon the person who has false beliefs about the value of pleasure? According to Aristotle, the key difference between the two kinds of ignorance is this: ignorance makes action involuntary only when the ignorance is itself involuntary. Ignorance that is voluntary cannot make the corresponding action involuntary. He introduces this account by reference to common assumptions about legal responsibility: Indeed, [legislators] punish a person for being ignorant, if he is thought to be the cause of his ignorance. . . . And they punish those who are ignorant of anything in the laws that they ought to have known and that is not hard to know. The same thing applies in other cases, wherever people are thought to be ignorant through carelessness, on the grounds that it was up to them to not be ignorant. For they were in control of whether they took care.22 According to this argument, our actions are voluntary and so we are accountable for them, even when they are done in ignorance, provided that we ourselves are responsible for the ignorance.

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In order for this to be true, we need not have deliberately set out to be ignorant at some particular time. Rather, our ignorance is voluntary simply insofar as we are ignorant of matters about which we could have known and “ought to have known.” By failing to take care and inquire into these matters, we thereby become voluntarily ignorant of them, and our corresponding actions are thus voluntary as well. Insofar as the vicious person wishes to be ignorant about the value of pleasure, in order to be able to indulge his appetites without hesitation or regret, his ignorance can be called voluntary. Note also that this account allows Aristotle to acknowledge that ignorance of circumstances does not always make action involuntary: if the agent’s ignorance of particulars is willful or negligent, then the resulting actions will be voluntary. One might wonder whether Aristotle has a consistent position here. It seems clear that he wants to insist on the voluntariness of vicious ignorance, since he thinks it is key to preserving individual responsibility for virtue and vice. He cares deeply that, as he puts it, “it is in our power to be excellent or base,”23 and so he needs an account that will allow him to say that the ignorance of the vicious does not make their actions involuntary. But at the same time, as we saw in Chapter 1, he also emphasizes the essential role of early upbringing in the formation of character. While some fortunate individuals may have received the right sort of ethical upbringing, others presumably were brought up to believe that the present pleasure is the only thing worth going for, or some other false ethical doctrines. So one might wonder how consistent Aristotle is, or how essential it is to his position, to insist that ignorance of general ethical truths is always voluntary.24 Despite these difficulties, this is an aspect of Aristotle’s views that recent virtue ethicists have wished to retain and defend. Foot, for example, follows Aristotle in holding that “virtue must be within the reach of anyone who really wants it.”25 She argues that vicious agents can be held responsible for their ignorance because the kind of knowledge required for virtue is “only that part of knowledge which is within the reach of any adult human being.”26 Thus Foot is prepared to insist that anyone who lacks such knowledge, regardless of how misguided her upbringing may have been, must be responsible for her ignorance, since this knowledge belongs to the sphere of what the agent could have known and ought to have known. If she does not know it, this is the result of blameworthy

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negligence and a lack of care on her part. Failure to possess this knowledge, then, is a sign of bad character and is incompatible with virtue. The idea that individuals are responsible for their moral knowledge might seem like an excessive or antiquated flourish on the part of virtue ethics. But in fact the motivations for this position lie deep within the tradition. For this view is really only a reflection of the demanding ideal of the virtuous person that we saw in the previous chapter. The virtuous person is expected not only to desire to act well, but to consistently discern what acting well would require in across a variety of challenging situations and to put her good desires effectively into action. Harboring mistaken moral views would profoundly get in the way of her ability to do this. Acknowledging the possibility that a virtuous person can act against character by acting in involuntary ignorance of her circumstances goes some way toward making the ideal of virtue ethics more realistic and attainable, in the sense that it at least allows that the virtuous person need not be infallible: she can make mistakes, and those mistakes can have terrible consequences. Recognizing this possibility helps to make the virtuous person seem a bit more like a human being. But at the same time, virtue ethics insists that the scope for error that is compatible with virtue is quite limited: the virtuous person must know anything that she ought to know, including all the basic moral truths. Even regarding particular matters pertaining to her circumstances, the scope for ignorance compatible with virtue is limited, since the virtuous person must know everything she can reasonably be expected to know, and can only be ignorant where ignorance cannot be construed as the result of negligence on her part.

Unendurable force Aristotle distinguishes between two main ways in which action can be involuntary, either through ignorance or through force. Having discussed the former in the previous section, I now turn to the latter. Aristotle’s discussion of involuntariness through force is less worked out than his discussion of ignorance, and so here our discussion will have to advance in certain ways beyond his text, while remaining consistent with the fundamental commitments of

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the virtue ethics tradition. Under the heading of force, Aristotle discusses a wide range of cases. He takes as his paradigm instances of involuntariness through force actions in which the agent can hardly be said to contribute anything at all, such as the case we saw above in which a person is carried away by a powerful wind. At the same time, he also puts in this category cases in which agents contribute a great deal, albeit under difficult circumstances, such as the case of the sailors who abandon their cargo in a storm. Most important for our purposes are two further kinds of cases that he discusses, in which agents have to make choices under circumstances that are in some way morally compromising. He recognizes, as one such kind of case, that of a person who “does what he ought not because of things that overstrain human nature and that no one would endure.”27 In this sort of case, he says, “pardon is given,”28 which is for him a sign that the action was involuntary. He also discusses a somewhat different kind of case, in which an agent is forced into a choice between two undesirable courses of action. Aristotle does not distinguish these types of case, but I find it helpful to do so: I discuss the first type in this section, under the heading of “unendurable force”; and then the second type in the following section, under the heading of “tragic dilemmas.” Aristotle regards both of these kinds of situations as morally compromising, in the sense that, in them, a virtuous person might do actions of a sort that would otherwise be deeply contrary to virtue. Because the force applied in these cases makes the resulting actions at least to some extent involuntary, however, the actions do not tend to show that the agent lacks virtue. The idea that there are situations that present such profound challenges that no one could reasonably be expected to surmount them seems intuitive. The difficulty is to reconcile this with the robustness of virtue as discussed in Chapter 1. As we said there, robustness means that the virtuous person is expected to stick by what virtue calls for, even when doing so is very difficult. Doing so is not just an unfortunate side effect of being virtuous, but in fact part of its point, since acquiring a virtue means taking on for oneself the full weight of certain considerations, for example, that one should not get an innocent man convicted of a crime. One who claims to appreciate the full gravity of this sort of consideration and yet is too easily tempted or frightened into setting it aside would seem not to have appreciated it after all. Again, to return to another of our earlier

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examples of robustness, Aristotle holds that the paradigm expression of the virtue of courage is the readiness to die in battle. He is aware that this places great demands on the courageous person. But he insists that only this readiness to sacrifice one’s life counts as a full demonstration of the courageous person’s attachment to the value of standing one’s ground in the face of threats. Nonetheless, Aristotle does want to recognize limits to what virtue can demand of us. He writes that while the courageous person will be “as undaunted as a human being can be,”29 all the same “there are things that are beyond human capacity, and these are fearful to anyone who has not lost his mind.”30 He recognizes a category of things “beyond human capacity,” in the face of which even a courageous person should be afraid, not just in the sense that the courageous person fears death while standing up to it, but in the sense that he could not even be expected to stand up to them. Aristotle illustrates these limits to human nature dramatically by saying that a person could only avoid fearing these things at the cost of his sanity; in his view, agents in these situations encounter the very limits of the human capacity to think and act. Despite his interest in acknowledging these limitations, it is telling that Aristotle himself never gives an example of what kind of force he thinks is beyond human endurance in the relevant sense. Similarly, this topic has not usually been treated in any detail by recent virtue ethicists.31 In both cases, I assume the reason for the neglect of what would otherwise appear to be an important topic has to do with a fundamental discomfort in acknowledging any real limitations to the moral fortitude of the virtuous person. Given the extreme demandingness of the ideals in virtue ethics, this discomfort is not all that surprising. Virtue ethicists have overwhelmingly preferred to praise the power of virtue to perfect human nature rather than to acknowledge the stubborn limits of our human frailty. That said, virtue ethicists have, to their credit, wanted to acknowledge that there are some limits, and to make the best case for their view we need to at least consider what those limits might look like. What we want is an example of a force that a virtue ethicist would recognize as making certain actions involuntary by pushing even a virtuous agent past the limits of her endurance. As a plausible example of such a force, I suggest prolonged, severe torture. In order to bring out the relevant features of this example, it is helpful to contrast it with the case of courage on the battlefield,

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which, demanding as it is, Aristotle does not think of as beyond human endurance.32 Virtue ethics insists that an agent cannot abandon her post on the battlefield without thereby showing herself to lack courage. By contrast, I suggest that virtue ethics has room to allow that an agent might do certain things under torture which are contrary to virtue—for example, giving useful information to the enemy—but which, when done under those circumstances, would not show her to lack courage or any other virtue. When we think of torture as something unendurable, we are likely to think first of all of pain. But focusing on pain is not likely to yield a relevant contrast with displays of courage on the battlefield. Aristotle acknowledges that fighting in wars can be very painful, even for the courageous person.33 Rather, the important points of contrast lie elsewhere, in the differences between the kind of agency a soldier on the battlefield has, as opposed to the kind available to a torture victim. The soldier is part of an army and sees himself as working together with others who support him to accomplish a strategic goal. His role within the army places some limitations on the choices he can make and the scope he has for independent action and decision. But nonetheless, he can think of himself as an active participant in the pursuit of the army’s shared goals. None of this is true of the torture victim. He is surrounded by hostile forces whose one aim is to undermine his capacity for independent will and judgment. He typically has no real hope of being able to escape or to alter his situation in any meaningful way. His only aim is the minimal one of suffering well and enduring in silence. For all of these reasons, holding out under torture asks something very different of a person than does showing courage on the battlefield.34 The integration of the virtuous agent means that she needs to have strongly internalized moral motivations, but it does not mean that those motivations need be wholly context-independent. In particular, we noted that virtue ethicists have traditionally thought of the virtues as naturally operating in a particular kind of social context, which allows the agent to think of herself as having reasonable prospects of being able to accomplish virtuous goals. This context includes instrumental resources such as some degree of nontrivial access to wealth and political power; a certain field of action, including both private life within a family and public life as a citizen; and friends who model, support, and enable virtuous conduct in various ways. This kind of context is plausibly thought

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of as being present for the courageous person on the battlefield. He faces a hostile army, but he does so as a member and representative of a community that supports him and within which he has a certain scope for action. By contrast, the required context is arguably lost for the torture victim, and this is what makes it possible to regard the case of torture as one in which action that would otherwise be contrary to virtue is instead compatible with it. Torture removes the context in which virtuous conduct ordinarily makes sense and systematically attacks the agent’s capacity for independent thought and action. In such a situation, if a person does something that would otherwise be considered wrong, such as revealing operational secrets to the enemy, he can be thought of as doing so as a result of unendurable force and therefore involuntarily. Note that this sort of involuntary action is importantly different from the previous kind, which turned on ignorance: in the case of unendurable force, the agent need not make any mistake about what he is doing. He may know perfectly well that he is giving valuable secrets away, and he may know perfectly well that this is something that he ought not do. Acknowledging the possibility of unendurable force helps to make the virtue ethicist’s picture yet more realistic: in this area, the virtue ethicist’s aim is explicitly to bring his ideal more closely into line with human nature. The case of unendurable force marks a further advance in this direction beyond the case of involuntariness due to ignorance, since it allows that an agent can act involuntarily even when he is not at all mistaken about what he is doing or about the circumstances of his action. All the same, we should keep in mind that the standard is still set very high: a virtuous person will be able to avail himself of this excuse only when he has been confronted with a force that no one could be expected to endure. A further qualification regarding the place of unendurable force in virtue ethics is also necessary. As we saw above, virtue ethicists insist that there are certain descriptions of an action that, if true, make the action altogether inconsistent with virtue, such as adultery, theft, and murder. Such things are simply impossible for the virtuous person: if someone does them, no matter what the circumstances, he thereby reveals himself not to be a virtuous person, regardless of what else he may have done or how he may have lived over the course of his life. It would appear that these limitations continue to be operative even in the presence of unendurable force. This

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much is suggested by the fact that Aristotle moves immediately from acknowledging that there are certain forms of force that “no one would endure” to emphasizing that nonetheless there are some actions that “we cannot be compelled to do, and rather [than do them] we should die after the most terrible suffering.”35 Even if someone tries to force us to do actions of these sorts by threatening us with torture or death, we ought rather to die than to do them. In saying that we cannot be compelled to do these things, I take Aristotle to mean that no amount of force will count as making it the case that these things are done involuntarily, and therefore are compatible with virtue.

Tragic dilemmas Aristotle treats different kinds of cases under the common heading of involuntariness due to force. We have just looked in detail at one kind of case, in which the action is said to be involuntary because it was extracted from the agent by pressure beyond human endurance. In this final section, we will look at another kind of scenario that Aristotle groups under the heading of force, which I will distinguish as cases of tragic dilemma. In the sense in which I use the term, a tragic dilemma is a situation in which the agent will have significant cause for regret no matter what he does.36 Aristotle gives us an example of a tragic dilemma and points to the way in which it gives rise to questions of voluntariness. He writes: If a tyrant ordered one to do something shameful, while he had power over one’s parents and children, and if one did it they would be saved, but if one did not do it they would be killed, there is some doubt as to whether this would be involuntary or voluntary.37 Aristotle’s treatment of the example is brief and sketchy, but I take his thought to be that in a case like this, an agent might do “something shameful” and yet not bring his virtue into question, insofar as he did it involuntarily, being forced by the tyrant’s threat. Aristotle notes that there is “some doubt” about this; despite the threat, the action will seem voluntary insofar as it was chosen by the

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agent under the circumstances. He goes on to try to accommodate the truth in both reactions by stating that such shameful actions are voluntary given the circumstances, but involuntary in themselves, since they are of a sort that the agent would never ordinarily choose to do, and which even in the circumstances he performs only with profound aversion and regret.38 Particularly salient in this sort of situation is not only the fear of the threat, but also the extreme limitations placed on the agent’s options: as the case is presented, the only available courses of action for him are to yield to the tyrant and do the shameful thing, or to refuse and allow his parents and children to be killed. Only if one’s options really are so limited can the situation be called a tragic dilemma and the shameful action be rendered involuntary. If there is some other, third way out, that does not involve the shameful deed (though it may involve great danger or cost), then the virtuous agent must certainly choose it. Furthermore, it will be no excuse that the agent did not think of a third alternative. As we have seen, virtuous people are held responsible not just for what they know, but for what they ought to have known. As a result, it cannot simply be that the agent thinks his options are so limited, but they must actually be as limited as he thinks they are. Supposing that a virtuous agent does actually find himself in a tragic dilemma, however, virtue ethics holds that the shameful action will thereby be rendered to some extent involuntary. Notice that this case goes beyond either of the forms of involuntary action discussed so far. It is unlike the case of involuntariness due to ignorance, and like the case of involuntariness due to unendurable force, in that the action can be called involuntary even if the agent knows perfectly well what he is doing and chooses to do it. The virtuous agent in a tragic dilemma does not wish to do the shameful action, anymore than the virtuous agent who is subjected to torture wishes to give away secrets. But in both cases, the agent chooses to do this as a result of the force of circumstances. The case of involuntariness due to tragic dilemma is different from that of unendurable force, however, in that the agent in the tragic dilemma chooses to do the involuntary action in an even stronger sense. The torture victim is not presented with two bad options: he has one good option that he wants to choose, namely, to remain silent. The problem is simply that he is unable to carry out this choice, and in this sense speech is forced from him involuntarily.

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By contrast, the virtuous person in a tragic dilemma is faced with two bad options, one of which he must choose. His choice is radically, terribly constrained, but the outcome is not forced upon him in the same way. As a result, though the virtuous person in a tragic dilemma may still act involuntarily, he becomes more profoundly morally compromised by his action than those in the other two types of case. From this point of view, virtue ethics takes a further step toward realism, by acknowledging that even virtuous people sometimes have to make hard choices in a context of drastically limited options, and that those who find themselves drawn into a painful moral compromise in such cases do not thereby show themselves to lack virtue. At the same time, there are significant limitations on the degree to which tragic dilemmas can render action involuntary. First, the limitations on the agent’s options need to be drastic indeed: there cannot be an alternative that allows the agent to avoid acting badly, at least not one that the agent could be expected to think of. Second, as Aristotle’s example suggests, the greater evils feared by the agent need to be very great: Aristotle carefully constructs the example so that the tyrant has in his power both the agent’s parents and his children, so that (with the apparent exception of his spouse) the agent is facing the extinction of his entire immediate family. Keep in mind also that, as with the case of torture, the kinds of action that a tragic dilemma can render involuntary will be limited. In this case, too, the virtue ethicist will want to say that actions intrinsically contrary to virtue, such as murder, are simply ruled out. So even though the agent in the tragic dilemma can do “something shameful” without thereby putting his virtue into question, it will have to be less shameful than adultery, theft, or murder.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter has been to explain the scope a virtue ethicist has for allowing that a virtuous person can act out of character. According to virtue ethics, she can do so only where the action is in some way involuntary. In order to bring out what this concession entails, I have examined three prominent cases of involuntary action acknowledged by the virtue ethics tradition: involuntary action due to ignorance; due to unendurable force; and due to tragic

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dilemma. Examination of each case has underscored two essential points about the place of involuntary action in virtue ethics. First, acknowledging the ways in which actions can fail to reflect the virtuous person’s character helps to make the ideal of virtue more realistic, and thereby make the virtuous person look more like a recognizable human being. In particular, virtue ethicists can acknowledge that the virtuous person need not be infallible, insofar as he can make mistakes regarding the circumstances of his action. Furthermore, he need not be all-powerful: his mind and body are vulnerable and his capacities for action and choice may break down in the face of force that overstrains human nature. Finally, he makes his choices against a background of circumstances, including the choices of others, that he may not be able to change, and sometimes those circumstances leave him with no good options. In these ways, the virtue ethicist acknowledges that even a virtuous person’s action will not always perfectly reflect his character, and this helps to make the ideal of virtue seem more available to human beings like us. Second, I have emphasized at the same time just how limited the scope for action against character really is in virtue ethics. Ordinary conceptions of character may be based on rough generalizations about how someone usually behaves, or on the long-term average tendencies in a person’s behavior. These conceptions can allow a great deal of room for acting against character, and they can happily discount one or even many instances of uncharacteristic behavior, without requiring any special explanation of how this behavior could occur. But the conception of the virtuous person’s character in virtue ethics is not like this. According to virtue ethics, the virtuous person has a deeply habituated disposition to see the world in a particular way and to respond to it accordingly in her feelings and actions. Such dispositions cannot fail to operate in a particular case without an explanation of a very particular kind being provided. Thus we have seen that, although virtue ethics allows for action against character when it is involuntary, the scope it allows for involuntary action is very limited. Action will only be involuntary due to ignorance if the agent is ignorant of something she could not be expected to know. The virtuous agent must be an unusually careful, thoughtful, and conscientious person who is constantly on the lookout for any morally relevant feature of her situation that she may have overlooked. Similarly, action will be involuntary due to unendurable force only if the force in question tests the very

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limits of human nature and is of a sort that no one, no matter how strong-willed, could be expected to endure. In effect, this means that the virtuous person must be as strong-willed as a human being could possibly be. Again, action will only be involuntary due to tragic dilemma if the agent’s options are in fact extremely limited: if there is any reasonable possibility of extricating oneself from the situation without acting badly, the virtuous person must find it. Each of these forms of involuntary action makes the ideal of virtue more realistic to a degree, but at the same time, the tightly circumscribed scope they offer for the virtuous person to act against her character equally serves to remind us of just how demanding the ideal of virtue really is.

Further reading The essential starting point for the topics discussed in this chapter is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, particularly Book III, Chapters 1–5. For helpful orientation to the themes and problems of Aristotle’s discussion of the voluntary, see Broadie 1991 and Meyer 2006. For attempts by recent virtue ethicists to accommodate the possibility of acting against character, see Baier 2003 and 2008, Hursthouse 1999, and Williams 1993 and 2006. On the difficult topic of voluntary and involuntary ignorance, see Foot 2002b and Anscombe 2005. The best treatments of tragic dilemmas and related topics within virtue ethics can be found in Hursthouse 1999 and Tessman 2015.

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Part two

Traits and behavior in psychology

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Chapter three

Six classic experiments Introduction The previous two chapters filled in the background of the debate between virtue ethicists and situationists from the side of virtue ethics. My aim in those chapters was to illuminate the distinctive features of the traditional conception of virtues as character traits; it is this conception that will ultimately constitute the primary target of criticism in the debate. But before we approach the debate proper, we need to put in place the other pieces of essential background for it, which come from psychology. At the center of the debate is a series of psychological experiments performed between the 1920s and the 1970s. This chapter describes these classic experiments and the traditional version of psychological trait theory that they were designed to critique. The next chapter provides a fuller picture of the place of these experiments within psychology by describing the main strategies that psychologists have developed for responding to them and defending psychological trait theory. Situationists claim that the experiments surveyed below fundamentally undermine the conception of character at the heart of virtue ethics. In order to accurately assess the force of their arguments, we first need to gain an understanding of the experiments in their original context. All of the studies described below were originally performed for the purpose of testing the psychological conception of “character” or “personality” traits.1 The authors of the studies took their results to significantly

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challenge this conception. But what these results really show for psychology or philosophy is a matter of ongoing discussion. Within psychology, some researchers take these results as decisive evidence against the psychological conception of traits, but many do not. Furthermore, even if the former group is correct about psychology, it remains unclear what the implications are for philosophy and in particular for virtue ethics. On the one hand, situationists in philosophy side with the first group of psychologists, and also make the further assumption that the virtue ethicist’s conception of character is essentially akin to the psychologist’s conception of traits. On the basis of these combined commitments, they conclude that the experiments undermine the conception of character traits in virtue ethics as well.2 On the other hand, some defenders of virtue ethics have argued that the two conceptions are so different that, whatever the experimental results show about psychology, they are not relevant to the philosophical conception at all.3 To avoid these extreme claims and achieve a more nuanced understanding, we need to appreciate the specific points of similarity and difference between the two conceptions. With this aim in view, before approaching the experiments themselves, this chapter begins with a brief orientation to the standard psychological conception of traits. This orientation is essential, both because this conception forms the main target of the experimenters’ critiques, and also because it bears important points of similarity and difference in relation to the virtue ethicist’s conception of character traits. The chapter unfolds in seven main sections. In the first section, I introduce the traditional trait concept in psychology, with a focus on its similarities and differences from the conception of virtues as character traits discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. I argue that psychological traits share some key features with virtues, including voluntariness, consistency, and integration. Since these features represent the most important points of overlap between the two conceptions, they are the focus of my subsequent discussion of the studies. In particular, I read the studies as concerned to provide evidence against the idea that behavior is typically consistent and well integrated. With this background in place, I then approach the six experiments themselves: Hartshorne and May’s 1928 study of dishonesty in children; Darley and Batson’s 1973 “Good Samaritan” study; Isen and Levin’s 1972 “phone booth” experiment; Latané and Darley’s 1968 “smoke-filled room” study; the “Stanford Prison

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Experiment” (Haney et al. 1973); and, finally, Milgram’s studies of obedience (Milgram 1974), which we have already described briefly in the Introduction. Many of these studies have been widely discussed not only in psychology but also in philosophy. But their assumptions, methods, results and limitations have not always been well understood. In reviewing them here, I aim to give a deeper and more nuanced reading than has usually been done, particularly by philosophers. I discuss these six experiments together in this chapter because they have all played such a prominent role in the philosophical debate. But I oppose the widespread tendency to treat them as a single package and instead seek to draw distinctions between them, both in terms of their intellectual significance and in terms of their methodological soundness. I especially aim to bring out two points: first, the studies differ widely in their methodological rigor and consequently in the significance of their results. Two of the studies in particular—Darley and Batson’s and Haney et al.’s—suffer from serious flaws in experimental design, and readers should therefore look on their conclusions with particular skepticism. I also aim to highlight the rigorous design of some of the studies, particularly Milgram’s, and the corresponding strength of the evidence they provide. Second, not all of the studies challenge trait psychology or virtue ethics in the same way. Some, such as Hartshorne and May’s, are most naturally read as focused narrowly on issues of consistency. Others, such as Isen and Levin’s, tend to also raise questions about integration. I take those experiments that raise questions about both consistency and integration to present stronger challenges for virtue ethics than those that only address consistency.

The traditional trait concept in psychology For the purposes of a concise introduction to the place of traits in psychology, we can take as representative two programmatic statements by Gordon W. Allport, the most widely influential figure in American personality psychology from the 1930s to the 1960s. Allport by no means speaks for all of his contemporaries, but his formulations have long been regarded as standard by both critics and defenders of psychological trait theory. Allport introduces his conception of traits by arguing for the basic principle that external

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stimuli alone cannot determine behavior: rather, behavior must be shaped and directed by an internal principle in the agent. He writes: It is not the stimulus that is the crucial determinant of behavior . . . it is the trait itself that is decisive. Once formed a trait seems to have the capacity of directing responses to stimuli into characteristic channels.4 In Allport’s view, explanation of an agent’s behavior by appeal to her external circumstances or situation can only ever be of limited value, since it is the agent’s internal dispositions that really shape her distinctive response to the situation. Insofar as the same stimulus is capable of eliciting a great range of responses, it is the agent’s internal constitution that really explains her behavior. Beyond this emphasis on the priority of internal causes of behavior, psychological trait theory advances a key hypothesis about the nature of these internal causes. The central claim of trait theory is that at least some of the most significant internal determinants of behavior take the form of highly general tendencies to respond to stimuli in typical ways across widely differing situations. Thus in Allport’s view, to have a trait is, in the first instance, to display “repeated reactions” which are “consistently a function of the same underlying determinant.”5 According to Allport, many of the most important aspects of our lives—including our choice of occupation, our attitudes toward other racial and ethnic groups, and the quality of our personal relationships—are likely to be a product of such highly general traits.6 Trait theorists also put forward a further hypothesis about how traits organize behavior, namely, through providing a certain broad shape to the agent’s values, aims, and concerns. In this respect, they hold that traits differ from mere skills or capacities. The latter may affect an agent’s life and prospects in significant ways, but they do not directly affect his actions. A person may have a certain skill or capacity; but what affects his action is the use he chooses to make of it. In this sense, his choices are what primarily determine behavior, and accordingly trait theory is concerned to capture not just any sort of broad dispositions an agent may have, but specifically his dispositions to choose.7 Thus Allport emphasizes that traits are “conative” rather than “intellective.”8 He describes them as involving “an evaluative posture toward life” that shapes

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“specific daily choices over a long expanse of years.”9 We can sum up this commitment of trait theory by saying that it holds that among the crucial determinants of behavior are certain highly general and stable evaluative attitudes. A fourth key assumption of trait theory is that individuals vary with respect to traits. From a psychological point of view, one of the main purposes of talking about traits is to describe certain systematic differences in attitudes among individuals and groups and to show how those differences give rise to significant differences in behavior. Allport regards trait theory as part of “the psychology of individual differences”10 and argues that traits should be studied both from the point of view of their effect on individuals and from the point of view of their “distribution in the population at large.”11 The latter task only makes sense on the assumption that individuals are expected to differ with respect to traits and that it is part of the purpose of trait theory to study these differences. From the point of view of psychological trait theory, variation in personality traits is treated as a natural given that constitutes part of its subject matter. Although traits are meant to represent large-scale patterns within an individual’s life, they are not expected to have any particular degree of strength in the overall psychic economy of the agent. Allport regards it as a basic principle of trait theory that “acts, and even habits, that are inconsistent with a trait are not proof of the non-existence of the trait.”12 I take him to mean that an agent’s acting in ways that are contrary to the trait, even habitually, is no proof that she lacks it. He freely allows that there may be “contradictory traits”13 in a single person, and that traits may differ in strength, so that a given trait may be strong in one person and weak in another. For example, one person may have the trait of conscientiousness in a high degree, and thus often show care, deliberation, and thoughtfulness in his actions; if another person rarely acts in these ways, this does not show that she lacks the trait of conscientiousness, but only that this trait is relatively weak in her or is overpowered by other, stronger traits that she possesses. Psychological trait theory aims to define a set of traits that is sufficient to fully capture all the personality differences there are among individuals. In technical parlance, traditional trait theory is “nomothetic,” meaning that it aims to develop a finite and welldefined body of trait concepts in terms of which all individual differences can be described. Indeed, much of trait theory since

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Allport’s time has been concerned with the task of enumerating these basic traits, a project that currently takes the predominant form of the “Five Factor” or “Big Five” model of personality.14 According to this model, all significant personality differences can be described in terms of five basic traits: openness to experience; conscientiousness; extraversion; agreeableness; and neuroticism. The traits are assumed to have standard definitions and to involve fairly definite patterns of behavior. For example, the trait of extraversion is associated with behavioral patterns such as initiating social contact, being energetic and outgoing in social settings, and engaging readily in conversation. Equipped with these standardized trait concepts, psychologists aim to explain an individual’s behavior by showing how it arises from the traits he possesses and their relative strengths in his psychic organization. Allport attempted to demonstrate the explanatory power of traits in three main ways. First, he showed that observers tend to converge in their ascription of traits to a particular subject given a common body of evidence about her, for example, a collection of her letters.15 Second, he found correlations between sets of attitudes, using first person reports from surveys: for example, in a survey of white American Protestants, he found a correlation between an “extrinsic orientation” toward religion, that is, valuing religion primarily for instrumental reasons such as social status, and bigoted attitudes toward other religious and ethnic groups, such as Catholics and Jews. He took these results to indicate the existence of a common trait underlying both sets of attitudes, namely, “a need for status, security, comfort, and a feeling of self-rightness.”16 Third, he aimed to establish correlations between certain traits and major life choices, such as the choice of occupation. In this vein, he used surveys to show that women with certain types of values, for example, those who give priority to “economic” rather than “social” or “religious” considerations, are more likely to study for certain professions, in this case, for careers in business rather than in nursing.17 This brief characterization of the trait concept in psychology indicates that psychologists’ traits are similar to virtues in some respects and quite different in others. First, regarding similarities: like virtues, traits contain an essential element of voluntariness, in the sense that they affect behavior through giving a certain shape to the agent’s values and choices. Just as virtue ethicists insist that to

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have a virtue is not simply to act in certain ways, but to be internally motivated to act in those ways, so also trait psychologists hold that a trait is not a mere habit of acting but involves a “conative” aspect and a certain “evaluative posture.” Second, both involve a notion of consistency: in both cases a key part of the value of the concept lies in the way that it ties together broad patterns of behavior and facilitates generalizations across quite different situations and contexts. Virtue ethics holds that a person with the virtue of temperance pursues pleasure moderately in a whole range of areas, including food, drink, and sex: his behavior follows a pattern that holds all of these areas together as cases where pleasure and the danger of excess pleasure are a central concern. In an analogous way, Allport assumes that a person with the trait of extraversion will be extraverted in all sort of situations: his behavior follows a pattern in which all different kinds of social interactions are treated as occasions for behavior that is energetic and outgoing. Third, both tend to expect a significant degree of integration among an agent’s beliefs, desires, and actions. According to virtue ethics, the virtuous person will exhibit a high degree of unity and harmony among his beliefs, desires, and actions. More generally, virtue ethics tends to assume that human actions are the products of rational deliberation based on our conscious beliefs and desires. In a similar fashion, Allport and the psychological tradition assume that traits are connected not only with certain typical behaviors, but also with a corresponding general outlook on life and corresponding desires and choices. Indeed, one of the central projects of traditional trait theory, as we have seen, is to establish empirically that individuals’ avowed attitudes and values have significant effects on their choices and behavior. On the other hand, there are also significant differences between psychologists’ traits and philosophers’ virtues. The first and most important is a basic difference of theoretical purpose and orientation: while philosophers are concerned to put forward the virtues as a normative ideal, psychologists are focused on developing trait theory as a descriptive framework for explaining observed behavior and categorizing individuals. Allport goes out of his way to emphasize that a trait is not a “moral quality”18 and that the ascription of traits to a subject does not imply any moral judgment about her, good or bad. Nothing in his discussion suggests that one

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ought to have traits, or that some traits are preferable to others. Rather, his project rests on the adequacy of trait theory to describe actually observed regularities in human behavior. This profound difference in orientation is connected with two further differences. First, psychological traits are not expected to be particularly rational: they need not embody any very consistent or precise views on the part of the agent about what is of value in life overall. In fact, Allport happily describes some of the traits he uncovers in his experiments as “illogical” and the subjects who possess these traits as “muddleheads.”19 This is a far cry from the virtues according to virtue ethics, where a virtuous person is supposed to live his life in accordance with a consistent set of well worked out moral principles. Second, psychologists’ traits are not robust: Allport allows that an agent can possess a trait even while often failing to act in accordance with it. He is far from insisting that a person with a given trait will need to persist in trait-typical behavior even in the face of powerful contrary factors. Likewise, he does not think of trait-contrary behavior as calling for any special explanation, of the sort we saw virtue ethicists concerned to offer through their account of involuntary action. For Allport, a trait simply needs to capture a significant regularity that ties together some aspect of an agent’s values, choices, and behavior. Traits can be present in a stronger or weaker form, and even when an agent frequently and habitually fails to act according to the trait, we are not entitled to conclude that she lacks it. In the following description of the studies, I focus on their implications for two shared commitments of trait psychology and virtue ethics highlighted above, namely, consistency and integration. The differences between trait psychology and virtue ethics will come into play in the next chapter, in which I describe psychologists’ responses to the experiments, and in Chapter 6, where I will consider whether philosophers can successfully draw on those responses to defend virtue ethics. In my review of the studies, I will argue that some of them challenge only consistency, while the more powerful ones challenge both consistency and integration. With each study, I proceed in the following way: I first describe the design and results of the study, followed by the authors’ conclusions. I then assess the implications of the study for trait psychology and virtue

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ethics, focusing on the implications for the shared assumption in both traditions that behavior is shaped by consistent and wellintegrated attitudes. In considering these implications, I also draw attention to significant methodological limitations or advantages of each study’s design.

Hartshorne and May 1928 Hugh Hartshorne and Mark A. May’s study of dishonesty in children began with a commission from Teachers College, Columbia University, to engage in a multi-year large-scale study of “character education.”20 Their charge was to “study the actual experiences of children which have moral and religious significance and the effect for periods of time of the moral and religious influences to which children, youth, and adults have been exposed.”21 Hartshorne and May were particularly concerned to overcome what they saw as the “lack of data”22 supporting existing methods of character education and to apply the “objective methods of the laboratory to the measurement of conduct under controlled conditions.”23 They lamented the fact that “hundreds of millions of dollars are probably spent annually by churches, Sunday schools, and other organizations for children and youth with almost no check on the product—a negligence of which no modern industry would be guilty.”24 Accordingly, their goal was to create a “large body of highly standardized test material for the measurement of a wide variety of achievement in the field of morality and religion.”25 Their eventual five-year study focused on just a single trait: dishonesty, which they conceived of as including lying, stealing, and cheating. They developed a variety of tests by which deceitful behavior could be detected across different settings, such as an in-class exam, a take-home exam, a party game, and an athletic competition. The results ultimately involved 10,865 students, mostly from fifth to eighth grade, enrolled at public and private schools around the United States. They designed their tests to interfere with the natural atmosphere of the classroom as little as possible. In their view, this was essential because they wished neither to artificially induce deceptive behavior through overly manipulative situations, nor to discourage dishonest behavior by revealing to the students that their honesty was being tested.

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Hartshorne and May analyzed the results of the tests from a variety of angles, and arrived at a number of significant conclusions. Most of these conclusions do not concern their ostensible charge, which was to investigate the efficacy of various methods of character education. (They do note that Sunday school attendance appears to have no effect on a child’s tendency to deceive, nor does membership in “organizations purporting to teach honesty.”26) Their more striking, and far more influential, conclusions have to do with the nature of honesty itself: they argue that “neither deceit nor its opposite, ‘honesty,’ are unified character traits, but rather specific functions of life situations.”27 Their basis for this claim is the surprisingly low degree of correlation between deceitful behavior across different kinds of situations: for example, the average correlation between cheating on tests in class, cheating outside of class, cheating in athletics, and stealing was quite low. Students are unlikely to act honestly or dishonestly in all of these situations; instead, they seem to decide whether honesty or dishonesty is called for, not based on an attitude toward honesty in general, but based on specific features of the circumstances they are faced with. Hartshorne and May acknowledge that their data tend to support the stability of behavior across similar situations: if we know that a child cheated on an in-class test by taking advantage of an answer key, for example, then we can predict with confidence that he will do so again in the future.28 But, they write, “even slight changes in the situation affect individual behavior in unpredictable ways.”29 In the case of cheating on in-class tests, for example, the probability of a child’s cheating varies significantly depending on the material tested, the format of the test, and the means of cheating available to him.30 Hartshorne and May acknowledge that there are some factors that they found to be correlated with deceit in general: they include age (older children deceive more), emotional instability, poverty, and attending movies more than once a week.31 They also found some noteworthy effects from the classroom environment: a child’s tendency to deceive resembles that of his classmates,32 and all forms of deceit are lowered by “an atmosphere of cooperation and good will”33 between the teacher and pupils. Nonetheless, they conclude that honesty “appears to be a consequence of specialized acts which are closely tied up with particular features of the situation in which deception is a possibility, and is apparently not greatly dependent on any general ideal or trait of honesty.”34

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Hartshorne and May’s study challenges the idea that behavior follows consistent patterns across differing situations. They take their results to show that children’s behavior is not organized according to broad attitudes of the sort that ascriptions of honesty or dishonesty would lead one to predict. Rather, children’s tendency toward honest or dishonest behavior in a given type of situation seems to be shaped by specific features of the situation, such as whether a test was given at home or at school, or whether they were being tested on academic or athletic ability. Insofar as conceptions of honesty or dishonesty as a trait lead us to predict that children will behave in a consistent fashion across these different occasions for honest or dishonest behavior, this prediction seems to be undermined by the results. Hartshorne and May were not skeptical, however, about the integration of conscious attitudes and behavior, at least as a worthy goal. They simply concluded that different modes of character education were required, ones that would bring home more clearly to children the moral stakes of honest and dishonest behavior. As they put it, “In the child’s imagination the honest mode of procedure [must] be clearly distinguished from the dishonest mode as a way of social interaction. . . . [This] would provide the foundation for the understanding of social ideals and laws and the basis for an intelligent allegiance to such ideals as proved consonant with social welfare.”35 Hartshorne and May emphasized that behavior is not naturally consistent, and that children need to learn the value of honesty by coming to understand its importance for a variety of different forms of social interaction. But they were not particularly doubtful about integration, insofar as they assumed that improving a child’s moral “imagination” and his “understanding of social ideals” would bring about an “intelligent allegiance” to those ideals, and as a result, improve his behavior. From a methodological point of view, the most significant limitation of this study is that it was done exclusively with children as subjects. A psychologist defending traits could argue that it is no surprise that children lack consistent traits of honesty or dishonesty, since consistent traits take time to develop and may not be fully present until adulthood. This line of response could also be used to defend virtue ethics, since, as we have seen, virtue ethicists likewise insist that character is acquired through a long process of habituation and practice.

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In addition, there is also the fact that this study focuses exclusively on showing that observed behavior falls short of a certain expected pattern of consistency, that is, the pattern commonly associated with “honest” behavior. It seems that a psychologist could conclude that “honesty” should be redefined, or that it is perhaps not a trait after all, while still retaining a basic commitment to the existence of traits. A virtue ethicist might similarly argue that the failure of this particular expectation of consistent behavior does not undermine her views all that fundamentally, since Hartshorne and May’s results are compatible with the idea that behavior might be consistent according to some more nuanced pattern. Because Hartshorne and May did not challenge integration, only used children as subjects, and did not consider the possibility of a more nuanced form of consistency, the challenge that their work presents to either trait psychology or virtue ethics is relatively weak.

Darley and Batson 1973 John Darley and Daniel Batson’s “Good Samaritan” study looked at factors affecting whether an individual would be willing to help a stranger in a public setting. Their subjects were forty students at the Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey. They were first given a questionnaire intended to determine their “type of religiosity,” as between those who saw religion primarily as a means, as an end in itself, or as a personal quest to find meaning and purpose. On a later occasion, the subjects were instructed to prepare a brief talk on an assigned topic, either the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Gospel of Luke or careers for seminary students. They were then told that their talk was to be delivered in a separate building, and they were given instructions regarding how quickly they needed to get to there. In the “high-hurry” condition, they were told: “Oh, you’re late. They were expecting you a few minutes ago. We’d better get moving.” In the “intermediate-hurry” condition, they were told to “please go right over.” And in the “lowhurry” condition, they were told: “It’ll be a few minutes before they’re ready for you, but you might as well head on over.”36 In each case, on the way to give the talk the student encountered a “victim,” that is, a stranger apparently suffering and possibly in need of help.

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(In fact, he was a confederate of the experimenters.) The aim of the experiment was to test which of the three variables—type of religiosity, content of talk, or degree of hurry—would have the most significant effect on whether the subject helped the victim. Helping behavior was graded from 0 to 5, with 0 being the least helpful response (the subject passed by the victim seemingly without noticing him) to 5 being the most helpful (after stopping, the subject refused to leave the victim or insisted on taking him somewhere to get help). Darley and Batson found that, of the three variables, hurry had the largest effect: only 10 percent of those in the high-hurry condition helped, whereas 45 percent of those in the intermediatehurry condition did, and 63 percent of those in the low-hurry condition. By contrast, the content of the talk had a lesser effect: 53 percent of those who spoke on the parable helped, whereas only 29 percent of those who spoke about careers did. The type of religiosity had no effect of statistical significance.37 Darley and Batson take this result to show that “whether a person helps or not is an instant decision likely to be situationally controlled,”38 and largely unaffected by occurrent thoughts or broader dispositions. Their results seem to undermine the natural assumption that “Thinking about the parable should make norms for helping salient and therefore produce more helping.”39 Similarly, the results also do not bear out predictions about helping based on the three types of religiosity: one might have expected that those who see religion as a personal quest or as an end in itself are more likely to help, but this turns out not to be the case. Like Hartshorne and May’s study, Darley and Batson’s experiment is most naturally read as an argument against consistency. This might seem like a surprising claim, since, unlike Hartshorne and May, Darley and Batson did not track individual subjects across differing situations. In the absence of such data, one might assume that we cannot make any claims about consistency or inconsistency. But in fact their data can be used to make such claims. To see how, note that the subjects were assigned to the experimental high-, intermediate-, and low-hurry conditions randomly. Since the assignment was random, we can assume that any given subject would probably have followed the majority response in each condition, if he had been assigned to that condition. We can also assume that he would have shown the typical pattern of responses across all three

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conditions, if he were serially placed in all three. All of the studies below can be used to draw inferences about consistency in this way. In Darley and Batson’s case, the expectation would be that a given subject would be quite unlikely to help in the high-hurry condition, more likely to help in the intermediate condition, and most likely to help in the low-hurry condition. If we assume that agents have consistent attitudes toward helping that shape their behavior, this looks like evidence against that assumption: the subject seems to decide whether to help not on the basis of a consistent attitude toward helping, but on the basis of how much of a hurry he is in. If we read their data in this way, Darley and Batson’s study can be read as a challenge to consistency. Like Hartshorne and May’s study, it does not mount a significant challenge to integration. Darley and Batson attempt to argue that their results undermine the presumed efficacy of occurrent thoughts on behavior, insofar as they show that the topic of the assigned talk had a weak effect on helping. But this interpretation of the results neglects the fact that other occurrent thoughts on the part of the subject did appear to have a powerful effect on behavior, namely occurrent thoughts about how much of a hurry he is in. Indeed, Darley and Batson acknowledge that their results are quite compatible with the conclusion that subjects decide whether to help based on conscious reflection about the comparative weight and relevance of various social norms at play in the situation. As they note, the subject “was in conflict between stopping to help the victim and continuing on his way to help the experimenter. . . . Conflict, rather than callousness, can explain their failure to stop.”40 For this reason, their results, like Hartshorne and May’s, do not challenge the assumption that behavior is tightly integrated with agents’ beliefs and desires. At a more general level, all of Darley and Batson’s claims for their results are undermined by a significant flaw in their experimental design: the victim’s appearance and manner did not consistently and straightforwardly invite help. In describing their experimental method, Darley and Batson write that “The victim should appear somewhat ambiguous—ill-dressed, possibly in need of help, but also possibly drunk or even potentially dangerous.”41 The victim’s script was likewise ambiguous as to whether he needed or wanted help. If the subject stopped and offered to help the victim, the victim said: “Oh, thank you [cough]. . . No, it’s all right. [Pause] I’ve got this respiratory condition [cough]. . . The doctor’s given me these

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pills to take, and I just took one. . . . If I just sit and rest for a few minutes, I’ll be OK. . . . Thanks very much for stopping though [smiles weakly].” These are not the words of a person unequivocally in need of help. As the script shows, the victim clearly and repeatedly discourages the subject from helping him. As a result, we might speculate that failure to help on the part of those in the high-hurry condition was at least in part due to the fact that the victim’s account of his situation was confusing and might require a lengthy conversation to clarify. Darley and Batson’s results would have been much clearer if they had used a victim who obviously needed and wanted help. The ambiguous appearance and script of the victim represent a confounding factor that make it unwise to draw broader conclusions from Darley and Batson’s data.

Isen and Levin 1972 As a first example of a study that raises doubts about integration, consider Alice Isen and Paula Levin’s 1972 “phone booth” study. Like Darley and Batson, Isen and Levin looked at factors influencing an individual’s willingness to help a stranger in a public place. In this case, they wanted to see whether a small piece of unrelated good luck could make their subjects more likely to help. Their experiment was conducted at suburban shopping malls in the San Francisco and Philadelphia areas. The subjects were adult men and women who used a phone booth while visiting the mall. The experimenter in some cases left a dime in the coin return of the phone booth, and in other cases did not. A female confederate then dropped a folder of papers on the floor as the subjects were returning from the phone booth. The aim of the study was to see whether the subjects who found the dime were more likely to help the confederate.42 Remarkably, Isen and Levin found that the dime made a very significant difference: of fifteen subjects in the “dime” condition, fourteen of them helped and only one did not; of twenty-six subjects in the control group, only two of them helped and twenty-four did not. Indeed, finding the dime made a greater difference than gender: men and women showed similar patterns of helping or not helping, depending on whether they found the dime. This is surprising, given that, as Isen and Levin put it, “our society has specific norms applying to this particular helping situation for males.”43 That is, our society expects

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(or at least did in 1972) that males will be especially willing to help a female stranger in mild public distress. Isen and Levin explain their results by arguing that finding the dime has a significant effect on subjects’ mood, and this in turn increases the likelihood of their helping. They go on to suggest the more general conclusion that behavior is more affected by mood, and less affected by social norms, than we commonly recognize. To appreciate the importance of this study, note that there is no connection, in the mind of the subjects, between finding the dime and helping. As far as the subjects are concerned, these are entirely unrelated events. Helping behavior varies widely depending on a certain feature of the situation, but this variation cannot be regarded as the subjects’ rational response to that feature. No subject thinks that his finding the dime gives him a good reason, or makes it somehow more appropriate, to help the stranger. Instead, good mood seems to affect behavior in ways that circumvent the agent’s conscious deliberation altogether. Like the previous two studies, Isen and Levin’s work can be read as a challenge to consistency: if we imagine a subject who helps when he finds a dime and does not help when he does not find a dime, he seems to lack a consistent attitude toward helping. But Isen and Levin also go beyond the previous two studies by mounting a challenge to integration: while the children in Hartshorne and May’s study and the seminarians in Darley and Batson’s study might have argued that they had good reasons for acting differently in the different situations, none of Isen and Levin’s subjects would cite finding the dime as a reason for helping. As a result, Isen and Levin’s results challenge not just the expectation of consistency, but also the idea that behavior is well integrated with agents’ conscious beliefs and desires. Isen and Levin’s study has faced serious criticism from the point of view of replication. In particular, Gregory Blevins and Terrance Murphy found, in a replication study in 1974, no correlation between finding the dime and helping.44 Of the fifteen subjects in their study who found the dime, only six helped and nine did not; of the thirty-five subjects who did not find the dime, fifteen helped and twenty did not. Unlike Isen and Levin, they found support for the “courtesy prediction” that “males . . . will aid a lady in distress.”45 Of the twenty-four males in their study (nine dime, fifteen no dime), five helped when the dime was present, and eight helped when no dime was present. In all of these studies, sample sizes were very

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small, which may lead to a great deal of statistical noise. Further, the experimental setting—a suburban shopping mall—is, while admirably naturalistic, extremely difficult to control and introduces a number of unpredictable elements (such as distractions, variations in shopper’s degree of hurry, etc.) that might constitute confounding factors. Failure to reproduce the results of a given study, however, does not imply that the hypothesis on which that study was originally based is invalid. Isen and Levin, together with other researchers, have subsequently developed a large body of literature that tends to confirm their original hypothesis that a small improvement in mood, even when caused by an unrelated event, can increase our readiness to help strangers.46 In one 1997 study, for example, Robert Baron found that customers in a shopping mall were more willing to help strangers with a minor task (picking up a dropped pen or making change for a dollar) in the presence of pleasant ambient odors, such as those produced by a Cinnabon bakery or a coffee-roasting cafe.47 Following the tradition of Isen and Levin, Baron proposes that the mediating factor in this case is mood: pleasant smells lift the subjects’ mood and make them more likely to help. Further studies have also confirmed the basic finding that helping is affected by subtle environmental factors that influence mood, such as weather and lighting.48 It is important to note, however, that these effects are generally for low-cost helping behaviors, and that these studies do not provide evidence that good moods can increase helping in circumstances where it is difficult or costly for the agent.49 Factors negatively affecting mood, such as high temperature and loud noises, have been found to affect behavior in negative ways, by increasing aggression and decreasing willingness to help.50 In these cases, the effects can be much more significant. Among the most disturbing findings in this line of research is the result of a recent study of Israeli parole boards, which found that whether a prisoner is given parole varied significantly and consistently with the time of day in which his or her case is heard. Boards are most likely to grant parole early in the morning, after which there is a steady decline before the first break for food, to the point where almost no one is granted parole immediately before the break. After the break there is a significant increase in the likelihood of being granted parole, which again decreases until the next break, after which the same pattern is repeated.51

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Mood studies such as these can be read as challenging consistency: parole board members who give parole easily in the morning and rarely just before lunch are not following a consistent attitude toward prospective parolees, and in this way expectations of consistency supported by trait theory may be violated. But the deeper challenge from mood studies is to integration. These studies show that behavior is powerfully shaped by moods in ways that the subjects are likely not aware of and would not endorse: no one thinks that a prisoner is less deserving of parole because his case comes up right before lunch. Results like these do not merely suggest that behavior is inconsistent; rather, they reveal a fundamental failure of consciously endorsed attitudes to maintain effective control over relevant behavior. Since mood studies cast doubt on both consistency and integration, they raise a more profound challenge to trait theory than either of the two studies previously discussed. Confronted with the evidence of their inconsistency, the subjects in the mood studies cannot claim that they are in fact consistently following some more nuanced pattern in their behavior; rather, the results suggest that their deliberations and consciously adopted norms exercise poor control over their actions, and that the actual patterns they follow are not ones that they would recognize or endorse.

Latané and Darley 1968 Darley and Bibb Latané’s 1968 “smoke-filled room” experiment provides further evidence that individuals are less integrated than trait theory would lead us to expect. Unlike Isen and Levin’s study, their research focused not on the effects of good fortune, but on the power of peers to shape behavior. Latané and Darley’s subjects were male undergraduates at Columbia University. They were invited to participate in a survey about “some of the problems involved in life at an urban university.”52 Upon arriving to take part in the experiment, the subjects were directed to a waiting room and asked to fill out a questionnaire. As they were filling it out, specially prepared “smoke” began to filter into the room from a wall vent. (The “smoke” was in fact harmless, but the subjects had no way of knowing this.) Subjects in the control group were in the room alone. Subjects in a first experimental group were in the room with two men whom they believed to be fellow naive subjects, also filling

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out the questionnaire, but who were in fact confederates who had been instructed to remain passive and ignore the smoke. Subjects in a second experimental group were placed in the room with two genuine naive subjects. Latané and Darley found striking differences in the subjects’ responses to the smoke, depending on which group they were assigned to. Those in the control group, who encountered the smoke alone, tended to react to it quickly and strongly: 75 percent of these subjects left the room and reported the smoke to the experimenters within six minutes, with a median report time of two minutes.53 By contrast, among those who were placed with passive confederates, only one out of ten reported the smoke at all.54 They clearly noticed the smoke and reacted to it up to a point. But instead of reporting it, they kept “doggedly working on their questionnaire and waving the fumes away from their faces.” “They coughed, rubbed their eyes, and opened the window,” Latané and Darley go on, “but they did not report the smoke.”55 When three naive subjects were grouped together, they were also less likely to report the smoke. In these groups, any of the three subjects could have complained about the smoke, but one of them did so only 38 percent of the time: in the majority of cases, all three naive subjects said nothing to the experimenters as the room filled with smoke.56 These results are made all the more striking when we note that in exit interviews, no subject gave the presence or behavior of the others as his reason for not reporting.57 Latané and Darley’s experiment, like the others reviewed above, can be read as a challenge to consistency: since we can assume that the subjects who reported the smoke when alone would not have reported it in the presence of peers, their tendency to report appears not to be shaped by a common attitude toward how to handle emergencies, but rather by the specifics of their social surroundings. But as with mood studies, Latané and Darley’s work is also a challenge to integration. In their interpretation of the results, Latané and Darley propose that certain powerful but tacit social norms are at work: in particular, that “it is considered desirable to appear poised and collected in times of stress,” so that “[being] exposed to public view may constrain an individual’s actions as he attempts to avoid possible ridicule and embarrassment.”58 Even if this explanation is correct, note the very peculiar way in which this norm operates in this case: none of the subjects avowed, or would be likely to accept, this supposed social norm as a justification for

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his behavior. Rather, the experiment seems to reveal a basic lack of integration, in which our conscious beliefs and desires about the apparent seriousness of the emergency are ineffective in motivating behavior, and our conduct is instead controlled by unconscious norms that we would not endorse. The design of Latané and Darley’s experiment is simple but methodologically sound. Consider two of its ingenious features. First, it combines a natural setting with the ability to effectively control variables. Filling out a questionnaire in a waiting room is a familiar and straightforward activity from the point of view of the subject; he or she is unlikely to be confused or distracted by the cognitive and emotional demands this task imposes. Yet the environment is also one that the experimenters can control, so as to keep certain features constant, in particular the quantity and appearance of the smoke, while varying others, such as who is in the room. Second, Latané and Darley were particularly insightful in their decision to include a group composed of naive subjects. If they had compared the control group only to the group containing passive confederates, they might have invited the response that the confederates’ behavior was artificial and bizarre, and thus created a strange situation with little relevance to real life. By including the group of naive subjects, they were able to demonstrate that the passive response was not a mere product of laboratory manipulation, but represents a genuine feature of human behavior in social groups. Although Latané and Darley’s experiment is sound, it does have significant methodological limitations. In particular, it is difficult to tell on the basis of their data alone what factors might be responsible for producing the results. Latané and Darley’s proposal that the driving factor is a desire to avoid embarrassment is one possible explanation, but it is not clearly favored by anything in their data, and it might be undermined by the fact that subjects did not find the presence of the others salient in explaining why they did not report. Their experiment would have been improved by further trials designed to test alternative hypotheses, of the sort found in Milgram’s study discussed below.

Haney et al. 1973 The study described in Haney et al. 1973 is commonly known as the “Stanford Prison Experiment” and is closely tied to the

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intellectual legacy of its senior author, Philip Zimbardo, a longtime professor of psychology at Stanford. Its subjects were twenty-one male undergraduates who were home on summer break from a variety of US colleges and universities. The subjects were recruited by a newspaper advertisement that initially yielded seventy-five volunteers. From this group, the subjects were chosen on the basis of a battery of standardized paper-and-pencil personality tests.59 These tests included measures of emotional stability, conformity, extraversion, empathy, and “Machiavellianism” (a trait associated with manipulativeness in interpersonal relations).60 Subjects were chosen based on their scores in the standardized “normal” or “average” range on these tests.61 In addition, the subjects were screened to insure that none of them had a history of crime or mental illness.62 The purpose of the experiment was to determine how these psychologically normal individuals would behave in the environment of a simulated prison. Subjects were assigned randomly to the role of “guard” or “prisoner,” and an artificial prison was created in the basement of Stanford’s psychology building. In total, ten subjects were assigned to play the role of prisoner, and eleven that of guard.63 Subjects playing the role of prisoner were “arrested,” without prior warning, at their homes by real officers from the Palo Alto City Police Department.64 They were then taken to a real police station, where they were fingerprinted, and finally delivered by police to the simulated prison. There they were strip searched, and given a loose smock, printed with an identification number, as their only clothing.65 Each prisoner was assigned to a small (six by nine foot) cell, which he shared with two other prisoners.66 The aim of these induction procedures was to humiliate and “deindividuate” the prisoners.67 By contrast, the induction of the guards happened more simply. They, too, were given uniforms: khaki shirts and trousers (“to convey a military attitude”), together with a whistle, nightstick, and mirrored sunglasses (to prevent eye contact with prisoners).68 Guards were given few instructions about their role, other than an “explicit and categorical prohibition against the use of physical punishment and aggression.”69 In a further effort to dehumanize the prisoners and break down their sense of individual identity, guards were instructed to address them only by the numbers printed on their uniforms, never by name.70 The prisoners were guaranteed certain rights, such as three meals per day, supervised use of the

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toilet, and two hours per day of free time for reading or letter writing. They were also allowed two visitors per week, as well as “movie rights” and exercise periods.71 Prisoners remained inside the prison twenty-four hours a day, while guards worked eight-hour shifts and otherwise went about their normal daily business. The results of the experiment are notorious and striking: though the simulation was originally planned to last two weeks, the experimenters intervened to stop it after only six days because of the escalating aggression of the guards.72 Five of the ten prisoners had to be released even before the six days had elapsed, because of “extreme emotional depression, crying, rage, and acute anxiety.”73 The prisoners appeared to accept and internalize their assigned role to a surprising degree: even though they knew they were participating in a psychological experiment and were free to leave the “prison” at any time, none of them chose to do so without the experimenters’ consent. Instead, they formed a “grievance committee” to advocate for improved conditions, demanded lawyers, and even speculated about “escape plans.”74 By the end of the six days, the prisoners who remained had developed a “syndrome” of “passivity, dependency, depression, helplessness, and self-deprecation.”75 In personal statements written after the experiment ended, prisoners reported feeling a profound loss of control and disintegration of identity. One wrote that “no matter how together I thought I was inside my head, my prison behaviour was often less under my control than I realised.”76 Another wrote: “I began to feel I was losing my identity . . . the person who volunteered to get me into this prison . . . was distant from me, was remote until finally I wasn’t that person, I was 416.”77 Perhaps even more disturbing were the effects on the guards. Guard aggression, which was initially a response to disobedience from the prisoners, gradually became routine, a “‘natural’ consequence of being in the uniform of a ‘guard’ and asserting the power inherent in that role.”78 In an atmosphere of impunity and unchecked, arbitrary power, guards quickly redefined the prisoners’ rights (including such basic rights as being allowed to eat, sleep, or use the toilet) as “privileges” that had to be earned and could be taken away at any time. In their personal statements, guards described how they, too, adapted to their assigned role. One remarked that he was “impressed by how little I felt for [the prisoners].”79 Another reported discovering that “Acting authoritatively can be fun” and that “Power can be a great pleasure.”80 One guard did report feeling

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upset at the treatment of the prisoners, but he did not actively intervene to stop it or refuse to continue in his role.81 Perhaps most remarkably, the guards described feelings of lack of control and loss of identity similar to those that the prisoners experienced. As one of the guards put it after the experiment was over, “I was surprised at myself. I was a real crumb. I made them call each other names and clean out toilets with their hands. I practically considered the prisoners cattle.”82 Haney and his coauthors take the experiment to provide powerful evidence against the idea that personality traits control behavior. Although all the subjects scored in the normal range on psychological diagnostic tests, in the simulated prison they quickly became “pathological and anti-social.”83 The authors argue that “The negative, anti-social reactions observed were not the product of an environment created by combining a collection of deviant personalities, but rather, the result of an intrinsically pathological situation which could distort and rechannel the behaviour of essentially normal individuals.”84 They conclude that “there is little reason to expect paper-and-pencil reactions on personality tests . . . to generalise into coping behaviours under novel, stressful, or abnormal environmental conditions.”85 Haney et al.’s results can be seen as challenging both consistency and integration. With respect to consistency, note that in this case, as in the other experiments, the subjects were assigned to their roles randomly. We can predict, therefore, that the subjects who displayed wanton cruelty and aggression as guards would have protested such treatment as prisoners, and vice versa. These results suggest that the subjects’ behavior was driven not by consistent attitudes toward a broad area of concern, for example, prisons or punishment in general, but rather by the specific role to which they happened to be assigned. The results also challenge the idea of the integrated psyche. This can be seen in two ways. First, we have just noted that both prisoners and guards experienced their behavior in the experiment as alien to the selves they previously believed themselves to be. As in some of the other experiments, the subjects seem to act on reasons that they would not reflectively endorse or even consciously recognize as their own. In addition, by comparing the results of the experiment with predictions based on personality self-reports, Haney and his collaborators call into question the power of avowed attitudes to consistently and effectively shape behavior.

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The reader should be wary of putting any great weight on this study, however, since it suffers from profound methodological flaws. As the experimenters themselves acknowledge, they failed to design and conduct the experiment so as to test any “specific hypotheses,” other than the vague one that assignment to the role of “guard” or “prisoner” would produce “significantly different reactions” in the subjects’ behavior and mood.86 Given the design of the experiment and the vagueness of these criteria, this hypothesis was essentially impossible to falsify. The experimenters’ primary interpretation of their results focuses on the idea that the subjects acted as they did because they became immersed in their assigned institutional roles. This interpretation, while not implausible, is open to doubt. Instead of an overidentification with the role of guard, for example, was it not perhaps the lack of a sufficiently clear definition for that role that led to many of the observed abuses? Are there other factors, such as the behavior of other authority figures, or of peers, that might significantly modify these effects? How might the results have been affected by other changes in the experimental design, such as alterations to the prisoners’ induction procedure or uniforms or to the architecture and routines of the prison? Because of the lack of specific hypotheses, and of distinct trials in which they could be tested, there are no good empirical grounds on which to defend competing interpretations of the data.87

Milgram 1974 Milgram’s experiments on obedience are the single most significant of the six classic studies discussed here. By contrast with the other studies mentioned so far, Milgram’s research is especially useful because of its tight controls and multiple variations, which facilitate much more substantial conclusions about causality and the true nature of the observed effects. Moreover, the behavior tested in Milgram’s studies is of the gravest moral significance. His work thus raises deep doubts about the power of traits to shape behavior even where the stakes are extremely high. We have already alluded to Milgram’s experiments in the Introduction. After briefly reviewing his basic experimental design, I will discuss in detail two further aspects of his results: first, his

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development of revealing experimental variations; and, second, the fact that many of Milgram’s subjects, including many of those classified as “fully obedient,” showed considerable “strain” in complying with the experimenter’s orders. In his “baseline” condition, Milgram recruited forty adult males from the New Haven, Connecticut, area by requesting volunteers for a study on “memory and learning.”88 The subjects were assigned to the role of the “teacher,” and they were introduced to another supposed volunteer (in fact a confederate), who would play the role of the “learner.” The teacher’s job was to read aloud to the learner a list of word pairs, such as “blue girl,” “nice day,” and so on. Then the teacher would test the learner’s memory by reading back to him only the first word in each pair, and asking him to choose the corresponding second word from a set of four choices. If the learner identified the second word correctly, the teacher would go on to the next question, and so on down the list. But if the learner gave a wrong answer, the teacher was to give him a shock as a form of punishment, beginning with a shock of 15 volts, and increasing the force of the shock by 15 additional volts after each wrong answer. Every time he received a shock, the learner audibly cried out in pain. As the shocks increased in voltage, so did the forcefulness of the learner’s protests, which the teacher could hear through a wall connecting the two rooms. At 150 volts, the learner said, “I refuse to go on.” After 330 volts, the learner ceased to respond altogether. Yet 65 percent of the subjects continued to obey the experimenter and to shock the learner, even to the point of administering the very highest level of shock, 450 volts.89 From one point of view, we might regard Milgram’s results as essentially of a piece with those of the studies mentioned above that documented inconsistencies in the subjects’ behavior. Subjects who acted decently and were not violent or criminal outside the laboratory were capable of terrible acts in the context of the experiment. It would be a mistake to make predictions about their behavior in the latter situation on the basis of their behavior in the former. Similarly, it would be a mistake to infer from the terrible acts the subjects performed in the laboratory that they were generally cruel or callous outside of it. Arguably, a tendency to assume consistency in behavior and to discount the special features

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of this unusual situation accounts for the erroneous predictions, among both psychologists and laypeople, about what Milgram’s results would be. As in the case of the experiments discussed above, however, this inconsistency in the observed behavior does not pose the deepest challenge to trait theory. If Milgram’s subjects are not willing to shock people to death outside the laboratory, but are willing to do so within it, that might only show that their behavior is consistent according to some more refined pattern. Perhaps they believe that one ought not shock a man to death without a good reason, but that the advancement of science is such a reason. In this case, the subjects’ behavior may look inconsistent, but in reality it is consistent by their own lights, and is still effectively under the control of norms that they consciously endorse. Closer inspection of Milgram’s data reveals that this explanation of the subjects’ behavior will not work. The deeper challenge posed by his results comes from the fact that the subjects were not actually consistent by their own lights. We can see this in two ways. The first comes out in some of the experimental variations that Milgram performed, which show how the subjects’ behavior is not only inconsistent, but is affected by factors that they would not endorse as valid reasons for action. Consider, for example, the surprising effect of physical proximity. Milgram found that the subject’s readiness to disobey the experimenter is surprisingly dependent on his physical position vis-à-vis the learner and the experimenter. Roughly, the teacher’s moral attention seems to be commanded most by whoever is physically closest to him: thus if the learner is brought closer, obedience is reduced, and similarly if the experimenter is moved away, obedience is also reduced. In a trial where the subject and the learner were seated in the same room, obedience significantly decreased, from 65 to 40 percent. In a further trial, where the subject had to forcibly place the learner’s hand on an electrified plate in order to shock him, obedience decreased even further, to just 30 percent.90 One of the strongest factors Milgram observed was the placement of the experimenter: in a trial where the experimenter and the subject are placed in separate rooms and communicate only by telephone, obedience drops yet further, to a mere 20.5 percent.91 These results show that the teacher’s proximity to the learner or to the experimenter makes a great difference to his behavior. But presumably no subject thought that the learner’s

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suffering matters less if he is in the next room, as opposed to the same one, or that orders given over the telephone are somehow less authoritative than those given in person. As with some of the other experiments, Milgram’s results suggest that behavior is powerfully shaped by factors that agents would not endorse as giving reasons for their behavior. Milgram’s experiment goes beyond these other experiments, however, to challenge the idea of integration in a second, even more direct manner. Here the challenge comes from the phenomenon that Milgram called “strain.”92 As we noted above, a surprising number of Milgram’s subjects continued to follow the experimenter’s instructions and to shock the learner despite clear evidence that the learner was in great pain, was at risk of harm, and wanted to discontinue the experiment. What is just as significant, however, is the extreme internal conflict that most of Milgram’s subjects felt, even as they were following the experimenter’s orders. Their behavior shows not only that they acted on reasons they would not endorse, but also that they failed to act on reasons that they would endorse, indeed ones that they brought to bear on the situation at the time. Of all the experimental data discussed here, this finding raises the deepest challenge to the model of the integrated psyche, by suggesting that even when agents recognize the relevance of their deeply held beliefs and desires to a given situation, they can still have a remarkable degree of difficulty channeling these conscious attitudes into effective behavior. Milgram’s subjects expressed the strain they felt in a wide variety of ways. They showed many involuntary signs of strain, such as profuse sweating, trembling hands, sighing, grimacing, wincing, and bursting out in fits of nervous laughter. They used a variety of more or less voluntary strategies to insulate themselves from the painful task they were carrying out, such as using their hands to hide their faces, or focusing their gaze narrowly on the desk in front of them. They tried in various ways to work around, or to compromise with, the experimenter, for example by pressing the switch on the shock generator for the shortest possible time, or by warning the learner of a forthcoming shock, or by signaling the correct answer using an altered tone of voice. Many struggled to hold back tears.93 By far the most significant expression of strain among Milgram’s subjects was verbal dissent. Many participants in the

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experiment—including those who would ultimately be counted among the “fully obedient”—engaged in sustained dialogues with the experimenter, in which they expressed serious concern about the learner’s safety and sought to discontinue the experiment. Consider, for example, the following stretch of dialogue between the experimenter and one of Milgram’s subjects, a man Milgram refers to under the pseudonym “Fred Prozi.” The dialogue begins just as Prozi has given the learner a 180-volt shock. Disturbed by the learner’s increasingly vehement protests, Prozi turns away from the shock generator and addresses the experimenter: SUBJECT: I can’t stand it. I’m not going to kill that man in there. You hear him hollering? EXPERIMENTER: As I told you before, the shocks may be painful, but— SUBJECT: But he’s hollering. He can’t stand it. What’s going to happen to him? EXPERIMENTER (his voice is patient, matter-of-fact): The experiment requires that you continue, Teacher. SUBJECT: Aaah, but, unh, I’m not going to get that man sick in there . . . know what I mean? EXPERIMENTER: Whether the learner likes it or not, we must go on, through all the word pairs. SUBJECT: I refuse to take the responsibility. He’s in there hollering! EXPERIMENTER: It’s absolutely essential that you continue, Teacher. SUBJECT (indicating the unused questions): There’s too many left here; I mean, Geez, if he gets them wrong, there’s too many of them left. I mean who’s going to take the responsibility if anything happens to that gentleman? EXPERIMENTER: I’m responsible for anything that happens here. SUBJECT: All right. (Consults list of words) The next one’s “Slow—walk, truck, dance, music.” Answer, please. (A buzzing sound indicates the learner has signaled his answer.) Wrong. A hundred and ninety-five volts. “Dance.” LEARNER (yelling): Let me out of here. My heart’s bothering me! (Teacher looks at experimenter.) EXPERIMENTER: Continue, please.

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LEARNER (screaming): Let me out of here, you have no right to keep me here. Let me out of here, let me out, my heart’s bothering me, let me out! (Subject shakes head, pats the table nervously.) SUBJECT: You see, he’s hollering. Hear that? Gee, I don’t know. EXPERIMENTER: The experiment requires . . . SUBJECT (interrupting): I know it does, sir, but I mean—hunh! He don’t know what he’s getting in for. He’s up to 195 volts!94 This subject is among those who never fully broke with the experimenter, and is thus included among the 65 percent of Milgram’s subjects in this trial who are counted as fully obedient. But this short sample of dialogue brings out just how much goes missing, if we focus only on the standard presentation of Milgram’s results: such-and-such a percentage disobeyed the experimenter, such-andsuch a percentage obeyed. For what we see in the dialogue is not happy, willing obedience, but something much more disturbing: a subject who seems to have the right beliefs and attitudes, but ends up obeying the experimenter anyway. In the dialogue above, Prozi clearly judges that the experiment is dangerous to the learner, feels responsible for the learner’s condition, and recognizes that the experimenter has not given him sufficient reason to continue with the experiment. And yet he carries on, unable to translate his conscious reaction to the situation into an effective response. The strain felt by Prozi and many of Milgram’s other subjects reveals a profound lack of integration. These subjects acted in ways that went directly against their occurrent beliefs and desires, and not just their general background commitments. In sum, Milgram’s experiment is uniquely powerful among the six surveyed here. It provides strong evidence not just for inconsistency in behavior, but for lack of integration: the subjects not only acted differently in different situations, but acted on the basis of factors that they would not endorse or recognize as constituting relevant reasons. In this respect, it goes beyond Hartshorne and May or Darley and Batson’s study, where the subjects act inconsistently, but not in ways that necessarily cast doubt on their ability to rationally control their behavior. It also goes beyond the other studies that reveal lack of integration, such as Latané and Darley’s, by documenting how the subjects acted contrary to beliefs and desires they consciously brought to bear at the time.

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Conclusion This is the first of two chapters whose aim is to orient the reader to the psychological background of the philosophical debate between virtue ethicists and situationists. It began with an introduction to the standard conception of traits in psychology, highlighting its specific points of similarity and difference in relation to the conception of virtues as character traits in virtue ethics. In particular, both conceptions have traditionally tended to see consistency and integration as characteristic marks of traits. I then argued that the experiments reviewed in this chapter can be seen as providing evidence that challenges the assumption that behavior is consistent and well integrated. In describing the studies, I have been concerned to bring out two important kinds of differences between them. First, they are not all equally well designed, and some of them contain methodological flaws that should discourage us from putting much weight on their results. Second, they test rather different hypotheses, and so can be seen to target different aspects of traits. Specifically, I have argued that while some of the experiments only challenge the expectation of consistency, others raise a further challenge, to the idea that behavior is well integrated with belief and desire. These differences in the nature of the challenge presented by the experiments will continue to be significant in the next chapter, as we consider different strategies psychologists have developed for reconstructing traits in response to these studies.

Further reading Readers are encouraged to begin with the studies themselves: full references for each of them can be found in the bibliography. Surveys of this tradition, together with interpretations of what holds it together, can be found in Ross and Nisbett 1991 and Doris 2002. Mischel 1968 places Hartshorne and May’s work within the broader context of personality research from the 1920s to the 1960s. Latané and Darley 1970 is an accessible introduction to their studies on bystanders and related work. For a helpful overview of research on mood and helping, see Isen 1987. Zimbardo has argued for the enduring psychological and political importance of the

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Stanford Prison Experiment in Zimbardo 2007. In order to arrive at a proper understanding of Milgram’s obedience experiment, readers are strongly encouraged not only to study his writings, but also to watch his excellent documentary film (Milgram 2008). The film is especially helpful in bringing home to the viewer the “strain” experienced by Milgram’s subjects. For recent debates about the implications of Milgram’s research, see Blass 2000.

Chapter Four

Reconstructing traits in psychology Introduction In the previous chapter, we began to establish the psychological background for the virtue ethics-situationism debate, by describing both the traditional trait concept in psychology and six classic studies that presented influential critiques of it. This chapter completes the work of filling in the psychological background, by orienting the reader to key developments in social and personality psychology that came in the wake of those experimental critiques. The chapter describes in detail four strategies that psychologists have developed since the 1970s for modifying trait concepts so as to bring them into line with the results of the classic studies. One of the key aims of this chapter is to give students of the philosophical debate a fuller sense of the recent history of trait psychology. Situationists within philosophy have sometimes written as if all psychologists agreed that the classic experiments effectively put an end to any form of respectable trait talk. Virtue ethicists, in their responses, have sometimes taken this characterization of psychology for granted, in ways that have hampered the argumentative moves available to them. But this description of the state of the art in psychology is quite misleading, as recent contributions on both sides of the philosophical debate have increasingly come to recognize. The interesting question, I suggest,

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is not whether psychology has “disproven” the existence of traits; in different ways, all of the psychologists discussed below would reject that characterization. Rather, the interesting question is whether the strategies that psychologists have developed for reconstructing traits in the face of the classic studies can be adopted by philosophers who seek to defend virtue ethics. In Chapter 6, I will examine philosophers’ attempts to draw on these strategies and argue that they cannot succeed as defenses of virtue ethics. The key reason for this failure is given in the present chapter, namely, that the psychologists’ strategies for defending traits depend on aspects of psychological traits that distinguish them from virtues as conceived in virtue ethics. As we saw in Chapter 3, trait psychology shares some important commitments with virtue ethics, in particular the idea that behavior is consistent and integrated. But it also differs from virtue ethics insofar as it does not see traits as normative or robust. In this chapter, I argue that these latter features of trait psychology are essential to the strategies psychologists have developed in order to defend it from the experimental critiques. Since these features are precisely those in which trait psychology differs from virtue ethics, I conclude that philosophers’ attempts to use the psychologists’ strategies in defending virtue ethics are doomed to fail. The chapter is divided into four sections, each of which focuses on one of the four strategies: (1) the idiographic approach to traits pioneered by Charles Lord; (2) the cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS) theory of personality developed by Walter Mischel and his collaborators; (3) Seymour Epstein’s aggregation method; and (4) longitudinal studies correlating personality measures with significant life outcomes, such as Angela Duckworth’s research on grit. In considering these approaches, I aim to bring out two main points: first, they succeed in offering ways to hold on to the trait psychologist’s commitment to consistency and integration, despite the experimental critiques; and second, they do so by drawing on features of trait psychology that make it profoundly different from virtue ethics. In particular, I argue that the first two approaches succeed by exploiting the fact that trait psychology is not normative, and the second two approaches succeed by drawing on the fact that psychological traits are not expected to be robust.

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Idiographic traits As we noted in Chapter 3, the traditional psychologist’s trait concept is “nomothetic,” in the sense that it aspires to capture all the significant personal differences that exist among individuals using a relatively small and well-defined set of trait concepts. Traditional trait concepts such as conscientiousness are thought of as having a standard definition that specifies certain trait-typical behaviors, in this case sticking to routines, fulfilling expectations, and being generally neat and organized in one’s personal habits. Psychologists think of the content of the trait as constant across individuals, although, as we have seen, they allow that individuals who possess the trait can differ in their behavior due to differences in the strength of the trait and the presence of other conflicting traits. The idiographic approach to traits proposes that the classic studies do not fundamentally undermine trait psychology per se, but only the common assumption among trait theorists that traits should be defined nomothetically. Instead, idiographic theorists propose that traits should be defined differently for different individuals or groups. They argue that what the classic studies show is not that behavior lacks the consistency associated with traits, but only that it lacks the consistency associated with nomothetic traits. They would interpret Hartshorne and May’s study, for example, as showing not that there is no such trait as “honesty,” but that there is not a single trait of honesty, but rather many such traits, each with its own distinctive pattern of associated behavior. For example, a given student might not count getting help on an at-home test as cheating, whereas she would count it as cheating to change her answers on an in-class test. If the student then uses help at home, but not on an in-class test, she is not dishonest by her own lights. Students who avoid what they consider cheating thus do, in a sense, have a trait of honesty: they act consistently according to their own view of how this region of the moral world hangs together. They engage in behaviors they consider honest and avoid those they consider dishonest, even if their use of those labels does not correspond to common moral norms or the expectations dictated by nomothetic trait definitions. The idiographic approach thus offers one version of a style of response to the classic studies that I mentioned in Chapter 3, in which the defender of traits seeks to accommodate

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the apparent inconsistencies in the subjects’ behavior by identifying a more nuanced form of consistency within it. The influential version of the idiographic approach developed by Lord first identifies the individual’s own conception of a given trait and its associated behaviors, and then seeks correlations between his self-ascription of that trait and his performance of those behaviors.1 Focusing on the trait of conscientiousness, Lord had Stanford undergraduates complete a survey in which they were asked to state how conscientious they believe themselves to be, and also to describe their usual behavior with regard to six specific situations generally presumed to be relevant to conscientiousness: neatness of closet, neatness of dress, being caught up on course readings, handing assignments in on time, keeping detailed lecture notes, and maintaining a routine schedule. Students’ behavior on these six measures was subsequently observed in the field and recorded by judges using standardized scales. Finally, students were also asked to rate the six situations according to how relevant they believed each of them was to the trait of conscientiousness. Lord’s data revealed higher degrees of cross-situational consistency when the subjects’ own ratings of the situations were taken into account. When the situations were rated as similar or dissimilar in nomothetic terms, little average consistency was found. But when situations were rated as similar or dissimilar in the subject’s own terms, the average consistency was much greater.2 Thus Lord concludes that “we can predict cross-situational consistency only when we approach the problem idiographically.”3 Lord points out that this approach offers a novel explanation of why previous studies have failed to find cross-situational consistency: those who appear “inconsistent” from an observer’s point of view simply have a different conception of what behaviors are relevant to the trait. Thus some of the students in his study tended to see matters of personal appearance as much less relevant to conscientiousness than academic matters such as keeping good notes or handing work in on time. As Lord puts it, “The 10 subjects who excluded personal appearance from the set of situations indicative of conscientiousness differed from the 30 subjects who included personal appearance by perceiving individuals who always look neat as . . . a rather shallow bunch of beautiful people, hardly the type who would concern themselves overly with course readings, lecture notes, and the like.”4

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The idiographic approach to traits has certain advantages. It preserves the consistency associated with traits by modifying how that consistency should be understood. Rather than understanding consistency in terms of an objective range of behavior relevant to the trait, idiographic theorists propose to understand consistency in terms of an agent’s consistently hewing to his own conception of what a trait calls for. In this way, idiographic theorists may be able to preserve the basic thought that behavior is organized according to broad fields defined by traits, while at the same time capturing the situational sensitivity of behavior found in studies such as Hartshorne and May’s. Idiographic approaches can also go some way toward addressing the worry about the lack of integration raised by some of the studies. Insofar as they show that the subjects’ behavior is reliably correlated with their conception of what a given trait requires, at least in some cases, they suggest that there is some significant degree of integration between their beliefs and action. The crucial point for our purposes, however, is that idiographic methods are deeply at odds with the normative approach to character found in virtue ethics. The strength of the idiographic method comes from the fact that individuals are free to define for themselves what they take a given trait to consist in. It is not altogether surprising that, given this freedom, individuals will describe a profile for the trait that fits their actual behavior more closely. In this way, idiographic approaches reveal patterns of consistency in the individual’s behavior that might not be apparent if we restrict ourselves to standardized definitions of the traits. But because each individual is free to define the traits for himself, the consistency thus revealed does not support the normative approach at work in virtue ethics, in which standard conceptions of virtue and vice are supposed to facilitate interpersonal moral comparisons. As a result, idiographic work gives little comfort to virtue ethics.5

CAPS theory The CAPS theory of personality is the culmination of a large body of experimental and theoretical work developed by Mischel and his collaborators from the 1960s to the 1990s. Like the other approaches surveyed here, the aim of CAPS theory is to retain the truth in traditional trait psychology, while also accommodating the

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challenging results of the classic studies described in Chapter  3. According to CAPS theory, the key to attaining this aim is to think of personality not as a disposition to engage in stereotyped behaviors, as with traditional traits such as “conscientiousness” or “agreeableness,” which are presumed to lead to trait-typical behavior on all relevant occasions. Rather, personality should instead be conceived of as “a stable system that mediates how the individual selects, construes, and processes social information and generates social behaviors.”6 According to this view, rather than expecting personality to yield consistent behaviors across differing situations, we should instead expect personality to manifest itself in the form of “distinctive and stable patterns of behavior variability across situations.”7 One of Mischel’s key ideas is that behavioral predictions should not be made absolutely (“he acts aggressively”) but rather conditionally (“if teased, he acts aggressively”).8 Mischel thus opens up the possibility of a different kind of consistency, in which subjects are consistent, not by acting in a specific way in every kind of situation, but by acting in a specific way when a specific type of situation recurs. The aim of CAPS theory is to provide a single conception that can account for “both the variability in the behavioral expressions of personality” and “the stability in the personality system that generates them.”9 CAPS theory is thus in a way akin to Lord’s idiographic approach, insofar as it tends to locate consistency not in the performance of certain stereotyped behaviors, but rather in the subject’s following his distinctive understanding of what is relevant and appropriate in different contexts. As Mischel and his collaborator Yuichi Shoda write, “To discover the potentially predictable patterns of variability that characterize individuals, a first step is to identify those features of situations that are meaningful to them and that engage their important psychological qualities.”10 The difference between the CAPS approach and idiographic approaches is that the latter uses the subjects’ ratings of situations in terms of their relevance to a broad trait (e.g., “conscientiousness”) whereas CAPS theory proposes to dispense with all such prefabricated trait terms and instead to explain the relevance of situations to individuals in terms of a variety of more fine-grained psychological characteristics, such as their competencies, expectations, and goals. Mischel developed the initial basis for what would become CAPS theory in terms of social learning. Here his key idea was

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that different behaviors are rewarded in different contexts, and so discriminative responses develop. As Mischel put it with reference to the trait of dependence: Because most social behaviors produce positive consequences in some situations but negative ones in other contexts, the relatively low associations found among an individual’s response patterns should not be surprising. Consider, for example, the intercorrelations among measures intended to sample dependent behaviors, such as “touching, holding, and being near.” If a child has been rewarded regularly at nursery school for “touching, holding, and being near” with his teacher but not with his father at home, a high correlation between dependency measured in the two situations will not be found and should not be expected.11 Mischel’s thought is that traditional approaches to traits will lead one to expect that if someone has the trait of dependence, for example, then he or she will equally exhibit dependent behavior in every kind of situation. When subjects display dependent behavior in one situation but not in another, we might take this as evidence against the idea that there is any meaningful coherence to personality. But Mischel argues that we should not draw such a drastic conclusion. The differences we observe in behavior across situations are likely due to the fact that certain behaviors are rewarded in some situations and not in others. The coherence of personality emerges, then, not at the level of overall consistency in behavior, but in regular correlations between types of behavior and types of situations. Mischel and his collaborators have developed a large body of evidence in favor of this proposed reconceptualization of personality. Here I will discuss two examples of Mischel’s research, by way of illustration. The first example concerns delay of gratification in preschool age children, which Mischel studied using his wellknown “marshmallow test.”12 In this experimental paradigm, four-year-old children are isolated in a quiet room and given an offer by the adult experimenter: they can either enjoy a desirable treat now (such as one marshmallow), or, if they do not eat the one marshmallow now, they can have a more desirable treat (such as two marshmallows) later. Mischel’s aim in these studies was to discover whether children’s delay of gratification was significantly correlated with other behavioral measures.

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He found that delay was significantly correlated with other measures of behavior, and more broadly with children’s later life outcomes. In particular, he found that children who successfully delayed gratification were more likely to be described “10 years later by their parents as adolescents who were more academically and socially competent than their peers and more able to cope with frustration and resist temptation.”13 Furthermore, children’s delay time in preschool also turned out to be “significantly related to their Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores when they applied to college.”14 There is a risk of confounding factors here. In particular, as Mischel and his colleagues note, it is possible that effective delay and better academic performance are not directly causally related, but rather that both are the product of some third factor, such as a stable home environment.15 Nonetheless, Mischel and his colleagues take themselves to have discovered significant individual differences in successful delay that have lasting and important effects on behavior.16 The second example comes from a collaboration between Mischel, Shoda and Jack C. Wright, in which they studied children at a summer camp in New Hampshire.17 Mischel and his colleagues developed a method for measuring the stability of an individual’s behavior in terms of his or her distinctive pattern of responses to certain emotionally salient features of situations. They argue that previous studies gave limited insight into personality structure because they classified situations nominally, in terms of features relevant to the experimenter’s context of observation, that is, the time and place in which the subject was observed. By contrast, in this study Mischel and his colleagues classified situations in terms of the primary interactant (peer or adult) and the emotional valence (positive or negative) of the interaction. More specifically, they observed how children reacted in five kinds of situations: when approached by a peer in a friendly way; when teased by a peer; when praised by an adult; when warned by an adult; and when punished by an adult. On each occasion, Mischel and his colleagues described children’s behavior in terms of four personality-relevant dimensions: prosocial talk, whining, compliance, and verbal aggression, and compared it to the mean on each dimension for each situation.18 Observations for each child were then split in half, and the two halves compared to determine if there were consistent patterns of correlation between situation and response. The resulting mean stability coefficients

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were 0.41 for prosocial talk, 0.20 for whining, 0.45 for compliance, and 0.53 for verbal aggression (where 1 = perfect match between the two halves of each individual’s results). These numbers are not extraordinarily high, but they do (in three out of the four cases) indicate significant correlations. As Mischel and his colleagues put it, “the profiles of how each individual’s behavior varied over the situations, relative to how others behaved in each situation, tended to constitute a predictable nonrandom facet of individual differences.”19 As with studies such as Hartshorne and May’s, little consistency across different types of situations was found. However, Mischel and his colleagues argue that this result should not be seen as undermining the case for personality. By focusing on the stability of behavior relative to the emotionally salient features of situations, they aimed to develop a body of data that can support a systematic theory of personality stability, based on the idea that behavior is guided by individuals’ distinctive “person variables,” such as their “beliefs and values,” and “the way different social situations are encoded by the person.”20 Arguing that the traditional quest to define personality in terms of a consistent pattern of response across situations (e.g., behaves aggressively at home and at work) has failed, they sought to redefine personality in terms of a stable signature of behavior that varies systematically across situations (e.g., behaves aggressively at home but not at work). By shifting the focus away from traits, even idiographically defined ones, CAPS theory might not seem to be in the business of trait psychology at all. But Mischel’s approach is meant to represent a successor to trait theory, in the sense that it aims to make good on the traditional idea that individuals’ desires and choices come in patterns that give regularity and structure to their behavior. In this sense, we might see him as holding on to a version of the ideas of consistency and integration that we saw associated with traits in Chapter 3. In Mischel’s view, the consistency and integration within personality is best understood, not in the traditional language of traits, but rather in the more heterogeneous terms of the various elements that go into the cognitive-affective personality system. The CAPS approach has the same basic limitation as idiographic studies from the point of view of virtue ethics, namely, that it does not support a conception of traits that can be used in normative theorizing. Following Mischel’s social learning theory,

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the correlations that the CAPS approach finds between behaviors and situations are held to be the product of an individual’s unique upbringing and life circumstances, and so are assumed to be radically idiosyncratic. CAPS theorists actively reject the project of attempting to develop a list of traits that could be equally applied to diverse individuals with diverse experiences, goals, strategies, and so on. As a result, CAPS theory, like idiographic personality theory, does not enable the kinds of interpersonal comparisons that are required by the project of virtue ethics.

Aggregation Epstein developed his aggregation technique in a series of papers during the late 1970s and 1980s.21 As with the two approaches discussed above, we can illustrate how Epstein’s approach is meant to work by seeing how it responds to the Hartshorne and May honesty study. Recall that in that study, observation of behaviors relevant to honesty—such as cheating on a test, cheating in a game, lying, and stealing money—revealed that the correlation between a child’s engaging in one of these behaviors and engaging in another was quite low. Hartshorne and May concluded that the trait of honesty is not a useful construct in predicting behavior, since whether a child behaved honestly or dishonestly in one kind of case was a poor predictor of how he would behave in a different kind of case. In response to this argument, Epstein concedes that performance in a single situation is a poor predictor of performance in another single situation, but argues that this fact does not invalidate the notion of traits. Drawing on his own studies and those of other researchers, Epstein argues that repeated observations of individuals over time reveal significant patterns of consistency that support the ascription of traits. For example, he found significant correlations among female college students between their scores on a standard personality test for extraversion and their tendency to engage in sociable behavior, as reported by a peer.22 This result suggests that students’ beliefs and desires, as reflected in the personality test, were integrated to some significant degree with their behavior. Furthermore, Epstein argued that significant regularities in behavior over time can also be observed, given sufficiently large samples.

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Rather than comparing a subject’s performance in one instance with that in another single instance, he compared the subject’s performance over several days with his performance over another period of several days. Using this methodology, Epstein was able to reveal significant patterns that indicate consistency in the long run.23 To see the intuitive idea behind Epstein’s methodology, consider an analogy that he draws between character and intelligence.24 Suppose that someone is taking an intelligence test. Whether he gets a single question right is a poor predictor of whether he will get another single question right. Most people’s tests are likely to contain a mix of right and wrong answers, and if we simply pick single questions to focus our attention on, the chances that those particular questions will be representative of his overall score is very low. We might instead try looking at how he did on, say, the previous twelve questions, and then use that as a basis for predicting how he would do on the next single question. This method might be somewhat more reliable, but again, the chances that his performance on the next single question will be representative of his overall performance is small. There are simply too many different factors that can affect his performance on a single question. If, however, we use his performance on the previous twelve questions to predict his performance on the next twelve questions, our chances of making an accurate prediction are much better. The differences between individual questions tend to get cancelled out as we take a larger sample size, and the same goes for our larger predictive target. Someone who has got ten of the first twelve questions right may or may not get the next question right; after all, he has missed some already. But it would be a reasonable bet that he will get ten of the next twelve questions right. It would be absurd to say that there is no such thing as intelligence, simply because we cannot predict with accuracy whether someone who has thus far performed well on an intelligence test will give the correct answer to a single question. Intelligence is a pattern that emerges in a person’s overall performance on the test. In the same way, Epstein suggests that we should think of a trait as a pattern that emerges from someone’s performance over time, understanding that his or her responses to individual situations taken singly will inevitably involve a good deal of variation. Epstein argues that the reason why correlations between single instances are low is error of measurement: single instances

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simply involve too many factors to allow for a reliable prediction. Thus he is happy to concede that “in any one instance behavior is determined largely by the situation.”25 On the other hand, he argues that a tight correlation between single instances of behavior simply is not necessary in order for the concept of a trait to be psychologically useful. As Epstein writes, “A trait is a generalized tendency for a person to behave in a certain manner over a sufficient sample of events and does not imply that he or she will exhibit trait relevant behavior in all situations or even on all occasions in the same situation.”26 Thus Epstein argues that “traits have received an undeservedly poor reputation because they were expected to do the impossible,”27 namely, to predict with accuracy how an individual would behave in a single situation or a small sample of situations. Epstein acknowledges that this conception of traits allows only for “actuarial”28 prediction, that is, reliable prediction about long-run tendencies given sufficiently large samples of past behavior. But he argues that this is sufficient for the practical purposes for which we care about traits: “In the long run,” he writes, “we can depend on people behaving true to character . . . whether we are betting our finances on the outcome of material events or betting our happiness on the outcome of human relationships.”29 Ascriptions of traits may not allow us to predict precisely how someone will act on a single occasion, but, in Epstein’s view, they can give us a good basis for predicting whether someone will make a generally reliable employee or spouse. By arguing that traits need only represent an average tendency in behavior over time, Epstein is able to accommodate the evidence for both inconsistency and lack of integration. With respect to inconsistency, he argues that, although agents do not exhibit highly reliable patterns of behavior within broad domains like honesty and dishonesty, nonetheless they can exhibit average tendencies with respect to those domains, and these tendencies are significant enough to make good on the traditional trait theorist’s project of mapping broad individual differences. With respect to integration, he argues that agents’ behavior is integrated with their beliefs and desires, but only on as an average long-run tendency, and that this connection admits of many instances in which they can come apart. Note also that Epstein’s approach, unlike idiographic and CAPS approaches, might seem favorable to the normative ambitions of virtue ethics, since he uses standardized trait definitions and argues

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that these can facilitate meaningful interpersonal comparisons regarding who will be, for example, reliably more honest over time. The key to all of these successes of Epstein’s version of trait theory, however, is that it is low in robustness, in the sense that it fails to make any predictions about how individuals will behave on particular occasions. As we saw in Chapter 3, this lack of robustness may not be a problem for psychological trait theory, which has always accepted the idea that trait-contrary behavior on one or more occasions is compatible with possession of the trait. But it is a problem for virtue ethics, since, as we noted in Chapter 1, virtue ethicists do expect virtue ascriptions to support strong predictions about what a virtuous person will and will not do, even on a single occasion.

Longitudinal studies Each of the approaches discussed in this chapter attempts to show that, the classic studies notwithstanding, there remain significant patterns that distinguish the behavior of individuals, and that these patterns are connected in important ways to individuals’ conscious beliefs, goals, and other attitudes. The three approaches described above attempt to vindicate these commitments of trait psychology through the direct observation of behavior. But claims for traits need not be based only on such observations. A fourth and final approach makes use of longitudinal studies, in which trait measures are shown to predict significant outcomes, without direct observation of behavior. In one sense, this is an advantage for these studies, since they can track subjects over a long period of years in real-life settings. At the same time, this aspect of longitudinal approaches makes them weakest when it comes to predictive and explanatory power: though they aim to predict certain outcomes, they do not make predictions about behavior at all. Furthermore, precisely because they observe subjects in real-life settings, these studies lack experimental controls and therefore tend to be especially vulnerable to the risk of confounding factors. As a typical example, consider Angela Duckworth’s research on a trait she calls “grit.”30 Defining grit as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals,”31 Duckworth argues that this trait is a significant predictor of a variety of life outcomes, in particular educational

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attainment and career success. Duckworth and her colleagues first developed a standardized self-report measure for grit, the twelveitem Grit scale. This scale asks respondents questions designed to measure their history with persistence and achievement of goals, by asking whether they agree with statements such as “I have achieved a goal that took years of work,” and “I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge.” The Grit scale also asks about consistency of interests, using reverse-scored statements such as “I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one,” and “New ideas and new projects sometimes distract me from previous ones.”32 Duckworth and her colleagues then performed a series of studies designed to test whether self-reported grit correlates with achievement. They found that grit does in fact have significant predictive power: for example, it is correlated with educational success (whether a subject finished high school, college, or a postcollege degree), with GPA among undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania, and with retention of new cadets at West Point. Furthermore, these effects of grit persist even when the researchers controlled for other potentially confounding factors, such as IQ and SAT score.33 In light of these results, Duckworth argues that grit has a genuine causal role in bringing about achievement: it is not that those who are successful look back and describe themselves as gritty because they stuck with their goals; rather, “an enduring personality trait we call grit is driving the observed correlations with success outcomes.”34 Indeed, Duckworth goes so far as to suggest that “grit may be as essential as talent to high accomplishment.”35 Longitudinal studies have many of the same strengths and weaknesses as Epstein’s aggregation approach, but in an even more extreme form. On the one hand, they can establish that individuals have broad attitudes toward certain general domains of life, such as perseverance toward long-term goals, and that these attitudes are correlated with significant outcomes, such as successful academic performance. In these ways, they can vindicate the expectations of consistency and integration associated with traditional trait theory. As with Epstein’s approach, longitudinal studies use standard trait definitions and so can facilitate interpersonal comparisons, including comparisons of a sort that virtue ethicists might find congenial to their normative project, for example comparisons regarding who is more “gritty” and therefore more likely to succeed in his overall life goals. From the point of view of mapping individual

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differences, longitudinal studies may be even more appealing than Epstein’s approach, since they can demonstrate that the differences they describe have important real-world effects. At the same time, longitudinal studies are even weaker than Epstein’s approach on robustness. Epstein assumed that traits would at least have to manifest themselves in significant differences in average performance over a period of a few weeks. Longitudinal studies, on the other hand, are content to show only that the subjects’ reported attitudes are correlated with significant effects over a period of months or years, and they make no specific claims about how those effects are connected with behavior. Like Epstein’s approach, longitudinal studies preserve consistency and integration only by drawing on the great flexibility in traditional trait theory about how robust traits need to be. As a result, longitudinal approaches cannot provide evidence in favor of the kind of robust traits required by virtue ethics.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter has been to complete the psychological background to the philosophical debate by introducing the reader to a range of responses that psychologists have developed to the classic studies discussed in the previous chapter. An understanding of these responses is essential both for grasping the full psychological context of the philosophical debate, and for assessing the progress of that debate itself. From a psychological perspective, they serve as a counterweight to our focus, in the previous chapter, on a few classic studies from the 1920s to the 1970s. These studies required their own detailed examination, because they have played such a central role in recent philosophical debates about the empirical evidence for character. But a reader who focused too exclusively on those studies would get a partial and outdated picture of psychology as a discipline. As the developments discussed in this chapter reveal, psychology since the 1970s has been riven by its own internal debates about how traits work and what role they should play in a theory of personality. From a philosophical point of view, the developments discussed in this chapter provide an essential background for understanding certain philosophical responses to the situationist challenge that will be discussed in Chapter 6. In the ongoing virtue ethics-situationism

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debate, many of the most ambitious defenses of character have drawn on one or another of these psychological research programs. In order to properly assess these philosophical arguments, the reader should keep in mind the strengths and the limitations of the psychological approaches discussed here. In particular, I have stressed that readers of these arguments need to bear in mind the deep differences between virtue ethics and trait psychology. While the two share some basic commitments, including the idea that behavior is consistent and integrated, they also differ profoundly, insofar as trait psychology does not treat traits as normative or expect them to be robust. These differences fundamentally limit the usefulness of the psychologists’ responses to the experiments for virtue ethics. In defending traits, psychologists have been free to develop approaches that define traits uniquely for each individual, or that see traits only as average, long-term regularities in behavior. These approaches can succeed in preserving a degree of consistency and integration in traits, but they are incompatible with the normative project of virtue ethics and with virtue ethicists’ commitment to robustness.

Further reading Many of the developments in psychology discussed here are surveyed in greater depth in Corr and Matthews 2009. Lord advances his idiographic approach to traits in Lord 1982. For classic statements of CAPS theory, see Mischel 1973 and Mischel and Shoda 1995. An accessible introduction to Mischel’s work can also be had in Mischel 2014. For theoretical and methodological debates around CAPS theory, see Cervone and Shoda 1999. The classic statements of Epstein’s aggregative approach are Epstein 1979 and Epstein and O’Brien 1985. On grit research, see Duckworth et al. 2007 and Duckworth 2016.

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Understanding the virtue ethicssituationism debate

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The varieties of situationist challenge Introduction The aim of this chapter is to formulate the situationist challenge to virtue ethics in the clearest and most compelling way. At its heart is the question of exactly how the classic experiments surveyed in Chapter 3 raise difficulties for virtue ethics. Situationists argue that the experiments tend to falsify certain empirical predictions that virtue ethics implies. But the force of the challenge depends a great deal on how the details of this argument are spelled out, in particular what the relevant empirical predictions of virtue ethics are taken to be, and how the experiments are taken to undermine them. The situationist challenge has been extensively discussed and debated since the 1990s, but surprisingly few writers have made a concerted attempt to clarify precisely what the challenge is.1 Contributors to the debate have often been content with vague formulations such as the claim that behavior “depends more on characteristics of the situation and less on characteristics of the person than people typically assume”2 or that “the difference between good conduct and bad appears to reside more in the situation than in the person.”3 Formulations like these rest on a simple opposition between explanations that appeal to situational factors and those that appeal to personal traits. According to these simple versions of the situationist argument, the classic studies undermine the

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case for character traits simply by showing that behavior is highly sensitive to situational variations. These formulations fall short, however, because they fail to demonstrate exactly how the observed situational sensitivity runs contrary to the commitments of virtue ethics. The five versions of the challenge that I canvass below represent different ways in which situationists have tried to give a more precise account of why the situational sensitivity observed in the experiments is incompatible with the virtue ethicist’s claims for character. The chapter proceeds in five main sections. In the first section, I introduce the well-known and influential formulation of the challenge developed by John Doris in a series of writings beginning in the late 1990s. In these writings, Doris focuses his argument on the idea that experimental evidence undermines expectations of consistency in behavior implied by virtue ethics. In the second section, I discuss a related but distinct line of argument developed contemporaneously by Gilbert Harman, which argues for an error theory of character judgments. These challenges, despite their familiarity, do not in fact represent the most significant versions of the worry that the experiments raise for virtue ethics. In the final three sections, I survey three alternative formulations of the challenge: one by Peter Vranas, which takes the experiments to show that most people are morally indeterminate in the overall quality of their character; one by Maria Merritt, which takes them to show that moral motivation is deeply dependent on particular forms of social relationship; and one put forward in a more recent piece coauthored by Merritt, Doris, and Harman, which takes them to show that human psychology fundamentally lacks the integration required by virtue ethics. Taken together, these five formulations represent the most widely discussed and debated versions of the challenge. I aim not only to clarify exactly how each of them should be understood, but also to bring out the differences between them, which have usually not been appreciated, particularly when all of them have been lumped together under the heading of “the situationist challenge.” My further aim is to show that some versions of the challenge are much more compelling and difficult to answer than others, and raise much deeper worries for virtue ethics. After describing each of these formulations and exploring their advantages and disadvantages, I conclude that the final challenge,

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focusing on lack of integration, is the most profound one and should raise the biggest concerns for virtue ethicists. This result will then shape my discussion of the prospects for a defense of virtue ethics in Chapter 6.

Inconsistency In his influential presentation of the situationist position, Doris focused on arguing that experimental evidence undermines the expectations of consistency associated with virtue ethics.4 Doris takes virtue ethics to hold that virtuous people “can be confidently expected to display trait-relevant behavior across a wide variety of trait-relevant situations, even where some or all of these situations are not optimally conducive to such behavior.”5 In Doris’s view, the experimental evidence reveals that this expectation is unfounded, insofar as it shows that human behavior is not organized into highly unified patterns that hold together across a wide variety of situations. He argues that the organization of behavior is in fact much more local and heterogeneous than virtue ethics expects, and is dependent to a surprising degree on the details of the particular situations we find ourselves in. According to Doris, the classic studies, together with other studies in the same experimental tradition, show that “there is a marked disparity between the extent of behavioral consistency that familiar conceptions of [virtue] lead one to expect and the extent of behavioral consistency that systematic observation suggests one is justified in expecting.”6 In making this argument, Doris draws on each of the six studies and in each case he follows the same basic strategy. He begins by pointing to features of the subjects that he assumes would lead us, given the expectation of consistency, to make a certain prediction about their behavior on a particular occasion. He then argues that the results falsify that prediction, and he concludes that we should reject the expectation of consistency. As an illustration of Doris’s approach, consider his reading of Hartshorne and May’s dishonesty study. In that study, Doris writes, “Hartshorne and May . . . found that even across quite similar situations, honest and dishonest behavior were displayed inconsistently.” As a result, Doris goes on, “they concluded that honesty is not an ‘inner entity’ but is instead ‘a function of the

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situation’.”7 The crucial point here is the evidence that Doris, following Hartshorne and May, takes to support this conclusion: namely, the fact that a student who acted dishonestly in one kind of case acted honestly in another, and vice versa. Doris’s thought is that expectations of consistency would lead us to predict that a student who acted dishonestly in one case would do so in another, and similarly, mutatis mutandis, for a student who on a given occasion acted honestly. Since this prediction turns out not to be true, Doris takes Hartshorne and May’s study to undermine the expectation of consistency. Doris places particular emphasis on the seemingly minor character of the situational variations in proportion to the differences they produce in behavior. He writes that “predictive and explanatory appeals to traits . . . are confounded by the extraordinary situational sensitivity observed in human behavior.”8 In other words, the key problem that Doris points to is not mere inconsistency per se: no one would be surprised if a person acted quite strangely and in ways we would not have previously expected if he or she were suddenly thrust into the middle of an obviously unfamiliar and difficult situation, such as a war or a natural disaster. But the circumstances of Milgram’s subjects, for example, are not extreme in this way, as is confirmed by the fact that both psychologists and laypeople felt that they could confidently predict how the subjects would perform. Doris argues that studies like Milgram’s do not merely reveal inconsistency, but more importantly they reveal inconsistency even in cases where we would reasonably expect consistency. For Doris, the expectation of consistency is essentially a case of overhasty generalization. As he puts it: “Every person, in the course of his or her life, exhibits a multitude of behaviors; since social observation is usually piecemeal and unsystematic, we should be hesitant to take our limited sampling of behaviors as evidence for confident interpretations of [traits].”9 Since our experience with people is based on observing them in a limited range of situations, we should be hesitant to make claims about how they will behave on a future occasion. The fundamental flaw in the notion of character, according to Doris, is simply that we engage in a kind of sloppy induction from a limited body of evidence. On the basis of this argument, Doris rejects trait psychology and virtue ethics, both of which he sees as committed to an empirically untenable conception of “global” traits, i.e., traits that provide

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a consistent shape to an individual’s behavior across a range of different kinds of situations. He allows that we might instead have “local” traits, where these are understood as regularities in behavior that operate only within a narrowly specified type of situation.10 To illustrate what he has in mind, he gives examples inspired by Hartshorne and May’s results, such as a student’s being “answer-key honest” or “score-adding honest.”11 According to Doris, a student might have the local trait of being “answer-key honest,” for example, insofar as he reliably does not cheat on tests by using an answer key. Ascription of this local trait to the student, however, would carry no implications about whether he would behave honestly given the opportunity to cheat using other methods. Hartshorne and May’s data support the idea that individuals are consistent in their behavior across repeated instances of such narrowly defined situations. But, Doris would insist, this kind of consistency should not be taken to support the existence of more “global” traits such as honesty simpliciter, since Hartshorne and May’s results also show that honest behavior in one kind of situation is poorly correlated with honest behavior in even slightly different kinds of situations. For example, honesty in not using an answer key is not strongly correlated with honesty when students are asked to add up and report their own score. Doris takes his argument to have practical as well as theoretical advantages. On the practical side, he particularly emphasizes the advantages for deliberation: in Doris’s view, effective deliberation requires us to remember that “for people like us, the world is a morally dangerous place.”12 He means that we are often more prone to temptation than we realize, and that we struggle to correctly anticipate the power that particular factors will have over us as we consider whether to enter into certain activities or positions. (Here, one might think of the case of Milgram’s subjects, who failed to anticipate the difficulty they would have in disobeying the experimenter.) According to Doris, thinking in terms of character can in fact compound the moral dangers we face, since “many times our confidence in character is precisely what puts us at risk in morally dangerous situations.”13 Doris suggests that in taking on new activities, roles or commitments, we should strive to carefully consider the subtle effects that situational factors may have on our behavior, and should be wary of placing too much trust in our supposed good character. Instead of expecting that we will be

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able to resist temptation, he proposes, we would often be better off avoiding tempting situations in the first place. I have two doubts about the practical helpfulness of this advice: first, it seems unlikely that we will always be able to avoid tempting situations, and so learning to avoid such situations is not a substitute for developing some degree of moral acuity and resilience.14 Doris’s advice might seem reasonable when we focus on the unusual situations created in the laboratory by Milgram or Zimbardo. But it seems much less helpful when we remember how ordinary some of the effects documented in the studies really are. What sort of life I am supposed to lead in which I will not be tempted to neglect the pressing claims of others when I am in a hurry or a bad mood? Second, since (as Doris himself emphasizes) the factors involved are many and various, and our moral limitations are often not transparent to us, it seems likely that we will not be particularly good at anticipating which situations will tempt us to act badly. Recall again that most of us, before we knew Milgram’s actual results, would expect that few people, if any, would be fully obedient. Now that we know the results, we are perhaps more aware of the dangers presented by our destructive tendency to obedience. But if moral life is really as complex and opaque as Doris argues, then presumably there are many other dangerous factors of which we are as yet unaware and which we will hardly succeed in avoiding simply by exercising greater caution. The deeper problems with Doris’s critique are theoretical. He argues that the experimental results undermine certain predictions that virtue-based expectations of consistency would lead us to make. But in many cases the predictions he has in mind are rather crude, and he provides no argument to show that a virtue ethicist would in fact make them. He does not point to any feature of virtue ethics from which it follows that, for example, a person who helps a stranger in one situation will necessarily help in another. Instead, he simply assumes that a virtue ethicist would make these predictions. As we saw in Chapter 1, the conception of consistency in virtue ethics includes the idea that the virtuous person is highly rational and reflective and is sensitive to the complex interplay of various factors in deciding what to do. For example, a generous person is understood by virtue ethics not as one who gives in every situation, or even in most, but rather as one who gives when, where, and to whom he ought. According to virtue ethics, a virtue is not

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a simple disposition to perform certain stereotyped behaviors, but is a complex disposition that is responsive to a plurality of circumstances and so might be extremely sensitive to differences in situation. Thus the bare fact that observed behavior turns out to be responsive to subtle differences in situation does nothing to undermine virtue ethics. Insofar as Doris’s case against virtue ethics rests on the idea that virtue ethicists are committed to simplistic predictions of consistency in behavior without regard for situational differences, his case fails to make contact with its target.

Error theory Harman’s critique of virtue ethics is largely similar to Doris’s, but it incorporates a more systematic account of the supposed fundamental error at work in character ascriptions, and as a result might seem to represent an advance over Doris’s position. Like Doris, Harman argues that virtue ethics entails predictions about behavior that are falsified by the studies, in some cases going beyond Doris in his detailed descriptions of these predictive failures. In the case of Darley and Batson’s study, for example, Harman points out that what the experiment tested was not simply a general disposition toward helping on the part of seminary students, but also a pair of further hypotheses that might seem consonant with virtue ethics: first, that those who were assigned to speak on the parable of the Good Samaritan would be more likely to help, on the grounds that norms associated with helping would be more salient to them at the time; and, second, that those who saw religious life more as an end in itself or as a personal quest would be more likely to help, as opposed to those who, in a more self-centered or mercenary fashion, saw a religious career as a mere means to an end. The form of Harman’s argument here closely parallels the arguments we saw Doris making above. He assumes that virtue ethics would predict that a single factor (such as a certain type of religiosity) would be strongly correlated with a particular behavior under certain circumstances. When that correlation fails to emerge, he concludes that virtue ethics has been substantially undermined. The key difference between Harman and Doris has to do with how they understand the kind of mistake at work in virtue attributions. Doris tends to describe it simply as a kind of faulty induction,

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in which we overconfidently predict that a certain regularity thus far observed in behavior will continue into different future circumstances. Harman, by contrast, diagnoses virtue attributions as a species of a deeper and more insidious kind of error, which, following Lee Ross, he calls “the Fundamental Attribution Error” (hereafter FAE). As Harman describes it, the FAE consists in the fact that “in trying to characterize and explain a distinctive action, ordinary thinking tends to hypothesize a corresponding distinctive characteristic of the agent and tends to overlook the relevant details of the agent’s perceived situation.”15 In making this argument, Harman draws not only on the work of Ross, but also on the broader study of cognitive biases pioneered by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.16 Kahneman and Tversky devised a highly productive method for studying unconscious thought processes, which was to look for common biases and heuristics that characterize our intuitive responses to many situations. We do not consciously adopt these biases and heuristics, and on careful reflection we can see that they are in fact misguided. But they shape our responses all the same, and, even when we know about them, they can prove surprisingly difficult to avoid. Consider, for example, the availability heuristic, which leads us to regard information as more salient because it is more readily available or more easily retrieved from memory. This heuristic might lead us to assume (as in an example of Kahneman’s) that politicians are more likely to commit adultery than other people. Unless we have made a serious study of statistics on adultery, we lack good grounds to draw that conclusion. The reason why we might assume that politicians are more prone to adultery is not that they commit more adultery, but that we hear more about their adulterous affairs in the news media. Because the adultery of politicians is more “available” to us, we tend to assume that it must be more common.17 As a second example, consider the resemblance heuristic which leads us to make judgments based on familiar patterns and stereotypes rather than on objective probabilities.18 Suppose that Steve is described as “shy and withdrawn,” “invariably helpful,” “meek and tidy,” with a “need for order and structure, and a passion for detail.” Now answer the following question: Is Steve more likely to be a librarian or a farmer? If you said librarian, you

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are like most people. But, like most people, you are also biased by the resemblance heuristic. Since being a farmer is actually a much more common profession for men than being a librarian, Steve is more likely to be a farmer. We assume that he is more likely to be a librarian only because of the resemblance of the above description with certain stereotypes about librarians. These heuristics give rise to biases, in the sense that they lead us to false conclusions in predictable ways. In this sense, they reveal “systematic errors in the thinking of normal people,” errors that reflect widespread flaws in “the design of the machinery of cognition.”19 In a series of publications, Ross and others have argued that commonsense character attributions should be thought of as the product of the FAE, a misguided heuristic analogous to the availability and resemblance heuristics described above. The FAE biases us by leading us to assume that any striking or distinctive behavior must reveal some “fundamental” quality in the agent.20 Summing up the FAE, Ross and his coauthor Richard E. Nisbett write, “People fail to recognize the extent to which observed actions and outcomes . . . may prove to be diagnostic not of the actor’s unique personal dispositions but rather of the objective situational factors facing the actor.”21 This bias toward personal rather than situational explanations has been documented in a number of studies. For example, Edward Jones and Victor Harris found that audiences tend to assume that a speaker’s remarks correspond to his own opinions, even when they are told that the speaker was randomly assigned to defend a particular position.22 On the basis of this critical diagnosis of our tendency to engage in character judgments, Harman proposes an “error theory” of those judgments, which is meant to explain their existence and their pretense to refer to a genuine subject matter, all the while denying that such judgments are ever true. Harman connects the FAE with two further biases well known in the psychological literature, the “correspondence bias,” which leads us to assume that a particular episode of external behavior must “correspond” to something deep in the agent, and the “confirmation bias,” which leads us to ignore information that might challenge our beliefs or assumptions.23 On the assumption that these biases offer a complete explanation of our tendency to form character judgments, Harman writes that “Since it is possible to explain our ordinary belief in character traits as deriving from certain illusions, we must conclude that

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there is no empirical basis for the existence of character traits.”24 According to Harman, while “Character-based virtue ethics may offer a reasonable account of ordinary moral views,” this is so much the worse for virtue ethics, because “these ordinary views rest on error.”25 Since he is convinced that the whole business of character judgments is predicated on error and bias, Harman is much less willing than Doris to countenance them in any form, no matter how reduced or modified. He concludes that, rather than attempting to work with notions such as Doris’s local traits, “it is better to abandon all thought and talk of character and virtue.”26 In order to further illuminate the kind of error he sees at work in character judgments, Harman offers a comparison between the “folk psychology” he takes to be behind these judgments, and the crude, prescientific thinking involved in “folk physics.” In Harman’s sense, “folk physics” refers to the intuitive expectations of observers about, for example, the movements of physical bodies. As Harman notes, these expectations are systematically out of line with modern scientific knowledge. For example, untrained observers tend to expect that an object dropped from an airplane will fall to earth in a straight line from the point where it was dropped. In fact, it falls in a parabolic arc following the direction of the airplane’s movement. According to Harman, folk psychology involves analogous errors. He writes: In attempting to characterise and explain the movement of a body, folk physics places too much emphasis on assumed internal characteristics of the body, ignoring external forces. Similarly, in trying to characterise and explain a distinctive action, ordinary thinking tends to hypothesise a corresponding distinctive characteristic of the agent and tends to overlook the relevant details of the agent’s perceived situation.27 The analogy between folk physics and folk psychology, for Harman, is quite close: it is not simply that in both cases crude, intuitive thinking makes false predictions and should be replaced by more informed and more reliable theorizing. In addition, there is an even closer analogy: in both cases, intuitive but erroneous thinking goes wrong by overemphasizing “internal” factors at the expense of “external” ones. Harman’s argument might seem to bolster Doris’s case, by explaining why it is not after all possible to simply clarify or

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modify virtue ethics in ways that would allow it to avoid the sorts of predictions falsified by the experiments. According to Harman’s explanation, this is not possible, because character attributions are not really reasoned judgments at all, but rather the product of biases, and in fact do not correspond to any genuine subject matter. Harman’s dismissal of virtue ethics is much more sweeping, and if it could be made to stick, it would go further than Doris’s in removing any hope for a version of virtue ethics that could meet the challenge. The problem for Harman is that his arguments turn out to have essentially the same weakness as Doris’s. That is, Harman makes no more of a compelling case than Doris that virtue ethicists need to make the kinds of predictions that he assumes. Harman asserts that “when people attribute robust character traits to other agents, they do so on the basis of minimal evidence and tend completely to overlook the relevance of features in agents’ situations that help to explain why they act as they do.”28 He lays great stress on the fact that we are easily tempted into hasty and simplistic character attributions. Thus he points out that when we consider any one of Milgram’s “fully obedient” subjects, for example, “It is hard not to think there is something terribly wrong with the subject. It is extremely tempting to attribute the subject’s performance to a character defect in the subject rather than to details of the situation.”29 But he does nothing to show that this needs to be the case, and in particular why any philosophically sophisticated version of virtue ethics needs to engage in such simplistic thinking. As I suggested above, it is open to a virtue ethicist to argue that attributions of character go hand in hand with sensitivity to differences in situation, as when a virtue ethicist explains why a generous person gives in one situation and not in another by appealing to some relevant difference in the situations, such as the time, place, or recipient of the gift. Harman tends to take as his target “ordinary” character attributions, as when he writes that “ordinary attributions of character traits to people are often deeply misguided.”30 He seems to assume that virtue ethics is ultimately beholden to “ordinary” thinking about character, and that he can undermine the project of virtue ethics simply by showing that ordinary character attributions are often mistaken and infected with bias. But even if his arguments are correct about the errors built into the folk conception of character, he provides no argument to show that virtue ethics needs to be closely tied to that folk conception.31 This failure spells serious

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trouble for Harman’s ability to improve upon Doris’s position. He can make a compelling case that virtue ethics is predicated on biases only if it genuinely commits the sorts of predictive mistakes he charges it with. Insofar as he fails to show that virtue ethicists in fact make those mistakes, he fails to show that his error theory of character judgments applies to virtue ethics.

Indeterminacy The problem for Doris and Harman was that they could not show that the behavior observed in the studies was inconsistent in any deep sense. They relied on the fact that the behavior appears inconsistent by the lights of a simplistic notion of character, according to which an agent will engage in certain stereotypical behaviors regardless of his situation. But they had no argument against a more sophisticated conception of character, of the kind found in virtue ethics, according to which an agent can be consistent by following a nuanced pattern of responsiveness to the morally relevant features of situations. One way to respond to this problem with Doris and Harman’s early arguments is to avoid the question of whether agents are consistent by their own lights at all, and to simply insist that their behavior is objectively incompatible with consistent character. A sophisticated version of this strategy has been developed by Peter Vranas. Like Doris and Harman, Vranas begins his argument from the thought that character evaluations entail expectations of consistency. But Vranas puts the notion of consistency to work in a quite different way. For him, the key point about consistency is not that agents are expected to act in specific trait-relevant ways across trait-relevant situations. Rather, the point is that agents are expected to maintain a consistent ethical valence in their overall behavior. Vranas takes the classic studies, together with additional evidence on helping,32 to show that most people are disposed to act in some cases very well and in other cases very badly, with the result that they are “indeterminate” when it comes to character, that is, they have no character, good or bad. In Vranas’s sense, a person is “indeterminate” (or “fragmented”) with respect to character if she “behaves deplorably in many and admirably in many other situations.”33 He takes the experimental evidence to show that most people are indeterminate in this sense.34

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Vranas relies on many of the same experimental results as Doris and Harman, but he reads them significantly differently, in ways that reveal underlying differences in their arguments. Thus in describing Milgram’s obedience experiments, for example, Vranas is content simply to point out that “most participants were induced to administer powerful . . . electric shocks to a screaming confederate.”35 Again, in the Stanford Prison Experiment, he notes simply that “most ‘guards’ in a simulated prison maltreated the ‘prisoners’.”36 His discussions of these studies are so spare because he is not concerned with discrepancies within these experiments between the expected and observed behavior. Rather, he is concerned only with the overall picture that emerges when we compare these results with those of other experiments. In particular, he aims to show that, whereas in the Milgram experiment, for example, most people act quite badly, in other experiments, similarly large majorities act quite admirably. In the latter studies, subjects “helped an apparently electrocuted confederate at the risk of being electrocuted themselves, or they stopped a simulated theft.”37 Since in certain studies most of the subjects act in ways that seem helpful and compassionate, while in others they act in ways that seem cruel and callous, Vranas concludes that the overall pattern of typical human behavior is incompatible with any form of determinate character. Once we take “both sets of experiments into account,” according to Vranas, we can conclude that “most people are fragmented.”38 The one seeming exception to my above characterization of Vranas’s use of evidence is his discussion of Hartshorne and May’s research, where he does argue that character-based predictions were defeated within a single study: as he reminds us, Hartshorne and May found that “a child who behaved much more dishonestly than average on a cheating test typically did not behave much more dishonestly than average on a stealing test.”39 But this is in fact no exception, since for Vranas the key point about this study is not that it provides evidence against expectations of consistency associated with the specific trait of honesty, but that it provides evidence against the broader prediction that a given individual will either usually act well or usually act badly.40 The heart of Vranas’s argument is an extrapolation from the experimental evidence to a claim about what most people are like: assuming that the experimental subjects are representative of the general population, we can conclude that most people would act

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badly in certain situations and admirably in others. As Vranas writes “The experiments suggest that most people are fragmented in the sense that they would behave in . . . deplorable or admirable ways,” if they were placed in these situations.41 On this basis, Vranas concludes that most people are indeterminate with respect to character: attempts to ascribe good or bad character to them will fail, since their behavior does not possess a consistent ethical valence, good or bad. As Vranas takes pains to argue, his point is not that most people have a middling or intermediate character: rather, they have no character at all, since their behavior seems to reveal such wildly different ethical qualities. Trying to assign a moral character to most people, to use an analogy of Vranas’s, would be like trying to assign a temperature to a lake that has many very warm and many very cold areas. One might assign the lake an average temperature, but this would be quite misleading, since it fails to capture the way in which the lake is characterized by inconsistency. Although one might say that the lake has an average temperature, and this average might correspond to a mild temperature, still the lake does not have a mild overall temperature: rather, it is better to say that it “has no overall temperature.”42 Some ways that Vranas has of summing up his point can make him sound a good deal like Doris and Harman. Thus he writes, for example, that “an extensive literature in personality psychology suggests that from information on how a person behaves in certain situations we cannot confidently predict how the person would behave in other, dissimilar situations.”43 But in fact his argument is meant to work quite differently, since he relies solely on moral descriptions of the observed behavior and does not speculate about its internal causes. This can seem to give his approach an advantage over Doris and Harman’s, insofar as he seems able to bypass the problem of proving that the experimental subjects’ different responses to different situations cannot be consistent by their own lights. Vranas attempts to bypass this problem by avoiding altogether the question of why people act in the way that they do. Vranas writes with a certain incomprehension: “I am frequently asked why most people are fragmented. I don’t know . . . but why would I need to provide an answer?”44 Unlike Doris and Harman, Vranas is not fundamentally interested in the question of whether behavior is more shaped by situational or personal factors;

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for the purposes of his argument, he assumes that the question of what causes the inconsistent patterns of behavior observed in the experiments is irrelevant. This seeming advantage, however, is more apparent than real. In refusing to give an explanation of why behavior is fragmented, Vranas risks falling into his own version of the problem that Doris and Harman faced. Vranas’s argument relies on the assumption that the pattern of behavior observed across the experiments is incompatible with any form of determinate character. He motivates this assumption by pointing to apparent differences in the ethical quality of the behaviors observed, such as that in some cases people seek to aid someone who is suffering, while in other cases they are themselves responsible for inflicting suffering. The problem is that these differences, though striking, are not in themselves decisive as regards the true ethical quality of the subjects’ behavior. A judge who lets one man free and sentences another to prison might seem inconsistent, insofar as he sometimes “helps” and sometimes “harms” the accused. But the judge may in fact not be inconsistent at a deeper level, insofar as he is in fact following the facts and the law in each case. On the other hand, he may be erratic or incompetent, and so not in fact following a consistent pattern in his rulings. The only way to decide whether the judge’s behavior manifests a consistent character is to look beyond the apparent outward quality of his actions and to determine their inward causes. Insofar as Vranas refuses to do this, his argument fails to show that the experimental data are inconsistent with determinate character on the part of the subjects. In refusing to speculate about the internal causes of behavior, Vranas is in danger of missing what the debate between virtue ethicists and situationists is really about. One way to see this is to note that it looks far too easy to change the world in such a way that we could give most people a consistent character in the terms of his account. Suppose that we successfully adopted the kinds of practical measures recommended by Doris, with the result that most people now avoid acting badly in situations like Milgram’s, because we prevent such situations from arising or have some other way of mitigating their effects. Does that mean that most people now have a consistent character after all? Doris and Harman would be inclined to say no, on the grounds that behavior still lacks an internal cause of consistency. Virtue ethicists would likewise insist that, if behavior appears consistent only because of external manipulation, it does not

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reveal character in the sense they are interested in. If the problem for character attributions is simply that as a matter of fact most people exhibit fragmented behavior, then it seems that the problem can be solved and character attributions restored simply by finding some way or another to prevent the troubling behavior. Vranas could argue that the required management of situations would be too great a task to be practicable, but it would be awkward for him to do so, since he himself endorses Doris’s pragmatic recommendations and tells us that we should “avoid morally dangerous situations” rather than “facing such situations with the misplaced confidence that [we] will overcome temptation.”45 Vranas encourages us to avoid the sorts of situations in which we are tempted to act badly; it seems that, paradoxically, if we follow his advice, we can display consistent character after all. This seems wrong, because the key claim in the virtue ethicist’s theory of character is not that behavior is consistent in some way or another, but that it is consistent insofar as it is internally directed and organized in a certain way. In failing to take up the question of the internal direction and organization of behavior, Vranas’s critique thus misses its target. In sum, Vranas appears to have an advantage over Doris and Harman insofar as he seems, at first blush, better able to explain why the inconsistency that emerges from the experimental record is incompatible with virtue ethics. But this apparent advantage evaporates on closer inspection, since without considering the internal causes of behavior, he cannot in fact establish that the observed behavior is at odds with any form of determinate character.

Dependence Merritt’s argument begins from a key observation that makes it a decisive advance over previous versions of the challenge. She points out that what makes the subjects’ behavior in the experiments so disturbing is not simply the degree to which it is affected by “subtle” or “minor” factors, but rather the degree to which it is affected by “morally irrelevant”46 and “arbitrary”47 factors. Referring to Isen and Levin and Darley and Batson, she writes that, according to virtue ethics, “The expectation is that relatively arbitrary factors, such as whether the ‘generous’ person is in a good mood [or] whether he is a hurry . . . will have minimal impact on his appropriate performance

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of generous actions.”48 Merritt recognizes that the key prediction of virtue ethics is not merely that behavior will be consistent in some way or other. Rather, she specifies that the key prediction is that behavior will be consistent in accordance with the agent’s sensitivity to the force of moral reasons for action. The problem for virtue ethics, on Merritt’s view, is that the experiments show our behavior to be less than consistently shaped by our sensitivity to such reasons. Instead, our actions are significantly shaped by irrelevant factors, in ways that reveal fundamental weaknesses in our capacity for moral self-control. In keeping with this reading of the experiments, Merritt focuses her argument on a different aspect of virtue ethics than the situationist writers discussed so far in this chapter. She identifies the target of her criticism, not simply as the assumption that behavior will be consistent across varying situations, but more specifically as the assumption that an individual agent’s moral motivation will be sufficiently strong to give a consistent shape to her behavior. She argues that virtue ethics contains a demanding ideal of “motivational self-sufficiency of character,”49 and it is this ideal that she takes the experiments to undermine. In her view, virtue ethics has been hampered by an excessive ideal of moral self-sufficiency derived from Aristotle, according to which “genuine virtues [must] be firmly secured in one’s own individual constitution, in such a way that one’s reliability in making good practical choices depends as little as possible on contingent external factors.”50 In opposition to this ideal of self-sufficiency, she argues that a better approach to ethics should begin from the idea that “whatever success we may enjoy in meeting our own self-evaluative standards for personal character . . . is typically subject to our ongoing engagement with the expectations of particular other individuals with whom we hold our values in common.”51 For Merritt, others’ expectations matter because they affect our capacity to meet our own moral standards. Her point is not merely, as in the case of Vranas, about the objective moral quality of our behavior. Rather, in her view, what the experiments reveal is that individual agents are often unable to live up to their own moral attitudes and perceptions. Merritt explains these failures in terms of the fact that our social roles and settings provide essential moral guidance that gives a consistent shape to our behavior; once we step outside of positive and supportive “climates of social expectation,”52 our

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good intentions are no guarantee of good performance. In Merritt’s view, our moral selves are much more caught up than we generally acknowledge with the “ongoing demands of self-presentation.”53 When our moral values are bolstered by the social supports of honor, esteem and friendship, we can act remarkably well. But when this supportive context is absent, our individual attachment to moral values is often insufficient to motivate behavior. An essential part of Merritt’s project is to provide an alternative explanation for the consistent patterns of behavior we observe in everyday life among our friends and family members. She writes: “Some of the situation-specific dispositions that seem to do the most explanatory work in accounting for behavioral consistency are directed most immediately toward the particular social relationships and settings that hold importance in a person’s life.”54 According to Merritt, we are not wrong to think that the people around us often act consistently; we are only wrong to assume that this consistency is purely a matter of internal factors, and thus something the agent can confidently expect to take with him into an isolating, destructive or alien environment. We may have virtuous dispositions, but such dispositions are more fragile than they appear: in particular, they are “remarkably subject to alteration and modification, depending on the social expectations that are most palpably in force for a person over a given period of time.”55 Merritt concludes that, rather than avoiding our dependence on how others see us and recklessly pursuing an ideal of moral selfsufficiency, we would do much better to acknowledge and embrace what she calls the “sustaining social contribution to character.”56 On this basis, she proposes an alternative approach to virtue theory. In this alternative version, we can still “recommend having and acting from the virtues” and we can still care that “one’s possession of the virtues . . . should be relatively stable over time.”57 But the key feature of this alternative—and in Merritt’s view, more psychologically sound—version of virtue theory is that it no longer looks for a guarantor of consistency in the individual’s moral constitution. Rather, Merritt’s approach is happy to acknowledge that the agent’s capacity to maintain her virtues is in part a function of her ongoing engagement in certain social relationships and institutions.58 Merritt’s formulation of the situationist challenge has a number of advantages over the other versions we have looked at so far, in that she identifies a commitment that can plausibly be attributed to

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much of virtue ethics, namely, the expectation that agents will be consistently and effectively guided by their own moral lights, and in particular, that they will not be swayed by morally irrelevant factors. By encouraging us to develop our moral attitudes and responses, virtue ethics assumes that these will effectively shape behavior. This expectation is challenged by the experiments, insofar as their results show that behavior is surprisingly subject to the force of irrelevant factors, even among subjects who seem to have the right attitudes and perceptions. Note that Merritt’s approach sets aside concerns about consistency, at least in the sense that this term invites us to frame the issue in quantitative terms. The situationist challenge is sometimes posed as a quantitative claim about whether people are less consistent than we expect, or whether “situational” factors matter more than “personal” ones in explaining behavior. Merritt’s approach avoids this quantitative framing and instead focuses on the deeper, qualitative issue of relevance. The key point she takes away from the experiments is that people’s behavior is swayed by factors that are irrelevant even by their own lights. This sets aside the issue of whether people act consistently or not in favor of the deeper question of whether an individual’s capacities for reason and desire are sufficient to maintain effective control over her behavior. Merritt’s framework seems to fit particularly well with the experiments that center on a well-defined form of social relationship, for example the relationship between the teacher and the experimenter in Milgram’s study and that between prisoner and guard in Haney et al.’s. A plausible reading of these experiments is that they show how our capacity for effective moral deliberation is deeply vulnerable to what Merritt calls “climates of social expectation.” Once cast in the role of “teacher” or “guard,” subjects found it surprisingly easy to identify with the demands of that role, even where these demands ran contrary to their considered values, and found it surprisingly difficult to remain connected with the moral selves they knew outside of that role. These experiments suggest that our capacity for sustained virtuous activity depends in important ways on social environments that encourage good behaviors and discourage destructive ones. But Merritt’s position seems to fit less well with other experiments, such as Isen and Levin’s and Darley and Batson’s. In these cases, the key factors that turn out to have a surprising effect on behavior—a

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good mood, in the one case, and a feeling of hurry, in the other—do not seem to be socially mediated in any interesting sense. Neither experiment tests any hypothesis about the degree to which the agent’s moral motivation is contingent on social factors. It may be true that, as Merritt argues, our moral dispositions are powerfully affected by others’ expectations. But how are the alterations in behavior seen in Isen and Levin’s study, for example, due to alterations in social expectations? The social relationships involved in that study—those between strangers at a shopping mall—are held constant between experimental and control groups, and so do not seem to explain the differences in the results. The expectations enforced by social relationships do not seem to explain all of the significant effects even in Milgram’s research. Recall that, in the Milgram experiment, some of the most powerful effects do not arise from the specific character of the relationship between teacher and experimenter, but rather from factors such as physical proximity. Thus while Merritt’s point about social dependence may capture something important that is revealed by the experiments, it is still only a limited success, insofar as it does not adequately address the full range of the experimental evidence.

Dissociation The strongest version of the situationist challenge yet developed comes from a 2010 piece coauthored by Merritt, Doris, and Harman.59 Although this piece draws in some ways on ideas discussed above in connection with all three authors, it also represents a significant advance over all of their earlier formulations. In particular, it builds on the key insights of Merritt’s earlier writings and reflects the ways in which her account of the challenge is an improvement over those offered by Doris, Harman, and Vranas. At the same time, it also advances beyond Merritt’s earlier work in ways that take account of the shortcomings noted in the previous section. The strong version of the challenge articulated by Merritt, Doris, and Harman begins with the fact that it identifies a new aspect of virtue ethics as its main target. Instead of focusing on consistency or motivational self-sufficiency, it focuses on the aspect that we have been calling integration, namely, the idea that the virtuous person’s thoughts, feelings, and actions operate in a unified and

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harmonious manner. As Merritt, Doris, and Harman formulate the view they now take as their target, “moral cognition is supposed to orchestrate a smooth transition from pre-existing moral norms to a choice of action in line with them, through the appropriate uptake of information about the actor’s present circumstances.”60 They set out to challenge the ideal of “virtuous practical rationality” understood as “the harmonious interrelation of reflective deliberation and habitual sensibilities.”61 The problem they seek to raise for the idea of integration is that behavior turns out to be surprisingly subject to a phenomenon they label “moral dissociation.”62 It is this phenomenon that they now take the classic studies to illustrate. In cases of dissociation, the subject’s behavior becomes “dissociated” from her beliefs and desires, in ways that run contrary to the virtue ethicists’ model of an integrated psyche. As a result, “subjects’ behavior fails to comply with moral norms of the sort that the subjects can be reasonably supposed to accept.”63 In order to illustrate this reformulated version of the situationist challenge, they take as their central example Milgram’s obedience studies. In approaching these studies, they begin by noting that Milgram’s subjects can be assumed to accept such norms as “the obligation not to inflict significant harm on an innocent person against his will.”64 We have reason to believe that the subjects accept these norms not just because they are ordinary citizens of New Haven, but also because of the strain they showed: as Merritt and her coauthors emphasize, “many subjects displayed great emotional strain” in carrying out the experimenter’s orders. It is therefore plausible, they write, “to suppose that most of Milgram’s subjects had internalized a prohibition against inflicting harm on innocents.”65 And yet this is precisely what the subjects go on to do, while nonetheless keeping their previous judgments intact and even recognizing that they apply in this situation. In making this argument, Merritt, Doris, and Harman seek to reframe the classic experiments using the insights of a recent psychological research program known as “dual-process theory.”66 The essential idea of dual-process theory is that human psychology involves two fundamentally different types of cognitive processes: one kind (process 1) is rapid, often emotionally laden, and may be automatic (independent of conscious control) and even outside of conscious awareness. The second kind (process 2) is slower, more

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abstract, and subject to conscious control and awareness. The work of process 1 has sometimes been called “fast” thinking, to capture its automatic and intuitive character, by contrast with the “slow” thinking of process 2. Process 1 thinking is also sometimes called “hot” thinking, to capture its affective intensity, by contrast with the “cool” thinking of process 2. The second kind of process more closely fits our commonsense understanding of what “cognition” or “thinking” is, and theories of cognition have in the past often simply identified thinking with process 2. The central claim of dual-process theory is that in fact much of our thinking occurs in process 1, and that the work of process 1 significantly impacts process 2, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. The contrast between process 1 and process 2 might seem like the familiar distinction between emotion and reason. But emotional responses are often conscious, if not always well understood by the subject. By contrast, process 1 operations are often unconscious. As Merritt, Doris, and Harman put it, “many cognitive processes typically influencing behavior are substantially automatic. Particularly striking is the degree to which cognitive processes are resistant to introspective access, even where subjects are encouraged to reflect on the reasons for their behavior.”67 Not only are we not aware of these processes, but even if we become aware of them, we “would not endorse” them as generating “acceptable reasons for action.”68 As an example of how unconscious processes can influence behavior, consider the phenomenon of priming, in which the use of words or phrases with certain associations can have powerful but unconscious effects on subsequent behavior. In one study of priming effects, participants were told that they would take two tests of language ability.69 When they arrived at the laboratory, they were given a “scrambled sentence test,” in which they were asked to form, as quickly as possible, any grammatical four-word sentence using a given set of five words, for example, “he it hides finds instantly.”70 After taking the first test, they were told to meet a second experimenter in another room, who would give them the second test. When they appeared for the second test, they found the experimenter engaged in a conversation with someone who appeared to be another volunteer but was in fact a confederate. The experimenter and the confederate were engrossed in a long and repetitive discussion, and neither of them acknowledged the subject in any way.

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Unbeknownst to the subjects, the purpose of the study was to see how long they would wait before interrupting the conversation to address the experimenter and ask for the second test. Also unbeknownst to the subjects, the experimental variable was the difference in priming effects prompted by certain words found in the first test. Subjects were randomly selected to receive one of three versions of the test: one test contained words associated with politeness, such as “respect,” “patiently,” and “courteous”; a second version contained words associated with rudeness, such as “aggressively,” “intrude,” and “brazen.” The third version contained only neutral words, such as “practiced,” “normally,” and “gives.” This difference in the words used in the first test turned out to have a significant effect on wait times: subjects who took the “polite” version waited on average 558 seconds before interrupting, that is, nearly ten minutes. Their average wait time was somewhat longer than that of those who received the “neutral version” (519 seconds). By contrast, those who took the “rude” version interrupted much more quickly, on average after just 326 seconds, almost twice as quickly as those who took the polite test. In exit interviews, the subjects never “showed any awareness or suspicion as to the scrambled-sentence test’s possible influence on their interruption behavior,” even when they were explicitly asked how they thought the first test “might have influenced them in the rest of the experiment.”71 The words used in the first test seem to affect the subjects’ behavior by unconsciously establishing an association between the situation and rudeness; the power of this association goes on to operate independently of the subjects’ awareness or intention. Results like this show how factors influencing process 1, such as priming, can have a profound effect on behavior while circumventing the conscious operations of process 2. Merritt, Doris, and Harman propose to reinterpret the classic situationist studies in the terms of this dual-process framework, focusing particularly on the case of Milgram’s obedience experiments. In their reinterpretation, what Milgram’s studies reveal is that moral dissociation can be caused by “the subliminal inhibition or misdirection of the subjects’ other-oriented attention.”72 In Milgram’s baseline condition, they argue, “most obedient subjects behave as if their attention is directed primarily to some combination of their own rising distress and the standpoint of the experimenter.”73 This explains why shifts in spatial relationships

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produce such powerful effects on obedience: they do so by altering the direction of the subject’s attention. The greater distance of the experimenter, or the greater proximity of the learner, makes the learner’s distress more salient. The subject’s thoughts are essentially unchanged, but the force of them is subtly altered, in ways that the subject himself is not conscious of. A subject who only participated in one of these modified versions of the experiment would have no awareness of these effects. Rather, he would simply have found it more obvious that the learner’s distress was a compelling reason to discontinue the experiment. He would explain his disobedience in terms of the learner’s distress, not in terms of the experimenter’s distance or the learner’s proximity. Process 1 thinking should be kept distinct from the heuristics and biases discussed above. The latter may be unreflective, but they are conscious. By contrast, automatic processes do not operate by way of conscious awareness at all. When we conclude that Steve is a librarian from the fact that he is shy and helpful, we take those descriptions of him to amount to at least somewhat good reasons (at least in the absence of any other information about him) to draw that conclusion. On reflection, we might realize that such reasoning is hasty, and in particular that it assumes an unrealistically close fit between personality traits and occupations. But we can at least recognize and reconstruct for ourselves the reasoning we go through in arriving at that answer. By contrast, no one thinks that taking a language test in which words such as “aggressively” appear is even remotely a reason for then going on to treat someone aggressively: the very idea seems absurd and bizarre. The power of automatic effects like these undermines the virtue ethicist’s expectation of integrated rationality a good deal more radically than the mere fact that we use flawed heuristics does. The idea of automatic cognitive processes, as understood in dualprocess theory, is deeply at odds with virtue ethics. We can see this by considering two attempts to accommodate that idea in the terms of virtue ethics, both of which fail. First, one might try to identify the kind of automaticity at issue in process 1 with the “quick thinking” that a virtue ethicist associates with deeply habituated character. As we saw in Chapter 1, virtue ethicists argue both that virtuous people deliberately choose their virtuous actions, and also that they are ready to act virtuously in an unforeseen crisis. They hold these two thoughts together by arguing that the reasoned grasp

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of moral principles that characterizes the virtuous person can be deeply habituated, to the point where it does not require conscious reflection on her part for her to deliberately choose a virtuous act on a particular occasion. All that is required is that the virtuous agent be able to articulate the reasoning motivating her action if asked. Process 1 also involves quick reactions, but it can include forms of thinking that the agent does not and would not endorse. In this sense, it is profoundly different from the habitual internalization of a conscious reasoning process posited by virtue ethicists. Second, one might try to identify the failure of integration described by Merritt, Harman and Doris with the virtue ethicist’s notion of weakness of will. It might seem natural to interpret cases such as Milgram’s, in which subjects act contrary to their considered values, in terms of weakness of will, and several virtue ethicists have attempted to use this concept in order to show that the results of the experiments can be accommodated within the terms of their tradition.74 In this vein, Erik Wielenberg proposes to explain the destructive obedience observed in Milgram’s studies in terms of a lack of “will power.” He writes: The majority of obedient subjects . . . seemed to have the ethical knowledge relevant to the situation and they seemed to assess the morality of the situation correctly. They knew they should not administer shocks beyond a certain point. Yet the found themselves unable to act in accordance with this knowledge. . . . Their attitudes and responses are those of people who found themselves faced with an unexpected temptation and who lacked the will power to resist that temptation.75 Wielenberg’s account might seem like a natural interpretation of Milgram’s results. According to Wielenberg, the behavior observed in Milgram’s experiments is essentially a case of weakness in the face of temptation. The weak-willed agent knows that he ought not, for example, overindulge in sweets, but gives in to his appetite when presented with a sumptuous dessert. In the same way, Milgram’s subjects knew they should not continue to shock the learner, but they gave in to their desire to obey the experimenter’s orders. If we see Milgram’s results through the lens of dual-process theory, however, then this interpretation is gravely mistaken. For in the traditional concept of weakness of will, the agent acts on certain

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conscious beliefs and desires, albeit in a way that runs counter to his considered values. Wielenberg follows this conception by describing the subjects as yielding to a “temptation.” By contrast, the automatic processes at work in Milgram’s study do not resemble rational processes: it is not just that they are contrary to the subjects’ allthings-considered judgments or general values, but that they seem to circumvent their capacity for effective deliberation altogether. A weak-willed agent, if he is honest, has no difficulty in reconstructing the reasoning that lead to his weak-willed action. But this is precisely what Milgram’s subjects cannot do, insofar as they are not even aware of the forces shaping their behavior. In light of this understanding of the experiment, the idea that what the subjects need in order to do better is simply more “will power” risks missing the real point of the results. We should note that the “automatic” character of process 1 does not mean that its operations and effects are entirely unavoidable or unchangeable. What it means is that such processes are resistant to direct attempts at intentional control in the moment. But if we become aware of such processes and anticipate them, we may be able to avoid them or at least to reduce their effects. As Merritt, Doris, and Harman put it, we should seek to form individual and collective “goals and policies, explicitly targeting situational factors pre-identified as problematic,” in such a way that, when the occasion for action comes, we are better prepared to “diminish the influence of unwelcome automatic tendencies.”76 For example, one well-known process 1 effect is “stereotype threat”: if women or members of other groups who are stereotypically regarded as less intelligent are required to state their membership in that group before taking a test of academic ability, they perform less well than they otherwise would. Researchers have shown that this effect can be overcome, however, by revising students’ implicit theories of intelligence.77 When students understand that academic success is a function of practice, adaptability and discipline as well as innate endowment, they are better prepared to counteract the effect of pernicious stereotypes on their performance. The later approach of Merritt, Doris, and Harman draws on a number of the strengths of Merritt’s earlier work, while also advancing beyond it in key respects. As in Merritt’s earlier writings, they essentially set aside the tendency to frame the challenge in terms of inconsistency. In her early work, Merritt rightly emphasized that

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the real worry was about the role of irrelevant factors in shaping behavior. In their later approach, Merritt, Doris and Harman push this insight further, by making it clear that their real target is integration, that is, the idea that behavior is effectively shaped and controlled by our conscious beliefs and desires. At the same time, the 2010 essay represents a significant advance over Merritt’s earlier work. In particular, it helpfully avoids her earlier tendency to present the challenge in terms of the dependence of moral motivations on social relationships. I argued above that this account is weak as an interpretation of the classic studies insofar as it fails to capture the full significance of their results. By contrast, the 2010 account based on dual-process theory provides a much more general and systematic framework to explain both what happens in the experiments and how it challenges virtue ethics. It nicely captures the way in which some of Milgram’s results, for example, seem to be as much about the effect of physical position as about social roles. It also provides a unified explanation for the results of Milgram’s studies and those of other experiments in which personal relationships do not seem to be at issue, such as Isen and Levin’s. Given its greater systematicity, the later approach can even be used as an overarching framework to explain why social relationships matter in the ways Merritt had emphasized earlier: they might help, for example, to manage some of the automatic process that govern our moral attention.

Conclusion This chapter has two closely connected primary aims. The first is to clearly distinguish the distinct forms of situationist challenge to virtue ethics that have been developed over the past two decades. Philosophers on both sides of the debate have had a regrettable tendency to speak of “the situationist challenge to virtue ethics,” as if all situationists have read the experimental literature in the same way and have agreed about the essential respects in which it makes difficulty for virtue ethics. In opposition to this common assumption, I have argued that different situationist authors have approached the experiments in different ways and have targeted different fundamental commitments of virtue ethics. In particular, I have emphasized that while the most commonly discussed versions

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of the challenge have focused on the expectation of consistency in virtue ethics, other versions focus their attack on the expectation of integration. These different versions involve different readings of the empirical material and different accounts of how it contests the psychology implicit in virtue ethics. Distinguishing these different versions of the challenge is essential to my second aim, which is to bring out the full depth of the challenge by isolating its strongest form. The version of the challenge that focuses on consistency, although the most widely discussed, is not in fact the most difficult to answer or the most philosophically significant. By contrast, I have argued that the version of the challenge focused on integration makes a more compelling case for the idea that the empirical material threatens to undermine virtue ethics and is more difficult for a virtue ethicist to adequately respond to. The tendency to overemphasize worries about consistency has had bad effects on both sides of the debate, but perhaps most of all on the side of virtue ethics. By assuming that the situationist challenge was essentially about consistency, virtue ethicists have often failed to get into view the distinct version of the challenge concerned with integration, and as a result have failed to engage with the deepest problems that the classic experiments present for their view. We will see the consequences of this failure in the next chapter, where I review the main forms of response to situationism offered by virtue ethicists, and argue that none of them has so far succeeded in answering the challenge in its strongest version.

Further reading The most influential formulations of the challenge from inconsistency are Doris 1998 and 2002. For Harman’s related but distinct challenge, based on his error theory of character judgments, see his 1999, 2000, 2003, and 2009. Vranas developed his indeterminacy version of the challenge in his 2005 and 2009. Merritt’s argument for the social dependence of character was introduced in her 2000 and further explored in her 2009. For the challenge based on lack of integration, see Merritt et al. 2010. Useful attempts to review the various formulations of the challenge and clarify its full import can be found in Prinz 2009, Russell 2009, and Webber 2006.

Chapter six

How not to defend virtue ethics Introduction As we saw in the previous chapter, the situationist critics take the classic studies to constitute a powerful body of evidence against the central claims of virtue ethics. This chapter provides a critical survey of the main strategies that virtue ethicists have developed in order to respond to the situationist challenge. I argue that all of these strategies fail for the same general reason: namely, that each of them responds to the situationist critique by weakening the project of virtue ethics in ways that contradict some of its basic commitments. Each response weakens virtue ethics in a different way, but the underlying failure of all the approaches is the same. These responses might be adequate to vindicate a revised and weaker conception of virtue, but they are incompatible with the traditional ambitions of virtue ethics. Since no successful defense of those ambitions has yet been mounted, virtue ethics remains in doubt. This conclusion leaves open, however, exactly where the discussion should go from here. One answer, favored by some of the situationist writers we discussed in the previous chapter, is to give up talk of virtue and character altogether. Another is to abandon virtue ethics in its traditional form, while retaining some revised conception of virtue, perhaps one that is less demanding and so can be more easily reconciled

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with the empirical data. A third possibility would be to continue to look for a way to defend virtue ethics. I take my arguments here to leave all three of these possibilities open. But it should be clear that my conclusions put particular pressure on the third option, continuing to defend virtue ethics. If my arguments in this chapter are correct, this will be not at all an easy thing to do. The chapter is divided into two main parts, corresponding to the two main types of response that virtue ethicists have developed. The two types involve a rather different understanding of how exactly situationists take the experiments to challenge virtue ethics, and their different approaches in response derive from their different interpretations of the challenge. The first type of response I call “direct.” Responses of the direct type assume that the challenge raised by the situationists is that the subjects’ behavior in the studies does not correspond to the behavior of virtuous people as described by virtue ethics. In answer to this challenge, they attempt to show that the behavior observed in the studies is actually consistent with virtue. Philosophers who pursue direct responses argue that the situationists have misunderstood the claims of virtue ethics, and in particular have taken virtue ethics to make specific empirical predictions about the behavior of virtuous people that it does not make. I argue that virtue ethics in fact does make the relevant predictions, and that these responses are thus incompatible with the traditional conception of virtue in virtue ethics. Some of these responses attempt to draw on the psychologists’ strategies for responding to the experiments that we discussed in Chapter 4. But those attempts fail as a result of the deep differences highlighted there between the commitments of trait psychology and of virtue ethics, in particular the fact that psychologists’ traits are not intended to be normative or robust. I call the second type of response “indirect.” Philosophers who pursue responses of the indirect type argue that empirical studies are not appropriate vehicles for testing the claims of virtue ethics. This response understands the situationist challenge in a different and deeper way. In this sense, we can see it as representing a kind of advance over the direct responses, although it will quickly run into problems of its own. The indirect responses recognize that the heart of the challenge is not simply the idea that the subjects of the experiments do not act in the way that virtue ethicists would expect

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a virtuous person to act. Rather, the deeper challenge comes from the fact that the subjects of the experiments do not act in the way that virtue ethicists expect human beings to act. The real challenge presented by the studies is to the general picture of human psychology at work in virtue ethics. In answer to this challenge, the indirect responses argue that the claims of virtue ethics are simply not subject to empirical testing. As with the previous type of response, I take this type to profoundly weaken the traditional commitments of virtue ethics. Indirect responses do this by giving up on the virtue ethicist’s distinctive approach to normativity, which is based on the idea that the virtuous person represents the excellent form of human nature. This approach depends on substantive claims about what human nature is, which we should regard as open to empirical assessment. In attempting to insulate the claims of virtue ethics from empirical scrutiny, philosophers who adopt the indirect responses abandon the project of making substantive claims about human nature and thus undermine the virtue ethicists’ traditional approach to normativity.

Direct responses Direct responses take the situationist challenge to consist in the thought that the subjects in the classic experiments do not act as a virtuous person would act according to virtue ethics. In response, they attempt to show that this challenge rests on a misunderstanding of the commitments of virtue ethics, and that the behavior observed in the experiments is in fact compatible with virtue. Philosophers who favor this response do not attempt to prove that the subjects are virtuous people. They only aim to show that the subjects’ behavior is insufficient to prove that they are not virtuous people, and so is compatible with the empirical predictions about how virtuous people would behave that are made by virtue ethics. I will focus on four versions of this response: the first argues that the situations used in the experiments are too unusual to test virtue; the second that the experiments err by looking at behavior only on a single occasion; the third that the experiments fail to take into account the subject’s own construal of the experimental situation; and the fourth, that the subjects were caught in a tragic dilemma characterized by a conflict between the opposing demands of multiple virtues.

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One might naturally worry that the experimental situations are simply too strange and unfamiliar to count as revelatory of what the subjects are really like. Critics in this vein charge the experiments with what Robert Adams has called “moral ambush.”1 As Adams points out, it seems unfair, and even inaccurate, to draw conclusions about someone’s character (or lack thereof) on the basis of his behavior in a strange situation for which he was unprepared. In the same spirit, Christian Miller criticizes Harman’s use of Milgram’s experiment by objecting that “we are not given an argument for why the results of this extremely contrived experiment” are supposed to be revelatory of the subjects’ character.2 In assessing a person’s character, perhaps we should look to whether she is, as Joel Kupperman has put it, “decent enough in familiar situations,” without worrying a great deal about how she would react in “some difficult or disorienting situation.”3 This response is most plausible in relation to Milgram and Haney et al.’s studies. The circumstances that the subjects of these experiments find themselves in are certainly highly unusual, and one might have natural doubts about their relevance to everyday life. In particular, one might wonder how studies such as these, which make elaborate use of theater and deception, can possibly get at the causes of normal, everyday behavior. In order to understand how virtue works in the real world, one might ask, would we not be better off looking at how people behave in the more typical situations of everyday life? Defenders of this response are right to encourage us to look closely at whether experiments create artificial or perverse incentives to strange behavior. This is a particularly relevant concern with laboratory experiments, by contrast with those done in the field. But it would be hasty for us to dismiss all laboratory experiments as “contrived” and therefore unreliable or uninformative. In fact, laboratory experiments are contrived for good reason: they allow experimenters to control variables that are difficult or impossible to control in natural settings, such as distractions, differences in the subjects’ information, and the interference of third parties. Furthermore, we should remember that experimenters are aware of the importance of “ecological validity,” and take pains to create lifelike experimental settings so as to get meaningful results. An experiment that was difficult and disorienting for the subjects in a haphazard and uncontrolled manner (as arguably Haney et al.’s

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was) will fail to constitute a good test of specific hypotheses. As I mentioned in Chapter 3, I have deep reservations about the methodology of Haney et al.’s study, so I am prepared to dismiss it as too poorly designed to provide significant results. On the other hand, the “moral ambush” response is not persuasive about Milgram’s admittedly “contrived” study. On reflection, we can see that Milgram’s study possesses its own peculiar kind of realism: since the subjects believed that they were taking part in a psychological experiment, it can be taken to represent fairly accurately how they would behave in a psychological experiment. The fact that many of them could be brought to kill a man in the course of participating in such an experiment arguably tells us a great deal about their moral vulnerabilities and limitations. Milgram’s situation is not one that most of us encounter in daily life, but it would be extreme to dismiss all information about how people behave in unfamiliar or stressful situations as irrelevant to an understanding of human psychology. We should also keep in mind that, even if this response is the right thing to say about laboratory studies, not all of the evidence cited by situationists comes from such studies: some of the most widely discussed and debated experiments, such as Hartshorne and May’s, were done in the field. Recall that Hartshorne and May took great care to make sure that their observations preserved the natural atmosphere of the classroom as much as possible, and that they took care to neither encourage nor discourage dishonest behavior. In this case, it is hard to see how there is anything particularly unusual about the situations in question. If taking an arithmetic exam is an unusual situation for fifth-grade children, then what is usual? Most fundamentally, it is not at all clear that in assessing character virtue ethicists should prioritize behavior in familiar or anticipated situations over that in unfamiliar or surprising ones. Indeed, as we saw in Chapter 1, Aristotle argues just the opposite: that behavior in sudden emergencies is more revelatory of virtue than behavior that is planned in advance. Milgram’s experiment, for example, would not likely have produced interesting results if he had told his subjects that the experiment was designed to test obedience: people know (in some sense) that you are “not supposed” to shock an innocent man to death for the sake of a psychology experiment. If they understood that they were being tested on their adherence to that norm, they would likely bring their behavior into line with

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it. Indeed, as we have seen, when Milgram asked various audiences to predict their own performance, no one predicted that he or she would be fully obedient. The value of Milgram’s experiment derives precisely from the gap between this prediction and the actual results. In order to create a real test of how well people are able to act on their moral knowledge, he needed to create an emergency, a situation that would, as Aristotle puts it, reveal one’s character rather than her “preparation.”4 So this response is arguably inadequate in its attempt to dismiss the results of the studies as the product of artificial situations. Here is another point to note about the limitations of this response. It might be promising as a way of countering the worry about inconsistency, insofar as defenders of this response could say that if the subjects acted differently in different situations, that is evidence not so much for the subjects’ inconsistency as for the peculiar character of the situations in question. But this response does nothing to counter the worry about lack of integration: the worry that human behavior is not only responsive to subtle situational differences—that in itself might not be that worrisome or surprising—but rather that human behavior is responsive to subtle situational differences in ways that often seem to bypass the agent’s conscious beliefs and desires. If this response concedes that, in unusual situations, our capacities for conscious control and effective deliberation threaten to break down, that is already a significant concession to the situationist position. At this point the defender of this response might try to appeal to the virtue ethicist’s idea (which we saw in Chapter 2) that virtue has its limits, and that there are some situations that even a virtuous person could not be expected to handle well.5 This move would help to strengthen the argument, by making clearer why the “unusual” character of the experimental situation should make it a poor test of virtue. Perhaps the situation was simply so unusual—so difficult and disorienting—that we could not expect even a virtuous person to perform well in it. The problem with this move is that it seems to lower the bar too much for what counts as the limits of human endurance. Aristotle thought that courageous people clearly had to be ready to face death in battle. As we saw in Chapter 1, recent virtue ethicists have likewise insisted that a virtuous agent must be prepared to face death rather than do something manifestly incompatible with virtue. Given this view of virtue, it is in fact rather hard to say what would count as a situation whose demands lie beyond

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the limit of human endurance: as I proposed in Chapter 2, perhaps only something like being tortured would qualify. By comparison, the rigors of Milgram’s situation seem awfully mild. Since virtue ethics holds that a virtuous person is highly skilled in discerning the morally relevant features of particular situations, it should have been clear to any virtuous person in Milgram’s laboratory that the learner was suffering and wished to stop, and that it was incumbent upon the teacher to discontinue the experiment. A conception of virtue that would not demand that rather minimal presence of mind is too weak to be compatible with virtue ethics. The second direct response holds that the experiments are of limited value because they look at only a single, isolated instance of the subjects’ behavior, rather than how they behave over the long term. Writing in this vein, Nafsika Athanassoulis argues that “the experiments were not designed to uncover differences in character traits” on the grounds that “they examined a specific reaction to a specific situation and did not reveal much about subjects’ long-term dispositions.”6 Many writers who favor this response have contended that Doris in particular is overly hasty in taking the experiments to show that individuals lack notable patterns of behavioral consistency. They argue that we can only properly determine whether an individual is consistent by observing many instances of her behavior over time. Such observations might reveal consistent patterns in her behavior, such as that she is unusually generous or unusually aggressive, although they would not provide a basis for confident prediction about how she would behave in any single situation. In this spirit, Adams suggests that we might usefully describe individuals in terms of “probabilistic virtues,” which would mark out certain individuals as more likely than average to engage in a given form of morally relevant behavior. Adams writes: If we ask, “Is she a generous person?” we do not mean, “Does she show notable generosity on every occasion?” Nobody has the personal resources for that. It will be worth asking her help, and appropriate to praise her character in this respect, if she is disposed to act with notable generosity as much as 10 percent of the time.7 These writers propose that the subjects’ apparently less than virtuous behavior in the experiments—for example, those who

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failed to help in Isen and Levin’s study, or those who fully obeyed the experimenter in Milgram’s—is in fact consistent with virtue, insofar as virtue does not primarily consist in acting in a certain way on a given occasion, but rather in exhibiting a certain pattern in one’s behavior over time. This line of argument has often been elaborated by drawing on two of the psychological approaches introduced in Chapter 4.8 As we saw there, Epstein argued that aggregating observations of an individual’s behavior over time can reveal significant consistency, not in every situation, but in his average tendency to act in certain ways. Longitudinal studies can also be taken to support this argument. Standard measures of traits such as grit have been shown to predict certain significant outcomes, and a reasonable hypothesis is that these outcomes are produced by consistent patterns of average, long-term behavior associated with the trait. An individual with these traits may not always act in accordance with them in a given case, but over time a higher-than-average tendency toward gritty behavior, for example, makes a significant difference to how her life turns out. As Adams suggests, it would be reasonable, from at least some practical points of view, to take possession of traits like these into account, insofar as they can make a significant difference over the long haul. As a first observation about this approach, note that it does not accurately describe all of the studies: in particular, Hartshorne and May did track individuals across multiple situations and found surprising inconsistencies in their behavior. Furthermore, as we noted in Chapter 3, even studies that look at only a single instance of behavior can form the basis for reasonable inferences about inconsistency by comparing experimental and control groups. If the behavior of these groups shows surprising differences, we can assume that the same differences would be exhibited in the behavior of a single individual who encountered the two situations at different times. As a result, even “one-shot” studies are capable of providing substantial evidence for inconsistency. The defender of this response might argue that we need to look not just at two or a few situations, but at an overall average of behavior over a longer period of time. These long-term averages may capture something important—as in aggregative and longitudinal studies—but it has real limitations as a way of defending virtue ethics. The latter simply demands a higher degree of robustness

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than the trait constructs used in these psychological approaches can provide. According to virtue ethics, a just person is supposed to be exquisitely sensitive to the rights of others: he does not merely avoid wrongdoing most of the time or more than the average person, but rather perceives clearly in any given situation what justice demands. Philosophers who put forward this line of argument are correct that there is an important distinction between a single action and a persistent state of character. But they are wrong to infer that the ascription of a virtue to an agent cannot carry precise implications about how she will act on a particular occasion. Recall that, according to virtue ethics, certain actions are simply ruled out for the virtuous person by their very nature. Aristotle included on his list of such actions adultery, theft, and murder. In his view, simply to do any of these actions, even on a single occasion, is to act contrary to virtue. We saw Foot express a related thought by arguing that a just person will not be tempted to get an innocent person convicted of a crime, and that if someone is tempted to do so, then he thereby gives us reason to conclude that he was not a just person after all. It is a deep commitment of the virtue ethics tradition that a single episode of action can be revealing of an individual’s character, in a case where that action is by its very nature contrary to a given virtue. Some of the conduct observed in the experiments would seem to fall into this category, in particular, the conduct of Milgram’s fully obedient subjects, which was tantamount to murder. Insofar as virtue ethicists hold that committing even one murder is not compatible with being virtuous, they must conclude that Milgram’s subjects showed themselves, by that single occasion of action, to lack virtue.9 The third direct response argues that the experiments look only at outward behavior, and so fail to take into account the subject’s construal of the situation.10 Writers in this vein have argued that the situationist critics operate with a “crude behaviouristic understanding”11 of character, according to which character traits are simple dispositions to act in stereotyped ways. Situationists thus fail to take into account, according to this line of argument, the ways in which character includes the agent’s own assessment of the situations she finds herself in. This argument is intended to show that the observed behavior is compatible with virtue, by arguing that if a subject did not see the situation as one that required, for example, helping a stranger, then her failure to help a stranger in that situation does not reveal a lack of virtue. Philosophers who give

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this response aim to address worries about consistency by arguing that an agent’s conduct should only be regarded as consistent or inconsistent by her own lights. If she helps in one situation but not in another, her behavior is not necessarily inconsistent, since she may have seen the first situation as one that called for helping and not the second. Her behavior may follow the consistent thread of her own judgments about when helping is called for. It only looks inconsistent to an uninformed outward observer, who does not understand the real basis on which she is acting in these situations. Some of the philosophers who make this defense of virtue ethics have drawn on the two other psychological defenses of traits discussed in Chapter 4, idiographic personality measurement and the CAPS theory of personality.12 As we saw there, both of these psychological approaches attempt to show that there is significant alignment between a subject’s avowed attitudes, his beliefs about what those attitudes involve, and his behavior. The distinctive value of the idiographic approach is that it can capture patterns of consistency that elude nomothetic approaches to personality, which rely on uniform trait definitions. As we saw above, CAPS theory has similar advantages, except that it proposes to dispense with generic trait terms and instead to explain personality in terms of more specific elements of an agent’s psychological makeup. Drawing on these psychological traditions, some virtue ethicists have recently attempted to use the idea of subjective construal to respond to the situationist challenge, by arguing that the experimental subjects’ behavior is compatible with virtue, insofar as they follow their own judgments about when virtuous behavior is called for. This line of response is correct, insofar as it insists that virtue can involve nuanced responses to the differences between apparently similar situations. As we saw in Chapter 1, the virtues are traditionally understood not merely as dispositions to behave in certain ways, but as rational dispositions that modulate behavior in light of a complex sensitivity to the differing moral demands of differing situations. As a result, virtue ethics holds that the pattern of consistency in the virtuous person’s actions may be difficult to discern: she may appear inconsistent to those who only see that a person helps in one situation and not in another. Julia Annas captures this aspect of virtue ethics when she says that “we are only likely to predict accurately the response of the virtuous person if we can match her level of practical understanding.”13 According

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to virtue ethics, appreciating the role of the agent’s construal of her situation is essential to understanding virtue. This response is appealing, insofar as it is more capacious and systematic than the others surveyed so far. In principle, it could offer a single, unified way of answering the challenge posed by all of the experiments, by arguing that in each case, the apparent inconsistencies in behavior are simply the product of a failure to understand the subjects’ construal of the situation, and that a deeper understanding of the subjects’ point of view would reveal deeper patterns of consistency. There are two general problems, however, facing this line of response. The first is that, even if it could help to reveal that the behavior of the subjects is consistent, it would not help to show that the behavior of the experimental subjects is compatible with virtue. Some of the subjects in Milgram’s experiment may indeed have construed the situation in such a way as to reveal a consistent pattern in their behavior. Perhaps some of them believed that it is wrong to kill an innocent man without a sufficiently good purpose, but that the advancement of psychological science is such a purpose. In this case, their apparently inconsistent behavior—not killing people in other cases, killing them in this case—is revealed to follow a consistent principle after all. In this sense, subjective construal can go some way toward addressing the problem raised by situationists, if that problem is conceived primarily as one about whether people exhibit any interesting form of consistency across different types of situations. The problem for this argument is that, unlike personality traits as studied by psychologists, virtues are meant to be normative. By proposing to define traits uniquely for each individual subject, this response does away with the normativity of virtue, and thus does away with a large part of the project of virtue ethics. If an individual has a trait that he calls “justice,” which usually forbids him from killing the innocent, but permits killing them in the name of psychology, then his behavior may be consistently organized around some sort of trait or other, but not the trait that virtue ethicists call “justice.” It is part of the normativity of virtue that it requires, not simply that an agent act according to her construal of a situation, but that her construal of the situation be correct, at least as regards the features of it relevant to the virtue in question.14 Philosophers in the virtue ethics tradition have held that virtue requires consistently correct judgment, even about particular cases, and that failure to

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judge correctly about matters of moral import amounts to a moral failing. Virtuous people are allowed to make mistakes of course; as we saw in Chapter 2, virtue does not require infallibility, and virtuous people can end up acting in ways they would regret as a result of involuntary errors regarding the circumstances of their actions. The problem is that the errors made by Milgram’s subjects do not look like innocent errors of this sort. If Milgram’s subjects believed that they were justified in killing an innocent man in the cause of psychological science, they were wrong about that, and a fundamental error in moral judgment of that sort is simply not compatible with virtue. The second worry is that the subjects’ construal of the situation does not in fact explain their behavior. As we saw in Chapter 3, the deepest challenge raised by the experiments is not that behavior turns out to be subtly sensitive to changes in situation, but that it turns out to be sensitive to changes in situation in ways that are outside of the agent’s conscious control, leading to behavior that is poorly integrated with his avowed attitudes. In Milgram’s experiments in particular, we find that people’s conscious beliefs and desires do a rather poor job of controlling their behavior. Recall that most of Milgram’s obedient subjects are in fact not happily acting on a judgment that killing is justified in this case. To the extent that the situationist worry is not about inconsistency, but about lack of integration between attitudes and behavior, appeals to subjective construal do not address it. The final direct response draws on the idea of tragic dilemmas we saw in Chapter 2: according to this line of argument, the subjects could not act in accordance with the requirements of all the virtues in the situation they were placed in, and so they acted in accordance with some and not others. Gopal Sreenivasan in particular has developed this response in a series of papers.15 He argues that in some cases the reasons for acting associated with one virtue can be defeated by reasons of greater weight associated with another. For example, in the case of Darley and Batson’s study, Sreenivasan argues that the subjects were torn between the conflicting demands of compassion for the victim and duty to the experimenters.16 In such a case, the agent may act against compassion, without thereby showing himself to lack that virtue. As we saw in Chapter 3, it is plausible to think that Darley and Batson’s subjects experienced a conflict of moral imperatives.

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Indeed, as we noted above, Darley and Batson propose this interpretation themselves. Sreenivasan’s argument builds on this line of interpretation, in order to argue that the subjects’ behavior was compatible with at least one virtue, if not with others. In his view, this kind of conflict is inevitable in a tragic dilemma, and so in these cases failure to act in accordance with the whole of virtue does not reveal a moral shortcoming in the agent’s character. Although the subjects failed to help, they did not show themselves to lack compassion or to be inconsistent: in this case, the requirements of compassion were “defeated” by the subjects’ duty to the experimenter, and so even a compassionate person could not be expected to help. There are two main problems with invoking tragic dilemmas in this context. First, while the idea of a conflict between two equally strong moral claims may plausibly apply to Darley and Batson’s experiment, it does not apply to many of the other studies. Where is the tragic conflict in the choice faced by Isen and Levin’s subjects, for example, whether to stop and help a stranger pick up her papers, or to ignore her and keep shopping? Second, even in cases where there is some palpable conflict, it hardly amounts to a tragic dilemma, as that notion is understood in virtue ethics. In Milgram’s study, for example, one might argue that the subjects experienced a conflict between two sets of requirements, on the one hand the requirement not to seriously harm the learner, and, on the other hand, the requirement to obey the experimenter. But a virtue ethicist can hardly call this conflict a tragic dilemma, since the requirement to obey the experimenter, whatever its force, simply does not outweigh the requirement not to harm the learner.17 That is why those outside of the experimental situation have no difficulty telling what the right thing to do is and so predict that they would not be fully obedient. They assume that they would be responsive to the manifestly greater weight of the requirement not to harm the learner. Second, note that the argument from tragic dilemma, like the argument from subjective construal, does not address the subjects’ apparent lack of integration. Most of the obedient subjects in Milgram’s study do not in fact appear to think of themselves as being in a tragic conflict, in which they are torn between equally good reasons to obey the experimenter and to refrain from harming the learner. Rather, they clearly perceive that the claims of the learner have greater weight, but find themselves unable to act on

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this perception effectively. So the obedient behavior of Milgram’s subjects cannot be made compatible with virtue by arguing that they faced a tragic conflict of virtues, even from their own point of view.18 I take the arguments of this section to show that the direct responses to the situationist challenge do not succeed. Each of these responses attempts to argue that the behavior observed in the experiments is compatible with virtue. But that claim will only seem plausible if we water down the requirements of virtue to a degree that is incompatible with virtue ethics. In light of the failure of the direct approach, one might be inclined to try an indirect approach, which gives up on the attempt to bring the subjects’ behavior into line with virtue and instead tries to dismiss the relevance of the studies to virtue ethics generally. I will argue that the indirect responses also do not succeed, since they run contrary to the ambition of virtue ethics to ground its ideals in human nature.

Indirect responses The indirect responses do not attempt to show that the subjects’ behavior in the experiments is compatible with virtue. In that sense, we can see them as representing a crucial advance over the direct responses. For the situationist challenge is not primarily about the question of whether the subjects of these experiments are virtuous. The real challenge presented by the studies is to the underlying account of human nature at work in virtue ethics. We can understand what that account is by working back from the virtue ethicist’s picture of the virtuous person, who is supposed to represent human nature in its fully developed form. The virtuous person holds correct moral beliefs, feels corresponding desires, and acts effectively in accordance with those beliefs and desires. Virtue ethicists recognize that most of us fall short of this ideal. But they also hold that we can and ought to approximate this ideal as much as possible. By practicing good habits of action, perception, and feeling, they believe that we will come to understand more clearly the moral demands of particular situations and to discover the greater pleasure there is to be had in living and acting virtuously. As a result, we will learn to act well and to avoid acting badly. The

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virtue ethicist’s ideal is thus based on an implicit theory of human nature, according to which our conscious beliefs and desires are in effective control of our actions. The strongest version of the situationist challenge begins from the thought that the experimental evidence challenges this theory of human nature. As we have seen, the experiments suggest that our actions are not well integrated with our beliefs and desires, and that our resources for conscious moral self-control are considerably more limited than virtue ethics implies. The hard problem for virtue ethics is to answer this version of the challenge. In order to do so, it needs to show not that the behavior of the subjects can be brought into line with virtue, but that the psychological theory for which the experiments provide evidence can be rendered compatible with the virtue ethicist’s account of human nature. In this section, I consider two attempts to do this, both of which I argue fail. Both of them attempt to insulate the claims of virtue ethics from empirical challenge and revision. But in doing so, they betray the commitment of virtue ethics to ground its moral ideal in a conception of human nature. As a result, I conclude that the indirect responses, like the direct responses, fail insofar as they fall short of certain essential ambitions of the virtue ethics project. The first indirect response argues that the concept of virtue is not subject to empirical criticism because that concept is indispensable to any form of empirical psychology. The most prominent version of this response was put forward by Robert Solomon. Solomon begins by taking issue with the analogy we saw Harman draw in Chapter 5 between folk psychology and folk physics. According to Harman, folk physics represents a naive and erroneous view of how bodies in nature move and interact; this naive view has rightly been surpassed and replaced through the development of scientific knowledge, grounded in rigorous experimentation, which reveals the true laws that govern the motions of bodies. In the same way, Harman argues that folk psychology, including the concepts of virtue and character, represents a naive view about how the human mind works, which should now be similarly surpassed and replaced by experimental knowledge that reveals the real causes of human behavior. Solomon rejects Harman’s analogy, by arguing that folk psychology is not scientifically dispensable in the same way that folk physics is. According to Solomon, psychology, unlike physics, cannot avoid starting from and working within a context

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of folk beliefs about the mind. In this way, he aims to show that folk psychological concepts, including the concept of character as traditionally understood in virtue ethics, have a status that is prior to any psychological investigation, and so cannot be challenged or undermined by the results of experimental research. Here is how Solomon puts this view: The social sciences, our ordinary intuitions, and moral philosophy are all of a piece. . . . All psychology, if it is psychology at all, is one or another version of ‘folk psychology’ . . . though empirical research in social psychology can on occasion shock us, surprise us, annoy us, and sometimes burst our illusions, it all gets weighed and accounted for, whether well or badly, in terms of our ordinary folk psychology observations and the ordinary concepts of belief, desire, emotion, character, and interpersonal influences, interactions, and institutions.19 Solomon argues that scientific psychology ultimately cannot transcend or question the basic terms of folk psychology, including the concept of character, because psychological research is simply too entwined with folk psychological concepts. One might wonder whether Solomon is correct in claiming that the folk notion of character is indispensable, given that many psychologists and philosophers, including many of those discussed here, have presented themselves as critics of the very idea of character. In particular, Ross and Nisbett, and following them Harman, have attempted to provide an “error theory” of character, which seeks to explain the folk role of the concept while at the same time denying that it refers to any genuine subject matter. Even if it is true that there is some folk notion of character that is indispensable to any form of thought about human behavior, this notion would have to be extremely vague and rudimentary. Otherwise, it would be impossible to explain how thinkers in different fields, such as trait psychology and virtue ethics, have arrived at such profoundly different, and even incompatible, conceptions of what character is. Solomon’s attempt to portray the virtue ethicist’s concept of character as a mere piece of folk psychology is contradicted by the highly idiosyncratic and theoretically sophisticated development of that concept within the virtue ethics tradition. Virtue ethicists take pains to distinguish their conception

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of character from other conceptions, such as that character is simply a disposition to engage in certain stereotyped behaviors or that character is simply an average tendency of the agent’s behavior in the long run. In opposition to these lines of thought, virtue ethicists insist that fully developed character requires the cultivation of certain habits of belief and desire that impart a specific rational and affective shape to the agent’s life. This is far from a mere piece of common sense. Even if some concept of character is indispensable, it cannot have the philosophically contentious claims of virtue ethics built into it, and so its indispensability cannot insulate those claims from the situationist critique. The second indirect response argues that, based on general considerations derived from virtue ethics, we should expect that virtue will be relatively rare, and so it should come as no surprise that the behavior of the experimental subjects is incompatible with virtue.20 As Rachana Kamtekar has expressed the idea: “I do not doubt that the virtuous person could see her way to the right course of action, but perhaps there was no virtuous person among the subjects of these experiments.”21 According to this response, empirical studies are in principle incapable of challenging virtue ethics, because those studies inevitably deal in generalizations about how most individuals think and act. Since virtue is a demanding achievement, the virtuous person is likely to be rare and exceptional, and so not accurately represented by studies that seek to capture broad features of human populations. The studies may show that their subjects found it surprisingly difficult to manage the moral demands of the experimental situations, but this finding does nothing to challenge the ideal of virtue, since we can be confident that the virtuous person, with her specially developed capacities, would be able to reliably respond well even in those situations. We should not be surprised that the subjects did not handle these situations well, because we have good reason to expect that virtuous people will be rare. In what follows I will refer to this argument as “the argument from rarity.” The traditional conception of the virtuous person in virtue ethics certainly makes it plausible to assume that virtuous people will be rare. As we saw in Chapter 1, the ideal of virtue is extremely demanding: it requires the agent to have a highly sophisticated capacity for practical reasoning, an unusually strong sense of moral motivation, and a deeply integrated set of beliefs and desires.

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Philosophers who advance the argument from rarity suggest that, even though this ideal is demanding, it need not be impossible. Here they might appeal to an analogy with extraordinary athletic or artistic achievement: very few of us have the speed, skill, and strength of a professional quarterback or ballet dancer. People like this are rare, and probably always will be. If we tried to test the human capacity for football, or ballet, by taking random samples of ordinary people and seeing whether they could give a professional level performance, most people would probably do rather poorly. But we would be wrong to conclude, on this basis, that greatness in these areas lies out of reach for human beings: it is just very difficult, and so very few people achieve it. In the same way, virtue ethicists might suggest that we should not conclude, from the fact that most people fall well short of the standards of virtue, that virtue is an impossible ideal for human beings. Virtue is terribly difficult, they argue, and so we should not be surprised if there are not many virtuous people around, just as they are not many great athletes or artists. This argument can sound unappealingly elitist.22 We are comfortable with the idea that relatively few people will be great athletes or artists, because we accept that there is no need for most people to be excellent in these areas. It sounds more disturbing to say that few people will ever be morally good. In response to this worry, some virtue ethicists have suggested that their view is not that virtue is inevitably rare, but only that it is rare under existing social and cultural conditions. Under different, more favorable conditions, they suggest, virtue might be easier to cultivate and so more widespread.23 The worry that the experimental results may be in part artifacts of cultural context is not an unreasonable one. As I mentioned in the Introduction, when considering whether ethical theories are psychologically realistic, we need to take into account the fact that human psychology is highly malleable and that ethical possibilities that now seem obvious to us would likely have seemed impossible to earlier generations. We should proceed with caution when attempting to draw general conclusions about the nature of human psychology from culturally limited bodies of evidence. All of the subjects in the classic experiments are from the modern United States, and as a result they may not be typical of human psychology in general. In fact, there are special reasons to worry

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about studies done with US subjects that go beyond a general worry about using culturally limited samples. These special reasons arise from the fact that the psychology of modern North American and European societies is very unusual in the context of human history. In recent years, psychologists have become increasingly sensitized to the fact that their theories and intuitions, as well as their data, tend to come from this very small and unrepresentative slice of the world’s population. Joseph Henrich and his colleagues have coined the acronym WEIRD (for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) in order to underscore the peculiarity of the context in which the vast majority of psychological research has been done, and to put psychologists (and other social scientists) on guard against making broad claims about human nature on the basis of work done in this context.24 Over the past three decades, psychological research that compares different cultures has yielded some significant results. In particular, researchers have found that cultures vary significantly not only in their specific moral values, as one might expect, but also in other, subtler ways. Subjects in Chicago and in the Indian state of Orissa, for example, have been found to differ systematically in the kinds of situations and values that they take to bear on moral judgment.25 Similarly, American students have been shown to prefer assigning blame for bad actions to individual agents, whereas Chinese students are more prone to blame groups or superiors.26 More generally, researchers have consistently found basic differences in the type of moral outlook that is characteristic of the “Western” cultures of North America and Europe, as opposed to “Eastern” cultures such as those of China, Korea, and Japan. According to this research, whereas Western cultures are associated with “individualistic” values that emphasize individual liberty and agency, Eastern cultures tend to take a more “collectivist” outlook that prioritizes group harmony and collective responsibility.27 These studies suggest that there are deep differences on fundamental matters of moral psychology across cultures, and that we should therefore be quite wary about drawing conclusions about what is possible for human beings from studies done using only US subjects. This worry is perfectly valid in general, but unfortunately it offers little aid to the virtue ethicist in responding to the situationist challenge. Not all of the classic experiments have been performed with subjects from other cultures, but to the extent that they have,

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the results are remarkably similar to those with US subjects. This is particularly true regarding the Milgram study, which has been repeated extensively in other countries, with little change in results. When the baseline version of the experiment was run in Jordan, a “non-Western” country, rates of obedience were found to be almost exactly the same as in the United States, at 62.5 percent.28 Some countries, such as Germany, have shown even higher rates of obedience than the United States: in one German study, 85 percent of subjects were fully obedient.29 Other countries have shown lower rates, particularly Australia, where only 28 percent of subjects were fully obedient.30 But none of these results shows huge differences, of the sort that would challenge the basic finding of the experiment, namely, that subjects obey at far higher rates than they or observers would antecedently expect, and that their admirable beliefs and desires are not consistently effective in preventing destructive obedience. In sum, although there may be significant differences in moral psychology between cultures, we lack evidence to suggest that these differences would substantially affect performance in the experimental situations. The deeper problem for the argument from rarity is that it skirts the issue of whether virtue, as conceived in virtue ethics, is in fact possible at all. To say that we lack evidence of virtuous people because virtue is rare is to presume that virtue is possible, while at the same time attempting to shield that claim from empirical scrutiny. Consider the following analogy: someone might try to make an argument from rarity for the existence of centaurs, by arguing that we lack evidence for centaurs only because centaurs are rare. This would be a bad argument, because what the absence of evidence for centaurs shows is not that they are rare; it is that they do not exist at all. They are a myth, a fiction. If the argument from rarity does not work for centaurs, we should not find it compelling in the case of virtue, either. The absence of evidence for character can hardly constitute an argument in its favor, any more than the absence of evidence for centaurs speaks in favor of their existence. Rather, to support virtue ethics we need positive evidence showing that people have developed the kinds of character traits virtue ethicists expect, or at least possess the underlying psychological capacities that those traits require. In response to this challenge, some virtue ethicists have argued that the classic studies themselves provide evidence in favor of the

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existence of at least a few virtuous people.31 There is a range of behavior in the experiments, they point out, and some subjects conduct themselves more admirably than others. In the baseline version of Milgram’s experiment, for example, although 65 percent of subjects are fully obedient, 35 percent are not. A virtue ethicist might take these results to show that, although most people fall short of virtue, there is substantial empirical evidence that virtue is a live possibility. On closer examination, however, I do not think there is much in the way of comfort for the virtue ethicist in these results. For good reasons grounded in the tradition of virtue ethics, we should be quite wary of ascribing virtue to these subjects simply because they were not fully obedient. To begin with, included in this 35 percent are many who obeyed long after they intuitively ought to have stopped: fully 82.5 percent of subjects continued to shock the learner even after reaching 150 volts, at which point he clearly expressed his refusal to continue with the experiment. Second, even if we focus on the small minority (17.5 percent) who stopped at or before that point, we do not know enough about their motivations for stopping, let alone about their more general patterns of behavior, to ascribe virtue to them. As we have seen, virtue ethicists insist on a distinction between doing a virtuous action and being a virtuous person. The subjects who disobeyed the experimenter may have done a virtuous action, but unless they did it out of the very special beliefs and desires characteristic of the virtuous person, they have not thereby shown themselves to be virtuous people, and so they have not provided any evidence for the existence of such people. Those who refused the experimenter’s orders may just be generally rebellious and disagreeable, or may have a phobia around electricity. For these reasons, the mere fact that 35 percent of subjects were not fully obedient provides no evidence for the possibility of virtue. One possible move open to virtue ethicists is to recommend closer empirical study of morally exceptional people.32 Perhaps experimental research could help us to identify a few plausible candidates for virtue, whose behavior could then be studied intensively through various trials in different kinds of morally challenging situations. If, over the course of these trials, some individuals revealed consistent, robust, and well-integrated moral dispositions, that would constitute positive evidence in favor of virtue as a realistic possibility. To my knowledge no virtue ethicist

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has carried out such experiments, or even proposed them. But if they could be carried out, with favorable results, then we might have empirical grounds for claiming that virtue is real though rare. Even if such exceptional people could be found, however, that would still leave certain deep questions about virtue ethics unresolved. If the capacities that enable their unusual performance are simply too unlike those possessed by the rest of us, then virtue ethics might be able to point to the existence of a few virtuous people, but it would still need to rein in some of its most characteristic claims, in particular the claim that the virtuous person represents normal human psychology in an excellent form. It would be costly for them to retract this claim, however, since it has traditionally been key to their account of the normativity of the virtues. As we saw in Chapter 1, according to virtue ethics, virtue is simply the excellent version of the basic structure of human psychology: it is what allows human beings to perform their characteristic activity well. In this respect, virtue is essentially different from athletic or artistic excellence, which does not pertain to the characteristic activity of human beings as such. If only a few people have the underlying qualities that would make professional football or ballet a realistic possibility for them, that is no objection to football or ballet. But if only a few people have the underlying qualities that virtue requires, that is a serious problem for virtue ethics. The worry here is not primarily an egalitarian sentiment that virtue needs to be available for everyone. Rather, the problem is that virtue ethicists claim that virtue is the perfected version of the psychology everyone has. So while virtue may be rare, the underlying structures and capacities it presumes cannot be. In arguing that the experiments do not undermine virtue ethics because they simply remind us that virtue is rare, virtue ethicists risk missing the point of the psychological research. In doing experiments, psychologists are not primarily interested in taking surveys to see what range of responses their subjects may have. They may be interested in the differences they find, but they are not in the business of simply taking polls. Rather, their aim is to gather evidence for (or against) fundamental theories about how human psychology works. If psychologists find little evidence for highly consistent, robust, well-integrated dispositions, they reasonably draw the conclusion that this is probably because such dispositions are not a good fit with human psychology.

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The point that the situationists, drawing on the empirical studies, want to make is not that most people fall short of a moral ideal; rather, the point is that the model of the human mind implicit in virtue ethics may be mistaken.33 As Daniel Russell has nicely put it, the deep challenge that virtue ethics needs to answer comes from the suspicion that “our psychology just doesn’t work that way,”34 that is, in the way assumed by virtue ethicists. Virtue ethics is naturally read as containing an implicit psychology, a view about how the human mind works: this view holds, among other things, that people’s conscious beliefs and desires are generally in control of their actions. On the basis of this implicit conception, they have told us to improve our ways of thinking and feeling about the world, on the assumption that this will help us to act better in difficult moments. But this conception, attractive as it is, might turn out to be empirically false.35 I conclude that the idea that virtue is rare is of little help to the virtue ethicist in responding to the situationist challenge. It misses the fact that the psychological experiments are meant not as surveys but as evidence for a theory of how the mind works. By failing to engage with that evidence, it betrays the traditional impulse in virtue ethics to take a stand on questions of fundamental human psychology. The question at issue in the debate is not whether virtue is rare or common, but whether the sorts of structures and capacities presumed by virtue ethics are found in real human beings. If they are not, then virtue will not be a demanding ideal; it will rather be a mirage. In order for the ideal of virtue to make meaningful demands on human beings, it needs to be genuinely possible for them. We can only tell whether it is possible by testing our psychological theories against the available evidence.

Conclusion I take the arguments of this chapter to show that all of the main responses so far developed for defending virtue ethics and responding to the situationist challenge face serious and as yet unresolved objections. In my view, all of the responses fail for the same basic reason, namely, that they all involve argumentative moves that contradict basic commitments of virtue ethics. In the case of the direct responses, they fail because, in attempting

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to bring the behavior of the experimental subjects into line with virtue, they weaken the standards for virtue in ways that run contrary to the demanding ideals of virtue ethics. In the case of the indirect responses, they fail because in attempting to insulate virtue ethics from empirical criticism, they give up on the virtue ethicist’s commitment to ground the virtues in an account of human nature. These arguments do not rule out the possibility that someone might still be able to give a successful defense of virtue ethics. But any attempt to do so must learn from the failures of the arguments discussed here.

Further reading For representative instances of the main defenses of virtue ethics put forward in the debate, see Adams 2006, Annas 2003, Athanassoulis 2000, DePaul 1999, Kamtekar 2004, Russell 2009, Solomon 2003, and Sreenivasan 2002. Insightful critiques of many of the early attempts to defend virtue ethics can be found in Doris and Stich 2005, Prinz 2009, and Webber 2006 and 2007. For other useful surveys of the debate, together with assessments of its progress and results, see Alfano 2013 and Russell 2009. Alfano is more skeptical about the possibility of defending virtue ethics; Russell is more sanguine. For proposals about how to develop an alternative version of virtue theory that can respond to the challenge, see Adams 2006, Alfano 2013, Doris 2002, Merritt 2000 and 2009, Miller 2014, Snow 2010, and Upton 2009.

Notes Introduction 1 See Milgram 1974: 55–60. 2 See Milgram 1974. 3 See Milgram 1974: 171–72. 4 Milgram 1974: 28. 5 See Hartshorne and May 1928. 6 See Darley and Batson 1973 and Isen and Levin 1972. 7 See Latané and Darley 1968. 8 See Haney et al. 1973. I discuss all of these experiments, including Milgram’s, in detail in Chapter 3. 9 The terms “virtue ethics” and “virtue theory” are sometimes used interchangeably, but I distinguish between them. Following Hursthouse 2012, I use the term “virtue ethics” to refer to a family of views that draw on Aristotelian lines of thought about what the virtues are like and how they fit into the broader scheme of human life. I take this family of views to be represented (for all of their many differences) by recent writers such as Julia Annas, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Peter Geach, Rosalind Hursthouse, Alasdair MacIntyre, John McDowell, Martha Nussbaum, David Wiggins and Bernard Williams. I outline the commitments of virtue ethics relevant to this book in chapters 1 and 2. Not all of the thinkers listed above accept all of the commitments I describe there; the position I refer to as “virtue ethics” represents a substantial overlap among their views. By contrast, I use “virtue theory” as a more generic term to cover any use of the concept of virtue in moral philosophy. In this sense, a consequentialist outlook that makes use of a notion of virtue, such as that of Driver 2007, engages in virtue theory, but not virtue ethics. The focus of this book is virtue ethics rather than virtue theory in this wider sense.

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10 Nicomachean Ethics [hereafter NE] 1102a18-19. All translations are my own. 11 See MacIntyre 1984, Nussbaum 1990, and Williams 1993. 12 For an overview of this psychological tradition, see Ross and Nisbett 1991. 13 For an overview of these developments, see Doris and Stich 2005. Much of the relevant work is surveyed in Doris et al. 2010. 14 Flanagan 1991: 32. 15 This point has been nicely made by Badhwar 2014: 18–19. 16 There are difficult questions about how to decide who is relevantly “like us,” for the purposes of Flanagan’s principle: What about mentally handicapped people, for example, or those who have been severely abused or neglected as children? For the purposes of this book, I leave these questions aside. 17 See Flanagan 1991: 33–34. 18 For a formulation of psychological realism that acknowledges the role of education in altering what is possible for human beings, see Fleming 2006: 31, n. 11. 19 See Flanagan 1991: 182. 20 See Brooks 2015. 21 Tough 2012: xix. Much of the research Tough draws on is reviewed in greater depth in Borghans et al. 2008. 22 See Milgram 1974: 175–89. The relevance of Milgram’s results to the Holocaust is disputed by Goldhagen 1997: 375–414. 23 See Conroy 2000; cf. Browning 1992. In the background of much of this work is Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil”: see Arendt 1994. 24 See Doris 2002: 53–58 and Harman 1999: 329. 25 For proposals about what such a version of virtue theory might look like, see Adams 2006, Alfano 2013, Doris 2002, Merritt 2000 and 2009, Miller 2014, Snow 2010, and Upton 2009.

Chapter 1 1 Following philosophers on both sides of the virtue ethics-situationism debate, I take virtues to be the paradigmatic instance of character traits in virtue ethics, and I discuss character in virtue ethics primarily

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in terms of virtues. It is noteworthy, however, that virtue ethicists traditionally recognize character traits other than virtues, including vices. For a treatment of the vices in recent virtue ethics, see Vogler 2002. 2 There is considerable debate within the tradition about how exactly this appeal to human nature is meant to be understood: for a representative range of views, see Anscombe 1981a, Foot 2002a, McDowell 1998b, Thompson 2004, and Wiggins 1998a. 3 See NE I.7 1097b33-1098a7. 4 NE I.7 1098a13-15. 5 See NE 1106a17-19. 6 See NE I.7 1098a9-12. 7 NE II.1 1103b14-22. 8 NE II.4 1105b5-9. 9 NE II.3 1104b3-8. 10 NE II.3 1104b11-13. 11 On the role of pleasure in the acquisition of virtue, see Burnyeat 1980. 12 See Aristotle’s discussion of the reasons that are (and are not) appropriate to courage at NE III.8 1116a16-1117a28. 13 NE III.2 1111b8-9. 14 See NE II.4 1105a31-2. 15 See NE III.2 1112a15. 16 NE III.8 1117a18-22. 17 Aristotle recognizes that an agent can engage in effective instrumental deliberation, without executing a choice in this sense: see NE VI.9 1142b19. 18 NE III.2 1112a17. 19 NE III.2 1112a7-8. 20 For an influential reconstruction and defense of Aristotle’s concept of choice by a modern virtue ethicist, see Anscombe 1981b. 21 See NE VII.1 1145b13-14. 22 See NE VII.2 1146a4-12. 23 For accounts of how weakness of will involves a failure of rationality, see McDowell 1998a and Price 2006. 24 NE VII.3 1147b1-2. 25 For helpful accounts of the ideal of rationality in virtue ethics, see Wiggins 1998b and Millgram 2005.

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26 Strictly speaking, Aristotle puts forward two further requirements on doing a virtuous action as a virtuous person does it: (1) one must choose the virtuous action for its own sake (see NE II.4 1105a32), and (2) one must do it from a “steadfast and unmovable” disposition (NE II.4 1105a33-34). I discuss requirement (2) below under the headings of consistency and robustness. Requirement (1) is irrelevant for my purposes and so I leave it aside. For discussions of requirement (1), see Williams 1995b and Hursthouse 1995. 27 See NE II.7 1107a33-1108b10. 28 NE II.7 1107a33-b6. 29 See NE II.7 1107b6-8. 30 Aristotle does recognize attitudes other than virtue and vice, in particular, the more conflicted attitudes of self-control and weakness of will. But even these he regards as attitudes toward the broad sphere of bodily pleasures as such: see NE VII.4 1147b21-23. 31 NE IV.1 1120a25. 32 NE II.6 1107a8-17. 33 For endorsement by recent virtue ethicists of the idea that certain actions are ruled out for the virtuous person, see Anscombe 1981a, Foot 2002a, Geach 1967 and Williams 1995a. 34 In the next chapter we will see that according to virtue ethics a virtuous agent is capable of acting badly under certain circumstances. But the key feature of these cases is that in all of them the agent acts involuntarily. 35 See NE III.6 1115a24-35. 36 See NE III.7 1115b7-28. 37 NE III.7 1115b13-14. 38 NE III.9 1117b9-12. 39 NE III.9 1117b14-15. 40 Foot 2002a: 129-30. 41 Foot 2002b: 8. 42 Foot 2002b: 9. 43 See NE I.8 1099a31-b8. For the idea that the virtues have a characteristic context, see Cooper 1999. 44 NE I.8 1099b1-2. The analogy with the lyre player comes from Aristotle’s Politics 1332a22-27. 45 NE VI.5 1140b10-11. 46 See NE IX.9 1169b3-1170b19.

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47 NE I.13 1102b28. 48 NE III.11 1119a12-20. 49 NE VII.2 1146a10. 50 NE VII.1 1145b8-9. 51 Thomas Aquinas’s Aristotle-inspired account of weakness of will is explicit in insisting that reason and desire are unified even in weakwilled actions: see Summa Theologiae I-II q. 77 a.2 (Aquinas 1948: 935).

Chapter 2 1 Hursthouse 1999: 78. For other recent appeals to the possibility of the virtuous person’s acting out of character, see Baier 2004: 176–77 and 2008: 20–21; and Williams 1993: 135–52 and 2006: 67–68. 2 See NE III.1 1109b2-3. 3 For the idea that acts expressing the virtues must be voluntary, see NE III.5 1113b3-14. 4 NE III.1 1109b35-1110a1. 5 NE III.1 1110a3-4. 6 NE III.1 1110b16-17. 7 NE III.1 1110a8-19. 8 See Williams 1981a: 102. 9 For the idea that weak-willed actions are voluntary, see NE III.2 1111b4-14. 10 NE I.13 1102b12. 11 See NE III.1 1110b22-23. 12 See Williams 1981b: 28. 13 Williams 1981b: 28. 14 This thought is central to Tessman 2015. 15 Hursthouse 1999: 73–74. 16 NE III.1 1111a1. 17 NE III.1 1111a1-2. 18 NE III.1 1110b28-29. 19 NE III.1 1111a8-15. 20 NE III.1 1111a17. 21 NE VII.3 1146b22-23.

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22 NE III.5 1113b30-1114a2. 23 NE III.5 1113b13-14. 24 On this problem, see Meyer 2006: 153–56. 25 Foot 2002b: 6. 26 Foot 2002b: 6. 27 NE III.1 1110a25-26. 28 NE III.1 1110a24. 29 NE III.7 1115b11. 30 NE III.7 1115b7-9. 31 An important exception is Williams 1993. 32 For helpful conversations about torture and its relation to the Aristotelian conception of courage, I am indebted to Erica Holberg. 33 See NE III.9 1117a35-b16. 34 For a first person account of the experience of being tortured that highlights these features, see Améry 1980. 35 NE III.1 1110a26-27. 36 My usage is similar to, but slightly different from that of Hursthouse 1999: 74–76. 37 NE III.1 1110a5-8. 38 See NE III.1 1110a18-19.

Chapter 3 1 In the past, psychologists tended to use these terms interchangeably; they now largely prefer “personality traits” or simply “traits.” I will follow the latter usage below. 2 See Doris 2002 and Harman 1999. 3 See Annas 2005 and Kamtekar 2004. 4 Allport 1931: 369 5 Allport 1931: 370. 6 See Allport 1966: 4–7. 7 I do not mean to imply that trait psychologists accept the technical notion of choice referred to in Chapter 1 in connection with virtue ethics. 8 Allport 1931: 370.

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9 Allport 1966: 5. 10 Allport 1931: 372. 11 Allport 1931: 372. 12 Allport 1931: 371. 13 Allport 1931: 371. 14 See McCrae 2009. 15 See Allport 1966: 7. 16 Allport 1966: 7. 17 See Allport 1966: 4. 18 Allport 1931: 371. 19 Allport 1966: 6. 20 Hartshorne and May 1928: vi. 21 Hartshorne and May 1928: vi. 22 Hartshorne and May 1928: 5. 23 Hartshorne and May 1928: vi. 24 Hartshorne and May 1928: 5. 25 Hartshorne and May 1928: 8. 26 Hartshorne and May 1928: 411. 27 Hartshorne and May 1928: 412. 28 See Hartshorne and May 1928: 381. 29 Hartshorne and May 1928: 381. 30 See Hartshorne and May 1928: 382–83. 31 See Hartshorne and May 1928: 408–09. 32 See Hartshorne and May 1928: 408–09. 33 Hartshorne and May 1928: 15. 34 Hartshorne and May 1928: 15. For a critical review of Hartshorne and May’s work which argues that there is evidence to support the existence of traits in their data, see Epstein and O’Brien 1985: 522–24. 35 Hartshorne and May 1928: 413. 36 Darley and Batson 1973: 103–04. 37 Darley and Batson note that type of religiosity was correlated with a difference in the type of help offered: subjects who expressed “strong doctrinal orthodoxy” were more likely to be “super helpers” who focused their efforts on “the presumed underlying needs of the victim” (e.g., by “revealing to him the strength to be found in

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Notes Christ”) rather than responding to “the victim’s comments about his own needs.” (Darley and Batson 1973: 107).

38 Darley and Batson 1973: 108. 39 Darley and Batson 1973: 105. 40 Darley and Batson 1973: 108. 41 Darley and Batson 1973: 102. 42 Subjects for whom the dime was available, but who did not take it, were eliminated from the results: see Isen and Levin 1972: 387. 43 Isen and Levin 1972: 387. 44 See Blevins and Murphy 1974. See also Weyant and Clark 1977. 45 Blevins and Murphy 1974: 326. 46 For reviews of this literature, including useful discussion of competing hypotheses about why good mood increases helping, see Isen 1987 and Carlson et al. 1988. 47 See Baron 1997. 48 See Cunningham 1979 and Gifford 1988. 49 On this point, see Sabini and Silver 2005: 539–40 and Snow 2010: 103. 50 See Anderson 1989 and Mathews and Cannon 1975. 51 See Danziger et al. 2011. 52 Latané and Darley 1968: 217. 53 See Latané and Darley 1968: 217. 54 See Latané and Darley 1968: 217–18. 55 Latané and Darley 1968: 218. 56 See Latané and Darley 1968: 218. 57 See Latané and Darley 1968: 220. 58 Latané and Darley 1968: 216. Sabini and Silver 2005 argue that this factor plays a central role in explaining the results not only of Latané and Darley’s research, but also Darley and Batson 1973 and Milgram 1974. For a critique of this approach, see Merritt et al. 2010: 367–70. 59 See Haney et al. 1973: 73. 60 See Haney et al. 1973: 83. 61 See Haney et al. 1973: 71. 62 See Haney et al. 1973: 71. 63 See Haney et al. 1973: 73. 64 See Haney et al. 1973: 76.

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65 See Haney et al. 1973: 75–76. 66 See Haney et al. 1973: 74. 67 See Haney et al. 1973: 76. 68 See Haney et al. 1973: 75. 69 Haney et al. 1973: 75. 70 See Haney et al. 1973: 74. 71 See Haney et al. 1973: 76. 72 See Haney et al. 1973: 92. 73 Haney et al. 1973: 81. 74 Haney et al. 1973: 86. 75 Haney et al. 1973: 89. 76 Haney et al. 1973: 88. 77 Haney et al. 1973: 88 78 Haney et al. 1973: 92. 79 Haney et al. 1973: 88. 80 Haney et al. 1973: 88. 81 See Haney et al. 1973: 81. 82 Faber 1971: 83. 83 Haney et al. 1973: 90. 84 Haney et al. 1973: 90. 85 Haney et al. 1973: 91. 86 See Haney et al. 1973: 72. 87 The authors themselves recognize some of these limitations: see Haney et al. 1973: 77–78. For critiques of the methodology of this experiment, see Thayer and Saarni 1975, and Banuazizi and Mohavedi 1975. 88 A full description of Milgram’s experimental design can be found in Milgram 1974. This text reflects on research initiated over a decade earlier: for Milgram’s original presentation of these studies, see Milgram 1963. The proper explanation of Milgram’s results has been much debated and discussed. Milgram 1974 explains them in terms of an innate human tendency to submit to authority under certain conditions. Today the standard view instead appeals to the interpersonal dynamics of responsibility and trust: see Blass 1991 and 1996. Alternative interpretations emphasize the subjects’ inability to formulate a clear understanding of the situation: see Gilbert 1981 and Ross and Nisbett 1991. For arguments that personality traits

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Notes are a significant factor, see Elms and Milgram 1966, and Burley and McGuinness 1977.

89 See Milgram 1974: 57. 90 See Milgram 1974: 34–40. One might object that technical problems are partly responsible for the drop in obedience here: certainly it will be a significantly greater burden on the learner’s acting skills to convincingly simulate receiving electric shocks the closer he is to the teacher. But note that the illusion seems to have held up surprisingly well, inasmuch as even when the teacher had to touch the learner to shock him, 30 percent of subjects were still fully obedient. 91 See Milgram 1974: 60. 92 See Milgram 1974: 154–61. 93 For a better appreciation of the many nonverbal expressions of strain found in Milgram’s subjects, see Milgram’s film of the experiments (Milgram 2008). 94 Milgram 1974: 73–74.

Chapter 4 1 See Lord 1982. 2 See Lord 1982: 1082. 3 Lord 1982: 1083. 4 Lord 1982: 1084. 5 An alternative version of an idiographic approach, developed in Mischel and Peake 1982, defines traits collectively for groups of individuals using surveys. This approach facilitates interpersonal comparisons, but does not take the group’s definition of the trait to represent an ideal standard to which individuals ought to conform, and so is again not normative in the sense relevant to virtue ethics. 6 Mischel and Shoda 1995: 246. 7 Mischel and Shoda 1995: 246. 8 See Mischel 1973: 270, 278 and Mischel and Shoda 1995: 248, 255–56. 9 Mischel and Shoda 1995: 262. 10 Mischel and Shoda 1995: 250. 11 Mischel 1973: 260. 12 For an accessible overview of this work, see Mischel 2014.

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13 Mischel et al. 1989: 934. 14 Mischel et al. 1989: 934. 15 See Mischel et al. 1989: 936. 16 Note that “delay of gratification” may be a somewhat misleading category, itself containing a number of different dimensions of behavior, along which individuals and groups can vary independently. While doing research on delay of gratification in Trinidad, Mischel discovered that Trinidadians of African descent often score poorly on his standard delay of gratification test while usually being successful at saving money, planning for the future, and so on. He hypothesizes that the reason for this is that the standard test is in effect a test of social trust: the subject must believe that the experimenter will return with the promised larger reward. Since “promises of future rewards have been broken frequently by promise-makers in their past experience” (Mischel 1968: 179), they have little reason to wait for the larger reward. The results, properly interpreted, show not that the subjects are impulsive, but that they are (understandably) mistrustful. 17 See Shoda et al. 1994. 18 A fourth dimension, physical aggression, was also observed, but was omitted from final computation of the data because it was not observed frequently enough in some of the situations: see Shoda et al. 1994: 680. 19 Shoda et al. 1994: 680. 20 Shoda et al. 1994: 683. 21 See Epstein 1979 and Epstein and O’Brien 1985. 22 Epstein 1979: 1122. 23 See Epstein 1979: 1110. He concedes that “there are marked individual differences in the degree to which individuals exhibit stability in their personality profiles.” 24 See Epstein 1979: 1121. 25 Epstein 1979: 1123; see also Epstein and O’Brien 1985: 514, where they write that “behavior is often highly situationally specific at the individual-item level but general at the aggregate level.” 26 Epstein 1979: 1102. 27 Epstein and O’Brien 1985: 532. 28 Epstein 1979: 1123. 29 Epstein 1979: 1123. 30 For an overview of this research, see Duckworth 2016.

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31 Duckworth et al. 2007: 1087. 32 Duckworth et al. 2007: 1090. 33 See Duckworth et al. 2007. 34 Duckworth et al. 2007: 1098. 35 Duckworth et al. 2007: 1100.

Chapter 5 1 There are a few significant exceptions, which I recommend to the reader: Prinz 2009, Russell 2009, and Webber 2006. 2 Vranas 2005: 3. 3 Merritt et al. 2010: 357. 4 See Doris 1998 and 2002. 5 Doris 2002: 18. 6 Doris 2002: 20. 7 Doris 2002: 24; quoting Hartshorne and May 1928: 385. 8 Doris 2002: 15. 9 Doris 1998: 508; in this quote I have silently corrected a typo in the original. 10 See Doris 1998: 507 and 2002: 62–6. 11 Doris 2002: 64. 12 Doris 1998: 516. 13 Doris 1998: 516. 14 This objection has been pressed by Kamtekar 2004: 489. 15 Harman 1999: 316. 16 The classic publication of this research is Kahneman and Tversky 1974. An accessible overview of the subsequent course of this field can be found in Kahneman 2011. 17 See Kahneman 2011: 7–8. 18 See Kahneman 2011: 7. 19 Kahneman 2011: 8. 20 See Ross 1977 and Ross and Nisbett 1991. 21 Ross and Nisbett 1991: 13. 22 See Jones and Harris 1967. 23 See Harman 2003: 90.

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24 Harman 1999: 316. 25 Harman 1999: 327. 26 Harman 2000: 224. Harman 1999: 328 allows that one might legitimately use virtue terms such as “just” or “courageous” to describe actions rather than persons. He associates this approach with Judith Jarvis Thomson’s work, especially Thomson 1997. He explores related issues in Thomson’s writings in more detail in Harman 2001. 27 Harman 1999: 316. 28 Harman 2001: 121. 29 Harman 1999: 322. 30 Harman 1999: 316. 31 In fairness to Harman, it is true that some defenders of virtue ethics have been inclined to argue that their view is simply a piece of common sense: see Solomon 2003. I discuss this view in Chapter 6. 32 See Clark and Word 1974 and Moriarty 1975. 33 Vranas 2005: 2. 34 Vranas focuses his argument on overall evaluations of character, that is, evaluations of people as morally good or bad simpliciter. He thus contrasts his concern with an interest in “character traits like honesty or courage” (2009: 214). But it seems clear that one could construct an analogue of his arguments for a particular character trait such as courage. In some of the studies he cites, people act quite courageously, for instance, in helping a stranger at the risk of being electrocuted; in others, in a quite cowardly fashion, for example, by not being brave enough to stand up to Milgram’s experimenter. So one might conclude, in a way analogous to Vranas’s arguments, that people are indeterminate with respect to courage. In any case, nothing in my criticism of Vranas’s argument turns on his concern with overall character as opposed to specific traits. 35 Vranas 2005: 2. 36 Vranas 2005: 2. 37 Vranas 2005: 2, referring to Clark and Word 1974 and Moriarty 1975. 38 Vranas 2005: 2. 39 Vranas 2009: 219. 40 Vranas sometimes puts his claim in epistemic terms, for example, by saying that “we almost never have adequate evidence to evaluate with confidence particular people as good, bad, or intermediate”

176

Notes (2005: 29) or that “character evaluations are almost always epistemically unwarranted” (2009: 214). As I understand him, however, Vranas does not mean his point to be a merely epistemic one, to the effect that we lack evidence for certain claims; he also takes us to have sufficient evidence to put forward contrary claims, to the effect that most people lack character.

41 Vranas 2005: 2. 42 Vranas 2005: 19. 43 Vranas 2005: 29. 44 Vranas 2005: 16. 45 Vranas 2005: 30. 46 Merritt 2009: 28. 47 Merritt 2000: 366. 48 Merritt 2000: 366. 49 Merritt 2000: 374. 50 Merritt 2000: 375. 51 Merritt 2009: 36. 52 Merritt 2000: 381. 53 Merritt 2009: 45–6. 54 Merritt 2000: 373–74. 55 Merritt 2000: 374. 56 Merritt 2000: 374. 57 Merritt 2000: 378. Merritt associates this alternative approach to virtue theory with Hume’s moral philosophy, particularly Hume 1978. 58 Merritt also acknowledges that social climates, particularly ones that are too supportive of our existing values, can breed moral dangers of their own: this is a special focus of Merritt 2009. 59 Merritt et al. 2010. 60 Merritt et al. 2010: 370. 61 Merritt et al. 2010: 375. 62 Merritt et al. 2010: 363. 63 Merritt et al. 2010: 363. 64 Merritt et al. 2010: 363. 65 Merritt et al. 2010: 364. 66 For a helpful introduction to dual-process theory and some of the experimental results on which it is based, see Bargh et al. 1996.

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67 Merritt et al. 2010: 373. 68 Merritt et al. 2010: 375. 69 See Bargh et al. 1996. 70 Bargh et al. 1996: 233. 71 Bargh et al. 1996: 234. 72 Merritt et al. 2010: 371. 73 Merritt et al. 2010: 382. 74 See Badhwar 2009: 262; Wielenberg 2006: 475; and Winter and Tauer 2006: 79–80. 75 Wielenberg 2006: 475. 76 Merritt et al. 2010: 388. 77 See Aronson et al. 2002, Dweck 2006: 75–78, and Good et al. 2003. For versions of virtue theory that draw on the malleability of our automatic responses, see Rees and Webber 2014, Rees 2016, and Snow 2010: 34–45.

Chapter 6 1 Adams 2006: 137. 2 Miller 2003: 369. For similar worries, see Athanassoulis 2000: 217 and Montmarquet 2003: 365. 3 Kupperman 2001: 250. 4 My argument is consistent with the idea that different cases are more or less paradigmatic in calling for the exercise of a given virtue, and that a virtue must be understood, as Gopal Sreenivasan puts it, “relative to some ‘normal background’ range of situations.” It would be a mistake, as Sreenivasan rightly points out, to assume that “in literally any novel situation, the behavior of an actual model—even a reliable one—will be consistent with his or her paradigm performances” (Sreenivasan 2002: 66). For an argument against the idea that virtues should be understood as dispositions operative in “normal” conditions, see Upton 2005 and 2009. My point in the main text is simply that these normal conditions for the exercise of a virtue should not be identified with those familiar to or anticipated by the agent. 5 See Miller 2003: 379, 388. 6 Athanassoulis 2000: 217. For similar arguments, see Adams 2006: 122–25; Athanassoulis 2013: 110; Fleming 2006: 38–39; Kupperman 2001: 244–45, and Slingerland 2011: 395.

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7 Adams 2006: 123. 8 See Athanassoulis 2013: 110, Kupperman 2001: 243–45, Sabini and Silver 2005: 540–42 and Slingerland 2011: 395–96. For objections to the use of psychological trait theory to support philosophical accounts of virtue, see Prinz 2009: 120–22. 9 Similar arguments against this response have been made by Adams 2006: 148–49, Alfano 2013: 77, Badhwar 2009: 263, and Russell 2009: 287. 10 For arguments along these lines, see Adams 2006: 120–22, Annas 2003: 24, Fleming 2006: 38–41, Kamtekar 2004: 476, Kristjansson 2012: 67–71, Russell 2009: 239–331, and Sreenivasan 2002: 58. 11 Kristjansson 2012: 67. 12 See Russell 2009: 239–331 and Snow 2010: 17–34. Russell and Snow both respond to Doris’s argument against the idea that CAPS traits are relevant to virtue: see Doris 2002: 76–85. 13 Annas 2003: 27–28. 14 See Montmarquet 2003: 358–59. For the same point framed as a criticism of virtue ethicists’ appeals to CAPS traits, see Alfano 2013: 78–79 and Miller 2014: 218–19. 15 See Sreenivasan 2002, 2008, 2009. The idea that the experimental subjects faced a conflict of moral demands is also defended by Snow 2010: 106–07. 16 See Sreenivasan 2002: 60. 17 On this point, see Miller 2014: 222–23. 18 For a version of this argument, see Webber 2006: 656–57. 19 Solomon 2003: 48. A similar argument is made by Montmarquet 2003: 368, who suggests that the concept of character may belong to what Wilfrid Sellars famously called “the manifest image,” that is, a timeless, commonsense picture of the world that the growth of scientific knowledge cannot debunk or replace (See Sellars 1963). I am skeptical about this argument, for the reasons given in the main text. For a related critique of the very idea of the manifest image, see Adams 2015. 20 See Athanassoulis 2000, Kamtekar 2004, and Sreenivasan 2002. 21 Kamtekar 2004: 485. 22 For this objection, see Doris and Stich 2005: 120, n. 9. 23 The most sophisticated version of this response has been developed by Edward Slingerland. He argues that few are virtuous in our society, but that this is not a permanent fact of human nature, but

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rather a moral indictment of current social conditions. In particular, Slingerland 2011: 418 raises the question of whether it is possible to be a virtuous person in a modern, secular democracy. 24 See Henrich et al. 2010. 25 See Shweder et al. 1987. 26 See Morris and Peng 1994. 27 See Nisbett 2003; see also Gelfand et al. 2011, who found systematic differences in ratings by subjects in different countries of their societies as “tight” or “loose” in the degree to which well-defined social norms control everyday interactions (subjects were asked whether it was acceptable, for example, to kiss in a variety of situations, such as at a bank, a library, a restaurant, a party, and so on.) Interestingly, the rankings from “tight” to “loose” do not correspond to the stereotypical “East vs. West” division: as one might expect, New Zealand and the United States rank as relatively loose, and South Korea and Singapore as relatively tight. But the sixth tightest country (out of the 33 countries in North America, South America, Europe and Asia that were studied) was Norway! 28 See Shanab and Yahya 1978. 29 See Mantell 1971. 30 See Kilham and Mann 1974. 31 See Badhwar 2009: 261. 32 For this suggestion, I am indebted to Daniel W. Harris. 33 See Russell 2009: 284 and Webber 2006: 651, n. 1. 34 Russell 2009: 284. 35 A similar point is made by Prinz 2009: 125. In view of this problem, Arjoon 2008: 227 suggests that the virtue ethicist should say not just that virtue is rare, but that character is rare, where that means that the forms of consistency and integration typical of the virtuous person just are not found in most people. This strikes me as a desperate move. To present the virtuous person as having a completely different psychological makeup from most people both invites skepticism about whether virtue is a live possibility rather than a myth and undermines the virtue ethicist’s account of normativity.

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INDEX

Adams, R.  142, 145–6, 162, 164 n.25, 177 n.6, 178 n.9, 178 n.10 Adams, Z.  178 n.19 agent-regret 44 aggregation technique of personality measurement  101–7, 146 aggression  77, 82–83, 99–100 Alfano, M.  162, 164 n.25, 178 n.9, 178 n.14 Allport, G.  63–8 Améry, J.  168 n.34 Annas, J.  38, 148, 162, 163 n.9, 168 n.3, 178 n.10 Anscombe, G.  37, 57, 163 n.9, 165 n.2, 165 n.20, 166 n.33 Aquinas, T.  167 n.51 Arendt, H.  164 n.23 Aristotle  3–4, 12, 17–37, 41–57, 127, 143–4, 147, 165 n.12, 165 n.17, 165 n.20, 166 n.26, 166 n.30 Athanassoulis, N.  38, 145, 162, 177 n.2, 177 n.6, 178 n.8, 178 n.20 automatic cognitive processes  131–7, 177 n.77 Badhwar, N.  164 n.15, 177 n.74, 178 n.9, 179 n.31 Baier, A.  57, 167 n.1 Bargh, J.  176 n.66

Baron, R.  77 Batson, D.  62, 63, 72–6, 89, 117, 126, 129, 150–1, 163 n.6, 169 n.37, 170 n.58 biases  118–22, 134 Big Five personality traits  66 Blass, T.  91, 171 n.88 Brooks, D.  7 CAPS (cognitive-affective personality system) theory  96–101, 103, 107, 148, 178 n.12, 178 n.14 conscientiousness  65–6, 94–5, 97 consistency  11, 27–30, 39, 62–3, 67–8, 72–4, 76, 78–9, 83, 85–6, 89, 90, 93, 94–8, 100–3, 105–7, 113–17, 122–6, 128–30, 136, 138, 144–6, 148–50, 166 n.26, 179 n.35 courage  21–3, 25, 28, 31–3, 50–2, 144, 165 n.12, 168 n.32, 175 n.26, 175 n.34 culture  6–7, 156–8. See also education; habit; upbringing Darley, J.  62–3, 72–6, 78–80, 89, 90, 117, 126, 129, 150–1, 163 n.6, 163 n.7, 169 n.37, 170 n.58 delay of gratification  8, 98–9, 173 n.16

INDEX deliberation  18, 24–7, 30, 65, 67, 76, 78, 115, 129, 134–6, 144, 165 n.17 DePaul, M.  162 dissociation 130–7. See also integration Doris, J.  90, 112–18, 120–6, 130–8, 145, 162, 164 n.13, 164 n.25, 178 n.12, 178 n.22 dual-process theory  131–7, 176 n.66 Duckworth, A.  104–5, 107 education  8, 69–71, 104–5, 164 n.18. See also culture; habit; upbringing Epstein, S.  101–7, 146, 169 n.34, 173 n.23, 173 n.25 error, as cause of involuntary action  48, 150. See also ignorance error of measurement, as explanation for apparent inconsistency in behavior 102–3 error theory of character judgments  117–22, 154. See also Fundamental Attribution Error extraversion  66–67, 81, 101 Flanagan, O.  5–7, 11, 164 n.16 Fleming, D.  164 n.18, 177 n.6, 178 n.10 Foot, P.  31–3, 37, 47, 57, 147, 163 n.9, 165 n.2, 166 n.33 force, as cause of involuntary action  22, 41–3, 48–56 Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) 118–19 Geach, P.  37, 163 n.9, 166 n.33 generosity  29, 116, 121, 145 genocide  8, 164 n.22

191

global traits, opposed to local 114–15 Good Samaritan Experiment. See Batson, D.; Darley, J. grit  104–5, 107, 146 habit in trait psychology  65–8 in virtue ethics  21–3, 32, 34, 56, 71, 134–5, 152 See also culture; education; upbringing Haney, C.  63, 80–4, 129, 142–3, 171 n.87. See also Zimbardo, P. Harman, G.  117–26, 130–8, 142, 153–4, 175 n.26, 175 n.31 Hartshorne, H.  69–74, 76, 89, 90, 94, 96, 100, 101, 113–15, 123, 143, 146, 169 n.34 helping  3, 45, 72–7, 116–17, 122–3, 125, 146–9, 151, 169 n.37, 170 n.46, 175 n.34 Henrich, J.  157 heuristics  118–19, 134 honesty  69–72, 94, 101, 103, 113–15, 175 n.34 honor  27–8, 128 human nature  6, 11, 18–24, 32–3, 36–7, 49–52, 56–7, 141, 152–3, 156–63, 165 n.2, 178 n.23 Hume, D.  176 n.57 Hursthouse, R.  38, 40, 44, 57, 163 n.9, 166 n.26, 168 n.36 idiographic traits  94–7, 100–1, 103, 107, 148, 172 n.5 ignorance, as cause of involuntary action  41–2, 44–8, 52, 54, 56–7. See also error

192

INDEX

indeterminacy in character judgments  122–6, 138, 175 n.34 integration  10–11, 34–6, 51, 62–3, 67–9, 71–80, 83, 87–90, 93, 96, 100–1, 103, 105–7, 112– 13, 130–7, 138, 144, 150–3, 155, 159–60, 179 n.35 intemperance  22–3, 28, 34–5, 46 involuntariness  4, 22, 41–57, 68, 87, 150, 166 n.34. See also responsibility; voluntariness Isen, A.  63, 75–8, 90, 126, 129–30, 137, 146, 151, 170 n.46 justice  21–3, 31–2, 147, 149, 175 n.26 Kahneman, D.  118–19 Kamtekar, R.  155, 162, 174 n.14, 178 n.10, 178 n.20 Kupperman, J.  142, 177 n.6, 178 n.8 Latané, B.  78–80, 89, 90 Levin, P.  63, 75–8, 126, 129–30, 137, 146, 151 Lord, C.  95–7, 107 MacIntyre, A.  38, 163 n.9, 164 n.11 May, M.  69–74, 76, 89, 90, 94, 96, 100, 101, 113–15, 123, 143, 146, 169 n.34 McDowell, J.  37, 163 n.9, 165 n.2, 165 n.23 Merritt, M.  126–38, 162, 164 n.25, 170 n.58, 176 n.57, 176 n.58 Meyer, S.  57, 168 n.24 Milgram, S.  1–4, 7, 8, 12, 63, 84–9, 91, 114–16, 121, 123, 125, 129–31, 133–7, 142–7,

149–52, 158–9, 164 n.22, 171 n.88, 172 n.93 Miller, C.  142, 162, 164 n.25, 178 n.14, 178 n.17 Mischel, W.  90, 96–100, 107, 172 n.5, 173 n.16 mood  3, 75–8, 79, 90, 116, 130, 170 n.46 Murdoch, I.  38 Nisbett, R.  90, 119, 154, 164 n.12, 171 n.88, 179 n.27 norms, normativity  5, 18–21, 36–7, 67, 93, 96, 100–3, 105, 107, 140, 149, 160, 172 n.5, 179 n.27, 179 n.35 Nussbaum, M.  163 n.9, 164 n.11 personality traits, compared with virtues 63–9 poverty  8, 70 Prinz, J.  138, 162, 174 n.1, 178 n.8, 179 n.35 rationality, reasons  4, 20, 24–9, 31, 34–7, 67–8, 76, 86–9, 116, 127–36, 148, 150–1, 155, 165 n.12, 165 n.23, 165 n.25, 167 n.51 realism, psychological  4–7, 11, 18, 41, 48, 52, 55–7, 143, 156, 159, 164 n.18 religion  6, 66, 69, 72–3, 117, 169 n.37 responsibility  44–8, 54, 89, 125, 157, 171 n.88. See also involuntariness; voluntariness robustness  30–4, 49–50, 68, 104, 106, 146–7, 166 n.26 Ross, L.  90, 118–19, 154, 164 n.12, 171 n.88 Russell, D.  138, 161, 162, 174 n.1, 178 n.9, 178 n.10, 178 n.12, 179 n.33

INDEX Sabini, J.  170 n.49, 170 n.58, 178 n.8 self-control  18, 127, 153 opposed to temperance  35, 166 n.30 Sellars, W.  178 n.19 shame  44, 53–5 Snow, N.  162, 164 n.25, 170 n.49, 177 n.77, 178 n.12, 178 n.15 Solomon, R.  153–4, 162, 175 n.31 Sreenivasan, G.  150–2, 162, 177 n.4, 178 n.10, 178 n.20 stability of behavior, contrasted with consistency  70, 99–100, 173 n.23 Stanford Prison Experiment. See Haney, C.; Zimbardo, P. stereotype threat  136 temperance  21, 28, 32–3, 35, 67 Tessman, L.  57, 167 n.14 Thompson, M.  165 n.2 Thomson, J.  175 n.26 torture  8, 50–5, 145, 168 n.32, 168 n.34 Tough, P.  8 tragic dilemmas  53–5, 150–2 trust  171 n.88, 173 n.16 upbringing  6, 47, 101. See also culture; education; habit

193

Upton, C.  162, 164 n.25, 177 n.4 vice  28, 35, 44, 46–7, 164 n.1, 166 n.30 Vogler, C.  164 n.1 voluntariness  21–4, 41–8, 53–4, 57, 66–7, 87, 167 n.3, 167 n.9. See also involuntariness; responsibility Vranas, P.  122–7, 130, 138, 175 n.34, 175 n.40 weakness of will  26–7, 35–6, 43, 135–6, 165 n.23, 166 n.30, 167 n.9, 167 n.51 Webber, J.  138, 162, 174 n.1, 177 n.77, 178 n.18, 179 n.33 WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) people  157 Wielenberg, E.  135–6, 177 n.74 Wiggins, D.  163 n.9, 165 n.2, 165 n.25 Williams, B.  38, 42, 44, 57, 163 n.9, 164 n.11, 166 n.26, 166 n.33, 167 n.1, 168 n.31 Zimbardo, P.  81, 90–1, 116. See also Haney, C.

194