Skepticism about Character Edited by Mark Alfano (City University of New York)

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  • Miguel Alzola (2008). Character and Environment: The Status of Virtues in Organizations. Journal of Business Ethics 78 (3).
    Using evidence from experimental psychology, some social psychologists, moral philosophers and organizational scholars claim that character traits do not exist and, hence, that the philosophical tradition of virtue ethics is empirically inadequate and should dispose of the notion of character to accommodate the empirical evidence. In this paper, I systematically address the debate between dispositionalists and situationists about the existence, status and properties of character traits and their manifestations in human behavior, with the ultimate goal of responding to the question (...)
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  • Anthony Appiah (2008). Experiments in Ethics. Harvard University Press.
    Appiah explores how the new empirical moral psychology relates to philosophical ethics. He elaborates a vision of naturalism that resists both temptations and traces an intellectual genealogy of the burgeoning discipline of 'experimental philosophy'.
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  • Nafsika Athanassoulis (2000). A Response to Harman: Virtue Ethics and Character Traits. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2):215–221.
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  • Neera K. Badhwar (forthcoming). The Milgram Experiments, Learned Helplessness, and Character Traits. Journal of Ethics.
    The Milgram and other situationist experiments support the real-life evidence that most of us are highly akratic and heteronomous, and that Aristototelian virtue is not global. Indeed, like global theoretical knowledge, global virtue is psychologically impossible because it requires too much of finite human beings with finite powers in a finite life; virtue can only be domain-specific. But unlike local, situation-specific virtues, domain-specific virtues entail some general understanding of what matters in life, and are connected conceptually and causally to our (...)
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  • John M. Doris (2002). Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior. Cambridge University Press.
    This book is a provocative contribution to contemporary ethical theory challenging foundational conceptions of character that date back to Aristotle. John Doris draws on behavioral science, especially social psychology, to argue that we misattribute the causes of behavior to personality traits and other fixed aspects of character rather than to the situational context. More often than not it is the situation not the nature of the personality that really counts. The author elaborates the philosophical consequences of this research for a (...)
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  • John M. Doris (1998). Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics. Noûs 32 (4):504-530.
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  • Diana Fleming (2006). The Character of Virtue: Answering the Situationist Challenge to Virtue Ethics. Ratio 19 (1):24–42.
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  • Alvin I. Goldman (1993). Ethics and Cognitive Science. Ethics 103 (2):337-360.
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  • Gilbert Harman (forthcoming). Skepticism About Character Traits. Journal of Ethics.
    The first part of this article discusses recent skepticism about character traits. The second describes various forms of virtue ethics as reactions to such skepticism. The philosopher J.-P. Sartre argued in the 1940s that character traits are pretenses, a view that the sociologist E. Goffman elaborated in the 1950s. Since then social psychologists have shown that attributions of character traits tend to be inaccurate through the ignoring of situational factors. (Personality psychology has tended to concentrate on people’s conceptions of personality (...)
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  • Gilbert Harman (2003). Three Trends in Moral and Political Philosophy. Journal of Value Inquiry 37 (3).
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  • Gilbert Harman (2000). The Nonexistence of Character Traits. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2):223–226.
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  • Thomas Hurka (2006). Virtuous Act, Virtuous Dispositions. Analysis 66 (289):69–76.
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  • Eric L. Hutton (2006). Character, Situationism, and Early Confucian Thought. Philosophical Studies 127 (1).
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  • Rachana Kamtekar (2004). Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character. Ethics 114 (3).
    Situationist social psychologists tell us that information about people’s distinctive character traits, opinions, attitudes, values, or past behavior is not as useful for determining what they will do as is information about the details of their situations.1 One would expect, they say, that the possessor of a given character trait (such as helpfulness) would behave consistently (helpfully) across situations that are similar in calling for the relevant (helping) behavior, but under experimental conditions, people’s behavior is not found to be cross-situationally (...)
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  • Joel J. Kupperman (forthcoming). Virtue in Virtue Ethics. Journal of Ethics.
    This paper represents two polemics. One is against suggestions (made by Harman and others) that recent psychological research counts against any claim that there is such a thing as genuine virtue (Cf. Harman, in: Byrne, Stalnaker, Wedgwood (eds.) Fact and value, pp 117–127, 2001 ). The other is against the view that virtue ethics should be seen as competing against such theories as Kantian ethics or consequentialism, particularly in the specification of decision procedures.
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  • Joel J. Kupperman (2001). The Indispensability of Character. Philosophy 76 (2):239-250.
    Gilbert Harman has argued that it does not make sense to ascribe character traits to people. The notion of morally virtuous character becomes particularly suspect. How plausible this is depends on how broad character traits would have to be. Views of character as entirely invariant behavioural tendencies offer a soft target. This paper explores a view that is a less easy target: character traits as specific to kinds of situation, and as involving probabilities or real possibilities. Such ascriptions are not (...)
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  • Maria Merritt (2000). Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 3 (4).
    In this paper I examine and reply to a deflationary challenge brought against virtue ethics. The challenge comes from critics who are impressed by recent psychological evidence suggesting that much of what we take to be virtuous conduct is in fact elicited by narrowly specific social settings, as opposed to being the manifestation of robust individual character. In answer to the challenge, I suggest a conception of virtue that openly acknowledges the likelihood of its deep, ongoing dependence upon particular social (...)
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  • Christian Miller (forthcoming). Social Psychology, Mood, and Helping: Mixed Results for Virtue Ethics. Journal of Ethics.
    I first summarize the central issues in the debate about the empirical adequacy of virtue ethics, and then examine the role that social psychologists claim positive and negative mood have in influencing compassionate helping behavior. I argue that this psychological research is compatible with the claim that many people might instantiate certain character traits after all which allow them to help others in a wide variety of circumstances. Unfortunately for the virtue ethicist, however, it turns out that these helping traits (...)
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  • Christian Miller (2003). Social Psychology and Virtue Ethics. Journal of Ethics 7 (4).
    Several philosophers have recently claimed to have discovered a new and rather significant problem with virtue ethics. According to them, virtue ethics generates certain expectations about the behavior of human beings which are subject to empirical testing. But when the relevant experimental work is done in social psychology, the results fall remarkably short of meeting those expectations. So, these philosophers think, despite its recent success, virtue ethics has far less to offer to contemporary ethical theory than might have been initially (...)
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  • James Montmarquet (2003). Moral Character and Social Science Research. Philosophy 78 (3):355-368.
    Gilbert Harman and John Doris (among others) have maintained that experimental studies of human behaviour give good grounds for denying the very existence of moral character. This research, according to Harman and Doris, shows human behaviour to be dependent not on character but mainly on one's ‘situation.’ My paper develops a number of criticisms of this view, among them that social science experiments are ill-suited to study character, insofar as they do not estimate the role of character in continuously shaping (...)
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  • Dana K. Nelkin (2005). Freedom, Responsibility and the Challenge of Situationism. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 29 (1):181–206.
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  • Jesse Prinz (forthcoming). The Normativity Challenge: Cultural Psychology Provides the Real Threat to Virtue Ethics. Journal of Ethics.
    Situationists argue that virtue ethics is empirically untenable, since traditional virtue ethicists postulate broad, efficacious character traits, and social psychology suggests that such traits do not exist. I argue that prominent philosophical replies to this challenge do not succeed. But cross-cultural research gives reason to postulate character traits, and this undermines the situationist critique. There is, however, another empirical challenge to virtue ethics that is harder to escape. Character traits are culturally informed, as are our ideals of what traits are (...)
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  • John Sabini & Maury Silver (2005). Lack of Character? Situationism Critiqued. Ethics 115 (3).
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  • Robert C. Solomon (2005). What's Character Got to Do with It? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (3):648–655.
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  • Ernest Sosa, A Defense of Virtue Theory Against Situationist Objections.
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  • Gopal Sreenivasan (forthcoming). Disunity of Virtue. Journal of Ethics.
    This paper argues against the unity of the virtues, while trying to salvage some of its attractive aspects. I focus on the strongest argument for the unity thesis, which begins from the premise that true virtue cannot lead its possessor morally astray. I suggest that this premise presupposes the possibility of completely insulating an agent’s set of virtues from any liability to moral error. I then distinguish three conditions that separately foreclose this possibility, concentrating on the proposition that there is (...)
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  • Gopal Sreenivasan (2008). Character and Consistency: Still More Errors. Mind 117 (467).
    This paper continues a debate among philosophers concerning the implications of situationist experiments in social psychology for the theory of virtue. In a previous paper (2002), I argued among other things that the sort of character trait problematized by Hartshorne and May's (1928) famous study of honesty is not the right sort to trouble the theory of virtue. Webber (2006) criticizes my argument, alleging that it founders on an ambiguity in "cross-situational consistency" and that Milgram's (1974) obedience experiment is immune (...)
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  • Gopal Sreenivasan (2002). Errors About Errors: Virtue Theory and Trait Attribution. Mind 111 (441).
    This paper examines the implications of certain social psychological experiments for moral theory—specifically, for virtue theory. Gilbert Harman and John Doris have recently argued that the empirical evidence offered by ‘situationism’ demonstrates that there is no such thing as a character trait. I dispute this conclusion. My discussion focuses on the proper interpretation of the experimental data—the data themselves I grant for the sake of argument. I develop three criticisms of the anti-trait position. Of these, the central criticism concerns three (...)
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  • Candace L. Upton (forthcoming). The Structure of Character. Journal of Ethics.
    In this paper, I defend a local account of character traits that posits traits like close-friend-honesty and good-mood-compassion. John Doris also defends local character traits, but his local character traits are indistinguishable from mere behavioral dispositions, they are not necessary for the purpose which allegedly justifies them, and their justification is only contingent, depending upon the prevailing empirical situation. The account of local traits I defend posits local traits that are traits of character rather than behavioral dispositions, local traits that (...)
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  • Candace L. Upton (forthcoming). Virtue Ethics and Moral Psychology: The Situationism Debate. Journal of Ethics.
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  • Candace L. Upton (2005). A Contextual Account of Character Traits. Philosophical Studies 122 (2).
    Character traits have several vital functions. They should enable us to assess others morally, inform us of others’ behavioral tendencies, and accurately explain and predict others’ behavior. But traits of character, as they have traditionally been understood, cannot adequately serve these purposes. For character traits are traditionally thought to be context-insensitive. The Contextual Account of Character Traits, which I here develop and defend, posits traits that are context-sensitive. Context-sensitive character traits are more receptive to the complexity of human psychology and (...)
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  • Jonathan Webber (2007). Character, Common-Sense, and Expertise. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 10 (1).
    Gilbert Harman has argued that the common-sense characterological psychology employed in virtue ethics is rooted not in unbiased observation of close acquaintances, but rather in the ‘fundamental attribution error’. If this is right, then philosophers cannot rely on their intuitions for insight into characterological psychology, and it might even be that there is no such thing as character. This supports the idea, urged by John Doris and Stephen Stich, that we should rely exclusively on experimental psychology for our explanations of (...)
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  • Jonathan Webber (2007). Character, Global and Local. Utilitas 19 (4):430-434.
    Philosophers have recently argued that we should revise our understanding of character. An individual’s behaviour is governed not by a set of ‘global’ traits, each elicited by a certain kind of situational feature, but by a much larger array of ‘local’ traits, each elicited by a certain combination of situational features. The data cited by these philosophers supports their theory only if we conceive of traits purely in terms of stimulus and response, rather than in the more traditional terms of (...)
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  • Jonathan Webber (2006). Virtue, Character and Situation. Journal of Moral Philosophy 3 (2).
    Philosophers have recently argued that traditional discussions of virtue and character presuppose an account of behaviour that experimental psychology has shown to be false. Behaviour does not issue from global traits such as prudence, temperance, courage or fairness, they claim, but from local traits such as sailing-in-rough-weather-with-friends-courage and office-party-temperance. The data employed provides evidence for this view only if we understand it in the light of a behaviourist construal of traits in terms of stimulus and response, rather than in the (...)
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  • Jonathan Webber (2006). Character, Consistency, and Classification. Mind 115 (459).
    John Doris has recently argued that since we do not possess character traits as traditionally conceived, virtue ethics is rooted in a false empirical presupposition. Gopal Sreenivasan has claimed, in a paper in Mind, that Doris has not provided suitable evidence for his empirical claim. But the experiment Sreenivasan focuses on is not one that Doris employs, and neither is it relevantly similar in structure. The confusion arises because both authors use the phrase ‘cross-situational consistency’ to describe the aspect of (...)
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  • Erik J. Wielenberg (2006). Saving Character. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 9 (4).
    In his recent book Lack of Character, Jon Doris argues that people typically lack character (understood in a particular way). Such a claim, if correct, would have devastating implications for moral philosophy and for various human moral projects (e.g. character development). I seek to defend character against Doris's challenging attack. To accomplish this, I draw on Socrates, Aristotle, and Kant to identify some of the central components of virtuous character. Next, I examine in detail some of the central experiments in (...)
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