Skepticism about Character Edited by Mark Alfano (University of Notre Dame)

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  1. Mark Alfano (forthcoming). Virtues, Intelligences, and Situations. [REVIEW] Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.
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  2. Mark Alfano (2011). Explaining Away Intuitions About Traits: Why Virtue Ethics Seems Plausible (Even If It Isn't). Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (1):121-136.
    This article addresses the question whether we can know on the basis of folk intuitions that we have character traits. I answer in the negative, arguing that on any of the primary theories of knowledge, our intuitions about traits do not amount to knowledge. For instance, because we would attribute traits to one another regardless of whether we actually possessed such metaphysically robust dispositions, Nozickian sensitivity theory disqualifies our intuitions about traits from being knowledge. Yet we do think we know (...)
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  3. Mark Alfano (2011). Expanding The Situationist Challenge To Responsibilist Virtue Epistemology. Philosophical Quarterly 62 (246):n/a-n/a.
    The last few decades have witnessed the birth and growth of both virtue epistemology and the situationist challenge to virtue ethics. It seems only natural that eventually we would see the situationist challenge to virtue epistemology. This article articulates one aspect of that new challenge by spelling out an argument against the responsibilist brand of virtue epistemology. The trouble can be framed as an inconsistent triad: (non-skepticism) many people know quite a bit; (responsibilism) knowledge is true belief acquired and retained (...)
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  4. Miguel Alzola (2008). Character and Environment: The Status of Virtues in Organizations. Journal of Business Ethics 78 (3):343 - 357.
    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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  5. 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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  6. 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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  7. Neera K. Badhwar (2009). The Milgram Experiments, Learned Helplessness, and Character Traits. Journal of Ethics 13 (2-3):257 - 289.
    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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  8. Sandrine Berges, Evil Behaviour and Character: Virtue Ethics Versus Social Psychology.
    Is there such a thing as evil character? Philosophers and social psychologists have cast doubt on the idea that evil behaviour is due to a defect in character formation, which some people have, and some have not. I will argue that their claims are misguided by putting forward the following thesis: evil character traits exist, but they are typically less stable, albeit more prevalent, than good character traits. This is because they typically do not receive the backing of formation, which, (...)
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  9. David M. Bersoff (1999). Explaining Unethical Behaviour Among People Motivated to Act Prosocially. Journal of Moral Education 28 (4):413-428.
    Moral reasoning theorists working in the constructivist tradition have tended to explain unethical behaviour by assuming that a breakdown occurs in the link between a person's moral judgement within a particular situation and his ultimate behaviour in that situation. This breakdown is usually seen as being the result of the individual ignoring his deontic judgement in favour of meeting a competing, non-moral social obligation or of fulfilling a selfish interest. This model of unethical behaviour has led to suggestions that moral (...)
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  10. Lorraine Besser-jones (2008). Social Psychology, Moral Character, and Moral Fallibility. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (2):310–332.
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  11. Sylvia Burrow (2003). Review: Lack of Character, John Doris. Metapsychology Online Review 7 (11).
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  12. 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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  13. John M. Doris (1998). Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics. Noûs 32 (4):504-530.
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  14. Diana Fleming (2006). The Character of Virtue: Answering the Situationist Challenge to Virtue Ethics. Ratio 19 (1):24–42.
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  15. Alvin I. Goldman (1993). Ethics and Cognitive Science. Ethics 103 (2):337-360.
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  16. Gilbert Harman (2009). Skepticism About Character Traits. Journal of Ethics 13 (2/3):235 - 242.
    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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  17. Gilbert Harman (2003). Three Trends in Moral and Political Philosophy. Journal of Value Inquiry 37 (3).
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  18. Gilbert Harman (2000). The Nonexistence of Character Traits. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2):223–226.
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  19. Thomas Hurka (2006). Virtuous Act, Virtuous Dispositions. Analysis 66 (289):69–76.
    Everyday moral thought uses the concepts of virtue and vice at two different levels. At what I will call a global level it applies these concepts to persons or to stable character traits or dispositions. Thus we may say that a person is brave or has a standing trait of generosity or malice. But we also apply these concepts more locally, to specific acts or mental states such as occurrent desires or feelings. Thus we may say that a particular act (...)
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  20. Eric L. Hutton (2006). Character, Situationism, and Early Confucian Thought. Philosophical Studies 127 (1):37 - 58.
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  21. Rachana Kamtekar (2004). Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character. Ethics 114 (3):458-491.
    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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  22. Kristján Kristjánsson (forthcoming). Situationism and the Concept of a Situation. European Journal of Philosophy:no-no.
    Abstract: The concept of a situation underlying the debate between moral situationists and dispositionists conceals various underexplored complexities. Some of those issues have been engaged recently in the so-called psychology of situations, but they have been slow to receive attention in mainstream philosophy. I invoke various distinctions among situations, and show how situationists have selectively chosen certain types of situations that, for conceptual reasons, skew the argument in their favour. I introduce the concept of a ‘virtue-calibrated situation’, and argue that (...)
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  23. Joel J. Kupperman (2009). Virtue in Virtue Ethics. Journal of Ethics 13 (2-3):243 - 255.
    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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  24. 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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  25. Maria Merritt (2000). Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 3 (4):365-383.
    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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  26. Christian Miller (2010). Character Traits, Social Psychology, and Impediments to Helping Behavior. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 5:1-36.
    In a number of recent papers, I have begun to develop a new theory of character which is conceptually distinct both from traditional Aristotelian accounts as well as from the positive view of local traits outlined by John Doris. On my view, many human beings do have robust traits of character which play an important explanatory and predictive role, but which are triggered by certain situational variables which preclude them from counting as genuine Aristotelian virtues. Like others in this discussion, (...)
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  27. Christian Miller (2010). Guilt and Helping. International Journal of Ethics 6 (2/3):231-252.
    A wealth of research in social psychology over the past twenty years has examined the role that guilt plays in our mental lives. In this paper, I examine just one aspect of this vast literature, namely the relationship between guilt and prosocial behavior. Researchers have typically found a robust positive correlation between feelings of guilt and helping, and have advanced psychological models to explain why guilt seems to have this effect. Here I present some of their results as well as (...)
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  28. Christian Miller (2009). Social Psychology, Mood, and Helping: Mixed Results for Virtue Ethics. Journal of Ethics 13 (2-3):145 - 173.
    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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  29. Christian Miller (2009). Empathy, Social Psychology, and Global Helping Traits. Philosophical Studies 142 (2):247 - 275.
    The central virtue at issue in recent philosophical discussions of the empirical adequacy of virtue ethics has been the virtue of compassion. Opponents of virtue ethics such as Gilbert Harman and John Doris argue that experimental results from social psychology concerning helping behavior are best explained not by appealing to so-called ‘global’ character traits like compassion, but rather by appealing to external situational forces or, at best, to highly individualized ‘local’ character traits. In response, a number of philosophers have argued (...)
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  30. Christian Miller (2003). Social Psychology and Virtue Ethics. Journal of Ethics 7 (4):365-392.
    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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  31. 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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  32. Deborah S. Mower (forthcoming). Situationism and Confucian Virtue Ethics. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice:-.
    Situationist research in social psychology focuses on the situational factors that influence behavior. Doris and Harman argue that this research has powerful implications for ethics, and virtue ethics in particular. First, they claim that situationist research presents an empirical challenge to the moral psychology presumed within virtue ethics. Second, they argue that situationist research supports a theoretical challenge to virtue ethics as a foundation for ethical behavior and moral development. I offer a response from moral psychology using an interpretation of (...)
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  33. Dana K. Nelkin (2005). Freedom, Responsibility and the Challenge of Situationism. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 29 (1):181–206.
    In conclusion, then, the situationist literature provides a rich area of exploration for those interested in freedom and responsibility. Interestingly, it does not do so primarily because it is situationist in the sense of supporting the substantive thesis about the role of character traits. Rather it is because it makes us wonder whether we really do act on a regular basis with the particular normative, epistemic,and reactive capacities that are central to our identity as free and responsible agents.
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  34. Jesse Prinz (2009). The Normativity Challenge: Cultural Psychology Provides the Real Threat to Virtue Ethics. Journal of Ethics 13 (2-3):117 - 144.
    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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  35. Daniel C. Russell (2009). Practical Intelligence and the Virtues. Oxford University Press.
    This book develops an Aristotelian account of the virtue of practical intelligence or "phronesis"--an excellence of deliberating and making choices--which ...
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  36. John Sabini & Maury Silver (2005). Lack of Character? Situationism Critiqued. Ethics 115 (3):535-562.
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  37. Steven M. Samuels & William D. Casebeer (2005). A Social Psychological View of Morality: Why Knowledge of Situational Influences on Behaviour Can Improve Character Development Practices. Journal of Moral Education 34 (1):73-87.
    Results from research in social psychology, such as findings about the fundamental attribution error and other situational influences on behaviour, are often used to justify attacking the existence of character traits. From this perspective, character development is an illusion, an impossibility, or both. We offer a different interpretation of how these issues interact with character development concerns. Rather than undermining the very idea of character traits, social psychology actually sheds light on the manner in which character development can occur. It (...)
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  38. Hagop Sarkissian (2010). Minor Tweaks, Major Payoffs: The Problems and Promise of Situationism in Moral Philosophy. Philosophers' Imprint 10 (9).
    Moral philosophers of late have been examining the implications of experimental social psychology for ethics. The focus of attention has been on situationism—the thesis that we routinely underestimate the extent to which minor situational variables influence morally significant behavior. Situationism has been seen as a threat to prevailing lay and philosophical theories of character, personhood, and agency. In this paper, I outline the situationist literature and critique one of its upshots: the admonition to carefully select one’s situational contexts. Besides being (...)
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  39. Nancy E. Snow (2010). Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory. Routledge.
    Introduction -- In search of global traits -- Habitual virtuous actions and automaticity -- Social intelligence and why it matters -- Virtue as social intelligence -- Philosophical situationism revisited -- Conclusion.
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  40. Robert C. Solomon (2005). What's Character Got to Do with It? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (3):648–655.
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  41. Ernest Sosa, A Defense of Virtue Theory Against Situationist Objections.
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  42. Gopal Sreenivasan (2009). Disunity of Virtue. Journal of Ethics 13 (2-2):195 - 212.
    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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  43. Gopal Sreenivasan (2008). Character and Consistency: Still More Errors. Mind 117 (467):603-612.
    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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  44. Gopal Sreenivasan (2002). Errors About Errors: Virtue Theory and Trait Attribution. Mind 111 (441):47-68.
    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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  45. Candace L. Upton (2009). Virtue Ethics and Moral Psychology: The Situationism Debate. Journal of Ethics 13 (2-3):103 - 115.
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  46. Candace L. Upton (2009). The Structure of Character. Journal of Ethics 13 (2-3):175 - 193.
    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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  47. Candace L. Upton (2009). Situational Traits of Character: Dispositional Foundations and Implications for Moral Psychology and Friendship. Lexington Books.
    Introduction -- Global traits of character -- Traits as dispositions -- Situational traits of character -- Situational traits and social psychology -- Situational traits and the friendly consequentialist.
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  48. Candace L. Upton (2005). A Contextual Account of Character Traits. Philosophical Studies 122 (2):133 - 151.
    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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  49. Peter B. M. Vranas (2009). Against Moral Character Evaluations: The Undetectability of Virtue and Vice. Journal of Ethics 13 (2/3):213 - 233.
    I defend the epistemic thesis that evaluations of people in terms of their moral character as good, bad, or intermediate are almost always epistemically unjustified. (1) Because most people are fragmented (they would behave deplorably in many and admirably in many other situations), one's prior probability that any given person is fragmented should be high. (2) Because one's information about specific people does not reliably distinguish those who are fragmented from those who are not, one's posterior probability that any given (...)
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  50. Peter B. M. Vranas (2005). The Indeterminacy Paradox: Character Evaluations and Human Psychology. Noûs 39 (1):1–42.
    You may not know me well enough to evaluate me in terms of my moral character, but I take it you believe I can be evaluated: it sounds strange to say that I am indeterminate, neither good nor bad nor intermediate. Yet I argue that the claim that most people are indeterminate is the conclusion of a sound argument—the indeterminacy paradox—with two premises: (1) most people are fragmented (they would behave deplorably in many and admirably in many other situations); (2) (...)
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  51. Jonathan Webber (2007). Character, Common-Sense, and Expertise. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 10 (1):89 - 104.
    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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  52. 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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  53. Jonathan Webber (2006). Character, Consistency, and Classification. Mind 115 (459):651-658.
    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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  54. Jonathan Webber (2006). Virtue, Character and Situation. Journal of Moral Philosophy 3 (2):193-213.
    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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  55. Erik J. Wielenberg (2006). Saving Character. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 9 (4):461 - 491.
    In his recent book Lack of Character, John 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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  56. Michael Winter & John Tauer (2006). Virtue Theory and Social Psychology. Journal of Value Inquiry 40 (1).
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