Abstract

Situationism is the view, now familiar in contemporary ethics, that virtue ethics is empirically inadequate. The central complaint is that virtues are global or robust traits, that is, traits that are deeply entrenched parts of personality manifested in regular behavior across different types of situations, and that a wealth of social psychological experiments show either that such traits do not exist, or are so scarce that they are not significant factors in producing behavior. Specific situationist complaints take a variety of forms. For example, Harman complains that social psychology gives us no reason to think that the kinds of traits that can be virtues exist, and, thus, no reason to think that we can become the kinds of people that virtue ethics tells us to be.See Gilbert Harman, “Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 99 , p. 316. Indeed, he is so negatively disposed to ..