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Heated agreement: Lack of Character as Being for the Good

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Notes

  1. Unless otherwise noted, all parenthetical references are to A Theory of Virtue.

  2. I first learned the lovely word “irenic” from Annas (2005, p. 639), in the course of her declining to adopt an irenic stance towards my positions on the issues discussed here.

  3. See Doris (1998, 2002, 2005, 2006), Doris and Stich (2005, 2006), Flanagan (1991, p. 281), Harman (1999, 2000), Merritt (2000; Meritt et al. 2010), and Vranas (2005).

  4. Aficionados of cognitive science should take care to avoid being led astray by Adams’ use of “modular.” Since dispositions that are “informationally encapsulated” in the way that prominent theories of modularity suppose (Fodor 1983, 1985, Stanovich 2004, pp. 37–44) might be poor candidates for the sort of conglomeration Adams contemplates, I expect Adams would disavow these associations.

  5. This observation leads me to think that the “baseball analogy” sometimes invoked in discussions of probabilistic accounts of traits (e.g., Sabini and Silver 2005) is rather off the point, in discussions of moral psychology: a batting average of .400 is Hall of Fame material, while a fidelity average of .400 is Divorce Court material.

  6. See Doris and Nichols (forthcoming) for an extended “collaborativist” brief on the importance of sociality in morality.

  7. Shah and Oppenheimer (2007) present three other studies demonstrating that subjects favor easy to process, or “perceptually fluent” information rather than difficult to process, or “dysfluent” information in their judgments.

  8. The evidence and arguments are developed in Olin and Doris (in preparation).

  9. Reflection has also been found to increase the extent to which “naïve” judgment diverges from “expert” judgment (Wilson and Schooler 1991).

  10. I try to push things further in Doris (2009) and Doris (forthcoming).

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Acknowledgements

I first presented this material in the course of an author meets critic session on Adams (2006). I am grateful to the other session participants, Robert Adams, Julia Annas, and Rachana Kamtekar, as well as the session audience, for lively and illuminating discussion. Many thanks to Lauren Olin and Simine Vazire for help on earlier drafts.

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  1. Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program, Philosophy Department, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA

    John M. Doris

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Doris, J.M. Heated agreement: Lack of Character as Being for the Good . Philos Stud 148, 135–146 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9507-2

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