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Character and Situationism: New Directions

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Abstract

The early work by Gilbert Harman and John Doris on character and situationism has fostered a vast literature over the past 15 years. Yet despite all this work, there are many important issues which remain largely unexplored. The goal of this paper is to briefly outline eight promising research directions: neglected moral virtues, neglected non-moral virtues, virtue assessment and measurement, replication, non-Aristotelian virtue ethics, positive accounts of character trait possession, prescriptive situationism, and virtue cultivation.

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Notes

  1. For their early work on situationism and virtue, see Harman 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003 and Doris 1998, 2002.

  2. Doris also mentions a third globalist thesis, evaluative integration (1998: 506, 2002: 22), but as he does in much of his discussion, I leave it to one side in what follows. In a recent article, talk of “global character traits” is replaced with talk of “robust character traits” (Merritt et al. 2010: 356). The terminology of “global” traits is not original to Doris; it has been used for decades in psychology.

  3. More precisely, whether participants helped or not seemed to be highly dependent on morally insignificant features of their environment, such as a smell or the temperature. Thus “both disappointing omissions and appalling actions are readily induced through seemingly minor situations. What makes these findings so striking is just how insubstantial the situational influences that produce troubling moral failures seem to be” (Merritt et al. 2010: 357, emphasis theirs). See also Doris 1998: 507, 2002: 2, 28, 35–36 and Harman 2003: 90.

  4. For more on the EAR and its relevance to studying moral character, see Mehl et al. 2015.

  5. See in particular Batson 2011 as well as the review in Miller 2013: chapter five.

  6. See, for instance, Open Science Collaboration 2015. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer who suggested I add replication issues to the list of new directions.

  7. A change, though, was that participants could help by picking up dropped packages, not papers.

  8. For more on subsequent attempts to replicate Isen and Levin’s work, see Miller 2013: chapter three.

  9. See also his recent discussion of replication issues in Doris 2015.

  10. On Slingerland’s reading, the normative requirements involved in the early Confucian concept of virtue are highly demanding, and so necessitate, “intensive, life-long, highly regimented training…” (2011: 404, see also 413).

  11. Although Tom Bates and Pauline Kleingeld seem to be heading in this direction. See Bates and Kleingeld forthcoming.

  12. Potentially one could hold a view whereby most people have a variety of local virtues and vices together in their characters. Also, a different account of local virtues (and vices) would require just virtuous behavior, rather than both virtuous behavior and virtuous motivations. In the interest of space, and to avoid things becoming too tedious, I have omitted these options from the above.

  13. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising this concern.

  14. See Miller 2003, 2014: chapter five, Russell 2009: chapters eight to ten, and Snow 2010: chapter one. For a brief connection, see also Adams 2006: 131–138.

  15. For a thorough presentation of the central claims and supporting evidence for the CAPS model, see Mischel and Shoda 1995. For a review, see Miller 2014: chapter five.

  16. For more details, see the works cited in footnote 33.

  17. For a more extensive review and assessment of several of these strategies, see Wilson and Miller forthcoming. The examples provided above are not intended to be exhaustive of the current work being done by philosophers. For instance, Ryan West has done extensive work on the implications of psychological research on self-regulation for helping to cultivate structural virtues like self-control, temperance, perseverance, courage, and patience.

  18. I am very grateful to Nancy Snow for inviting me to be a part of this special issue and for her helpful comments as well as those of two anonymous reviewers. Work on this paper was supported by a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation. The opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Templeton World Charity Foundation.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Wake Forest University, Box 7332, Winston-Salem, NC, 27109, USA

    Christian B. Miller

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Miller, C.B. Character and Situationism: New Directions. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 20, 459–471 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-017-9791-4

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