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Power, Situation, and Character: A Confucian-Inspired Response to Indirect Situationist Critiques

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Abstract

Indirect situationist critiques of virtue ethics grant that virtue exists and is possible to acquire, but contend that given the low probability of success in acquiring it, a person genuinely interested in behaving as morally as possible would do better to rely on situationist strategies - or, in other words, strategies of environmental or ecological engineering or control (Doris, 2002, 1998; see also Levy 2012). In this paper, I develop a partial answer to this critique drawn from work in early Confucian ethics and in contemporary philosophy and psychology. From early Confucian ethics, I lean on the concept of li, or ritual. Ritual represents both a set of situational manipulations that are especially effective at directly producing moral behavior and at indirectly cultivating virtue over time, and also a virtue that consists of facility with and expertise in these situational manipulations (Mower 2013; Slingerland, 2011; Sarkissian, 2010; and Hutton, 2006). Appealing to the particular example of social power, I then argue that one is justified in attempting to acquire virtue if one (a) knows that one will frequently encounter circumstances in which purely situationist strategies lose effectiveness, (b) if these circumstances also carry moral urgency: the risk of great harm or opportunity for great benefit to others is high, and (c) if utilizing the potent combination of situationist strategies and virtue envisioned by the early Confucians as ritual is possible.

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Notes

  1. By “early Confucian ethics,” I mean the ethical theories espoused by Kongzi (Confucius) in the Analects, by Mengzi (Mencius) in the Mengzi, and Xunzi in the Xunzi. In this essay, I use Slingerland’s (2003) translation of Kongzi’s Analects, Van Norden’s (2008) translation of the Mengzi, and Hutton’s (2014) translation of the Xunzi.

  2. We can distinguish other types of virtue ethical theories. Metaethical, rather than normative virtue ethics are not interested in how virtues might guide our moral behavior in particular circumstances but instead in providing accounts of how concepts of virtues are prior to, more fundamental than or explanatory of other key moral concepts such as goodness or rightness (see Watson 1990; Kawall 2009; Russell 2009). A normative virtue ethics need not be (and in most historical cases, has not been) committed to a metaethical virtue ethics (see Mcaleer 2007). Normative virtue ethics itself can be divided into three main categories according to the virtue theory (that is, their theory of what virtues amount to, see Merritt (2000), Crisp (1996), and Driver (1996)) they adopt: character trait views (according to which virtues are types of character traits), aspirational trait views (such as Hursthouse 1999, according to which virtues are traits that we ought to aspire to, not traits that we ought to acquire), and virtues-as-heuristics views (see Sreenivasan 2017; Hurka 2006; Thomson 1997) according to which virtues are not traits at all but are instead epistemic tools or heuristics that we can use in specific circumstances to help filter morally salient information in difficult cases (for example, by asking ourselves “what would really be the compassionate thing to do here?”). Situationists critiques traditionally have focused on character trait and aspirational trait normative virtue ethics (Doris 1998, 2002; see also Ciurria 2014).

  3. Responses to direct situationist critiques can be very roughly categorized into conciliatory or denialist approaches (though in practice, many authors adopt aspects of both approaches). Conciliatory responses, such as Snow’s (2009) theory of virtue built on CAPS models of personality (see Mischel and Shoda 1995; Fleeson’s Whole Trait Theory (Jayawickreme and Fleeson 2017; Fleeson and Jayawickreme 2015; Fleeson 2001), and Morton’s (2013) “bounded” virtues accept that situations drastically influence our behavior but develop new theories of traits and virtues that attempt to show how stability, consistency, integration, or situation-independence might still exist in some way or other. Denialist responses, as the name suggests, deny that situationists critiques have identified a genuine problem for virtue ethics, either by arguing that the rarity of genuine virtue is compatible with a lack of observed virtue in empirical findings (see Kamtekar 2004; Athanassoulis 2000), by arguing that the empirical evidence fails to support some of the strongest situationist claims (see Slingerland 2011; Sreenivasan 2013), or that in the case of early Confucian ethics, constructs like cross-situational consistency might not track virtuous behavior because virtuous behavior in this paradigm is inherently radically situation-dependent (see Mower 2013). For our purposes, we can be somewhat agnostic about responses to direct situationist critiques: the indirect situationist critique implicitly grants that direct situationist critiques are false, and adopts a rough picture of virtue (where virtue is extremely rare but possible to acquire) that is consistent with most interpretations of early Confucian virtues and responses to direct situationist critiques.

  4. One objection to my overall project in this paper is to draw upon work in moral exemplarism (Olberding 2012; 2008; Zagzebski 2017; 2013; 2010) to argue that socially powerful moral exemplars represent a straightforward counterexample to my worry that having social power challenges one’s ability to behave morally. First, it must be pointed out that my claim is not that situationist strategies are completely ineffective for those with social power, but instead they generally lose effectiveness for those with social power and sometimes drastically so. More generally, this objection to my argument seems highly unconvincing to me: moral exemplars are so few and far between that I shouldn’t expect to be able to become one, and further, it seems that part of what allows most moral exemplars with social power to be moral exemplars is that they adopt strategies such as those I discuss.

  5. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that I address this response. Relatedly, Sreenivasan (2017) discusses a “ham-fisted Aristotelian” response to indirect critiques (which he calls "rearguard" critiques), according to which I become more virtuous by doing virtuous things, and since in any given situation I should try to do the most virtuous thing, in any given situation I should try to become more virtuous. But, the ham-fisted Aristotelian model runs straight up against well-trod situationist worries: given the high degree to which situations affect our behavior, trying to do virtuous things without managing the situations we run into will sometimes lead to much worse moral results, thus, somewhat surprisingly, it is not clear that you should always try to do the virtuous thing.

  6. See Cua 2003; Sim 2015; Tiwald 2010; Van Norden 2003, 2013, See Angle 2014 for a broad discussion of various interpretive paradigms for the Analects, as well as Sim 2015 for an extended defense of interpreting the Analects as a virtue ethics based largely on the text’s focus on particular virtues. However, some scholars have expressed concerns about classifying early Confucian ethics as a virtue ethics (Tiwald 2010; Chong et al. 2006; Lee 2013, see Sim 2015 and Hutton 2015 for a discussion of some of these objections). If virtue ethics is viewed essentially as an explicit competitor to strictly consequentialist and strictly deontological approaches to ethics (as it sometimes is treated today), then Confucian ethics trivially fails to be a virtue ethics because the conceptual terrain in early Chinese ethics was so vastly different than it is today (Tiwald 2010; Huang 2005, p. 510). Alternatively, some have argued that in the Analects it’s not entirely clear than Kongzi completely distinguishes virtues from the rules of ritual ceremony (li) (Liu 2006, pp. 226–230) or from duty (Lee 2013, pp. 52–3).

  7. Ames and Rosemont have argued vehemently against interpreting early Confucian ethics as a virtue ethics (see Ames 2011, especially Ch. 4). In particular, they argue that the conceptual apparatus that underlies western notions of virtue simply doesn’t translate to the conceptual apparatus of the early Confucians. Of course, we are not here concerned with finding the correct interpretation of early Confucian ethics but instead in understanding how different interpretive paradigms are susceptible to the indirect situationist critique, or something like it. It seems that at least one key component of Ames and Rosemont’s role ethics – the radically relational model of persons – is in general compatible with virtue ethics (see Hutton 2015; Gier 2001, 2004; Bretzke 1995; for a survey of differences among role ethicists, see Ramsey 2016), and thus susceptible fairly straightforwardly to indirect situationist critiques. Though I won’t in this paper undertake an explicit argument that some version of the indirect situationist critique can be (heavily) translated to be challenging even for more radical versions of role ethics (perhaps by dropping references to "virtue" altogether), I do suspect that such a project could be successfully insofar as the early Confucians are committed to certain long-term programs of moral development instead of relying solely on li.

  8. In response, one might point to Kongzi’s statement in Analects 7.30 that virtue is never far away. On my view, this passage does not amount to a claim that the lengthy process of Confucian moral training is not strictly necessary, but instead a comment about weakness of will.

  9. Deborah Mower (2013) has argued that viewing virtues as situationally-immune character traits is inconsistent with Xunzi’s view of virtue. On that view, virtuous people are highly attuned to the tiniest of situational factors and adjust their behavior accordingly.

  10. To be clear, I am not claiming that those with social power in this case are experiencing hermeneutical injustice – they aren’t experiencing an injustice at all, but perpetrating one. The claim is that in cases of hermeneutical injustice, the relevant concept (e.g. of sexual harassment) is simply not publicly available to anyone, empowered or disempowered.

  11. The literature on epistemologies of ignorance is large, but see Code 2004; Tuana 2006; Ortega 2006; Alcoff 2007; Sullivan and Tuana 2007, and Medina 2013, esp. Ch. 1.

  12. This and many similar strategies are suggested in Thaler and Sunstein 2009.

  13. For a nice discussion of recent work related to paternalism and Confucian ethics, see O’Dwyer (2015) .

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    Seth Robertson

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Robertson, S. Power, Situation, and Character: A Confucian-Inspired Response to Indirect Situationist Critiques . Ethic Theory Moral Prac 21, 341–358 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9884-8

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