Abstract
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 person is fragmented should be close to one’s prior—and thus should also be high. (3) Because being fragmented entails being indeterminate (neither good nor bad nor intermediate), one’s posterior probability that any given person is indeterminate should also be high—and the epistemic thesis follows. (1) and (3) rely on previous work; here I support (2) by using a mathematical result together with empirical evidence from personality psychology.
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Notes
If the epistemic thesis is true, then one’s posterior probability that p is not good should be high, and then evaluations of people as not good (similarly, as not bad or as not intermediate) are almost always epistemically justified.
One might argue that the move from P1 to L1 violates a version of the is/ought thesis because L1 is a normative claim but P1 is not. To avoid this problem, I can replace P1 with the (normative) claim that one’s probability that most people are fragmented should be high (assuming one’s background knowledge includes the evidence I adduce for P1). Compare: my probability that the numbers of most tickets will not be drawn should be high (assuming my background knowledge includes commonly known propositions about lotteries).
I will give a proof of the following simpler result (the proof of the theorem uses the same methods): If Δ is the event that more than σ D of the S variables take the value −1, then P(Δ|D s ) − P(Δ) = (1 − p D )P (exactly σ D of the remaining S − 1 variables take the value −1). Let Δ n be the event that exactly n of the S variables take the value −1; with an obvious change in terminology, Δ n is the event of n “successes” in S “trials” of a Bernoulli process with success probability p D and failure probability q D = 1 − p D . Clearly Δ = \( {\cup_{n > \sigma_{D}}} \) Δ n , so (1) P(Δ|D s ) − P(Δ) = \( {\Sigma_{n > \sigma_{D}}} \) [P(Δ n |D s ) − P(Δ n )]. Now P(Δ n D s ) is the probability of n successes in S trials and a success at the s-th trial, so it is the probability of n − 1 successes in S − 1 trials times the probability of a success at the s-th trial. So (2) P(Δ n |D s ) = P(Δ n D s )/P(D s ) = P(n − 1 successes in S − 1 trials). Now (3) P(Δ n ) = P(n successes in S trials) = P(n − 1 successes in S − 1 trials and a success at the remaining trial) + P(n successes in S − 1 trials and a failure at the remaining trial) = P(n − 1 successes in S − 1 trials)p D + P(n successes in S − 1 trials)q D . From (2) and (3) we get: P(Δ n |D s ) − P(Δ n ) = q D [P(n − 1 successes in S − 1 trials) − P(n successes in S − 1 trials)]. So P(Δ|D s ) − P(Δ) = \( {\Sigma_{n > \sigma_{D}}} \) q D [P(n − 1 successes in S − 1 trials) − P(n successes in S − 1 trials)] = q D {[P(σ D successes in S − 1 trials) − P(σ D + 1 successes in S − 1 trials)] + [P(σ D + 1 successes in S − 1 trials) − P(σ D + 2 successes in S − 1 trials)]+···+[P(S − 1 successes in S − 1 trials) − P(S successes in S − 1 trials)]} = q D P(σ D successes in S − 1 trials).
Applying the normal approximation to the binomial distribution, the probability that exactly σ D out of S − 1 variables take the value −1 is at most [2π(S − 1)p D (1 − p D )]−1/2.
Trivially, for example, in the extreme case in which E is the proposition that p behaves deplorably in more than σ D and admirably in more than σ A situations, E entails that p is fragmented; so P(F|E) should be 1 even if P(F) is not close to 1.
It might be objected that one’s evidence about a given person need not be limited to behavioral information, namely information on how the person behaves in various situations: one’s evidence may also include personological information, namely information on how the person’s character is judged by others (including those who know the person well and those who are considered expert judges of character) or information on the person’s character based on a questionnaire. I reply that such judgments of character have been found to be inaccurate: their correlations with actual behavior are low (Mischel 1968).
There is a gray area between cross-situational consistency and temporal stability: depending on how coarse- or fine-grained one’s individuation of situations is, in some cases one may consider a situation s´ to be either (1) the same as a (recurring) situation s (so that the comparison between s and s´ is relevant to temporal stability) or (2) different from—but very similar to—a situation s (so that the comparison between s and s´ is relevant to cross-situational consistency). The average correlation coefficients between people’s behaviors in various situations are higher if the situations are similar than if they are not (cf. Davies 1991, p. 528; Doris 2002, p. 64; Hartshorne and May 1928, p. 384). So for the Approximate Independence Condition to hold I adopt a coarse-grained individuation of situations: I consider (what one might consider to be) very similar situations to be identical.
One could equivalently define Y σ as a sum (rather than an average): the correlation coefficients would remain unchanged.
Epstein is talking here about the temporal stability, not about the cross-situational consistency of behavior (see Epstein 1983b), but an analogous argument (as Epstein himself points out) might be given about cross-situational consistency.
Epstein did not specify what these standard assumptions are, nor did he explain why they are rarely met in real-life situations.
It is also worth noting that the above discussion was about prediction of aggregate behavior (over a number of situations) from a measure of aggregate behavior (over a number of other situations). When one tries to predict behavior in a single situation, using a measure of aggregate behavior would be of much less help even if the assumptions behind the Spearman-Brown formula were true. This is because, under these assumptions, the correlation coefficient r sσ between B ps and Y σ (as opposed to the correlation coefficient r σσ′ between Y σ′ and Y σ ) is given by the following formula: r sσ = K 1/2 r ss′/[1 + (K − 1)r ss′]1/2; thus r sσ goes to r 1/2ss′ , not to 1, as K goes to infinity (e.g., for r ss′ = .16, r sσ goes to .4).
In their response to Epstein, Mischel and Peake (1982, p. 731) note: “far from overlooking reliability, virtually all of the classic, large-scale investigations of cross-situational consistency (e.g., Dudycha, 1936; Hartshorne & May, 1928; Newcomb, 1929) routinely employed behavioral measures aggregated over repeated occasions”. Mischel and Peake (like many others), however, fail to note that (as I just said) Hartshorne et al. (1930) also employed behavioral measures aggregated over situations (not just over occasions).
It is true that esteem is sometimes non-moral (I can esteem you as a tennis player) or moral but partial (I can esteem you for your courage and still overall despise you), and that such kinds of esteem are not based on moral character evaluations. But it is also true that esteem is sometimes moral and global (I can esteem you for your character, as a good person), and my point in the text is that this kind of esteem is based on moral character evaluations.
According to a variant of the triviality objection, the epistemic thesis is uninteresting for philosophers, because philosophers (e.g., Plato and Aristotle) believe that virtue is rare (cf. DePaul 2000) and thus seldom make moral character evaluations. I do not see much force in this criticism; as an analogy, even if a novel refutation of creationism is uninteresting for biologists, it may still be important if there are many creationists among non-biologists. Moreover, even if philosophers believe that virtuous people in the sense of moral exemplars are rare, they need not believe that virtuous people in the sense of morally good (as opposed to morally excellent) people are rare; and even if philosophers believe that morally good people are rare, they may still believe—especially if they hold a version of the “reciprocity of the virtues” thesis (Irwin 1988, p. 61; cf. Badhwar 1996)—that we can reliably detect the rare good people.
Moreover, even if forming moral character evaluations turns out to be inevitable, I see no reason to suppose that holding such evaluations is inevitable. As an analogy, even if in an optical illusion we are unable to avoid forming spontaneously the erroneous belief that one of two lines is longer than the other, we are able to discard this belief once we measure the two lines and find them to be of equal length (although the one may still look longer than the other). So a restricted version of the epistemic thesis, in terms of holding (rather than forming or holding) moral character evaluations, escapes the objection from ought-implies-can. But I see no need to retreat to such a restricted version even if the first premise of the objection turns out to be true, since in the text I go on to argue that the second premise of the objection is false.
Indeed, I believe I can defend such an epistemic version of the ought-implies-can principle by adapting my published defense (Vranas 2007) of a non-epistemic version of the principle.
More formally, letting E be the proposition that p 1 behaves admirably in s 1 and p 2 behaves deplorably in s 2 (in symbols, and with a slight change in notation from Sect. 3.2, E is Ap 1 s 1 & Dp 2 s 1), the claim is: for any s 2, P(Ap 1 s 2|E) should be much higher than P(Ap 2 s 2|E) and P(Dp 2 s 2|E) should be much higher than P(Dp 1 s 2|E).
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Acknowledgments
My work on this paper was supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I am grateful to many people, especially David Brink, Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton, for help with my doctoral dissertation in philosophy, on a considerably modified part of which this paper is based. Thanks also to Julia Driver for comments, to Gopal Sreenivasan, Chris Tucker, and Jennifer Wright for discussion, and to my mother for typing the bulk of the paper. A version of this paper was presented at a conference on Virtue Ethics and Moral Psychology (University of Denver, October 2005).
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Vranas, P.B.M. Against Moral Character Evaluations: The Undetectability of Virtue and Vice. J Ethics 13, 213–233 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-009-9049-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-009-9049-z