Social psychology and virtue ethics

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 7, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 365-392

  Miller, Christian ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME   (United States)

Author keywords

Character traits; Gilbert Harman; John Doris; Situationism; Social psychology; Virtue ethics

Indexed keywords

EID: 33751114998     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1026136703565     Document Type: Article

References (176)

1. See for example Gilbert Harman, "Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99 (1999), pp. 315-332;
2. "The Nonexistence of Character Traits," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2000), pp. 223-226;
3. John Doris, "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics," Noûs 32 (1998), pp. 504-530;
4. Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
5. and John Campbell, "Can Philosophical Accounts of Altruism Accommodate Experimental Data on Helping Behavior?" Australasian Journal of Philosophy 11 (1999), pp. 26-45.
6. Other philosophers who seem to show some sympathy towards this objection include Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 36,
7. and Thomas Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 44.
8. In the field of social psychology, personality-based explanations have been criticized by, among others, W. Mischel, Personality and Assessment (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1968);
9. W. Mischel and P. Peake, "Beyond Déjà Vu in the Search for Cross-Situational Consistency," Psychological Review 89 (1982), pp. 730-755,
10. and R. Nisbett and L. Ross, The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991).
11. For some important preliminary responses, see Owen Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991);
12. Michael Depaul, "Character Traits, Virtues, and Vices: Are There None?" Proceedings of the World Congress of Philosophy, Volume 1 (Bowling Green: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1999), pp. 141-157;
13. Maria Merritt, "Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology," Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 3 (2000), pp. 365-383;
14. Nafsika Athanassoulis, "A Response to Harman: Virtue Ethics and Character Traits," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2001), pp. 215-222.
15. Recently Gopal Sreenivasan ["Errors about Errors: Virtue Theory and Trait Attribution," Mind 111 (2002), pp. 47-68] has developed a more sustained response to Harman, "Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology", and Doris, "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics." He mentions two reservations he has with their approach, but only has space to defend the first. In what follows, I take up the task of developing something like his second reservation concerning the "scope of a theory of virtue." Thus this paper can be viewed as complementing Sreenivasan's response, although he should in no way be construed as endorsing any of what follows.
16. See in particular Harman, "Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology and The Nonexistence of Character Traits." The presentation of Harman's view is based on the earlier article. It is important to note that while virtue ethics is a type of normative theory, it like many such theories is also committed to the truth of certain descriptive claims. Similarly, one might think that some consequentialists are committed to the existence of states of affairs, and some deontologists to the existence of faculties of practical reason. In the case of virtue ethics, what exactly the relevant descriptive commitments are will be considered at some length in sections II and V.
17. Harman, "Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology," p. 316.
18. Harman, "Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology," pp. 316-318.
19. Thus Harman wants to exclude schizophrenia, mania, depression, shyness, and sadness from being character traits (Harman, "Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology," p. 316), but it is not at all clear that he is justified in doing so based on these standards alone. Nor do his criteria seem able to exclude anorexia, bulimia, talkativeness, smoking, alcoholism, drug addiction, and many other "long-term stable dispositions to act in distinctive ways."
20. See also Depaul, "Character Traits, Virtues, and Vices," pp. 143-146.
21. For further details about this experiment, see Stanley Milgram, "Behavioral Study of Obedience," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67 (1963), pp. 371-378,
22. and the helpful discussion in Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality, pp. 293-300
23. and Athanassoulis, "A Response to Harman," p. 216.
24. For important recent work on Milgram and obedience experiments, see W. Meeus and Q. Raaijmakers, "Obedience in Modern Society: The Utrecht Studies," Journal of Social Issues 51 (1995), pp. 155-175;
25. F. Rochat and A. Modigliani, "The Ordinary Quality of Resistance: From Milgram's Laboratory to the Village of Le Chambon," Journal of Social Issues 51 (1995), pp. 195-210;
26. T. Blass, "The Milgram Obedience Experiment: Support for a Cognitive View of Defensive Attribution," Journal of Social Psychology 136 (1996), pp. 407-410;
27. T. Blass, "The Milgram Paradigm after 35 Years: Some Things We Now Know about Obedience to Authority," Journal of Applied Social Psychology 29 (1999), pp. 955-978;
28. T. Blass (ed.), Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm (Mahwah: Erlbaum, 2000).
29. After all, some explanation has to be given for why roughly one third of the participants did not turn the dial up all the way. Given that they were in exactly the same situation as the other subjects, it would seem that such an explanation would have to appeal to certain features of their psychology and personality in order to account for the difference in behavioral outcome.
30. One subject reacted to the outcome of his participation by remarking, "So he's dead. I did my job!" [S. Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), p. 88].
31. And another obedient subject reported that he models himself on a grandfather who, "believed one should take and carry out an order whether one believed it was right or wrong, as long as the person giving it was in authority to give it" [A. Elms and S. Milgram, "Personality Characteristics Associated with Obedience and Defiance Toward Authoritative Command," Journal of Experimental Research in Personality 1 (1966), p. 288].
32. For similar concerns, see Athanassoulis, "A Response to Harman," p. 217. Milgram himself observed that for "a large number of cases the degree of tension reached extremes that are rarely seen in sociopsychological laboratory studies"
33. Milgram, "Behavioral Study of Obedience," p. 374
34. Harman, "Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology," p. 322.
35. For a detailed discussion of situationism, see G. Allport, "Traits Revisited," American Psychologist 21 (1966), pp. 1-10;
36. K. Bowers, "Situationism in Psychology: An Analysis and a Critique," Psychological Review 80 (1973), pp. 307-336;
37. Nisbett and Ross, The Person and the Situation, Chapter 1;
38. and Doris, "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics," p. 507.
39. J. Darley and C. Batson, "'From Jerusalem to Jericho': A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27 (1973), p. 102.
40. Darley and Batson, "From Jerusalem to Jericho," p. 105.
41. For interesting recent work, see G. Maio and J. Olson, "Values as Truisms: Evidence and Implications," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 (1998), pp. 294-311;
42. G. Maio et al., "Addressing Discrepancies between Values and Behavior: The Motivating Effect of Reasons," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 37 (2001), pp. 104-117, and the references cited therein.
43. Harman, "Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology," p. 324.
44. Unfortunately we are not told which trait(s) this is supposed to be, although likely candidates include compassion, empathy, and charity.
45. See L. Ross, "The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings," in L. Berkowitz (ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 10 (New York: Academic, 1977) and the discussion in Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality, pp. 306-307.
46. See Mischel, Personality and Assessment;
47. Ross, "The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings"; P. Pietromonaco and R. Nisbett, "Swimming Upstream against the Fundamental Attribution Error: Subjects' Weak Generalizations from the Darley and Batson Study," Social Behavior and Personality 10 (1982), pp. 1-4;
48. Nisbett and Ross, The Person and the Situation, Chapter 5;
49. and Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality, p. 285.
50. For important recent work, see D. Gilbert and P. Malone, "The Correspondence Bias," Psychological Bulletin 117 (1995), pp. 21-38;
51. J. Uleman et al., "People as Flexible Interpreters: Evidence and Issues from Spontaneous Trait Inference," in M. Zanna (ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 28 (San Diego: Academic Press, 1996), pp. 211-280;
52. V. Yzerbyt et al., "The Dispositional Inference Strikes Back: Situational Focus and Dispositional Suppression in Causal Attribution," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (2001), pp. 365-376, and the references cited therein.
53. See Sreenivasan, "Errors about Errors," pp. 53-54. As he notes, "From the fact that people happen to add badly, it does not follow that there are no sums. Likewise with character traits" (p. 54).
54. For a preliminary sketch of various ways to resist committing the Fundamental Attribution Error, see Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality, pp. 313-314,
55. Doris, "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics," p. 519;
56. and Merritt, "Virtue Ethics." For some difficulties, see Yzerbyt et al., "The Dispositional Inference Strikes Back."
57. Harman, "Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology," pp. 324-330,
58. and "The Nonexistence of Character Traits," p. 223.
59. Harman, "Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology," pp. 316, 330. It is not clear whether Harman wants to reject local character traits as well. At times, he claims that his target is merely character traits as ordinarily conceived, which presumably is meant to include global but not local character traits
60. (Harman, "The Nonexistence of Character Traits," p. 223). But he also writes that, "[w]e need to abandon all talk of virtue and character"
61. (Harman, "The Nonexistence of Character Traits," p. 224). It would be surprising, however, if his project was to reject local character traits too since he has given us no reason for doing so, and in fact there is abundant empirical evidence for their existence, as we shall see in Section V.
62. According to another form of Global Trait Instrumentalism, we are not justified in believing either that there really are or that there really are not any global character traits, but it is still useful to talk as if such traits did exist.
63. He explicitly rejects Global Trait Instrumentalism in Harman, "The Nonexistence of Character Traits," p. 224.
64. As Harman himself readily acknowledges. Thus Judith Jarvis Thomson has recently been developing a version of virtue ethics which focuses on virtuous action rather than on the cultivation of virtuous character dispositions. See in particular Judith Jarvis Thomson, "Evaluatives and Directives," in G. Harman and J. Thomson (eds.), Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), pp. 125-154;
65. "The Right and The Good," The Journal of Philosophy 94 (1997), pp. 273-298.
66. Thus Owen Flanagan writes that "[t]he entire enterprise of virtue ethics depends on there being individual traits of character which are causally effective in the production of behavior across situations of a kind" (Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality, p. 282).
67. See also Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 11-12, 29.
68. Hence A. Maclntyre: "From an Aristotelian standpoint to identify certain actions as manifesting or failing to manifest a virtue or virtues is never only to evaluate;
69. it is also to take the first step towards explaining why those actions rather than some others were performed" [A. Maclntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 199].
70. See also Stephen Hudson, "Character Traits and Desires," Ethics 90 (1980), pp. 539, 542;
71. Michele Moody-Adams, "On the Old Saw that Character is Destiny," in Owen Flanagan and Amélie O. Rorty (eds.), Identity, Character, and Morality: Essays in Moral Psychology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), p. 111;
72. and Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality.
73. For similar claims in psychology, see Allport, "Traits Revisited", and Mischel, Personality and Assessment, p. 5. One might reasonably doubt whether all explanations have to be causal or whether the virtue ethicist is committed to giving a causal account of trait-based action. Unfortunately, adequate discussion of these important issues will have to wait for another time.
74. It need not follow, of course, that he did the relevant action for the reason that it was just. Rather, because he was just he recognized that particular reason, whatever it may be, as the one on which he ought to act.
75. For more on character traits as dispositions, see in particular Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 9, 35-37;
76. Richard Brandt, "Traits of Character: A Conceptual Analysis," reprinted in Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 266;
77. and "The Structure of Virtue, " reprinted in Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights, pp. 289-311.
78. Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality, p. 279,
79. and Brandt, "Traits of Character," p. 266.
80. See Doris, "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics," p. 509. The counterfactual is merely a necessary condition since the virtue theorist may also want to insist that the T-sortal act also arise from a stable disposition and from the appropriate intentions and desires. Additionally, the probability qualification is important since trait possession is not an all or nothing event, but rather comes in degrees of more or less
81. (see Brandt, "Traits of Character," p. 266). We shall return to this point at greater length in sections four and five. Finally, the qualification about merely attempting to perform the relevant action is needed for those cases where external impediments prevent the agent's actually being able to perform it.
82. See Mischel, Personality and Assessment, pp. 9, 13;
83. N. Dent, "Virtues and Actions," The Philosophical Quarterly 25 (1975), pp. 327-328;
84. Moody-Adams, "On the Old Saw," p. 118;
85. and Merritt, "Virtue Ethics," p. 365.
86. Brandt, "The Structure of Virtue," p. 289;
87. Stephen Mumford, Dispositions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 11-12;
88. and Harman, "Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology," p. 317.
89. See Mischel, Personality and Assessment, p. 10;
90. Moody-Adams, "On the Old Saw," p. 118;
91. and Mumford, Dispositions, p. 11.
92. See Doris, "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics"; and Lack of Character. Here our focus will be on Doris' argument in the earlier work.
93. Doris, "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics," p. 520.
94. See especially Doris, "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics," pp. 505-507.
95. Doris, "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics," pp. 505, 507-509.
96. Doris, "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics," pp. 509, 522, fn 14.
97. Doris, "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics," p. 523, fn 23. In this regard, it seems to me quite plausible to think that the Milgram and Good Samaritan experiments provide some supporting evidence in favor of premises (ii) and (iv). If, for example, many of the seminary students did fully possess such virtues as charity and benevolence, then third party observers should have been able to predict that the students would not let time considerations distract them from aiding the slumped-over man. But as Darley and Batson showed, the degree to which the students exhibited helping behavior seemed to be strongly influenced by the degree to which they took themselves to be in a hurry. So it does seem as if these students did not fully possess the relevant virtues as robust features of their characters.
98. Alternatively one could take the argument to show that the Consistency and Predictive Expectations are false, but that is not Doris' aim.
99. Doris, "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics," pp. 511-512.
100. See James Wallace, Virtues and Vices (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 143;
101. Gary Watson, "Virtues in Excess," Philosophical Studies 46 (1984), p. 58;
102. and Brandt, "Traits of Character," pp. 285-287.
103. Athanassoulis, "A Response to Harman," pp. 218-219, makes a similar point in response to Harman, "Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology."
104. For further discussion of this point in the context of responding to Harman, "Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology," see Depaul, "Character Traits, Virtues, and Vices," pp. 150-153.
105. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1985), 1099b29-32, 1103b16-31, 1152a30-34, 1179b25-29, 1180al-5, 15-19;
106. M. Burnyeat, "Aristotle on Learning to Be Good," in Amélie Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 69-92;
107. and Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, pp. 38-39, for Aristotle's account of moral development.
108. See also Athanassoulis, "Response to Harman," pp. 219-220. In light of the above, it is extremely odd that John Campbell formulates his argument from social psychology as an attack on what he takes to be the popular Kantian and virtue ethical commitment to, "powerful forces toward helping behaviour that are widespread if not universal, and which occupy a central place in many persons' motivational constitution" (Campbell, "Can Philosophical Accounts of Altrism Accommodate Experimental Data on Helping Behavior?," p. 41).
109. Aristotle himself writes that, "the many naturally obey fear, not shame;
110. they avoid what is base because of the penalties, not because it is disgraceful. For since they live by their feelings, they pursue their proper pleasures and the sources of them, and avoid the opposed pains, and have not even a notion of what is fine and truly pleasant, since they have had no taste of it" (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1179b11-16). And according to Athanassoulis, "[v]irtue ethics presumably requires that moral behaviour, in the form of possessing virtuous character traits, is a possibility, rather than an actuality for the majority of people" (Athanassoulis, "Response to Harman," p. 217).
111. (Athanassoulis, "Response to Harman," p. 217).
112. See also Lawrence Blum, Moral Perception and Particularity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 94-96,
113. and Doris, "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics," footnote 32. What it is for a global character trait to be "weakly" or "moderately" possessed will be discussed in more detail at the end of Section V.
114. Thus Aristotle seems to locate most people somewhere between continence and incontinence when he writes that, "[i]ncontinence and continence are concerned with what exceeds the state of most people;
115. the continent person abides [by reason] more than most people are capable of doing, the incontinent person less" (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1152a25-27). The issue of continence introduces an important problem for arguments based on social psychology. For the empirical experiments do not usually discriminate between actions properly described as virtuous and those that are merely continent. The same problem arises with vice as opposed to incontinence
116. see also Athanassoulis, "Response to Harman," p. 218.
117. Doris, "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics," p. 520.
118. Doris, "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics," p. 512.
119. A more detailed account of global trait acquisition is developed in the next section.
120. Doris, "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics," p. 512.
121. Doris, "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics," p. 520.
122. In particular, the work of Bernard Williams and Michael Stocker is sometimes taken to show that appealing to impersonal rules or norms in the course of deliberation is dehumanizing and introduces a form of schizophrenia between an agent's reasons and motives. See especially Williams, "A Critique of Utilitarianism," in Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 116, 131,
123. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, pp. 54-70, and Michael Stocker, "The Schizophrenia of Modern Moral Theories,"
124. The Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976), pp. 453-466. Yet according to Doris, "[t]heoretical mediation through an ideal of virtue is no less obviously problematic than through an ideal of rationality, duty, or maximizing happiness, and alienation, if it is a genuine difficulty, may plague character-based ideals no less than other ideals"
125. (Doris, "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics," p. 520).
126. For a rather different and in my view convincing response to Doris on theoretical mediation, see Merritt, "Virtue Ethics," pp. 370-371.
127. For a start, see Mischel and Peake, "Beyond Déjà Vu in the Search for Cross-Situational Consistency;" J. Wright and W. Mischel, "A Conditional Approach to Dispositional Constructs," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53 (1987), pp. 1159-1177;
128. and "Conditional Hedges and the Intuitive Psychology of Traits," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 55 (1988), pp. 454-469;
129. Y. Shoda, W. Mischel, and J. Wright, "Intuitive Interactionism in Person Perception: Effects of Situation-Behavior Relations on Dispositional Judgments," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 56 (1989), pp. 41-53;
130. and "Intra-individual Stability in the Organization and Patterning of Behavior," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67 (1994), pp. 674-687;
131. and W. Mischel and Y. Shoda, "A Cognitive-Affective System Theory of Personality," Psychological Review 102 (1995), pp. 246-268.
132. The "probably" qualifier in the consequent of each conditional is intended to capture the fact that local character trait possession can come in degrees. Note as well that strictly speaking (LT) can also serve as a necessary condition for global trait possession. Thus it is not meant to isolate the relevant difference between local as opposed to global character traits, but rather to emphasize the important role that temporal stability plays in the case of the former. What instead serves as the central differentiating condition is the failure of local character traits to exhibit cross-situational consistency.
133. See Mischel and Shoda, "Cognitive-Affective System Theory."
134. See W. Mischel, "Toward a Cognitive Social Learning Reconceptualization of Personality," Psychological Review 80 (1973), pp. 252-283; Mischel and Shoda, "Cognitive-Affective System Theory."
135. Mischel and Shoda, "Cognitive-Affective System Theory," pp. 252, 256.
136. Mischel and Shoda, "Cognitive-Affective System Theory," pp. 256-257.
137. See also W. Mischel, Y. Shoda and R. Mendoza-Denton, "Situation- Behavior Profiles as a Locus of Consistency in Personality," Current Directions in Psychological Science 11 (2002), p. 53.
138. See especially the important studies cited in footnote 57. For more recent work in this area, see also Y. Shoda and W. Mischel, "Toward a Unified, Intra-Individual Dynamic Conception of Personality," Journal of Research in Personality 30 (1996), pp. 414-428;
139. "Personality as a Stable Cognitive-Affective Activation Network," in S. Read and L. Miller (eds.), Connectionist Models of Social Reasoning and Social Behavior (Mahwah: Erlbaum, 1998), pp. 175-208;
140. K. Vansteelandt and I. Van Mechelen, "Individual Differences in Situation-Behavior Profiles: A Triple Typology Model," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75 (1998), pp. 751-765;
141. D. Cervone and Y. Shoda, The Coherence of Personality: Social-Cognitive Bases of Consistency, Variability, and Organization (New York: Guilford, 1999);
142. C. Morf and P. Rhodewalt, "Unraveling the Paradoxes of Narcissism: A Dynamic Self-Regulatory Processing Model," Psychological Inquiry 12 (2001), pp. 177-196;
143. R. Mendoza-Denton et al., "Person & times;
144. Situation Interactionism in Self-Encoding (I Am ... When ...)," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 80 (2001), pp. 533-544;
145. Mischel, Shoda and Mendoza-Denton, "Situation-Behavior Profiles";
146. and J. Forgas, "Feeling and Doing: Affective Influences on Interpersonal Behavior," Psychological Inquiry 13 (2002), pp. 1-28.
147. Mischel and Shoda, "Cognitive-Affective System Theory," p. 261. See also B. Roberts et al., "The Kids Are Alright: Growth and Stability in Personality Development From Adolescence to Adulthood," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (2001), pp. 670-683 and the references cited therein.
148. See also B. Roberts et al., "The Kids Are Alright: Growth and Stability in Personality Development From Adolescence to Adulthood," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (2001), pp. 670-683 and the references cited therein.
149. Mischel and Shoda go on to note that individuals, "can link goal-relevant plans and implementation intentions to the relevant situations in ways that will trigger the desired behavior when needed" (Mischel and Shoda, "Cognitive-Affective System Theory," p. 261).
150. According to Sreenivasan, "In one study, Charles Lord found that an individual's cross-situational consistency in conscientiousness was significantly higher when the pair of situations in question was regarded as similar by the individual himself or herself" (Sreenivasan, "Errors about Errors," p. 65, emphasis his).
151. For Lord's study, see Charles Lord, "Predicting Behavioral Consistency From an Individual's Perception of Situational Similarities," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 42 (1982), pp. 1076-1088.
152. Sreenivasan, "Errors about Errors," p. 66.
153. Another departure from ordinary thinking about ethics was noted at the end of Section I in the context of discussing the Fundamental Attribution Error. My view readily agrees with the claim that ordinary people are far too quick to appeal to characterological explanations without sufficient evidence of temporally and cross-situationally repeatable trait-evincing behavior.
154. A similar idea seems to have been expressed less formally by Watson, "Virtues in Excess," p. 58;
155. Brandt, "Traits of Character," pp. 277, 285-288;
156. and Mumford, Dispositions, pp. 41-42.
157. See Brandt, "Traits of Character," p. 285.
158. Unfortunately, (MS) is inadequate as it now stands for various reasons both technical - whether there can be a least member set if the minimal subset is infinite in size, whether there is vagueness in determining what falls inside and outside the scope of the minimal subset, whether there can be a determinate truth-value for counterfactuals concerning free human actions, whether (MS) can accommodate moral dilemmas - and intuitive, such as whether there might be more than one minimal subset for any given global character trait. I take up each of these issues in more recent work.
159. For all we know, a few of these subjects may possess well-developed global character traits. In the Good Samaritan experiment, 10% of participants in the high hurry scenario and 45% in the intermediate one, still stopped to help the slumped-over man. What is the best explanation of this behavior which seemingly neglected occurrent external determinants of action? Well, perhaps one way to answer this question would be to take that particular group of subjects and submit them to several other helping experiments involving varying degrees of situational influence. If the majority of participants continue to exhibit helping behavior, then we might have some empirical evidence that they in fact have the relevant virtues as part of their characters.
160. See also Pietromonaco and Nisbett, "Swimming Upstream Against the Fundamental Attribution Error"
161. and Campbell, "Can Philosophical Accounts of Altnuism Accommodate Experimental Data on Helping Behavior?," p. 43.
162. A follow-up study was done by Elms and Milgram on the significant number of disobedient participants in the Milgram experiment, and there some significant personality differences were uncovered, although how best to interpret their results still remains unclear (Elms and Milgram, "Personality Characteristics Associated with Obedience and Defiance Toward Authoritative Command," pp. 282-289).
163. Doris, "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics," p. 504.
164. A. Isen and P. Levin, "Effect of Feeling Good on Helping: Cookies and Kindness," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21 (1972), p. 387.
165. Isen and Levin, "Effect of Feeling Good on Helping," p. 387.
166. See, for example, the studies cited by J. Weyant and R. Clark, "Dimes and Helping: The Other Side of the Coin," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 3 (1977), p. 107.
167. G. Blevins and T. Murphy, "Feeling Good and Helping: Further Phone Booth Findings," Psychological Reports 34 (1974), p. 326.
168. Blevins and Murphy, "Feeling Good and Helping," p. 326.
169. P. Levin and A. Isen, "Further Studies on the Effect of Feeling Good on Helping," Sociometry 38 (1975), p. 146.
170. Weyant and Clark, "Dimes and Helping," p. 109.
171. Weyant and Clark, "Dimes and Helping," p. 109.
172. See also their graphite variant on the payphone experiment (Weyant and Clark, "Dimes and Helping," pp. 107-108).
173. It is worth noting that J. Schellenberg and G. Blevins ("Feeling Good and Helping: How Quickly Does the Smile of Dame Fortune Fade?," Psychological Reports 33 (1973), pp. 72-74) also could not duplicate the results of a different helping experiment described by Isen and Levin in "Effect of Feeling Good on Helping." of finding the dime in the coin slot.
174. See C. Batson et al., "Generality of the 'Glow of Goodwill': Effects of Mood on Helping and Information Acquisition," Social Psychology Quarterly 42 (1979), pp. 176-179.
175. For important recent work on similar kinds of helping experiments, see R. Baron and M. Bronfen, "A Whiff of Reality: Empirical Evidence Concerning the Effects of Pleasant Fragrances on Work-Related Behavior," Journal of Applied Social Psychology 24 (1994), pp. 1179-1203;
176. and R. Baron, "The Sweet Smell of ... Helping: Effects of Pleasant Ambient Fragrance on Prosocial Behavior in Shopping Malls," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 23 (1997), pp. 498-503, as well as the more general issues about affective influence raised by Forgas, "Feeling and Doing."