Virtue, character and situation

Journal of Moral Philosophy

Volumn 3, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 193-213

  Webber, Jonathan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Character traits; Situationism; Social psychology; Virtue ethics

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149517522     PISSN: 17404681     EISSN: 17455243     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1740468106065492     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. John Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behaviour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), chs. 1-5
2. Peter Goldie, On Personality (London: Routledge, 2004), chs. 3 and 4; the sailing example is taken from p. 115
3. Doris, Lack of Character, pp. 146-47
4. Maria Merritt, 'Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology', Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 2 (2000), pp. 365-83
5. Goldie, On Personality, chs. 3 and 4
6. Gilbert Harman presents a similar but distinct argument in his paper 'Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99.3 (1999), pp. 315-31. He employs some of the data employed by Doris, and argues that character is illusory and so characterological discourse should be abandoned altogether. I cannot do justice to his argument here, but see my 'Character, Common-Sense, and Expertise' (forthcoming)
7. Summary of Alice M. Isen and Paula F. Levin, 'Effect of Feeling Good on Helping: Cookies and Kindness', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21.3 (1972), pp. 384-88, Study II
8. Merritt, 'Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology', p. 366
9. Christian Miller, 'Social Psychology and Virtue Ethics', The Journal of Ethics 7.4 (2003), pp. 365-92, Appendix
10. See, for example, John Sabini, Social Psychology (London and New York: Norton, 2nd edn, 1995), pp. 307-10
11. John Sabini and Maury Silver, 'Lack of Character? Situationism Critiqued', Ethics 115.3 (2005), pp. 535-62 (539-40)
12. Rachana Kamtekar, 'Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character', Ethics 114.3 (2004), pp. 458-91 (466 n. 30)
13. Other objections to the use of this data are raised by Gopal Sreenivasan in 'Errors About Errors: Virtue Theory and Trait Attribution', Mind 111.441 (2002), pp. 47-68
14. and by John Sabini and Maury Silver on pp. 540-44 of their 'Lack of Character? Situationism Critiqued', Ethics 115 (2005), pp. 535-62. These criticisms are misplaced, as Doris rightly does not use this data as evidence. See also note 23 below, and my 'Character, Consistency, and Classification' (forthcoming)
15. Summarized from Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), ch. 2
16. See Milgram, Obedience to Authority, ch. 4 experiments 1 and 2, and ch. 6 experiments 5 and 8
17. Sabini and Silver, 'Lack of Character?', pp. 546-47, esp n. 33
18. Summary of Bibb Latané and John M. Darley, The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn't He Help? (New York: Meredith, 1970), pp. 57-60
19. Summary of J.M. Darley and C. Daniel Batson, 'From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behaviour', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27.1 (1973), pp. 100-108
20. Doris provides much the same understanding of traits in his earlier paper, where he first puts forward his argument against the traditional conception of character: 'Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics', Noûs 32.4 (1998), pp. 504-30 (506-507)
21. Michael DePaul, 'Character Traits, Virtues, and Vices: Are There None?', in Bernard Elevitch (ed.), Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy. IX: Philosophy of Mind (Bowling Green, OH: Philosophy Documentation Center, 2000), pp. 150-53
22. Miller, 'Social Psychology and Virtue Ethics', §IV
23. See also Sreenivasan, 'Errors About Errors', p. 57
24. Doris, 'Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics', pp. 505, 506-507, 511-13
25. When Kamtekar claims that such empirical arguments against 'virtue ethics' wrongly suppose that traits must be distinctive to the individuals possessing them ('Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character', pp. 467-68), she similarly fails to engage with this argument
26. As we saw in section 3, the authority involved in the Obedience Experiment is that of an institutional expert and moral guide, not simply that of the person in charge. Sabini and Silver question whether the behaviour of the subjects in the Samaritan Experiment should be described in terms of punctuality, preferring instead to invoke potential embarrassment at arriving late ('Lack of Character? Situationism Critiqued', p. 558). But these explanations seem complementary rather than contrary. Potential embarrassment could enforce one's acting on one's commitment to punctuality, and without that commitment it is difficult to see why somebody would be embarrassed by being late rather than proud of having stopped to help
27. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, translated by Christopher Rowe, with introduction and commentary by Sarah Broadie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Quotation is from 1106b21-23; see also 1115b15-20
28. Nicomachean Ethics, 1144b32-1145a2
29. John McDowell, 'Virtue and Reason', Monist 62 (1979), pp. 331-50
30. Reprinted in his Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), §2
31. Philippa Foot, 'Virtues and Vices', in her Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), §111
32. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book 7 chapters 1-10, esp. 1146b31-5
33. McDowell, 'Virtue and Reason', §3
34. See Bernard Williams, 'Internal and External Reasons', in his Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 104
35. Aristotle's lengthy and scattered thoughts on deliberation are discussed in: Richard Sorabji, 'Aristotle on the Role of Intellect in Virtue', pp. 205-207
36. David Wiggins, 'Deliberation and Practical Reason', pp. 231-37; both in Essays on Aristotle's Ethics, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980)
37. Nicomachean Ethics, 1143b11-14; see also 1109b18-23, 1126b2-4 and 1142a27-30
38. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 20
39. Wiggins, 'Deliberation and Practical Reason', pp. 232-33
40. Martha C. Nussbaum, 'The Discernment of Perception: An Aristotelian Conception of Private and Public Rationality', in her Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 74 and 79
41. See Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (Oxford and Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), p. 21
42. For more on the definitions of 'northern' and 'southern' used here, see Nisbett and Cohen, Culture of Honor, Appendix C
43. Nisbett and Cohen, Culture of Honor, ch. 4. For further data in support of the theory of a southern culture of honour, see chs. 3 and 5; for more on what this culture involves, see chs. 1 and 6