The situationist critique and early confucian virtue ethics

Ethics

Volumn 121, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 390-419

  Slingerland, Edward ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 79251528419     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/658142     Document Type: Article

References (107)

1. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (1777), 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 174-75.
2. This earlier attitude is well exemplified in Kant's indignant rejection of the "slack, or indeed ignoble, attitude which seeks for the moral principles among empirical motives or laws," as well as his claim that the purity of moral philosophy depends upon it being "the authoress of her own laws" rather than "the mouthpiece of laws whispered to her by some implanted sense or by who knows what tutelary nature" (Groundwork of theMetaphysics of Morals [1785], trans. H. J. Paton [New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964], 93).
3. Owen Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991);
4. Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
5. This view is most succinctly and famously expressed in Flanagan's "Principle of Minimal Psychological Realism": "Make sure when constructing a moral theory or projecting a moral ideal that the character, decision processing, and behavior prescribed are possible ⋯ for creatures like us" (Flanagan, Varieties, 32).
6. Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008);
7. Jesse Prinz, "Passionate Thoughts: The Embodiment of Moral Concepts," in Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language and Thinking, ed. Diane Pecher and Rolf A. Zwaan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 93-114
8. and The Emotional Construction of Morals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
9. A recent, representative collection of the "experimental philosophy" work can be found in Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols, Experimental Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
10. See, e.g., Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Putnam's, 1994);
11. and Jonathan Haidt, "The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment," Psychological Review 108 (2001): 814-34. (Pubitemid 33604149)
12. A helpful review of this literature can be found in Jonathan Haidt, "The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology," Science 316 (2007): 998-1002. (Pubitemid 46799481)
13. Paul Churchland, "Toward a Cognitive Neurobiology of the Moral Virtues," Topoi 17 (1998): 83-96;
14. William Casebeer, Natural Ethical Facts: Evolution, Connectionism and Moral Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003);
15. Edward Slingerland, "'Of What Use Are the Odes?' Cognitive Science, Virtue Ethics, and Early Confucian Ethics," Philosophy East and West 61 (2011): 80-109.
16. Of course, more recent proponents of both deontology and utilitarianism have acknowledged an important role for intuitive, implicit cognitive processes, sometimes confining explicit algorithmic reasoning to a critical meta level, which may only be invoked when conflicts arise or justifications need to be provided. While certainly more psychologically realistic, this still begs the question of how the behavioral desiderata arrived at through deontological or utilitarian reasoning are to be built into automatic everyday cognition, which is an issue that I would argue virtue ethics uniquely and explicitly addresses.
17. Gilbert Harman, "Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99 (1999): 315-31;
18. John Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
19. It is worth noting that Flanagan's original cautions were relatively mild and that he has since become quite critical of what he refers to as "a small band of mischievous hyperbolists, really just two" (i.e., Harman and Doris) who "have had their fun for too longmaking ontological mischief" (55) among psychologically and statistically underinformed philosophers. See Owen Flanagan, "Moral Science? Still Metaphysical after All These Years," in Personality, Identity, and Character: Explorations in Moral Psychology, ed. Darcia Narvaez and Daniel Lapsley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 54-65, for a critique of situationism that resonates with the arguments that I will be making below.
20. See, e.g., Joel Kupperman, "Naturalness Revisited," in Confucius and the Analects, ed. Bryan W. Van Norden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 39-52;
21. Rachana Kamtekar, "Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character," Ethics 114 (2004): 458-91; (Pubitemid 39224107)
22. John Sabini and Maury Silver, "Lack of Character? Situationism Critiqued," Ethics 115 (2005): 535-62; (Pubitemid 40829166)
23. Diana Fleming, "The Character of Virtue: Answering the Situationist Challenge to Virtue Ethics," Ratio 19 (2006): 24-42;
24. Eric Hutton, "Character, Situationism, and Early Confucian Thought," Philosophical Studies 127 (2006): 37- 58; (Pubitemid 44084399)
25. and Nancy Snow, Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory (New York: Routledge, 2010).
26. For a defense of Confucianism as "virtue ethic," see Stephen Wilson, "Conformity, Individuality, and the Nature of Virtue: A Classical Confucian Contribution to Contemporary Ethical Reflection," Journal of Religious Ethics 23 (1995): 263-89;
27. Philip J. Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 2000);
28. Edward Slingerland, "Virtue Ethics, the Analects, and the Problem of Commensurability," Journal of Religious Ethics 29 (2001): 97-125;
29. and Bryan Van Norden, Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). I take early Confucian thought as my model of virtue ethics both because it is the only form of virtue ethics that I am qualified to responsibly discuss and because, as I will argue in Sec. II, it may be less vulnerable to the situationist critique than the Aristotelian form that has played a more prominent role in the revival of virtue ethics.
30. John Darley and C. Daniel Batson, "From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27 (1973): 100-119;
31. Alice Isen and Paula Levin, "The Effect of Feeling Good on Helping: Cookies and Kindness," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21 (1972): 384-88.
32. "Personality and Assessment at Age 40: Reflections on the Past Person-Situation Debate and Emerging Directions of Future Person-Situation Integration," ed. M. Brent Donnelan, Richard Lucas, and William Fleeson, special issue, Journal of Research in Personality 43 (2009).
33. The reader is referred to this issue for a much more detailed account of the state of the field than can be provided here. Although one might feel that the Journal of Research in Personality hosting a survey of the personality vs. situation debate is a bit like Pravda at the height of the Cold War devoting an issue to the relative merits of capitalism vs. communism, the editors of this special issue made a concerted effort to be evenhanded, and the full spectrum of opinions on the topic is represented. David C. Funder, "Persons, Behaviors and Situations: An Agenda for Personality Psychology in the Postwar Era," in ibid., 120-26, at 120.
34. See Brent Roberts, "Back to the Future: Personality and Assessment and Personality Development," Journal of Research in Personality 43 (2009): 139-40, on the subject, what are personality traits, anyway?
35. Walter Mischel, "From Personality and Assessment (1968) to Personality Science, 2009," Journal of Research in Personality 43 (2009): 282-90, 284;
36. Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda, and Rodol Denton, "Situation-Behavior Profiles as a Locus of Consistency in Personality," Current Directions in Psychological Science 11 (2002): 50-54.
37. Doris, Lack of Character, 64.
38. Regarding "Big-Five" and "not entirely unalterable or context insensitive," see Jack Block and Jeanne H. Block, "Venturing a 30-Year Longitudinal Study," American Psychologist 61 (2006): 315-27; (Pubitemid 43815187)
39. and Dan P. McAdams and Jennifer L. Pals, "A New Big Five: Fundamental Principles for an Integrative Science of Personality," American Psychologist 61 (2006): 204-17 (Pubitemid 43667966)
40. Regarding "have a considerable genetic component," see Auke Tellegen, David Lykken, Thomas Bouchard, Kimerly Wilcox, Nancy Segal, and Stephen Rich, "Personality Similarity in Twins Reared Apart and Together," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54 (1988): 1031-39
41. Regarding "predict substantive life outcomes," see Paul Costa and Robert McRae, "Personality in Adulthood: A Six-Year Longitudinal Study of Self-Reports and Spouse Ratings on the Neo Personality Inventory," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54 (1988): 853-63;
42. Robert Hogan, "In Defense of Personality Measurement: New Wine for Old Whiners," Human Performance 18 (2005): 331-41; (Pubitemid 41634642)
43. Daniel Ozer and Verónica Benet-Martinez, "Personality and the Prediction of Consequential Outcomes," Annual Review of Psychology 57 (2006): 401-21; (Pubitemid 43237238)
44. and Brent Roberts, Nathan Kuncel, Rebecca Shiner, Avshalom Caspi, and Lewis Goldberg, "The Power of Personality: The Comparative Validity of Personality Traits, Socioeconomic Status, and Cognitive Ability for Predicting Important Life Outcomes," Perspectives on Psychological Science 2 (2007): 313-45.
45. Doris, Lack of Character, 73-74.
46. In another of the early situationist classics, Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett granted that the correlations might be as high as 0.4 (Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett, The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991]).
47. Always sensitive to potential counterarguments (a character trait?), Doris does acknowledge that one person's "weak" correlation is another person's "suggestive" one (Lack of Character, 38), but he fails to further question this dismissal of 0.3 as insignificant.
48. Gregory J. Meyer, Stephen E. Finn, Lorraine D. Eyde, Gary G. Kay, Kevin L. Moreland, Robert R. Dies, Elena J. Eisman, Tom W. Kubiszyn, and Geoffrey M. Reed, "Psychological Testing and Psychological Assessment: A Review of Evidence and Issues," American Psychologist 56 (2001): 128-65. (Pubitemid 33624315)
49. David Funder and Daniel Ozer, "Behavior as a Function of the Situation," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 44 (1983): 107-12;
50. F. D. Richard, Charles Bond, and Juli Stokes-Zoota, "One Hundred Years of Social Psychology Quantitatively Described," Review of General Psychology 7 (2003): 331-63 (Pubitemid 38023813)
51. Richard et al.'s "One Hundred Years," a massive meta-study of a century of social psychology literature encompassing 25,000 studies of 8 million subjects, concluded that social psychological effects averaged a "Pearson product-moment coefficient" (r), which measures the linear dependence between two variables, of 0.21, with a standard deviation of 0.15.
52. Robert Rosenthal and Donald Rubin, "A Simple, General Purpose Display of Magnitude of Experimental Effect," Journal of Educational Psychology 74 (1982): 166-69.
53. From Robert Abelson, "A Variance Explanation Paradox: When a Little Is a Lot," Psychological Bulletin 97 (1985): 129-33 (cited in Sabini and Silver, "Lack of Character?").
54. Harman, "Moral Philosophy";
55. Doris, Lack of Character, 64.
56. As Nancy Snow observes, Doris's strong antiglobalist view of local traits is even more extreme than the model currently embraced by Walter Mischel and his colleagues, the "cognitive-affecting processing system (CAPS)," which encompasses the individual's subjective interpretation of situations as well as objective situational features and thus is much more amenable to modification or extension (Snow, Virtue as Social Intelligence).
57. To be fair, for all his dramatic talk of "lack of character," the argument of Doris, at least, is not based upon a blanket denial of global traits, or an absolute distinction between local and global, but merely the claim that empirically defensible traits are not global enough to do the work that virtue ethics requires of them. I will address this "high bar" argument-the claim that nothing short of a nearly 1.0 correlation between traits and behavior is adequate to get a virtue ethical system off the ground-in Sec. II.
58. David C. Funder, "Persons, Behaviors and Situations: An Agenda for Personality Psychology in the Postwar Era," Journal of Research in Personality 43 (2009): 120-26, at 122.
59. Richard E. Lucas and M. Brent Donnellan, "If the Person-Situation Debate Is Really Over, Why Does It Still Generate So Much Negative Affect?" Journal of Research in Personality 43 (2009): 146-49.
60. Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May, Studies in the Nature of Character, vol. 1, Studies in Deceit (New York: Macmillan, 1928).
61. Doris, Lack of Character, 115.
62. It was pointed out by an anonymous reader that xin is a crucial virtue in interactions with one's you , a term typically translated as "friends," which might seem to undermine my claim that xin is restricted to one's professional behavior. It is important to realize that, in the Confucian context, you refers not to random acquaintances or childhood buddies, but rather to a subset of the professional colleagues of a given "gentleman"-the cultivated scholar-politician who is the target of Confucian education-who are more or less of the same rank/seniority and with whom the gentleman, to borrow a concept from Aristotle, shares a vision of the "Good." You marks out those colleagues whom one finds personally amenable and who also share one's moral aspirations.
63. My first-run guess would be that it involves a perceived metaphorical resonance between the financial harm caused by professional compact with a client and the emotional harm caused to one's spouse by violating a social compact.
64. As mentioned above, this can be seen as the core of Doris's argument against virtue ethics, and I thank both Doris (personal communication, 2009) and one of the anonymous readers for this journal for clarifying this point and focusing my attention upon it.
65. See John Knoblock's Xunzi, chap. 2 ("Cultivating the Self"), for a more extended expression of this sentiment (Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, vol. 1 [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988], 154-55).
66. This article is intended more as a response to the situationist critique than as a full introduction to early Confucian ethics, so I will do no more here than briefly sketch out a few relevant aspects of the early Confucian picture of self-cultivation. For more in-depth discussions, the reader is referred to Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation;
67. Edward Slingerland, Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003);
68. and Van Norden, Virtue Ethics, as well as the Confucian response to situationism described by Eric Hutton, "Character, Situationism," 37-58.
69. Confucius declares in Analects 16.9 that "those who are born understanding it are the best," and the portrayal of the disciple Yan Hui in that text suggests that he was such a person (see esp. 2.9, 5.9, 6.7, and 11.4);
70. cf. the portrayal of the sage-king Shun in Mencius 7:A:16.
71. See, e.g., Kamtekar's observation ("Situationism and Virtue Ethics") that narrow dispositions can be extended cross-situationally through analogical reasoning. Snow, Virtue as Social Intelligence.
72. Snow, Virtue as Social Intelligence, 34
73. An example of the research Snow discusses is Patricia Devine and Margo Monteith, "Automaticity and Control in Stereotyping," in Dual-Process Models and Themes in Social and Cognitive Psychology, ed. Shelly Chaiken and Yaacov Trope (New York: Guilford, 1999), 339-60.
74. Snow, Virtue as Social Intelligence, quotations, respectively, at 38 and 37.
75. A roughly contemporaneous text that is very critical of Confucian morality, the Zhuangzi, contains a passage where a butcher cutting up an ox in front of his ruler, presumably for just such a sacrifice, is presented as a perfected sage and his butchering as a model for proper living. It is possible that this story is partially intended to mock the fastidious hypocrisy of Mencius 1:A:7.
76. For Mencius, "benevolence" (ren ), although only one of four cardinal virtues, is the most important, and it often stands in metonymically for the other three, which accounts for his eagerness to demonstrate its existence in even such a figure as King Xuan.
77. See Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, for an overview of this literature.
78. Phillip J. Ivanhoe, "Confucian Self-Cultivation and Mengzi's Notion of Extension," in Essays in the Moral Philosophy of Mengzi, ed. Xiusheng Liu and Phillip J. Ivanhoe (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), 221-41, 226;
79. cf. David Wong, "Reasons and Analogical Reasoning," in Liu and Ivanhoe, Mengzi, 187-220;
80. and Van Norden, Virtue Ethics, 234-38.
81. This account of Mencian self-cultivation is derived from Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, to which the reader is referred for a more complete account.
82. See ibid. for an outline of the various strategies found in early Confucian selfcultivation.
83. Xunzi, Discourse on Ritual, chap. 19. In this passage, "sorrow and joy" are standing in metonymically for all innate human emotions.
84. For more on the moral significance of "style" for the early Confucians, see Nicholas Gier, "The Dancing Ru: A Confucian Aesthetics of Virtue," Philosophy East and West 51 (2001): 280-305;
85. Kupperman, "Naturalness Revisited";
86. Amy Olberding, "The Educative Function of Personal Style in the Analects," Philosophy East and West 57 (2007): 357-74.
87. On this topic, see also the discussion by Hagop Sarkissian on the apparent importance of "agent-introduced situational effects" in Confucius's Analects (Hagop Sarkissian, "After Confucius: Psychology and Moral Power" [PhD diss., Department of Philosophy, Duke University, 2008]).
88. For contemporary discussions on the importance of situational factors for virtue ethics, see Maria Merritt, "Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology," Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 3 (2000): 365-83, on virtues as local traits sustained by social relationships and settings;
89. or Steven Samuels and William Casebeer, "A Social Psychological View of Morality: Why Knowledge of Situational Influences on Behavior Can Improve Character Development Practices," Journal of Moral Education 34 (2005): 73-87, on the role of proper training environments in facilitating virtue acquisition. (Pubitemid 40482788)
90. Ap Dijkhuizen and A. Van Knippenberg, "The Relation between Perception and Behavior, or How to Win a Game of Trivial Pursuit," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 (1998): 865-77. (Pubitemid 128656657)
91. For a review of some of this literature, see Ap Dijkhuizen and John Bargh, "The Perception-Behavior Expressway: Automatic Effects of Social Perception on Social Behavior," in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 40, ed. Mark P. Zanna (San Diego: Academic Press, 2001), 1-40. (Pubitemid 33804394)
92. Lee Ross and Andrew Ward, "Naive Realism in Everyday Life: Implications for Social Conflict and Misunderstandings," in Values and Knowledge, ed. Edward Reed, Elliot Turiel, and Terrance Brown (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1996), 103-35.
93. For more on zhengming, see Hui-Chieh Loy, "Analects 13.3 and the Doctrine of 'Correcting Names,'" Monumenta Serica 51 (2003): 19-36.
94. To take merely a few examples from the Analects, Confucius himself was reluctant to declare himself perfected, noting that "what can be said about me is no more than this: I work at it without growing tired and encourage others without growing weary" (7.34); on a similar note, he warned his disciples to "learn as if you will never catch up, and as if you feared losing what you have already attained" (8.17). Master Zeng in 8.7 notes that the journey of the gentleman ends "only with death," and even the supposedly "good-by-birth" disciple Yan Hui is portrayed in Analects 9.11 as lamenting of the Confucian Way, "the more I look up at it the higher it seems; the more I delve into it, the harder it becomes. Catching a glimpse of it before me, I then suddenly find it at my back."
95. Harman, "Moral Philosophy."
96. Hutton, "Character, Situationism."
97. Xunzi, chap. 23 ("Human Nature Is Bad"), adapted from Hutton's translation, with an additional line cited at the beginning.
98. As one anonymous Ethics referee observes, one might argue that such an ethic should be seen as "situationism with a touch of virtue theory thrown in" rather than as a genuine virtue ethic. However, since situationism as it has typically been formulated leaves essentially no causal room for character traits, it would seem that, when it comes to early Confucian ethics, we are still clearly under the ambit of "virtue ethics," although the relative roles being played by enhanced character traits and situational controls is an open question.
99. See Mischel, "From Personality and Assessment," for a helpful overview of this work on the "agentic, proactive self."
100. Ibid., 288.
101. Xin refers to the organ of the heart, which by mid-Warring States was perceived as the locus of distinction making, language use, reasoning, and free will, as well as the locus of certain moral emotions. It thus does not correspond neatly to either "mind" or "heart."
102. On this topic, see Edward Slingerland, "Toward an Empirically Responsible Ethics: Cognitive Science, Virtue Ethics, and Effortless Attention in Early Chinese Thought," in Effortless Attention: A New Perspective in the Cognitive Science of Attention and Action, ed. Brian Bruya (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 247-86, and "Of What Use?"
103. Jonathan Cohen, "The Vulcanization of the Human Brain: A Neural Perspective on Interactions between Cognition and Emotion," Journal of Economic Perspectives 19 (2004): 3-24. (Pubitemid 43572701)
104. Ibid., 19.
105. Patrick Hill and Daniel Lapsley, "Persons and Situations in the Moral Domain," Journal of Research in Personality 43 (2009): 245-46.
106. One of Mencius's primary critiques of the consequentialist, rationalist Mohist school was that their ethical demands and extreme voluntarism went against basic human cognitive and emotional capacities and were therefore psychologically infeasible; Xunzi similarly criticized Mohism for ignoring basic human emotional tendencies and the ability of cultural forms to reshape these tendencies in an ethically desirable way.
107. For more on this topic, see Donald Munro, A Chinese Ethics for the New Century: The Ch'ien Mu Lectures in History and Culture, and Other Essays on Science and Confucian Ethics (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2005); and Slingerland, "Of What Use?"