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  1. Virtue Ethics.Rosalind Hursthouse & Glen Pettigrove - 2022 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Virtue ethics is currently one of three major approaches in normative ethics. It may, initially, be identified as the one that emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to the approach that emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or that emphasizes the consequences of actions (consequentialism). Suppose it is obvious that someone in need should be helped. A utilitarian will point to the fact that the consequences of doing so will maximize well-being, a deontologist to the fact that, in doing (...)
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  • Malleable character: organizational behavior meets virtue ethics and situationism.Santiago Mejia & Joshua August Skorburg - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (12):3535-3563.
    This paper introduces a body of research on Organizational Behavior and Industrial/organizational Psychology that expands the range of empirical evidence relevant to the ongoing character-situation debate. This body of research, mostly neglected by moral philosophers, provides important insights to move the debate forward. First, the OB/io scholarship provides empirical evidence to show that social environments like organizations have significant power to shape the character traits of their members. This scholarship also describes some of the mechanisms through which this process of (...)
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  • Virtue Theory for Moral Enhancement.Joao Fabiano - 2021 - American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 12 (2-3):89-102.
    Our present moral traits are unable to provide the level of large-scale co-operation necessary to deal with risks such as nuclear proliferation, drastic climate change and pandemics. In order to survive in an environment with powerful and easily available technologies, some authors claim that we need to improve our moral traits with moral enhancement. But this is prone to produce paradoxical effects, be self-reinforcing and harm personal identity. The risks of moral enhancement require the use of a safety framework; such (...)
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  • Moral psychology: Empirical approaches.John Doris & Stephen Stich - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Moral psychology investigates human functioning in moral contexts, and asks how these results may impact debate in ethical theory. This work is necessarily interdisciplinary, drawing on both the empirical resources of the human sciences and the conceptual resources of philosophical ethics. The present article discusses several topics that illustrate this type of inquiry: thought experiments, responsibility, character, egoism v . altruism, and moral disagreement.
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  • The Possibility of Virtue.Miguel Alzola - 2012 - Business Ethics Quarterly 22 (2):377-404.
    ABSTRACT:To have a virtue is to possess a certain kind of trait of character that is appropriate in pursuing the moral good at which the virtue aims. Human beings are assumed to be capable of attaining those traits. Yet, a number of scholars are skeptical about the very existence of such character traits. They claim a sizable amount of empirical evidence in their support. This article is concerned with the existence and explanatory power of character as a way to assess (...)
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  • The most important thing about climate change.John Broome - 2010 - In Jonathan Boston, Andrew Bradstock & David L. Eng, Public policy: why ethics matters. Acton, A.C.T.: ANUE Press. pp. 101-16.
    This book chapter is not available in ORA, but you may download, display, print and reproduce this chapter in unaltered form only for your personal, non-commercial use or use within your organization from the ANU E Press website.
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  • The Milgram Experiments, Learned Helplessness, and Character Traits.Neera K. Badhwar - 2009 - The Journal of Ethics 13 (2):257-289.
    The Milgram and other situationist experiments support the real-life evidence that most of us are highly akratic and heteronomous, and that Aristototelian virtue is not global. Indeed, like global theoretical knowledge, global virtue is psychologically impossible because it requires too much of finite human beings with finite powers in a finite life; virtue can only be domain-specific. But unlike local, situation-specific virtues, domain-specific virtues entail some general understanding of what matters in life, and are connected conceptually and causally to our (...)
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  • Virtue, Environmental Ethics, Nonhuman Values, and Anthropocentrism.Marcello Di Paola - 2024 - Philosophies 9 (1):15.
    This article discusses the encounter between virtue ethics and environmental ethics and the ways in which environmental virtue ethics confronts nonhuman axiology and the controversial theme of moral anthropocentrism. It provides a reasoned review of the relevant literature and a historical–conceptual rendition of how environmental and virtue ethics came to converge as well as the ways in which they diverge. It explains that contrary to important worries voiced by some non-anthropocentric environmental ethicists, environmental virtue ethics enables and requires a rich (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Drugs and Hugs: Stimulating Moral Dispositions as a Method of Moral Enhancement.Michał Klincewicz, Lily Eva Frank & Marta Sokólska - 2018 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 83:329-350.
    Advocates of moral enhancement through pharmacological, genetic, or other direct interventions sometimes explicitly argue, or assume without argument, that traditional moral education and development is insufficient to bring about moral enhancement. Traditional moral education grounded in a Kohlbergian theory of moral development is indeed unsuitable for that task; however, the psychology of moral development and education has come a long way since then. Recent studies support the view that moral cognition is a higher-order process, unified at a functional level, and (...)
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  • Virtuous acts as practical medical ethics: an empirical study.Miles Little, Jill Gordon, Pippa Markham, Lucie Rychetnik & Ian Kerridge - 2011 - Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 17 (5):948-953.
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  • Extended Virtues and the Boundaries of Persons.Robert J. Howell - 2016 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (1):146--163.
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  • Commonsense morality and the bearable automaticity of being.Samuel Murray & Thomas Nadelhoffer - 2024 - Consciousness and Cognition 125 (C):103748.
    Some research suggests that moral behavior can be strongly influenced by trivial features of the environment of which we are completely unaware. Philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists have argued that these findings undermine our commonsense notions of agency and responsibility, both of which emphasize the role of practical reasoning and conscious deliberation in action. We present the results of four vignette-based studies (N = 1,437) designed to investigate how people think about the metaphysical and moral implications of scientific findings that reveal (...)
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  • Virtue Ethics is Empirically Adequate: A Defense of the Caps Response to Situationism.Ryan West - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (S1):79-111.
    According to situationists, the available empirical psychological data show that prevalent conceptions of virtue are ‘empirically inadequate.’ The charge is ambiguous. I begin by differentiating four families of empirical inadequacy charges, explaining the conceptual connections among the families, and showing how different situationists press different versions of the charges from each family. Then I explain how the empirical psychological model known as the ‘cognitive affective personality system,’ or ‘CAPS model,’ enables distinct responses to these varied charges. The CAPS response has (...)
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  • Character and Situationism: New Directions.Christian B. Miller - 2017 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (3):459-471.
    The early work by Gilbert Harman and John Doris on character and situationism has fostered a vast literature over the past 15 years. Yet despite all this work, there are many important issues which remain largely unexplored. The goal of this paper is to briefly outline eight promising research directions: neglected moral virtues, neglected non-moral virtues, virtue assessment and measurement, replication, non-Aristotelian virtue ethics, positive accounts of character trait possession, prescriptive situationism, and virtue cultivation.
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  • Empirical Adequacy and Virtue Ethics.Philip A. Reed - 2016 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 19 (2):343-357.
    Situationists contend that virtue ethics is empirically inadequate. However, it is my contention that there is much confusion over what “empirical adequacy” or “empirical inadequacy” actually means in this context. My aim in this paper is to clarify the meanings of empirical adequacy in order to see to what extent virtue ethics might fail to meet this standard. I argue that the situationists frequently misconstrue the empirical commitments of virtue ethics. More importantly, depending on what we mean by empirical adequacy, (...)
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  • The appearance standard: Criteria and remedies for when a mere appearance of unethical behavior is morally unacceptable.Muel Kaptein - 2018 - Business Ethics: A European Review 28 (1):99-111.
    While there are companies whose codes of ethics state that mere appearance of unethical behavior by employees is morally unacceptable, this so‐called appearance standard has hardly received any attention in the business ethics literature. Using corporate integrity theory, this article explores the criteria that may explain how mere appearances of unethical behavior can arise (i.e., the presence of conflicts of interests, the entanglement of these interests, a reputation for lack of integrity, and deviant outcomes) and those that may make such (...)
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  • Situationism and the problem of moral improvement.Matthew C. Taylor - 2019 - Philosophical Explorations 22 (3):312-327.
    A wealth of research in social psychology indicates that various ethically arbitrary situational factors exert a surprisingly powerful influence on moral conduct. Empirically-minded philosophers have argued over the last two decades that this evidence challenges Aristotelian virtue ethics. John Doris, Gilbert Harman, and Maria Merritt have argued that situationist moral psychology – as opposed to Aristotelian moral psychology – is better suited to the practical aim of helping agents act better. The Aristotelian account, with its emphasis on individual factors, invites (...)
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  • Non-Ideal Virtue and Situationism.Matthew C. Taylor - 2021 - The Journal of Ethics 26 (1):41-68.
    Several philosophers, known as situationists, have argued that evidence in social psychology threatens to undermine Aristotelian virtue ethics. An impressively large amount of empirical evidence suggests that most people do not consistently act virtuously and lack the ability to exercise rational control over their behavior. Since possessing moral virtues requires these features, situationists have argued that Aristotelianism does not accurately describe the character traits possessed by most people, and so the theory cannot lay claim to various theoretical advantages such as (...)
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  • The Cultures of Insider Trading.Meir Statman - 2009 - Journal of Business Ethics 89 (1):51 - 58.
    Paul Bond is a lawyer who overheard two other lawyers at his office discussing the proposed purchase of a company by one of their clients. He proceeds to buy shares of this company. Would you rate Bond's behavior completely fair, acceptable, unfair, or very unfair? I posed this vignette to samples of university students in China, Taiwan, and the U. S. Most students in the U. S. and Taiwan samples rated Bond's behavior unfair or very unfair while most students in (...)
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  • Hacer de la necesidad virtud: Apuntes sobre las transformaciones de la Ética por el influjo de las ciencias empíricas.Hugo Viciana - 2009 - In Concepción Diosdado, Francisco Rodríguez Valls & Juan Arana, Neurofilosofía: Perspectivas Contemporáneas. Madrid: Plaza y Valdés. pp. 11-36.
    Se plantea la cuestión de los lazos entre la teoría ética y las ciencias empíricas del comportamiento. En particular a modo de estudios de caso se pasa revista a la relevancia de ciertos descubrimientos sobre el comportamiento en la formulación de teorías sobre la virtud, el carácter o la voluntad. Desde ahí se pretende esbozar un procedimiento general de cambio progresivo y parcial de términos teóricos, descriptivos y normativos, de la teoría ética por nuevos términos apoyados en el aumento de (...)
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  • Measuring Individuals’ Virtues in Business.David Dawson - 2018 - Journal of Business Ethics 147 (4):793-805.
    This paper argues that Shanahan and Hyman’s Virtue Ethics Scale should be abandoned and that work should begin to develop better-grounded measures for identifying individual business virtue in context. It comes to this conclusion despite the VES being the only existing measure of individuals’ virtues that focuses on business people in general, rather than those who hold specific leadership or audit roles. The paper presents a study that, in attempting to validate the VES, raises significant concerns about its construction. In (...)
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  • Limited Conventions about Morals.Marinus Ferreira - 2017 - Dissertation, University of Auckland
    n this thesis I describe how conventions specify how to put normative principles into practice. I identify a class of recurring situations where there are some given normative principles in effect, but they underdetermine what each individual should do, and what is best for an individual depends on what others do. I demonstrate that in such cases, whenever the community develops a response that repeatedly brings them to as good an outcome as is available according to their principles, that response (...)
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  • Does Habit Interference Explain Moral Failure?James Bernard Murphy - 2015 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (2):255-273.
    Social psychologists have performed many well-known experiments demonstrating that experimental subjects will perform in ways that are normatively inconsistent even across very similar situations. Situationist social psychologists and philosophers have often interpreted these findings to imply that most people lack general moral dispositions. These situationists have argued that our moral dispositions are at best narrowly local traits; they often describe our moral characters as fragmented. In this paper, I offer an alternative hypothesis for the same experimental results. I argue that (...)
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  • Sharing the responsibility of dealing with climate change: Interpreting the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities.Dan Weijers, David Eng & Ramon Das - 2010 - In Jonathan Boston, Andrew Bradstock & David L. Eng, Public policy: why ethics matters. Acton, A.C.T.: ANUE Press. pp. 141-158.
    In this chapter we first discuss the main principles of justice and note the standard objections to them, which we believe necessitate a hybrid approach. The hybrid account we defend is primarily based on the distributive principle of sufficientarianism, which we interpret as the idea that each country should have the means to provide a minimally decent quality of life for each of its citizens. We argue that sufficientarian considerations give good reason to think that what we call the ‘ability (...)
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  • Making Do Without : A Response to Arpaly, Tiberius, and Kane.John M. Doris - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 97 (3):771-790.
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  • Flourishing in the Age of Climate Change: Finding the Heart of Sustainability.William Throop - 2016 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 40 (1):296-314.
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  • Moral Lessons from Psychology: Contemporary Themes in Psychological Research and their relevance for Ethical Theory.Henrik Ahlenius - 2020 - Stockholm: Stockholm University.
    The thesis investigates the implications for moral philosophy of research in psychology. In addition to an introduction and concluding remarks, the thesis consists of four chapters, each exploring various more specific challenges or inputs to moral philosophy from cognitive, social, personality, developmental, and evolutionary psychology. Chapter 1 explores and clarifies the issue of whether or not morality is innate. The chapter’s general conclusion is that evolution has equipped us with a basic suite of emotions that shape our moral judgments in (...)
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  • Situationism and the Concept of a Situation.Kristján Kristjánsson - 2011 - European Journal of Philosophy 20 (S1):E52-E72.
    Abstract: The concept of a situation underlying the debate between moral situationists and dispositionists conceals various underexplored complexities. Some of those issues have been engaged recently in the so-called psychology of situations, but they have been slow to receive attention in mainstream philosophy. I invoke various distinctions among situations, and show how situationists have selectively chosen certain types of situations that, for conceptual reasons, skew the argument in their favour. I introduce the concept of a ‘virtue-calibrated situation’, and argue that (...)
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  • The Use of Good Character Discounts in Sentencing Financial Fraudsters.Lisa Marriott - 2024 - Criminal Justice Ethics 43 (3):285-303.
    This article assesses how good character is used to discount sentences in tax and benefit fraud cases in Aotearoa New Zealand. Four factors are highlighted. The first is a focus on neoliberal priorities that privilege “good citizens” who are primarily tax fraudsters, with the provision of sentence discounts to ensure the offender can remain in employment. The second is sentence reduction, which is primarily visible in tax cases when repayment of the outstanding funds is made. While the average value of (...)
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  • Corrupted: An Essay on Intellectual Character and Epistemic Vice.Taylor Matthews - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Nottingham
    This thesis examines the relationship between character and intellectual or epistemic vices. The philosophical study of epistemic vices is called vice epistemology. To date, much of the work in this emerging field has focused on the nature and epistemological significance of particular intellectual vices such as close-mindedness or dogmatism. Far less has been said about how it is that people come to acquire and develop these intellectual vices. My aim in this thesis is to fill this lacuna by articulating how (...)
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  • A Defence of Sentiments: Emotions, Dispositions, and Character.Hichem Naar - unknown
    Contemporary emotion research typically takes the phenomenon of emotion to be exhausted by a class of mental events that are intentional, conscious, and related to certain sorts of behaviour. Moreover, other affective phenomena, such as moods, are also considered to be relatively short-term, episodic, or occurrent states of the subject undergoing them. Emotions, and other putative emotional phenomena that common-sense takes as long-lasting, non-episodic, or dispositional are things that both philosophers and scientists sometimes recognise, but that are relatively neglected in (...)
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  • Beyond following rules: Teaching research ethics in the age of the Hoffman Report.Elissa N. Rodkey, Michael Buttrey & Krista L. Rodkey - 2022 - History of the Human Sciences 35 (5):80-107.
    The Hoffman Report scandal demonstrates that ethics is not objective and ahistorical, contradicting the comforting progressive story about ethics many students receive. This modern-day ethical failure illustrates some of the weaknesses of the current ethics code: it is rule-based, emphasizes punishments for noncompliance, and assumes a rational actor who can make tricky ethical decisions using a cost–benefit analysis. This rational emphasis translates into pedagogy: the cure for unethical behavior is more education. Yet such an approach seems unlikely to foster ethical (...)
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  • Freedom.Jonathan Webber - 2011 - In Sebastian Luft & Søren Overgaard, The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology. Routledge.
    Human freedom was Jean-Paul Sartre’s central philosophical preoccupation throughout his career. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the cornerstone of his moral and political thought, Being and Nothingness, contains an extensive and subtle account of the metaphysical freedom that he considered fundamental to the kind of existence that humans have. Although rooted in phenomenology, Sartre’s account of freedom draws very little on analysis of the experience of freedom itself. It is rather based on a general phenomenological account of perceptual experience (...)
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  • Moral progress and Canada's climate failure.Byron Williston - 2011 - Journal of Global Ethics 7 (2):149 - 160.
    In a recent letter to Canada's national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, British columnist and climate change gadfly George Monbiot pleaded with Canada to clean up its greenhouse gas emissions act. The letter appeared just a week before the Copenhagen climate conference. In it, Monbiot alleged that Canada's newly acquired status as oil superpower threatens to ?brutalize? the country, as it has other oil-rich countries (Monbiot, G. 2009. Please, Canada, clean up your act, The Globe and Mail, November 30, A15). (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Drugs and Hugs: Stimulating Moral Dispositions as a Method of Moral Enhancement.Michał Klincewicz, Lily Eva Frank & Marta Sokólska - 2018 - In Michael Hauskeller & Lewis Coyne, Moral Enhancement: Critical Perspectives. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
    Advocates of moral enhancement through pharmacological, genetic, or other direct interventions sometimes explicitly argue, or assume without argument, that traditional moral education and development is insufficient to bring about moral enhancement. Traditional moral education grounded in a Kohlbergian theory of moral development is indeed unsuitable for that task; however, the psychology of moral development and education has come a long way since then. Recent studies support the view that moral cognition is a higher-order process, unified at a functional level, and (...)
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