Two debates in contemporary philosophical moral psychology have so far been conducted almost entirely in isolation from one another despite their structural similarity. One is the debate over the importance for virtue ethics of the results of situational manipulation experiments in social psychology. The other is the debate over the ethical implications of experiments that reveal gender and race biases in social cognition. In both cases, the ethical problem posed cannot be identified without first clarifying the cognitive structures underlying the (...) problematic phenomena. In this chapter, I argue that the two kinds of phenomena share a basic cognitive structure, which is well articulated by the findings of the empirical psychology of attitudes, especially if these findings are understood in the context of the cognitive-affective system theory of personality. On the basis of this joint construal of situationism and implicit bias, I argue that the negative programme of ethical improvement that many philosophers recommend in response to one or other problem is unrealistic. Instead, we should consider more seriously the prospects of the positive programme of ethical improvement recommended by Aristotle, the direct aim of which is to instil deeply in ourselves the values at the heart of each of the virtues. (shrink)

Moral judgements are based on automatic processes. Moral judgements are based on reason. In this paper, I argue that both of these claims are true, and show how they can be reconciled. Neither the automaticity of moral judgement nor the post hoc nature of conscious moral reasoning pose a threat to rationalist models of moral cognition. The relation moral reasoning bears to our moral judgements is not primarily mediated by episodes of conscious reasoning, but by the acquisition, formation and maintenance (...) ? in short: education ? of our moral intuitions. (shrink)

Philosophers who have written about implicit bias have claimed or implied that individuals are not responsible, and therefore not blameworthy, for their implicit biases, and that this is a function of the nature of implicit bias as implicit: below the radar of conscious reflection, out of the control of the deliberating agent, and not rationally revisable in the way many of our reflective beliefs are. I argue that close attention to the findings of empirical psychology, and to the conditions for (...) blameworthiness, does not support these claims. I suggest that the arguments for the claim that individuals are not liable for blame are invalid, and that there is some reason to suppose that individuals are, at least sometimes, liable to blame for the extent to which they are influenced in behaviour and judgment by implicit biases. I also argue against the claim that it is counter-productive to see bias as something for which individuals are blameworthy; rather, understanding implicit bias as something for which we are liable to blame could be constructive. (shrink)

A crucial socio-political challenge for our age is how to rede!ne or extend group membership in such a way that it adequately responds to phenomena related to globalization like the prevalence of migration, the transformation of family and social networks, and changes in the position of the nation state. Two centuries ago Immanuel Kant assumed that international connectedness between humans would inevitably lead to the realization of world citizen rights. Nonetheless, globalization does not just foster cosmopolitanism but simultaneously yields the (...) development of new group boundaries. Group membership is indeed a fundamental issue in political processes, for: “the primary good that we distribute to one another is membership in some human community” – it is within the political community that power is being shared and, if possible, held back from non-members. In sum, it is appropriate to consider group membership a fundamental ingredient of politics and political theory. How group boundaries are drawn is then of only secondary importance. Indeed, Schmitt famously declared that “[e]very religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is suffciently strong to group human beings e#ectively according to friend and enemy”. Even though Schmitt’s idea of politics as being constituted by such antithetical groupings is debatable, it is plausible to consider politics among other things as a way of handling intergroup di#erences. Obviously, some of the group-constituting factors are more easily discernable from one’s appearance than others, like race, ethnicity, or gender. As a result, factors like skin color or sexual orientation sometimes carry much political weight even though individuals would rather con!ne these to their private lives and individual identity. Given the potential tension between the political reality of particular groupmembership defnitions and the – individual and political – struggles against those definitions and corresponding attitudes, citizenship and civic behavior becomes a complex issue. As Kymlicka points out, it implies for citizens an additional obligation to non-discrimination regarding those groups: “[t]his extension of non-discrimination from government to civil society is not just a shift in the scale of liberal norms, it also involves a radical extension in the obligations of liberal citizenship”. Unfortunately, empirical research suggests that political intolerance towards other groups “may be the more natural and ‘easy’ position to hold”. Indeed, since development of a virtue of civility or decency regarding other groups is not easy, as it often runs against deeply engrained stereotypes and prejudices, political care for matters like education is justified. Separate schools, for example, may erode children’s motivation to act as citizens, erode their capacity for it and!nally diminish their opportunities to experience transcending their particular group membership and behave as decent citizens. This chapter outlines a possible explanation for such consequences. That explanation will be found to be interdisciplinary in nature, combining insights from political theory and cognitive neuroscience. In doing so, it does not focus on collective action, even though that is a usual focus for political studies. For example, results pertaining to collective political action have demonstrated that the relation between attitudes and overt voting behavior or political participation is not as direct and strong as was hoped for. Several conditions, including the individual’s experiences, self-interest, and relevant social norms, turned out to interfere in the link between his or her attitude and behavior. Important as collective action is, this chapter is concerned with direct interaction between agents and the in$uence of group membership on such interaction – in particular joint action. Although politics does include many forms of action that require no such physical interaction, such physical interaction between individuals remains fundamental to politics – this is the reason why separate schooling may eventually undermine the citizenship of its isolated pupils. This chapter will focus on joint action, de!ned as: “any form of social interaction whereby two or more individuals coordinate their actions in space and time to bring about a change in the environment”. Cognitive neuroscienti!c evidence demonstrates that for such joint action to succeed, the agents have to integrate the actions and expected actions of the other person in their own action plans at several levels of speci!city. Although neuroscienti!c research is necessarily limited to simple forms of action, this concurs with a philosophical analysis of joint action, which I will discuss below. (shrink)

In this chapter, we will offer a sketch of the state of the art as concerns existing accounts of virtue acquisition in relation to automaticity. In particular, we will focus on the so-called “skill model,” which we aim to improve by questioning its rather common underlying dualistic picture of the mind. Then we will propose an account of skillful emotions by identifying the features that make them both automatic and embedded in an intelligent practice. Finally, we will show how this (...) view can help the skill model by offering a better description of emotion shaping in virtue acquisition. By doing so, we will contend that emotions contribute autonomously and actively to the skillfulness of the habits in which they are embedded. (shrink)

This dissertation is a contribution to the field of empirically informed metaethics, which combines the rigorous conceptual clarity of traditional metaethics with a careful review of empirical evidence. More specifically, this work stands at the intersection of moral psychology, moral epistemology, and philosophy of action. The study comprises six chapters on three distinct (although related) topics. Each chapter is structured as an independent paper and addresses a specific open question in the literature. The first part concerns the psychological features and (...) cognitive function of moral intuition. Chapter 1 (“Moral intuition, strength, and metacognition”) is focused on the concept of intuitive strength, which is one of the defining features of moral intuition. I provide a metacognitive account of intuitive strength and show why such a view is preferable to emotional or quasi-perceptual accounts. Then, in Chapter 2 (“Dual process reflective equilibrium”), I will discuss the interplay between intuition and reflection in moral reasoning. I will contend that the influential “default-interventionist” model of reasoning, theorized by Greene, is insufficiently supported by the evidence. In light of some recent studies, I outline an account of moral reasoning in which intuition and reflection are not in conflict but cooperate to reach a reflective goal. I call this model dual process reflective equilibrium. The aim of the first part is descriptive, i.e., it argues for an accurate understanding of moral intuition and reasoning in light of the available empirical evidence. In contrast, the second part addresses a normative question: is a subject epistemically justified in forming a belief on the basis of a moral intuition? Skeptics of moral intuition argue that accepting moral intuitions should be the exception rather than the rule to the extent that epistemically defective processes determine the content of moral intuitions. Chapter 3 (“Moral intuitionism and the reliability challenge”) introduces the recent empirical challenges to the reliability of moral intuitions and elaborates a promising strategy for defending intuitionism. In short, I consider whether subjects can track the reliability of their intuitions with their confidence. In Chapter 4 (“The argument from limited cognitive resources”), I evaluate a different strategy to defend moral intuitionism. Specifically, I develop an argument according to which accepting moral intuitions is legitimate because it is the most rational option that a subject has, given her limited resources. The third and final part of the dissertation concerns the role of moral intuitions in action. The influence of automatic processes on moral conduct raises different challenges to moral philosophy. The first challenge is to explain how a subject can be motivated by certain values without the mental effort of deliberation. Chapter 5 (“Caring, moral motivation, and automatic conduct”) tackles this issue. Chapter 6 (“Moral sensitivity as skillful automaticity”) aims to explain how moral agents can be sensitive to good reasons through automatic mental processes. (shrink)

How can agents act virtuously out of habit? Virtuous actions are done for the right reasons, and acting for (right) reasons seems to involve deliberation. Yet, deliberation is absent if an agent’s action is habitual. That implies that the relationship between reasons and actions should be characterized in such a way that deliberation is unnecessary. In this paper, I examine three possible solutions: radical externalism, unconscious psychologism, and unconscious factualism. I argue that these proposals all fail to cast reasons in (...) their proper role. In light of that, I propose an alternative view of how to account for habitual virtuous actions, based on the work of G. E. M. Anscombe. I maintain that if we focus on the inherently rational structure of actions, the tension between acting habitually and acting for the right reason dissolves. (shrink)

If an ethical theory sometimes requires that agents be motivated by features other than those it advances as justifications for the rightness or wrongness of actions, some consider this type of self-effacement to be a defeater from which no theory can recover. Most famously, Michael Stocker argues that requiring a divided moral psychology in which reasons are partitioned from motives would trigger a “malady of the spirit” for any agent attempting to live according to the prescriptions of modern ethical theories. (...) Stocker’s argument is tremendously influential, and the fact that he specifically links modern ethical theories to self-effacement leads advocates of virtue ethics to presume that their view is immune to the problem of self-effacement and that this immunity gives virtue ethics an advantage over its contemporary rivals. This immunity has been challenged by Thomas Hurka and Simon Keller, who maintain that virtue ethics is equally as vulnerable to the charge of self-effacement as its modern counterparts. I argue in this paper that recent attempts to reply to Hurka and Keller are not successful. Specifically, I argue that recent attempts to immunize virtue ethics from self-effacement do not adequately address the challenge from Keller that virtue ethics can only escape from self-effacement via measures that are also available to modern theories. Thus, even if virtue ethics can avoid self-effacement, one must give up the claim that virtue ethics is uniquely immune to self-effacement compared to its modern rivals. I close by noting that my aim is not to argue that virtue ethics is deficient in this respect. Instead, I suggest that advocates of virtue ethics ought to consider the possibility that self-effacement is a tolerable psychological challenge for any ethical theory that requires agents to reflect on the substantive normative guidance it provides. (shrink)

We answer the title question with a qualified “No.” We arrive at this answer by spelling out what the proper place of the concept 'happiness' is in a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics: (1) Happiness in the sense of personal well-being has only a loose relation to virtue; it doesn't deserve any prominent place in virtue ethics. (2) Happiness in the sense of flourishing is impossible without virtue, but that doesn't imply that individual actions should aim at flourishing. (3) Instead, flourishing sets (...) the standard of good practical reasoning; it is hardly ever the proper aim of a practical inference. This paper begins with a common (mis)interpretation of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, on which it is a form of rational egoism. We then develop our alternative understanding against this foil. (shrink)

“Implicit bias” is a term of art referring to relatively unconscious and relatively automatic features of prejudiced judgment and social behavior. While psychologists in the field of “implicit social cognition” study “implicit attitudes” toward consumer products, self-esteem, food, alcohol, political values, and more, the most striking and well-known research has focused on implicit attitudes toward members of socially stigmatized groups, such as African-Americans, women, and the LGBTQ community.[1] For example, imagine Frank, who explicitly believes that women and men are equally (...) suited for careers outside the home. Despite his explicitly egalitarian belief, Frank might nevertheless implicitly associate women with the home, and this implicit association might lead him to behave in any number of biased ways, from trusting feedback from female co-workers less to hiring equally qualified men over women. Psychological research on implicit bias is relatively recent (§1), but a host of metaphysical (§2), epistemological (§3), and ethical questions (§4) about implicit bias are pressing.[2]. (shrink)

To speak of being religious lucky certainly sounds odd. But then, so does “My faith holds value in God’s plan, while yours does not.” This book argues that these two concerns — with the concept of religious luck and with asymmetric or sharply differential ascriptions of religious value — are inextricably connected. It argues that religious luck attributions can profitably be studied from a number of directions, not just theological, but also social scientific and philosophical. There is a strong tendency (...) among adherents of different faith traditions to invoke asymmetric explanations of the religious value or salvific status of the home religion vis-à-vis all others. Attributions of good/bad religious luck and exclusivist dismissal of the significance of religious disagreement are the central phenomena that the book studies. Part I lays out a taxonomy of kinds of religious luck, a taxonomy that draws upon but extends work on moral and epistemic luck. It asks: What is going on when persons, theologies, or purported revelations ascribe various kinds of religiously-relevant traits to insiders and outsiders of a faith tradition in sharply asymmetric fashion? “I am saved but you are lost”; “My religion is holy but yours is idolatrous”; “My faith tradition is true, and valued by God, but yours is false and valueless.” Part II further develops the theory introduced in Part I, pushing forward both the descriptive/explanatory and normative sides of what the author terms his inductive risk account. Firstly, the concept of inductive risk is shown to contribute to the needed field of comparative fundamentalism by suggesting new psychological markers of fundamentalist orientation. The second side of what is termed an inductive risk account is concerned with the epistemology of religious belief, but more especially with an account of the limits of reasonable religious disagreement. Problems of inductively risky modes of belief-formation problematize claims to religion-specific knowledge. But the inductive risk account does not aim to set religion apart, or to challenge the reasonableness of religious belief tout court. Rather the burden of the argument is to challenge the reasonableness of attitudes of religious exclusivism, and to demotivate the “polemical apologetics” that exclusivists practice and hope to normalize. Lexington Books Pages: 290 978-1-4985-5017-8 • Hardback • December 2018 • $95.00 • (£65.00) 978-1-4985-5018-5 • eBook • December 2018 • $90.00 • (£60.00) ISBN 978-1-4985-5018-5 (pbk: alk. paper) (coming 2020) [Download the 30% personal use Discount Order Form I uploaded for hardcover or e-book, and please ask your library to purchase a copy for their collection.]. (shrink)

Research programs in empirical psychology from the past two decades have revealed implicit biases. Although implicit processes are pervasive, unavoidable, and often useful aspects of our cognitions, they may also lead us into error. The most problematic forms of implicit cognition are those which target social groups, encoding stereotypes or reflecting prejudicial evaluative hierarchies. Despite intentions to the contrary, implicit biases can influence our behaviours and judgements, contributing to patterns of discriminatory behaviour. These patterns of discrimination are obviously wrong and (...) unjust. But in remedying such wrongs, one question to be addressed concerns responsibility for implicit bias. Unlike some paradigmatic forms of wrongdoing, such discrimination is often unintentional, unendorsed, and perpetrated without awareness; and the harms are particularly damaging because they are cumulative and collectively perpetrated. So, what are we to make of questions of responsibility? In this article, we outline some of the main lines of recent philosophical thought, which address questions of responsibility for implicit bias. We focus on (a) the kind of responsibility at issue; (b) revisionist versus nonrevisionist conceptions of responsibility as applied to implicit bias; and (c) individual, institutional, and collective responsibility for implicit bias. (shrink)

Recent decades have witnessed a sea change in thinking about emotion, which has gone from being seen as a disruptive force in human thought and action to being seen as an important source of situation- and goal-relevant information and evaluation, continuous with perception and cognition. Here I argue on philosophical and empirical grounds that the role of emotion in contributing to our ability to respond to reasons for action runs deeper still: The affective system is at the core of the (...) process of evaluatively modeling situations, actions, and outcomes, which is the foundation upon which rational deliberation and action can be built. Taking up this perspective affords new approaches to long-standing problems in the theory of reason-based action. (shrink)

It has recently been pointed out that the cloudiness of the concept of authenticity as well as inflated ideologies of the ‘true self’ provide good reasons to criticize theories and ideals of authenticity. Nevertheless, there are also good reasons to defend an ethical ideal of authenticity, not least because of its critical and oppositional force, which is directed against experiences of self-abandonment and self-alienation. I will argue for an elaborated ethical ideal of authenticity: the ambitious ideal of a continuous self-reflective (...) process of ‘self-authentication’. For this purpose, the ideal of being authentic in expressing and unfolding one’s individual personality and characteristics will be combined with the ideal of being ‘an authentic person’ - whereby ‘a person’ is to be understood in a Kantian sense as an autonomous person who is reasonable and morally responsible. (shrink)

Enhancement ist eine tolle Sache: dieser Begriff ist notwendigerweise positiv (ein bisschen wie der traditionelle Gottbegriff), so dass wenn eine Änderung keine richtige Verbesserung hervorbringt, es auch kein richtiges Enhancement gewesen ist: sehr praktisch. Wie könnte man unter diesen Umständen überhaupt gegen Enhancement sein? Beim Enhancement geht es nicht mal um das plausible aber nicht unumstrittene „mehr ist besser“; vielmehr geht es um das tautologische „besser ist besser“.

A recent turn in the cognitive sciences has deepened the attention on embodied and situated dynamics for explaining different cognitive processes such as perception, emotion, and social cognition. This has fostered an extensive interest in the social and ‘intersubjective’ nature of moral behavior, especially from the perspective of enactivism. In this paper, I argue that embodied and situated perspectives, enactivism in particular, nonetheless require further improvements with regards to their analysis of the social nature of human morality. In brief, enactivist (...) proposals still do not define what features of the social-relational context, or which kind of processes within social interactions, make an evaluation or action morally relevant or distinctive from other types of social normativity. As an alternative to this proclivity, and seeking to complement the enactive perspective, I present a definition of the process of moral sense-making and offer an empirically-based ethical distinction between different domains of social knowledge in moral development. For doing so, I take insights from the constructivist tradition in moral psychology. My objective is not to radically oppose embodied and enactive alternatives but to expand the horizon of their conceptual and empirical contributions to morality research. (shrink)

This paper proposes the idea of thinking about practical rationality in terms of self-regulation and defends the thesis that self-regulation is a virtue, insofar as we have reason to think it is our highest form of practical rationality. I argue that understanding self-regulation as a virtuous form of practical reasoning is called for given the kinds of limitations we face in developing agency and pursuing our goals, and presents us with several advantages over traditional understandings of practical rationality.

Recent findings in empirical psychology show that implicit biases can affect behavior in ways that are difficult to control deliberatively. Doris argues that findings like these constitute a threat to agency, if agency is defined as the ability to reflectively, deliberatively direct one’s actions. I argue, however, that implicit biases pose no fundamental threat to agency since they can be brought under indirect deliberative control, whereby deliberative, reflective actions put in place automatic processes that automatically inhibit unwanted biases. Since automatic (...) processes can be thus used to achieve deliberatively, reflectively endorsed goals, agency should be defined as the ability to act in line with reflectively endorsed goals, whether by deliberative or automatic processes. (shrink)

Bill Pollard has recently developed an account of habits of action, endeavoring to rehabilitate the traditional notion of habit in a way that can be used to address current philosophical concerns. I argue that Pollard’s account has important shortcomings. The account is intended to apply indiscriminately to both habitual and skilled acts, but this overlooks crucial distinctions. Moreover, Pollard’s account fails to do justice to the various ways in which the idea of habit figures in the explanation and assessment of (...) action. These shortcomings are a consequence of certain assumptions Pollard shares with the accounts of mind and action he sets to criticize. As long as these assumptions are left intact, the potential of dispositional notions such as habit and skill to contribute to contemporary debates will not be realized. (shrink)

A large part of the current debate among virtue ethicists focuses on the role played by phronesis, or wise practical reasoning, in virtuous action. The paradigmatic case of an action expressing phronesis is one where an agent explicitly reflects and deliberates on all practical options in a given situation and eventually makes a wise choice. Habitual actions, by contrast, are typically performed automatically, that is, in the absence of preceding deliberation. Thus they would seem to fall outside of the primary (...) focus of the current virtue ethical debate. By contrast, Bill Pollard has recently suggested that all properly virtuous actions must be performed habitually and therefore automatically, i.e. in the absence of moral deliberation. In this paper, Pollard’s suggestion is interpreted as the thesis that habitual automaticity is constitutive of virtue or moral excellence. By constructing an argument in favor of it and discussing several objections, the paper ultimately seeks to defend a qualified version of this thesis. (shrink)

In 1849, Kierkegaard published The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Devotional Discourses, which were closely followed by two discourses on the woman who was a sinner, published in 1849 and 1850. I argue that these discourses are intended to set the stage to learn how to embody Christian love from the woman. Kierkegaard’s claims about what is required to teach Christian virtue imply that the woman becomes more than loving, she becomes love. I explore (...) his notion of acquired originality and how applied philosophical concepts such as automaticity and skillful coping elucidate this notion. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to articulate a distinction between habit and bodily skill as different ways of acting without deliberation. I start by elaborating on a distinction between habit and skill as different kinds of dispositions. Then I argue that this distinction has direct implications for the varieties of automaticity exhibited in habitual and skilful bodily acts. The argument suggests that paying close attention to the metaphysics of agency can help to articulate more precisely questions regarding the varieties (...) of automaticity exhibited in overt action. (shrink)

Full virtue and practical wisdom comprise the end of neo-Aristotelian moral development, but wisdom cannot be cultivated straight away through arguments and teaching. Wisdom is integrated with, and builds upon, habituation: the acquisition of virtuous character traits through the repeated practice of corresponding virtuous actions. Habit formation equips people with a taste for, and commitment to, the good life; furthermore it provides one with discriminatory and reflective capacities to know how to act in particular circumstances. Unfortunately, habituation is often understood (...) primarily as a method suitable only for children. This article examines whether Aristotle limited habituation to children and, if not, what the relationship between habituation and wisdom beyond childhood might look like. This article concludes that wisdom-guided habituation is also possible for adults who continue and confirm their already established virtuous habits. The implications of this for professional moral education are subsequently discussed. (shrink)

Social psychologists tell us that much of human behavior is automatic. It is natural to think that automatic behavioral dispositions are ethically desirable if and only if they are suitably governed by an agent’s reflective judgments. However, we identify a class of automatic dispositions that make normatively self-standing contributions to praiseworthy action and a well-lived life, independently of, or even in spite of, an agent’s reflective judgments about what to do. We argue that the fundamental questions for the "ethics of (...) automaticity" are what automatic dispositions are (and are not) good for and when they can (and cannot) be trusted. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Mindfulness is an umbrella term for a set of practices and strategies related to attention and non-critical awareness of our thoughts. Mindfulness is currently having a moment in popular culture and in clinical psychology for its many perceived benefits. However, there are reasons to worry about whether certain commitments and strategies of mindfulness might conflict with long-term progress in character development. This article places mindfulness in conversation with developmental considerations of virtue, asking how mindfulness practices might impact the various (...) stages between natural character and mature moral virtue in different ways. Moreover, it proposes a distinction between two kinds of virtues, presence and absence virtues, that are differently impacted by the continued use of mindfulness practices in the later stages of virtue development. (shrink)

Our primary aim in this paper is to sketch the account of virtue that we think most amenable to virtue measurement. Our account integrates Whole Trait Theory from psychology with a broadly neo-Aristotelian approach to virtue. Our account is ‘ecumenical’ in that it has appeal for a wide range of virtue ethicists. According to WTT, a personality trait is composed of a set of situation-specific trait-appropriate responses, which are produced when certain “social-cognitive” mechanisms are triggered by the perception of trait-relevant (...) stimuli in a person’s external and/or internal environment. Moving from this starting point, we discuss our conception of a virtue and respects in which it both aligns with and diverges from Aristotle’s conception. We discuss roles for practical wisdom and motivation in our conception of virtue, and highlight respects in which WTT provides an amenable empirical framework into which key Aristotelian elements can be integrated. We conclude with brief remarks about our conception as an empirically adequate and measurable account. (shrink)

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 (...) explanatory power and egalitarian character education. In contrast to previous defenses which either downplay the relevance of psychological evidence or revise philosophical conceptions of virtue to fit the data, this paper appeals to previously neglected psychological evidence on self-efficacy and mental contrasting in combination with “non-idealized” interpretations of Aristotelian moral virtue to support the view that the available empirical evidence is compatible with widespread possession of virtuous character. These “non-idealized” interpretations of virtuous character allow for serious deviations from virtuous conduct, especially in the contexts described by the psychology experiments. Furthermore, decades of research on mental contrasting and self-efficacy suggest that subjects in the psychology experiments acted for reasons and possessed the ability to exercise rational control over their behavior. Hence, situationists are mistaken in thinking that, based on the empirical data, Aristotelianism is deprived of various theoretical advantages. (shrink)

Some habits are vital to who we are in that they shape both our self-perception and how we are seen by others. This is so, I argue, because there is a constitutive link between what I shall call ‘identity-shaping habits’ and narrative agency. Identity-shaping habits are paradigmatically acquired and performed by persons. The ontology of personhood involves both synchronic and diachronic dimensions which are structurally analogous to the synchronic acquisition and the diachronic performance of habits, and makes persons distinctly suitable (...) to being shaped by habits. Since habits differ vastly in their scope, I develop a conceptualization that carves out defining features of identity-shaping habits. Such habits, I venture, fundamentally alter a person’s embodiment such that the alterations to their psychological and physiological make-up vitally inform their persistence—if not metaphysically, then at least practically by crucially shaping one’s narrative agency. (shrink)