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  1. 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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  • Proposing an Islamic virtue ethics beyond the situationist debates.Muhammad Velji - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    I begin the first part by showing how situationism should make us question traditional understandings of virtues as intrinsic dispositions. I concentrate specifically on situationist experiments related to mood. I then introduce Islamic virtue ethics and the dawa movement. In parts two and three I examine ethnography of the dawa movement to explore how they deal with worries about the influence of mood on their virtue. In part two I show how they train their habits in very traditional virtue ethics (...)
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  • Against reductivist character realism.Anne Jeffrey & Alina Beary - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology 36 (1):186-213.
    It seems like people have character traits that explain a good deal of their behavior. Call a theory character realism just in case it vindicates this folk assumption. Recently, Christian Miller has argued that the way to reconcile character realism with decades of psychological research is to adopt metaphysical reductivism about character traits. Some contemporary psychological theories of character and virtue seem to implicitly endorse such reductivism; others resist reduction of traits to finer-grained mental components or processes; and still others (...)
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  • Responsibility and Situationism.Brandon Warmke - 2022 - In Dana Kay Nelkin & Derk Pereboom (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 468-493.
    This chapter explores the relationship between an agent’s moral responsibility for their actions and the situations in which an agent acts. Decades of research in psychology are sometimes thought to support situationism, the view that features of an agent’s situation greatly influence their behavior in powerful and surprising ways. Such situational fea­tures might therefore be thought to threaten agents’ abilities to act freely and responsi­bly. This chapter begins by discussing some relevant empirical literature on situationism. It then surveys several ways (...)
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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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  • Opacity of Character: Virtue Ethics and the Legal Admissibility of Character Evidence.Jacob Smith & Georgi Gardiner - 2021 - Philosophical Issues 31 (1):334-354.
    Many jurisdictions prohibit or severely restrict the use of evidence about a defendant’s character to prove legal culpability. Situationists, who argue that conduct is largely determined by situational features rather than by character, can easily defend this prohibition. According to situationism, character evidence is misleading or paltry. -/- Proscriptions on character evidence seem harder to justify, however, on virtue ethical accounts. It appears that excluding character evidence either denies the centrality of character for explaining conduct—the situationist position—or omits probative evidence. (...)
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  • Situationism, subjunctive hypocrisy and standing to blame.Adam Piovarchy - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (4):514-538.
    Philosophers have argued that subjects who act wrongly in the situationist psychology experiments are morally responsible for their actions. This paper argues that though the obedient subjects in Milgram’s ‘Obedience to Authority’ experiments are blameworthy, since most of us would have acted in the same manner they did, it is inappropriate for most of us to blame them. On Todd’s ([2019]. “A Unified Account of the Moral Standing to Blame.” Noûs 53 (2): 347–374.) recent account of standing to blame, agents (...)
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  • 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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  • Essays in Philosophical Moral Psychology.Antti Kauppinen - 2008 - Dissertation, University of Helsinki
    This 183-page introductory part of my dissertation is an overview of some key debates in philosophical moral psychology and its methodology.
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  • The Challenges of Detection and Enforcement of Insider Trading.Brian J. Adams, Tod Perry & Colin Mahoney - 2018 - Journal of Business Ethics 153 (2):375-388.
    Trading on non-public material information is fertile ground for a discussion of ethical behavior. The long-running legal tug-of-war over what constitutes illegal insider trading delivers challenges to regulatory authorities charged with detecting and enforcing the law, and is likely one of the reasons that prosecution of insider trading events remains rather uncommon. One can observe both increased volume in the equity and option markets and run-ups in the stock price prior to the announcement of the acquisitions; however, the detection of (...)
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  • The ethics of border guarding: a first exploration and a research agenda for the future.Peter Olsthoorn - 2018 - Ethics and Education 13 (2):157-171.
    Although the notion of universal human rights allows for the idea that states (and supranational organizations such as the European Union) can, or even should, control and impose restrictions on migration, both notions clearly do not sit well together. The ensuing tension manifests itself in our ambivalent attitude towards migration, but also affects the border guards who have to implement national and supranational policies on migration. Little has been written on the ethics that has to guide these border guards in (...)
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  • Attempts to Prime Intellectual Virtues for Understanding of Science: Failures to Inspire Intellectual Effort.Joanna Huxster, Melissa Hopkins, Julia Bresticker, Jason Leddington & Matthew Slater - 2017 - Philosophical Psychology 30 (8):1141-1158.
    Strategies for effectively communicating scientific findings to the public are an important and growing area of study. Recognizing that some complex subjects require recipients of information to take a more active role in constructing an understanding, we sought to determine whether it was possible to increase subjects’ intellectual effort via “priming” methodologies. In particular, we asked whether subconsciously priming “intellectual virtues”, such as curiosity, perseverance, patience, and diligence might improve participants’ effort and performance on various cognitive tasks. In the first (...)
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  • Can Character Traits Be Based on Brute Psychological Facts?Iskra Fileva - 2018 - Ratio 31 (2):233-251.
    Some of our largely unchosen first-order reactions, such as disgust, can underwrite morally-laden character traits. This observation is in tension with the plausible idea that virtues and vices are based on reasons. I propose a way to resolve the tension.
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  • Situations and Dispositions: How to Rescue the Military Virtues from Social Psychology.Peter Olsthoorn - 2017 - Journal of Military Ethics 16 (1-2):78-93.
    In recent years, it has been argued more than once that situations determine our conduct to a much greater extent than our character does. This argument rests on the findings of social psychologists such as Stanley Milgram, who have popularized the idea that we can all be brought to harm innocent others. An increasing number of philosophers and ethicists make use of such findings, and some of them have argued that this so-called situationist challenge fatally undermines virtue ethics. As virtue (...)
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  • Practical Wisdom and Business Ethics.Dennis J. Moberg - 2007 - Business Ethics Quarterly 17 (3):535-561.
    ABSTRACT:Practical wisdom has received scant attention in business ethics. Defined as a disposition toward cleverness in crafting morally excellent responses to, or in anticipation of, challenging particularities, practical wisdom has four psychological components: knowledge, emotion, thinking, and motivation. People's experience, reflection, and inspiration are theorized to determine their capacity for practical wisdom-related performance. Enhanced by their abilities to engage in moral imagination, systems thinking, and ethical reframing, this capacity is realized in the form of wisdom-related performance. This can be manifested (...)
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  • Character and theory of mind: an integrative approach.Evan Westra - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (5):1217-1241.
    Traditionally, theories of mindreading have focused on the representation of beliefs and desires. However, decades of social psychology and social neuroscience have shown that, in addition to reasoning about beliefs and desires, human beings also use representations of character traits to predict and interpret behavior. While a few recent accounts have attempted to accommodate these findings, they have not succeeded in explaining the relation between trait attribution and belief-desire reasoning. On my account, character-trait attribution is part of a hierarchical system (...)
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  • Aristotelian moral psychology and the situationist challenge.Adam M. Croom - 2015 - Polish Psychological Bulletin 46 (2):262-277.
    For some time now moral psychologists and philosophers have ganged up on Aristotelians, arguing that results from psychological studies on the role of character-based and situation-based influences on human behavior have convincingly shown that situations rather than personal characteristics determine human behavior. In the literature on moral psychology and philosophy this challenge is commonly called the “situationist challenge,” and as Prinz has previously explained, it has largely been based on results from four salient studies in social psychology, including the studies (...)
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  • (1 other version)Experimental Moral Philosophy.Mark Alfano & Don Loeb - 2012 - In Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Experimental moral philosophy began to emerge as a methodology inthe last decade of the twentieth century, a branch of the largerexperimental philosophy approach. From the beginning,it has been embroiled in controversy on a number of fronts. Somedoubt that it is philosophy at all. Others acknowledge that it isphilosophy but think that it has produced modest results at best andconfusion at worst. Still others think it represents an important advance., Before the research program can be evaluated, we should have someconception of (...)
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  • (1 other version)Experimental moral philosophy.Mark Alfano, Don Loeb & Alex Plakias - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:1-32.
    Experimental moral philosophy emerged as a methodology in the last decade of the twentieth century, as a branch of the larger experimental philosophy (X-Phi) approach. Experimental moral philosophy is the empirical study of moral intuitions, judgments, and behaviors. Like other forms of experimental philosophy, it involves gathering data using experimental methods and using these data to substantiate, undermine, or revise philosophical theories. In this case, the theories in question concern the nature of moral reasoning and judgment; the extent and sources (...)
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  • The Structure of Character.Candace L. Upton - 2009 - The Journal of Ethics 13 (2-3):175-193.
    In this paper, I defend a local account of character traits that posits traits like close-friend-honesty and good-mood-compassion. John Doris also defends local character traits, but his local character traits are indistinguishable from mere behavioral dispositions, they are not necessary for the purpose which allegedly justifies them, and their justification is only contingent, depending upon the prevailing empirical situation. The account of local traits I defend posits local traits that are traits of character rather than behavioral dispositions, local traits that (...)
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  • Virtue and Disagreement.Bridget Clarke - 2010 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 13 (3):273-291.
    One of the most prominent strands in contemporary work on the virtues consists in the attempt to develop a distinctive—and compelling—account of practical reason on the basis of Aristotle’s ethics. In response to this project, several eminent critics have argued that the Aristotelian account encourages a dismissive attitude toward moral disagreement. Given the importance of developing a mature response to disagreement, the criticism is devastating if true. I examine this line of criticism closely, first elucidating the features of the Aristotelian (...)
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  • (1 other version)Indications of virtues in conscientiousness and its practice through continuous improvement.José Hernández & Ricardo Mateo - 2012 - Business Ethics: A European Review 21 (2):140-153.
    There is convergence among researchers of the ‘Big Five’ personality traits taxonomy, that the dimension of conscientiousness best explains differences in work performance. This research is a literature review on the interrelationship between certain traits of the conscientiousness dimension and human virtues, or character traits. It also analyzes whether or not it is rational to argue that the continuous improvement culture enhances the exercise of these character traits. The personal effort to develop one's conscientiousness enriches one's character or way of (...)
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  • Trust, Trustworthiness, and the Moral Consequence of Consistency.Jason D'cruz - 2015 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (3):467-484.
    Situationists such as John Doris, Gilbert Harman, and Maria Merritt suppose that appeal to reliable behavioral dispositions can be dispensed with without radical revision to morality as we know it. This paper challenges this supposition, arguing that abandoning hope in reliable dispositions rules out genuine trust and forces us to suspend core reactive attitudes of gratitude and resentment, esteem and indignation. By examining situationism through the lens of trust we learn something about situationism (in particular, the radically revisionary moral implications (...)
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  • The Empirical Argument Against Virtue.Candace L. Upton - 2016 - The Journal of Ethics 20 (4):355-371.
    The virtues are under fire. Several decades’ worth of social psychological findings establish a correlation between human behavior and the situation moral agents inhabit, from which a cadre of moral philosophers concludes that most moral agents lack the virtues. Mark Alfano and Christian Miller introduce novel versions of this argument, but they are subject to a fatal dilemma. Alfano and Miller wrongly assume that their requirements for virtue apply universally to moral agents, who vary radically in their psychological, physiological, and (...)
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  • Consistent egoists and situation managers: two problems for situationism.Pauline Kleingeld - 2015 - Philosophical Explorations 18 (3):344-361.
    According to philosophical “situationism”, psychological evidence shows that human action is typically best explained by the influence of situational factors and not by “global” and robust character traits of the agent. As a practical implication of their view, situationists recommend that efforts in moral education be shifted from character development to situation management. Much of the discussion has focused on whether global conceptions of virtue and character, and in particular Aristotelian virtue ethics, can be defended against the situationist challenge. After (...)
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  • Character and concept : how conceptual blending constrains situationism.Brandon D. C. Fenton - unknown
    This thesis is an attempt to defend the notion of character from concerns raised recently by situationists. Situationism attempts to undermine the concept of character used to support most versions of virtue ethics by appealing to research in the social sciences. More specifically, both John Doris and Gilbert Harman are global character trait eliminativists who take the social-psychological research to warrant the abandonment of the concept of character. This thesis draws heavily upon the mental space mapping theory known as conceptual (...)
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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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  • Scientific Challenges to Free Will and Moral Responsibility.Joshua Shepherd - 2015 - Philosophy Compass 10 (3):197-207.
    Here, I review work from three lines of research in cognitive science often taken to threaten free will and moral responsibility. This work concerns conscious deciding, the experience of acting, and the role of largely unnoticed situational influences on behavior. Whether this work in fact threatens free will and moral responsibility depends on how we ought to interpret it, and depends as well on the nature of free and responsible behavior. I discuss different ways this work has been interpreted and (...)
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  • Biotechnology, Justice and Health.Ruth Faden & Madison Powers - 2013 - Journal of Practical Ethics 1 (1):49-61.
    New biotechnologies have the potential to both dramatically improve human well-being and dramatically widen inequalities in well-being. This paper addresses a question that lies squarely on the fault line of these two claims: When as a matter of justice are societies obligated to include a new biotechnology in a national healthcare system? This question is approached from the standpoint of a twin aim theory of justice, in which social structures, including nation-states, have double-barreled theoretical objectives with regard to human well-being. (...)
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  • Vindicating virtue: A critical analysis of the situationist challenge against Aristotelian moral psychology.Adam M. Croom - 2014 - Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 48:18-47.
    This article provides a critical analysis of the situationist challenge against Aristotelian moral psychology. It first outlines the details and results from 4 paradigmatic studies in psychology that situationists have heavily drawn upon in their critique of the Aristotelian conception of virtuous characteristics, including studies conducted by Hartshorne and May (1928), Darley and Batson (1973), Isen and Levin (1972), and Milgram (1963). It then presents 10 problems with the way situationists have used these studies to challenge Aristotelian moral psychology. After (...)
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  • Understanding ourselves: character and self-knowledge in Conrad and Shopenhauer.Norman Stinchcombe - unknown
    That Conrad was familiar with Schopenhauer’s philosophy has been proposed by literary scholars and seconded, in passing, by philosophers. This has resulted in one-way studies of literary influence. This thesis is instead a two-way study in the philosophy of literature. It shows how Schopenhauer’s philosophy can illuminate Conrad’s fiction and how the fiction can become an analytical tool for exploring the philosophy. There are two strands in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. One is uncompromisingly concerned with salvation and will-denial. The second focuses on (...)
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  • Believing For a Reason.John Turri - 2011 - Erkenntnis 74 (3):383-397.
    This paper explains what it is to believe something for a reason. My thesis is that you believe something for a reason just in case the reason non-deviantly causes your belief. In the course of arguing for my thesis, I present a new argument that reasons are causes, and offer an informative account of causal non-deviance.
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  • Character Traits, Social Psychology, and Impediments to Helping Behavior.Christian Miller - 2010 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 5 (1):1-36.
    In a number of recent papers, I have begun to develop a new theory of character which is conceptually distinct both from traditional Aristotelian accounts as well as from the positive view of local traits outlined by John Doris. On my view, many human beings do have robust traits of character which play an important explanatory and predictive role, but which are triggered by certain situational variables which preclude them from counting as genuine Aristotelian virtues. Like others in this discussion, (...)
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  • Minor Tweaks, Major Payoffs: The Problems and Promise of Situationism in Moral Philosophy.Hagop Sarkissian - 2010 - Philosophers' Imprint 10.
    Moral philosophers of late have been examining the implications of experimental social psychology for ethics. The focus of attention has been on situationism—the thesis that we routinely underestimate the extent to which minor situational variables influence morally significant behavior. Situationism has been seen as a threat to prevailing lay and philosophical theories of character, personhood, and agency. In this paper, I outline the situationist literature and critique one of its upshots: the admonition to carefully select one’s situational contexts. Besides being (...)
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  • Explaining Away Intuitions About Traits: Why Virtue Ethics Seems Plausible (Even if it Isn't).Mark Alfano - 2011 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (1):121-136.
    This article addresses the question whether we can know on the basis of folk intuitions that we have character traits. I answer in the negative, arguing that on any of the primary theories of knowledge, our intuitions about traits do not amount to knowledge. For instance, because we would attribute traits to one another regardless of whether we actually possessed such metaphysically robust dispositions, Nozickian sensitivity theory disqualifies our intuitions about traits from being knowledge. Yet we do think we know (...)
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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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  • Collective epistemic virtues.Reza Lahroodi - 2007 - Social Epistemology 21 (3):281 – 297.
    At the intersection of social and virtue epistemology lies the important, yet so far entirely neglected, project of articulating the social dimensions of epistemic virtues. Perhaps the most obvious way in which epistemic virtues might be social is that they may be possessed by social collectives. We often speak of groups as if they could instantiate epistemic virtues. It is tempting to think of these expressions as ascribing virtues not to the groups themselves, but to their members. Adapting Margaret Gilbert's (...)
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  • Intentions, foreseen consequences and the doctrine of double effect.Alison Hills - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 133 (2):257 - 283.
    The difficulty of distinguishing between the intended and the merely foreseen consequences of actions seems to many to be the most serious problem for the doctrine of double effect. It has led some to reject the doctrine altogether, and has left some of its defenders recasting it in entirely different terms. I argue that these responses are unnecessary. Using Bratman’s conception of intention, I distinguish the intended consequences of an action from the merely foreseen in a way that can be (...)
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  • The story of my life : virtue, character and narrative.Lisa Grover - 2011 - Dissertation, University of Kent
    The primary aim of this research is to develop a new philosophical analysis of the concept of character that reflects the complexity of people and meets the demands of moral explanation. It places the agent's particular perspective and the wider context at the centre of moral judgement. The reason for undertaking this project is to establish an account of morality that is not in conflict with discoveries in empirical psychology. It responds to the challenge that the situation usually has the (...)
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  • Teaching and Assessing Learning About Virtue: Insights and Challenges From a Redesigned Journalism Ethics Class.David A. Craig & Mohammad Yousuf - 2018 - Journal of Media Ethics 33 (4):181-197.
    ABSTRACTVirtue ethics, a topic of growing interest in media ethics and philosophy more broadly, poses challenges for classroom instruction because it is rooted in long-term development of character. This article explores approaches for incorporating virtue into media ethics instruction and assessing associated student learning, based on an analysis of how students in a journalism ethics class demonstrated their understanding and application of virtues through activities tailored to virtue ethics. The analysis, in addition to suggesting the value of assignments such as (...)
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  • (1 other version)Does Situationism Threaten Free Will and Moral Responsibility?Michael McKenna & Brandon Warmke - 2017 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 14 (6):698-733.
    The situationist movement in social psychology has caused a considerable stir in philosophy. Much of this was prompted by the work of Gilbert Harman and John Doris. Both contended that familiar philosophical assumptions about the role of character in the explanation of action were not supported by experimental results. Most of the ensuing philosophical controversy has focused upon issues related to moral psychology and ethical theory. More recently, the influence of situationism has also given rise to questions regarding free will (...)
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  • Situationism versus Situationism.Travis J. Rodgers & Brandon Warmke - 2015 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (1):9-26.
    Most discussions of John Doris’s situationism center on what can be called descriptive situationism, the claim that our folk usage of global personality and character traits in describing and predicting human behavior is empirically unsupported. Philosophers have not yet paid much attention to another central claim of situationism, which says that given that local traits are empirically supported, we can more successfully act in line with our moral values if, in our deliberation about what to do, we focus on our (...)
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  • Vicious minds: Virtue epistemology, cognition, and skepticism.Lauren Olin & John M. Doris - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 168 (3):665-692.
    While there is now considerable anxiety about whether the psychological theory presupposed by virtue ethics is empirically sustainable, analogous issues have received little attention in the virtue epistemology literature. This paper argues that virtue epistemology encounters challenges reminiscent of those recently encountered by virtue ethics: just as seemingly trivial variation in context provokes unsettling variation in patterns of moral behavior, trivial variation in context elicits unsettling variation in patterns of cognitive functioning. Insofar as reliability is a condition on epistemic virtue, (...)
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  • Trustworthiness and Moral Character.Thomas W. Simpson - 2013 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (3):543-557.
    Why are people trustworthy? I argue for two theses. First, we cannot explain many socially important forms of trustworthiness solely in terms of the instrumentally rational seeking of one’s interests, in response to external sanctions or rewards. A richer psychology is required. So, second, possession of moral character is a plausible explanation of some socially important instances when people are trustworthy. I defend this conclusion against the influential account of trust as ‘encapsulated interest’, given by Russell Hardin, on which most (...)
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  • Autonomous Action: Self-Determination in the Passive Mode.Sarah Buss - 2012 - Ethics 122 (4):647-691.
    In order to be a self-governing agent, a person must govern the process by means of which she acquires the intention to act as she does. But what does governing this process require? The standard compatibilist answers to this question all assume that autonomous actions differ from nonautonomous actions insofar as they are a more perfect expression of the agent’s agency. I challenge this conception of autonomous agents as super agents. The distinguishing feature of autonomous agents is, I argue, the (...)
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  • Virtue Ethics, Character, and Normative Receptivity.Candace Upton - 2008 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 5 (1):77-95.
    Classically-conceived accounts of character posit traits that are both dynamic and global. Dynamic traits produce behavior, and global traits produce behavior across the full range of situation kinds relevant to a particular trait. If you are classically just, for example, you would behave justly across the full range of situation kinds relevant to justice. But classical traits are too crude to fulfill trait attributions' intrinsically normative purpose, which is to reflect the moral merit agents deserve. I defend an extra-classical account (...)
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  • Good ethics can sometimes mean better science: Research ethics and the Milgram experiments.Dan McArthur - 2009 - Science and Engineering Ethics 15 (1):69-79.
    All agree that if the Milgram experiments were proposed today they would never receive approval from a research ethics board. However, the results of the Milgram experiments are widely cited across a broad range of academic literature from psychology to moral philosophy. While interpretations of the experiments vary, few commentators, especially philosophers, have expressed doubts about the basic soundness of the results. What I argue in this paper is that this general approach to the experiments might be in error. I (...)
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  • Character and consistency: Still more errors.Gopal Sreenivasan - 2008 - Mind 117 (467):603-612.
    This paper continues a debate among philosophers concerning the implications of situationist experiments in social psychology for the theory of virtue. In a previous paper (2002), I argued among other things that the sort of character trait problematized by Hartshorne and May's (1928) famous study of honesty is not the right sort to trouble the theory of virtue. Webber (2006) criticizes my argument, alleging that it founders on an ambiguity in "cross-situational consistency" and that Milgram's (1974) obedience experiment is immune (...)
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  • The indeterminacy paradox: Character evaluations and human psychology.Peter B. M. Vranas - 2005 - Noûs 39 (1):1–42.
    You may not know me well enough to evaluate me in terms of my moral character, but I take it you believe I can be evaluated: it sounds strange to say that I am indeterminate, neither good nor bad nor intermediate. Yet I argue that the claim that most people are indeterminate is the conclusion of a sound argument—the indeterminacy paradox—with two premises: (1) most people are fragmented (they would behave deplorably in many and admirably in many other situations); (2) (...)
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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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