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 (...) several rounds of debate, both sides claim victory, and they seem to have reached a stalemate. In this paper, I refocus the debate on the arguments offered in support of situationism itself. I argue that two serious problems have so far gone unnoticed in the literature. First, the argument in support of situationism is unsound. It is based on evidence that agents’ morally relevant behavior reliably covaries with morally irrelevant situationa.. (shrink)

Aggregation shows that virtue-relevant behavior is indeed highly predictable, and that individual differences in global virtues do indeed exist. Aggregation is a key response to the situationist argument against the existence of broad virtues. However, a concern with aggregation is that, because it is an average, the specifics of what are included in that average matter. In particular, if heinous actions could be included in the average, then aggregates cannot provide enough confidence that the holders of high aggregates have not (...) conducted heinous actions and thus cannot provide enough confidence that such people qualify as virtuous. Doris has challenged aggregation with this concern, and no one has responded substantively to this challenge. If Doris’ challenge is in fact correct, then the situationist argument against the existence of broad virtues stands. In the article, we present a full response to this concern. We argue that aggregation does not in fact allow heinous exceptions, because aggregates do indeed predict extreme single behaviors very well. In fact, aggregates do allow confidence that holders of high aggregates do not commit heinous actions. Thus, Doris’ rejection of the aggregation solution does not defeat aggregation, aggregation continues to stand in the defense of global virtues, and the situationist argument does not threaten the existence and predictive power of global virtues. Models of traits that rely on aggregates, such as Whole Trait Theory, may provide useful post-situationist models of virtues. (shrink)

Within the nursing ethics literature, there has for some time now been a focus on the role and importance of character for nursing. An overarching rationale for this is the need to examine the sort of person one must be if one is to nurse well or be a good nurse. How one should be to live well or live a/the good life and to nurse well or be a good nurse seems to necessitate a focus on an agent's character (...) as well as actions because character is (for the most part) expressed in action (e.g. seeLaird). This paper will give an overview of the reasons for the role and importance of character in nursing practice and explain its relation to nursing's frequent use of virtue ethics in order to recommend caution. While the paper agrees that the role of character is important in nursing caution is needed in both how much moral and thus normative, emphasis is being placed on the psychology of character and on the drift to virtue ethics. The psychological which may be explanatory needs to be linked with the normative, and a justification for the normative is needed. A justification as virtue ethics is contested, and nursing practice does not need to take on this explanatory and justificatory burden.A tentative proposal raised but not discussed in depth in this paper is that when an ultimate explanation or explanatory ground is needed, nursing practice leads quite naturally to a form of consequentialism as well as a realist metaethic. On this account, there are two levels of moral thinking, and nursing practice entails the virtues at one level and leads quite naturally to moral thinking at another more critical level of the criterion of what makes something right and good independently of character. (shrink)

Considerable progress in personality and social psychology has been largely ignored by philosophers, many of whom still remain sceptical concerning whether the conception of character presupposed by virtue theory is descriptively adequate. Here, I employ the five-factor model of personality, currently the consensus view in personality psychology, to respond to a strong reading of the situationist challenge, whereby most people lack dispositions that are both cross-situationally consistent and temporally stable. I show that situationists rely on a false dichotomy between character (...) traits and situations, and that evidence supports the empirical adequacy of the sorts of character traits presupposed by virtue ethics. Additionally, I suggest that the personality traits of the five-factor model are relevant to virtue theory, in so far as they are malleable, morally salient, and seem to structurally parallel Aristotelian virtues and vices. Thus, contra situationism, the five-factor model supports the descriptive adequacy of a virtue-theoretical framework. (shrink)

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 (...) these normative inconsistencies in behavior might well be produced by habit interference: experimental subjects err by over-generalizing dispositions formed in prior situations. I ground this alternative hypothesis in the long tradition of transfer of learning studies, which demonstrated that cognitive inconsistency was often the result of habit interference and, hence, overly generalized dispositions. I shall thus explore the analogy between moral and cognitive inconsistency to show why social psychology might well benefit from adopting the experimental design of the classic transfer of learning studies. (shrink)