This book is a provocative contribution to contemporary ethical theory challenging foundational conceptions of character that date back to Aristotle. John Doris draws on behavioral science, especially social psychology, to argue that we misattribute the causes of behavior to personality traits and other fixed aspects of character rather than to the situational context. More often than not it is the situation not the nature of the personality that really counts. The author elaborates the philosophical consequences of this research for a (...) whole array of ethical theories and shows that, once rid of the misleading conception of motivation, moral psychology can support more robust ethical theories and more humane ethical practices. (shrink)

1. Presumably the point of, say, inculcating a moral outlook lies in a concern with how people live. It may seem that the very idea of a moral outlook makes room for, and requires, the existence of moral theory, conceived as a discipline which seeks to formulate acceptable principles of conduct. It is then natural to think of ethics as a branch of philosophy related to moral theory, so conceived, rather as the philosophy of science is related to science. On (...) this view, the primary topic of ethics is the concept of right conduct, and the nature and justification of principles of behaviour. If there is a place for an interest in the concept of virtue, it is a secondary place. Virtue is a disposition to behave rightly; the nature of virtue is explained, as it were, from the outside in. (shrink)

Ordinary moral thought often commits what social psychologists call 'the fundamental attribution error '. This is the error of ignoring situational factors and overconfidently assuming that distinctive behaviour or patterns of behaviour are due to an agent's distinctive character traits. In fact, there is no evidence that people have character traits in the relevant sense. Since attribution of character traits leads to much evil, we should try to educate ourselves and others to stop doing it.

Everyone wants to be virtuous, but recent psychological investigations suggest that this may not be possible. Mark Alfano challenges this theory and asks, not whether character is empirically adequate, but what characters human beings could have and develop. Although psychology suggests that most people do not have robust character traits such as courage, honesty and open-mindedness, Alfano argues that we have reason to attribute these virtues to people because such attributions function as self-fulfilling prophecies - children become more studious if (...) they are told that they are hard-working and adults become more generous if they are told that they are generous. He argues that we should think of virtue and character as social constructs: there is no such thing as virtue without social reinforcement. His original and provocative book will interest a wide range of readers in contemporary ethics, epistemology, moral psychology and empirically informed philosophy. (shrink)

In this incisive study Sarah Broadie gives an argued account of the main topics of Aristotle's ethics: eudaimonia, virtue, voluntary agency, practical reason, akrasia, pleasure, and the ethical status of theoria. She explores the sense of "eudaimonia," probes Aristotle's division of the soul and its virtues, and traces the ambiguities in "voluntary." Fresh light is shed on his comparison of practical wisdom with other kinds of knowledge, and a realistic account is developed of Aristototelian deliberation. The concept of pleasure as (...) value-judgment is expounded, and the problem of akrasia is argued to be less of a problem to Aristotle than to his modern interpreters. Showing that the theoretic ideal of Nicomachean Ethics X is in step with the earlier emphasis on practice, as well as with the doctrine of the Eudemian Ethics, this work makes a major contribution towards the understanding of Aristotle's ethics. (shrink)

This book develops an Aristotelian account of the virtue of practical intelligence or "phronesis"--an excellence of deliberating and making choices--which ...

The goal of this book is to develop a new framework for thinking about what moral character looks like today. My central claim will be that most people have moral character traits, but at the same time they do not have either the traditional  ...

This book first reviews Miller's theory of Mixed Traits, as developed in his 2013 book Moral Character: An Empirical Theory. It then engages extensively with situations, the CAPS model in social psychology, and the Big Five Model in personality psychology. It ends by taking up implications for his view in meta-ethics (a modified error theory) and normative ethics (a challenge for virtue ethics).

_Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory_ takes on the claims of philosophical situationism, the ethical theory that is skeptical about the possibility of human virtue. Influenced by social psychological studies, philosophical situationists argue that human personality is too fluid and fragmented to support a stable set of virtues. They claim that virtue cannot be grounded in empirical psychology. This book argues otherwise. Drawing on the work of psychologists Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda, Nancy E. Snow argues that the (...) social psychological experiments that philosophical situationists rely on look at the wrong kinds of situations to test for behavioral consistency. Rather than looking at situations that are objectively similar, researchers need to compare situations that have similar meanings _for the subject_. When this is done, subjects exhibit behavioral consistencies that warrant the attribution of enduring traits, and virtues are a subset of these traits. Virtue can therefore be empirically grounded and virtue ethics has nothing to fear from philosophical situationism. (shrink)

Dual process theorists in psychology maintain that the mind’s workings can be explained in terms of conscious or controlled processes and automatic processes. Automatic processes are largely nonconscious, that is, triggered by environmental stimuli without the agent’s conscious awareness or deliberation. Automaticity researchers contend that even higher level habitual social behaviors can be nonconsciously primed. This article brings work on automaticity to bear on our understanding of habitual virtuous actions. After examining a recent intuitive account of habitual actions and habitual (...) virtuous actions, the author offers her own explanation in terms of goal-dependent automaticity. This form of automaticity provides an account of habitual virtuous actions that explains the sense in which these actions are rational, that is, done for reasons. Habitual virtuous actions are rational in the sense of being purposive or goal-directed and are essentially linked with the agent’s psychological states. Unlike deliberative virtuous actions, the agent’s reasons for habitual virtuous actions are not present to her conscious awareness at the time of acting. (shrink)

For the past decade and a half, Aristotelians have tried to counter the following criticism articulated by John Doris: if we look at personality and social psychology research, we must conclude that we generally neither have, nor have the capacity to develop, character traits of the kind envisioned by Aristotle and his followers. Some defenses of Aristotelian virtue ethics proceed by trying to insulate it from this challenge, while others have tried to dissipate the force of Doris's critique by showing (...) how virtue ethics and recent findings in personality psychology share surprisingly extensive common ground. For example, in their 2009 books, Daniel Russell and Nancy Snow both argue that the empirical research regarding character complements - not undermines - virtue ethics. Specifically, each argues that the situationally sensitive Cognitive-Affective Personality System developed by Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda can be integrated into a virtue ethical moral philosophy and theory of character. In this paper, I raise several objections to their attempts to use the CAPS model to rehabilitate Aristotelian virtue ethics and argue that, as a result, this model has not been shown to have the promise Snow and Russell allege it has. (shrink)

This is a collection of the late Heda Segvic's papers in ancient moral philosophy. At the time of her death at age forty-five in 2003, Segvic had already established herself as an important figure in ancient philosophy, making bold new arguments about the nature of Socratic intellectualism and the intellectual influences that shaped Aristotle's ideas. Segvic had been working for some time on a monograph on practical knowledge that would interpret Aristotle's ethical theory as a response to Protagoras. The essays (...) collected here are those on which her reputation rests, including some that were intended to form the backbone of her projected monograph. The papers range from a literary study of Homer's influence on Plato's Protagoras to analytic studies of Aristotle's metaphysics and his ideas about deliberation. Most of the papers reflect directly or indirectly Segvic's idea that both Socrates' and Aristotle's universalism and objectivism in ethics could be traced back to their opposition to Protagorean relativism. The book represents the considerable achievements of one of the most talented scholars of ancient philosophy of her generation. (shrink)

This is a collection of the late Heda Segvic's papers in ancient moral philosophy.