Abstract
Virtue ethics prescribes cultivating global and behaviorally efficacious character traits, but John Doris (Noûs 32:504–530, 1998; Lack of character: personality and moral behavior. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002) and others argue that situationist social psychology shows this to be infeasible. Here, I show how certain versions of virtue ethics that ‘go mental’ can withstand this challenge as well as Doris’ (Philos Stud 148:135–146, 2010) further objections. The defense turns on an account of which psychological materials constitute character traits and which the situationist research shows to be problematically variable. Many situationist results may be driven by impulsive akrasia produced by low-level (in some cases even perceptual), emotionally induced ignorance about one’s situation, and some may be driven by a further subtype: modal akrasia. Many subjects in the infamous Milgram experiments, e.g., seem to have recognized what the virtuous thing to do was and that they should do it, and only failed to do it because their emotions prevented them from seeing (or at least from recognizing, at the level of deliberation) that they could. If the primary constituents of character traits are higher-level mental dispositions involved in deliberation, though, then the results don’t show that these psychological materials are problematically variable.
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Notes
I’ll focus on Doris’ account, but the response developed also applies to Harman (1999) and Vranas’ (2005). Merritt (2000) and Flanagan (1991) express somewhat different worries about character. Ross and Nisbett (1991) provide an introduction to the relevant empirical findings, which Mischel (1968, 1971) applies to character traits.
I’ll argue for an important modification of this conditional in §4. Following Doris, we’ll bracket any worries about conditional analyses of dispositions and the details of eliciting conditions and exact probabilities.
Most of the relevant data come from between-subjects studies, but the best explanation of the cross-situational inconsistency found in these experiments is intrapersonal inconsistency (Doris 2002: 63). See also note 50.
On psychological realism, see Flanagan (1991: Ch. 2) and Doris (2002: 112–114). Doris insists that the real debate is over traits of type T, had to extent E (where T and E are those required by virtue ethics), such that others, like Prinz (2009: 125), overstate things in saying, e.g., that “[i]f situationists are right about average minds, then virtuous minds are not merely hard to attain; they may be nomologically impossible” (my emphasis). However, if we say that situationism only shows it to be extremely difficult, not impossible, to possess the relevant traits, then there is more force in the response that the virtues are supposed to be rare (Annas 2005; Sreenivasan 2002). We can reconcile these characterizations by construing the debate in terms of the possibility of character traits of type T + , possessed to extent E +. (All parties should agree that whatever we currently possess is improvable; the question is whether we could develop robust and extensive enough traits for the purposes of virtue ethics. I’ll often leave these qualifiers implicit in the text.) Empirical data can support this type of nomological possibility claim. We have excellent empirical evidence, e.g., that no human can run 100 m in under 3 s (through natural means).
I really do mean “on behalf” of. I won’t offer a positive argument for the existence of character traits, only a negative argument against situationists’ claims to have proven them untenable. I think there are independent motivations for virtue ethics, and only intend to de-fang the situationist challenge to it here, clearing the path for these positive considerations. For surveys of other responses to situationism, see Prinz (2009) and Russell (2009: Part III). “Best” is trickier. I’ll go on to argue that virtue ethical theories that take some of the primary constituents of character to lie at the pre-deliberative level (e.g., Alfano 2013; DesAutels 2012; McDowell 1978, 1979; Russell 2009; Snow 2008; Wiggins 1975) fare worse against the situationist challenge than theories that take its primary constituents to be deliberative. I’ll discuss the former theories in what follows, but will have to pass over the independent things that can be said in their support. I note, then, that there may be tradeoffs. Just in terms of, and for the purposes of responding to the situationist challenge, however, deliberative theories of character are better situated than pre-deliberative theories, and so are included in its “best” defense in that sense. The rest of the argument I offer—the re-interpretation of the situationist results—can be used by all virtue ethicists.
These are the dispositions that constitute traits, could develop into them, or would (if that were possible).
These are convenient ways of dividing processes that occur along more of a spectrum, and surely other causal arrows (some pointing in opposite directions) are needed for anything like completeness. We don’t need to take a stand on all of the model’s details, since its structure is what’s important. Dual-processing theories do, however, lend a certain amount of empirical support: system 1 processes are often construed as quasi-perceptual (e.g., by Kahneman 2011), System 2 processes as effortful and deliberative.
As Jacobson (2005) notes, moral sensibility theorists sometimes use ‘seeing’ and ‘perception’ to refer to actual sensory perception, sometimes to a cognitive or intellectual sort of “perception” (indeed, compare NE 1147a25-27 and 1147b15-19, where Aristotle speaks of sensory perception and NE 1143a25-1143b7, where the relevant sense of “perception” is noûs.) McDowell (1978, 1979) and Wiggins (1975) claim that phronêsis—prudence or practical wisdom construed as a way of moral seeing or quasi-perception—is a constituent of the virtues (though McDowell takes the relevant states to have a dual direction of fit). Note also that speaking of “epistemic” sensitivities at the perceptual (and perhaps quasi-perceptual) level is an expedient. They need not concern actual knowledge, but they are—like genuinely epistemic sensitivities at higher levels—passive, receptive dispositions.
I mean to construe deliberation more broadly: not broadly enough to include theoretical reasoning, but not to require practical reasoning of any particular sort (e.g., “weighing” or “calculating”), either. The deliberative account has affinities with theories of identification, according to which actions produced by deliberation are more fully one’s own than others. Some deliberative accounts may tie character traits more tightly to the will (in line with volitionalists about identification, like Frankfurt, 1988), while others may connect them more closely to evaluative judgments (in line with cognitivists, like Watson, 1975). The relevant dispositions may also constrain, rather than motivate, one’s choice, as in Frankfurt’s (1988) “volitional necessities”.
All references to Nicomachean Ethics are to Thomson (2004) except the next, which is Ross (1998; NE 1106b35-1107a3; my emphases). The interpretation of Aristotle’s views is, of course, a matter of debate (though Doris 2002: 175 also seems to take his to be a deliberative account). Suffice to say that the interpretation I offer here is Aristotelian (and at least what Aristotle should have said if apprised of modern social psychology).
NE 1139a23-26. Earlier, Aristotle says that the virtues are not feelings, but rather the dispositions to have feelings through practical reasoning: “when we are angry or frightened it is not by our choice; but our virtues are expressions of our choice, or at any rate imply choice” (NE 1106a2-4).
NE 1111b5-6; my emphasis.
Arguably, well-functioning sensitivities would underlie intellectual, rather than moral virtues. More importantly, responsibility attributions aren’t a perfect guide to character—they’re also sensitive to other factors like moral luck. Our question, however, concerns cases where responsibility is diminished because of a lack of character in producing it (that is, cases in which the agent would otherwise have been responsible, holding fixed any other factors like moral luck, habitual shortcomings, etc., were it not for her lack of character).
NE 1147b7.
NE 1110b30-1111a2.
NE 1111a18-21.
NE 1146b35-1147a10.
NE 1147a26-27; my emphasis.
NE 1146b31-1147a24.
NE 1147b15-19; my emphasis. Moss (2009: 137, n. 37; 150) also interprets Aristotle as claiming that akrasia involves a genuinely perceptual shortcoming (akin to a perceptual illusion), rather than a failing of phronêsis, as McDowell (1978, 1979) and Wiggins (1975) would have it. Like the moral sensibility theorist, though, Moss still takes the akratic to lack a kind of moral knowledge. This doesn’t sit well with Aristotle’s claim that akrasia is partly mitigating, since he suggests (e.g., in the quote above about involuntariness) that moral ignorance is the most blameworthy type of ignorance. It’s for this (intuitively compelling) reason that we should take involuntariness and akrasia to involve descriptive, or factual epistemic failures, rather than ignorance of moral or normative knowledge.
NE 1150b7-12 and 1152a17-19.
NE 1150b30-1151a28; cf. 1102b13-19.
NE 1128b17-21. Burnyeat (1999) details the deep parallels between youth and akrasia for Aristotle.
NE 1150a19-21; cf. 1152a17-20.
NE 1150b27.
NE 1151a1-2.
This model isn’t Aristotle’s, of course. For one, Aristotle’s ‘choice’—prohairesis—is somewhat ambiguous between judgment and decision, and he may not have had an independent concept of the will (Frede 2011). Our model resolves that ambiguity in the distinction between deliberative and post-deliberative levels.
Bypassing “occurs when one’s actions are not causally dependent on one’s [responsibility]-relevant mental states and processes, such as one’s beliefs, desires, deliberations, and decisions” (Murray and Nahmias 2014: 440). Bypassing also occurs when lower-level processes cut out higher-level processes from the causal chain.
Davidson (1980: 22), for instance, defines akrasia as follows: “In doing x an agent acts incontinently if and only if: (a) the agent does x intentionally; (b) the agent believes there is an alternative action y open to him; and (c) the agent judges that, all things considered, it would be better to do y than to do x.” Pre-deliberative akrasia need not involve any judgment, and the modal akrasia discussed below also fails to satisfy condition (b). Others are of course free to call these shortcomings something other than ‘akrasia’, but I’ll follow Aristotle’s terminology. Rorty (1980) is an important exception. She recognizes that akrasia can occur on a number of different levels, including the perceptual, but it’s sometimes unclear whether she has in mind practical, or instead epistemic, akrasia.
This is only occurrent inaccessibility, compatible with having the knowledge dispositionally. As Aristotle says, akrasia may result from having knowledge only in the sense of the asleep or intoxicated.
Taking regret and remorse to provide evidence of mitigating conditions supports this point (assuming that such reactions arise at the level of deliberation). The weak akratic’s compunction shows that his passions, unlike the vicious or wicked’s, were properly regulated by practical reasoning at the deliberative, even if not post-deliberative, level.
Even if impetuous akrasia doesn’t involve occurrent deliberative-level failures, doesn’t it still require that such failures occurred on some past occasion(s)? No: passionate interference with information about some specific aspect of one’s current situation at the pre-deliberative level doesn’t imply any past failure to regulate that passion with respect to that information. One may never have encountered any situation with that aspect before. In that case, past regulative failures don’t explain how one’s practical reasoning would regulate one’s passions on this particular occasion in light of this particular information, so the current passionate interference provides no evidence about the psychological materials that (would) underlie one’s character traits.
Doris accepts that situationism may demonstrate widespread akrasia, but remains ambivalent about whether this mitigates responsibility (2002: 136; 214, n. 22). I suspect this lies in the fact that he focuses on the weak, post-deliberative variety—akrasia involving failures of “self-control” and “normative competence” (2002: 133).
Many cases of self-deception qualify as quasi-perceptual akrasia: desires curtail epistemic sensitivities (e.g., to evidence of one’s partner’s infidelity) prior to deliberation. As discussed in the text below, there is evidence that mood affects attention, and experiments in the New Look tradition of the 1950 s and more recent studies in the same vein provide further evidence that desires and affective states can influence genuinely perceptual sensitivities (Balcetis and Lassiter 2010). Ambiguous figures are more likely to be perceived as desired objects—e.g., as food for subjects who are hungry (Balcetis and Dunning 2006, Epstein 1961). Subjects perceive objects that lead to a reward to be closer to them than less desirable objects (Balcetis and Dunning 2010). Subjects perceive a hill as steeper the more they’re afraid of skateboarding down it (Stefanucci et al. 2008), and subjects who are more afraid of heights over-estimate them (Stefanucci and Proffitt 2009). The classic finding remains Bruner and Goodman’s (1947): children of lower socio-economic status perceive some coins as larger than better-off children. Stokes (2011) argues that these results demonstrate direct causal effects of desires on perception in more detail.
Levin and Isen (1975) found similar results when the measured behavior was mailing a lost letter left on top of the phone (the assumption being that every subject would perceptually register such a conspicuously placed object whether they had found a dime or not). However, other researchers have failed to replicate this “lost letter” result (Weyant and Clark 1977: 108–109), and still others have failed to replicate the original “dropped papers” result (Blevins and Murphy 1974). The literature on mood effects more generally also gives “mixed results” (Miller 2009), and so may not need to be explained away by virtue ethicists at all.
Similarly, Ross and Nisbett (1991: 43) suggest that many subjects in the Bystander Effect experiments (like Latané and Darley 1970) fail to help due to their “subjective construal” of the situation: “interestingly, it also appears that group situations may have inhibited subjects from noticing the emergency in the first place.” Snow (2008: Ch. 5) offers a similar interpretation of many of the situationist findings, though see note 46.
De Motu Animalium 701a24-25.
Evidence of this emotional distress comes from quantitative self-reports of how “tense and nervous” subjects were (Milgram 1974: 41–43), qualitative self-reports in post-experiment debriefings, and third-party observations. One particularly poignant third-party report: “I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 min he was reduced to a twitching and stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse. He constantly pulled on his earlobe, and twisted his hands. At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: “Oh God, let’s stop it.” And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter, and obeyed to the end” (quoted in Milgram 1963: 377).
According to Bok (1996: 190–191), the Milgram results are not driven by one duty (e.g., obedience) outweighing another at the (post)-deliberative level, but instead by conflicting duties causing subjects not to make any decision at all, which Bok takes to constitute failure of a virtue that allows people to resolve such dilemmas.
People can judge that they should perform actions that they think they can’t; they just can’t decide to perform them. That is, at least one type of ‘ought’ implies can (though subjects might fail to recognize this). It’s plausible that only the deliberative ‘ought’ implies can, while the evaluative ‘ought’—the sense in which Levi ought to win the lottery because he’s had terrible luck (but is such a nice guy)—does not (Schroeder 2011: 8–9). Milgram (1974: 8–9) makes a similar suggestion: “Another psychological force at work in this situation may be termed ‘counteranthropomorophism’… attributing an impersonal quality to forces that are essentially human in origin and maintenance… Thus, when the experimenter says, ‘The experiment requires that you continue’, the subject feels this to be an imperative that goes beyond any merely human command… ‘It’s got to go on. It’s got to go on’, repeated one subject. He failed to realize that a man like himself [the designer] wanted it to go on. For him the human agent had faded from the picture, and ‘The Experiment’ had acquired an impersonal momentum of its own.” Believing ‘The Experiment’ was literally issuing commands seems incredible, but many subjects may have taken it to have an “impersonal momentum” that simply wasn’t within any human’s power (at least their own) to terminate.
‘Modal akrasia’, of course, concerns nomological, metaphysical, and perhaps logical modality, as well as what’s possible for an agent relative to his or her set of capacities and abilities—not deontic modality.
If we can perceive affordances—e.g., if we can see the apple as eat-able-(for-me) (Gibson 1979)—and if our passions can disrupt our doing so, that would constitute genuinely perceptual modal akrasia. For example, some Milgram subjects may have literally failed to see the learner as help-able-by-me because of the experimental demands. Compare Ross and Nisbett (1991: 57), who speculate that if there had been a big red ‘stop the experiment!’ button in front of subjects (thereby providing them a “channel factor”), most would have pressed it. Plausibly, the reason this would make a difference is that the button would allow subjects to see the experiment as stop-able-by-me (or the learner as help-able-by-me) in virtue of seeing the button as press-able-for-me.
This fact, though, seems to have more to do with the capacities humans happen to have for acquiring evidence about character traits, rather than the nature of the traits themselves. The reactive attitudes might still make perfect sense in a society of completely paralyzed but, e.g., telepathic (or technologically-enabled) mind readers.
A need not recognize S as “C.” One can act courageously without any thoughts about courage as such (one might simply recognize the enemy as fight-able-for-me). “CAPS” theorists like Snow (2008) and Russell (2009) make a similar point, though what they advocate adding to the antecedent is “subjective construal” (cf. Kamtekar 2004: 471). Following Mischel and Shoda (1995), they argue for a version of ‘going mental’ that straddles the two main families: character traits are robust patterns in the cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS), which consists of a number of different types of state, such that both pre-deliberative sensitivities like “subjective construal” and deliberative-level processes count as primary constituents. This opens CAPS theories to the internal variability challenge: if pre-deliberative sensitivities are among the primary constituents of character traits, the situationist data remain problematic, since they demonstrate variability in those internal states. Moreover, CAPS theorists tend to take “subjective construal” to include much more than the non-moral (quasi)-perceptual states involved in (ii): affect, emotions, and even evaluative judgments. The more we include in the specification of S, though, the more we risk making the conditional vacuous qua test or analysis of character. At the limit, adding the constituents of the character traits themselves into the antecedent amounts to individuating situations in terms of which traits are operative in them, which gets us nowhere. See note 5, though.
Doris (2009, forthcoming) and Railton (2009, 2011) argue that the psychological literature on “automaticity” shows that human behavior is caused by pre-deliberative instead of deliberative-level processes most of the time (in which case, we either aren’t responsible for most actions or responsibility and agency don’t require deliberation). Doris and Railton don’t pose this as an objection to virtue ethics, but it may require a modification of the present account, insofar as we need to explain how responsibility for pre-deliberatively-caused behaviors can nonetheless vary. The deliberativist picture developed here can be extended to do so. Deliberative processes are most central to one’s character traits, but some pre-deliberative states or processes may be more central than others if: (i) they were formed or shaped by the former on some past occasion or (ii) have properties analogous to those the virtue ethicist takes to be important about the former. (These pre-deliberative attitudes might then be disrupted or bypassed by genuinely “brute” passions—those that don’t satisfy (i) or (ii)—in forms of akrasia akin to those discussed here.) This may be the most plausible way to relax the requirement that character traits be deliberative, rather than pre-deliberative, while maintaining a clean separation between (V) and (C). See notes 5 and 46.
To the extent that we can train epistemic sensitivities to be more consistent, the situationist challenge is even less threatening to versions of virtue ethics that take those sensitivities to be more central to character traits than the deliberative account. Doris (2002: 148) even optimistically recommends teaching people about situationist effects. Beaman et al. (1978), e.g., find that watching a short film or a lecture on group effects increases helping behavior in subsequent bystander paradigms. Simply being informed that people in groups are less likely to help seems to cause people in groups to help more. There’s also evidence that deliberative instruction can affect pre-deliberative—even perceptual—sensitivities. Langer et al. (2010), e.g., show that telling subjects either that practice or motivation (“try and you will succeed”) on visual acuity tests improves performance actually improves performance.
Indeed, the more human behavior is driven at the pre-deliberative rather than deliberative level, the less information we have about deliberative-level processing in general, and so the less evidence we have about whether it’s problematically variable (see note 47). As noted, Doris (1998: 511, 2002: 69–71) himself tends to trace the variability in overt behavior back to epistemic sensitivities, rather than to active, deliberative-level processing. Doris (2002: 69–71, 2005: 659, 2010: 142–143, forthcoming) and Olin and Doris (2014) discuss many of the relevant findings. Note, moreover, that even if behavioral variability’s primarily being driven by epistemic sensitivities gets virtue ethics off the hook, it only fans the flames of recent critiques of virtue epistemology (Alfano 2013; Olin and Doris 2014), as an anonymous reviewer for this journal points out.
Another situationist staple is Hartshorne and May (1928), where the (within-subject) correlation of honest behavior in many children was shown to be (only) about 0.2 (see note 3). Mischel and Shoda (1995) show much higher correlations in children when individuating situations by subjective construal. For reservations, see note 46.
Assuming, at least, that non-deliberative versions of virtue ethics aren’t independently more plausible (see note 5, though for suggestions about how non-deliberative elements might be allowed into the primary constituents of character traits while holding onto the re-interpretation strategy pursued here, see notes 46 and 47).
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Acknowledgments
A previous version of this paper was presented at the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, 2010, where Robyn Gaier gave comments. I’d also like to thank the audience there, as well those on several occasions (formal and informal) where I presented this material at Berkeley. I’ve greatly benefitted from a number of people’s comments and conversation, including Eugene Chislenko, Ryan DeChant, Alex Kerr, John MacFarlane, Tim O’Keefe, Jonathan Phillips, Reuben Stern, Rush Stewart, Justin Vlasits, Jay Wallace, an anonymous reviewer for Philosophical Studies, and especially John Doris, Lauren Olin, Alex Madva, and Eddy Nahmias.
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Murray, D. Situationism, going mental, and modal akrasia . Philos Stud 172, 711–736 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0330-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0330-z