![]() Annas (2002), Swanton (2003), and other virtue ethicists have responded to the challenge. Yet even the more balanced presentation of a similar skepticism in John Doris's 2002 study surely calls for critical appraisal by virtue theorists of any normative persuasion. Such a sweeping dismissal of all talk of character traits is, arguably, an overly simplified reading of the relevant personality studies (see Matthews, Deary, and Whiteman 2003 for a synthesis of the empirical evidence favoring interactionism, the view that behavior is a function of both personality differences and situational influences). We need to abandon all talk of virtue and character, not find a way to save it by reinterpreting it" (1999/2000, p. We need to convince people to look at situational factors and to stop explaining things in terms of character traits. ![]() … I think we need to get people to stop doing this. I believe that ordinary thinking in terms of character traits has had disastrous effects on people's understanding of each other. Gilbert Harman, considering both experimental and real-life examples of such catastrophic character failure, has forcefully pressed the negative implications he sees for the very foundations of virtue theory: "I myself think it is better to abandon all thought and talk of character and virtue. ![]() In addition, we have increasing evidence from developments at prisons in Iraq and other places around the world that average American young people, in stressful environments, can engage in dehumanizing practices that shock almost all of us. In experiments no longer permitted by twenty-first-century ethical guidelines, subjects were duped into administering what they were led to believe were severe electric shocks to their "victims" or invited to "role-play" as prison guards to such an extent that the subsequent sadistic behavior caused the researchers to abort the exercise. Extreme situationists argue on the basis of considerable experimental evidence that the layperson's readiness to attribute to themselves and others robust character traits that are stable across situations, both over time and in various circumstances, and that can be used to predict behavior, is undermined by what has been termed "the power of the situation." In this identification Hurka is acknowledging a controversy stemming from certain results in social psychology that some philosophers have taken to rule out on empirical grounds any robust conception of personality traits. Tom Hurka (2001), for example, defines moral virtues and vices as responsive attitudes taken up toward intrinsic goods and evils, in explicit opposition to the view going back to Aristotle that treats them as stable dispositions or persisting states of persons. This recent consequentialist vindication of virtue can involve a considerable departure from the paradigmatic picture of virtues and vices as traits of character, however. ![]() An Empirical Challenge to Traits of Character Jeremy Bentham, for example, gave a rather rude treatment of virtue in his Deontology, as recently described by Julia Annas (2002). While the attention to virtue among Kantians and neo-Kantians is not too surprising, since much of Kant's later work was devoted to working out the important role that virtue and character play in morality (the weighty concluding section of the 1797 Metaphysics of Morals is rightly titled "The Doctrine of Virtue"), the consequentialist turn to virtue is, perhaps, more surprising. ![]() Thus, two consequentialists (Driver 2001, Hurka 2001) have produced full-length treatments of the virtues, and there has been a growing appreciation of the key role of virtue in Immanuel Kant's ethics (Herman 1993, O'Neill 1996, Wood 1999). Assuming that human agents possess settled dispositions or character traits, some of which are especially deemed worthy of praise while others deserve blame or reproach, moral philosophers have long treated the first sort under the category "virtue" and their opposites under the general term "vice." The fin-de-siecle revival of the virtue tradition in normative ethics as a third force, alongside Kantianism and consequentialism, has resulted in focused attention by theorists of all persuasions on the nature and proper role of virtues and vices in any comprehensive treatment of morality. ![]()
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