People like us: Morality, psychology, and the fragmentation of character.

Abstract

Reflection on a 70-year "situationist" tradition in social psychology (e.g., Darley, Milgram, Mischel, Nisbett, and Ross) indicates that the characterological moral psychology typical of Aristotelian virtue ethics (e.g., Foot, McDowell, and Williams) is empirically inadequate: it cannot account for important behaviors in experimental settings and the variability of moral behavior in naturalistic contexts. In response, the virtue theorist may insist that she is not proposing a descriptive psychology, but a normative theory, or a system of regulative ideals. If so, the virtue theorist owes some argument concerning the advantages of her approach relative to prominent alternatives such as utilitarianism and Kantianism, since the initial attraction of her theory appeared to be a richer psychological account of moral education, deliberation, and agency than that available to its "rule-based" competitors. I consider a variety of contexts in which characterological ethical reflection might be practically indispensable: narrative intelligibility, moral responsibility, therapeutic transformation, personal relationships, and normative guidance. I conclude that characterological reflection is not indispensable in any of these settings. I argue further that there may be considerable practical advantage in embracing a more empirically adequate conception of moral personality, such as the one I derive from situationist psychology. This does not mean that virtue theory has no place in our ethical reflection, but it does suggest that its advantages are considerably more tenuous than proponents have maintained.