states of character vs. virtues
January 11, 2010
Ok, one last bit for now on the situationism stuff (continued from here, here, and here).
I think a main source of confusion is the distinction between what empirical claims virtue ethicists make, imply, or are committed to, and what their normative claims are. Here’s my interpretation of at least part of the story:
Empirical Claim: People ordinarily have various states of character, which regulate their behavior (and emotions) across time and across situations. Some of these states of character are virtuous (full honesty when called for), some are vicious (dishonesty), and some are in between (partial honesty when called for).
Normative Claim: People ought to cultivate all and only those states of character that are virtuous (because that fulfills their human function and allows them to flourish, blah blah blah).
Situationists aren’t really attacking the normative claim, or the rarity of people meeting its demands. Rather, they are using various bits of empirical evidence to challenge that people have states of character at all. Virtues are only a subset of the possible states of character a person can have. But, if people don’t have states of character in the virtue ethicists’ sense at all, then they cannot by extension have virtues. So the situationists only indirectly make trouble for the normative claim.
Virtue ethicists who are sensitive to the empirical nature of their presuppositions must explain what they mean not just by “virtue,” but more importantly by “states of character” such that it is consistent with the situationists’ data. And this is where things get tricky, and people in the literature start talking past each other, and everyone sounds correct. With that, I’ll quit beating this dead situationist horse for a while 
another stab at situationism
January 3, 2010
I think maybe I explained situationism rather poorly back here in skepticism about moral character. Some things Adam says over at Sophistpundit about The Nature of Character provide a good opportunity for me to clear things up for him as well as anyone else I may have unwittingly confused. So let me address a few things he writes, and do let me know if anything remains unclear.
Adam writes, about the concept of “character”:
“All I’m talking about is any regularity of behavior across particular circumstances. Anything where, after getting to know someone, one person may be able to guess with reasonable accuracy at how the other person will behave within certain circumstances.”
“Any regularity” is actually difficult to define. Even personality psychologists (e.g. Mischel) are often happy with what seem like weak relationships between the character traits they study and the outward behaviors of subjects. But that’s not too important for now. The rest of Adam’s quote above is actually consistent with even rather radical forms of situationism.
Here’s what I failed to emphasize previously: Situationists do not, and need not, deny that people may be able to predict with reasonable accuracy how some other people will behave some of the time. That’s because they may hold the following: People do have character traits, but they range over a limited set of circumstances. Since we usually see people in the same situations, they appear to have traits that we assume range over all possible situations – but that inference is bad. Moral theories (such as traditional Aristotelian virtue ethics) which posit the existence or possibility of robust traits that do range over all situations are therefore on the rocks of empirical adequacy. (I discussed this a little here: snapshots of moral character)
Adam again:
“So if situationism, at one extreme, argues that people’s behavior is determined entirely by what the circumstance is, to me that sounds tantamount to saying that everyone has the same, identical character. That is, we all behave the exact same way when our circumstances are the same, and any difference in behavior just reflects a difference in situation.”
Situationists also do not, and need not, claim that a person’s behaviors are totally determined by situations, or that at bottom we all have the same traits or character. Most of them just make some claim to the effect that, in some interesting subset of cases, whatever traits people may have are overriden, or prove impotent. In these cases, behavior tends towards a norm, for reasons that are unclear and worthy of further study.
For instance, in some iterations of the Milgram experiment, it appeared that subjects would shock the confederate all the way to a high and allegedly dangerous intensity approximately 2/3 of the time. If people were really all the same character-wise in any important sense, then this significant split in their behavior would presumably not occur. Just from a naturalistic point of view, there has got to be some reason why any given participant acted the way he did – but it might be a reason we do not take to be of moral relevance or to be something for which we are morally responsible (silly made up example: the ratio of one chemical to another in the brain at that moment in time). What situationists seem to want to press is that if character traits cannot explain these and other surprising situationist experimental results, then some morally unimportant factors (of the situation and/or of the person) have great causal power in at least some even high-stakes moral situations.
Then, new moral problems emerge. In what situations do character traits play an important role? In which are they of little behavioral influence? In the latter, what ought we to think about moral responsibility? And so on. There is a good deal of literature on these and other related issues.
Adam’s opinion here, then, is consistent with situationism:
“My personal belief is that biology sets the bounds on the sort of character we can become, and when combined with experience and the decisions we make throughout our life, we end up with who we are at a given moment. There are parts of ourselves that are more flexible and others that become more rigid with time.”
Neither he nor the situationists must “buy the idea that the situation here and now is the only or even the primary thing that determines what choices we make,” in general at least.
so be good for goodness sake
December 24, 2009
I’m taking a break from serious content to bring you frivolous xmas post, 2009.
You know that song “Santa Clause is Coming to Town?” It contains the lyric: “so be good for goodness sake.” But this is clearly inconsistent with the content of the song, and it drives me crazy.
Being good for goodness’ sake means that you should be good because it has intrinsic value for you, or value not as a means to any other end. But the song is all about how Santa is watching you, and how you won’t get presents if you are bad. This suggests that being good has merely extrinsic or instrumental value, value as a means to some end (the presents).
So, Christmas carolers, if you want to teach your kids that being good has intrinsic value, UR DOIN IT WRONG.
And to all a good night.
skepticism about moral character
December 21, 2009
The other day, my buddy Adam over at Sophistpundit wrote about Character. I was not surprised that, being an economist and some kind of Humean virtue ethicist, he thinks that morality mostly concerns what kind of people we are, and that actions are signals to other people, providing information about what we’re like.
Adam claims that people object to his point of view on the basis that it is “unforgiving,” apparently in that it encourages us to judge badly of people when they act badly. I actually agree with Adam that his position is not unforgiving, at least not in any objectionable sense, because if it’s true that bad actions indicate bad character, then there is nothing wrong with making the inference, and nothing wrong with acting on it by, for instance, dissociating from such persons.
However, I do object to Adam’s point of view not on the basis of its being unforgiving, but because it is grounded in a folk psychological theory about moral character that is very likely to be false. So I’m going to take this opportunity to explain a little bit about situationism and a big reason to be skeptical about moral character, something I’ve been studying for quite a while.
Situationists are a diverse bunch of psychologists and philosophers who argue that the way people act has more to do with the situations in which they find themselves (and less to do with their characters) than psychologists, philosophers, and regular people have historically assumed. This can range from thinking there is literally no such thing as a moral character, to thinking that character exists but in a much different form, to thinking that our moral characters are usually pretty stable except in a few oddball situations.
I am most interested in the kind of situationism espoused by John Doris in his excellent book Lack of Character. Doris argues against Aristotelian virtue ethics, which holds that virtues are “robust,” in that they regulate behavior both across time and across relevantly similar situations. There is reason to doubt that people have robust character traits (virtuous or vicious) on account of evidence such as the Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram obedience experiments. In these experiments, subjects who displayed absolutely no measurable psychological abnormalities were induced by experimental environments into behaving in violent and even sadistic ways.
This gives us some reason to believe that actions are not in fact reliable indicators of character. In at least some cases, people behave in ways that do not reflect the character traits they seem otherwise to have. Then, the difficult task becomes figuring out whether this skepticism about moral character infects all inferences from actions (good or bad) to character assessments, or whether only some kinds of situations have this power (and, if so, which ones).
I don’t mean to come off as overly critical of Adam or the folk – I myself espouse some version of virtue ethics. But this is a real problem. I have been reading and thinking hard about it for over two years now and just don’t know what to make of it. Now that I’ve given an intro to skepticism about moral character here on TFIR, I will be more inclined to discuss it further in the future, which will maybe help me to come to some kind of defensible position on the matter.
PS – If you’re looking for something academic-lite-ish to read on situationism, I highly recommend pioneering situationist Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Zimbardo provides a fascinating retelling of his famous Stanford prison experiment, which still haunts him, and also discusses his experience testifying for the defense of a man accused of abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib. In closing, he provides some helpful tips for resisting being influenced by situations which pressure us to behave immorally. A must-read.
grad school ch-ch-changes
December 16, 2009
You, as my friend and/or reader, may have seen me post stuff on Twitter and Facebook suggesting that I am currently applying to graduate schools. Indeed, I am. I figured I’d explain the situation here, once and for all.
Very shortly after I began a PhD program in philosophy in the fall of 2007, my research interests rapidly started shifting towards topics in education. First I got interested in moral character and moral education, then arguments for and against school choice, then the relationship between feminism and education, and most recently, I’ve started studying alternative forms of education such as unschooling.
Because not many people in departments of philosophy focus on education, and because the job market for professors of education seems rather better than that for philosophers, I have decided to move to a school of education to complete my graduate studies. I have ten applications under consideration in US News & World Reports top 25 schools of education, all of which have programs in the philosophy of education or something similar (most PhD, one EdD). With any luck, I will be accepted to one or more of them with funding, and will be making the move for the fall of 2010.
Some philosophers with whom I have discussed this have expressed their regret that I am leaving philosophy. However, I don’t see myself as leaving the field at all. In fact, I will be pursuing exactly the same research projects as I would have pursued had I stayed in philosophy, only with the more useful guidance of experts in education. So, it is more of a strategic move than anything else, and will likely benefit me career-wise in the long run.
So keep your fingers crossed for me, and look for updates on this over the next few months
some evidence for parentism
December 11, 2009
A while back, I wrote a little bit on “parentism,” which I defined as “consisting in discriminating against people on account of their parental status, or in individual actions and attitudes or institutional arrangements that favor persons of a particular parental status unjustly.”
Here’s some evidence for the phenomenon: you can buy a box of kid paraphernalia for the purpose of convincing your coworkers that you have a kid and are therefore entitled an important perk of parenthood – skipping out of some work while looking sympathetic instead of like a deadbeat.
The ridiculous thing here is not that someone sells this kit, or that people buy it. What’s ridiculous is that it is even needed in the first place. Some people value things other than spawning. Shocking, I know. Please learn to respect this in the way that you want them to respect your life choices.
love in the time of HIV/AIDS, for the innocent
December 4, 2009
I read this article on CNN the other day: Love in the time of HIV/AIDS . It’s about how HIV/AIDS patients are living longer lives and are increasingly able to do normal stuff like get married (even to HIV negative partners) and have biological kids (who are very often HIV negative).
All this is great news! But I wonder whether the article itself displays some stigma towards HIV/AIDS sufferers. Why would I think such a thing? Because, of all the couples they could have picked to feature in the article, they chose one in which the HIV-positive partner “contracted HIV through contaminated blood products when he was a child.” As such, he is sexually innocent, having played no part in his contracting HIV. We should be glad that he is able to get married, because he didn’t do anything wrong.
The reality of the matter is that nowadays few people contract HIV through contaminated blood products and most contract it instead through choices involving sex and drugs. Many individuals play russian roulette in this regard, and some lose. CNN passed up a valuable opportunity to portray the reality of the matter: that most HIV/AIDS patients are not victims of circumstances but of their own choices. However, that does not make them terrible people or undeserving of valuable relationships, it’s just the way the disease works. With the loving understanding of their partners, people who have made all kinds of mistakes in the past, even including those resulting in HIV/AIDS, can participate in successful marriages.
With the help of friends, family, and medicine, HIV/AIDS patients are now more able than ever take control of their futures and enjoy lives well worth living. This is something to be celebrated, regardless of whether the patient in question was a drug user or did not conform to rarely practiced ideals of sexuality. Let (s)he who is without sin cast the first stone.
’tis the season
December 2, 2009
Just wanted to check in and say that, no, I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth and, no, I’m not quitting blogging again.
Rather, it’s just that the annual winter end-of-semester meltdown is upon me, and this is perhaps the worst one ever. So, posting will be light for the next six weeks or so.
I also wanted to take this opportunity to say hang in there and keep up the good work to my fellow grad students who are busy burning the midnight oil and turning coffee into original thoughts. Yes, we might be underpaid, underappreciated, and lacking in job prospects, but I sure am thankful that it is possible for us to be doing our thing.
Fa la la la la, la la la la
selling philosophy as quasi-science: a parable
November 21, 2009
I came across an interesting post by Adam over at Sophistpundit called Being a Scholar When You Can’t be a Scientist. The author argues that, although disciplines like history and philosophy are not sciences, there exist relevant virtues to be honored in their practice: humility, transparency of method, engaging extensive sources, and clarity of presentation.
I basically agree with all of this. But I have kind of a pragmatic objection to biting the philosophy-isn’t-science bullet all the way, at least in my capacity as a philosophy teaching assistant. Allow me to illustrate this reservation with a virtual skit.
Scene: Philosophy Teaching Assistants’ office. Late afternoon. A young woman, casually dressed, spins in a chair in her cubicle, fiddling with an iPhone.
Enter, stage left. An even younger women, carrying a large backpack, approaches the cubicle and tentatively takes a seat.
TA: Hi, are you here for office hours? What can I help you with?
Student: Well, I studied really hard for the last test, but I only got a B. I thought I knew all the right answers but apparently they just aren’t good enough!
TA: (looking at blue book) Well, on this first question here, you were supposed to show that you know that some things just might be valuable intrinsically, apart from anyone’s beliefs or choices. Do you remember when we discussed that in class?
Student: Um, kind of, I don’t know. I try to take good notes to memorize later but (bracing self) it’s just all so SUBJECTIVE. I’m an engineering major, and in science there are facts. In philosophy, it’s like everyone is just MAKING STUFF UP.
TA: (getting excited) Oh no, it’s not like that at all! So you know how scientific experiments work, right? You come up with a hypothesis and then test it?
Student: (meekly) Yes…
TA: (getting a little too excited) Well it’s actually alot like that in philosophy! We started with a theory – or hypothesis – about the origin of moral value. We decided to test whether all value is necessarily subjective. But then, we did an experiment of sorts! A thought experiment! And we found evidence that subjectivism might not be true! Because we had intuitions that it’s good that a beautiful planet exists, even if no one knows about it!!!!!
Student: Oh, I see now! Philosophers disagree on matters, and they have methods for testing which theories fit the relevant data better!
TA: Hallelujah!
Student: It all makes sense! I love philosophy now! (kissing TA’s feet)
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
