I hope to study the implications of this stuff on moral/character education. Fortunately, for these purposes, I can probably ignore the details of the debate. I’m worried about situationists’ arguments and suggestions that character education is necessarily fruitless and/or that we should primarily focus on changing what kinds of situations to which people are subjected instead of what kind of character people/kids develop. The educational theory literature has not picked up on these philosophical developments, so maybe I can break some ground there.

If you do ever have the time and inclination to get into the literature, just let me know, and I can send you the reading list I used for my independent study on situationism.

“At least some of them appear to think that, if character traits have any real role in determining behavior at all (as virtue ethicists hold), that they would prevent at least the totally egregious moral transgressions witnessed in the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments.”

See, I would think just the opposite. The more removed an experimenter gets from everyday life, the less inclined I am to think that the results of his/her experiments will actually bear upon discussions of things like character traits to any real degree. By my lights, the conclusion to be drawn from something like the prison experiment is this: “When we really screw with people’s heads, even the nicest person can act like a real asshole.” But this seems to me to fall well short of undermining the belief that, in the common course of our everyday lives, people exhibit traits of character that play some role in the determination of their decisions, actions, etc.

As you suggest, no virtue ethicist will deny that we are manipulable beings. So I would think it should come as a surprise to no one that we behave in out-of-the-ordinary ways when placed in circumstances to which we are largely unaccustomed, and that are psychologically very moving. What would truly be strange, though, would be if it only takes something like the presence or absence a dime in a coin-return slot to do the manipulating.

“But when people who work with Fred see him at home, or people who go to school with Fred see him in a restaurant, it is rather likely that he will act in a way that is incompatible with the traits they thought Fred had …”

Is that really the case? I mean, initially, I’m inclined to doubt that Fred (or any other person with normal brain function and the like) would really exhibit a significantly different set of character traits around his co-workers than he does around his family. And as far as I can tell, the only way to actually confirm something like this would have to involve studying Fred’s behavior across a wide-enough range of relevant circumstances (at home, at work, in a restaurant with family, in a restaurant with co-workers, etc., etc., etc.). But as you said, there just aren’t (m)any studies of this nature taking place.

The more interested I get in virtue ethics, the more interested I’m sure I’ll become in these issues. But for now, I’m still relatively unfamiliar with the literature, so it all still feels to me like a bunch of relatively hasty conclusions.