“In the 1990s, social psychologists developed a theory of “depletable” self-control. The idea was that an individual’s capacity for exerting willpower was finite—that exerting willpower in one area makes us less able to exert it in other areas.”

Relevant experiments have been extensively replicated, and the depletable self-control hypothesis seems reasonably well-confirmed. The implication for poverty is this: the less money you have, the more situations you will encounter in which you must restrain yourself and make difficult purchasing tradeoffs, and this means you’ll have less willpower leftover later to deal with other situations in which you might need it. In other words, of two individuals who have the same baseline level of natural and/or cultivated willpower (assuming there is such a thing), the richer one will make better choices, ceteris paribus, than the poorer one, where those choices require willpower and self-control.

In light of these findings, and to put some words in Dr. Cholbi’s mouth, we might wonder whether it is reasonable to maintain a commonsense view that willpower and self-control are virtues: stable states of character with rational, affective, and behavioral components, and which agents cultivate over time. Instead, the depletable self-control hypothesis suggests that the behaviors of individuals are largely subject to the circumstances in which they find themselves, financially and choices-wise. The fact of the psychological matter may be that willpower is less of a trait that one develops and more of a force to which one is susceptible.

However, I think it makes better sense to think about the depletable willpower hypothesis not as evidence that willpower isn’t a virtue, but as supporting the view that developing the virtues requires a sufficient amount of certain external goods (such as money, health, being born into a good family, etc). At first blush, the external goods requirement may seem as somewhat elitist, entailing as it does that privileged people are more likely to become virtuous. But really this is a reasonable alternative to the Socratic-ish view that only morally bad acts can truly harm us, and therefore that virtue can be developed essentially independently of one’s circumstances. Tragic as it is, our life possibilities are in fact constrained by the situations in which we find ourselves, situations that may not be entirely or even partially under our control, and this includes our prospects for flourishing or not. If you are poor, the moral deck may be stacked against you when it comes to willpower (and becoming well educated, and reserving time for contemplation, and having aesthetic experiences, and so on).

But, even assuming that the external goods requirement is correct, we can and should take up the further question of the extent to which an individual bears responsibility for her continued lack (or possession) of some external good or other. A clear example is to what kind of family  you’re born, an external good potentially contributing to human flourishing for which no one ever bears responsibility. People will be responsible for their financial situations (and, relatedly, the extent to which their willpower is continually taxed) to varying degrees.

This picture pretty much comports with standard Aristotelian virtue ethics, and with commonsense morality too, I think. Its most important implication for the depletable willpower hypothesis is actually not related to understanding how virtue theory applies to impoverished individuals themselves, but for correcting how we morally appraise those individuals. If the hypothesis is true, and a person is impoverished for reasons substantially beyond her control, compassion and wisdom require that we refrain from labeling her as merely lacking in willpower, or as having anemic self-control. This may cause us to treat impoverished people better (policy-wise or on an individual level) than we would if we were thinking of them instead as weak, depraved, akratic, etc.

Finally, notice that there are still rich people facing few willpower-taxing situations who still make bad choices. The external good of financial security supports willpower, self-control, and temperance, but it doesn’t guarantee them. These qualities may indeed be virtues, but virtues that are more dependent upon the having the external good of wealth than some other virtues.

On the one hand, sometimes the badness of being judgmental gets explained something like this: “Well, when I first met Bob, I thought he was stupid and annoying, but I gave him another shot. And now he’s my best friend! So we shouldn’t be too judgey about people.” This view is really about what’s prudentially wrong with being judgmental: you sometimes judge wrongly, causing you to miss out on valuable relationships and experiences.

But there’s still something morally wrong with being judgmental: it’s vicious to have negative attitudes towards others, in certain cases. No reasonable person would go so far as to say that negative attitudes towards others are always wrong to have — attitudes like resentment play an important role in our moral-psychological lives. So to be “judgmental” in this sense must have something to do with having unwarranted negative attitudes towards others. Our judgments are unwarranted when they are based on too little information about another person, such as a single encounter with them or just going by their appearance.

There are probably some ought-implies-can issues here, in that our attitudes may not be under our rational control. I actually think that’s true, and as a result people should be cut a certain amount of moral slack for merely having negative attitudes towards others. But they should refrain from acting upon those attitudes when they are in fact unwarranted.

But notice that not being judgmental, on this account, is completely compatible with making informed judgments about the qualities of others’ characters and deciding to associate with them (or not) on that basis. One need not refrain from making any social discriminations in order to avoid charges of being judgmental. In my opinion, it is neither morally required nor prudent to behave as a kind of equal opportunity socializer — our time is limited, and we should spend it with certain people (and not with others) for good reasons.

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 :-)

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.

The short answer: No, in all my moderately extensive reading on this subject, I have not found any “studies that actually involve the observation of a person’s behavior across a wide range of relevant circumstances,” as opposed to studies which deal with only a kind of “snapshot” of a person’s behavior.

The longer answer: I think only the virtue ethicists, and not the situationists, think such a study would vindicate the idea of robust character traits. Here’s why (very generally speaking, from my reasonably informed point of view on the subject).

The virtue ethicists (like Aristotle) have accounts on which it could be the case that a person does have a rather robust character trait, but that in extreme situations this trait is, in a sense, prone to being overriden (e.g., in Milgram scenarios containing an authoritative experimenter, or whatever). The existence of compassion in a person who acts cruelly in the snapshot captured by the Milgram experiment could be vindicated by a long-term study of some kind showing compassion manifested most of the time in compassion-relevant situations.

It seems to me that the situationists have a different interpretation of the force of the Milgram experiments and similar evidence. 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. And, if the data is indeed sufficient for disproving the kinds of traits that virtue ethicists postulate, then it’s understandable that the situationists would have limited interest in other patterns of behavior. (John Doris does think that there are narrow, as opposed to robust, character traits, such as academic honesty as distinct from personal relationship honesty. These could probably be verified by empirical observation. Also, notice that the situationists’ explanation here — if it is at all how I explain it — would not pertain to the dime in the phone booth-type experiments, which do not involve egregious moral transgressions).

As for this part of Jim’s comment:

Suppose that everyone who really knows Fred considers him to be a reliably compassionate person. But two psychologists who were hiding behind a ficus tree, watching as Fred walked past a poor soul who’d just dropped a bunch of papers, insist that he clearly could not have so robust a character trait. Surely, the people who really know Fred are in a better position than any psychologist hiding behind a ficus tree (or worse, any philosopher sitting in an armchair) to judge the robustness of Fred’s putative traits, right?

What the situationists tend to say about this is the following: Because people who know each other well see each other in the same types of situations over and over, it is unsurprising that Fred’s friends have formed apparently accurate conceptions of what his moral character is like. 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 (and this is even more likely to be the case when Fred is put in an extreme situation, such as a war or an emergency). This evidence is compatible with both the interpretation that there are no character traits (Gilbert Harman) and that there are narrowly defined and not robust character traits (John Doris).

In my opinion, it is not very useful at that point to debate whether people have “character traits” at all or not, because everyone seems to have a different definition for what a “character trait” is. Instead, we should try to figure out what kind of virtue ethics, if any, remains consistent with the empirical evidence, and work backwards to what the empirically adequate notion of virtues or character traits might be. See Maria Merritt, Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology for a good starting point. I am still thinking it over myself.

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.

Flash back to fall 2007. It was my first semester in graduate school. I was living alone and trying to be self-sufficient on a tiny budget. This meant eating all but one or two meals per week at home. And also, I didn’t know how to cook at all.

This was kind of a perfect storm, because meat is both expensive and tricky to prepare, and it resulted in a huge decrease in the amount of meat I was eating. At this point, though, I was hardly aware of my trend towards vegetarianism. In fact, I distinctly remember telling a friend sometime during that semester that I “didn’t get why people would choose to be vegetarian.”

However, by the spring of 2008, I had realized that I was becoming very nearly vegetarian, and I started eating meat only once per week and never at home. I planned to continue in that manner, except all of the sudden meat became absolutely revolting and I lost nearly all of my desire to eat it even rarely. I remember barely being able to keep some of it down.

Part of what caused me to become so disgusted by meat was that I had just adopted my first dog. In addition to being very cute and friendly, he had separation anxiety, as is pretty common amongst shelter & rescue dogs. I watched him experience full-blown panic attacks whenever I picked up my keys to leave the house. I already knew and believed the facts about factory farming conditions, but the suffering of animals was made vividly salient to me through my dog. So, I decided to be vegetarian for real by early summer 2008.

What interests me most about how this went down is that it’s a great counterexample to a commonsense understanding of moral psychology. Often, in both philosophy and just in general, we assume that people always deliberate, make value judgments and then act, and that value judgments and actions can usually or always be explained by some prior deliberation. But actually, often it’s the other way around. Your value judgments and deliberative processes can themselves be altered by ways in which you already act. This is to avoid cognitive dissonance, if I understand it correctly: the human mind generally tries to keep thoughts in coherence with actions, and that can entail adjusting either one to fit the other. In my case, this meant that I became much more receptive to philosophical arguments for vegetarianism apparently because I had already been eating that way.

In the near future, I’ll write on the next phase of my adventures in plant-based eating: the vegan period!

I really should have mentioned originally that I think that tv violence is only morally valuable when it’s somewhat realistic. My friend is absolutely right that the way fictional characters routinely survive shootings, car accidents, beatings, etc. must mislead many children into thinking that violence is not as serious as it is in reality. This is probably exacerbated by the typical path of human development. For example, it has been well-documented that, at certain ages, most children do not understand that death is permanent. So yes, unrealistic violence is, at best, not morally objectionable and at worst, quite morally misleading. (Possible hard cases here could be science fiction stories, in which creatures share some but not all qualities with humans. For instance, if the creatures can be resurrected Cylon-style, then the violence would probably be unrealistic to children. But, if the only difference is that the creatures are much more intelligent than humans, then the violence amongst them could be quite realistic.)

A stickier issue is that of how to ensure that the audience members will identify with the “good guy” in violent scenes. Possible troublesome examples my friend mentioned include the tv show Dexter, in which a serial killer channels his murderous inclinations for good by killing only other, ostensibly worse serial killers, and shows or movies featuring vigilante-style justice, in which our sympathies are often engaged by the vigilante (maybe this would include Dirty Harry; while the protagonist is a real cop, he dramatically oversteps the boundaries of institutional justice).

I suspect that the problem here is that there is often an inverse correlation between how gripping a story is and how obvious it is which party is the “good guy” with whom one is supposed to identify. Children’s tales usually feature morally good protagonists who ultimately prevail, or flawed protagonists who change their ways (think animated movies: The Little Mermaid, Toy Story, Cinderella, Aladdin, Cars, Beauty and the Beast, etc etc). While these stories may be entertaining to adults, they don’t really offer much opportunity to exercise your moral imagination. The morals of these stories are trite: treat others as you would like to be treated, if you try hard enough then your dreams can come true, and the like. It’s obvious to the kids who the good guy is, and they might learn something. But, to adults, the point is overly obvious.

More interesting to adults are “grey area” stories, wherein it is not quite clear who is the good guy and who is the bad guy and why, or movies that lack genuine good and bad guys altogether. These stories have real moral value because they encourage the viewer to work through their resultant moral emotions and judgments and, if necessary, to reassess prior moral commitments in light of them. However, the “greyer” the story, the more likely it is that the viewer might ultimately come to identify with the wrong party. So, you might become overly sympathetic to Dexter and kind of approve of his murdering ways, or you might become overly sympathetic to Dirty Harry, and thereby approve of cops everywhere who aren’t afraid to get their hands a little messy in the name of justice. But maybe even this suboptimal outcome is better than if those grey area fictions never existed. A sensitive person who thinks seriously about these stories will be at least morally uncomfortable with the killing and torture portrayed in them, even if they ultimately approve of those actions, and I think that’s morally healthy. It’s analogous to the waging of a just war: even if a leader is wholly convinced that a particular war is a just one, he or she ought to remain sensitive to the violence that accompanies war, and humanity of it all. So there might be moral value in watching grey area violent tv, even if ultimately your resulting moral conviction is a thoughtful but mistaken one. But, in any case, these kinds of shows are not appropriate for children, because they are not yet morally capable of recognizing and working through the moral subtleties. They are likely to uncritically identify with a Dirty Harry, which might be detrimental to the development of moral maturity and sensitivity in the future.

I’ll wrap up with a related story. One summer when I was maybe ten or twelve, my mom took my younger brother and me to a theatrical production of West Side Story at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, my hometown. It was a matinee, and much of the audience was comprised of what appeared to be underprivileged children participating in some kind of summer camp program. In case you didn’t know, West Side Story is a kind of updated Romeo & Juliet; the main characters are Tony & Maria instead, the setting is urban, and the theme involves alot of gang violence. Towards the end of the play, there is a climactic scene when a member of a rival gang shoots and kills Tony. Immediately after the shot rang out into the theatre, basically all of the summer camp children broke out into laughter. I don’t recall thinking much of it at the time, but my mom was horrified. To her, it was a glaring example of the desensitization of the children to violence. The scene in the play was completely realistic, but for whatever reason the children still found it hilarious. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I suppose it could have been a case in which one kid laughed and it became infectious. It’s possible that by now all those kids have realized that guns are no joke. I really hope that no one had to learn the hard way.

I understand that there are various damning statistics/studies on tv violence and its effects on children in particular, and I am not apt to doubt the data. But, in my own experience, I find that watching such movies actually makes me more acutely aware of the wrongness of most types of violence and intentional harming of persons.

(WARNING: Possible Kingdom of Heaven spoilers below the fold)If watching violent television were morally desensitizing, then voluntarily watching it would be a form of self-harm. It would be a moral disvalue, not only to oneself, but to anyone else the viewer might go on to harm in the real world as a result of the tv desensitization. Maybe I’m just not watching enough violence to become desensitized, and if I watched more, I would become desensitized?

But it seems to me that, offered at the right times and in the right amounts, watching some violent television can do a person real moral good. A person shouldn’t wholeheartedly enjoy watching it, as that would betray a deficiency of character.  Instead, violent, conflict-ridden television is a (not totally pleasant) way of exercising one’s moral imagination. How would I feel if I were on the battlefield of Jerusalem nearly a thousand years ago? Could anyone of that time period and culture reasonably be expected to become a “conscientious objector” to the fighting? Given the medical knowledge and religious beliefs of the time, was it reasonable for the queen to kill her young leprous son? What role should religious conflict play in the waging of truly just war? Is a soldier morally excusable for following the orders of a bloodthirsty military leader?

I come away from a movie like “Kingdom of Heaven” even more repulsed by war than I was in the first place. Thinking explicitly about the moral questions raised by the movie validates the moral repulsion I felt at it. That is a good thing, as far as I can tell.

What about you? Is watching tv violence difficult for you? Is it morally educational, or just desensitizing?