The Philosophy and Psychology of Character and Happiness

Nancy E. Snow, Franco V. Trivigno

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135136109
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Since ancient times, character, virtue, and happiness have been central to thinking about how to live well. Yet until recently, philosophers have thought about these topics in an empirical vacuum. Taking up the general challenge of situationism – that philosophers should pay attention to empirical psychology – this interdisciplinary volume presents new essays from empirically informed perspectives by philosophers and psychologists on western as well as eastern conceptions of character, virtue, and happiness, and related issues such as personality, emotion and cognition, attitudes and automaticity. Researchers at the top of their fields offer exciting work that expands the horizons of empirically informed research on topics central to virtue ethics.

Part I
Persons, Situations, and Virtue

1
The Real Challenge to Virtue Ethics from Psychology

Christian B. Miller

For over ten years now, Gilbert Harman and John Doris have advanced what has become a well-known line of criticism against certain forms of virtue ethics.¹ Very roughly, the strategy involves drawing on the situationist tradition in psychology to argue that there is compelling evidence against the widespread possession of the traditional virtues and vices.

I join many philosophers in thinking that their particular line of criticism against virtue ethics is not very compelling.² However, unlike many of these critics, I also do not think that virtue ethics is off the hook with respect to the relevant psychological evidence. Rather, in the spirit of this volume to try to move ‘beyond’ situationism, I will argue that there is another challenge that is independent of the situationist tradition and that poses a real threat to virtue ethics and indeed any other ethical theory that supports the cultivation of the traditional virtues.

In section one, I briefly comment on Harman and Doris before developing what I take the real challenge to virtue ethics to be in section two. The final section of the paper suggests two strategies for beginning to address this challenge.

I. The Harman/Doris Strategy

Since the editors of this volume already present the main line of reasoning offered by Harman and Doris, I will pass over the details in the interest of space. Instead, let me only note that their discussion proceeds in two stages. First, they draw on experimental results from psychology, such as the famous Milgram experiments, to argue for the following:

• (HD) We are justified in believing that most people do not possess the traditional virtues (such as compassion or honesty), and nor do they possess the traditional vices (such as callousness or dishonesty).

Let me simply grant this negative claim in this paper.³

In the second stage of their discussion, Harman and Doris use (HD) to assess the plausibility of Aristotelian virtue ethical accounts, along with any other theories in ethics that rely on such traits. Unfortunately, here it is much less clear how their argument is meant to go. According to Harman, “this sort of virtue ethics presupposes that there are character traits of the relevant sort, that people differ in what character traits they have, and these traits help to explain differences in the way people behave.”⁴ This does seem accurate as a description of certain commitments of standard forms of virtue ethics. But none of these claims seems to be threatened by the empirical results that they present. Simply denying that there is widespread possession of the virtues and vices is straightforwardly compatible with, for example, still thinking that these traits exist and that people differ in whether they have them or not. Some people might have one virtue, others one vice, and still others several virtues or vices, whereas perhaps the majority do not have any virtues or vices at all.

Doris claims in his 1998 paper that “Aristotelian virtue ethics, when construed as invoking a generally applicable descriptive psychology … [is] subject to damaging empirical criticism.”⁵ This quote isolates what, according to Doris, is the key assumption that Aristotelian virtue ethics is committed to—namely, that it provides a descriptive account of our psychologies, which attributes the virtues or vices to most people. Unfortunately, though, little evidence is offered that there actually are any virtue ethicists who accept this assumption.⁶

Indeed, by his 2002 book, it is hard to find Doris offering any clearly developed arguments connecting (i) the denial of the widespread possession of traditional virtues and vices to (ii) an assessment of the truth of Aristotelian virtue ethics as a normative theory. Instead, the main project seems to have evolved into showing, first, that approaches in moral psychology that appeal to traditional character traits are empirically inadequate as descriptive accounts of most people, and second, to then raising concerns about how practically relevant virtue ethics would be if most of us do not have such traits.⁷ Questions about the truth of the ethical theory do not now seem to be raised, and instead, we are presented with a practical concern that needs further clarification. I will return to issues about the practicality of virtue ethics in section two.

Whatever exactly the Harman/Doris concern is with virtue ethics, it seems to center on the idea that the theory is committed to the widespread possession of traditional virtues or vices, and that this commitment, once rendered empirically inadequate, somehow threatens the plausibility of the view. To this there is a now familiar response, which we can call the rarity response. It denies that any reasonable form of virtue ethicists is committed to the widespread possession of the virtues as a descriptive claim.⁸

According to this line of response, virtue ethicists can readily agree that studies in psychology justify the belief that there currently is not widespread possession of the virtues—there was never any justifiable expectation otherwise. As Aristotle himself writes, “the many naturally obey fear, not shame; they avoid what is base because of the penalties, not because it is disgraceful. For since they live by their feelings, they pursue their proper pleasures and the sources of them, and avoid the opposed pains, and have not even a notion of what is fine and truly pleasant, since they have had no taste of it.”⁹ While contemporary virtue ethicists need not commit themselves to these particular empirical claims, they can accept that many people have characters that are for the most part mixed, continent, incontinent, or in some other way nonvirtuous.¹⁰

There is much more that could be said about the rarity response as well as about the other replies that have been made in the literature in order to respond to Harman and Doris. But at this point, I want to try to take the debate one step further by outlining what I think is the real challenge to virtue ethics from psychology.

II. The Real Challenge

I do not think that virtue ethicists are completely in the clear just yet. In fact, I want to switch gears here and ultimately agree with Harman and Doris that there is a potential concern for virtue ethics lurking in this neighborhood, and I want to try to do a better job of identifying exactly what it is.

The concern has to do with showing how becoming a virtuous person is psychologically realistic for beings like us.¹¹ This concern has been alluded to briefly in the literature. Harman, for instance, writes that, “if we know that there is no such thing as a character trait and we know that virtue would require having character traits, how can we aim at becoming a virtuous agent? If there are no character traits, there is nothing one can do to acquire character traits that are more like those possessed by a virtuous agent.”¹² It may also be what Doris intends as his primary criticism of virtue ethics in Lack of Character, although in my mind, the discussion is not clear there. At one place, he does say that “[a] practically relevant character ethics should have something to say about securing ethically desirable behavior.”¹³ But this is a claim about behavior, not about character traits themselves.

In this section, I want to begin to make this vague concern more precise. In order to do so, it is important to appreciate just how stark the contrast is between the psychological picture of what most of us actually seem to be like and the nature of the virtuous character traits that we should attain. On the one hand, the following are what I consider to be commonplace platitudes about virtue:

• (i) A person who is virtuous will, other things being equal, typically attempt to perform virtuous actions when, at the very least, the need to do so is obvious and the effort involved is very minimal.
• (ii) A person’s virtuous trait will, other things being equal, not be dependent on the presence of certain enhancers or inhibitors such that if these they were not present, then the person’s frequency of acting virtuously would significantly decrease or increase.
• (iii) A person’s virtuous trait will, other things being equal, typically lead to virtuous behavior, which is done for motivating reasons that are morally admirable and deserving of moral praise and not for motivating reasons that are either morally problematic or morally neutral.
• (iv) A virtuous person does not, other things being equal, regularly act from egoistic motives, which are so powerful that they would lead the person to not pursue a virtuous course of action if an alternative is deemed to be more desirable in contributing to his or her own egoistic pursuits.

For instance, a compassionate person is expected to at least attempt to help when, say, a person has dropped a stack of papers or has a tear in a shopping bag, which is now leaking. In addition, the person’s frequency of helping would not be reliably sensitive to, for instance, a variable like guilt or positive mood. A compassionate person is expected to regularly help address at least the moderate needs of others regardless of whether the helping would relieve her guilt or contribute to maintaining a positive mood. And when she does help, it should be primarily for morally admirable motivating reasons. In the case of compassion, for instance, these might be altruistic reasons, which are ultimately concerned with what is good for another person. At the very least, they should not primarily be egoistic reasons, such as helping to maintain a good mood or relieving feelings of guilt. Finally, the last requirement should not need much explanation—that is not the pattern of behavior I think most of us would expect from a virtuous person.

How are most people today doing with respect to these standards? Well, if the results of hundreds of relevant psychology experiments conducted over the past fifty years tell us anything here, it is that the answer appears to be— not well. There is no way I can possibly summarize this research in the space remaining. So what I will do instead is use the example of compassion and review one representative study per requirement while emphasizing that I am not drawing any conclusions just from this one study, but rather collectively from a whole host of relevant ones.¹⁴ Let me begin with the following claim:

• (i*) Most people do not attempt to perform various virtuous actions even when the need to do so is obvious and the effort involved is very minimal.

Dennis Regan and his colleagues observed twenty female control participants in a shopping mall who each were approached by a male confederate as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I Persons, Situations, and Virtue
• PART II The Moral Psychology of Virtue
• PART III Asian Philosophy and Psychology on Virtue and Happiness
• PART IV Happiness
• Contributors
• Index