A Response to Harman: Virtue Ethics and Character Traits

Athanassoulis, Nafsika

doi:10.1111/1467-9264.00076

Cited by 22 publications

(16 citation statements)

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“…324-330; see also Harman 2000, p. 223). This argument has met with the response that the data Harman cites can only impinge on empirical claims about the distribution of character traits, and hence does not impinge on ethical claims about the traits we ought to strive to develop (Athanassoulis 2000;Kamtekar 2004). It might be added (adapting Webber 2006) that the data is perfectly compatible with the idea that behaviour issues from character traits, and that further data provides positive evidence in favour of this idea, so long as this idea is correctly understood.…”

Section: Erroneous Attributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Character, Common-Sense, and Expertise

Webber

2006

Ethic Theory Moral Prac

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Gilbert Harman has argued that the common-sense characterological psychology employed in virtue ethics is rooted not in unbiased observation of close acquaintances, but rather in the "fundamental attribution error". If this is right, then philosophers cannot rely on their intuitions for insight into characterological psychology, and it might even be that there is no such thing as character. This supports the idea, urged by John Doris and Stephen Stich, that we should rely exclusively on experimental psychology for our explanations of behaviour. The purported "fundamental attribution error" cannot play the explanatory role required of it, however, and anyway there is no experimental evidence that we make such an error. It is true that trait-attribution often goes wrong, but this is best explained by a set of difficulties that beset the explanation of other people's behaviour, difficulties that become less acute the better we know the agent. This explanation allows that we can gain genuine insight into character on the basis of our intuitions, though claims about the actual distribution of particular traits and the correlations between them must be based on more objective data.

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Section: Erroneous Attributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Character, Common-Sense, and Expertise

Webber

2006

Ethic Theory Moral Prac

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“…With respect to P 1 , the main issue in psychology concerns the debate between personality theorists and situationist theorists. 42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53 Situationists believe that one's environment or ''situation'' mostly determines behavior, while personality theorists argue that personality plays a significant causal role in shaping and influencing behavior. Since virtues are conceived here as a proper subset of the personality traits, the GVP depends on P 1 being resolved in favor of the personality theorists.…”

Section: Empirical Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enhancing genetic virtue: A project for twenty-first century humanity?

Walker¹

2009

Politics and the Life Sciences

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The Genetic Virtue Project (GVP) is a proposed interdisciplinary effort between philosophers, psychologists and geneticists to discover and enhance human ethics using biotechnology genetic correlates of virtuous behavior. The empirical plausibility that virtues have biological correlates is based on the claims that (a) virtues are a subset of personality, specifically, personality traits conceived of as "enduring behaviors," and (b) that there is ample evidence that personality traits have a genetic basis. The moral necessity to use the GVP for moral enhancement is based on the claims that we should eliminate evil (as understood generically, not religiously), as some evil is a function of human nature. The GVP is defended against several ethical and political criticisms.

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“…2 They have argued that the situationist findings do not show that the virtues are nonexistent, merely that they are much harder to achieve than people would like to think. After all, there were some differences among people as to the extent to which they obeyed the instructions to administer the shocks (Athanassoulis, 2000). These critics have alleged that the results of the experiments actually support folk-psychological attributions of character traits, which are much finer grained than Harman (1999), in particular, allows for (Kupperman, 2001).…”

Section: The Situationist Critique Of Virtue Ethicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Good Character: Too Little, Too Late

Levy¹

2004

Journal of Mass Media Ethics

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A Response to Harman: Virtue Ethics and Character Traits

Cited by 22 publications

References 0 publications

Character, Common-Sense, and Expertise

Character, Common-Sense, and Expertise

Enhancing genetic virtue: A project for twenty-first century humanity?

Good Character: Too Little, Too Late

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