Character, Common-Sense, and Expertise

Abstract

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.

Reconciling situational social psychology with virtue ethics

“…The interpretation of the experimental results supports the view that social psychologists conceive of character traits purely in terms of stimulus and response, rather than in the more traditional terms of inner mental items such as inclinations (Webber 2007a). Besser‐Jones (2007) concludes that social psychologists are right to take an agent's dispositions to be reflective of one's character, but they fail to acknowledge why one does so, and so this leaves them with a watered‐down account of character that equates the nature of a person's dispositions with that of an animal.…”

“…They propose a situationist view as an alternative, more empirically adequate conception of character or personality structure (the idea that people lack robust character traits and therefore behave inconsistently across situations). The behaviourists’ approach subscribes to the view that an individual's behaviour is determined by a large array of ‘local character traits’, each elicited by a certain combination of situational features (Webber 2007a). Doris (1998) outlines three characteristics of such a view: (1) behavioural variation across a population owes more to situational differences than to dispositional differences; (2) an individual to whom we have attributed a given trait will often behave inconsistently with regard to the behaviour expected in attribution of that trait; and (3) personality structure is not typically evaluatively consistent, as the dispositions operative in one situation may have a very different evaluative status from those manifested in another situation.…”

“…In the final analysis, what is required to reconcile situationist social psychology with virtue ethics is a normative moral theory concerned with regulative ideals as suggested by both situationists (Doris 1998) and those who support character‐based ethics (Besser‐Jones 2007) to explain and guide human behaviour, with the ethical aims of character development and situation management (Webber 2007a). This issue is addressed in the next section.…”

Getting to know you: Accuracy and error in judgments of character

“…Another potential objection to this argument comes from Jonathan Webber, who anticipates how a situationist might respond to the suggestion that trait judgments become more accurate with acquaintance (Webber, 2007). He suggests that accurate beliefs about the character traits of one's loved ones could simply be due to familiarity with that person's behavior in particular situations .…”