ESCOTE CHRISTINE JOSANNE D.

PHIN102 N1Ar DIGEST 4

Comments on John Doris’s Lack of Character

“First impressions may mislead.” (p.636)

“The other is from situations where people are motivated to act by factors in the
situation which should not affect someone with the relevant virtue.” (Ibid.)

“Rather, he thinks, we have local traits, including the virtues, limited to a type of
situation. It is a mistake of ‘over attribution to think that we have global traits-that
Thomas is brave, for example. Rather, when we say that he is brave, we should tacitly
add a rider such as ‘in situations of physical danger and risk’, making no commitments
as to how he will stand up to pressure and other kinds of inducement to do the wrong
thing.” (p.637)

“A virtue is a disposition to act on reasons. It is exercised in making decisions and is

built up not by mindless habit but by and deliberating and making decisions. For most
thinkers in the tradition, it is built up the way a skill is.” (Ibid.)

“The more you develop a virtue, the less important to you is mere habit, and the more
complex and flexible your ability to reason about new and innovative kinds of situation
you may be faced with. Hence, the more virtuous you are, the more complex and
dynamic your character.” (Ibid.)

“The more you have developed a virtue through reflection and reasoning, the more, not
less, aware you become of what is important in different situations.” (p.638)

“We find the opposite: virtue is developed through intelligent decisions and results in
more intelligent deliberation and decision.” (Ibid.)

“My point is that the book contains no arguments against virtue ethics in the actual
Aristotelian tradition; it sets up as opponent only a radically unintellectual version of
virtue.” (p.639)

“The virtue ethics tradition, moreover, is in a better position to explain that and why we
‘over-ascribe’, underestimating the impact of the situation and overestimating the power
of character.” (Ibid.)

“We say that Thomas is brave, but we bear in mind that we’ve only seen him in a
situation of physical danger, and so we don’t yet know whether he is, as we say, really
brave-whether he will stand up to pressure and so on. It is also because we rely too
much on the superficial, conventional understanding of the virtues that we can find out,
sometimes shockingly, that we and others can be motivated by reasons which we reject
when we think about the matter more deeply.” (Ibid.)
“What the subjects in the situationists’ experiments found was that they had not
developed the kind of practical intelligence that would have dealt appropriately with
unforeseen kinds of situations and pressure; presumably, they had not thought that they
needed to put in this effort.” (Ibid.)

“For, according to Doris, local traits are all we have; thinking of ourselves as having
global traits which unify our practical reasoning is a mistake.” (p.640)

“Respect, however, is not a trait that switches off in situations where the opinions of the
people concerned can be ignored; this is, of course, why we are shocked when we
discover the rude behaviour to the people that don’t matter to Mary.” (p.640)

“But we do not just have a stand-off between global and local views of traits; we now
have two explanatory strategies for making sense of Mary, and the situationist’s
strategy does a bad job by any reasonable standard for explanation.” (Ibid.)

“She just has developed a local trait for work, and another local trait (or possibly three)
for soccer pitches, shops and restaurants. This is all that there is; trying to unify these
is just a mistake.” (p.641)

“Nor could it be a matter of self-interest; a fragmented self will have a fragmented self-
interest, so Mary has, on the situationist view, no available way of globally comparing
the (presumably) unsatisfactory results of her behavior in shops with the more
satisfactory results she gets at work.” (Ibid.)

“This kind of example shows that there are deep problems in rejecting the ideas that a
virtue is a global trait, and that evaluative integration is needed to make sense of
ourselves and others.” (Ibid.)

“Virtue ethics, to which these ideas are central, is not threatened by the results of social
psychology. Indeed, it can welcome and benefit from its results; but only if it recognizes
that a virtue is a disposition to act on reasons, and that these are reasons which apply
in the agent’s life overall.” (p.641-62)

“What’s Character Got to Do with it?”*

“Confidence in the stability of circumstances is not at all the same thing, and given the
nature of life, betting on the stability of circumstances is probably a bad bet.” (p.648)

“There is no such thing as character, or, at any rate, what character we have lacks the
robustness that virtue ethics and virtue theory require. What turns out to be a much
better predictor, in minor details as well as overall, is the situation, and Doris allies
himself early on with the “situationist” approach to the social sciences.” (p.649)
“What consistency we display is more plausibly attributed to a sameness of
circumstances and not to the character.”(Ibid.)

“If we surround ourselves or are surrounded by criminal influences we shall very likely
display the character of criminals. If we surround ourselves or are surrounded by the
religiously pious we more likely display the more saintly or at least one hopes decent
character of the Pious.” (Ibid.)

“Here is an account of character that escapes Doris’s criticism and emphasizes the
dynamic interaction both in the formation of and in the interplay between character and
social pressures and the environment.” (Ibid.)

Empiricism and the Question of Character

“Although character consists of traits that are more or less resistant to social or
interpersonal pressures, it is never fully formed and settled. It is always vulnerable to
circumstances and trauma.” (p.650)

“People’s characters respond in interesting and sometimes immediate ways to their

environment, their peers, and pressures from above. Put into an unusual, pressured, or
troubled environment, many people will act “out of character,” sometimes in heroic but
more often in disappointing and sometimes shocking ways.” (Ibid.)

“His conclusion is that virtue ethics, construed in terms of character, is at best a

mistake, and at worst a vicious political maneuver.” (Ibid.)

“It is the idea that a person can and should resist those pressures, even at considerable
cost to oneself, depending on the severity of the situation and circumstances.” (Ibid.)

“To be sure, the character is vulnerable to the environment but it is also a bulwark
against the environment. Character supplies that familiar and sometimes uncomfortable
or even uncanny resistance to untoward pressures that violate our “principles” or
morally disgust us or are damaging to our “integrity.” (p.651)

“Virtue ethics requires a solid notion of character, but not a fixed and permanent notion
of character.” (Ibid.)

“On the contrary, I have argued that one’s inclinations (one’s emotions, in particular)
form the essential core of the virtues. And one’s emotions are largely reactive,
responsive to other people and the social situations in which one finds oneself.” (Ibid.)

Virtue Ethics and Empirical Science

“Of course, there remains a debate about the relative influence of “external’
(environmental) and “inner” factors (character), but the debate, whichever way it goes,
remains within the framework of folk psychology and our ordinary psychological
concepts.” (p.652)

“Accordingly, he “gives us reason to question the robustness of dispositions implicated

in compassion-relevant moral behavior.” (p. 653)

“The disposition (virtue) that is most prominent and robust in this very contrived and
unusual situation, the one that virtually all of the subjects had been brought up with and
practiced everyday since kindergarten, was doing what they were told by the person in
authority. Compassion, by contrast, is a virtue more often praised than practiced.” (Ibid.)

Conclusion: In Defense of Virtue Ethics

“The renewed emphasis on character is an attempt to build a personal bulwark (call it

“integrity”) against such pressures and rationalizations and (though half-heartedly) to
cultivate virtues other than those virtues of unquestioning obedience that proved to be
so dominant in the Milgram experiments and in Vietnam atrocities such as My Lai.”
(p.654)

“Too often preachers of the virtues praise (in effect) their own sterling personalities
without bothering to note how little there has been in their lives to challenge their high
opinion of themselves. Too often, people are blamed for behaving in ways in which,
given the situation and their personal backgrounds, it is hard to see how they could
have acted or chosen to act otherwise.” (Ibid.)

“We need less moralizing and more beneficent social engineering.” (Ibid.)

“Thus clerics and criminals place themselves, or are placed by others, in situations that
differ precisely because they induce clergy to look, feel, and act consistently like clergy
and induce criminals to look, feel, and act consistently like criminals.” (Ibid.)

“On the contrary, it furthers them and explains why people “feel obliged and even
committed to act consistently.” (Ibid.)

“But none of this implies that we should give up on character but rather tells us that
circumstances and character cannot be pried apart and should not be used
competitively as alternative explanations of virtuous or vicious behavior.” (Ibid.)