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K.A. Appiah, in his "Experiments in Ethics" (2008), gives a rather drastic picture of the attack virtue ethics finds itself under by moral psychology.

In a nutshell, (a vast amount of) experiments arguably not only show that people are biased in their ethical decisions by normatively the most irrelevant negligibilities (-> weak character). They act so systematically inconsistent when taking moral action in general that the concept of character traits, the concept of stable dispositions, shaping these actions is no longer tenable (-> no character).

The concept of virtuous character runs the risk of being part of a fictuous story philosophers tell when discussing what should shape our decisions and acts (justification) and what does shape our decisions and acts (explanation). Character building, a traditionally important brick of virtue ethics, becomes part of this story.

Psychology goes on to offer its own explanations of what triggers moral action. Jesse Graham et al. (2013) argue for up to six moral modules which may fire and trigger rapid and affective judgements when an ethically critical situation occurs.

Now, according to Hursthouse/Pettigrove (2018, p. 28), these arguments have "[...] left traditional virtue ethicits unmoved [...]", although "[...] it has generated a healthy engagement with psychological literature."

This seems to me a mildly underwhelming reaction. Is virtue ethics in denial? Is it keeping up pure conceptual analysis with no serious cooperation with moral psychology? Against the background of the empirical results and from the point of philosophy of science, are pure analytical investigations into virtues still justifiable?

References:

Appiah, K.A: Experiments in Ethics. HUP, 2008.

Graham, J., Haidt, J., Koleva, S., Motyl, M., Iyer, R., Wojcik, S. P., & Ditto, P. H. (2013). Moral foundations theory: The pragmatic validity of moral pluralism. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology(Vol. 47, pp. 55-130). Academic Press.

Hursthouse, R. and Pettigrove, G.: Virtue Ethics, SEP (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

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    So people are often not acting virtuously, what a surprise. Philosophers tell a fictional story by design, it is a story of what people should, and in their better moments would, ideally aspire to, a normative story. Moral psychology tells a story of how people fall short, an empirical story. Presumably, the better we know how and why we fall short the better we will be able to remedy it. It is a cooperative relationship. – Conifold Aug 03 '20 at 06:35
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    If there is nothing that could -- psychologically or neuro-biologically -- be identified as character, this specific fiction is futile. That seems to be a valid point. Appiah is very respected. –  Aug 03 '20 at 06:38
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    Why futile? Ultimately, character is just a traditional way of describing certain ways of acting, or dispositions to act, that there is some tangible neurological correlate circumscribing them is doubtful even on general grounds. The point is to move to change and describe in what direction. We also know that stars are not pearls in the sky, but they still evoke and inspire. – Conifold Aug 03 '20 at 06:50
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    Virtue ethics has a very specific idea of what a character is and how it can be developed. If the empirical sciences cannot find anything that suits, this may cause more damage to the theory that can be repaired. In stars we still belive, but phlogiston is gone and phlogiston theory with it. –  Aug 03 '20 at 07:02
  • Actually no, we still talk about heat flow and the like, Fourier's theory of it remains intact, only the word disappeared. Modern physics reproduces a heat fluid at the effective level when there is no significant conversion of mechanical energy, or when it can be treated as a source or sink. The same with ether. Psychology will certainly introduce corrections into descriptions of virtues and character, and even more so into ways of "building" them, but the normative story remains. – Conifold Aug 03 '20 at 07:28
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    Are we now discussing scientific revolutions and under what conditions a theory is translatable in another?---I asked a well backed question you tried to push aside in a sarcastic comment. Why don't you get seriously involved in the question of how a philosopher in virtue ethics has to do research against the background of these empirical results? If you just need the last word, bray "hee-haw" and I will shut up. –  Aug 03 '20 at 07:50
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    It was not clear to me from the post how you think empirical findings can attack a normative theory. It is dissimilar to scientific theories, so the analogy of character to phlogiston is shaky. Ordinary concepts, even philosophically developed, do not need to match something scientific, especially in ethics, they address different purposes. Simply put, the lack of concern from virtue theorists should not be surprising. They do take note, but adapt psychological findings in banal ways, as a fine grained look at common behavior and its underlying mechanisms. – Conifold Aug 03 '20 at 08:14
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    This lack of concern is exactly what Appiah and other naturalists consider a mistake. I find their arguments convincing. You -- as I understand it -- don't. Ok. –  Aug 03 '20 at 08:28
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    More importantly, they do not, see e.g. [Upton's survey of the debate on situationism](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10892-009-9054-2) (human reactions are determined by situations more than by character). A common response is that situationist critiques take too rigid a view of character and virtues. – Conifold Aug 03 '20 at 08:36
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    If humans already by nature acted virtuous, there would not be any need for a branch of philosophy called ethics. – tkruse Aug 03 '20 at 10:47
  • more importantly who does not what @Conifold did you actually read "other" to mean "all"? –  Aug 04 '20 at 07:08
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    *“Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.”* – Roger Vadim Sep 21 '22 at 07:03
  • If humans did not already by nature self-reflect, there would not be any possibility of Philosophy. Ethics, if anything, straddles this reality the most of any area of study. – Scott Rowe Sep 21 '22 at 10:09
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    As stressed by Sosa, Greco, Code and Zagzebski et al, virtue ethics has a deep link with the epistemic value problem as JTB knowledge has an inseparable normative component. Even Peter Singer converted to moral objectivism after co-authoring *The Point of View of the Universe* in 2014. The fact that people do have character is also an empirical knowledge and Zeno the Stoic would most likely found *felicitous* names about characters in our current language to your stated experimentally "concluded" empirical findings of weak/no characters... – Double Knot Sep 22 '22 at 04:54

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It is a sensible point to argue that valid moral theorizing is constrained by empirical findings, though to what extent I do not know. Surely normative claims hold against empirical shortcomings, but they become invalid upon demanding the impossible. Virtue ethics would not seem to be in denial, then, as the reported findings ('weak character', 'no character') fail to establish such a strong verdict. I'd agree that "the concept of virtuous character runs the risk of being part of a fictuous story", but reification strikes me as the more obvious response than abandonment. Yet again, I couldn't tell how to find the right balance there.

Turtur
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Looked a bit like one argument for moral anti-realism: there's a lot of disagreements about what to do, so maybe we don't "know" what is moral.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/moral-realism-intuitive.html https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/moral-realism-explain.html

may have some relevance.

Moral disagreement is widely held to pose a threat for metaethical realism and objectivity

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10892-008-9041-z

The fact that we're talking about psychological traits rather than knowledge, may be relevant, or it may not. It will suffice, for me, to point out that moral scepticism may need to respond to the idea of "progress" -- so what if the Aztecs practised human sacrifice -- in ways that the challenge against virtue ethics does not.

For me, if no-one is virtuous, then we can probably infer that virtue ethicists - 'virtue' is a long standing science - are not being very helpful, and that they may not even believe in virtue themselves. That would make it at best a thought experiment.

  • "If no one is virtuous"... Oh, I see, you are are stating an obvious falsehood to support the opposite of what you're saying. – Scott Rowe Sep 21 '22 at 10:24
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N.B. The question as written is presumptive and argumentative: it asserts that empirical psychology has seriously undercut rational moral philosophy, and then questions why moral philosophers haven't acknowledged that. As a rule, asking whether a group of people are 'in denial' is a poor start for any intellectual exercise; it speaks to bias.

That aside, The reason that virtue ethicists (not to mention deontologists and consequentialists) haven't had more of a reaction to empirical research in psychology is that they don't really need to. This kind of research calls into question some of the presumptions of virtue ethics, but doesn't really touch its core principles.

Virtue ethics is a old field, having roots all the way back in ancient Greece. Its core idea is that ethical behavior comes from virtuous character traits, such that a man who has such traits will act more ethically than a man who does not. We should understand, however, that this particular approach to ethics is steeped in a naïve classical psychology, in which character traits are malleable, easily modified by conscious applications of will and reason. For Plato or Aristotle, self-examination and philosophical introspection are the keys to creating virtue; anyone willing to put in the effort can improve their character and attain some measure of ethical standing. This was the prevailing worldview up until Freud and his introduction of unconscious mental activity. Most of the writings of Classical Liberalism (Locke, Smith, Rousseau, etc), shared this understanding of the human mind, and even today we can still find plenty of authors in fields like economics, political theory, and even theology who cling to 'rational actor' models of human behavior.

Of course — as the question highlights — modern psychology has provided a large body of experimental evidence that people do not always (or even generally) act with conscious rationality. People are subject to biases, misattributions, cognitive shortcuts, emotional reasoning, anti-statistical intuitions, and other non-rational influences. People do not (in the language of virtue ethics) demonstrate 'good character' on a regular basis.

But this is where we need to be careful. The fact that people do not consistently or frequently show 'good character' does not imply that people have a disposition towards 'bad character'. That tendency to think of character traits as dispositional, not contextual, is an example of the Fundamental Attribution Error. Any virtue ethicist who considers this psychological research will likely admit that the classical worldview is flawed, but hold that the general principle — that people can and should develop virtuous character traits — is still valid. All that's changed is the process by which those character traits are developed. Virtue cannot be achieved by the direct application of will to build character, but by a more subtle, indirect process of working through unconscious attitudes. One ends up at something like Jung's efforts to embrace and integrate the 'shadow' into one's overt, expressed nature.

Virtue ethicists might seem underwhelmed by psychological research, but only because psychological research isn't challenging the substance of their programme, only its implementations.

Ted Wrigley
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  • But we know that there are traits: OCEAN. People who disagree are standing in that big river in Egypt. Buddhism says how to reach the other shore, leave your raft behind and move on. – Scott Rowe Sep 21 '22 at 10:16
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The reason that Virtue Ethicists do not consider the experimental results to be refutations is because they do not actually test virtue ethics. Virtue ethics does not predict that virtuous people will always behave virtuously, but that virtuous character habits increase the frequency of virtuous actions from the virtuous person.

That people are more likely to be helpful when smelling something nice -- does not change that the test subjects who actually are helpful in the experiments, will be more frequently those who acquaintances will describe by the character traits "helpful" and "kind". And while some circumstances will increase the frequency of lies that the test subjects tell, those people who acquaintances describe as "deceitful" and "liars" will feature predominantly among those who tell lies.

The above, that there are differential dispositional traits that we observe among people, IS experimental data. It is not the RECENT experimental data that is cited by Appiah, but that is actually the nature of faddism in philosophy. Studies generally pursue questions that could reinforce the researcher's predispostions, and there is a clear pattern of fads in published philosophy. Hence the recent trend of data supporting situationalism is reflective of little more than that recent PhD candidates lean toward situationalism.

It is a bit of a conundrum as to why Appiah, who favors a long view of philosophy, and realizes experiments to be intrinsic to most historical philosophiszing, was blinded by the recency fallacy to think that the historical Virtue ethics thinking was NOT based on experiment!

Dcleve
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  • Maybe he has a tendency to ignore what he doesn't want to acknowledge, even an unconscious tendency? We could investigate that. – Scott Rowe Sep 21 '22 at 10:13