and Impediments to Helping Behavior

philosophy in the past ten years has examined the implications of empirical results in social psychology for the existence and nature of character traits. Gilbert Harman and John Doris in particular have argued that these results give us good reason to reject the existence of character traits as traditionally understood, while philosophers sympathetic to Aristote-lian notions of character and virtue have attempted to carve out an important explanatory role for them to play in the lives of at least some human beings.1 Given the extensive array of traditional character traits and the thousands of experiments in social psychology which could potentially bear on their exist-ence, it is not surprising that, in order to focus the discussion, both sides have largely examined only one such trait, namely compassion. In a number of recent papers, I have begun to develop a new theory of character which is conceptually distinct both from traditional Aristotelian accounts as well as from the positive view of “local ” traits outlined by Doris.2 On my view, many human beings do have robust traits of character whic