SITUATIONISM AND MORAL RESPONSIBILITY: AN EXTERNALIST ACCOUNT

ii Situationism is the position that there is no such thing as broad, situation-invariant character. This view emerged from situationist psychology experiments, such as the famous Milgram Obedience Experiments. It is supposed to impugn character-based theories that posit motivationally self-sufficient virtues, such as (one natural reading of) Aristotelian virtue ethics. While situationists agree on this point, a survey of the literature reveals that they defend inconsistent accounts of moral responsibility, ranging from radically revisionary to staunchly conservative. In my dissertation, I begin by focusing on three of the most preeminent situationists—John Doris, Gilbert Harman, and Philip Zimbardo—and show that their accounts of moral responsibility are inchoate, mutually incompatible, and sometimes incongruous with the central logic of situationist psychology. I also argue that the epistemological problem, i.e., the problem that we have very weak and unreliable access to our mental states, undermines traditional psychological accounts of moral responsibility, which depend on strong introspective access. This position is corroborated by cognitive science research into cognitive distortions such as confabulation