Virtue ethics and situationism : on empirical adequacy and theoretical usefulness

This thesis explores and responds to a certain critique of Aristotelian virtue ethics\ud offered by philosophers and social psychologists called ???contextualists.??? Contextualists\ud dispute the very existence of significant states of character, arguing that variations in\ud behavior are better explained by features of a person???s situation than by distinctive moral\ud dispositions. The particular version of the contextualist critique that I will discuss comes from\ud John Doris??? ???Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics.??? I shall argue that Doris is mistaken\ud about the implications of contextualism for virtue ethics.\ud Doris draws three main conclusions: (1) that behavioral variation across a population\ud owes more to situational differences than dispositional differences, (2) that the empirical\ud evidence problematizes the attribution of robust traits, (3) that personality structures are\ud typically evaluatively inconsistent. I point out, however, that not one of these claims is an\ud issue for Aristotelian virtue ethics properly understood. Aristotle is a philosopher highly\ud concerned with the impact that situational variability has on behavioral outcomes. Indeed, he\ud addresses the issue thoroughly with his many discussions on moral perception. The issue of\ud robust trait attribution does not come up for virtue theory, because unlike Doris, the virtue\ud theorist does not assume that all character traits must be robust. The virtue theorist???s claim is\ud simply that some character traits have the potential to be developed into robust traits. Virtue\ud ethics acknowledges Doris??? conclusion (3) from the onset of its project and considers it to be\ud one of the central reasons as to why Aristotle established an ethical theory. With this in mind,\ud I conclude that Doris??? situationist project does not have the far reaching implications for\ud Aristotelian virtue ethics that he had hoped it would