Sinnott-Armstrong Walter - Moral Psychology: Volume 5: Virtue and Character

edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Christian B. Miller

A Bradford Book

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moral psychology / edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong.

v. cm.

A Bradford Book.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents: v. 1. The evolution of morality : adaptations and innateness -- v. 2. The cognitive science of morality : intuition and diversity -- v. 3. The neuroscience of morality : emotion, disease, and development. -- v. 4. Free will and moral responsibility

ISBN 978-0-262-19561-4 (vol. 1 : hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-262-69354-7 (vol. 1 : pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-262-19569-0 (vol. 2 : hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-262-69357-8 (vol. 2 : pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-262-19564-5 (vol. 3 : hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-262-69355-4 (vol. 3 : pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-262-02668-0 (vol. 4 : hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-262-52547-3 (vol. 4 : pbk : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-262-03557-6 (vol. 5 : hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-262-53318-8 (vol. 5 : pbk : alk. paper)

eISBN 9780262337274

1. Ethics. 2. Psychology and philosophy. 3. Neurosciences. I. Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, 1955

BJ45.M66 2007

170--dc22

ePub Version 1.0

Walter is happy to dedicate this volume to all of his golfing buddies because they have built his character and overlooked his vices.

Christian would like to dedicate this volume to the Wake Forest University philosophy department, which has been such a joy to be a part of for the past twelve years.

The main papers in this volume arose from a conference at Wake Forest University in May of 2015. The conference was part of the Developing Character Project (www.thecharacterproject.com), directed by Christian B. Miller, which was funded by a very generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation. Additional funding for the conference was provided by the Wake Forest Philosophy Departments Thomas Jack Lynch fund.

For support while preparing this volume, Christian would like to thank the Templeton World Charity Foundation. The opinions expressed here and throughout the volume are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation. For help in organizing the conference, Christian is very grateful to Julia Blackwell and Kathleen Stimely, who made everything run very smoothly. Win-Chiat Lee, Jessie Lee Miller, Charles Miller, and Joyous Miller were also tremendously supportive during the entire process of putting this volume together. Finally, a very special thanks to Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. He was very generous in asking me to come onboard and coedit this volume with him, and he has been absolutely phenomenal to work with. We have spent countless hours together planning the chapters, inviting contributors, editing drafts, organizing the material, and doing all the other things that come with a large project like this. Unfailingly, Walter has been tremendous, and I could not ask for a better collaborator. Here and in many other ways, he exhibits much virtue.

Walter would like to thank all who helped fund and organize the conference (listed above) as well as Duke University and the Kenan Institute for Ethics in particular for supporting MADLAB (Moral Attitudes and Decision-Making lab) and the members of MADLAB for many discussions about the issues in this volume. Walter is also very grateful to Christian B. Miller for going far above and beyond the call of duty in arranging the conference and for his admirable care in editing the numerous and diverse materials collected here. His efficiency, insights, patience, and good cheer made editing this volume a pleasant learning experience. Here and in many other ways, he exhibits extremely good character.

Christian B. Miller and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Volumes 14 of this series focused on moral judgments about actions: Which actions are morally right or wrong? Are actions ever freely willed? Are agents ever morally responsible for their actions? Volume 5 turns to another important area of moral psychology, namely virtues, vices, and character. Here the focus is on general character traits instead of specific actions.

There has been a resurgence of interest in virtues, vices, and character during the past forty years in philosophy. Psychology has also seen a vigorous debate about the relative contributions of personality traits and social circumstances to individual decisions. Unfortunately, most moral philosophers worked in relative isolation from the sciences. In recent years, however, psychology and philosophy have been brought together.

This volume is an outgrowth of the new wave of interest in interdisciplinary work on virtue, vice, and character. The chapters that follow all raise philosophical issues in light of empirical work in psychology, some of which was conducted by the authors themselves. Each chapter provides new and exciting avenues for better understanding virtue, vice, and character in ways that could not be achieved by philosophy or psychology alone.

This introduction will briefly summarize the chapters. Each chapter is followed by two commentators and a reply, with one commentator being a philosopher and the other a psychologist.

The opening chapters provide rich discussions of two recent challenges to the very notion of character traits as well as virtues and vices: an eliminativist challenge about the need for character traits and a situationist challenge about the empirical adequacy of traditional accounts of virtues and vices. In the first chapter, the psychologist C. Daniel Batson advocates the eliminativist challenge. Specifically, he questions the scientific usefulness of the concept of character, preferring to jettison it in favor of familiar folk psychological notions like goals and values. In addition, by drawing on his own extensive research on what he calls moral hypocrisy, Batson questions the prevalence and power of good character.

Both of Batsons commentators focus on his discussion of moral hypocrisy. Joshua May argues that, even in light of the moral hypocrisy research, there is good reason to think that we are more virtuous and morally motivated than Batson suggests. Specifically, he tries to show that the data may provide evidence for certain forms of moral integrity and that the scope of moral hypocrisy may be limited. Karl Aquino similarly takes Batsons data to warrant a less cynical interpretation about the goodness of peoples character. His strategy in arguing for this response is different than Mays, as Aquino sees hypocrisy as an outcome of the selfs maintaining a belief in its own goodness alongside a desire for consistency. In Aquinos eyes, this provides for a more positive interpretation of the hypocrisy results as demonstrating a form of identity work. In his reply to May and Aquino, Batson appreciates their original and thoughtful suggestions but explains why his cynicism about good character remains.

The next two chapters engage with situationist challenges to character. Situationists in social psychology first raised doubts about the existence and role of cross-situationally consistent character traits back in the 1960s, culminating in the publication of Walter Mischels landmark 1968 book