11/19/2023 0 Comments Quotjohn lack![]() ![]() 1) “Consistency”: to possess a trait involves exhibiting trait-relevant behavior in a wide variety of trait-relevant “eliciting conditions.” (Doris means “appropriately eliciting” rather than “actually eliciting.”) 2) “Stability”: Character and personality traits are reliably manifested by a given agent in trait-relevant behaviors over iterated trials of similar trait-relevant eliciting conditions. Doris calls the conception of character he opposes “globalist,” involving three features. The predictive, descriptive, and explanatory appeal to traits, such as is generally understood as entailed by the notion of “character,” is “confounded by the extraordinary situational sensitivity observed in human behavior” (15). Doris provides a modest defense of social psychology against challenges to its scientific status and relevance to philosophical moral psychology, but no more than he needs to maintain that it contributes to our understanding of human behavior in a manner pertinent to philosophical moral psychology.Ĭhapter 2: Character and Consistency sets out Doris’s main contentions. ![]() Disciplinary narrowness and a misunderstanding of the autonomy of ethics fed this failure of cross-disciplinary engagement. As moral philosophers turned toward character and virtue, social psychology in the 1960’s and 1970’s was problematizing those very notions. In Chapter 1: Joining the Hunt, Doris appropriately chides moral philosophers for ignoring psychologists ’ explorations of the psychology of moral personhood, even while turning to its own brand of philosophical moral psychology. It is a terrific and important contribution to moral theory and moral psychology. He recommends jettisoning thinking about human behavior and moral capacities in terms of broad traits of character such as “honesty,” bravery,” and “self-reliance.” Lack of Character is engagingly and accessibly written, provocative, non-dogmatic, chock full of interesting arguments. Following Owen Flanagan’s pioneering work, Varieties of Moral Personality (1991), Doris draws on the literature of experimental social psychology to make a case that virtue theory and the language of character on which it draws are committed to various unsustainable empirical claims about human behavior. John Doris’s Lack of Character argues against the virtue theoretic trend in contemporary moral theory. ![]()
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