Situationism and trait-eliciting situations

Analysis 83 (1):80-88 (2022)
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Abstract

Doris, in his 2002 book Lack of Character and 2005 paper ‘Replies: evidence and sensibility’, famously argues that we lack the kinds of global character traits posited by theories of virtue, because the situationist experiments demonstrate that people do not display trait-relevant behaviour in trait-relevant situations above chance. This paper argues that some notable situationist experiments are not trait-relevant situations. By analysing which factors improve or reduce participants’ chances of success (e.g. stress, lack of familiarity, ambiguity), and observing that these factors decrease agents’ capacity to recognize and respond to a variety of reasons in a variety of settings, the best explanation of many subjects’ failure to do the right thing is that they are affected by factors that are capacity-compromising. This matters, because settings in which agents have a reduced capacity to avoid wrongdoing are typically not apt tests of an agent’s character traits.

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Adam Piovarchy
University of Notre Dame Australia

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References found in this work

Dispositions.John Heil - 2005 - Synthese 144 (3):343-356.
Virtue, Character and Situation.Jonathan Webber - 2006 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 3 (2):193-213.
The ability to do otherwise and the new dispositionalism.Romy Jaster - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (9):1149-1166.
Situationism, capacities and culpability.Adam Piovarchy - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (6):1997-2027.

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