The Normativity Challenge: Cultural Psychology Provides the Real Threat to Virtue Ethics

The Journal of Ethics 13 (2-3):117-144 (2009)
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Abstract

Situationists argue that virtue ethics is empirically untenable, since traditional virtue ethicists postulate broad, efficacious character traits, and social psychology suggests that such traits do not exist. I argue that prominent philosophical replies to this challenge do not succeed. But cross-cultural research gives reason to postulate character traits, and this undermines the situationist critique. There is, however, another empirical challenge to virtue ethics that is harder to escape. Character traits are culturally informed, as are our ideals of what traits are virtuous, and our ideals of what qualifies as well-being. If virtues and well-being are culturally constructed ideals, then the standard strategy for grounding the normativity of virtue ethics in human nature is undermined.

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Jesse J. Prinz
CUNY Graduate Center

Citations of this work

Virtue Ethics.Rosalind Hursthouse & Glen Pettigrove - 2022 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Epistemic Virtue and the Epistemology of Education.Duncan Pritchard - 2013 - Journal of Philosophy of Education 47 (2):236-247.
Moral psychology: Empirical approaches.John Doris & Stephen Stich - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Situated agency: towards an affordance-based, sensorimotor theory of action.Martin Weichold - 2018 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17 (4):761-785.

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References found in this work

The metaphysics of morals.Immanuel Kant - 1797/1996 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Mary J. Gregor.
Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior.John M. Doris - 2002 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
The emotional construction of morals.Jesse J. Prinz - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press.

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