Character and consistency: Still more errors

Mind 117 (467):603-612 (2008)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

This paper continues a debate among philosophers concerning the implications of situationist experiments in social psychology for the theory of virtue. In a previous paper (2002), I argued among other things that the sort of character trait problematized by Hartshorne and May's (1928) famous study of honesty is not the right sort to trouble the theory of virtue. Webber (2006) criticizes my argument, alleging that it founders on an ambiguity in "cross-situational consistency" and that Milgram's (1974) obedience experiment is immune to the objections I levelled against Hartshorne and May. Here I respond to his criticisms. The most important error in Webber's argument is that it overlooks a distinction between "one time performance" experiments and "iterated trial" experiments. I explain why the former cannot begin to trouble the theory of virtue. CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    What's this?

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
91 (#172,642)

6 months
2 (#668,348)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Gopal Sreenivasan
Duke University

Citations of this work

Identifying and Defending the Hard Core of Virtue Ethics.Mark Alfano - 2013 - Journal of Philosophical Research 38:233-260.
Situated agency: towards an affordance-based, sensorimotor theory of action.Martin Weichold - 2018 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17 (4):761-785.
Disunity of Virtue.Gopal Sreenivasan - 2009 - The Journal of Ethics 13 (2):195-212.
What the Science of Morality Doesn’t Say About Morality.Gabriel Abend - 2013 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 43 (2):157-200.

View all 18 citations / Add more citations