Factitious virtue

The primary aim of this project is to argue that empirical challenges to moral theories like virtue ethics should be co-opted rather than resisted. Virtue ethics has much to offer. Its vision of a flourishing life seems a better object of moral contemplation and evaluation than the desiccated, ascetic rules of deontology and consequentialism; its focus on "thick" concepts like honesty and courage seem to bridge the is/ought gap; its weaving together of reasons and motivations obviates concerns about moral schizophrenia. Furthermore, the virtue ethical account of action paints a detailed picture of sensitivity to reasons, careful and correct construal of ambiguous information, and thoughtful deliberation.;Recently, however, philosophers informed by the situationist tradition in social and experimental psychology have begun to question the empirical presuppositions of virtue ethics, and a cottage industry has grown up around attacking and defending their arguments. To move the debate forward, I develop a comprehensive list of the empirical presuppositions of virtue ethics, the most contentious items of which are consistency (if an agent possesses a virtue sensitive to reason r, then she responds to r whenever it is relevant), explanatory power (if an agent possesses a virtue, then reference to that virtue sometimes explains her behavior), predictive power (if an agent possesses a virtue, then reference to that virtue sometimes enables prediction of her behavior), and egalitarianism (almost anyone can be virtuous).;The empirical challenge relates to the conjunction of these four claims. Several decades of studies in social psychology have shown that most people sometimes respond not to the reasons there are for them to act on a given occasion but to situational factors like ambient sounds, ambient smells, moods and emotions, and presence of bystanders. These morally irrelevant but causally powerful factors can be unified under the heading of attentional focus: loud and annoying sounds, unpleasant smells, negative moods and emotions, and the presence of bystanders all lead to the focusing of attention on a small number of situational features, while their opposites lead to the dilation of attention. When their attention is focused, people exhibit inattentional blindness, which leads them to miss or misconstrue important moral features of their situations; insensible to the reasons there are for them to act, they deliberate poorly (if at all) and act in violation of virtue.;Situationist psychology does not just deny character traits. It also explains away the strongly felt intuition that there are character traits, invoking a virtual pantheon of gods of error and ignorance that includes the power of (mis)construal (misinterpreting ambiguous information as evidence for character traits), selection bias (using non-representative samples of behavior, thus overlook cases where people act in violation of traits), availability bias (assuming that first impressions are representative), and confirmation bias (seeking and using only evidence that confirms first impressions). These mechanisms guarantee that intuition would lead us to believe in traits even if traits did not exist. Since one does not know that p if one would believe p were it false, we cannot know on the basis of intuitions that character traits exist.;Three primary responses to the situationist critique can be identified in the literature. The dodge: virtue is a rare ideal, so data showing that most people are not virtuous is moot. The counterattack: the data do not support the situationist critique. The retreat: although the situationist critique shows that global traits do not exist, a naturalistic theory of virtue can still be formulated in terms of actions or local traits. Unfortunately, most versions of these arguments are either unsound or give up the consistency, explanatory power, predictive power, or egalitarianism of virtue. The dodge, for instance, is an outright denial of egalitarianism. Most versions of the counterattack fail to individuate virtues by their characteristic reasons, and thus are morally inadequate; others rely on intuitions, which have already been shown unreliable. Two compatible tactics for dealing with the challenge, however, do emerge from this literature: an emphasis on the portability of context and a shift from situationconsumerism to situation-producerism. By recognizing the power of situations and identifying the types of situations (not) conducive to behavior in accordance with virtue, one can strategically seek (avoid) situations likely to lead to (non-)virtuous actions. And by recognizing the causal dialectic between agents and situations, one can shift to thinking of agents as active producers rather than mere passive consumers of situations -- a point of view that encourages the creation of situations conducive to behavior in accordance with virtue.;Along these lines, I argue that virtue (though not vice) attributions of the right sort should be made regardless of their truth-value. Drawing on formal work in multi-agent epistemic logic and empirical studies in social psychology, consumer research, and behavioral economics, I show that the plausible, public attribution of virtuous traits induces both identification with those traits and belief that others expect one to act in trait-consonant ways, which in turn leads to trait-consonant behavior. The notions of placebo effects and self-fulfilling prophecies are instructive parallels to virtue-labeling. Thinking of virtue attributions merely as fact or fiction is too limited. We must recognize in addition a third category: factitious attributions, which make themselves true by being plausibly, publicly announced.;In another example of the portability of context and situation-producerism, I present a novel theory of social distance in terms of potential for interaction, group identity, and information. This theory draws support from recent work by experimental psychologists and economists, as well as an experiment that I myself conducted. By manipulating heuristics that track social distance, agents can be led systematically to underestimate it, which in turn leads to elevated levels of behavior in accordance with virtue.