Virtue And Action:on The Situationist Challenge Of Virtue Ethics

The key of the situational challenge to the virtue ethics lies in negating the reality of character characteristics,which is fatal to virtue ethics.In this essay,I attempt to respond this challenge by critically reviewing and combing the contention between situationism and virtue ethics.In the first part of the thesis,I will examine the emergence of virtue ethics and situationism and their relevance to psychology,and use it as a basis to illustrate the importance of virtue ethics in responding this challenge in two aspects: On the one hand,the basic position of the concept of virtue in the theory of virtue ethics and the critical significance of situationism in questioning the reality of character.On the other hand,it is the impact and challenge of modern experimental science on the status of traditional speculative philosophy in an interdisciplinary context.In the second and third part of the dissertation,I will use the argument between situationism and virtue ethics as a clue to sort out and summarize the main process of the debate.Then I will analyze the viewpoints of both sides,pointing out possible problems.In chronological order,Doris questioned the character concept of virtue ethics first.He acknowledged the existence of character characteristics,but thought that they were fragmented local traits and could not determine human behavior.Afterwards,Harman pushed this question to a radical point of view,saying that there is simply don't exist what we call character,and that moral beliefs commit "basic attribution errors".Therefore,situationists claim that situational facts have a decisive influence on behavior,but they hold different opinions on the substantiality of character.In the face of questioning situationism present,virtue ethics on the one hand questioned the legitimacy of situationists experiments and their data,and on the other hand appealed to their own concept of virtue,responding to the challenge of situationism.Finally,combining the existing opposition and response,after summarizing and analyzing,I will try to stand up to the challenge of situationism from the perspective of virtue ethics.Firstly,virtue ethics regards "good" rather than "right" as the standard for measuring behavior,which make virtue ethics not committed to proposing a set of routine behavioral guidelines.But situationism does not aware of the complexity of moral life and acquiesce that virtue ethics is intended to provide such a routine behavioral guidelines to help actor make right choices.What's more,I believe that the virtue ethics concerns the internal state of the actor.This internal state contains right feeling,and the experiments of situationism does not and cannot examine whether the emotions are consistent with the behavior.This makes it impossible for situationist to effectively understand the behavior through experimental data.Therefore,the experimental design of situationism is irrational.Thus,the experimental data they obtained cannot be a strong support for their conclusion.