Situationism and the problem of moral improvement

Abstract

A wealth of research in social psychology indicates that various ethically arbitrary situational factors exert a surprisingly powerful influence on moral conduct. Empirically-minded philosophers have argued over the last two decades that this evidence challenges Aristotelian virtue ethics. John Doris, Gilbert Harman, and Maria Merritt have argued that situationist moral psychology – as opposed to Aristotelian moral psychology – is better suited to the practical aim of helping agents act better. The Aristotelian account, with its emphasis on individual factors, invites too much risk of morally bad conduct insofar as it ignores the power of situational factors which lead us astray. Moral agents are often better off detecting and intervening on situational factors to help themselves act better. This paper offers an argument against the claim that situationism enjoys practical advantages over Aristotelian virtue ethics. There is empirical evidence suggesting that people can improve their behavior via Aristotelian strategies of deliberate self-improvement. This evidence also suggests that focusing our ethical attention on morally trivial factors may result in worse overall conduct. Accordingly, Aristotelianism may fare better than situationism on the practical issue of moral improvement.

Keywords:

• virtue ethics
• normative ethics
• social psychology
• situationism

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Christian Miller, Nancy Snow, Mark LeBar, Howard Curzer, Alfred Mele, John Schwenkler, Dhananjay Jagannathan, and two anonymous referees at this journal who each read and commented on earlier drafts of this paper. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Pacific American Philosophical Association meeting in San Francisco 2016. Dhananjay Jagannathan’s commentary at the APA was very helpful in improving the paper. I am also grateful to the APA audiences for their helpful feedback and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Matthew C. Taylor is a Ph.D candidate in the Philosophy Department at Florida State University. His research interests include moral psychology, ethics, and moral responsibility.

ORCID

Matthew C. Taylor http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4050-7290

Notes

1 The primary focus of the situationist literature is surprising, given that situationists themselves have claimed that the issue of character trait dispersion is not sufficient to undermine Aristotelian virtue ethics. For example, John Doris (1998) claims that

an empirically compelling moral psychology is not the only desideratum for ethical theory. So I must join the question directly: to what extent does reflection on a few extraordinary individuals facilitate ethically desirable behavior? In what follows, I begin to develop the suggestion that situationist moral psychology may fare better than Aristotelian alternatives with respect to important practical concerns. (Doris 1998, 512–513)

2 Empirically-minded philosophers who argue against virtue ethics are explicit in claiming that they are only focused on Aristotelian views that accept a practical conception of ethics (Doris 1998, 513).

3 Doris also claims that characterological accounts of moral psychology my even be psychologically wasteful (Doris 2002, 120).

4 Doris makes a similar claim elsewhere: “The way to get things right more often, I suggest, is by attending to the determinative features of situations” (Doris 2002, 158–159).

5 See Doris (2002, 112) and Doris (1998, 517)

6 There has been a significant amount of attention on self-regulative strategies for virtue cultivation (Sarkissian 2010; Miller 2014; Alfano 2013; Railton 2011; Upton 2017). It is unclear whether these strategies are sufficient as a response to the problem of moral improvement. This evidence provided in these works only showed increases in the frequency of virtue-concordant behavior in circumstances without trivial influences. I take it that part of the situationist challenge is that we need to focus primarily on situational factors in ethically unfriendly circumstances. This paper addresses this concern by showing that Aristotelian strategies can make it easier for the agent to control the behavioral impact of these influences.

7 Those identified as experts reported an average of 8.21 years of nursing experience, whereas the non-experts did not report such high levels of experience.

8 Experimenters report that there was a difference in arousal between high and low competency helpful subjects. Subjects who did help were more likely to feel tense or nervous if they were in the low competency group.

9 According to experimenters, the average sales experience in the expertise group was 41.3 months (as opposed a mean of 7.6 months in the novice group).

10 In the positive mood condition, notice that the experienced subjects performed less helping behavior than less experienced subjects. Does this mean that it is better to have less experience if you are in a good mood? Not necessarily. It may be the case that experienced employees do not need to perform as many helping behaviors because they understand the best means towards providing the help required and they display this by exhibiting a far more consistent behavioral pattern across mood conditions. They are able to give the best help consistently across conditions whereas non-experts were unable to do this.

11 The extent to which practice explains most of the variance in performance as opposed to natural talent is unclear. Macnamara, Hambrick, and Oswald (2014) emphasize the importance of natural talent but do not give any particular estimate about how much performance variance is explained by these factors.

12 Someone might worry that there is something special about moral performance such that it cannot be assimilated to other domains. John Hacker-Wright (2015) has argued that the deployment of practical wisdom requires a kind of sui generis knowledge that is lacking in the case of mundane skills, and so the “skill analogy” between virtue and skill overshadows this distinctive aspect of morality. I will side-step the issue about whether this kind of knowledge is required for the deployment of practical wisdom. Even if Hacker-Wright is correct, we need not locate the similarities in the “skill analogy” between performance from virtues and skills. We can instead locate the relevant similarity between (among other things) performance in accord with virtues and skills. There is an important similarity between what it takes to help people act in accord with morality and what it takes to help people act in accord with their skills. It is not necessary that a person actually possess practical wisdom (or moral virtue) in order to perform the same acts as a practically wise (or virtuous) agent. In that case, helping people act better via (AVE) need not require the distinctive kind of knowledge Hacker-Wright identifies. The “skill analogy” can be recast in a way that allows for the use of the evidence on practice and expertise in a way that supports the kind of moral improvement defended in this paper. Special thanks an anonymous reviewer at this journal for pointing out this concern.

13 It is also sometimes exceedingly difficult to find the practice effect in some domains (such as “computer programming, military aircraft piloting, soccer refereeing, and insurance selling”) (Macnamara, Hambrick, and Oswald 2014, 10).Why not think that the moral domain is more like these practice-ineffective domains (e.g. computer programing) rather than practice-effective domains (e.g. music playing)? Rather than answer this difficult question, we might instead reject the claim that the evidence has shown that these are practice-ineffective domains. Macnamara, Hambrick, and Oswald (2014, 8) and Hambrick et al. (2016, 10) consider the following live empirical hypothesis – it is possible that the experiments in the above domains (e.g. computer programing) failed to delineate the relevant kind of practice required for improved performance in those domains. Further research is needed before concluding that the evidence shows these domains are practice-ineffective domains. Special thanks to an anonymous reviewer at this journal for raising this issue.

14 Robertson (2018) uses the evidence on the corrupting influence of power – or having too much power – can have bad effects on moral behavior. The proposal here suggests another issue – having too little power – can have bad effects as well.

15 While the study was meant to test the negative effects of believing free will skepticism, the empirical findings are relevant here insofar as the experimental primes are similar to claims made by situationists, namely that behavior is largely (or sometimes entirely) a result of environmental influences that are beyond our (direct) control.

16 Janelle Gormley has noted that Aristotelians might also accept the view that you should bring your friends with you on the evening encounter, given the importance of friendship in keeping yourself on track and living a good life. This would seem to blur the lines between (AVE) and (SMP).

17 In “The Methods of Ethics” Henry Sidgwick (1874) identifies this issue as the paradox of hedonism. The general idea is that the more one focuses on maximizing pleasure, the less likely one is to actually maximize pleasure on certain occasions. If I am trying to maximize pleasure by reading a book, I should get absorbed in the book itself, as opposed to continually thinking about whether each chapter, sentence, word, or letter is in fact maximizing pleasure.

18 See Kleingeld (2015) and Rodgers and Warmke (2015) for an argument about whether such interventions would itself require moral virtue. These authors put the challenge against (SMP) rather than (SMP*), but one could easily modify their worry to target (SMP*). Of course, the tension they identify within situationism would no longer be there, but someone might still worry about the practical efficacy of such an approach.

19 Asking others is not expected to work since it may facilitate the same kinds of susceptibility to situational influence that occurs when individuals attempt to employ (SMP) themselves. The awareness that behavior is largely driven by situational factors may be enough to prime people into greater situational susceptibility. This is why the (SMP) must be covertly implemented.

20 The situationist may reply that they are interested in a different kind of practical significance that avoids this response. But then the original argument missed its target since Aristotelians never claimed practical superiority in the situationist’s sense of that term.