Character and Moral Psychology 1

C H A R A C T E R A N D M O R A L PS Y C H O L O G Y
Character and
Moral Psychology
C H R I S T I A N B. M I L L E R
1
3
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To Jackson Miller, my wonderful son
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of chapters one, six, and eight were discussed as part of the
Character Project Research in Progress Group at Wake Forest University.
Thanks in particular to William Fleeson, R. Michael Furr, Peter Meindl, and
Eranda Jayawickreme.
For written comments on a version of chapter one, I am very grateful to
Kevin Timpe, Donald Smith, Matt Talbert, Peter Vranas, and Nicole Smith.
Material from chapter ve was presented as Snows Virtue as Social Intelli-
gence, for an Author-Meets-Critics Symposium at the 2011 American Philo-
sophical Association Pacic Division Meeting. Nancy Snows response to my
comments helped improve this chapter.
Figure 5.1 in chapter ve is reproduced with the kind permission of John
Wiley and Sons from:
Yuichi Shoda (1999). A Unied Framework for the Study of Behavioral Consist-
ency: Bridging Person x Situation Interaction and the Consistency Paradox.
European Journal of Personality 13: 36187.
Figure 5.2 in chapter ve is reproduced with the kind permission of the
Guilford Press from:
Yuichi Shoda (1999). Behavioral Expressions of a Personality System: Gener-
ation and Perception of Behavioral Signatures, in The Coherence of Personality:
Social-Cognitive Bases of Consistency, Variability, and Organization. Ed.
D. Cervone and Y. Shoda. New York: Guilford Press, 15581.
With kind permission of Continuum Press, several paragraphs in chapters
seven and eight draw on my:
An Overview of Contemporary Meta-ethics and Normative Theory, in The
Continuum Companion to Ethics. Ed. Christian Miller. London: Continuum
Press, 2011.
Thanks to Terence Cuneo and Jason Baldwin for their written comments on
the original material.
With kind permission from Springer Science + Business Media B.V.,
material in sections 8.1 and 8.2 of chapter eight draws on my paper:
Social Psychology and Virtue Ethics. The Journal of Ethics 7 (2003): 36592.
For written comments on the original paper, I am very grateful to Joe
Syverson, Charles Young, Michael DePaul, Chris Toner, several anonymous
referees, and especially Reza Lavroodi. An earlier version was read at the 2002
viii Acknowledgements
American Philosophical Association Pacic Division Meeting, where Charles
Young was my commentator. Finally, the writing of that paper was supported
with a Presidential Fellowship from the University of Notre Dame.
With the kind permission of Acumen Press, material in chapter eight draws
on my paper:
The Problem of Character, in The Handbook of Virtue Ethics. Ed. Stan van
Hooft and Nicole Saunders. Durham: Acumen Press, forthcoming 2013.
It also draws on my paper:
The Challenge to Virtue, Character, and Forgiveness from Psychology and
Philosophy. Symposium on Forgiveness. Philosophia Christi 14 (2012):
125143. The following is required to reprint: The Editor of Philosophia Christi
grants non-exclusive world rights in all languages, all media (both print and
electronic) to use this article for Character and Moral Psychology. Philosophia
Christi is the journal of the Evangelical Philosophical Society (<http://www.
epsociety.org>).
Material from chapter eight was presented as The Real Challenge to Charac-
ter from Social Psychology for the International Society for Comparative
Study of Chinese and Western Philosophy at the 2011 American Philosophical
Association Central Division Meeting. Thanks to Julia Annas, Nancy Snow,
Terence Cuneo, and Rachana Kamtekar for their written comments on this
chapter, and to Nancy and Terence for written comments on chapter seven
as well.
I would like to thank two anonymous referees for Oxford University Press
for their very helpful comments on this manuscript, and Peter Momtchiloff
for all of his support. Thanks as well to Joshua Seachris for his help at the last
minute editing the bibliography and to Jason Baldwin for his tremendous
work proofreading the document and preparing the Index.
This book was written during the 201011 academic year while I was on a
research leave from Wake Forest University. I am very grateful to my department
and especially to my chair, Ralph Kennedy, for all their support, and to the
Reynolds Leave Program and the Thomas Jack Lynch Funds for funding. For
summer support in 2010 and 2011, I am also very grateful to the John Templeton
Foundation and their support of the Character Project grant that I direct at Wake
Forest (<http://www.thecharacterproject.com>). The opinions expressed in this
book are mine alone and do not necessarily reect the views of the John
Templeton Foundation, the Character Project, or Wake Forest University.
On a personal note, I would like to thank my parents, Charles and Joyous
Miller, and my wife, Jessie Lee Miller, for all their support and encouragement
as I was working on this project. While this book was under review, our rst
son, Jackson Smith Mobley Miller, was born. Our lives have been so much
better ever since. May he grow up to be a person of both character and virtue.
Contents
Preface xi
List of Figures xv
PART I THE MIXED TRAIT FRAMEWORK

1. The Conceptual Background 3
2. The Framework of Mixed Traits 37
3. Illustrating the Framework: Cheating 62
PART II ENGAGING OTHER FRAMEWORKS

4. Situationism 85
5. The CAPS Model 107
6. The Big Five 129
PART III APPLYING THE FRAMEWORK

7. Errors about Character? Some Implications for Meta-Ethics 153
8. Trouble for Virtue Ethics? Some Implications for Normative Ethics 187
PART IV THE NEXT STEP

9. Looking Forward 227
References 241
Index 267
Preface
THE THEME OF THE BOOK
Philosophers and psychologists have been hard at work trying to unlock the
mysteries of our characters. Unfortunately, their answers have been all over
the map.
According to one position, every single person has all of the moral virtues,
such as modesty and compassion, although to varying degrees. Versions of
this idea can be found in the Big Five model which dominates personality
psychology today.1
According to another position, on the other hand, no one has any character
traits at all since they are simply illusions and do not exist. Hence there is not
one person who is honest or compassionate or courageous. Some followers of
the situationist movement in psychology seem to say things like this, including
a prominent philosopher inspired by that movement who has written an
article entitled, The Nonexistence of Character Traits.2
These are two extreme positions, to say the least. And between these
extremes, there are plenty of intermediate views. For instance the philosopher
John Doris has claimed that most people do not have any traditional virtues or
vices, but rather local traits of character such as honesty in test taking
situations or humility with the boss. A person could have these particular
traits while also, at the same time, lacking honesty at parties and humility
with subordinates.3
However, I think that all of these positions are not accurate as a reection of
what most of us are like today. In the companion book to this one, Moral
Character: An Empirical Theory, I instead develop and support a novel theory
of what I call Mixed Traits. On my view, most people do not have the moral
virtues, and most people also do not have the moral vices. They also do not
have local virtues or vices like honesty in test-taking situations. But at the
same time, most people do have robust character traits that play a central
role in giving rise to morally relevant thoughts and actions. How can all these
claims hang together consistently?
The very short answer is that these Mixed Traits are indeed causally active
mental dispositions, but from a moral perspective they have both signicant
morally positive aspects (hence precluding them from counting as vices)
1
See chapter six for discussion of this model.
2
Harman 2000. Situationism will be the topic of chapter four.
3
Doriss position will be considered at length in chapter eight.
xii Preface
alongside signicant morally negative aspects (hence precluding them from
counting as virtues). They can, for instance, give rise to powerful feelings of
seless empathy for the suffering of another person which leads to altruistic
helping, while also disposing us to kill an innocent person in a matter of
minutes under pressure from an authority gure.
The goal of this book is to explore some of the implications of my Mixed
Trait framework. Hence I will not spend a lot of time offering support for the
framework in what follows, nor will I outline it as extensively as I did in Moral
Character.4 Rather I will be assuming the plausibility of my view, and then
going on to do two main things:
(i) Engage with the other leading positions on the empirical nature of
character, in particular situationism, the CAPS model, the Big Five
model, and the local trait model.
(ii) Apply my view to important topics in ethics. In particular, I will argue
in chapter seven that my position gives rise to a novel error theory
about our judgments of character, whereby most of those judgments
are going to turn out to be false or mistaken. And in chapter eight I will
argue that virtue ethics in particular, but really any position which
believes it is important to cultivate the virtues, faces a signicant
challenge if my Mixed Trait approach is correct.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THIS BOOK

AND MORAL CHARA CTER: AN EMPIRICAL THEORY
My previous book considered a bunch of empirical research in psychology on

morally relevant thoughts and actions in order to develop and support the
Mixed Trait framework. In particular, it looked extensively at the literature on
helping, and more briey at research on harming others and on lying.
So there is a natural progression of beginning with the articulation of and
support for the Mixed Trait framework in that book, and then in this book
engaging with competing views as well as applying the framework to philo-
sophical debates. At the same time, I have written Character and Moral
Psychology as an independent work, and chapter two in particular is designed
for those who have not read Moral Character. My goal was to write this book
so that it makes sense on its own without prior familiarity with its predecessor.
4
Chapter two will give an overview of the position which is sufcient for what comes in the
later chapters.
Preface xiii
INTENDED AUDIENCE
As with Moral Character, this book is intended to be a contribution to our

understanding of character which is aimed primarily at scholars working in
philosophy and psychology. In addition, it should be of interest to those whose
work signicantly overlaps with philosophical and psychological questions
about character, such as scholars in the elds of religion, moral education,
sociology, history, and literature. I also hope that many people who are simply
interested in the topic will nd this book to be helpful independently of their
professional work.
Hence as before, I have tried to make the writing accessible without at the
same time sacricing clarity and rigor. Because of this, I hope that philoso-
phers will not expect the philosophical discussions to be overly technical, and
similarly that psychologists will understand why I do not wade into details
about methodology or statistical analysis. Given the interdisciplinary nature of
this project, I thought these were wise choices to make.
Having said this, the book is still an academic study of the topic, and may be
challenging for those with no background or training in either philosophy or
psychology.
PLAN OF THE BOOK
The heart of Part I of the book is chapter two, which gives a broad overview of
the Mixed Trait framework using the illustration of aggressive thoughts and
behavior. Those readers who are already familiar with Moral Character can
safely skip this chapter. The rst chapter provides some conceptual discussion
of the relationship between personality and character traits, and of the meta-
physical nature of character traits as dispositions. Finally chapter three both
illustrates and provides additional support for the Mixed Trait framework by
looking at a research literature I have not considered before, namely studies
of cheating.
Next, Part II engages with arguably the three leading approaches to thinking
about personality traits in psychology over the past several decades: situation-
ism, the CAPS model, and the Big Five model. I end up being the most critical
of certain versions of situationism and the Big Five, but also note that there are
many places where my framework can agree with each of these positions.
Part III turns more directly to philosophical matters. Chapter seven focuses
on meta-ethics, and in particular on the development of an error theory about
character judgments. There is also a discussion of some of the reasons why we
have gotten things so wrong in the past, as well as what we should do in the
xiv Preface
future in light of our mistakes. Then chapter eight looks at the eld of
normative ethical theory, and in particular at the challenge raised from
situationist psychology by Gilbert Harman and John Doris to Aristotelian
forms of virtue ethics. While I end up parting ways with Harman and Doris,
I do develop my own challenge to virtue ethics based on the Mixed Trait
framework. Indeed, my challenge applies much more broadly to any position,
whether philosophical or not, that takes the cultivation of the virtues seriously.
Finally, the book ends with some preliminary suggestions in chapter nine
about how this new challenge might be met.
List of Figures
1.1 Two kinds of traits 4

1.2 Two kinds of personality traits 9
1.3 The causal activity of the trait of compassion 27
1.4 Property monist and dualist approaches 29
1.5 Property dualism 31
1.6 Two kinds of character traits 33
2.1 Three kinds of moral character traits associated with aggression 45
2.2 Larrys aggression prole (peer ratings) 47
2.3 Larrys aggression prole for many situations 48
2.4 Larrys frequency of harming at different levels of aggressiveness
during a year 49
2.5 Larrys aggression prole (peer ratings) 51
2.6 Larrys average level of aggressiveness in the same 20 situations
during two weeks 53
2.7 Larrys aggression prole for two Milgram setups (peer ratings) 56
2.8 Two aggression proles in three situations 58
2.11 Average level of aggressiveness for 20 people over two hours 60
2.12 Average level of aggressiveness for 20 people over many situations 60
4.1 Two honesty proles in three situations 93
4.2 Two honesty proles in three situations 94
5.1 A conscientiousness prole for one student at two times 119
5.2 A verbal aggression prole for one child at two times 119
8.1 Various options for thinking about most peoples actual moral character 199
Part I
The Mixed Trait Framework
1
The Conceptual Background
The goal of this book is to outline my framework for thinking about what
moral character looks like today, and then apply that framework to a number
of different topics in both psychology and philosophy. First, though, I need to
do some preliminary conceptual work in order to clarify both how I will be
using terms such as character traits, dispositions, and virtues, and how
I will be thinking about their relationship. So in this chapter, I attempt to do
the following:
(i) Start with traits in general, and then focus on personality traits.
(ii) Suggest that character traits are just one kind of personality trait, and
briey introduce two proposals about what makes them unique.
(iii) Examine the nature of character traits as dispositions, and clarify how
I understand such dispositions.
(iv) Consider the metaphysical relationship between character trait dispos-
itions and mental state dispositions.
(v) Focus specically on the moral character traits.
This should provide a clear enough starting point for outlining my positive
view of character traits in chapter two.
1.1 TRAITS AND PERSONALITY TRAITS 1
Let me begin at a very general level with traits. All kinds of things have traits,
not just human beings. Cars, for instance, have traits, including various sizes,
speeds, and shapes. Countries have traits, such as being comparatively wealthy
or poor. Fish have traits, such as swimming quickly or being large or small in
size. Traits are features or properties of things.
1
Material in this section draws on Moral Character: An Empirical Theory, chapter one,
section one.
4 Character and Moral Psychology
We also have all kinds of traits too, including our height, weight, and color.
But none of these examples of traits is directly relevant to this book. Rather,
I am only interested in what psychologists call personality traits. So let me
introduce this distinction with Figure 1.1:
Traits
Personality Traits Non-Personality Traits
Figure 1.1 Two kinds of traits
Here are some examples of personality traits:

Talkative, expansive, artistic, dry, jovial, formal, clever, calm, nervous, extra-
verted, shy, sociable, imaginative, logical, and witty.
I do not intend to give a careful analysis of what a personality trait is, just as
I will not do for any of the other central concepts in this chapter. But there are
a few things I can say about this distinction.
As personality traits, they are concerned with the mental life of a creature, i.e.,
the mental states and processes that constitute thinking. These mental states and
processes can and typically do inuence behavior in all kinds of ways. A shy
person, for instance, wants to avoid speaking in public, and so may decline
speaking invitations because of that. A sociable person, on the other hand, may
get excited by an upcoming party and spend hours mingling with the crowd.
As personality traits, they are more than just momentary states of mind.
A person who wants to skip a particular party does not automatically count as
shy. Indeed, he could be highly sociable or extraverted in general, but may also
have a pressing commitment elsewhere that evening. Similarly, someone who
thinks of a clever joke does not thereby count as witty just because of this one
thought; it could be entirely out of character for him.
So momentarily exhibiting certain thoughts does not mean that someone
has the underlying trait. Personality traits can give rise to characteristic mental
states, but mental states do not have to depend on personality traits.2 As
another illustration, Smith might be in a compassionate frame of mindhe
might be thinking about how best to help someone else in need, care a lot at
this moment about helping that person, and arrive at the correct answer as to
what would be best to do for her. It certainly seems that Smith has
2
For the distinction between traits and states in psychology, see, e.g., Mischel and Shoda
1995: 257, 1998: 235, Fleeson 2001: 1012, 2007: 826, Fleeson and Noftle 2008a: 1358, Fleeson and
Noftle 2008b, Fleeson and Gallagher 2009: 1099, and Roberts 2009: 140 (and the references cited
therein). The distinction is commonplace in philosophical discussions of character.
The Conceptual Background 5
compassionate mental states. But if this happens to be the only time in his life
when he thinks and feels this way, and otherwise he just tries to promote his
own self-interest, then I suspect we would also likely not say anything more
than thishe does not have a trait of compassion, but just a momentary
compassionate state.
The same idea applies to the distinction between personality traits and
characteristic bodily actions. Smith might make a large donation to charity.
In most cases we would call that a compassionate action, and would praise him
for it. But merely knowing this about his action does not necessarily tell us
anything about either the mental states behind the action or the traits (if any)
which led to its being performed. For all we know, Smith could have been
entirely in a selsh frame of mind, wanting to be recognized by society. That
state of mind could have arisen from a trait of selshness. So a compassionate
action does not entail the possession of a compassionate trait. And neither
does a compassionate state of mind.3
Thus for someone like Tom to have the personality trait of shyness, for
instance, he has to have some enduring tendency or disposition to have shy
thoughts and act in shy ways.4 This disposition is distinct from the shy
thoughts and actions, although it can give rise to both of them. Furthermore,
these thoughts need not be active all the time or in every situation; when he is
alone, for instance, Tom may not have them at all. Rather, it might only be
when he is in certain conditions which are relevant to this trait, such as parties
or classrooms, that they kick in and play an active role in his psychology. As
philosophers like to say, in these conditions Toms shy thoughts go from being
merely dispositional thoughts, to being occurrent thoughts.5
3
For use of these distinctions, see Foot 1978: 173, Aristotle 1985: 1105b610, 1134a16,
1135a511, 1135b201136a4, 1151a10, Irwin 1996: 47, 54, Wiggins 1997: 99100, Hursthouse
1999: 123, 1346, Athanassoulis 2000: 218, Harman 2003: 92, 2009: 239, 241, Swanton 2003: 4,
29, Kamtekar 2004: 486, Hurka 2006, Adams 2006: 3, Appiah 2008: 61, 64, 70, Russell 2009: 80,
133, 191, and Annas 2011: 8, 445, although I depart from Swanton and Hurka in claiming that a
person could perform a compassionate action from either a good or bad motivetrait properties
of actions are not tied to the motives or intentions behind the actions, on my view, just as they
are not tied to any character traits which give rise to them either. Rather I prefer to say that
performing a virtuous action just amounts to the person performing that action, whichever it
happens to be, which is deemed to be a virtuous action by the correct normative theory,
regardless of what motives the person had for performing it. For instance, it might be the action
which has the property of being what a fully compassionate person, acting in character, would
have also performed in the same circumstances, as Aristotle seems to hold (1105b6).
4
This requirement is true for all personality traits, but not for traits in general. Someone
could have a particular weight, for instance, only for a very short period of time. Thanks to
Donald Smith for making sure I claried this.
5
Occurrent thoughts, though, need not be conscious. I can have many subconscious occur-
rent desires which are causally inuencing my behavior in all kinds of ways. For instance, Tom
might be inuenced to leave the party by a desire to avoid crowds of people, without realizing
that he in fact has this desire.
Similarly, the shy beliefs and desires that he forms in these situations need
not be precisely the same particular mental states on every relevant occasion
they can be as diverse as wanting to leave a party or wanting to hide behind a
large football player in class. What matters is that they are of the same broad
type, namely shy thoughts, not that they are mental states with exactly the
same content on each occasion.
So generalizing from this example of Tom, I propose that in a preliminary
way we can understand a personality trait had by a person as roughly:
(1) A disposition to form beliefs and/or desires of a certain sort and (in many
cases) to act in a certain way, when in conditions relevant to that disposition.6
A person who is shy is disposed to believe, desire, and act shyly, and can form
such thoughts and act this way when, for instance, at a large party. Someone
who is sociable is typically disposed instead to form different thoughts and
exhibit different behaviors when at large parties.
A quick note about how I will be using beliefs and desires. It is
customary in philosophy to divide all mental states into two broad types
cognitive mental states which are labeled beliefs and non-cognitive mental
states which are labeled desires.7 The difference between the cognitive and
non-cognitive is notoriously hard to pin down precisely. To use a common
metaphor, cognitive mental states are all those states which aim to capture or
reect the way the world is; they are said to have a mind-to-world direction of
t. A belief that Thomas Jefferson was the rst President of the United States
fails to reect the way the world is, and so the fault is with the belief, not the
world. Non-cognitive mental states have the opposite, world-to-mind direc-
tion of t, and so aim to change the world to bring it in line with the desire. For
6
Compare Brent Roberts: Personality traits are the relatively enduring patterns of thoughts,
feelings, and behaviors that reect the tendency to respond in certain ways under certain
circumstances (2009: 140, italics removed). And Lawrence Pervin says that Probably most
would agree that trait represents a disposition to behave expressing itself in consistent patterns of
function across a range of situations (1994: 108, emphasis his). See also Bem and Allen 1974:
506, Tellegen 1991: 1315, Johnson 1997: 74, and Wiggins 1997: 1025.
Note that nothing in (1) requires that there be individual differences between how people are
disposed to believe, desire, and act in order for there to be personality traits. Psychologists often
focus on individual differences when studying traits, but I claim this focus should be restricted to
gathering evidence for their existence, rather than as a conceptual requirement for understanding
them in the rst place. In principle, there may be no individual differences in a populations
possession of a personality traitit is conceivable that everyone could have honesty or courage
equally, for instance. Hence individual differences are not constitutive of such traits in the rst
place (contrary to Funder 2008: 570 and Fleeson and Noftle 2009: 151). For a similar claim,
see Doris 2002: 19 n. 23, Kamtekar 2004: 468, Badhwar 2009: 280, and Sosa 2009: 287. For
the opposing view, see Johnson 1997: 74, 87.
7
More precisely, it is customary to divide all mental states with intentional objects into these
two categories. I am not committing myself to the claim that all of what goes on in our mental
lives falls under the heading of either beliefs or desires. As an anonymous reviewer noted, qualia,
for instance, are not meant to be part of this discussion.
instance, I might desire to be the next President of the United States, and so
aim to make the world reect this goal. A failure to do so is not a failure of the
desire, but of the world from my perspective.8 Here I will use the term desire
very broadly to range over a number of different kinds of non-cognitive
mental states, such as wishes, wants, tastes, whims, urges, promptings,
hopes, and intentions.9 The objects of desires can include such familiar mental
items as my goals, plans, and aspirations.
Returning to (1), then, the idea is that personality traits are dispositions to
form beliefs and/or desires and potentially to act in relevant ways as well when
in the appropriate circumstances. The ambiguity about whether they pertain
to beliefs, desires, and actions is intentional. Some personality traits certainly
do seem to involve all of these elements, as in the case of compassion or
selshness. Others, though, could involve desire states without a belief state
perhaps irritability or general anxiousness might be candidates.10 Still other
traits such as foresight or closed-mindedness might only involve belief states
without desire states. Finally, note that some personality traits do not directly
involve action in any ordinary sense pertaining to intentional bodily move-
ment (hence action here does not include mental actions). The traits of
being analytical and logical, which pertain to a persons reasoning capacities,
might be two such examples.11 While I do not want to commit myself to any of
these specic proposals in this paragraph, I also do not want to rule them out
from the very start.
This way of understanding personality traits allows them to be clearly
distinguished from non-personality traits such as a persons height or weight.
But it also excludes certain biological dispositions from counting as personal-
ity traits, and so will require a revision to what some psychologists have said in
the past. For instance, Newman and Josephs (2009) claim that testosterone is a
personality variable, and that levels of testosterone are stable over time and
have high predictive validity. But clearly testosterone is not a disposition to
form beliefs or desires of any sort. Or to use another example, Seymour
Epstein suggests that, despite its lower reliability than heart rate mean,
8
For more on the direction of t metaphor and some of the challenges it faces, see Schueler
1991, Humberstone 1992, Zangwill 1998, and Sobel and Copp 2001.
9
For broad versus narrow uses of desire, see Schueler 1995: chapter one. Some philoso-
phers of action argue that intentions are best understood as primarily cognitive states (e.g.
Velleman 1989). Nothing hangs upon how I classify them here.
10
To reiterate what was said in n. 5, nothing is assumed here about the desires having to be
conscious. In some cases, at least part of the effect of a trait can be to lead to the formation of
subconscious desires to act in certain ways. Thanks to Kevin Timpe here.
11
See also Hampshire 1953: 6, Alston 1970: 6572, 1975: 21, and Adams 2006: 1328.
Richard Brandt even raises the possibility of personality traits that inuence a persons (non-
intentional) behavior without involving dispositions to form either beliefs or desires (1988: 68).
heart rate range is a more interesting personality variable.12 Again, though,
heart rate range is not a personality trait on my proposal.13
So there are personality traits and non-personality traits. But what does this
have to do with character?
1.2 PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER TRAITS
There are hundreds of different concepts which we use to describe someones

character, such as forgiving, just, compassionate, loving, kind, nefarious, vile,
greedy, understanding, and courageous. All of these concepts are used to refer
to traits of characterto say that someone is a greedy person, for instance, is to
say that one of the traits which best describes his character is the trait of being
greedy. Thus I think that:
(2) A persons character primarily consists of her character traits and the rela-
tionships between them.
To partially describe Hitlers character, for instance, I might mention traits like
cruelty and injustice and how the two might have worked together in his
mind.14
What are traits of character? The literature in personality and social psych-
ology has discussed traits extensively for over one hundred years. But it is a
surprising fact about the history of psychology that for an extended period of
time until just recently, talk of character traits was rare in the journals.15 The
12
Epstein 1979: 1120. John Doris (2002: 18 n. 20) uses the example of a gag reex to make a
point that is similar to mine.
13
In fairness, testosterone might be a factor which causally inuences dispositions to form
mental thoughts; as Newman and Josephs write, high testosterone men and women are
motivated to maintain high status, and bothered when they lose it (2009: 258). But all kinds
of things inuence our personality traits, including oxygen levels, blood ow, waste disposal
rates, and so forth, and none of these is a personality trait either. Similar remarks apply to the
case of heart rate.
Now if it was discovered that people who, say, have high levels of testosterone are somehow
disposed thereby to form certain particular beliefs and desires, then given (1) testosterone would
count as a personality trait. This is an empirical matter, not one that can be decided by reection
on the concept of testosterone. I am not aware of relevant research suggesting this claim, but leave
this matter open to further discussion and research.
14
Moody-Adams 1990: 116. This does not capture all uses of character, such as when we
say of a person whom we just met that he is quite a character! Rather I am only interested in the
sense of character that has been of primary interest in discussions of moral education, ethical
theory, and personality psychology, and that is represented in ordinary discourse by expressions
such as, Mother Teresa has a compassionate character or, We want our children to grow up to
become people of strong character.
15
For examples of recent work in psychology which explicitly draws attention to character
traits, see Peterson and Seligman 2004, Lapsley and Power 2005, and Narvaez and Lapsley 2009.
historical and sociological reasons for this trend are complex and I do not
want to pause to consider them here.16 Instead I only note that the examples
from the previous paragraph would have been considered under the broad
heading of personality traits. So the question for this section concerns the
relationship between personality and character traits.
One very easy and tempting answer is to just say that they are identical, so that
it follows that all personality traits are character traits and all character traits are
personality traits.17 But in this section I want to explore an alternative of saying
that character traits are a specic kind of personality trait. Hence Figure 1.2:
Traits
Character Traits Non-Character Traits
Figure 1.2 Two kinds of personality traits
Admittedly, there is nothing approaching consensus about how to use the

terms character traits and personality traits, and to some extent the
accounts offered below will be stipulative. Nevertheless, I do want to consider
whether there is a plausible basis for making a distinction between character
and non-character traits.
One proposal is to claim that each character trait involves the making of
some normative judgment of the relevant kind by the person who possesses
it.18 For instance, the virtue of honesty counts as a character trait provided it
16
Among the leading factors cited as fostering this development is the rise of positivism,
which insisted on a sharp distinction between facts and values, with the latter being deemed
unscientic and relegated to the study of philosophy. Since the concepts of character and various
character traits were deemed to be value-laden, they could be cast out of the sciences as well. In
addition, because of early studies like Hartshorne and May 1928, a general skepticism about the
consistency of character traits arose, culminating in Walter Mischels classic 1968 book Person-
ality and Assessment and the predominance of the situationist movement in social psychology
(which will be examined in chapter four). For further discussion of these and other factors, see
Peterson and Seligman 2004: 559.
17
This assumption may be at work in certain passages by, for instance, Hartshorne and
May 1928, Crutcheld 1955, Bowers 1973: 332, Block 1977: 47, Epstein 1979: 1123, and Nettle
2007: 9, 15.
18
A quick note on terminology. In psychology, normative is often used to refer to what is
average or standard in a given group or class. Hence the normative rating on a Likert trait scale
of aggression which goes from 1 to 7 might be 5.5 for a given study. But that is not the sense of
normative that is used in philosophy, and which will also be employed throughout this book.
involves judgments about the moral appropriateness of telling the truth, while
wittiness might similarly have to involve judgments about the value of
humor.19 Infants, on the other hand, do not have the mental sophistication
needed for making these judgments, and so (rightly, the view would say) they
do not have any character traits.
But I do not think that this is a promising route to take, for the simple
reason that it makes the possession of character traits too intellectual.
A person can be honest by (at least in part) responding appropriately to
specic situations having to do with truth-telling, without also forming either
a broad judgment about the value of telling the truth, or even by forming
specic normative judgments about the goodness or rightness of each of those
considerations. The person could simply be moved by the thought that, He
asked me a question or, She needed the information.20 And yet if anything
should count as a paradigm character trait, surely it is honesty. Furthermore, it
is unclear how this proposal would even work when it comes to the normative
judgments needed to be logical or imaginative, and in the case of humility an
explicit normative judgment may be in tension with possessing the trait in the
rst place.21
On this alternative usage, the normative is contrasted with the descriptive, and it concerns
norms and standards which various things are expected to live up to or embody, regardless of
whether they actually succeed in doing so or not.
19
See, e.g. Timpe 2008: Philosophers typically think that moral character traits, unlike other
personality or psychological traits, have an irreducibly evaluative dimension; that is, they involve
a normative judgment. In other places in the same article, though, Timpe does say things which
are closer to my two positive proposals.
20
For helpful discussion of this idea, see Hursthouse 1999: chapter six. See also Williams
1985: 10 and Butler 1988: 231.
21
Here I assume that the traits of being logical and imaginative are character traitsit would
be a serious cost for any framework, in my view, if it ended up classifying them as non-character
traits. They can function in action explanation, prediction, and assessment, involve dispositions
to form beliefs of certain kinds, can be gradually acquired over time, serve as a basis for praise
and blame of the appropriate type, and so forth. But I acknowledge that some might not share
my assumption about these two cases.
A critic might instead claim that a person who is logical is expected to form a judgment such as
the following: If I know that P entails Q, and I believe P, then I ought to believe Q. But it seems to
me that plenty of people exhibit logical reasoning, including reasoning that as a matter of fact
conforms to this principle, without having ever given any thought to the principle itself. It is far
too intellectual of a requirement on being logical.
Similarly, someone might propose that humility requires judgments such as, Praising oneself
is morally impermissible or One ought to decline praise from others. But again why think that
anyone needs to form such intellectual judgments in the rst place in order to be humble?
In response, the advocate of this view might only make the weaker claim that the humble
person must be disposed to make these judgments, not that he actually has to make them when in
the relevant situations. But this still strikes me as overly demandinga person can have the trait
of humility without even having the concept of moral obligation; indeed he might reject the
entire set of deontological concepts altogether as appropriate to ethical thinking.
Thanks to Nicole Smith for suggesting the proposals considered in this footnote.
More generally, I am skeptical that we are going to nd any distinctive
mental stateslike normative judgments in this proposalwhich are going to
help neatly separate character from non-character traits. Instead I want to
propose two different strategies. I introduce them below as worthy of consid-
eration, but I also do so tentatively. They may not hold up under closer
examination, and will need to be worked out in more detail than I do here.
Let me begin by considering again the case of infants. Infants have a variety
of dispositions to believe, desire, and act in certain ways. But I think most of us
would be reticent to attribute moral virtues or vices to them like being
compassionate or cruel. Similarly with epistemic virtues like being wise or
understanding, or aesthetic virtues like being artistic or creative. The traits
they do in fact possess, the thought is, count as personality traits which are not
(or at least not yet) character traits.
Imagine as well a case in which a persons personality traits are genetically
acquired and, while they have a signicant impact on his thoughts and actions,
are completely immune to environmental inuences and outside of his con-
trol, including his own efforts at modifying them. Then it seems that in such a
case these traits would not be moral virtues or vices, for instance. And they
would also not seem to qualify as epistemic virtues or legal virtues either.22
Rather, this persons traits would fall under the heading of non-character
personality traits, and something more is required to be a character trait
than just being a personality trait.
Generalizing from these examples, the rst strategy uses considerations
about responsibility to ground the distinction between character versus non-
character personality traits. Thus:
(3) A character trait is a personality trait for which a person who possesses it is (at
least to some degree) normatively responsible for doing so.23
The reference to normative responsibility is meant to make it clear that I am
not just talking about moral responsibility in (3). Other kindssuch as legal
and epistemic responsibilityare in question here as well.
A person is responsible for possessing a trait, in turn, only if the person is
in this respectan appropriate candidate for the positive reactive attitudes
(praise, admiration, respect, gratitude, congratulations, etc.), the negative ones
22
Two of the leading personality psychologists today, Paul Costa and Robert McCrae, claim
that the personality traits in their Big Five taxonomy are in fact like this, and furthermore that
this taxonomy provides a comprehensive account of all the personality traits there are. I discuss
their view at length in chapter six.
23
(3) only applies to normative kinds of responsibility, and not to causal or role responsibility
for instance. For these distinctions, see Audi 1991: 1578.
Initially I formulated (3) in terms of the person being appropriately held responsible for
possessing the trait. But whether or not a person is responsible for something is a distinct
question from whether or not it is appropriate to hold that person responsible for that thing. See
in particular Smith 2007. Thanks to Matt Talbert for help here.
(blame, condemnation, resentment, indignation, disapproval, etc.), or some
combination of the two.24 Honesty, for example, can be a character trait given
(3), if the honest person in question is someone who is morally responsible for
being honest and is (thereby) a t candidate for praise and respect. On the
other hand, an infants disposition to cry when hungry is not a character trait
since this tendency is not one for which the infant is morally (or in any other
normative way) responsible.25 Similarly the genetically acquired personality
traits described above would not count, since intuitively the person does not
exhibit the kind of control (whether over their acquisition or their continued
functioning) needed in order to be responsible for them.26 So too with traits
24
Note that the claim here is that the person is an appropriate candidate for these attitudes,
not that they are actually expressed towards her. Similarly, the proposal in the text does not
require the actual having of these attitudes, but only that the having of them be appropriate, apt,
or tting. These points pick up on the same theme from the previous footnote, namely that I am
not focusing on whether a person is being held responsible, but rather whether she is responsible
for her traits. For discussion of reactive attitudes and responsibility see, e.g. Strawson 1962 and
Fischer and Ravizza 1998: chapter one. Fischer and Ravizza note that there are views about
responsibility which restrict the class of reactive attitudes more narrowly than I do here (1998:
57), but nothing hangs on this debate for my purposes in this chapter.
George Sher has argued that responsibility and blame in particular come apart such that a
person can be appropriately blamed for having a bad trait without being normatively responsible
for it (2001: 1578). Regardless of the plausibility of Shers view, my claim in the above runs in
the other direction, namely that being an appropriate candidate for the reactive attitudes is a
condition for being responsible for a trait. This serves to also highlight that my claim is only
offering a necessary and not a sufcient condition for being responsible for possessing a trait
(whereas on Strawsonian approaches, being responsible simply is a matter of being the appro-
priate object of the reactive attitudes (Fischer and Ravizza 1998: 10 n. 12)). Furthermore, this is a
condition on responsibility with respect to trait possession, and whether a similar condition
generalizes to other objects of responsibility is not my concern here. For instance, as Matt Talbert
pointed out to me, there might be some neutral actions for which we are (normatively) respon-
sible but for which both positive and negative reactive attitudes (i.e. praise and blame) would not
be appropriate.
25
We might still say, using normative language, that it is tting or appropriate for the infant
to cry when hungry, but this does not entail that the infant is normatively responsible for doing
so. Norms of ttingness do not entail responsibility on the part of the person or thing which
meets them, as in the case of a piece of furniture which is appropriate or tting for a room given
its decorative style.
26
Here I am assuming what has been called a volitional approach to (normative) responsi-
bility, where choice or voluntary control is a necessary condition for responsibility. But recently
there has been increasing support for a rival rational relations view (see Scanlon 1998, Smith
2005, 2008, and Sher 2001: 158, 2006). Following the characterization provided by Angela Smith,
this view holds that to say that an agent is morally responsible for some thing, on this view, is to
say that that thing reects her rational judgment in a way that makes it appropriate, in principle,
to ask her to defend or justify it (2008: 369).
This is not the place to assess the rational relations view or to clarify the ways in which it
differs from the volitional approach. Rather, I only want to note here that advocates of both views
seem to share the same verdict about cases of genetically acquired and subsequently uncontrol-
lable traits. With respect to the rational relations view, Smith writes that in order for a creature
to be responsible for an attitude . . . it must be the kind of state that is open, in principle, to
revision or modication through the creatures own processes of rational reection (2005: 256;
see also her 2005: 258, 2613, 268, 2701, 2008: 3701, 383 for additional discussion of this
when they become, through no fault of the person who has them, compulsive
or addictive in such a way as to be irresistible and outside of his control as it
pertains to responsibility.27
Now of course it would be nice if I had a theory of responsibility which
articulated the conditions whereby someone is or is not normatively respon-
sible. But clearly this is not the appropriate place to try to develop such a
theory, which would require tackling the vast literature on responsibility
in philosophy.28 Furthermore, I want to make my proposal as ecumenical
as possible, so that it can be readily adapted to different detailed accounts of
responsibility even if they happen to conict with my own preferred
account.29
sensitivity requirement). But clearly the particular traits in question would not meet this
requirement. Thanks to Matt Talbert for suggesting that I consider the rational relations view.
27
For remarks which are broadly in line with (3), see Aristotle 1985: 1109b301115a5,
Moody-Adams 1990: 120, Kupperman 1991: 7, Zagzebski 1996: 1035, 116, 1278, Solomon
2003: 58, Goldie 2004: 33, chapter four, Taylor 2006: 6, 16, Smith 2008: 388, and Timpe 2008. As
Moody-Adams writes, Only those actions for which one is responsible can be taken to reveal
ones character . . . the practice of making assessments of character is undermined if we are
unable justly to hold people responsible for their actions (1990: 120). For an opposing view, see
Nagel 1979 and Trianosky 1990. See also Zagzebski 1996: 125 and Adams 2006: 15870.
Peter Vranas has brought to my attention the following case as a potential counterexample to
(3). Suppose a person, through intense training, has cultivated the disposition of being a quick
runner. This disposition might seem like it gets to count as a character trait given (3), but
intuitively it is not a character trait. My initial reaction is that it is not clear to me that this
disposition even counts as a personality trait in the rst place, in the sense of a disposition to
form beliefs and desires of the relevant kind. Being an ambitious or a competitive runner would
count, but not a quick runner. So if it does not count as a personality trait, it does not count as a
character trait either.
28
For a few starting points, see Fischer and Ravizza 1998 and Kane 2005. For responsibility
with respect to character traits in particular, see Audi 1991 and Russell 2009: chapter twelve.
29
For instance, one way to go in developing a more detailed proposal is to make use of the
idea of motivating and normative reasons (Goldie 2004: 1315, 43, 66, chapter four). Suppose
I donate ten dollars to charity X. My motivating reasonthe consideration which by my lights
was the reason why I made the donationcould have been to support the humanitarian work
that charity X is doing. This reason was a good reason in my eyes, let us suppose, although I did
not use fancy labels like motivating reason or even good reason. Nevertheless it was a
consideration which justied the donation from my perspective. At the same time, it does not
count as a normative reason, i.e. as what in fact is a good (moral) reason for making a donation
since unbeknownst to me, charity X is actually a front for a mob organization. Roughly speaking,
motivating reasons are what a person takes to be good reasons, whereas normative reasons really
are good reasons (for more on this distinction, see Smith 1994: chapter four and Dancy 2000:
chapter one, as well as Miller 2008a).
When applied to character traits, the thought then is that the personality traits had by infants
would not count as character traits because they are more like dispositions to have reexive
responses than they are like dispositions sensitive to motivating reasons. The same would be true
for the genetically acquired and uncontrollable traits. In other words:
(3*) A character trait is a personality trait which is appropriately reasons-responsive
(at least to some extent) in its formation, retention, and expression.
(The three aspects of formation, retention, and expression are highlighted in Fischer and
Ravizza 1998: 88. See also Audi 1991: 160). The genetically uncontrollable traits, for instance,
Nevertheless even without such a theory of responsibility, intuitions are
likely to diverge about this proposal. In particular, some might think that if an
adult has the trait of honesty, that trait can still be a character trait even if its
initial acquisition and subsequence functioning are entirely outside of her
control in the sense of control relevant to responsibility. She might not
deserve any credit for being honest, but this need not imply that the trait is not
part of her character, or so the thought is.30 Others might have the opposing
intuition that a moral virtue like honesty could not be possessed as a character
trait if the person who has it is not praiseworthy for doing so.
I do not want to try to carefully sort out these intuitions here. Indeed I need
not even offer the proposal in (3) as an attempt to capture our commonsense
intuitions, although that is my preferred approach. But it could instead be a
revisionary proposal which uses character traits in a new technical way that
explicitly differs from ordinary usage.
But let me at least offer one thought about this example. For those who do
have the intuition that the person could still have the trait of honesty in this
case, technically speaking the proposal in (3) need not challenge this. For there
can be honesty the character trait and honesty the non-character trait.
Whether in a particular case a persons trait of honesty gets to count as a
character trait or not will, according to (3), depend on facts about normative
responsibility. But whether it gets to count as the trait of honesty does not
depend on such facts. So traits like honesty, compassion, humility, temper-
ance, and so forth can fall under the heading of either character traits or non-
character traits in a given instance on this proposal, depending on what the
facts are about normative responsibility for the person in question.
Rather than pursue (3) any further, let me instead turn to a second strategy
for distinguishing character from non-character personality traits, a strategy
which makes use of the idea of normative standards. There are numerous
normative standards governing everything from actions to consequences,
might be reasons-responsive in their expression, but not in their formation and retention.
A weaker proposal than (3*) would only require reasons-responsiveness for one of these aspects.
(3*) is only one way of developing (3) in more detail. It too requires much further elaboration,
as the literature on reasons-responsiveness attests. For instance, on some ways of developing the
proposal, the personality traits had by newborn infants might still count as character traits
because they are reasons-responsive when this is understood in a very weak sense, a result
which is contrary to what I intend by the proposal. For relevant discussion of different kinds of
reasons-responsiveness, see in particular Fischer and Ravizza 1998: chapters two and three.
30
Thanks to Donald Smith and an anonymous referee for related discussion here. The referee
also noted this passage from Sidgwick:
Now Free Will is obviously not included in our common idea of physical and intellectual
perfection: and it seems to me also not to be included in the common notions of the
excellences of character which we call virtues: the manifestations of courage, temperance,
and justice do not become less admirable because we can trace their antecedents in a
happy balance of inherited dispositions developed by a careful education (1981: 68).
motives, and persons. Furthermore, their subject matter can range from
morality to etiquette, beauty, athletics, and the law. The Ten Commandments,
the NCAA college athletic requirements, and the rules in Emily Posts Wedding
Etiquette all count as different normative standards. The key point here is that:
(4) A character trait is a personality trait for which a person who has it is, in that
respect, an appropriate object of normative assessment by the relevant norms.
Less abstractly, honesty can count as a character trait in this sense because a
person cannot be considered honest if it is not appropriate to assess his truth
telling in the rst place. Thus for an infant or for an adult with severe mental
handicaps, the normative standards governing truth telling do not apply
these human beings are not appropriate objects of assessment by them.31
Similarly, it might be argued that a psychopath does not have the necessary
psychological capacities in order to be appropriately assessed by the moral
norms associated with helping and not harming. So on this way of thinking, he
does not qualify as a candidate for being either compassionate or cruel,
although clearly this is a complicated kind of case that would need much
further discussion.
It follows from this proposal that for any given character trait, there are
normative standardswhether moral or non-moralwhich apply to it, and
the trait is necessarily assessed in light of those standards. Hence an important
consequence is that if a person does have a character trait, then that trait not
only has one or more descriptive properties, such as disposing the person to
form certain beliefs and/or desires, but it also has one or more normative
properties as well, such as being admirable or decient in light of the relevant
normative standards for that trait.32 Character traits, then, turn out to be so-
called thick rather than thin properties, which are said to be more purely
normative (such as goodness, rightness, and oughtness).33
31
The appropriate is important. While some people might actually assess the truth-telling
of an adult with severe mental handicaps, that is irrelevant herethe question is whether it is
appropriate to do so, where that is a normative and not an empirical matter. What precisely it is
that makes it the case that infants, for instance, are not appropriate objects of assessment by these
norms is a difcult matter, but one natural hypothesis has been suggested in footnote 29, namely
the fact that they are not reasons-responsive beings yet. This would be in line with my suggestion
later in this section that the proposals in (3) and (4) should be integrated.
32
This leaves it open how the normative and descriptive properties are related. For all that is
said here, they could be identical with each other. Furthermore, it also leaves it open whether a
trait always has the same normative properties. For instance, on some views a trait like cruelty
can be bad in some contexts but good in other contexts. See Vyrynen 2011 for related discussion
of this debate at the level of concepts rather than actual traits.
33
Similarly the attribution of character traits involves the use of thick terms and concepts,
which have both descriptive and normative elements. In fact, the thick/thin distinction is more
often applied to terms and concepts than to properties. For more on the distinction, see Williams
1985: 12930, 1405 as well as Kamtekar 2004: 478 and Vyrynen 2011. For some of the
Thus according to this strategy it is impossible for the possession of a
genuine character trait to not involve any normative considerations, whether
they are moral, legal, aesthetic, or so on. Someone has the trait of being logical
or illogical, for instance, in virtue of her reasoning dispositions being appro-
priately assessed in certain ways by the norms of logical reasoning. Similarly
someone has the trait of being an artistic home designer in virtue of her
dispositions to do design work being appropriately assessed in certain ways
by the norms associated with this practice. It would be impossible for this
person to be artistic in this respect, independently of norms and standards
pertaining to what counts as good and bad home design.34 Note, though, that
nothing has been said about either the nature of these standards themselves or
about who or what is doing the assessing. Certain standards could, for
instance, be grounded in the will of God, or exist as objective facts in the
universe, or be based solely on individual or cultural beliefs. Assessment could
be done by God, by cultures, by individuals, and so forth. All of the options are
left open so that I do not take a stand on controversial disputes in meta-ethics
and other meta-normative discussions.35
On this proposal, whether a personality trait is also a character trait does
not in the rst instance depend on issues about responsibility and control. The
person with the generically acquired and uncontrollable trait of honesty, for
difculties involved in trying to carefully work out the distinction, see Eklund 2011. Given these
challenges, I will not make use of the distinction in what follows.
34
For more on the link between character traits and the evaluative, see Piedmont 1998: 57,
122, Solomon 2003: 48, Kamtekar 2004: 478, Goldie 2004: 4, 64, Nettle 2007: 70, 245, Besser-
Jones 2008: 314, and Upton 2009a: 44. As Joel Kupperman notes, To say that someone has a bad
character has a clear and familiar meaning, whereas to say bad personality would normally be
considered a misuse of language or a category mistake (1991: 6). Similarly John Doris admits
that its actually rather hard to think of character attributions that are readily understood as
evaluatively neutral (2002: 5). Even Gordon Allport claimed that Character enters the situation
only when this personal effort is judged from the standpoint of some code (1937: 51, emphasis
removed).
Doris own proposal for distinguishing personality from character traits is slightly different
from mine. He claims that character traits necessarily involve valuation or maintaining certain
values on the part of the person who has itthe honest person, for instance, values forthright-
ness (2002: 19). But the proposal is only briey outlined, and we are not told what valuing
involves. In addition, I have already raised worries about appeals to a normative judgment. An
additional worry is that there may be traits which are neither virtues nor vices (as I will suggest in
chapter two) but which also do not involve anything obviously amounting to valuing. Neverthe-
less, the traits are subject to normative assessment, and so on my proposal count as character
traits (as I think they intuitively should). Or consider traits such as warmness or calmness. Doris
might deny that these are character traits, but if they are, then it is not clear in what sense any
relevant valuation is going on.
35
Mixed answers are also available. For instance, whether someone has the virtue of being
logical, could depend upon the assessment of that persons relevant trait using objective norms of
logical reasoning. On the other hand, whether someone has the virtue of being an artistic home
designer, could depend upon the assessment of that persons relevant trait using more subjective
individual or cultural norms associated with good design. In that case, whether a person has that
particular virtue could be a matter of highly variable trends in a given society.
instance, can still count as having this trait as part of her character. To the
extent that this is an intuitive result of the proposal, then it is a result which
can count in its favor.
Given (4), one way to determine whether a given trait possessed by a person
is a character trait or not is the following:
(4*) Vary the degree to which the person possesses the trait, and see whether the
normative assessment of the person in this regard alone also changes.
Suppose someone has the trait of compassion to a moderate degree, and now
ask whether our moral assessment of the person would change in this one area
of her life if she had it to a lesser or greater extent. The answer is obvious. The
same is true of non-moral traits such as being logical or being artistic. But
contrast this with an infants trait. If this trait is strengthened or weakened,
does that make the person any better or worse from a moral or some other
normative perspective? Perhaps not.36 Finally, keep in mind that (4*) is only a
rough test to help us discern whether a trait is a character trait; it is not a
requirement for whether a trait actually is one or not.37
I have introduced these two proposals as if they were largely independent.
But one natural thought is to combine them together, so that a character trait
is any personality trait for which the person who has it is both responsible and
the person is, in that respect, an appropriate object of normative assessment by
the relevant norms.38 Indeed, I personally think this is the right way to go.39
But this proposal too is controversial, and there is no reason for me to close off
any possibilities here.
36
Although I admit that intuitions may diverge here.
37
For a different test that is in the same spirit as my proposals in (3) and (4), see Goldie
2004: 323.
38
In fact, one proposal might imply the other and/or explain the other. In particular it could
be that a character trait is connected to whether a person is an appropriate object of normative
assessment because the person is responsible for possessing the trait. This latter requirement, in
other words, is a prerequisite for the former. If so, then the focus should be directed to (3).
39
Nicole Smith mentioned the traits of being gorgeous and being homely as possible counter-
examples to my proposal in (4), since plausibly they involve normative assessment but one might
think it would be odd to classify them as character traits. One response is to recall that I am
starting with personality traits, and trying to distinguish the character ones. But being gorgeous
and being homely might not seem to be personality traits, at least as I am understanding them in
terms of dispositions to form beliefs and desires of the relevant kind. How does being gorgeous
dispose someone to form particular beliefs and desires? Of course, some people who are gorgeous
are also disposed to think highly of themselves, but those kinds of beliefs would be associated
with arrogance or pride, and certainly do pertain to character (for related discussion, see Brandt
1988: 68).
If this rst reply to these cases is not plausible, then a second reply could use the idea of
combining (3) and (4) by saying that someone who is innately gorgeous is not responsible for
being this way, and so the persons having this trait fails to count as a character trait because of
the criterion in (3).
Hence in this section I have offered two strategies for distinguishing
character from non-character personality traits.40 Because my concern in
this book is just with traits of character, from this point on I will put the
other traits to one side.
1.3 DISPOSITIONS AND CHARACTER TRAITS
According to my proposal, character traits are dispositions of a certain kind.

The main goal of the next two sections is to get a bit clearer about what
dispositions are and to articulate an approach to thinking about character trait
dispositions which helps to make their existence sound more tractable and
familiar.
The idea that character traits are dispositions should be an acceptable
claim for most philosophers.41 But among psychologists there is a signi-
cant divide in the literature on this very point with respect to personality
traits in general (and hence character traits in particular). According to the
summary view, the leading alternative position to the dispositional view,
trait terms refer only to actual patterns of relevant mental thoughts and
bodily action. A persons character traits on this view, then, just are the
relevant mental states and bodily actions that she has in fact exhibited over
time. There are no dispositions over and above these mental states and
actions, which might have been responsible for bringing them about in the
rst place.
For instance, David Buss and Kenneth Craik maintain that, the statement
Mary is arrogant means that, over a period of observation, she has displayed a
high frequency of arrogant acts, relative to a norm for that category of acts.42
Similarly John Johnson claims that [t]raits are consistent patterns of
thoughts, feelings, or actions that distinguish people from one another.43
Walter Mischel states in his 1973 paper that the present position sees [traits]
as the summary labels (labels, codes, organizing constructs) applied to
40
For yet another strategy, see Brandt 1970: 27, 1988: 76.
41
The link between character traits and dispositions is widespread in philosophical work on
character. See, as representative examples, Hampshire 1953: 5, Alston 1970: 65, Brandt 1970: 24,
27, Aristotle 1985: 1105a34, Butler 1988: 216, 231, Audi 1991: 160, Mumford 1998: 8, Sher 1998:
5, Harman 1999: 317, 2003: 92, Athanassoulis 2000: 218, Sreenivasan 2002: 49, 57, Swanton
2003: 1, 19, Kamtekar 2004: 479, Goldie 2004: 8, 15, Upton 2005: 1334, 2009a: chapter two,
Webber 2006b: 205, Adams 2006: 18, 1302, Besser-Jones 2008: 311, 31621, Appiah 2008: 35,
Russell 2009: 12, 14, 191, Flanagan 2009: 53, Prinz 2009: 131, Sosa 2009: 27980, Annas 2011:
89, 104 (for virtues but not for vices), and especially the references in Doris 1998: 509 n. 20,
2002: 15 n. 2.
42 43
Buss and Craik 1983: 106. Johnson 1997: 74.
observed behavior.44 And Jerry Wiggins nicely summarizes the view by
remarking that [w]hen we say that John is aggressive, we are asserting that
the general trend or disposition of his conduct, to date, has been to engage in a
variety of aggressive actions over a period of time.45 Note that even though
Wiggins mentions the term disposition, all that term refers to on this view is
just the aggressive behavior the person has already displayed up to this point
in time.
Now an expression such as personality traits or character traits can be
dened as one chooses to do so, and even in ordinary thought there are likely
multiple senses of these phrase. But on conceptual grounds I nd this alterna-
tive summary approach to be problematic for two main reasons. First, it seems
conceivable that someone could have a trait such as heroism, but never be
presented with an opportunity to actually exhibit it in either thought or
action.46 But this possibility would be unintelligible on the summary view.
Secondly, suppose that someone has in fact exhibited a pattern of heroic
behavior, but only in the distant past. Subsequently he has not been presented
with any opportunities to be either heroic or cowardly. Now presumably there
is a fact of the matter as to whether he currently does or does not possess
heroism. We might not know what that fact is, but either he does have the trait
or he does not. On the dispositional approach which I favor, this amounts to
the question of whether he does or does not have a dispositional property of
heroism. Contrary to the summary approach, whether he is actually a cour-
ageous person now does not seem to be a function of what patterns of heroic
thought and behavior he exhibited decades ago (except in the innocuous sense
that such patterns may have played a role in shaping his current character).47
44
Mischel 1973: 264, emphasis his. To be fair, this quote does not say that this is all there is to
traits, although that seems to be the natural implication of Mischels remark and also what
is suggested by the surrounding context.
45
Wiggins 1997: 108. For helpful and sustained defenses of the summary view, see Buss and
Craik 1983 and Wiggins 1997: 1028. For other remarks which seem to be in line with the
summary view, see also Hampshire 1953: 9, Mischel 1968: 42, 689, 1973: 262, 264, Hogan et al.
1977: 2567, Buss 1989: 1383, 1386, Hogan 1991: 875, 1996: 1703, Revelle 1995: 315, Winter
et al. 1998: 2326, Fleeson 2001, 2007: 825, Fleeson and Noftle 2008a: 1363, Fleeson and Noftle
2008b, and Heller et al. 2009: 171.
46
For similar remarks, see Brandt 1970: 26, Irwin 1996: 54, Mumford 1998: 8, and Kupper-
man 1991: 15. For an opposing view, see Hampshire 1953: 6. One way to object to my claim
would be to suggest that such a case is impossible because in order to develop heroism in the rst
place, one must have rst exhibited heroic behavior in the past as part of gradually acquiring the
trait. But even if this is right, the past heroic actions did not themselves require the trait of
heroism rst in order to perform them. And my example involves acquiring that trait (through
whatever means are relevant) but then never having an opportunity to exhibit it.
47
Hence I am not drawn to Wiggins proposal that the statement John is aggressive conveys
that John has been observed to engage in topographically dissimilar aggressive actions over a
period of time (1997: 104, emphasis removed, see also 99). The statement that John is
aggressive could be true of him even if he had not exhibited these actions, or only did so
many years ago. Furthermore, we typically think that it can convey something in addition about
At the same time, it would be a mistake to conclude that since he is not
now exhibiting patterns of heroic thought and action, he thereby does not
have the trait of heroism. He very well could have this trait, and could
exhibit it if the appropriate circumstances arise. More generally, it seems
that many character traits can exist in a person regardless of whether they
are or have been recently expressed in thought or resulting behavior. It is
hard to see how the summary approach can make sense of this ordinary
and familiar idea.48
So I will stick with the dispositional view for now. But what are moral
character trait dispositions, or trait dispositions as I will call them for short?
For that matter, what are dispositions in general? The literature on dispos-
itions is vast and complicated in philosophy, but some standard terminology
will be helpful to start.
Dispositions are sensitive to certain stimulus events or stimulus conditions
specic to the given disposition. In virtue of being fragile, for instance, a vase
might be sensitive to being hit by a baseball, but not to the color of the baseball.
Similarly a properly functioning thermostat is sensitive to the temperature in
the room, but not to its smell. It seems that certain events and facts about
a situation or environment are relevant to a disposition in a way that others
are not.49
Stimulus events can trigger characteristic manifestations of dispositions.
A baseball can break a fragile vase, and the temperature of the room can
lead to a certain reading on the thermostat. Prior to the stimulus, the dispos-
ition might have been latent, as for example the disposition to believe that
2+7=9 is latent during most of my day. But with the right kind of stimulus,
such as a math test, the disposition can become manifest, say in the form of the
occurrent belief that 2+7=9. Indeed, all dispositions to believe or desire
certain things become manifest directly in the form of occurrent mental states.
the patterns of thought and behavior he would exhibit in certain future situations. But the
summary view denies that personality traits ground true counterfactual conditionals
(Wiggins 1997: 107).
48
A third concern with the summary view is that it does not capture the familiar idea from
ordinary thinking about character traits that they play a role in leading people to act in certain
ways in future situations. People commonly say that someones integrity will prevent her from
taking the bribe, or someones cowardice will cause him to ee from the battleeld. And people
provide causal and rationalizing explanations of certain behaviors in terms of traits (i.e. he lied
once again because he is a dishonest person). To abandon both a casual and a predictive role for
traits would require a signicant revision to ordinary thinking about them.
For additional criticism of the summary view, see Newman and Uleman 1989: 164. Fortu-
nately many psychologists do adopt the dispositional approach to conceptualizing traits. See, e.g.
Allport 1966: 3, Mischel 1968: 6, 9, Tellegen 1991: 13, Pervin 1994: 108, Epstein 1979: 10978,
1121, 1994: 121, McCrae and Costa 1995, and Johnson 1999: 444.
49
For a complication involving dispositions and absent stimulus conditions, see Manley and
Wasserman 2008: 723.
These occurrent mental states can then lead in many cases to corresponding
behavior.50
Character traits work in the same way. The trait of compassion can be
triggered by what the person sees as ongoing suffering, and can lead directly to
compassionate thoughts and ultimately to compassionate behavior aimed at
relieving that suffering.51 Note that the immediate stimuli for character traits
do not have to be the actual features of a situation, but can just be the persons
impressions of those features, impressions which in some cases can be seriously
mistaken and yet still activate the relevant trait. Suffering that goes unnoticed
in a situation through no fault of the persons own, for instance, will not have
an impact on her trait of compassion, even if it is true that if the suffering were
noticed, then she would typically help to relieve it.52
As I did in earlier sections, I have continued to focus on how trait dispos-
itions function. But I also want to examine what these dispositions actually are.
Hence the focus will now be in the rst instance on the metaphysics of trait
dispositions.53 Furthermore, I will assume a realist view about such dispos-
itions. On a realist view, trait dispositions, when possessed by individual
50
Things are not so simple, of course. Background conditions also play an important role.
A match has the disposition of being ammable and so typically lights (manifestation) when
struck (stimulus), but not in an environment without oxygen. A vase has the disposition of being
fragile and so typically breaks (manifestation) when knocked off a ledge (stimulus), but not if
gravity is much weaker than it is on Earth. And so forth.
Note that these are cases where the background conditions interfere with the ability of the
disposition to be manifest, but still allow the disposition to continue to exist. Other background
conditions may either prevent or eliminate a disposition from being instantiated in the rst
place, such as a healthy human being with the disposition of being strong, suddenly passing away
from a heart attack. See Mumford 1998: 86.
51
But not if there are interfering background conditions, i.e. the person is experiencing
serious depression or a mental illness which blocks the operation of the trait and precludes the
formation of compassionate thoughts even in the presence of obvious suffering. For general
remarks about character traits and background conditions, see Brandt 1970: 35 and Upton 2005:
1356, 2009a: 2730. In addition, nothing about the above is meant to imply that the compas-
sionate behavior need depend only on the trait of compassionother character traits, for
instance, can also play a partial causal role as well.
52
For this last point, see Alston 1975: 21. Note that nothing about the above implies how
frequently character traits are actually triggeredthat will depend on a number of factors
including how strongly the trait is held, the situations the person is in, and even the nature of
the particular trait itself. Some traits, such as fairness, perhaps, or modesty, are by their very
nature likely going to be highly active during the day for people who have them to a signicant
extent. With other traits, such as perhaps bravery or integrity, the person may rarely be in the
kinds of situations which trigger their activation. Indeed, I already noted that it seems possible on
conceptual grounds that a person could have a character trait and yet never have it be triggered at
all during her lifetime.
53
In this chapter I will say very little about trait ascriptions, although in chapter seven I will
examine in some detail what my positive view of Mixed Traits implies about moral trait
ascriptions. Briey, though, the important point here is that trait ascriptions are different from
traits themselves. When I say, in a normal conversational context, that George Washington was a
courageous person, I am ascribing to a person the character trait of being courageous. At the
same time, it could turn out as a matter of fact that my ascription is mistakenperhaps
persons, are in fact genuine properties, or more precisely, instantiations of
genuine properties. These properties can be had by persons independently of
the presence of any stimulus events and independently of our ability to
recognize and conceptualize them. The opposing, anti-realist view holds that
trait dispositional properties simply do not exist, and so an ascription of
honesty to a person does not correspond to any actual property of being
honest which is had by that person.54
This is not the place to attempt to argue for the superiority of a realist
approach to dispositions in general and trait dispositions in particular. Others
have done so with great sophistication, to the point where the realist view now
seems to the dominant approach in the larger disposition literature.55 So I will
simply assume that it is correct in what follows.56 On a realist approach then:
Washington was not courageous but Lincoln was, or perhaps no one is courageous at all if there
is no such thing as courage to begin with.
54
Here I follow the characterization in Mumford 1998. For the classic statement of an anti-
realist view about dispositions, see Ryle 1949. For a more recent version of the view with respect
to character traits, see Moody-Adams 1990: 117.
Despite the non-existence of dispositional properties, trait ascriptions are still true or false on
the anti-realist view. For instance, the anti-realist can say that it is true of Jones that he is
compassionate, and that it is false of him that he is selsh. How can this be? Anti-realists have a
familiar strategy, which is to reduce ascriptions of trait dispositions to conditional behavior
(whether mental or physical) and hence to conditionals such as the following overly crude
example:
(AR) The ascription Jones is compassionate is true if and only if (and because) if Jones
were to encounter one or more people whom he notices are in need of a moderate amount
of help, he would typically attempt to help and do so from a compassionate state of mind.
Note that nothing about this statement mentions a property of compassionthe ascription can
be understood entirely in terms, not of properties of Joness mind, but simply in terms of his
counterfactual behavior. Thus by providing some suitably sophisticated conditional analysis of
ascriptions of trait dispositions, anti-realists hope to avoid any commitment to actual trait
dispositional properties themselves. Finally, note that many realists can also accept a connection
between trait ascriptions and conditional behavior, but for them there is more to such ascriptions
than just what is captured in conditionals such as the one in (AR).
A version of this anti-realist view shows up in several places in the psychology literature on
traits. Advocates of it reject the actual existence of personality traits understood as properties of
human psychology which play either a causal or an explanatory role in relation to thought and
action. But these traits can still be ascribed to individuals in virtue of a persons conditional
behavior. Note that this is counterfactual rather than actual behavior, i.e. how Jones would think
and act if he were to notice a moderate need for help, not how he has thought and acted in the
past. Thus this position is an alternative to the summary view mentioned at the start of this
section. For relevant discussion of this conditional view of traits, see Wright and Mischel 1987:
11612 and Newman and Uleman 1989: 1634.
55
For a helpful overview of this debate, see Mumford 1998. For specic criticism of anti-
realism about traits, see Brandt 1970.
56
Note that in doing so, I am not begging any questions later in chapters four and eight when
I consider situationist views about character traits in psychology and philosophy. As will become
clear, the issues there concern which traits are instantiated and if so, how frequently they are
instantiated. They do not concern the metaphysics of character traits in general.
(5) The ascription Jones is compassionate is true if and only if (and because)
Jones has in fact instantiated the property of compassion.
Such a property mediates between stimulus events, such as seeing someone in
need, and relevant manifestations, such as wanting to help and believing that
I (Jones) can help by donating money.
As a character trait, this property of compassion plays a variety of different
functional roles. Suppose Jones is reliably doing compassionate things when
appropriate for other people in a wide variety of circumstances. And suppose
he does them for morally admirable reasons having to do with relieving their
suffering. In contrast, suppose Frank encounters the same people in need, but
does nothing to help them, and not because of any larger compassionate
projects or other worthy goals to which he seems to be committed. Rather,
in these situations Frank just cares more about himself. In this kind of case, it
seems that one crucial difference between Jones and Frank is having the
property of compassion. Such a disposition can help to understand Jones
better. It can help explain why he is acting the way that he is, and why his
behavior is different from Franks.57 It can help to predict how he will act in
these kinds of circumstances in the future. It can help to evaluate him as a
person, and to serve as a potential basis for imitation.
Note that in functioning in these ways, character dispositions are not inert
properties in a persons mental life; rather they causally mediate between their
various stimuli and manifestation events. So if Jones has a compassionate
disposition whereas Frank does not, that is not merely an individual difference
between them. It is also and crucially a difference in the possession of a
property which (together with the relevant stimulus) plays a signicant causal
role in leading to Joness compassionate thoughts and behavior.
Because of this causal role, trait dispositions can also create expectations
about how a person would likely behave in various situations, thereby serving
as a basis for making accurate predictions. If, for instance, George Washington
was deeply courageous and Abraham Lincoln highly honest, then we can
reasonably predict how they would likely have behaved in different circum-
stances during the course of their lives. Similarly for compassionate Jones it
might be true that:
(6) If Jones were to encounter a person who he notices is in need of a moderate
amount of help, he would typically attempt to help, regardless of whether
helping is in his self-interest.
57
This claim will be elaborated on in the next section. For a detailed discussion of the general
role of dispositions in causal explanations for behavioral differences, see Mumford 1998:
chapter six.
Whereas for selsh Frank:
(7) If Frank were to encounter a person who he notices is in need of a moderate
amount help, he would typically attempt to ignore the need, unless he thought
helping were in his self-interest to a relevant degree.
Of course as stated these predictions are much too simplistic. Background
conditions can interfere with dispositions in all kinds of waysJones might
also be suffering from depression or mental illness, for instance. But for now the
important point here is that the causal activities of trait dispositions can create
expectations about the persons future behavior in both himself and others.58
Let me summarize what has been said about character trait dispositions in
this section. Dispositions in general can be stimulated in various ways, and so
long as there are no interfering background conditions, they can give rise to
their relevant manifestations. If Jones has a particular trait disposition such as
compassion then Jones has an actually existing (instantiation of a) property
which can causally bring about occurrent compassionate thoughts and,
thereby, compassionate behavior. These dispositional properties play various
functional roles, and in particular ground the truth of conditionals about what
a person would likely think and do in relevant situations.
1.4 CHARACTER TRAIT DISPOSITIONS

AND M ENTAL S TA TE DISPOSITIONS
With this background in place, the realist view of character traits might look
mysterious. There are many other, far more familiar mental dispositions
which exist in a persons mind, such as dispositions to form beliefs and desires.
For instance, I am disposed to believe that 2+7=9 and to desire that Notre
Dame win college football games; given appropriate stimulus events these
beliefs and desires can become occurrent states in my mind. The question
becomes whether trait dispositions exist in a persons mind independently of
these other mental dispositions. If so, then what do they do in their own right
that cannot be adequately accounted for already in terms of the activities of
more ordinary dispositions to believe and desire?
58
Various attempts have been made in the literature to improve these predictions (for an
overview, see Upton 2009a: chapter two). For instance, one attempt is that:
(6*) If Jones is in ideal conditions, then if he were to encounter a person who he notices is in
need of a moderate amount of help, he would typically attempt to help, regardless of
whether helping is in his self-interest (see Mumford 1998: 88).
Alternatively, it might be better to focus on normal conditions (relative to what is normal in the
actual world) (Malzkorn 2000. See also Brandt 1970: 33, 36 and Upton 2009b: 179). Or to focus
on contextually relative conditions (Upton 2009a: 403). Fortunately nothing in this book
should hinge on sorting out these complexities.
To expand on this concern, consider again my favorite example of Jones
and his trait of compassion. If he just happens to have this trait and if it is
completely unrelated to ordinary mental dispositions to form compassionate
beliefs and desires, then what additional causal, predictive, or explanatory
contribution does the trait actually make? Why posit an extra property,
namely the trait of compassion, when his compassionate thoughts and behav-
ior can already be accounted for in terms of these familiar mental dispositions?
This is the rst mystery. But there are also other mysteries here. Explaining
Joness compassionate thoughts and actions in terms of his being a compas-
sionate person does not count as a very helpful or enlightening explanation by
itself. For what explains his being a compassionate personit had better not
be the particular thoughts and actions he exhibits!59 Nor can ordinary mental
dispositions be used in an informative explanation, if the trait of compassion is
unrelated to them. This is the second mystery. Finally, it is not clear what
explains why Jones has the trait of compassion in the rst place. In other
words what makes it the case that he has the property which plays a causal role
in leading to compassionate feelings and actions, rather than Frank who acts
selshly? That becomes the third mystery.
The answer to these mysteries, in my view, is to note that trait dispositions
are not ungrounded themselves, but rather exist in virtue of certain underlying
properties which enable them to be instantiated. What are these underlying
properties?
In the dispositions literature, there are two main options: categorical prop-
erties or further dispositional properties. The distinction between categorical
versus dispositional properties is extremely hard to draw precisely
categorical properties are all non-dispositional, obviously enough, and famil-
iar examples include the molecular structure of a thing, or its being square in
shape or having been destroyed. On one standard way of drawing the distinc-
tion, dispositional properties ground the truth of conditionals of the kind
noted above, whereas categorical properties do not.60 But I am not going to
offer a positive proposal for making this distinction here.
59
For the common worry that character trait explanations are circular and uninformative
pseudo explanations, see, e.g. Mischel 1968: 42, Hogan et al. 1977: 257, Locke and Pennington
1982: 219, Newman and Uleman 1989: 167, Kamtekar 2004: 461, Goldie 2004: 10, Adams 2006:
131, Annas 2011: 11, 39, and especially the extensive discussion in Boag 2011.
60
A related approach is to hold that dispositions ground the truth of claims about what
something does, whereas categorical properties ground the truth of claims about what mechan-
isms the thing in question actually uses to do it. Hence according to Stephen Mumford (who puts
the distinction in terms of dispositional and categorical ascriptions): Disposition ascriptions are
ascriptions of properties that occupy a particular functional role as a matter of conceptual
necessity and have particular shape or structure characterizations only a posteriori. Categorical
ascriptions are ascriptions of shapes and structures which have particular functional roles only a
posteriori (1998: 77).
Concerning trait dispositions, it is entirely compatible with everything I say
here to hold that underlying each such disposition are categorical properties at
the neural level in the brain or, even further down, categorical properties at the
atomic level. I do not have to take a stand on this issue here.61 Rather, I need
only note that what immediately underlie a trait disposition are further
dispositions, more precisely the dispositions to form one or more occurrent
mental states which are relevant to that character trait. This underlying causal
base of the disposition, in other words, includes dispositions to form certain
trait-specic beliefs and/or desires in the persons mind.62 These do not need
to be a signicant number of the total mental state dispositions the person has;
after all, there will likely be many other causal bases involving mental state
dispositions for other traits as well, and there may even be some sharing and
overlap of the mental state dispositions in these respective bases.63 So on this
picture, trait dispositions are indeed tied very closely to mental state
dispositions.
Returning to Jones, then, his compassion is itself grounded in underlying
mental state dispositions in Joness mind, and specically in mental state
dispositions which are appropriate to the virtue of compassion from an ethical
perspective. These could include his disposition to recognize people suffering
in his environment, to want to help relieve their suffering regardless of
whether doing so would benet himself, to weigh different helping strategies,
and so forth. But it would not include, for instance, a disposition to want to
make people feel guilty after being helped, since from any plausible ethical
perspective that would not be a disposition which is an appropriate constitu-
ent of the virtue of compassion. Figure 1.3 illustrates the picture I have in
mind, with the arrows symbolizing causal inuence.
To reiterate, when Jones encounters someone in need and the relevant
background conditions are cooperative, his trait can be activated. But I said
that underlying the trait as its causal base are dispositions to form mental
61
Another possibility is that ontologically each dispositional property is also a categorical
property, whereas at the conceptual level the dispositional and conceptual are different modes of
presentation which we talk about in different ways. Mumfords positive view is along these lines
(1998: 190).
62
Elizabeth Prior and her colleagues provide a helpful general denition of a causal basis as
the property or property-complex of the object that, together with the [stimuli] is the causally
operative sufcient condition for the manifestation in the case of surere dispositions, and in
the case of probabilistic dispositions is causally sufcient for the relevant chance of the mani-
festation (1982: 251).
63
For early statements of these ideas, see Alston 1970: 61, 8890, 1975: 456, Brandt 1970:
27, 1988: 667, and Butler 1988: 220. See also more recently Trianosky 1990: 97, Audi 1991:
162, McCrae 1994: 152, Johnson 1997: 77, Doris 2002: 66, Solomon 2003: 47, Kamtekar 2004:
479, Sabini and Silver 2005: 546, Upton 2005: 1345, 2009a: 411, 289, 49, 2009b: 177,
Webber 2006b: 209, Adams 2006: 4, 17, 1318, Taylor 2006: 6, Russell 2009: 172, 292, and
Snow 2010: 901. For opposing approaches in psychology, see Winter et al. 1998 and Roberts
2009: 142.
Relevant Stimuli (such as the perception of someone as being in need)

+
Those Dispositions to Form Beliefs and Desires, which are the
Appropriate Constituents of the Virtue of Compassion
+
Appropriate Background Conditions
Compassionate Occurrent Beliefs and Desires
Compassionate Behavior
Figure 1.3 The causal activity of the trait of compassion
states of various kinds that are appropriate to the virtue of compassion. As

dispositions, they will have their own stimulus conditions. And as the grounds
of compassion, they can be activated by the perception of need. In being
activated, they can go from being latent dispositions, to causing the formation
of occurrent mental states as their manifestation eventsbeliefs, wishes,
hopes, intentions, etc. of the relevant sort, in this case compassionate
which then in turn can cause the performance of compassionate actions,
other things being equal.
Without at least something like these underlying dispositions to form
appropriate mental states, Jones would not even be eligible to have the
property of compassion in the rst place. They serve, then, as among the
prerequisites that must be met in order for him to be a suitable candidate for
having this character trait disposition. So the third mystery has been solved.64
In addition, these underlying mental state dispositions also serve as part of a
deeper and much more informative explanation for why Jones acts in the
relevant ways. A particular compassionate action can be explained in terms of
a causally relevant compassionate trait. That is a legitimate explanation and
tells us something informative about Joness character that we might not have
known before, such as how he usually is in this area of his life and how he will
tend to behave in the relevant situations. But it is also a shallow explanation by
itself until we are told what makes something a compassionate traitwithout,
that is, appealing back to the performance of compassionate actions. By
explaining the trait of compassion itself in terms of dispositions to form
specic beliefs and desires, there is a deeper and more psychologically
64
Note that I do not intend the above discussion to suggest that any step of the process in
Figure 3 from relevant stimuli to compassionate behavior must be intellectually reective or even
conscious. A spontaneous act of helping can be done as a result of subconscious beliefs and
desires being activated and in turn causing bodily movement.
satisfying explanation using familiar mental categories that are already found
to be illuminating in explaining behavior.65 So now the second mystery has
been addressed.
Of course, questions could be raised about what underlies these more
specic mental state dispositions themselves. Such a discussion might turn
to further dispositions underlying them, and perhaps ultimately to categorical
properties at the neural or atomic levels. But this is not a discussion that I need
to have here. Dispositions to form occurrent mental states are a familiar
feature of our minds; anyone working on the philosophy or the psychology
of the mind has to examine them, regardless of whatever special concerns
there might be about character traits. So here I want to leave the discussion of
levels at only one underlying level below trait dispositions.
Two mysteries have now been solved. But the most important mystery still
remainseven if trait dispositions are grounded in a causal base which
consists of mental state dispositions, it is still not clear what work is left for
the traits themselves to do. In other words, cant trait dispositions just be
eliminated entirely and future research focus on the underlying mental state
dispositions, thereby vindicating an anti-realist view about at least these
dispositional properties of persons in the process?
In order to address this concern, two broad options emerge here which are
familiar from the philosophy of mind. One is to accept a property dualist
picture whereby trait dispositional properties are metaphysically distinct from
their underlying mental state dispositional properties. It might be, for in-
stance, that the former are constituted by but not reducible to the latter.
Similarly, statements about character traits would be true in virtue of the
instantiation of trait dispositional properties, and not in the rst instance in
virtue of the particular mental properties in the causal base of that trait
disposition.
65
On character traits, mental states, and explanation, see Tellegen 1991: 14, Johnson 1997:
778, and Kamtekar 2004: 479. Emphasizing the relationship between character traits and
underlying mental state dispositions also serves to avoid the worry about theorizing in terms
of traits that was raised by Lawrence Pervin, where on his view a motive is different from the
trait concept, not a substitute for it and certainly not to be replaced by it! (1994: 110). The view
of character traits outlined in this section certainly agrees. See also Funder 1994: 126.
Dan McAdams offers an interesting proposal for understanding the role of trait explanations.
On his view, a trait explanation offers a formal causal explanation which accounts for phenom-
ena in terms of a general form or pattern that they take. For example, a wide set of discrete
behaviors exhibited by a given person over the course of a week . . . may be explained as
manifestations of a particular trait, say extraversion (1994: 1456). In contrast, explanations
in terms of desires and motives will be Final-cause explanations [which] invoke the ends or
goals for the sake of which a given phenomenon exists . . . a main distinction between trait and
motive is that, although trait is primarily a formal-cause construct, motive involves explanations
of nal cause (1994: 146, emphasis in original). My framework can accept this proposal while
still maintaining that traits and motives (and mental state dispositions more generally) are
intimately related.
The opposing, property monist view maintains that trait dispositions are
simply identical to the mental state dispositions which underlie them.66 Hence
Joness trait of compassion is nothing more than the various interrelated dispos-
itions to form occurrent mental states of the appropriate kind.67 Note that
property monism is an ontological position. It is not saying that people think
of character traits and mental state dispositions in the same way, or even that
many people realize that they are in fact identical. For centuries people did not
realize that water is identical to H2O, though as a matter of fact it is. Furthermore,
even if people do come to appreciate that these dispositions are identical, it can
still be helpful to describe each of them in different ways, as we do in the case of
water. So an identity claim at the ontological level is distinct from an identity
claim about our concepts and our thinking about that subject matter. Figure 1.4
provides a rough illustration of both the property monist and dualist approaches.
Trait Dispositions Trait Dispositions

=
Their Underlying Mental Their Underlying Mental
State Dispositions State Dispositions
e.g., e.g.,
Trait of Compassion Trait of Compassion
=
Underlying Dispositions to Underlying Dispositions to
form Compassionate Beliefs form Compassionate Beliefs
and Desires and Desires
Figure 1.4 Property monist and dualist approaches
In the broader literature on dispositions, property dualist and monist views

have many advocates, and the arguments used against each side are numerous
and complex.68 But in the literature on character traits in particular, such
66
More precisely, token trait dispositional properties are identical to the cluster of token
mental state dispositional properties which underlie them. So the property monist about trait
dispositional properties need only be committed to a token identity view, which is compatible
with rejecting a type identity relation between the two kinds of dispositions. In addition, the
property monist view might strain talk of a casual base for a character trait since if two things
are identical it is hard to say that one is the base for the other. Thanks to Paul McNamara for
pointing this out to me.
67
See Brandt 1970: 30 for an early statement of this position. McCrae 1994: 151 briey alludes
to it as well.
68
For helpful discussion, see Armstrong 1973, Prior et al. 1982, and Mumford 1998. It is
important to note that my use of property dualism and property monism differs from one
common usage in the larger disposition literature. There the debate has centered on the
relationship between dispositional and categorical properties, with the dualist denying and the
monist afrming an identity relationship between these properties. Here my discussion concerns
the relationship between a dispositional property and the set of dispositional properties which
underlies it; hence such a discussion is strictly speaking neutral on the truth of the larger property
debates have been almost entirely neglected. In my view, there is good reason
to accept a monist view at least for character traits. Here it would take me far
too long to argue for this properly, but let me briey note one consideration.69
I already said that:
(8) Each trait disposition has a causal base of mental state dispositions.
According to the dualist approach:
(9) Each trait disposition is metaphysically distinct from its underlying mental
state dispositions.
Together these seem to imply that:
(10) Each trait disposition is causally inert.70
(10) is extremely implausible and would require signicant revisions to most
peoples thinking about character traits. It seems that the main reason we
ascribe character traits to each other in the rst place is to try to causally
explain why people think and act in certain ways.
Why does (10) seem to follow from the two prior claims? Otherwise there
would be an unacceptable causal overdetermination in the case of all occurrent
thoughts and actions which stem from character traits. In other words, if trait
dispositions are to have causal powers, then the property dualist would
seem committed to saying that when Jones has the occurrent desire to
relieve the suffering of someone in need, this desire is caused in him both by
the disposition to desire to relieve the suffering of someone in need, and by the
trait disposition of compassion. Furthermore each of them is sufcient on its
own to cause this occurrent desire.71
Figure 1.5 provides an illustration of what the property dualist story would
look like if trait dispositions do causal work. This is a picture of casual
overdetermination, which most philosophers nd unacceptable.72 The way
out for the property dualist about character traits is to say that there is no
causal work for the distinct trait disposition to do, which seems like a
signicant cost of accepting such a view.
dualist debate formulated in the above terms, since it says nothing about whether categorical
properties ultimately underlie these dispositional ones.
69
For a related discussion, see Prior et al. 1982: 2556 and Mumford 1998: 11417.
70
Prior et al. 1982 explicitly accept this as an implication of property dualism for all disposi-
tional properties.
71
As Prior et al. note, It is relatively non-controversial that one event may have two distinct
(antecedent) sufcient conditions. We deny, however, that one event ever has two distinct
operative sufcient conditions. The classic examples of overdetermination are ones where one
sufcient condition is operative, the other is not (1982: 255, emphasis theirs).
72
Of course the mere fact that most philosophers nd it unacceptable is no argument. If this
book were devoted to the metaphysics of character trait dispositions, I would need to say more
about why overdetermination here seems so objectionable.
Trait of Compassion

Underlying Dispositions to Form Desire to Relieve the
Compassionate Beliefs and Desires Suffering of Someone in
(including the disposition to desire to Need
relieve the suffering of someone in
need)
Figure 1.5 Property dualism
The above argument is a version of a familiar strategy that is well known

from philosophy of mind but generalizes to other areas as well.73 Those who
are not persuaded by this strategy to abandon property dualist views about,
say, mental properties or moral properties, for instance, probably will not be
moved by the above argument either. Fortunately, despite my attraction to this
argument and my preference for the monist approach, it would be a virtue of
the subsequent discussion in this book if it remains neutral on this difcult
debate. In light of this, the main upshot of the discussion of the grounds of
trait dispositions can be stated ecumenically as follows:
(11) A character trait disposition which is had by Jones consists of some cluster of
Joness relevant interrelated74 mental state dispositions such that necessarily,
if Jones has this cluster of dispositions, then Jones instantiates that character
trait as well.75
Hence Joness trait of compassion consists of some specic cluster of mental
state dispositions involving suffering and helping behavior, and it could not be
the case that Jones has these particular mental state dispositions without his
also having the trait of compassion. But at the same time, this leaves it open as to
73
For an accessible presentation in philosophy of mind, see Kim 1998: chapter six. For application
of the argument to moral properties, see Shafer-Landau 2003: 10514.
74
That the mental state dispositions are interrelated is important. Obviously not just any random
collection of mental state dispositions will amount to a character trait like compassion independently
of the content of those mental states. But it is also not enough for a person to just have the appropriate
mental state dispositions. A person does not have the trait of compassion unless she has the relevant
belief and desire dispositions, and they (or the occurrent states they give rise to) trigger each other
when appropriate. The beliefs that someone is in need and that I can help that person, should in
relevant cases be related to a desire to devise means of helping him. Otherwise there could be an
unrelated bunch of mental states, rather than a character trait. For similar remarks, see Snow 2010: 20.
75
There may be more required for the instantiation of a character trait than having just the
right underlying mental state dispositions. For instance, certain abilities, faculties (e.g. willpower
if it is a faculty), or skills (e.g. perceptual sensitivities) might also be needed in at least some cases
for the possession of a character trait, and perhaps these abilities, faculties, or skills do not
themselves entirely consist of mental state dispositions. Then I can easily amend (11) so that a
character trait disposition consists of some cluster of interrelated mental state dispositions and
abilities/faculties/skills had by the person.
whether Joness compassion is identical to those underlying dispositions, or is
merely constituted by but not identical to them. It also leaves it open whether there
is only one specic cluster of mental state dispositions associated with (the instanti-
ation of ) a given character trait, or whether that trait is multiply realizable and so
there is a plurality of different clusters which can be associated with it.76
Of course, I do not take this to be the end of the story about the nature of
character trait dispositions. As I noted at the start, my goal is not to provide a
set of worked out necessary and sufcient conditions here. Rather, I hope to
have provided a broad conceptual framework that helpfully captures at least
the paradigm examples of character traits. Such a framework will be enough to
assist with the larger tasks still to come.77
1 .5 M O RA L V I R T U ES AN D V I C E S 78
Let me end with two nal conceptual points about character traits. First, there
might seem to be a striking omission up to this pointnowhere have
I specically mentioned the idea of morality. After all, isnt the concept of a
character trait a moral one?
At times this seems to be assumed in the psychology literature.79 And of
course psychologists are free to dene the terms character and character
76
As Nicole Smith reminded me, there are uses of the term cluster in certain areas of
philosophy of language which imply that no single member of a cluster of properties is either
necessary or sufcient for, in this case, possessing the trait of compassion, but to have sufciently
many of the properties in the cluster is necessary and sufcient for possessing the trait. I want to
make it clear that I am not using the term in this technical sense.
77
Lorraine Besser-Jones argues that approaches like mine leave out a central element of
charactermore than dispositions constitute peoples characters, be they behavioral dispos-
itions or dispositions to feel and judge (2008: 317). To illustrate this, she uses an example in
which two people are said to have the same dispositions, but have different (specically moral)
characters. Jane has the belief that everyone should be treated equally, but subconsciously exhibits
racist behavior. Mark, on the other hand, consciously holds racist beliefs and acts the same way as
Jane does in the presence of racial minorities. So despite various dispositional similarities, Jane
and Mark clearly have different moral characters. What in general is supposed to be missing from
a dispositional framework are moral beliefs to which one is evaluatively committed (317).
I have two concerns with this proposal. First of all, it seems easy enough for a dispositional
approach to handle the exampleJane and Mark have different dispositions to form moral beliefs
pertaining to racial equality, and each of these dispositions is part of the underlying mental state
dispositions that make up their moral character in this area of their lives. So a dispositional approach
like mine above can naturally ascribe a very important role in character traits to moral beliefs.
But secondly, having moral beliefs on Besser-Joness framework becomes a necessary condi-
tion for having moral character. Furthermore, these are very particular moral beliefsbeliefs
whose content is explicitly moral, i.e. beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of certain
behaviors (318). This strikes me as overly intellectualit seems possible for someone to have
a moral character trait like honesty without ever actually forming beliefs with moral content
pertaining to the rightness of telling the truth, for instance.
78
Material is this section is borrowed from Moral Character, chapter one, section three.
79
See, e.g. Narvaez et al. 2006: 967. For this same assumption in philosophy, see, e.g. Goldie
2004: 27, 31, 33 and Russell 2009: xii, 2923, 330.
trait as they wish. But if they are also trying to capture ordinary and
widespread views about character, then the answer to this question is no.
Many character traits are indeed moral traitsconsider honest, compassion-
ate, and just to name a few. But what about this list:
Talkative, expansive, artistic, dry, jovial, formal, clever, calm, nervous, extra-
verted, shy, sociable, imaginative, logical, and witty.
All of these seem like they are character traits. While they function to evaluate
the person who has themto say that someone is witty seems to be at once
to describe and to assess that personthe kind of evaluation that is involved
here certainly need not involve moral evaluation. We do not morally praise
someone just for being logical or witty.80
Another way to see this point is to note that if anything is a character trait,
certainly a virtue would be (and the same with a vice). But there are plenty of
non-moral virtues and vices; just take examples from the epistemic (e.g., being
logical), prudential (e.g., being clever), and aesthetic (e.g., being artistic)
realms of the normative, for instance. Someone who has the virtue of artistry
when it comes to home designing would indeed have a character trait but not a
moral one.81
So I think there is good reason to not put all character traits under the
heading of morality.82 Instead, the moral character traits83 are only one subset
of all the character traits, as represented in Figure 1.6.
Traits
Moral Character Traits83 Non-Moral Character Traits
Figure 1.6 Two kinds of character traits
80
As Kupperman remarks, Someone can be a weak and depressing oaf without ever
behaving immorally (1991: 8).
81
Brandt 1988: 79. For an opposing view, see Swanton 2003: 6976.
82
For similar remarks, see Brandt 1970: 23, Butler 1988: 215, and Kupperman 1991: 79.
Gordon Allport made the same observation long ago (1931: 371).
83
To be clear, these are moral character traits in the sense that distinguishes them from
epistemic, prudential, aesthetic, and other character traits. They are not moral in the sense of
only referring to the moral virtues. The moral vices, for instance, also fall under this heading.
It would be nice to have some plausible and informative criterion to use to
distinguish the moral from the other normative domains. But unfortunately
I do not have such a criterion, and neither does anyone else as far as I know.
Philosophers have been hard pressed to come up with any rigorous way of
properly distinguishing the moral, typically relying instead on their intu-
itions.84 So while I can provide the following test for distinguishing a moral
character trait from a non-moral one:
(12) Vary the degree to which the person possesses the trait, and see whether our
moral assessment of the person in this regard alone also changes.
it obviously relies upon a prior familiarity with what counts as moral assess-
ment. Fortunately for my purposes, it does seem as if there are clear intuitions
in this area, as the examples above were intended to illustrate. And I will not
need anything like a rigorous criterion for the scope of morality in what
follows. So for the remainder of this book, my focus will be on the moral
character traits, and any reference to character traits should be assumed to
apply only to the moral ones unless otherwise noted.
The mention of virtues takes me to the second point. Much of the recent
philosophical interest in character traits has centered specically on the
virtues. Virtue ethicists take the virtues to be among the central ethical
concepts and often use them to ground an account of morally right actions.
But even consequentialists, Kantians, moral pluralists, and advocates of other
competing views have realized the importance that the virtues should play in
their overall normative ethical theories, even if it is not at the foundational or
grounding level.
I see no reason why these various accounts of the virtues cannot accept my
approach to character traits and simply add additional conditions in order to
narrow the focus to the virtuous ones. While trying to remain neutral on
disputes between these different approaches in normative theory, one general
proposal would be to add the following:
(14) The virtues are all and only those good traits of character which are such
that, other things being equal, when they directly lead to action (whether
mental or bodily), the action is (typically) a good action and is performed for
the appropriate reasons.85
84
For relevant discussion, see my 2011b, section one. For a review of different proposals, see
Gert 2011.
85
This leaves it open whether the trait is intrinsically or only instrumentally good. On some
approaches, for instance, certain virtues like courage fall into the latter category. For relevant
discussion, see Foot 1978: 1746 and Adams 2006: 334. Hurka (2006) sketches a view which
would allow virtuous dispositions to have only instrumental value.
The proposal also leaves it open as to what makes the action good and the reasons appropriate.
The goodness of the action could be grounded in facts about virtue or in something else
altogether such as good consequences. Hence no claim is being made about the dependence
Compassion clearly counts as a virtue on this proposal, whereas greed would
not. And note again that the virtue terms can also be properly applied to
actions and states of mind, independently of their connection to an under-
lying virtuous disposition. Certain actions can still be compassionate even
if they happened to be performed for primarily selsh reasons such as to
avoid guilt or seek public recognition. Similarly, a state of mind can be
compassionate and morally praiseworthy even though it happens to only
be eeting in a given persons psychology and not tied to a deeper psycho-
logical structure.86
Virtues make up only one subset of the character traits, and parallel
remarks to the above apply as well to the vices. They both are to be found
in all of the various normative domains,87 but again I want to focus just
on the moral domain. In the next chapter, I will make the perhaps surprising
suggestion that the virtues and the vices do not exhaust all of the character
traits.88
1. 6 CON CLU SI ON
I have covered a lot of ground in this chapter in order to develop the

conceptual framework needed for what is to come. So let me summarize the
central observations made about character traits:
(a) They are personality trait dispositions which manifest as beliefs, desires,
and/or actions of a certain sort appropriate to that trait, as a result of
being stimulated in a way appropriate to that trait.
(b) They are those personality traits for which a person can be appropri-
ately held responsible and/or be normatively assessed.
relation between the goodness of the dispositions and the goodness of the action that is caused by
the activation of the disposition (for helpful discussion, see Hurka 2006).
Nevertheless, this very broad proposal still might be too restrictive to capture all the accounts
of virtue in the literature. Some, for instance, may not require the last clause about appropriate
reasons (see Driver 2001). It does, however, capture most of the leading proposals so far as I am
aware, especially in the literature on Aristotelian forms of virtue ethics.
86
For discussion of this way of applying the virtue concepts to actions and states of mind, and
for some of the controversy that arises here, see footnote 3.
87
While it might have been commonplace in the past to dwell on the moral virtues, the
epistemic virtues are receiving a great deal of attention for instance (DePaul and Zagzebski 2003),
and there are plenty of candidates for virtues in the aesthetic, prudential, legal, political, religious,
and athletic domains.
88
For brief remarks along these lines, see Kupperman 1991: 10, Zagzebski 1996: 11213,
Sreenivasan 2002: 62, Swanton 2003: 25, 2067, Kamtekar 2004: 4824, Besser-Jones 2008: 326,
and Annas 2011: 103, 105. Brandt 1970, Goldie 2004: 26, Adams 2006: 36, and Winter and Tauer
2006: 75 seem to hold the opposing view.
(c) They are metaphysically grounded in the interrelated mental state
dispositions specic to the given trait such that necessarily, if these
dispositions obtain in a person, then the character trait disposition
obtains as well.
(d) Some of them are virtues and vices, but perhaps there are character
traits which are neither virtues nor vices.
Let me move away from the conceptual and towards the empirical in thinking
about what most peoples actual moral character looks like today.
2
The Framework of Mixed Traits
The goal of this chapter is to summarize my empirical framework for thinking

about the moral character traits which I claim are widely possessed by people
today. Rather than motivating and defending the view, though, I will simply
outline the main ideas that will be relevant in later chapters. To help make the
discussion less abstract, I will also focus on harming motivation and behavior,
but the framework is intended to generalize to all domains of our moral lives.1
Section one begins by distinguishing between virtues, vices, and what I call
Mixed Traits. Section two then looks at the patterns of behavior we should
expect on my framework. Second three shifts the focus to the motivation
behind morally relevant behavior. Next, section four turns to the implications
for stability over time and consistency across situations, while the last section
focuses on individual differences.
2 . 1 VI R T U E S , VI C E S , AN D M I X E D T R A I T S
There are many different areas of our moral lives having to do with everything
from lying to stealing to helping. For each area, it seems that there is a
traditional virtue concept and a traditional vice concept. For instance consider
the domain of harming others, which will be our main example in this chapter.
This domain includes both reactive aggression, which is harmful behavior
done in the heat of the moment or in hot blood as a result of impulsive
reactions such as feelings of anger or frustration, as well as proactive aggres-
sion, which is harmful behavior done planfully and in a premeditated way in
cold blood. The vice concept in this area is easy to identifyit is cruelty. The
virtue concept, on the other hand, is a bit less familiar. It is not compassion,
since that has to do with helping as opposed to not harming. Instead a
traditional answer is to say that the virtue concept is non-malevolence, or the
1
In Moral Character, I outline my framework in much greater detail, as well as motivate it at
length by drawing on studies of helping, harming, and lying.
moral virtue associated with being reliably disposed to not harm others when
appropriate, and for the right reasons.
For any given character trait, there are various normative standards it has to
satisfy in order to qualify as a particular virtue. Similarly a character trait has
to satisfy relevant normative standards to qualify as a particular vice instead.
Let me call these specic standards the minimal threshold that it has to meet in
order to qualify as a particular trait such as compassion or honesty, rather than
some other trait.
What enables a character trait to satisfy these standards for being a virtue or
being a vice? The previous chapter gives us the answer. There I said that
character traits are grounded in relevant interrelated dispositions to form
particular beliefs and desires. But if character traits are grounded in specic
mental state dispositions, then one cannot count as having a virtue like
honesty without rst having the specic dispositions to form beliefs and
desires relevant to honesty, and also not having the specic dispositions to
form beliefs and desires relevant to dishonesty. So a character trait qualies as
a certain virtue, for instance, provided that its underlying mental state dispos-
itions are of that particular virtuous kind themselves.
Once a trait does satisfy the standards for being a particular virtue or vice,
then it is not as if it is always possessed to the same extent. Two people can
have the virtue of compassion, say, but they might each have it to different
degrees.2 One might be only weakly compassionate as a person, while the
other is deeply compassionate. To use language familiar from psychology, the
virtues (and vices) are categorical traitsyou have to meet certain standards to
qualify as possessing thembut once you do they are continuous traits which
can show up anywhere along a wide continuum of more and less. So in light of
this discussion, there are two distinct questions that one can ask about a
persons possession of the virtues (and vices): does she have a particular virtue,
such as honesty, at all, and if she does, to what degree does she possess this
trait?
Let me work this out in more detail using the virtue of non-malevolence.
Here are a few examples of some of the conditions in the minimum threshold
for this virtue:
(1) A non-malevolent person, when acting in character, will reliably refrain from
attempting to harm others, without adequate moral justication, when in
situations where opportunities to harm present themselves.
2
This assumption about character traits is widespread. For representative statements, see
Allport 1931: 371, Brandt 1970: 23, 367, 1988: 79, Alston 1970: 756, Butler 1988: 232,
Kupperman 1991: 14, Hursthouse 1999: 145, Taylor 2006: 9, Appiah 2008: 35, 48, Upton
2009a: 1516, Badhwar 2009: 274, Russell 2009: chapter four, and Sosa 2009: 280. The degree
to which a person has a character trait is some complex function of the degree to which he has
the underlying mental state dispositions and the relations between them.
The Framework of Mixed Traits 39
A specic application of this requirement is the following:
(1A) A non-malevolent person, when acting in character, will reliably refrain
from attempting to kill an innocent person under pressure from an author-
ity gure for no morally good reason.
Furthermore, not only will such a person reliably refrain from harming when
given the opportunity, but he will do so for the right reasons:
(2) A persons non-malevolent character trait, when it leads him to refrain from
harming, will do so primarily for motivating reasons that are morally admir-
able and deserving of moral praise, and not primarily for motivating reasons
which are either morally problematic or morally neutral.
I take these to be fairly intuitive and uncontroversial standards. Many more
could be formulated for this virtue, but these are enough to serve as
illustrations.
When we turn to the empirical research on aggression in psychology, how
do most people seem to be faring in qualifying as even weakly virtuous in this
area of their lives? I review this literature at length in Moral Character, and
there I come to the conclusionnot very well. The Milgram shock experi-
ments serve as the obvious illustration. There the majority of participants in
the standard setup were willing to shock an innocent person all the way to
death under pressure from an authority gure. Other research has docu-
mented the pervasive effects that anger, frustration, shame, and threatened
self-esteem can have in enhancing aggression. On the ip side, avoidance of
guilt and avoidance of a negative mood can prevent people from harming
others, but those hardly count as morally admirable reasons to do so.
This is not the place to review the empirical work again. Instead, let me
present just one example from a study by Wim Meeus and Quinten Raaij-
makers (1986). It is modeled after the Milgram setup, but is different enough
that is provides a nice illustration of how the dangers associated with obedi-
ence to authority are not just limited to the specics of Milgrams procedure.
In their setup, a confederate is taking a test, the participant is administering
the test verbally from another room and records the answers, and the experi-
menter is with the participant. The participant knows that the test taker is
unemployed and that this test is very important as it must be passed for him to
get a job. The participant is told that, during the course of the 32-question test,
he is to make certain negative and stressful remarks at set times.3 These range
from mild comments (Up to now, your test score is insufcient) to harsh
ones (If you continue like this, you will certainly fail the test; According to
the test, you are more suited for lower functions).4 Participants could see a
computer readout of the level of stress being experienced by the applicant, and
3 4
Meeus and Raaijmakers 1986: 314. Meeus and Raaijmakers 1986: 323.
also saw that as the test went on and the remarks were more stressful, the
applicants performance was getting worse. On top of all this, the participant
knew that the applicant had been lied to ahead of time about the procedure,
and for every stressful remark the applicant would protest in some way. At
rst these were mild protests, but by remark 10 the applicant demanded that
the subject stop making the remarks. He accused the experimenter of having
given him false information about the nature of the experiment and withdrew
his consent . . . After stress remarks 14 and 15, his response was one of
despair.5 Participants who raised objections were given the same four prods
from the Milgram setup, such as, Please continue and, You have no other
choice, you must go on.
The results are hard to believe. Out of the 15 stress remarks, the median was
14.81 remarks. 91.7 percent of subjects used all 15 remarks on the applicant,
and so they delivered remarks 14 and 15 even after they had seen that the
applicant had failed the test.6 So most participants were, in effect, willing to
ruin an unemployed persons job prospects for the sake of complying with a
seemingly legitimate authority.
These results do not seem to me to be compatible with the widespread
possession of the virtue of non-malevolence, and in particular they violate the
requirement in (1) above. Of course, I do not want to reason as follows:
(i) One study, such as Meeus and Raaijmakers (1986), found that participants
behaved in a particular situation in a way that is incompatible with the
requirements for possessing the virtue of non-malevolence.
(ii) Therefore, there is good reason to think that most people in general do not
have the virtue of non-malevolence.
Clearly we should not be impressed with such an argumentno broad
conclusion would be warranted on the basis of one such study. Rather, using
this study together with many more like it, I reason as follows:
(i*) Dozens of studies have observed the behavior of participants in different
harming-relevant situations.
(ii*) On the basis of these studies collectively, we can arrive at plausible accounts
of the underlying mental state dispositions which are responsible for the
patterns of behavior that were observed.
(iii*) When compared to various requirements for possessing the virtue of non-
malevolence, both the patterns of behavior that were observed as well as the
underlying mental states that were inferred, are incompatible with these
requirements.
5 6
Meeus and Raaijmakers 1986: 316. Meeus and Raaijmakers 1986: 317.
(iv*) Therefore, there is good reason to think that most people in general do not
have the virtue of non-malevolence.
Thus on the basis of looking at an extensive array of studies in psychology on
aggression, I conclude that:
(3) Most people do not have the virtue of non-malevolence to any degree,
although a few might possess it.7
This last clause is important, as I am not claiming anything so strong as that
the possession of this virtue is psychologically impossible, but only that it is
difcult andgiven the psychological evidence such as it is at the present
timerare.
Recall that the virtue of non-malevolence is being used in this section just as
an illustration. My even more controversial claim is this:
(4) Most people do not have any of the virtues to any degree, although a few might
possess one or more of them.
In order to properly assess this claim, we would have to go step by step
through each of the moral domains and test the standards in the minimal
threshold of each virtue against the available psychological evidence. I will do
this for the case of honesty and cheating in the next chapter, but otherwise will
not take up such a project in this book.
Note that if most people do not have a virtue like honesty or compassion, it
does not follow that they must have acquired an opposing trait such as
dishonesty or cold-heartedness to any degree. They may simply have none
of these traits at all. But when it comes to aggression and when we see studies
like Milgrams or Meeus and Raaijmakers, it is tempting to conclude that the
evidence points in the direction of a widespread vice thesis to the effect that
most people are cruel. So let me return to the domain of harming for a
moment.
Just as with non-malevolence, we can formulate various standards in the
minimum threshold that a character trait has to meet in order to qualify as a
vice, in this case the vice of cruelty. For instance:
(5) A cruel person, when acting in character, will reliably attempt to harm others
when in situations where opportunities to harm present themselves, at least
when those opportunities are not thought to involve signicant inconvenience
to him and he believes he will not get punished or be otherwise negatively
affected by others for doing so.
7
When speaking of what is true for most people, this is intended to refer just to adult
human beings. The claims in question obviously are not intended to imply to any non-human
persons, nor to infant human beings.
Or again:
(6) A cruel person, when acting in character, will not rst experience signicant
internal conict about whether to act cruelly before in fact performing cruel
actions as a result of his trait of cruelty.8
Or yet again still:
(7) A cruel person, when acting in character, will not regularly experience (signi-
cant) feelings of moral guilt when harming others, nor will his harming others
be inuenced in a signicant way by avoiding anticipated guilt.9
These seem to be intuitively plausible criteria, although they are just a few of
the many that could be stated.
How well do they stack up against the empirical evidence? Once again, the
answer seems to benot well. For instance, in the Meeus and Raaijmakers
study there was a control condition in which participants were allowed to give
as many stressful remarks as they liked without pressure from an authority
gure. It turned out that no one gave all 15 remarks, and the median was only
6.75.10 And in the original obedience version, they found that participants
intensely disliked making the stress remarks11 even though they went ahead
and did so anyway. Contrary to (6), this suggests internal conict rather than a
wholehearted desire to inict harm or suffering. Finally, while not examined in
this particular study, guilt has been found to be a signicant inhibitor of
aggression in much other research.12
So on the basis on dozens of additional relevant studies on aggression,
I conclude it is also true that:
(8) Most people do not have the vice of cruelty to any degree, although a few
might possess it.
And on the basis of looking at many studies in other moral domains, I also
hold more generally that:
(9) Most people do not have any of the vices to any degree, although a few might
possess one or more of them.
8
In traditional Aristotelian thinking, this would describe the incontinent person, not the
vicious person. See, e.g. Aristotle 1985: 1145a151152a35 (especially 1150a20, 1150b30,
1151b351152a4), McDowell 1979: 1456, Irwin 1996: 4950, Hursthouse 1999: chapter four,
Webber 2006b: 207, Annas 2007: 517, 2011: 678, 75, Taylor 2006: 56, and Baxley 2010: 401.
9
For Aristotles similar claim about the intemperate person, see 1150a20, 1150b30.
10
Meeus and Raaijmakers 1986: 317.
11
Meeus and Raaijmakers 1986: 318.
12
For guilt and aggression, see Caprara and Pastorelli 1989: 126, 133, Baumeister et al. 1996:
10, Eisenberg 2000: 66771, and especially Stuewig et al. 2010. For a more extensive treatment of
the standards of cruelty and their relation to the available psychological evidence, see Moral
Character, chapter nine.
Summarizing, then, my negative position is that:
(10) On the basis of the available psychological research, most people do not have
the appropriate clusters of interrelated mental state dispositions which
enable them to qualify as possessing either any of the moral virtues or any
of the vices to any degree, although a few people may so qualify.
This is a negative claim about what people are not like. What can be said
positively about what most people are like?
Here is where the Mixed Trait framework comes into play. For I claim it is
also true that:
(11) Most people actually do possess traits of character pertaining to the different
moral domains, and these traits consist of various interrelated mental state
dispositions pertaining to that domain.13
How can this be? If these traits of character are not the traditional virtues or
vices, then what are they like?
To see, let us return to the domain of aggression. On the basis of work by
Milgram, Meeus and Raaijmakers, and many others, we can begin to infer
what some of the mental state dispositions are which seem to be widely held
and which play a role in bringing about aggressive behavior. Here are some
important examples:14
Beliefs and desires concerned with harming the offender in order to retaliate for
his offense, or to get even with him, or to get revenge.
Beliefs and desires concerned with harming others in order to maintain a positive
opinion of myself.
Beliefs and desires concerned with harming others in order to obey instructions
from a legitimate authority.
Beliefs and desires concerned with not harming others when they are similar to
me in important ways.
Beliefs and desires concerned with not harming others when I am thought to bear
a signicant degree of personal responsibility for the harm and would be blamed
if I did.
These are by no means all the beliefs and desires which most of us have that
are directly relevant to aggressive behavior, but they are central ones and ones
which help to illustrate my positive view.
13
Let me qualify this claim right away. As I note in Moral Character, chapter seven, rather than
talking about the vast majority of people in general today, I should limit this to the vast majority of
people in Western industrial societies. This is simply because the studies that I review in that book
are almost always conducted using participants from either North American or European popula-
tions. My picture of character may apply more universally than this, but clearly a lot more research
would need to be done rst before I would feel comfortable making such a claim.
14
For relevant discussion, see Moral Character, chapter nine.
Note that some of these mental states dispositions would, by themselves,
earn a negative moral evaluation on most reasonable approaches to morality.
Consider, for instance, the rst set of beliefs and desires. Others, though, such
as the last set seem to deserve a more positive evaluation. It is good to want to
not harm another person to whom you have signicant attachments that
would make you personally responsible for the harm, such as one of your
close friends.
Now consider the character trait that is made up of these and the other
widespread mental state dispositions directly relevant to aggression. My next
claim is the following:
(12) This character trait which most adult human beings possess, does not
correspond to any of the words or concepts which ordinary people have
for traits associated with harming.
It is not the virtue of kindness or non-malevolence or compassion as it fails to
qualify as a moral virtue on a multitude of fronts. But it is also not the vice of
cruelty or brutality or meanness or hostilityit also fails to quality as a moral
vice on a multitude of fronts.
So what is it? Well, if we do not have an ordinary term for it, then we will
just have to invent one. I will call it a Mixed Aggression Trait, with the
capital letters meant to serve as a reminder that this is a technical term that
I have conjured up. The mixed has to do solely with the moral evaluation
of trait, as it has both morally positive and morally negative aspects. The
aggression has to do with the domain of morality that it pertains to.
The story about why we never came up with a term for this trait and why
we have seemed to overlook it for thousands of years of human history is an
interesting one, and one that I will return to in chapter seven.
It is important to be clear about the sense in which this trait is mixed. The
claim is not that the Mixed Aggression Trait is a virtue in some situations or
contexts, and a vice in others. Rather the claim is that this trait is not a virtue in
any situations or contexts. Nor is it a vice in any situations or contexts. Nor is it
entirely morally good or bad in any situations or contexts. Instead a Mixed
Aggression Trait is neither a virtue nor a vice, neither entirely good nor bad in
every situation or context in which a person possesses it.
So my view with respect to this moral domain can be put succinctly as
follows:
(13) Most people have a Mixed Aggression Trait as part of their character, and
not the virtue of non-malevolence or the vice of cruelty.
With this new category of moral traits, we can expand on our diagram from
chapter one as follows in Figure 2.1.
And now stepping back from this particular moral domain of aggression,
my view can be stated in general terms as follows:
Traits
Moral Character Traits15 Non-Moral Character Traits
Associated with Aggression Associated with Lying, Stealing, Helping, etc.
Harming Relevant Virtues Harming Relevant Vices Mixed Aggression Traits

(e.g., non-malevolence) (e.g., cruelty)
Figure 2.1 Three kinds of moral character traits associated with aggression
(14) Most people have a variety of Mixed Traits as part of their character and not
a variety of virtues or vices.
This is compatible with it also being the case that:
(15) A few people have one or more virtues to some degree, rather than the
corresponding Mixed Trait(s).
As well as with:
(16) A few people have one or more vices to some degree, rather than the
corresponding Mixed Trait(s).
It is even compatible with:
(17) Some people do not have Mixed Traits, virtues, or vices when it comes to
what causes their morally relevant behavior.
Such people might include infants, psychopaths, and those suffering from
various severe mental handicaps which do more than just block the activation
of these character traits but actually undermine or prevent them from obtaining.
15
Again, these are moral character traits in the sense that distinguishes them from
epistemic, prudential, aesthetic, and other character traits.
The remaining sections of this chapter will highlight some of the ways in
which Mixed Traits function. But the key point about these traits is not how they
function, but what they actually consist of, that is, what the specic mental state
dispositions to believe and desire various things are which actually make them
up. These dispositions are numerous and sometime complex, and without the
benet of careful psychological research we would not be aware of nearly as
many of them as we are today. But as we learn more about them, we also can see
on normative (as opposed to psychological) grounds how, collectively, they can
be both disturbingly negative in some ways and highly admirable in others.
2.2 MIXED TRAITS AND BEHAVIOR
Having said a few preliminary things about Mixed Traits, in this section I want
to briey note some of the ways that these traits manifest themselves in
behavior. Again my goal is not to provide a detailed discussion here, but
only to say enough to help with the subsequent chapters.
A moral virtue should reliably manifest itself in virtuous behavior when the
person who has it is in relevant circumstances, other things being equal. So too
should a moral vice reliably manifest itself in vicious behavior. A Mixed Trait,
in contrast, should reliably manifest itself in . . . what? Let me return to the
example of aggression.
Given the underlying mental state dispositions pertaining to aggressive
thoughts and behavior that constitute a Mixed Aggression Trait, the actual
behavior which results from them should likely appear fragmented to inde-
pendent observers. In some cases where there is an opportunity to harm
someone, a person with this trait wont do so. In other cases, he will, and to
varying degrees of aggressiveness. Plus, the cases might vary only slightly in
their details. For instance, in the standard Milgram setup a person with such a
trait will likely, because of his beliefs and desires having to do with obeying
authorities, end up killing an innocent test-taker. But if we keep everything
else the same and only add a second authority gure who gives commands
contradicting those of the rst, then most likely there will be very little harmful
shocking, as Milgram in fact found to be the case.16
So according to my framework:
(18) A person with a Mixed Aggression Trait will typically exhibit behavior from
one harming-relevant situation to the next which can seem fragmented to
observers.17
16
Milgram 1974: 95, 1057.
17
Here and throughout the remainder of this chapter, I assume that other things are being
held equal.
And an implication of this claim which deserves to be made explicit is
that:
(19) A person with a Mixed Aggression Trait will sometimes, without adequate
moral justication, exhibit aggressive and harmful behavior toward others
when in certain situations in which opportunities to do harm present
themselves, even without being forced or compelled to do so.
Again, the Milgram and Meeus and Raaijmakers experiments provide nice
illustrations of this claim, but there are plenty of other, less dramatic instances
of harmful behavior in the research literature that could be mentioned as
well.18 At the same time, it is also an implication of (18) that:
(20) A person with a Mixed Aggression Trait will not exhibit aggressive and
harmful behavior toward others when in some situations in which oppor-
tunities to harm present themselves, even though it would be easy to do
so and he knows he could get away with it without getting caught or
punished.
There could be a variety of factors which play a role in why a person refrains
from harming in these casesguilt avoidance, empathy for the other person,
or shame might, for instance, be holding him back.
The common tool in psychology of a prole can be useful for illustrating
these claims. A prole is a set of scores for the same kind of behavior exhibited
by a person in different situations.19 Here, in Figure 2.2, is an example of what
Larrys prole might look like for four different situations.
4
Aggressiveness
0
S1 S2 S3 S4
Four Situations
Figure 2.2 Larrys aggression prole (peer ratings)
18
For some examples, see Moral Character, chapter nine.
19
I have been helped by the discussion of proles in Furr 2009. More precisely, as Furr notes
the above characterization applies to only one kind of prole among many that could be used in
psychology (2009: 197).
The x-axis lists the situations in question. The y-axis on proles could have
a variety of different scales, such as the conditional probability of aggressive
behavior, a Likert scale from 1 to 7 of self-reported likelihood of aggression, or
a frequency scale of the number of aggressive actions in that particular
situation over time. In this gure I just have the y-axis represent a simple
rating, from 0 to 5, of how aggressively Larry behaved in a particular situation
at one moment of time, say this morning when he was driving to work. The
ratings themselves could be the average of scores by peer raters who were
observing his behavior in that situation. A rating of 5 would be highly
aggressive, such as causing an accident due to road rage, while a 0 would
count as showing no signs of aggression at all.
In this ctional example, then, Larrys aggressive behavior is all over the map
in these four situations. S1 could be the standard Milgram setup, for instance,
or arguing with his wife. S2 could be drinking at a bar, where he gets very calm
and mellow. The point is that when this prole is constructed for these four
situations, we can see in a visual way the fragmentation claimed in (18).
Figure 2.2 only involves four situations. We can also come up with a prole
for many more situations than those, as seen in Figure 2.3.
4
Aggressiveness
0
Variety of Situations in One Year
Figure 2.3 Larrys aggression prole for many situations
Here Larrys prole is very messy, and it seems hard to nd any consistent
patterns to his behavior.
It would help if we switched to a different prole which measured how often
Larry exhibited the ve different levels of harmfulness during the year, as in
Figure 2.4. Note that, perhaps not surprisingly, much of his behavior clusters
around the lower levels of aggressiveness. In other words, much of the time we
tend to not behave aggressively, especially when others are around to notice,
and there are obvious self-interested reasons for why that is the case. But even
still, we can see that Larry exhibits the entire range of aggressiveness in his
behavior over the course of the year. There are plenty of situations where he is
Frequency of Harming
at that Level
0 1 2 3 4 5
Level of Aggressiveness
Figure 2.4 Larrys frequency of harming at different levels of aggressiveness during a

year
moderately aggressive, and a few where he is maximally so. Thus it turns out
that how aggressive Larry is during any given hour of this year, does not
reliably predict how aggressive he is during any other given hour.20
What holds for aggression and Mixed Aggression Traits also holds, to
varying degrees perhaps, for the other domains of morality and the Mixed
Traits pertaining to each of them. In other words:
(21) A person with a Mixed Trait will typically exhibit behavior from one
situation relevant to that Trait to the next which can seem fragmented to
observers.
Surprisingly, though, this fragmentation can coexist alongside remarkable
consistency in behavior. That will be the topic of section four. But rst let
me say a word about Mixed Traits and motivation.
2.3 M IXED TRAITS AND MOTIVATION
Mixed Traits, like all character traits, have the effect on behavior which they
do by rst giving rise to occurrent beliefs and desires. In particular, they can
both increase motivation to perform certain actions as well as increase motiv-
ation to not perform other actions as well. Let me relate each of these points to
the psychology of aggressive behavior.
Given the various beliefs and desires listed in section one as some of the
constituents of a Mixed Aggression Trait, it is not surprising that there are
20
For similar claims about non-moral behavior, see Fleeson 2001.
specic psychological variables which can trigger this trait and serve as
enhancers for aggressive behavior. In other words:
(22) There are certain enhancers for a persons Mixed Aggression Trait which can
inuence the Trait in such a way that there is an increase in motivation to act
aggressively when presented with opportunities to do so, as compared to the
level of motivation to act aggressively apart from the inuence of the
enhancer.
Examples of these enhancers include the following (among others):
Anger
Frustration
Shame
Threatened self-esteem
These should be intuitive enough even apart from the psychological evidence;
naturally a strong feeling of anger is going to make it more likely that someone
behaves aggressively than he otherwise might in the same situation.
Diagrammatically, we can represent the activity of enhancers as follows:
Appropriate enhancer is activated

(such as anger over a perceived offense)
Relevant motive is formed (such as a motive to harm the

offender in order to get revenge)
+
Beliefs about opportunities to harm him in my circumstances
Activation of a Mixed Aggression Trait

(in this case, activation of the underlying beliefs about which forms of harming
are conducive to getting revenge and which are not, combined with desires to
harm or to not harm depending upon whether such harming would be conducive)
Increased motivation to harm

(in this case, so long as I am still feeling angry)
Increased aggressive behavior

(in this case, so long as I am still feeling angry)
Of course much of this psychological activity is not going to be carried out in a

conscious, sequential manneroften it is largely automatic or is at work at the
subconscious level.
5
4
Aggressiveness
0
1 2 3 4
Four Situations
Figure 2.5 Larrys aggression prole (peer ratings)
The role of enhancers can also be illustrated using a prole. They can give a
boost to someones self-reported aggressiveness, frequency of being aggressive
in the same situation over time, probability of being aggressive in subsequent
situations, oras in the case of Figure 2.5level of aggressiveness in a given
instance. Of course it is articial to suppose that Larrys aggressiveness would
increase to the same extent in these different situations. Again, proles in this
chapter are being used purely for illustration.
Just as there are enhancers for aggressiveness, so too:
(23) There are certain inhibitors for a persons Mixed Aggression Trait which can
inuence the Trait in such a way that there is an increase in motivation to
not act aggressively when presented with opportunities to do so, as com-
pared to the level of motivation to not act aggressively apart from the
inuence of the inhibitor.
In this case examples include:
Guilt
Empathy
Negative affect
Activated moral norms
Again these should be largely intuitive, and there is support in the psycho-
logical literature for each of them functioning as inhibitors.21
I will not pause here to offer a diagram or a prole to illustrate the role of
inhibitorstheir functioning parallels that of enhancers, but in the opposite
way. It is important to stress, though, that the claim is not that inhibitors,
21
For more on enhancers and inhibitors for aggressive behavior, see Moral Character,
chapter nine.
when active, simply lead to the same levels of aggressive motivation and
behavior which would typically be found in control participants if we were
doing studies of aggression. Rather, the claim is that they give rise to motiv-
ation to not harm others in a certain situation. So inhibitors, when the right
conditions obtain, are expected to reduce aggression rates below those seen in
controls.
Stepping back as usual from the domain of aggression, the more general
claim about enhancers and inhibitors for Mixed Traits is the following:
(24) For each Mixed Trait, there are certain enhancers and inhibitors which can
inuence motivation to act in trait-relevant ways, relative to what those
levels would be were they not present. What the enhancers and inhibitors
are for any given Mixed Trait is a function of the mental state dispositions
which ground that trait. So for any particular Mixed Trait there may be
unique enhancers and inhibitors which are specic to it, although some
emotions and feelings such as guilt, anger, and positive and negative
moods are common enhancers or inhibitors for many Mixed Traits.
Let me step back from specic instances of behavior, and look at broader
patterns over time and across situations.
2 . 4 M I X E D T RA I T S , S T A BI L I T Y , AN D
CONSISTEN CY
One of the hallmarks of a character trait is that it persists over some period of
time. During that time it is expected, other things being equal, that the trait
will give rise to stable patterns of thoughts and behavior when the person is in
the same relevant situations on multiple occasions. Let me try to clarify this
notion of stability a bit more and then relate it to the example of aggressive
behavior and Mixed Aggression Traits.
It turns out that there are several different kinds of stability, only two of
which will be mentioned here. One of them is the following:
Single-Situation Trait Stability: A person regularly manifests behavior which is in
accordance with the trait in question, over several instances of the same trait-
relevant situation.
So, for instance, if Smith is very cruel he might kick his dog most every time he
comes home from work as a way to remind the dog who is boss.
If someone has a Mixed Aggression Trait, we would certainly expect to see
the behavior arising from the trait exhibit this kind of stability. For instance,
Larry might typically be very mellow and calm at the bar when he goes for a
drink after work. There just are not many enhancers for his trait that he
personally comes across regularly in this situation. In contrast, when he is cut
off by someone on the road, he might tailgate the person aggressively, and then
do the same thing next week when it happens again. Hence his level of
aggressiveness in a situation at one time is positively correlated with his
level of aggressiveness in the same situation at other times. And the same
should be broadly true for the stability of his aggressiveness over time in
various other situations as well. Here, in Figure 2.6, is a prole to illustrate the
idea, where each point represents one of 20 different situations.
5
Level of Aggressiveness
During Week Two
0
0 1 2 3 4 5
Level of Aggressiveness During Week One
Figure 2.6 Larrys average level of aggressiveness in the same 20 situations during
two weeks
As we noted in section two, Larrys behavior uctuates dramatically in its

aggressivenessit displays a great deal of within-person variability across
these various situations. But within any one situation, it is also remarkably
stable.22
There is another kind of stability worth mentioning briey here as well:
Aggregate Trait Stability: A person regularly manifests similar average levels of
aggregate behavior which is in accordance with the trait in question, over
different periods of time.
This will take a bit of unpacking. For this kind of stability the focus is now
on how a person behaves, on average, in lots of morally relevant situations
during one time (say a month), in comparison with how she behaves, again
on average, in the morally relevant situations she encounters during an-
other month. If there is trait stability in this sense, then the averages will
be broadly similar. So how she is in general in one month can predict how
she will be in general in that other month, at least with respect to this part
of her moral life.
22
In this gure I have been helped by Fleeson 2001: 1018.
With a Mixed Aggression Trait, we would expect to nd this form of
stability as well. If Larry displays an average level of aggressive behavior of
2.5 during the month of January with respect to all the relevant situations
(driving, at the bar, etc.), then barring signicant changes in his life we should
expect his average level to be in the same vicinity in the next month too. Just
because his aggressive behavior might appear fragmented from one situation
to the next, does not imply that his overall level of aggressiveness cant remain
relatively consistent over time. Provided that the same mental state dispos-
itions which constitute his Mixed Aggression Trait are in place, such stability
in fact is likely going to obtain. And this point generalizes to Mixed Traits
as a whole.
But enough about stability. As we will see in later chapters, the lively debates
in both psychology and philosophy about the existence and nature of charac-
ter traits have not challenged their stability over time. What has instead been
the main point of controversy is their consistency across situations.23
Now I am prepared to grant right from the start that Mixed Aggression
Traits are not going to lead to consistently aggressive behavior across what are
called the nominal features of situations. Situations are classied nominally
if they are distinguished, not by using the point of view of the person like Larry
whose behavior is of interest, but rather by using the point of view of a third
party who is not taking into consideration how the world looks to Larry. Thus
psychologists observing Larrys behavior might label one situation home and
another work.
If this is how we are going to think about situations, then Mixed Aggression
Traits are not going to lead to consistently aggressive behavior from one
situation to the next where each of those situations provides an opportunity
to harm others. As noted in section two, these traits are expected to give rise to
fragmented behavior across situations, behavior which ranges from not being
aggressive at all to being highly aggressive. One moment a person could be
sitting peacefully by himself, and ve minutes later he could be shocking to
death an innocent person.
But, drawing on a widely used distinction in psychology, there is another
way of thinking about the features of situations, and that is by looking at what
23
As Yuichi Shoda and his colleagues note, the phenomenon of temporal stability is widely
accepted (Shoda et al. 1993: 1024). Even Walter Mischel wrote in 1968 that, Considerable
stability over time has been demonstrated (36). In psychology see, e.g. Mischel 1968: 36, 135,
28198, 1973: 253, 1984: 362, 1999b: 43, 2004: 68, 2009: 285, Bem and Allen 1974: 508, Hogan
et al. 1977: 258, Epstein 1979: 1122, Mischel and Peake 1982: 732, 7347, 749, Zuroff 1986: 998,
Wright and Mischel 1987: 11612, Ross and Nisbett 1991: 101, Shoda et al. 1993: 10234, 1994:
67585, Mischel and Shoda 1995: 253, 1998: 2425, 2008: 208, 219, 224, 229, Kunda 1999: 4434,
499, Shoda 1999a: 160, 1999b: 3656, Shoda and LeeTiernan 2002: 24956, Mischel et al. 2002:
52, Penner et al. 2005: 3745, Fleeson and Noftle 2009: 151, and Roberts 2009: 140. In philosophy
see Doris 1998: 5078, 2002: 235, 646, Goldie 2004: 68, Upton 2009a: 55, and Russell
2009: 247.
is important to the psychological life, whether conscious or not, of the person
in question who is actually in them. These psychologically salient features are
the features of the situation that have signicant meaning for a given individ-
ual.24 So rather than what features the experimenters or other observers think
are relevant, on this approach to operationalizing situations what matter are
the features which activate relevant psychological dispositions in the persons
mind in either a conscious or subconscious manner.
Hence two situations might be very similar with the only exception being
one seemingly slight difference. With respect to their nominal features, then,
observers could expect a person to act the same way in both of them, that is,
cross-situationally consistent. Then when the person ends up doing something
quite different in one of them as opposed to the other, this can seem puzzling
and hard to explain. But if instead we try to adopt the interpretative perspec-
tive of the person actually faced with these situations, then we might realize
that this one slight difference actually matters a lot to him at some level of
conscious or subconscious psychological processing. It could be, for instance, a
difference in fragrance, which induces a positive mood.25 It could be a
difference in the number of people present, which induces fear of embarrass-
ment.26 It could be a difference in the amount of grafti on the wall, which
induces diffusion of responsibility.27 And so on.
When we turn then to the psychologically salient features of a situation,
there is no reason why a Mixed Aggression Trait cannot exhibit cross-
situational consistency. For instance, compare Larry in a situation involving
the standard Milgram setup, with his being in a situation several years earlier
involving this same setup plus the addition of the second experimenter who
gives orders contradicting those of the rst (and forget for the moment the
possibility of the rst situation inuencing his behavior in the second). If Larry
is like the majority of participants, then his prole would be something like
Figure 2.7.
24
Mischel 2004: 15. The distinction between nominal and psychologically salient features
of situations is especially prominent in social-cognitive approaches to personality, which will
be discussed in chapter ve. See, e.g. Mischel 1968: 190, 1973: 25961, 263, 1999b: 434, 46,
2004: 15, 2007: 266, 2009: 284, Mischel and Peake 1982: 749, Shoda et al. 1993: 10245, 1029,
1994: 685, Mischel and Shoda 1995: 248, 1998: 2478, 2008: 218, Shoda and Mischel 1996:
4212, Shoda 1999a: 163, Cervone 1999: 3236, Mischel et al. 2002: 51, Mendoza-Denton
et al. 2007: 215, Zayas and Shoda 2009: 2801, and especially Shoda et al. 1994: 6756 and
Shoda and LeeTiernan 2002. See also Ross and Nisbett 1991: chapter three, Vansteelandt
and Van Mechelen 1998: 758, Funder 2008: 5713, Eaton et al. 2009: 210, 212, Orom and
Cervone 2009: 230, 234, 2389, and van Mechelen 2009: 180. For philosophers who have
discussed this distinction, see Brandt 1988: 78, Flanagan 1991: 291, Sreenivasan 2002: 50,
5760, Doris 2002: 7685, Solomon 2003: 52, Kamtekar 2004: 4703, Upton 2009a: 1213,
2009b: 178, Lukes 2009: 293, Russell 2009: chapters eight to ten, Snow 2010: chapter one, and
Alfano 2011: 127.
25 26 27
Baron 1997. Darley and Latan 1968. Keizer et al. 2008.
5
Aggressiveness
4
3
2
1
0
1 2
Two Situations
Figure 2.7 Larrys aggression prole for two Milgram setups (peer ratings)
This looks to be as cross-situationally inconsistent as you can get! And it is,

with respect to the nominal features. But when we take into account Larrys
own perspective, and in particular that component of his Mixed Aggression
Trait which includes his:
Beliefs and desires concerned with harming others in order to obey instructions
from a legitimate authority.
then this pattern of behavior makes sense and is in fact entirely consistent
relative to his mental state dispositions.28
Stepping back, the mental states which make up a Mixed Aggression Trait
can render different nominal situations psychologically similar in a persons
mind by picking up on what seem to her to be their similar features. This is the
case, even despite the variability in aggressiveness that the person exhibits in
other nominal situations. To adopt a phrase from Yuichi Shoda and Scott
LeeTiernan, the person is exhibiting a consistent pattern of variability in
aggressiveness across different situations, or what they call higher-order
consistency.29 This consistency is explained by the particular mental state
dispositions in a Mixed Aggression Trait which are responding appropriately
to the various (interpretations of) features of each new harming-relevant
situation that pertain to them.
So on the one hand, based upon observations of what they are doing, it
seems that most people exhibit a high degree of within-person variability in
aggressiveness from one situation to the next and from one hour to the next.
The expectation is that these within-person behavioral correlations will turn
out to be discouragingly low, just as behavioral correlations associated with a
variety of personality traits have often failed to cross the 0.30 threshold during
the past several decades of psychological research.30
28
The material in the remainder of this section borrows from Moral Character, chapter
seven, section three.
29
Shoda and LeeTiernan 2002: 266. See also Smith et al. 2009.
30
This last point will be examined at length in chapter four.
But now suppose I am right in thinking that most people also have a Mixed
Aggression Trait which, I claim, gives rise to stable and cross-situationally
consistent aggressive behavior over time. Surprisingly, behavioral variability is
not an embarrassment for the existence of such traits. It does not have to be
due to measurement error or environmental noise or randomness or any other
factors that need to be discounted, say by aggregating over multiple situations
in order to arrive at a persons average level of aggressiveness.31 Instead the
variability in aggressiveness can be understood as a product of the person
encountering different situations where harm can be done, and having a
multitude of mental state dispositions which, subtly and often below the
level of conscious awareness, can coherently adjust her willingness to harm,
actual harming, and depth of harming to the situational features as she
perceives them. If observers do not appreciate those mental state dispositions,
then this person can seem to exhibit deeply fragmented behavior that is
evidence of a failure or lack of character. But once these dispositions are
recognized and better understood, the persons patterns of aggressiveness
become intelligible as a product of both situational features and character
traits working together.
So with these points in mind, let me make two more claims about Mixed
Traits in general:
(25) A person with a Mixed Trait will often show momentary or extended cross-
situational inconsistency in his behavior in situations relevant to the trait,
when those situations are compared based solely upon their nominal
features.
(26) A person with a Mixed Trait will often show momentary or extended cross-
situational consistency in his behavior in situations relevant to the trait, when
those situations are compared based upon the features which are psycho-
logically salient to him.
Again, what counts as relevant will be a function in large part of the various
mental state dispositions which make up that persons Mixed Trait.
So despite the air of paradox, it turns out that a Mixed Trait can indeed lead
to patterns of behavior which are at the same time both fragmented and
consistent.
31
Hence I do not follow Seymour Epstein, who claims that, Single items of behavior, no
matter how carefully measured, like single items in a test, normally have too high a component of
error of measurement to permit demonstration of high degrees of stability (1979: 1121). Instead
my view here closely aligns with how advocates of the CAPS model treat within-person
variability and aggregation. For more see chapter ve, section two.
2 . 5 MI X E D T R A I T S AN D I N D I V I D U A L DI FF E R E N C E S
So far we have been focusing on poor Larry and his Mixed Aggression Trait.
But now let me introduce Sam who also has one of these traits. And lets also
add the point from section one that character traits come in degrees. Then
assuming that Larry and Sam do not have their Mixed Aggression Traits to
exactly the same degree, there are going to be individual differences between
the two of them in this area of their lives. In other words, in some cases they
could be in the same nominal situation and yet still behave rather differently.
To use another term from psychology, they can each have different behavioral
signatures despite having the same trait.32
Proles are especially helpful in illustrating this idea.33 Here, in Figure 2.8, is
an example of how Larry and Sam might behave in three situations (all the
examples which follow assume that both of them have a Mixed Aggression
Trait).
5
Aggressiveness
0
S1 S2 S3
Three Situations
Larry Sam
Figure 2.8 Two aggression proles in three situations
From this prole alone, it is natural to say that while both of them have the
trait, Larry has it to a greater degree than Sam since his level of aggressiveness
is higher across the board in these situations.
Now compare that prole to this one in Figure 2.9. Here again we nd a
consistent rank ordering of the persons. But with the rst prole, there was
also a consistent rank ordering of the situations as wellboth Larry and Sam
showed increased aggressiveness from S1 to S3. Now that is no longer the case
32
For more on behavioral signatures, see Shoda et al. 1994: 6758, Mischel and Shoda 1995:
249, 251, 255, 258, 1998: 242, 245, 2008: 208, 224, 228, 233, Shoda and Mischel 1996: 419,
Mischel 1999a: 459, 1999b: 44, 2004: 8, 1011, 16, 2009: 285, Shoda 1999a: 160, 1999b: 366,
Cervone and Shoda 1999a: 21, Caprara and Cervone 2000: 80, Shoda and LeeTiernan 2002: 245,
264, Mischel et al. 2002: 51, Fournier et al. 2008, 2009, Smith et al. 2009, and van Mechelen 2009.
33
For these next few proles, I have been helped by van Mechelen 2009.
5
Aggressiveness 4
0
S1 S2 S3
Three Situations
Larry Sam
given the divergence with S3. For instance, this might be an obedience
situation, and Larry may have much stronger desires to obey authority gures
than Sam does.
Proles also help to illustrate the importance of comparing the behavior of
two people in a number of different situations before drawing any conclusions
about their comparative degree of trait possession. For instance, consider a
prole like this in Figure 2.10.
5
Aggressiveness
0
S1 S2 S3
Three Situations
Larry Sam
If we just observed Larry and Sam in S1 and S3, we might come to think that
they have a Mixed Aggression Trait to the same degree. But this could be false,
and a situation like S2 helps to show that.
Just as we nd a great deal of within-person variability from one situation to
the next in any single person with a Mixed Aggression Trait, so too would we
expect to nd that variability when we look at populations of individuals.
The next prole in Figure 2.11 offers a (once again ctional) representation of
that idea.
Average Level of Aggressiveness 5

During Second Hour
4
0
0 1 2 3 4 5
Average Level of Aggressiveness During First Hour
Figure 2.11 Average level of aggressiveness for 20 people over two hours
Here there is a great deal of variation for most of these individuals from one
hour to the next. Knowing how aggressive they each have been during the rst
hour does little to accurately predict how aggressive they will be in the next. As
we can see, their level of aggressiveness could dramatically uctuate up or
down, or just stay the same. This is reected in the line running through the
middle of the prole, which illustrates the lack of signicant statistical correl-
ation between the levels of helpfulness during the two time periods.
But things change if we take a broader perspective. Now for each person,
rst collect reports of his or her level of aggressiveness in each of the many
situations relevant to harming others over several months or years. Then take
any random half of those reports and average the level of aggressiveness. Next
take the other half of the reports and average them too. Finally compare the
average levels of aggressiveness to assess split-half reliability. Do this again for
each of the twenty people. According to my framework, a different prole
(Figure 2.12) is likely to emerge.
Average Level of Aggressiveness
5
for Second Half of Reports
0
0 1 2 3 4 5
Average Level of Aggressiveness for One Half of Reports
Figure 2.12 Average level of aggressiveness for 20 people over many situations
First note how each person is different from the next, which illustrates again
how twenty people can have the same Mixed Trait, and yet because it comes in
degrees, it manifests itself in different ways. But also note how despite this
diversity, there is still remarkable consistency over time in the average levels of
aggressivenessthis time the line shows a signicant correlation.34
To summarize, we can add the following to the picture of Mixed Traits:
(27) The possession of a Mixed Trait comes in degrees of more or less, and two
people can both possess a Mixed Trait and still exhibit signicant differences
in their patterns of relevant behavior in the same nominal situations.
2. 6 CON CLU SI ON
This chapter has offered an overview of my framework of Mixed Traits, a

framework which I claim is empirically more plausible as an account of the
moral character traits had by most people than is the claim that we have the
traditional moral virtues or the traditional vices or some combination of
the two. Of course there is much more that could be said in further developing
the framework. For instance, in Moral Character I also address:
Prediction: Mixed Traits can serve as the basis for reliable predictions of relevant
behavior.
Generality: Mixed Traits can exist and function in narrower ways so that they do
not apply to an entire moral domain such as helping or harming, but just to some
more restricted aspect of that domain.
Awareness: Mixed Traits can function at both the conscious and the subconscious
levels.
Fortunately we will not need these additional points in what is to come, and so
I have omitted them from this chapter.
If my view is correct, then thankfully most of us are not cruel, dishonest,
greedy, or otherwise vicious people. But we also have a long way to go before
being eligible to have the virtues.
34
In this gure, I have been helped by Fleeson 2004: 86.
3
Illustrating the Framework: Cheating
The previous chapter provided an overview of my framework of Mixed Traits.

To help illustrate that framework and appreciate how it ts well with the
available data in psychology, this chapter examines some of the leading
research on cheating. It also complements the discussion of helping, harming,
and lying in Moral Character.
Section one focuses on cheating behavior, and section two looks at motiv-
ation to cheat. Section three then draws on this research to sketch a picture of
character in this area of our moral lives, a picture that ends up looking just like
what one would expect on my Mixed Trait approach. Finally section four
offers several reasons for why we should reject the widespread possession of
either the virtue of honesty or the vice of dishonesty.
3.1 CHEATING BEHAVIOR
By cheating behavior I will mean behavior which intentionally breaks the

relevant rules in a situation (whether moral or non-moral) in order to gain an
advantage using deceit or fraud. Athletes who use performance-enhancing
drugs are intentionally and deceitfully breaking certain rules of their respective
sports in order to acquire a competitive edge. Taxpayers who underreport
their income are intentionally breaking tax rules in order to benet nancially
in a fraudulent way. Students who plagiarize their essays are intentionally
breaking educational rules in order to come out ahead academically while
representing the work as their own. And so on. Note that this characterization
does not require that the cheater be the one who necessarily is getting the
advantage. A student may let a friend copy his homework, for instance, not for
the students own academic advantage, but for that of his friends.1
1
I do not claim that the characterization of cheating behavior I have offered provides either
strictly necessary or sufcient conditions. Perhaps, for instance, there are cases of cheating where
a person breaks the relevant rules, but does so unintentionally. Or perhaps some cheating can be
Illustrating the Framework: Cheating 63
As compared to lying, discrete incidents of cheating are less frequent, since
they often require more planning, effort, and time to carry out than do at least
simple everyday lies. At the same time there seems to be evidence from a
variety of sources that most human beings today are in fact disposed to
regularly cheat when the relevant opportunities arise. At an anecdotal level,
the news is lled with stories of cheating. In the nancial world, prominent
leaders such as Charles Rangel, Bernard Madoff, and Kenneth Lay have been
found guilty of fraud, embezzlement, and the like. In the athletic world,
numerous football, baseball, and cycling stars have been suspended for doping.
Extramarital affairs are commonplace among celebritiesBill Clinton, John
F. Kennedy, Tiger Woods, Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, Elizabeth Taylor,
Prince Charles, Kobe Bryant, and Jude Law headline a long list.
More systematic attempts to document cheating behavior are found in the
now sizable research literature on academic cheating. Three recent studies
reported that, at the time, the average cheating rate of students while in college
was 70 percent, 86 percent, and 60 percent respectively.2 Apparently these
rates have increased dramatically over time, with Ogilby (1995) reporting
an increase in self-reported college cheating from 23 percent in 1940 to
84 percent in 1982. Yet according to one study, of the students who say that
they cheated, only roughly 3 percent report getting caught.3
Rather than just report broad averages, here are two more focused studies.
S. Kukolja Taradi and colleagues (2010) surveyed medical school students in
Croatia about their academic cheating while in high school. Out of 472
participants, only three reported that they had never cheated in one of the
nine ways listed on the questionnaire, and 78 percent said they had cheated
often in at least one of these ways.4 For instance, on Getting exam questions
from someone who already has taken the test, 94 percent admitted to doing
this at least once but only 5 percent considered it serious cheating, while
28 percent said it was not cheating at all and 46 percent considered it trivial
cheating. Similarly, 90 percent admitted to Copying from another student
during a test or exam with his/her knowledge, with only 4 percent counting
this as serious. In fact, even 68 percent said yes to Taking a test for someone
else, but still only 33 percent saw this as serious cheating.5
bald-faced without deceit or fraud. My goal here is only to offer a characterization which
encompasses most of the familiar cases from ordinary life and from the psychology literature
on cheating.
2
See Klein et al. 2007, McCabe et al. 2006, and Rokovski and Levy 2007.
3
Singhal 1982. For additional data on academic cheating, see Smith et al. 1972: 644, 646,
Haines et al. 1986: 345, McCabe and Trevio 1993, 1997, Faulkender et al. 1994, Newstead et al.
1996, McCabe et al. 2001, Samuels and Casebeer 2005: 83, Anderman and Murdock 2007,
Williams et al. 2010, Simkin and McLeod 2010, ORourke et al. 2010: 53, 55, and Taradi
et al. 2010.
4 5
Taradi et al. 2010: 667. Taradi et al. 2010: 668.
An even more focused study by Patricia Faulkender and her colleagues
(1994) had to do with an incident of cheating in an introductory psychology
course at the University of Southern Mississippi. The second test of the
semester was stolen from the printer and photocopied in mass. Compared
to the rst test, students nished taking this exam comparatively early and
scored much higher. A formal investigation was launched, and a mandatory
retake announced. Faulkender decided to survey the 633 enrolled students,
and found that 22 percent anonymously self-reported cheating using a copy of
the test, while an additional 35 percent reported that they would have gotten a
copy of the test if they had been given a chance to. So 57 percent reported that
they were highly disposed to cheat on this test if they could get away with it.
Similarly, students in a math course at the same university (where this time
there was no evidence of cheating) were asked if they would get a stolen
copy of their test ahead of time if given a chance, and 49 percent said that
they would.6
The upshot of this and other research on academic cheating is that such
cheating is widespread among at least Western students today. As Valerie
Haines and her colleagues remark in an often cited paper, cheating at college
campuses is an epidemic, and I suspect most researchers in the eld would
agree.7 But there is nothing special about academic cheating per se. Rather, the
evidence suggests that most people are disposed to cheat in a variety of
circumstances, whether these are academic, athletic, nancial, or some other
setting. These dispositions, furthermore, can be explored in controlled experi-
mental settings, as a number of published studies have shown. I will only
briey mention two examples in this section.8
Edward Diener and Mark Wallbom (1976) had participants take an ana-
gram test, only about half of which could be completed during the ve-minute
time limit. The experimenter informed each participant that he would have to
leave for ten minutes in order to help other participants, and he then set a
timer bell for ve minutes with the warning to Remember not to go any
further after the bell rings.9 A two-way mirror off to one side of the partici-
pant was used to see whether he or she would indeed stop after ve minutes.
6
Faulkender et al. 1994: 212.
7
Haines et al. 1986: 342. Murdock and Stephens describe cheating as rampant across
society (2007: 248), while DeSteno and Valdesolo call it rampant and commonplace,
practically expected (2011: 173).
8
In addition to the below, see also Jacobson et al. 1970, Dienstbier and Munter 1971, Houston
1978, Bloodgood et al. 2008, Vohs and Schooler 2008, Mazar et al. 2008a, Gino and Pierce 2009,
Gino et al. 2009, 2011, Mead et al. 2009, Zhong et al. 2010, Gillath et al. 2010, and Gino and
Margolis 2011, although many more studies could be cited. See Blasi 1980: 213 for a review of
some earlier studies.
9
Diener and Wallbom 1976: 109.
Seventy-one percent of participants kept going after the bell sounded.10 This
was actually the control group for the study; I will return to the experimental
group in the next section.
In one of the conditions in a recent study by Lisa Shu and her colleagues
(2011), participants received $10, a worksheet with 20 problems, and a
collection sheet where they recorded their performance on the problems.
They were given four minutes to do the problems (which was not long enough
by design), and were told that they could keep $0.50 per right answer. In the
control condition, the experimenter checked the answers and oversaw pay-
ment. In the shredder condition, the participants were told to count the
number of correct answers, record this total on the collection sheet, shred
their worksheet, and then pay themselves the correct amount. The experi-
menter did not check any of this. In other words, participants in the shredder
condition could write down whatever number of correct answers they wanted,
get paid accordingly, and no one would know the difference. Here were the
resullts:11
No opportunity to cheat 7.97 problems answered correctly (group average)

Opportunity to cheat 13.22 problems answered correctly (group average)
It is hard to believe that the participants in the second group were that much
better at anagram problems! Rather, on average they clearly took advantage of
an opportunity to cheat and get away with it.
In sum, while I have only focused on the details of four studies in this
section, they are representative of many additional ndings in the research
literature. Cheating appears to be widespread, and can be evoked in most of us
given the right situations.12
10
Diener and Wallbom 1976: 110. It could be that many of these participants went over the
time limit by just a little bit in order to nish the problem they were working on. However,
Diener and Wallbom also recorded the number of responses completed after the time period,
and the mean number of cheating responses was 2.71 (110).
A recent study by Bargh et al. (2001) had a similar setup. Fifty-seven percent of participants
who received a high-performance goal prime continued to work even after they were told to stop
through the intercom system, whereas only 22 percent of controls did (1022). See also their
experiment 5 where 66 percent of the primed participants cheated (1023).
11
Shu et al. 2011: 339.
12
One notable omission in this discussion is the famous studies by Hartshorne and May
1928. In part this is because I want to look at more recent work on cheating which is carried out
with the benet of the latest statistical and theoretical resources in psychology. In part I also want
to examine data on cheating for adults, rather than the schoolchildren who were the participants
in this research. For similar reasons for not focusing on Hartshorne and Mays research in the
context of better understanding character and virtue, see Doris 2002: 63 and Webber 2006a: 652.
See also the concerns raised by Epstein 1979: 1101 and Sreenivasan 2002: 5560.
3 . 2 CH E A T I N G AN D M O T I V A T I O N
Why do so many of us go down this path of cheating? What is the best

research evidence on the motives behind such behavior? There does not
appear to be a simple story to tell here. A person can cheat in very different
ways for the same reason, and two people can cheat in the same way for very
different reasons.
To begin to make sense of cheating motivation, let me start with the
important point that most people say they believe cheating in general is
wrong, as are various specic forms of cheating such as copying off another
persons test. So the correct moral beliefs seem to be there, and often they can
lead to motivation to not cheat when an opportunity arises.
One way to examine the presence and role of moral beliefs with respect to
cheating is to conduct experiments which manipulate their salience. For
instance, Nina Mazar and her colleagues (2008a) ran an experiment in
which members of the control group rst had to write down the names of
ten books they read in high school (non-moral reminder), while the experi-
mental group had to write down from memory the Ten Commandments
(moral reminder). Then they completed a problem solving task with 20
problems that had a similar design as the Shu studyeither an experimenter
checked their results, or they recycled their worksheet and could submit
an answer sheet with any number of correct answers they wanted to
without the experimenter checking. It turned out that for the control condi-
tion it did not matter which recall task was performedan average of 3.1
problems was solved. However, when books were recalled in the recycling
condition, cheating was noticeably higher (4.2 problems solved). But when
the Ten Commandments were recalled in the recycling condition, perfor-
mance dropped to an average of 2.8 problems solvedthe lowest of all.13
The implication should be clear enoughthe moral reminder served to
make the importance of moral standards increasingly salient to the person,
and so in his own mind made it much more difcult to justify doing the wrong
thing by cheating. So the beliefs against cheating appear to be there, alright,
but often we seem to not be mindful or aware of them at least in some ethical
situations.14
This particular study may not be very applicable to preventing cheating in
real-world situations, but it does relate to an important topic in discussions of
academic cheating, namely the use of an honor code. Studies have repeatedly
found that honor codes are correlated with reduced rates of cheating.
For instance, during 199091, Donald McCabe and Linda Trevio (1993)
found that 28 percent of college students at schools without an honor code
13 14
Mazar et al. 2008a: 636. Mazar et al. 2008a: 635.
self-reported helping another person on a test, whereas only 9 percent did
at schools with an honor code. Similar trends were found with plagiarism
(18 percent versus 7 percent), unauthorized crib notes (21 percent versus
9 percent), and unpermitted collaboration (39 percent versus 21 percent),
among other forms of cheating.15 In particular, they found that to be effective,
an honor code cannot be, in their words, mere window dressing, but rather,
a truly effective code must be well implemented and strongly embedded in
the student culture.16
In fact, a signicant effect of honor codes on cheating behavior has been
shown to exist even in simple laboratory manipulations. In another study
Mazar varied the initial setup by dropping the recall task, and having the
control condition just involve the experimenter checking the participants
performance on the task. The recycle condition was as before in providing
an opportunity to cheat. But now in a third recycle + honor code condition, at
the top of the test sheet was the statement, I understand that this short survey
falls under MITs [Yales] honor system, under which participants had to
print and sign their name.17 No threat of external punishment was at work
here, Mazar reasoned, since neither school did in fact have an honor code at
the time.18 Here were the results:19
Solved matrices Solved matrices

($0.50 per correct answer) ($2 per correct answer)
Control condition 3.4 3.2

Recycle condition 6.1 5.0
Recycle + HC condition 3.1 3.0
15
See McCabe et al. 2001: 224. Part of the explanation that McCabe and Trevio (1993)
provide for this effect is that, wrongdoing is more clearly dened under honor code systems.
When the denition of wrongdoing is made clear, it becomes more difcult for potential cheaters
to rationalize and justify cheating behavior, and the incidence of cheating may be lower as a
result (525).
16
McCabe et al. 2001: 224. For additional discussion and data on honor codes and cheating,
see McCabe and Trevio 1993, McCabe et al. 2001, and Thorkildsen et al. 2007: 191. For related
discussion of the effects of formal ethics instruction (such as courses on business ethics) on
cheating behavior, see Bloodgood et al. 2008.
17
Mazar et al. 2008a: 637.
18
They also replicated the experiment at an institution with a strict honor code, and found
similar results (Mazar et al. 2008a).
19
Mazar et al. 2008a. In the study by Shu and her colleagues (2011) that was reported in the
previous section, they also varied the role of an honor code, although in the honor code
conditions participants only read rather than signed the code. In the recycle plus no honor
code condition, participants reported 13.22 problems solved on average, versus 10.03 in the
recycle plus read honor code condition. Still, this was higher than the 7.97 problems in the
control condition with no honor code (Shu et al. 2011: 339). Merely reading versus signing an
honor code perhaps makes a difference, which will be explored in more detail in section four.
So even though nothing changed in the third condition in terms of their ability
to get away with cheating, participants on average performed even slightly
worse than the controls. Nor did the additional reward of $2 per correct
answer seem to tempt them to cheat.
Suppose that most people do in fact think that cheating is morally wrong in
general and/or in a variety of particular cases.20 Nevertheless, despite the
presence of these beliefs, cheating is still rampant. What explains the disparity?
There is no single answer; different motives to cheat will be at work in different
individuals and situations. But let me at least mention a few broad categories
of motivational factors. One is a desire to cheat so as to avoid failure (and,
relatedly, embarrassment or shame).21 Another is a desire to cheat in order to
succeed or to achieve certain competitive advantages, ambitious goals, or other
benets.22 Still another is a desire to cheat because cheating (or the risk of
getting caught) is fun or interesting.23
These desires can be lumped together as broadly egoistic, involving the costs
and benets for the person (so he thinks) if he were to successfully cheat. At
the same time, there are the moral norms which stand in opposition to these
desires and which oppose cheating. So when these two elements are brought
together, the natural motivational story to tell is that a person will have greater
motivation to comply with her moral norms if the perceived net benets of
cheating in this situation do not outweigh the perceived net benets of doing
the morally right thing. On the other hand, if the person thinks it is more
benecial to cheat instead of doing the morally right thing, then there will be
greater overall motivation to cheat.
This is a fairly commonplace storydoing the morally right thing comes
into psychological tension in some cases with what is thought to promote self-
interest.24 And, while not strictly entailed by that story, one might nevertheless
have thought that the following would also be true: if people know they can get
20
See also Haines et al. 1986, Murdock and Stephens 2007: 229, Gino et al. 2009, ORourke
et al. 2010, and DeSteno and Valdesolo 2011: 173.
21
See, e.g. Jacobson et al. 1970, Smith et al. 1972, Newstead et al. 1996: 233, Murdock and
Stephens 2007: 244, Thorkildsen et al. 2007: 193, and Rick and Loewenstein 2008. Jacobson also
introduces a role for being motivated to cheat so as to maintain a certain image, say as a
successful person (1970: 54).
22
See, e.g. Smith et al. 1972, Newstead et al. 1996, Thorkildsen et al. 2007: 192, Murdock and
Stephens 2007: 248, Rick and Loewenstein 2008: 646, Williams et al. 2010: 299303, Simkin and
McLeod 2010, DeSteno and Valdesolo 2011: 172, and Gino and Margolis 2011. For related
discussion of motives to cheat, see Newstead et al. 1996 and McCabe et al. 2001: 228.
23
See, e.g. Tibbetts 1997, Nagin and Pogarsky 2003, and Thorkildsen et al. 2007: 183.
24
For a nice example of this story being told by psychologists about cheating, see Smith et al.
1972. As they note, Clearly moral rules are not the only determinants of moral behavior,
expectations of gain or punishment also play an important role. A person who believes cheating
is immoral may nevertheless cheat if the expected gain is sufciently great, while a person who
does not regard cheating as wrong may, nevertheless, refrain from cheating because of fear of
punishment (656).
away with it, those who would cheat because they think it is in their own self-
interest would not just cheat a little bit, but would try to benet themselves as
much as they could. For instance, they might maximize their nancial gain or
their athletic advantage.
Yet look back at the Mazar results abovean average of 3.1 problems were
solved in the control conditions, while 4.2 problems were solved in the
recycling condition. But this was out of 20 total problems! Since the experi-
menter would not know the difference, why didnt participants in the recycle
condition push the limit more and thereby immediately earn greater nancial
rewards for themselves, knowing full well that their cheating would go un-
detected? Similarly in their honor code study, the recycle condition with a
$0.50 payout per correct answer had a higher average score (6.1 problems
solved) when compared to the recycle condition with a $2.00 payout
(5 problems solved). Why did the second group only stop at an average of
ve out of 20 problems? Indeed Mazar ran another study with four different
payments ($0.10, $0.50, $2.50, and $5)there was some dishonesty compared
to controls in the rst two recycle groups, but none in comparison to controls
for the last two groups.25 In fact, across six experiments and 791 participants,
only ve people were found to cheat the maximum amount.26 Their behavior
at least makes sense to us; everyone elses behavior is puzzling!27
The explanation that Mazar and others have proposed to solve this puzzle,28
and which I will also adopt here as well, is that these participants were typically
willing to cheat so long as doing so did not threaten their conception of
themselves as honest. In other words, while they wanted some of the benets
of cheating (in this case nancial rewards), the increased marginal benet for
themselves at a certain point was not enough to outweigh how important it
was to them to continue seeing themselves as honest.
This leads to a revision to the simple story about cheating motivation. It is
not just that most people have a desire to cheat when the benets of complying
with the relevant moral norms against cheating are (signicantly) outweighed
by the costs. Rather, it is that they have such a desire to cheat, while also
desiring, as much as possible, to still appear to be moral both to others and to
25 26
Mazar et al. 2008a: 642. Mazar et al. 2008a: 643.
27
For similar results, see also Vohs and Schooler 2008: 52, Gino et al. 2009, 2011, Mead et al.
2009: 5956, Zhong et al. 2010: 312, Gino and Margolis 2011, and Shu et al. 2011. One
hypothesis that would be in line with the original model has to do with fear of detection.
When the payments are larger, perhaps participants feared that the experimenters will somehow
gure out that they are cheating if they claim to have solved 15 problems (which would make for
a sizable reward), and so limit their cheating to try to minimize detection. Mazar tested this
hypothesis in another study by (mis)informing participants that the average student solves eight
problems in the time limit. But even then, the average number of problems solved in the recycle
condition was only 4.8, which was higher than for controls (3.4) but less than what they could
have claimed without looking out of the ordinary (Mazar et al. 2008a: 640).
28
Mazar et al. 2008a, 2008b.
themselves. People, in other words, tend to care about thinking of themselves
as honest.29 That will be quite difcult to do if they are also aggressively
cheating whenever the opportunity arises.30
Let me take this thought one step further. In the last section, the Diener and
Wallbom (1976) study was reviewed which found that 71 percent of partici-
pants cheated by going over their ve minute time limit when alone complet-
ing an anagram test. This, as I mentioned, was the result for the control group.
In the experimental group, the participants were seated directly in front of the
two-way mirror and, thus saw themselves whenever they glanced up.31 The
result? Only 7 percent of participants cheated in this condition.32 This is a
startling difference, and the preceding discussion can help make sense of it.
Surely most of the participants in the control group had certain moral
norms against cheating that were to some degree salient to themafter all,
they had been told directly and more than once to not go over the ve minute
limit. Yet most of them did. Why? Because the benets for themselves of
cheating outweighed the benets of doing the right thing, and there was a
negligible risk of being caught since the experimenter had left the room. But
what about the threat that such behavior would have to continuing to see
themselves as honest people? Surely it would be hard to maintain such a self-
concept while continuing to work after the buzzer goes off.
This is where a kind of self-deception comes into play.33 If a person can
(subconsciously) deceive himself into not comparing this act of cheating with
his moral norms, then the threat to his self-concept is diminished. That is why
a seemingly trivial variable like the placement of a mirror can have such a
dramatic effect on behavior. The mirror gives the person much less room to
hide. With increased self-awareness, the difference between what the persons
moral beliefs require and his temptation to cheat is made especially salient, so
that it becomes that much more difcult for participants to deceive themselves
into thinking they are still honest.
This proposal can also shed more light on why the saliency of a moral norm,
as in the Ten Commandments recall study, can have such an impact on
improving compliance with that norm. Part of the reason might simply be
that when salience is increased, it reliably increases motivation to comply with
the norm. But now I think we can also say that increased salience makes it
even harder to perform actions which would threaten a persons conception of
29
For studies related to the extent and importance of thinking of oneself as honest, see
Gordon and Miller 2000: 47.
30
For a similar story about lying as opposed to cheating, see Gordon and Miller 2000: 467.
31
Diener and Wallbom 1976: 109. There was also an audio manipulation as well in the
experimental condition which was designed to increase self-awareness.
32
Diener and Wallbom 1976: 110.
33
I also explore the same idea in Moral Character, chapter four, with regard to Daniel
Batsons studies of moral hypocrisy (Batson et al. 1999).
herself as honest. As Mazar writes, when moral standards are more accessible,
people will need to confront the meaning of their actions more readily and
therefore be more honest.34
Two nal points about the importance of thinking of oneself as honest are
worth noting. The rst is that this proposal should not be taken too far. Clearly
some people do aggressively cheat. If the perceived benets to the self from
cheating are so great (unlike in the simple experimental setups where only a
small amount of money was at stake), then they can trump both motivation to
comply with the moral norms against cheating and motivation to continue to
think of oneself as honest.35 Such a person might concede that he was being
dishonest, but also claim that it was worth it.
Secondly, self-deception is only one way in which people can continue to
maintain their self-image as honest while cheating. Another common strategy
is to rationalize their behavior. They can say that, for instance, copying
homework for a friend is not really wrong. That may be what is going on
with the Croatian medical students, the majority of whom admitted to repeat
cheating but who did not see even getting test questions from someone who
had already taken the test as serious cheating.36 Or another approach to
rationalizing behavior is to take advantage of ambiguity and use certain
categories as opposed to others in order to label an action so that it does not
seem (as) morally problematic.37
Yet another strategy for maintaining the self-concept is to lessen or deny
personal responsibility for the cheating, perhaps by saying that everyone else is
doing the same thing. In fact, the extent to which other students are thought to
be cheating is one of the leading predictors of the likelihood that a given
student will engage in academic cheating.38 And still other strategies, such as
34
Mazar et al. 2008a: 635.
35
For relevant discussion, see Mazar et al. 2008a: 642, 2008b: 651 and Rick and Loewenstein
2008: 646.
36
As Taradi writes, most students did not see their cheating actions as out of the ordinary or
morally wrong (Taradi et al. 2010: 669).
37
See Mazar et al. 2008a. For instance, in another study they added a recycle+token
condition to the familiar recycle and control conditions from earlier. In this condition, partici-
pants would earn one token per correct solution, which would then be exchanged moments later
for money. The thought was that a token could lead to a more ambiguous interpretation of ones
action as to whether it is really morally wrong, thereby leading to increased cheating. And this is
what they foundthe group averages for problems solved were 3.5 (control), 6.2 (recycle), and
9.4 (recycle + token) (638).
38
See Smith et al. 1972: 655, Haines et al. 1986: 3501, McCabe and Trevio 1993: 5278,
5323, 1997: 3834, 3912, Newstead et al. 1996: 233, 239, McCabe et al. 2001: 222, Taradi et al.
2010: 669, DeSteno and Valdesolo 2011: 1725, and especially ORourke et al. 2010. For
controlled experiments which examine the effect of peer cheating on nancial rather than
academic cheating behavior, see Gino et al. 2009. For denial of responsibility and cheating
more generally, see Murdock and Stephens 2007: 23843.
denying that cheating occurred at all or blaming the accuser, are no doubt
employed as well.39
Before ending this section, I want to register one corrective to the picture
about cheating motivation which has been sketched here. That motivation has
been connected to egoistic benets for the person doing the cheating. But not
all cheating is aimed at immediately beneting the person who cheats. For
instance, in academic contexts many students give their homework to a
classmate to copy, or let a friend see his answers during a test. Stephen
Newstead and his colleagues (1996), for instance, surveyed 943 students and
found that 14 percent of those who admitted to cheating gave as one of their
reasons, to help a friend.40 They also found that 16 percent of these students
reported doing another students coursework, and 29 percent marked another
students work more generously than it deserved.41 Such actions can signi-
cantly help out the other person, to be sure, but they do not immediately
benet the cheater. Of course it does not follow that other-oriented cheating is
ultimately motivated by altruistic concerns, a topic which I will return to in
section four.
For now, I have sketched a picture of motivation to cheat which is sup-
ported by a number of recent studies and which should also apply to many
cases of actual cheating behavior.
3.3 CHEATING AND CHARACTER
Let me try to combine this research on behavior and motivation into a story
about what character looks like in this part of the lives of most of us. In
particular I will focus on the nature of the character trait which I claim most
people possess, as well as how it can be enhanced and inhibited.
This trait is not honesty and it is also not dishonesty with respect to
cheating, for reasons which will be offered in the next section. Not surpris-
ingly, I will call it a Mixed Cheating Trait. It is mixed because it has both
morally positive and morally negative features. It is a cheating trait because
39
These are all strategies for what is often called neutralization or moral disengagement.
While I have focused on strategies that are employed after the performance of an action the
person believes is wrong, neutralization can occur before, during, or after such behavior (Haines
et al. 1986: 344, 346 and Shu et al. 2011: 3302). For related discussion in the context of cheating,
see Haines et al. 1986, Faulkender et al. 1994: 215, Newstead et al. 1996: 229, McCabe et al. 2001:
227, Murdock and Stephens 2007: 23348, Simkin and McLeod 2010: 444, ORourke et al. 2010,
and Taradi et al. 2010: 669. For more general discussion of mechanisms of neutralization and
moral disengagement, see in particular Sykes and Matza 1957, Bandura et al. 1996, Murdock
and Stephens 2007, and Shu et al. 2011.
40 41
Newstead et al. 1996: 233. Newstead et al. 1996: 232.
it consists of all the widely held mental state dispositions to form beliefs and
desires which directly pertain to cheating and refraining from cheating.
What more specically is the makeup of this trait? The story offered above
about motivation to cheat can be used here, and it involves dispositions to
form beliefs and desires of at least the following kinds:
(a) Beliefs and desires concerned with cheating in order to avoid personal
failure, embarrassment, and so forth.
(b) Beliefs and desires concerned with not cheating in order to avoid
getting caught, punished, and so forth.
(c) Beliefs and desires concerned with achieving various goals or forms of
enjoyment (for oneself and others) by cheating.
(d) Beliefs and desires concerned with various benets (for oneself and
others) of following moral norms against cheating.
(e) Beliefs and desires concerned with various costs (for oneself and others)
of not following moral norms against cheating, such as potential social
disapproval, guilt, lost trust, and so forth.
(f) Beliefs concerned with how to weigh these various costs and benets.
(g) Desire concerned with not cheating when the benets of cheating do
not (signicantly) outweigh the costs.
(h) Desires concerned with cheating when the benets of cheating (signi-
cantly) outweigh the costs, while also desiring as much as possible to
still be thought of as an honest person by oneself and others.
On this way of thinking, most people are motivated to cheat when doing the
right thing is not worth it to them. However, while they want to cheat, they do
not want to appear as cheaters. In other words, they want to be able to cheat
when that is benecial to them, but still be thought of as honest people and,
what is also important, still think of themselves as honest people.
With these kinds of mental state dispositions at work, it is no wonder that most
peoples behavior in this area of their lives will appear to be highly fragmented.
Sometimes they will cheat and sometimes they will not, depending on how the
features of a given situation interact with their psychologies. In addition, there are
factors that tend to enhance or inhibit that cheating, including:42
Anticipated detection/punishment
Anticipated failure
Anticipated guilt43
Activated moral norms
42
This list is nowhere near exhaustive. For instance, there may be an inhibitory relation
between anticipated fear and cheating (see Dienstbier and Munter 1971). See also Gillath et al.
2010 (8512) on insecurity and cheating.
43
See Dienstbier and Munter 1971 and Bandura et al. 1996.
Indeed, these variables can function as both enhancers and inhibitors
anticipated punishment, for instance, can enhance cheating (if cheating is
thought to be a means of avoiding the punishment), or have the opposite effect
(if the person will likely get caught and punished for cheating).44
The psychological functioning of activated moral norms, which can serve as
an inhibitor of cheating if the norms themselves oppose such behavior,45
deserves special mention. The story here in broad outline is the following:46
Appropriate background conditions

#
Activation of one or more moral norms relevant to the persons cheating
#
Motive to comply with these norms
+
Potential beliefs about other actions available to the person besides cheating
#
Activation of the persons Mixed Cheating Trait
(Cost/benet assessment and additional motives to support or avoid complying
with these moral norms depending on the assessment)
#
Increased motivation to not cheat
#
Decreased cheating behavior
Let me clarify a few of these steps.

As examples of appropriate background conditions, the person must think
(whether consciously or not) that there is an opportunity for him to cheat in
the rst place. Also, activation of moral norms against cheating is expected to
be correlated with, among other things, whether these are personal norms (as
opposed to merely social norms), the persons level of moral identity,47 and
whether he thinks he is able to cheat or not.48 Recent work also suggests that a
44
For anticipated punishment as an inhibitor, see Haines et al. 1986: 3467, McCabe and
Trevio 1993: 527, 1997: 384, 391, Newstead et al. 1996: 233, Murdock and Stephens 2007: 234,
Rick and Loewenstein 2008: 647, ORourke et al. 2010: 63, and Williams et al. 2010: 299303. For
the claim that the anticipation or probability of being caught, independently of the severity of the
punishment, is a signicant inhibitor, see Nagin and Pogarsky 2003, Thorkildsen et al. 2007: 194,
and Mazar et al. 2008b: 652.
45
See, e.g. Smith et al. 1972: 652, Newstead et al. 1996: 233, Williams et al. 2010: 299303,
ORourke et al. 2010, and Simkin and McLeod 2010: 444, 447.
46
This story parallels what is said in Moral Character, chapters four and nine about the role
of activated moral norms in inuencing a persons helping and not harming others.
47 48
See Gino et al. 2011. See ORourke et al. 2010.
belief in free will is important, as participants who were inuenced by a deter-
ministic message showed increased cheating behavior.49 Similarly studies have
suggested a relationship between self-control resources and cheatingwhen self-
control is exercised in one task, then cheating behavior tends to increase if the
next task provides an opportunity to cheat.50 Finally, the extent of cheating that a
person thinks is going on around him also deserves to be mentioned here, as
thoughts of pervasive cheating can suppress activation and even lead to the
revising of a persons moral norms against cheating.51 Of course, these are only a
few of the many background conditions that are relevant here.52
Activation of the relevant moral normssuch as the norm that it is morally
wrong to cheat on ones taxesis a matter of going from a state where the
person is disposed to believe this about a norm that he holds in memory, to a
state where the belief is occurrent and relevant to psychological processing
about the cheating opportunity. Note that activation does not require con-
scious awareness of the norm by the personhe could be led away from
cheating by his belief that cheating on his taxes is morally wrong, without
paying much attention to that belief or even giving it any thought.
The most important part of the above model is what is to be found in the
persons Mixed Cheating Trait. This includes the mental states from earlier in
this section which are concerned with costs and benets such as those which
arise by his doing what the moral norm says and not cheating on his taxes. For
instance, one benet could be avoiding guilt, whereas one cost could be the lost
money. But another relevant part of the Mixed Cheating Trait is the desire to
still be thought of as an honest person by himself and others. If he only cheats
in a limited way, then that might not threaten his self-concept, but not
reporting thousands of dollars of income could be a different story. The
upshot once all these considerations are taken into account is that, if he is
like most people, he will be increasingly motivated initially to not cheat as a
result of his moral norm becoming more salient, but whether he does end up
cheating or not is another matter.
Other features of Mixed Cheating Traits could be elaborated on herethey
are stable and cross-situationally consistent in certain ways, they can differ
49
See Vohs and Schooler 2008.
50
See Mead et al. 2009 and Gino et al. 2011. For instance, Mead and her colleagues had
participants in the depletion condition write a short essay without the letters A and N, followed
by the familiar problem-solving setup with recycle and experimenter-score conditions. The
number of reported correct answers was 104 percent greater in the depleted recycle condition
than in the depleted experimenter-score condition (595).
51
See ORourke et al. 2010 and especially Gino et al. 2009.
52
See, e.g. Zhong et al. 2010 on anonymity and cheating. For a more systematic treatment of
background conditions with respect to moral agency in general, see Bandura et al. 1996. For a
classic early discussion of some background conditions that otherwise could lead to the neutral-
izing of moral norms, see Sykes and Matza 1957. I discuss background conditions more in Moral
Character, chapter four.
from one person to the next, they vary in their generality, they often carry out
their psychological processing without conscious awareness, and so forth. But
I will pass over these details here.53 The main point is that my Mixed Trait
framework can be extended to the moral domain of cheating as well.
3.4 CHEATING AND VIRTUE
To me anyone who behaves and is motivated to act in the ways described in

sections one through three, is clearly not honest (with respect to cheating). At
the same time, although perhaps less clearly, such a person is not dishonest
either (again, with respect to cheating). To try to support both of these claims,
I will adopt my usual approach of articulating various standards that are in the
minimum threshold for the virtues and vices in question, in this case honesty
and dishonesty. These are standards that must be satised in order to be
eligible to even have them weakly.
But rst, here is one more study which ties together much of the previous
discussion of cheating and which can be used to help focus the evaluation of
peoples moral character. In another study by Shu and her colleagues (2011),
there was also the control and recycle conditions, as well as the no-honor-code
and sign-honor-code conditions. Shu added another variation, where partici-
pants read but did not sign the honor code. In addition, the experimenters
secretly coded each test sheet so that they could recover them from the recycle
containers later and match them up with the answer sheets. That way they
could not only calculate group averages but also determine exactly who did
and did not cheat. Finally, in the post-test questionnaire participants were
asked, among other things, a few questions designed to test their memory of
what the honor code said. Here were some of the results:54
Reported problems solved Actual Honor code items
No opportunity to cheat
No honor code 7.79 7.79
Read honor code 7.39 7.39 3.39
Sign honor code 7.38 7.38 4.00
Opportunity to cheat
No honor code 13.09 7.61
Read honor code 10.05 7.23 2.82
Sign honor code 7.91 7.45 4.27
53
For recent work on predictions of cheating behavior which is very much in line with my
framework, see Vansteelandt and Van Mechelen 1998.
54
Shu et al. 2011: 341.
This is a lot to digest, so let me note what I think are the most interesting
ndings. First, there was denitely signicant cheating going on in the recycle
condition when no honor code was involved (an average of 13.09 reported
versus 7.61 actual problems solved). In fact, 57 percent of participants over-
reported. In contrast, there was less average cheating in the read-honor-code
condition, but still some. Thirty-two percent overreported. But in the sign-
honor-code condition, only one person out of 22 overreported.55 Hence, while
reading an honor code made something of a difference to combatting
cheating, actually signing it eliminated cheating almost entirely. This is per-
haps not surprisingmerely passively reading is different from actively com-
mitting oneself to something.56
Also, note that while an average of 13.09 in the no-honor-code recycling
condition is a much higher average than the actual performance, it is still
signicantly lower than the 20 correct-answer maximum. Participants ended
up costing themselves roughly $3.50 on average by not cheating as much as
they could safely get away with. Finally, consider the number of items of the
honor code that were remembered correctly on averageit was signicantly
lower in the read-honor-code (2.82 items) versus the sign-honor-code (4.27
items) recycle conditions. Another study found a similar trend.57 Apparently
some kind of rationalization strategy is at work here, where participants are
motivated to forget what they had read when it opposes their actual
behavior.58
With these results freshly in mind, here is one requirement on honesty
(with respect to cheating, which from now on will be assumed):
(a) A person who is honest, when acting in character, will regularly refrain from
cheating in situations where he is a free and willing participant and the
relevant rules are fair and appropriate, even if by cheating he is assured of
acquiring some benet for himself.59
The Shu study illustrates that, in this one situation at least, many people are
not like thisthey cheated even though they were volunteers in a research
study aimed at improving scientic knowledge whose rules were clearly stated,
fair, and appropriate. Many other studies reviewed earlier involving different
situations could also be cited here, and note that these are typically studies of
actual cheating behavior rather than just studies using self-reports.60
55
Shu et al. 2011: 342.
56
Shu et al. 2011: 344. See also McCabe and Trevio 1993, 1997 and Mazar et al. 2008a.
57
Shu et al. 2011: 3369.
58
Shu et al. 2011: 344.
59
See, e.g. Hursthouse 1999: 10 and Adams 2006: 121. Thanks to Tim Mawson for suggesting
a revision to an earlier formulation.
60
Can we say that many people are disposed to cheat regularly? There seems to be good
reason to suspect this is the case, in that high numbers of people in these studies have been found
Now (a) might not hold as a general principle. Perhaps there are some cases
where by cheating under these conditions a person can also bring about a great
moral good for others, such as friends or loved ones. Consider, for instance, a
spy who has inltrated a company as an employee and needs to break its
standard operating procedures in order to retrieve some piece of information
that is vital to stopping a terrorist attack. Then while she would still be
cheating the company, it does not necessarily follow that all things considered
she was doing anything morally wrong or acting in opposition to the moral
virtue of honesty.
If there are counterexamples like this to (a), I am not too worried. Suitable
revisions could be made. The key point here is that these revisions would not
apply to the cases of cheating in the experiments by Shu, Mazar, and others,
nor to other research on academic cheating or athletic doping or nancial
abuse.
Here is another requirement:
(b) A person who is honest, when acting in character, will not allow his honest
behavior and cheating to be dependent, at least in many cases, on the presence
of certain enhancers and inhibitors (such as anticipated punishment or
anticipated embarrassment), especially when important moral matters are
at stake.
In other words, an honest person would not have his cheating behavior vary
depending on the likelihood of his getting punished, or his being embarrassed
for failing at something.61 And yet there is much experimental research to
suggest that people are indeed like this.
Briey, here is a motivational requirement:
(c) An honest persons trait of honesty will typically lead him to refrain from
cheating primarily for motivating reasons that are morally admirable and
deserving of moral praise, and not primarily for motivating reasons which are
either morally problematic or morally neutral.62
to cheat in a variety of nominally different situations where cheating opportunities arise.

Furthermore, I would suspect that there would also be regular cheating by the same people in
repetitions of, for instance, the recycle, no-honor-code condition of Shus study, especially once
they saw the rst time that they could get away with their cheating. Both of the these claims,
however, outstrip the available evidence, the rst because the same participants were not
studied in different cheating situations, and the second because the same participants were not
followed longitudinally over time in repetitions of the same (nominal) cheating situations.
61
Here again there may need to be exceptions made for certain extreme cases, say when a
person suddenly starts cheating when he thinks he will not get caught, in order to prevent his
family from unjust starvation. Such cases might be compatible with the person still being honest.
But those are not the kinds of cheating cases that are being discussed in this chapter.
62
See, e.g. Hursthouse 1999: 11.
Yet I have already mentioned that avoiding punishment for being caught
cheating is one important motivator for not cheating. Another, more subtle
motivator has to do with whether cheating would allow a person to still think
of himself as honest. It could form at least part of the explanation as to why
participants in the Shu study averaged 13.09 correct answers and not 20. But
clearly that kind of motivator is not morally admirable.63
Here is a requirement that has not been mentioned in this chapter:
(d) A person who is honest, when acting in character, will not exhibit cheating
behavior which varies with whether her moral beliefs about the wrongness of
cheating (when it is wrong) are salient.
In other words, a person who cheats regularly when the relevant moral norms
prohibiting cheating are not salient in her mind, but who refrains from
cheating when they are salient, has not yet achieved an honest disposition.
But that is exactly what the Shu study suggests is true of many of us, as did the
earlier study by Mazar using the Ten Commandments as well as the bulk of
the research literature on honor codes and academic cheating.
Finally, here is one more requirement:
(e) A person who is honest will, when he cheats in ways that are clearly morally
wrong, typically attempt to prevent the cheating from happening again and be
disappointed in himself for cheating in the rst place, rather than using self-
deception or rationalization to avoid having to confront his cheating.64
But there is strong empirical evidence that many of us do not live up to this
standard either. Earlier I discussed at some length how self-deception can keep
a persons actual cheating behavior and his moral disapproval of that behavior
separate. I also briey alluded to several ways people also tend to rationalize
their cheating, making it seem as if it was really not morally wrong, or at least
not their fault. Now also note the data in this section on participants memory
of the honor code. It seems that when they cheated, they were motivated to
forget the honor code, thereby lessening the feeling of disapproval of their
action. As Shu writes, We nd that bad behavior motivates moral leniency
and leads to the strategic forgetting of moral rules . . . we suggest people could
set off on a downward spiral of having ever more lenient ethics and even more
unethical behavior.65
63
Note that if the motivator were to actually be or become an honest person, then that could
in fact be a morally admirable motivator. But this was not part of the motivational story told in
section two, which focused on the desire to think of oneself as honest, and that is an importantly
different desire both psychologically and morally. Thanks to an anonymous referee for asking me
to clarify this.
64
See, e.g. Hursthouse 1999: 11. For this requirement with respect to the virtues in general,
see Kupperman 2009: 245.
65
Shu et al. 2011: 344. See also 332.
Cumulatively, then, these requirements on honesty do not seem to be met
by most people today in the populations that were studied, and this inference
is based not on self-report data but on actual behavioral results. Furthermore,
these requirements are not the only ones which could be mentioned here.66
The picture of character which thus begins to emerge can look rather bleak
from a moral perspective.
But that is not the lesson I take away from the research ndings. Indeed
there seem to me to be at least four quite positive aspects to most peoples
character in this area, aspects which conict with their possessing the vice of
dishonesty (with respect to cheating). Here is the rst one:
(f) A dishonest person does not have moral beliefs to the effect that cheating is
wrong in general, as well as wrong in most particular instances of what are
widely considered to be acts of cheating. Or if he does happen to have such
beliefs, he will not care much about them and they will not play a signicant
motivational role in his psychology.
Why, for instance, would a dishonest person believe that cheating researchers
out of a few dollars in the problem-solving task is morally wrong? Yet when
moral norms were made salient using something as simple as recalling the Ten
Commandments or reading the honor code, most people did not cheat as
much if at all. That is quite an astounding testament to their moral strength, in
my opinion.
Another requirement is that:
(g) A dishonest person, when acting in character, would not genuinely commit
himself to behaving honestly prior to a situation where (he thinks) he can
cheat in a way that is completely undetectable, and do so for nancial or other
gain.
Now this might not be true in generalperhaps the dishonest person could
benet in all kinds of ways if it became known to others that he had made this
pledge. Fair enough. But that is not the kind of case I have in mind here
suppose instead that he is the only one who would know about this pledge.
Then what would be the point of making the commitment, in so far as he is
dishonest? Yet that is what Shu found most people didonly one out of 22
participants cheated in the condition where they had to sign an honor code.
Here is a third requirement:
66
For instance, there is some evidence that dishonest behavior is contagious when someone
else who is a member of an in-group is observed acting dishonestly (Gino et al. 2009, DeSteno
and Valdesolo 2011: 1735). But an honest person would not typically become increasingly
dishonest in her behavior when seeing someone act like this.
(h) A dishonest person, when acting in character, would try to maximize the
benets from cheating when he can cheat in a way that (he thinks) is
completely undetectable and is benecial overall to him.
But overwhelmingly, it turned out that participants did not do this. Most
engaged in only a limited form of cheating.
To this last requirement in (h) it might be claimed that these people could
still be dishonest because they were trying to jointly maximize both external
benets such as nancial gain and internal benets such as the preservation of
their self-concept as honest. But here is the nal requirement on dishonesty
I will mention:
(j) A dishonest person, when acting in character, might desire that others think he
is honest, but he would not be strongly committed to thinking of himself as
honest.
Yet this is precisely the kind of thought that is being postulated in some of the
most recent research on cheating that was reviewed earlier.
I do not know how to argue for this requirement. I guess one could try to
object to (j) by trying to imagine a dishonest person who nevertheless wants to
think of himself as honest. Now if he wanted to actually be honest, then it is
not clear that he would count as a dishonest person. But perhaps if he just was
content to only think of himself that way (say, self-deceptively), then the
objection is that he could still be dishonest. I am not sure what to think of
this possibility, besides noting that it could lead to all kinds of psychological
tension in his life, where his dishonest impulses pull him to cheat more,
whereas this desire tries to curb the cheating so that he can still think of
himself as honest. But then there would be psychological tensions that are not
traditionally thought to be present in either the vicious person or the virtuous
person, who are said to act wholeheartedly in one direction or the other.
Clearly more needs to be said here, and so I will not put too much weight
on (j).
One nal possibility worth exploring is that of altruistic cheating. As
I alluded to at the end of section two, there are cases of cheating where the
immediate motivation is other-oriented rather than self-oriented. This is easy
to see in cases of academic cheating,67 although it is not limited just to that
context. If it turned out that in at least some of these instances, the ultimate
motive was altruistic too, then that would seem to be in tension with how a
dishonest person is thought to be normally disposed. Especially promising in
this regard might be cases of empathetic cheating, which might be ultimately
done on behalf of what is good for another person regardless of whether it
67
See, e.g. Newstead et al. 1996.
benets oneself.68 Unfortunately, though, there is so little research done to
investigate the existence of altruistic cheating that on empirical grounds it
remains idle speculation at this point.
3.5 CONCLUSION
Given the research I have considered on cheating behavior and motivation, my

conclusion is that when it comes to cheating most people are neither honest
nor dishonest. They have some positive moral qualities and some negative
moral qualities in this area of their lives. In other words, they have Mixed
Cheating Traits.
68
For some suggestive initial ndings, see Gino and Pierce 2009.
Part II
Engaging Other Frameworks
4
Situationism
In Part Two I want to compare my Mixed Trait framework to what are

arguably the three leading accounts of personality traits in the psychology
literature: situationism, the CAPS model, and the Big Five model. The overall
conclusion will be that my framework is most in line with the CAPS model,
but for a surprising reason.
Before beginning, I want to make it clear that my goal in Part Two is not to
rigorously assess the plausibility of these three views. That would require a
book in its own right. Furthermore, each of them is offering an approach to
thinking about personality and behavior in general, rather than focusing just
on moral character traits as I have done in this book. So instead my goal here
is the more modest one of explaining what I consider to be the central tenets
of each view and then clarifying to what extent they would be incompatible
with my own Mixed Trait approach, if they were applied specically to moral
character traits. Where any such incompatibilities do arise, I will explain why
I think my approach has the upper-hand. To the extent that my framework is
plausible, that can tell against any opposing claims made by other views.1
4.1 SITUATIONISM IN PSYCHOLOGY
While it was before my time, according to various accounts the situationist

movement in psychology caused quite a stir in the late 1960s and 1970s,
launching the longstanding person-situation debate and calling into ques-
tion widely held assumptions about personality and indeed about the viability
1
I have omitted some additional positions which deserve to be discussed in a longer
treatment of personality approaches in psychology, such as Skinnerian behaviorism, other
versions of the social-cognitive approach to personality besides the CAPS model (such as
Bandura 1999), and other versions of broadly interactionist approaches besides CAPS (for
CAPS as an interactionist approach, see Mischel and Shoda 2008: 228). On the other hand,
the three positions I have chosen have received an enormous amount of attention in the past
forty years in the philosophical and psychological literatures on traits.
of the entire discipline of personality psychology as a whole. One nds in the
literature expressions about this movement as giving rise to a paradigm
crisis,2 as having surprisingly devastating force,3 as trying to bury person-
ality as a eld and construct,4 as a blitzkrieg, so to speak, that dened
and destroyed the enemy almost simultaneously,5 and as traumatic and
intense,6 involving warfare7 and heated but futile battles.8 My goal here
is not to reconstruct that history, but rather to extract certain claims made by
psychologists who at the time were usually considered advocates of situationist
positions about the nature and role of traits and situations.9 I will divide these
claims into one very inuential negative claim about certain personality traits,
and a series of positive claims about the relationship between situations and
behavior. The central conclusion of this chapter will be that with respect to
moral character, my Mixed Trait approach can agree with the negative claim
made by situationists, albeit for different reasons than they typically cite, while
at the same time rejecting some of their positive views.
Of course there is no one position or set of clearly articulated claims which
goes by the name of situationism, and indeed I nd the view very difcult to
pin down.10 So in what follows I will do my best to clearly identify certain ideas
which are commonly associated with situationist approaches in psychology,
even if they might not have been uniformly held by all advocates of the view.
First, let me start with the central negative claim about traits, the claim that
the situationist position is perhaps most famous for advocating:
(N1) There is a large body of experimental evidence which is incompatible with
the widespread possession of certain traits.
2
Shoda 1999a: 156. See also Mischel 1973: 254, 1984: 351, 1999a: 4578, 1999b: 39, Block
1977: 38, Shoda 1999b: 361, 379, and Mischel and Shoda 2008: 208, 222.
3
Funder 2007: 103.
4
Mischel 2004: 4.
5
Wiggins 1997: 96.
6
Mischel 2009: 283. See also Mischel 2007: 264.
7
Mischel 1999b: 39.
8
Mischel 1999b: 39. See also Kenrick and Funder 1988: 23, 31, Ross and Nisbett 1991: 95,
Goldberg 1993: 26, Mischel 1999b: 39, 2007: 264, 2009: 2823, McCrae and Costa 2003: 21, and
Nettle 2007: 356 for additional descriptions.
9
Furthermore, my focus will be on the psychology literature, rather than on the recent
remarks made by philosophers such as Gilbert Harman (1999, 2000) and John Doris (1998,
2002) who developed their own interpretations of what situationism amounts to and then used
them to argue for substantive philosophical conclusions. Hence the title of this section is
Situationism in Psychology. Chapter eight will consider philosophical situationism in detail.
10
For similar remarks, see Bowers 1973: 3089. Harry Reis characterizes situationism as the
idea that behavior is inuenced by circumstances external to the person (2009: 266). If that is
the view, then there would be no debate at all as the position would be obviously true.
Situationism 87
Much hangs on exactly what conception of traits situationists have in mind,
and unfortunately this is far from clear. Again, though, let me try to identify
some common themes.
Below are terms frequently used to label the conception of traits which is
being called into question:
(i) Behavioral dispositions11
(ii) Psychological realities12
(iii) Causes of behavior13
(iv) Broad14
(v) Global15
(vi) Stable16
(vii) Cross-situationally consistent17
(viii) Situation or context free18
These should sound like fairly traditional features of traits. The last feature,
though, deserves special comment, as it is central to the conception of traits
being criticized.
On one interpretation of situation free traits, these dispositions are
understood as being active and as functioning (or not) regardless of what
situation the person happens to be in; their psychological operation, in other
words, is understood to be situation invariant. Does this sound like a recog-
nizable feature of traits, and especially of the moral ones? It is true that a few
traditional virtues and vices may perhaps function in this way. Humility, for
instance, is a quality that might be active in the humble person regularly
11
Mischel 1968: 6, 11, 150, 281, 293, 1973: 253, 1999b: 38, 45, 2004: 2, 2009: 285, Mischel and
Mischel 1976: 200, Ross and Nisbett 1991: 20, Funder 1991: 32, Mischel and Shoda 1995: 246,
1998: 231, 2008: 209, 225, Shoda 1999a: 156, and Russell 2009: 247.
12
Mischel 1968: 5, Wright and Mischel 1987: 1160 and Funder 1991: 32.
13
Mischel 1968: 5, 8, 1973: 253, 264, Wright and Mischel 1987: 1160, Funder 1991: 32, and
Snow 2010: 34.
14
Mischel 1968: 9, 146, 193, 293, 1973: 2623, 1984: 351, 357, 1999a: 456, 1999b: 40, 2004: 4,
Mischel and Peake 1982: 731, Ross and Nisbett 1991: xiii, 101, Mischel and Shoda 1998: 231,
2008: 222, Funder 2007: 99, Russell 2009: 246, 251, 295.
15
Mischel 1968: 10, 193, 291, 301, 1973: 2523, 255, 258, 2623, 1984: 3512, 362, 1999a: 457,
1999b: 54, 2004: 5, Mischel and Mischel 1976: 202, Ross and Nisbett 1991: 104, Funder 1991,
Shoda et al. 1994: 675, Shoda 1999a: 159, Cervone et al. 2007: 45, Mischel and Shoda 2008: 222,
225, 234, Russell 2009: 295, and Snow 2010: 3.
16
Mischel 1968: 6, 10, 44, 76, 150, 293, 1973: 253, 1999b: 38, Mischel and Mischel 1976: 200,
Wright and Mischel 1987: 1160, Ross and Nisbett 1991: xiii, Mischel and Shoda 1998: 231,
Russell 2009: 246, and Snow 2010: 3.
17
Mischel 1968: 9, 13, 424, 75, 146, 150, 1973: 253, 264, 1984: 357, 1999a: 4578, 1999b:
389, 2004: 2, Mischel and Mischel 1976: 200, Mischel and Peake 1982: 7302, Wright and
Mischel 1987: 1160, Ross and Nisbett 1991: xiii, 92, 101, Mischel and Shoda 1995: 247, Shoda
1999a: 157, Russell 2009: 246, and Snow 2010: 34.
18
Mischel 1968: 282, 1984: 362, 1999a: 4578, 2004: 3, 4, Wright and Mischel 1987: 115960,
Mischel and Shoda 1998: 231, 2008: 209, 225, 234, Shoda 1999a: 156, Cervone and Shoda 1999a:
10, Cervone et al. 2007: 45, 7, Appiah 2008: 38, and Russell 2009: 249, 251, 261, 2956.
throughout the day, regardless of what particular set of circumstances she is
confronting.19 But as a general characterization of the ordinary traits with
which we are familiar, surely this is an unusual approach. Traits such as
compassion or courage are not expected to be active and lead to relevant
behavior regardless of what situation the person who has them is in. Rather,
their activation and functioning are responsive to the features of the particular
situation which happen to activate them and to how those features are
construed or interpreted by the person, such as whether a child is drowning
in a pond, a person is sincerely asking for money, or an employee has
accidently dropped papers in the rain. In other words, the activation and
psychological functioning of familiar traits is naturally thought to be highly
situation dependent.20
Yet this rst interpretation is suggested by a number of passages in the
relevant situationist writings. For instance, Walter Mischel writes that
according to what he calls the classic view, the basic qualities of the person
are assumed to be independent of, and unconnected with, situations.21 And
as Auke Tellegen has remarked, It seems that the concept of disposition is
often viewed as synonymous with action tendency, without reference to
circumstances. This, at least, would explain why dispositional trait concepts
have been criticized for being situation-free. 22 If what I said above is correct,
19
The same may be true of non-moral traits such as being methodical, energetic, and warm,
which are often labeled as stylistic traits because they concern how behavior is carried out. See
Alston 1975: 21 and Johnson 1999: 445.
20
As Ernest Sosa writes, any competence, indeed any disposition, will issue in a certain
behavior only given certain triggering conditions. Behavior will in general have a two-ply
explanation, one strand being the disposition, the competence, and the other strand being the
relevant triggering conditions that elicit the manifestation of the competence. This is obviously
true of dispositions in general. A cube dissolves not just due to its solubility but also due to its
insertion (2009: 285). Similarly, John Johnson writes that every trait incorporates, whether
explicitly or implicitly, a situational context that literally helps to dene the trait (1999: 445).
And again Owen Flanagan notes that virtues cannot be thought of as situationally insensitive.
They are dened as dispositions that are active only in certain situations. The essence of a virtue
is to be a disposition designed to be situationally sensitive (2009: 62). Similarly he considers the
idea of a trait which is totally situation insensitivethat is, a trait that is displayed no matter
what. If this were the intended meaning, then the issue would be simple. Happily, there just are
no such traits. On any reasonable view traits are situation sensitive (1991: 280). See also Allport
1931: 369, 1937: 2905, 1961: 3457, 1966: 23, Kenrick and Funder 1988: 29, Flanagan 1991:
277, 2801, Tellegen 1991: 1619, Funder 1991: 36, Solomon 2003: 47, Roberts and Pomerantz
2004: 406, Roberts 2009: 139, and Sosa 2009: 288. For a contrary view, see Ozer and Benet-
Martnez 2006: 402.
21
Mischel 2004: 4. See also Hartshorne and May 1928: 385, Mischel 1968: 9, 37, 41, 1767,
2812, 293, Mischel and Shoda 1998: 231, Cervone and Shoda 1999a: 10, Shoda 1999a: 156, and
Andersen and Thorpe 2009: 163. For interpretations of situationism as criticizing such a view,
see Bowers 1973: 318, Kenrick and Funder 1988: 24, Caprara and Cervone 2000: 14, Roberts
2009: 139, and Russell 2009: 24952, 262, 271, 2956. Mischel does briey acknowledge early on
that there are other ways of conceptualizing traits which do not make them situation free in the
above sense. See his 1968: 389.
22
Tellegen 1991: 16.
Situationism 89
then it seems that situationists are working with a technical conception of
traits, which may or may not have been common in the personality literature
in psychology at the time. Indeed, situationists have been accused of attacking
a straw man opponent that even personality psychologists did not accept.23
Regardless of this historical point, it seems clear enough that any attempt to
understand in this way either ordinary commonsensical thinking in general or
traditional philosophical thinking about character traits in particular would be
a mistake. Hence the evidence situationists cite and the arguments they make
may have limited bearing on these conceptions of character traits.
Naturally other interpretations of situation free are available besides this
one. A simple alternative is to just understand situation invariance in terms of
the possession of a trait, rather than its operation. In other words, whether a
person has a trait like honesty does not depend on what particular situation
the person is in; it can be true of him that he is honest or has the trait of
honesty even when swimming in the pool, going to the bathroom, or sleeping.
Or perhaps what is intended by situationists is that a trait is situation free
so long as comparatively speaking, when the same trait is held by different
persons to different degrees, then for the person who holds it to a higher
degree, it will be more frequently displayed in a given situation that is relevant
to the trait, regardless of what that particular situation happens to be. For
example, two people might both have the trait of honesty, but to different
degrees. If this is a situation free trait, then when they are in the same
relevant situations, the person who has a higher degree of honesty would be
expected to be more frequently honest.24
23
For the characterization of traits by arguably the leading personality psychologist of the
rst half of the twentieth century, a characterization which sees them as dependent upon
situations for their activation, see Allport 1931: 369, 1937: 2905, 312, 3302, 340, 1961: 181,
333, 3457, 363, 1966: 23. As Allport writes, the ever-changing nature of traits and their close
dependence upon the uid conditions of the environment forbid a conception that is over-rigid
or over-simple (1937: 312), and, We are now challenged to untangle the complex web of
tendencies that constitute a person, however contradictory they may seem to be when activated
differently in various situations (1966: 2). For helpful discussion of Allports view, see Zuroff
1986. For similar concerns about a straw man opponent, see Block 1977, Hogan et al. 1977: 257,
Zuroff 1986, Kenrick and Funder 1988: 24, Tellegen 1991: 1619, 278, McAdams 1994: 341,
McCrae and Costa 1996: 57, Caprara and Cervone 2000: 49, Peterson and Seligman 2004: 10, and
Roberts 2009: 139. For the claim that such a characterization does not correspond to common-
sense thinking about traits, see Russell 2009: 307.
24
For discussion which suggests this interpretation, see Mischel 1968: 9, 1999a: 458, Mag-
nusson and Endler 1977a: 14, 17, Zuroff 1986: 993, Mischel and Shoda 1995: 247, and Shoda
1999b: 380. Hence Magnusson and Endler write that the effects of situations on behavior . . . are
supposed to be general and to inuence the level of behavior or the strength of reactions but do
not affect the rank orders of individuals with respect to the behavior being investigated
(1977a: 14).
Still another interpretation is that a trait is situation-free when considered from the
perspective of the average behavior it leads to across many different situations, i.e. the cross-
situational behavioral aggregate. A person who is friendly, for instance, will have a higher level of
average friendly behavior across many situations, than someone who is not friendly, even though
This third interpretation will be explored in more detail below when
discussing correlation coefcients. Like the second, it captures an intuitive
sense in which traits can be said to be situation or context free. Both also
seem more ecumenical, harmonizing with ordinary and traditional philosoph-
ical thinking about character traits and thereby capturing the sense in which
situationists themselves can say they are concerned with a commonsense
conception of traits, and not merely technical or unfamiliar conceptions. For
instance, many of their examples involve the traditional moral virtues and
vices such as honesty, and ordinary folk conceptions of traits were alleged by
situationists to have been incorporated into the research programs of person-
ality psychologists in the 1950s and 1960s.25
These three interpretations of situation free traits require a choice to be
made. In what follows, I will be assuming that either the second possession
interpretation or the third comparative interpretation is correct, so that I can
work with a conception of traits that is more than a merely technical account
which is of historical relevance to psychology. Otherwise with the rst acti-
vation interpretation, it seems that situationism as developed in the psych-
ology literature would have no direct bearing on either ordinary or
philosophical conceptions of character traits, which are my primary focus in
this book.
So call folk traits those personality traits which have all the features
(i) through (viii), with the last feature understood using either the second or
third interpretations. (N1) can be revised to read:
the widespread possession of folk traits.26
What is this large body of evidence?
there may be particular situations where at that moment they are equally friendly or the second
person is behaving friendlier than the rst person. For passages which suggest this reading, see
Shoda 1999b: 380 and Cervone et al. 2007: 45, 7.
25
See, e.g. Mischel 1968: 236, 42, 67, 81, 147, 179. Thus Mischel writes that The initial
assumptions of trait-state theory were logical, inherently plausible, and also consistent with
common sense and intuitive impressions about personality (1968: 147). Hence according to
Ross and Nisbett, the net result of the traditional personologists empirical and intellectual
labors is a view of individual differences that is entirely compatible with, and in fact seems
essentially an elaboration of, conventional lay views about the dimensions of personality and
social behavior (1991: 93). For similar remarks about the relationship between situationism and
folk conceptions of traits, see Bowers 1973: 309, Ross 1977, Kenrick and Funder 1988, Ross and
Nisbett 1991: xiii, 3, 20, 91, 93, 98, 1089, 11944, and Funder 1991.
26
Daniel Russell, in his characterization of situationism, claims that the target of the view is
psychological dispositions in general (2009: 239, 2412). But as this chapter should make clear,
not only do situationists not have to reject a range of psychological dispositions besides the trait
ones, they can even accept many trait dispositions so long as they do not satisfy features
(i) through (viii).
Situationism 91
4.2 SUPPORT FOR S ITUATIONISM

FROM PSYCHOLO GY
The evidence comes in different forms, but the most famous kind has been the
correlational evidence and related issues about the predictability of an indi-
viduals behavior in particular situations.27 On the one hand, correlations
between certain items on personality questionnaires tend to be quite high.28
But on the other hand, when scores for a group of participants on such
questionnaires are related to their actual behavior, or when trait-relevant
behavior in one particular situation is related to behavior in another situation,
correlations are surprising low, rarely exceeding the now famous 0.30 per-
sonality coefcient. As Mischel characterized this term in what became the
classic text of situationism, Personality and Assessment, the phrase personal-
ity coefcient might be coined to describe the correlation between 0.20 and
0.30 which is found persistently when virtually any personality dimension
inferred from a questionnaire is related to almost any conceivable external
criterion involving responses sampled in a different mediumthat is, not by
another questionnaire.29
On one standard way of thinking about correlations in psychology, a
correlation such as 0.30 between, for instance, a personality test of honesty
and a behavioral measure of honest behavior, would indicate that honesty only
accounts for 9 percent of the proportion of variance in the honest behavior
(as measured by squaring the correlation coefcient, 0.3*0.3 = 0.09).30 Ninety-
one percent of the variance would then remain unexplained. And situationists
like to stress that a 0.30 correlation would be on the high end. Often correl-
ations like these are lower than 0.30, with the conclusion meant to be that such
folk-trait variables play much less of a role in behavior than would have been
expected.31
This focus on correlation coefcients in evaluating the existence and
importance of folk traits helps to highlight what for situationists is the heart
27
For classic studies cited by situationists, see Hartshorne and May 1928, Newcomb 1929,
Dudycha 1936, and, later, Milgram 1963, 1974, Haney et al. 1973, Darley and Batson 1973, and
Mischel and Peake 1982. For classic reviews and discussions which are commonly labeled under
the heading of situationist, see Vernon 1964, Hunt 1965, Peterson 1968, Mischel 1968,
Bandura 1969, and, later, Ross and Nisbett 1991.
28
Mischel 1968: 24, 81, 177, 1973: 253 and Ross and Nisbett 1991: 99. As Mischel writes,
Response consistency tends to be greatest within the same response medium, within self-
reports to paper-and-pencil tests, for example (1968: 177).
29
Mischel 1968: 78, emphasis his.
30
For helpful discussion, see Kenrick and Funder 1988: 30, Meyer et al. 2001: 133, Funder
2007: 81, and Leary 2004: 1534.
31
See, e.g. Mischel 1968: 38, 83, 147 and Ross and Nisbett 1991: 3, 95.
of the matterthe alleged cross-situational consistency of folk traits.32 When
it comes to stability over time in the same situations, for instance, situationists
typically admit that correlations are robust and often well above 0.30.33
Consistency across situations, where situations are typically individuated in
the situationist literature in terms of their nominal and not their psychologic-
ally relevant features,34 is a different matter.
I think it is worth pausing a moment here to get clearer on what the
correlation coefcient is supposed to tell us in this discussion. A correlation of
0.30, for instance, is being used to index cross-situational consistency, as already
noted. But more precisely, it is indexing cross-situational consistency as oper-
ationalized in terms of individual differences or the consistent rank ordering of
peoples behavior.35 To put this more straightforwardly, it helps to start with the
underlying assumptions at work here. Situationists are assuming that according
to trait theory, for any given trait such as honesty, most people do in fact have
that trait, but they have it to different degrees.36 As a result, this difference in
degree can manifest itself in terms of individual differences in behavior in the
same situations. In other words, two people might have the trait of honesty, but
exhibit different frequencies of honest behavior in situation S1, such as an ofce
party on Friday afternoon. Furthermore, and here comes the next assumption, it
is assumed that the degree to which a person has a trait directly corresponds to
how frequently it is manifested in action. As Mischel writes, Dispositions and
their behavioral expressions were assumed by denition to correspond directly,
so that the more a person has a trait of conscientiousness, for example, the more
conscientious the persons behavior was expected to be over many different
kinds of situations, relative to other people.37
32
As Yuichi Shoda writes, At the center of the debate was the degree of cross-situational
consistency in real-life social behavior (1999b: 362). See, e.g. Mischel and Peake 1982, Wright
and Mischel 1987: 1160, Mischel and Shoda 1995: 247, Shoda 1999a: 157, and Mischel 1999a:
4578, 2004: 2, 2009: 285.
33
Hence Mischel writes that Considerable stability over time has been demonstrated (1968:
36) and that, although behavior patterns may often be stable, they are usually not highly
generalized across situations (1968: 282). See also Mischel 1973: 253, Bem and Allen 1974:
508, Epstein 1979: 1122, Mischel and Peake 1982: 732, 7347, Wright and Mischel 1987: 11612,
Ross and Nisbett 1991: 101, 129, Shoda et al. 1993: 1024, 1994: 6813, Shoda 1999b: 3656, and
Roberts 2009: 140.
34
Shoda et al. 1994: 675 and Bower 2007: 23. On this distinction, see chapter two, section
four. It will be discussed at length again in chapter ve.
35
For related discussion, see Bem and Allen 1974: 50910, Magnusson and Endler 1977a: 7,
15, 17, Bem and Funder 1978: 499, Mischel and Shoda 1995: 247, Piedmont 1998: 67, Shoda
1999a: 157, 1999b: 362, 379, Mischel 1999a: 458, 2004: 2, 2007: 26970, 2009: 285, Roberts and
Pomerantz 2004: 406, Bower 2007: 212, Furr 2009: 196, and Sherman et al. 2010: 3323.
36
Mischel 1968: 6, 13. In fact, the assumption is often even stronger than thisthat the trait is
universally held. See, e.g. Cervone et al. 2007: 5.
37
Mischel 2004: 2. See also Mischel 1968: 9, Mischel and Shoda 1995: 246, and Shoda
1999b: 379.
Situationism 93
100%
75%
Frequency
50%
25%
0%
S1 S2 S3
Three Situations
Smith Robinson
Figure 4.1 Two honesty proles in three situations
These ideas might seem familiar enoughdifferent people can have the
same trait to different degrees and so manifest it to correspondingly different
extents. When the focus shifts to multiple situations, then, these assumptions
imply that folk traits will lead people to behave across situations in ways that
maintain the same rank ordering in the degree to which they each have the
trait in question. In other words, two people with different degrees of honesty
might not always demonstrate the exact same frequency of honest behavior in
two different situations, but the person who is more honest should still be
higher in her frequency of honest behavior when ranked against that of the
second person. Figure 4.1 helps illustrate this picture.38
Return then to the correlation coefcient, which again is supposed to index
cross-situational consistency as operationalized in terms of the consistent
rank-ordering of a group of peoples behavior. If there is a group of people
whose honest behavior exhibits consistent rank ordering like that in
Figure 4.1, then we should expect the correlation between honest behavior
and situations for this group to be high. Instead, though, it turns out as a
matter of fact that the studies of folk traits which situationists cite tend to nd
low correlations, suggesting that groups of experimental participants exhibit
behavior that is more like this in Figure 4.2.
Hopefully, these gures help to illustrate that the correlation coefcients which
are at the heart of the evidence offered by situationists are not measures of whether
a group of people tends to either tell the truth or not, or help other people or
not, or in general exhibit trait-relevant behavior or not. Rather they are measures
of how constant the rank ordering of their trait-relevant behavior really is.
38
Here I have been helped by Shoda 1999a: 158 and Bower 2007: 22. See also Mischel 1968: 9.
100%
Frequency 75%
50%
25%
0%
S1 S2 S3
Three Situations
Jones Shrader
Figure 4.2 Two honesty proles in three situations
4.3 EVALU ATING THE NEGATIVE

SIDE OF SITUATIONISM
What should be made of this negative side of situationism and its attack on the
widespread possession of folk traits? Again, my aim here is not to assess the
plausibility of the view with respect to all folk personality traits, but only with
respect to folk moral traits. So the claim I am interested in is this:
the widespread possession of folk moral virtues and vices.
Now taken by itself, (N3) is a claim I am perfectly happy to accept. Indeed,
much of Moral Character is concerned with arguing for precisely this conclu-
sion. However, the experimental evidence I cite and the implications I draw
from it tend to be different from the correlation data which is the primary
support for the situationists criticism of folk traits. So while situationists and
I might both endorse (N3), it may be because we have different bodies of
evidence in mind for this conclusion and so approach it from divergent
perspectives.
Over the past forty years, there have been a number of criticisms raised
about the correlation data used by situationists, including:
(a) Selective review of the literature. Other studies not cited by situationists,
it is claimed, have found larger correlations.39
39
For discussion, see Block 1977: 42, Hogan et al. 1977: 260, Kenrick and Funder 1988: 30,
Solomon 2003: 55, and Funder 2007: 103.
Situationism 95
(b) Problems with the experiments. Concerns have been raised about certain
methodological decisions made in particular studies cited by situation-
ists. For instance, in a review of studies published in 1968, Rae Carlson
(1971) writes that not a single published study attempted even
minimal inquiry into the organization of personality variables within
the individual.40
(c) 0.30 need not be small. There is controversy about how to interpret the
size of a correlation like 0.30, whether it is in fact small, and whether it
would only account for 9 percent of the variance (and, indeed, what that
even means).41 In addition, many familiar guidelines show much
smaller correlations, such as 0.02 between taking aspirin and reducing
the risk of a heart attack, 0.03 between chemotherapy and breast cancer
survival, and 0.11 between antihistamines and a decreased runny nose/
sneezing.42 Robert Abelsons baseball analogy is often used here too.
Knowing what someones batting average is, will not tell us what the
player will do during the next plate appearance, but it is very important
to the success of the team nevertheless.43
(d) Overlooks aggregation. Much higher correlations have been found when
aggregates of behavior over many situations are used rather than single
instances of behavior.44
In my view these are interesting points to consider, and they have already been
thoroughly investigated by others for many years now without my needing to
rehash them here.45
But they are not where my main concern lies. That has to do specically
with the fact that moral traits come in degrees.46 If someone has the virtue of
honesty deeply or to a very high degree, then naturally it can be assumed that
the rank ordering of her honest behavior will be regularly higher than that of
someone who is only weakly honest. A picture like Figure 4.1 is only to be
40
Carlson 1971: 209, emphasis removed. For related discussion, see Carlson 1971, Bowers
1973: 324, Block 1977, Ross and Nisbett 1991: 1056, and Funder 2007: 1035.
41
For discussion, see Kenrick and Funder 1988: 30, Meyer et al. 2001: 133, Hemphill 2003,
Funder 2007: 812, 1057, Fleeson and Noftle 2009: 151, Roberts 2009: 140, and Flanagan
2009: 63.
42
See Rosenthal 1991: 136 and Meyer et al. 2001: 133.
43
This relates to the next point about aggregation. For the baseball analogy, see Abelson 1985,
Kenrick and Funder 1988: 301, Kashy and DePaulo 1996: 1050, Johnson 1997: 76, 1999: 448,
Meyer et al. 2001: 133, Sabini and Silver 2005: 5412, Roberts and Pomerantz 2004: 410, Doris
2010: 139 n. 5, and Slingerland 2011: 398.
44
For related discussion, see Epstein 1979, 1983, 1994, Kenrick and Funder 1988: 30, Buss
1989: 13823, Ross and Nisbett 1991: 10718, Tellegen 1991: 214, Wiggins 1997: 109, McCrae
and Costa 2003: 267, Nettle 2007: 445, 48, Funder 2007: 105, and Slingerland 2011: 395.
45
For additional criticisms, see also Johnson 1997: 75.
46
The concern which follows may generalize to non-moral traits too, but that is not my
focus here.
expected. Is it surprising, then, that the correlation data does not tend to
support this picture? Not at all. No one thinks that the possession of deep
honesty or compassion or any other folk moral virtue is common, and we
do not need psychological studies in order to reject such a view. It is obvious
from our experience of the world around us that most people are not like that.
As Allport said back in 1931, All people must not be expected to show the
same degree of integration in respect to a given trait. What is a major trait
in one personality may be a minor trait, or even non-existent in another
personality.47
But if the view that situationists aim to reject is instead that most people
possess honesty to some degree or other, then results like those in Figure 4.2 are
far from surprising. A person who is only weakly honest can frequently exhibit
honesty in situation S1 but not in S2, whereas another weakly honest person
could do the reverse given idiosyncrasies in whatever else he happens to
believe or desire. So it is unclear to me how the correlation ndings are
supposed to tell against the widespread possession of folk moral traits to
even a minimal degree. To reject that kind of claim, I think we need to look
elsewhere, which is what I try to do in my earlier book.
A further reason to question the use of the consistency correlations by
situationists, at least with respect to evaluating folk moral traits, is that they
are not measures of a given individuals behavioral consistency across
situations. Rather, they are based on the experimental groups behavior in
those situations.48 For instance, in Hartshorne and Mays famous 1928
studies of honesty and cheating among schoolchildren, they reported an
average correlation of 0.23 between any pair of the measures of honesty
they used. But this was for all the children studied as a whole, rather than
for any particular child.49
As a result, this focus on the behavior of groups can mask the possibility
that some of the members in that group have the trait in question to perhaps
even a signicant degree.50 John Sabini and Maury Silver have recently made
this point in a very helpful way:
Suppose there were a situation in which it was very difcult to behave in an
honest way. Now let us imagine that in this circumstance 20 percent of the
population did tell the truth in this circumstance; now imagine another situation
47
Allport 1931: 371, emphasis his.
48
This point is also relevant to the discussion in Ross and Nisbett 1991: 11113. Individual
behavioral consistency across situations is often labeled ipsative consistency, within-person
behavioral consistency, or person-centered consistency in the psychology literature. See, e.g.
Sherman et al. 2010: 333.
49
Hartshorne and May 1928. See Mischel 1968: 236 for extensive use of their work.
50
This point might seem to be in tension with the rst concern I just raised. But the rst
concern concedes that the view that many people are deeply honest is false. Now the second
concern notes that, for all the correlation studies show, a few people might still be deeply honest.
Situationism 97
in which very few people would be seduced into lying. So the 20 percent who told
the truth in the rst situation once again tell the truth, but an additional
60 percent of the population would, too. What is the correlation in honesty
between these situations? 0.25. Now we have no idea whether it is true that
20 percent of any sample would be consistently honest; our point is merely that
correlations of quite low magnitude are consistent with there being a substantial
percentage of honest people. Put another way, consistently high correlations
would require not only that some people are consistently and virtuously honest
but also that other people are consistently, and perhaps perversely, dishonest.
Thats how correlations work.51
Their last point reinforces again the relationship between rank orderings and
high correlations. But now the further concern is that even with low correl-
ations, there can still be a signicant minority of the participants who are
being cross-situationally consistent in their honest behavior, even if the
majority is not. This fact would be lost in the correlation coefcient pertaining
to the group as a whole. Hence it is primarily for these two reasons that I am
hesitant about using the correlation data cited by situationists to arrive at
(N3), and have instead adopted a different approach to get to the same
conclusion. That approach has been to try to determine what mental state
dispositions seem to be at work in our minds, and from there evaluate whether
those dispositions would qualify as components of virtues or vices.
4.4 E VALUATING THE POSITIVE SIDE

OF SITUATIONISM
Situationists naturally do not just advance negative claims aimed at criticizing

or rejecting competing views; they also argue for important positive claims
about how to understand human behavior. Some of those claims end up being
in tension with my Mixed Trait approach, and so I especially want to focus on
them here.
51
Sabini and Silver 2005: 543. As James Lamiell also forcefully notes:
Correlations which are not perfect, will not bear any interpretation at the level of the
individual precisely because they are, in effect, group means around which the variances are
not zero. The problem here is not that a statement about an individual based on . . . a
Pearson r of which the absolute value is less than 1.00, is knowably false for all individuals.
The problem is that such a statement is not knowably true for any individual, and this is
because the statement is certainly false for some individualsthough we could not say
which ones without investigating the matter case by caseand possibly false for all of the
individuals . . . it is difcult to imagine an epistemologically worse state of affairs (1997: 119,
emphasis his).
For similar points, see Bem and Allen 1974: 510, Lamiell 1997, Doris 2002: 63, Sreenivasan 2002:
567, McCrae and Costa 2003: 267, Kamtekar 2004: 466 n. 30, and Sherman et al. 2010: 334.
Despite what some contemporary supporters of situationism have
claimed,52 there are clearly positive statements being made by leading situ-
ationists such as Walter Mischel and Donald Peterson in the 1960s which (at
the time) commit them to some form of Skinnerian behaviorism. Here, for
instance, is a representative example from Peterson:
A quasi-Skinnerian behavioral view seems at present to be the foremost candidate
to replace the dynamic views which dominated thought about behavior disorders
for the rst half of the twentieth century.53
Similarly, I. E. Farber writes that:
Mental events exist, and in a commonsense way we know what we mean when we
refer to them, but it is unnecessary to appeal to them in a thoroughgoing account
of behavior.54
While Mischel, like Skinner himself,55 does acknowledge the existence of inner
mental states, he often describes them in his early writing as merely internal
mediators between stimulus conditions and observable responses, that is, as
Skinners mental way stations. Hence, for instance, he writes that although
the existence of mediating processes is acknowledged, they are not attributed the
causal powers usually assigned to them in cognitive and dynamic theories.56
Now these behaviorist claims might be hard to reconcile with other parts of
their work, as well as with their later writings. Be that as it may, I do not think
I need to say anything here about why they should no longer be taken seriously
by contemporary psychologists and philosophers.
Instead, let me turn to another facet of the argument made by situationists
which is also important to appreciate. Not only do people seem to exhibit a
high degree of cross-situational inconsistency in their trait-relevant behavior,
but situationists claim that this inconsistency can be brought about by subtle
and seemingly insignicant changes in the situation, rather than by the
workings of their folk traits.57 In a classic study, for instance, John Darley
52
See, e.g. Mischel 1984: 352, Ross and Nisbett 1991: 11, and Doris 2002: 25 n. 41. Others
have accepted these claims too quickly, e.g. Russell 2009: 253, 257 and Sosa 2009: 2789.
53
Peterson 1968: 612.
54
Farber 1964: 8. See also 289. As he famously wrote, I, for one, look forward to the
day . . . when personality theories are regarded as historical curiosities (37). For Farber on
individual differences and personality variables, see 2431.
55
The objection to inner states is not that they do not exist, but that they are not relevant in a
functional analysis (Skinner 1953: 35).
56
Mischel 1966: 62. See also his 1968: 95, 1971: 104, although for an opposing emphasis see
his 1968: 190, 205, 300. This view about mental states seems to have undergone a signicant shift
away from behaviorist themes by his 1973, as will become clear in chapter ve. For a helpful
overview of behaviorism and situationism, see Bowers 1973. See also Cervone and Shoda 1999a:
7 and Caprara and Cervone 2000: 45.
57
As Mischel wrote, Response patterns even in highly similar situations often fail to be
strongly related. Individuals show far less cross-situational consistency in their behavior than has
Situationism 99
and Daniel Batson found that the presence or absence of a request to hurry to
another building to give a lecture made a signicant difference (10 percent
versus 63 percent) to whether a seminary student would stop along the way to
check on someone who was slumped over against a wall seemingly in need of
help.58 And nding a dime or not in the coin return slot of a phone booth
seemed to make a signicant difference (88 percent versus 4 percent) to
whether a participant would subsequently help pick up dropped papers.59
This line of argument could be used to further support the negative claim
(N2) about the widespread existence of folk traits. These traits would be
expected, the argument might go, to show more by way of cross-situational
consistency in the face of seemingly minor or comparatively insignicant
considerations. But here I want to consider how such reasoning can also be
part of a positive story about the relationship between situations and behavior.
For it is natural to start to think that mental states and traits, and even
personality more generally, all take a back seat to the demands of the situations
which confront us during our daily lives. This idea gets expressed in stronger
and weaker forms by situationists. An extreme version is that:
(a) Behavior is entirely a product of situational forces. Personality does not make
any causal contribution.60
More restrained and defensible than this claim is that:
(b) Behavior is primarily a product of situational forces. Personality only has a
modest causal contribution to make.
What should be made of these claims?61
been assumed by trait-state theories . . . Even seemingly trivial situational differences may reduce
correlations to zero (1968: 177). And again, the ndings remind us that what people do in any
situation may be changed dramatically even by relatively trivial alterations in their prior experi-
ences or by slight modications in the particular features of the immediate situation (1973:
2589). See also Mischel 1968: 24, 293 and Ross and Nisbett 1991: 46, 1011, 4658.
58
Darley and Batson 1973.
59
Isen and Levin 1972. I discuss this study, and some of the replication trouble that arose
subsequently, in Moral Character, chapter three.
60
Hence Skinner: Every discovery of an event which has a part in shaping a mans behavior
seems to leave so much the less to be credited to the man himself; and as such explanations
become more and more comprehensive, the contribution which may be claimed by the individ-
ual himself appears to approach zero (195556: 52). See also the relevant discussion in Flanagan
1991: 264 and Funder 2007: 107.
61
As Bo Ekehammar writes, situationism can be regarded as the antithesis of personologism
and labels those views emphasizing environmental (situational) factors as the main sources of
behavioral variation (1974: 1026). Similarly, Seymour Epstein claims that according to the
situationist position, there is little stability in personality, as behavior is determined almost
exclusively by situational variables (1979: 1099). Similarly Kenneth Bowers writes, recent and
inuential accounts of personality have emphasized the importance of the situational determin-
ants of behavior while minimizing the importance of dispositional or intrapsychic determin-
ants, and again that situationism would suggest that most of the variance would be due to
If personality is just equated with honesty, compassion, or other folk traits
as described earlier, then the idea that personality only has either a modest or
no causal contribution to make to behavior seems to me to be highly plausible.
But as far as I can tell there is no uniformity to how personality was
understood in the early literature devoted to the person-situation debate. At
one extreme, it was equated with mental dispositions of any kind which could
cause behavior, thereby potentially leading again in the direction of Skinnerian
behaviorism. At the other extreme, personality was equated very narrowly
just with the folk traits. In between these extremes there are many other
options. Trying to sort out how best to interpret different writers would be a
tedious task.62
Instead let me focus on the rst sentence in the more restrained claim (b),
namely that behavior is primarily a product of situational forces.63 In the
moral case, the idea is that our moral behavior is primarily the result of
situational forces which may or may not be morally relevant. This is a claim
that my Mixed Trait approach cannot accept. I have argued that most of us
have Mixed Character Traits understood as psychological clusters of particular
belief and desire dispositions which, when activated in appropriate ways and
other things being equal, causally give rise to morally relevant behavior.
Situational forces are a crucial part of this story too, in that Mixed Traits are
highly sensitive to different features of situations and can adjust their causal
activity from one situation to the next. Seemingly small changes in a situation
can have a surprisingly large impact on subsequent behavior, whereas seem-
ingly major changes might not. At the same time, Mixed Traits also cause
behavior, thereby having an impact in the other direction on the shape of
present and future situations. Yet it is not clear in this Mixed Trait framework
that it makes any sense to talk about situational forces being the primary
causal force responsible for behavior. Rather, Mixed Traits and situations
mutually work together in giving rise to behavior.
Independently of whether it is compatible with my own framework or not,
there are good reasons to be suspicious of the claims about situational forces in
(a) and (b). One is that the situations which we encounter do not directly
circumstances and little if any to the individual (1973: 307, 319). For similar claims and
interpretations of situationism, see also Bowers 1973: 30811, 31516, 326, 328, Funder and
Ozer 1983, Ross and Nisbett 1991: xiv, Funder 2007: 101, 112, 117, Bower 2007: 21, and Lucas
and Donnellan 2009: 149.
62
For helpful discussion, see Bowers 1973. Similar problems arise with how to understand
situations and situational forces. For instance, Robert Hogan writes that the conceptual
status of situations is a mess. After 40 years, there is little agreement about how to dene
situations, there is no widely accepted taxonomy of situations, and social psychologists have no
idea how to measure them in a standardized manner (2009: 249). The complaint about an
inadequate account of situations is a common one in the psychology literature.
63
For an accessible discussion of how situational power and dispositional power are meas-
ured in psychology, see Funder and Ozer 1983 and Funder 2008.
Situationism 101
produce intentional actions on our part. Rather, their inuence is shaped by
our mental states, that is, our beliefs and desires and the interpretations which
we give to situations. It is not the situation of being near a woman with a torn
bag leaking candy that leads me to help by picking up the candy. It is my
interpretation of that situation as an opportunity to help, perhaps along with a
desire to help so as to avoid feeling guilty if I dont, and various beliefs about
what would count as helping in this context, which are what jointly cause the
formation of a desire to pick up the candy and in turn cause this actual
behavior.
The causal relationship also often goes in the other direction as well; our
mental states have a signicant impact on creating, selecting, and shaping the
situations in which we are present. Here are some colorful examples from the
psychologist Paul Wachtel:
How do we understand the man who is constantly in the presence of overbearing
women, or constantly immersed in his work, or constantly with weaker men who
are cowed by him but offer little honest feedback? How do we understand the
man who seems to bring out the bitchy side of whatever women he encounters, or
ends up turning almost all social encounters into work sessions, or intimidates
even men who usually are honest and direct?64
Stepping back, then, my behavior is directly the product of mental forces and
only indirectly of situational ones (as they impact my mind), with both forces
working together in an interactive relationship to produce this output.65
64
Wachtel 1973: 331, emphasis removed. Similarly Daniel Nettle writes that By mature
adulthood, at least in afuent and liberal societies, life consists in responding appropriately to
situations that we have in signicant part, consciously or unconsciously, chosen for ourselves
(2007: 47). Much more could be said about these points than I have done so here, but fortunately
the discussion in the psychology literature is extensive. See, e.g. Allport 1937: 3212, Mischel
1968: 2989, Wachtel 1973: 330, Bowers 1973: 329, Zuroff 1986: 995, Buss 1989: 1382, Ross and
Nisbett 1991: 19, 1546, Tellegen 1991: 17, Roberts and Pomerantz 2004: 41113, Caspi et al.
2005: 4706, Nettle 2007: 457, Mischel and Shoda 2008: 212, 229, 233, Funder 2008: 571, 575,
Krueger 2009: 132, Zayas and Shoda 2009: 281, and Sherman et al. 2010: 334.
65
As Ernest Sosa rightly notes: Situationists conclude: forget virtues, explain by situations!
But wait: remember, behavioral explanation is two-ply, requiring when laid out fully both the
relevant particulars of the situation, and the relevant non-Skinnerian dispositions . . . Neither
extreme position seems acceptable: neither that such traits explain with no situational help at all,
nor that such situational particulars explain with no dispositional help at all. Behavioral explan-
ation is two-ply when laid out fully (2009: 288, emphasis his). Similarly, Bowers writes that
Clearly, some kind of reformulation of the situationist-trait issue is in order . . . Obviously, and
to some considerable extent, the person and the situation are codeterminers of behavior, and
they need to be specied simultaneously if predictive accuracy is desired (1973: 322). And David
Funder writes that Research cannot even resolve whether personal or situational inuences on
behavior are more powerful because these factors do notexcept in rare and extreme
circumstancescompete with each other in some kind of zero-sum game . . . neither can have
any impact on the world at all without the contribution of both (2008: 569). But Mischel himself
puts the point best of all when he writes that we may predict best if we know what each situation
means to the individual, and consider the interaction of the person and the setting, rather than
Another reason for suspicion is that personality and situations need not be
thought of in zero-sum terms, where the leftover variance not accounted for
by a personality variable must thereby be accounted for by a situation variable.
For instance, in the earlier example of a correlation of 0.30 between a personality
test of honesty and a behavioral measure of honest behavior, the 9 percent of the
proportion of variance in honest behavior that is accounted for by the variable
of honesty, does not imply that the remaining 91 percent of the variance is to
be accounted for by situational forces.66 It could at least partially be accounted
for in terms of person x situation interactions and other personality variables,
that is, other traits or more specic mental states. This is a familiar point from
the psychology literature, but is rarely made in the philosophy one.67
This line of reasoning has been explored more rigorously in a well-known
paper by David Funder and Daniel Ozer (1983).68 They took several classic
experiments in the situationist tradition and calculated correlations between
behaviors and situational variables. Here were the results:69
Behavior Situational variable Correlation Study
Attribute report Incentive for advocacy 0.36 Festinger and Carlsmith 1959
Bystander intervention Hurry 0.39 Darley and Batson 1973
Bystander intervention Number of onlookers 0.38 Darley and Latan 1968
Obedience Victims isolation 0.42 Milgram 1974
Obedience Proximity of authority 0.36 Milgram 1974
concentrating either on the situation itself or on the individual in an environmental and social
vacuum (1971: 149). See also Magnusson and Endler 1977a: 4, 16, 1921, Bem and Funder 1978:
4856, Locke and Pennington 1982: 219, Small et al. 1983: 14, Zuroff 1986: 995, Winter et al.
1998: 239, Roberts and Pomerantz 2004: 41013, Jost and Jost 2009: 253, Furr 2009: 196, Russell
2009: 2567, and Flanagan 2009: 64.
These themes clearly resonate with an interactionist approach in psychology, at least broadly
construed. As Bowers writes, interactionism argues that situations are as much a function of the
person as the persons behavior is a function of the situation (1973: 327, emphasis removed, see
also 31933). For more on interactionism, see the classic volume edited by Magnusson and
Endler (1977b) or the brief overviews in Magnusson and Endler 1977a, Buss 1989: 13812, and
Caprara and Cervone 2000: 1004.
66
This point has been made for quite some time. See, e.g. Hogan et al. 1977: 260, Kenrick and
Funder 1988: 30, and Funder 2007: 107.
67
For similar criticisms to those in the last two paragraphs, see Bowers 1973: 31933, Mischel
1971: 149, 1973: 2546, 1984: 3524, 1999a: 456, 2004: 4, 2007: 265, 2009: 2834, 289, Magnus-
son and Endler 1977a: 4, Mischel and Shoda 1995: 257, 260, 2008: 222, 226, 228, Shoda and
Mischel 1996: 4201, Johnson 1999: 4445, Funder 2008, Krueger 2009, and Flanagan 2009: 64.
For a thorough and technical critique, see Shoda 1999b.
68
Funder and Ozer 1983. For related discussion, see also Sarason et al. 1975 and Krueger
2009: 129.
69
Funder and Ozer 1983: 110.
Situationism 103
The upshot is that these correlations with respect to situational variables were
not much greater than the personality correlations reported by situationists,
and yet the situational variables were clearly highly important in these studies.
As Funder and Ozer note, situational effects need not explain large percent-
ages of the behavioral variance in order to be important; we suggest this might
also be true of person effects.70
Despite these concerns, I do not want to be overly harsh in my assessment
of (a) and (b). In fact, I think there is a thesis in the same neighborhood that is
perfectly reasonable to accept:
(c) The behavior of most individuals tends to be inuenced by various situational
forces which activate certain of their mental dispositions, whose functioning
and degree of impact on behavior are underappreciated by both ordinary
people and even trained philosophers and psychologists.71
In the moral case, this can be developed in more detail as:
(c*) The moral behavior of most individuals tends to be inuenced by various
situational forces which activate certain of their mental dispositions, whose
functioning and degree of impact on behavior are underappreciated by both
ordinary people and even trained philosophers and psychologists, especially
if most people are assumed to have the traditional virtues or vices. Further-
more, until recently it was unrecognized that many of these dispositions
signicantly inuence moral behavior to the extent that they do, such as
when they are activated by the presence of authority gures, strangers in a
room, fragrances, particular temperatures, and so forth.
It is difcult to contest the idea that the studies cited by situationists have
revealed the workings of all kinds of mental dispositions which bear on our
moral behavior, dispositions that we might have previously never paid much
attention to or even known were widely possessed. For instance, the Milgram
experiments powerfully illustrate the role of dispositions to be obedient to
those whom we think are legitimate authority gures, despite the common
expectation that most participants would not turn the dial up nearly as high as
they actually do. These insights from the situationist writings that are captured
70
Funder and Ozer 1983: 111. See also Hogan et al. 1977: 260, Buss 1989: 137980, and
Funder 2007: 10711, 2008: 570. In an early review of 11 studies, Bowers found that the total
variance due to traits was 12.71 percent and 10.17 percent for situations, but it was 20.77 percent
for person x situation interactions (1973: 321). This contradicts Mischels earlier claim that there
is enormous variance due to situationally specic variables that determine the consequences for
behavior in any particular context (1968: 823), a claim which Mischel seemed to quickly back
away from in subsequent writings (see in particular the quote at the beginning of chapter ve).
71
For broadly similar sentiments, see Ross and Nisbett 1991: 46, Flanagan 1991: 292, Doris
2002: 63 n. 5, Vranas 2005: 3, and Russell 2009: 253, 277.
in (c) and (c*) are welcome ones and advance our understanding of ourselves
and our behavior.72
Another set of positive claims by situationists that I want to mention here
has to do with understanding and explaining our practices of making folk trait
attributions. The most famous idea became known as the fundamental
attribution error, or roughly the idea that people who make trait attributions
tend to overestimate the role of dispositions and underestimate the role of
situations.73 Even before Lee Ross coined this expression in his classic 1977
paper, situationists had long been at work trying to not only describe but also
explain why people make the attributions that they do.74
Much of chapter seven will be devoted to discussing the fundamental
attribution error and related issues about attributing traits, so I will be brief
here. My only point is that this set of issues is largely orthogonal to the
concerns of the Mixed Trait approach. How, why, and when people say that
a person is honest or compassionate, are very different questions from
whether people actually have those traits in the rst place. My primary
concern is with the psychological reality of moral character traits, not with
how people go about labeling each other.
Let me end this chapter with one more point about situationism. I have
formulated its main negative claim as:
the widespread possession of folk traits.
But at times one nds in their writing much more ambitious claims. For
instance, Farber writes that the study of personality is essentially coterminous
with the study of behavior and that If they do no more than account for the
particular behavior from which they are adduced, [intervening variables] are
fatuitous.75 Thus a natural reading of these and other perhaps incautious
statements is that their authors take there to be a large body of experimental
evidence which is incompatible with the widespread possession of any mental
dispositions whatsoever.
Now of course the studies they cite do not tell against the possession of
beliefs and desires, including needs, emotions, goals, and hopes, all of which
are mental dispositions. Nor do they even tell against the possession of other
traits besides the folk ones, such as my Mixed Traits understood as character
72
For a similar observation about Milgram, see Krueger 2009: 130.
73
Ross 1977: 183. See also his 1977: 184, 2001: 37 as well as Bierbrauer 1979: 68, Pietromo-
naco and Nisbett 1982: 1, Ross and Nisbett 1991: 4, Flanagan 1991: 306, Doris 2002: 93,
OSullivan 2003: 1316, Samuels and Casebeer 2005: 75, Russell 2009: 308, and Snow 2010: 71
for similar characterizations.
74
See, e.g. Jones and Nisbett 1971.
75
Farber 1964: 5, 29. See also Harr and Secord 1972: 27, Bowers 1973, Mischel 2004: 2, and
Russell 2009: 23942.
Situationism 105
traits which are neither moral virtues nor vices. So these kinds of statements
are certainly ill-advised.76
But they are also ill-advised for another, much more interesting reason.
Situationists who are not tempted by Skinnerian behaviorism tend to instead
tell a story about behavior in which mental states do in fact play a central role.
Walter Mischel is a prime example in his elaboration of the CAPS model, as
will become clear in the next chapter. But even in his 1968 book he wrote that
In the present view, cognitions, affects, and other mediating events are
construed as internal responses that also serve as stimuli, linking external
stimulus inputs with the ultimate overt terminal outputs in complex stimulus-
response chains.77 Similarly to take another example, in their more recent
exposition and defense of situationism, The Person and the Situation, the
psychologists Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett write that the key to a more
powerful conception of individual differences is to be found in the enduring
motivational concerns and cognitive schemes that guide attention, interpret-
ation, and the formulation of goals and plans.78
Yet once situationists accept the importance of beliefs and desires
including goals, policies, emotions, plans, intentions, and the likethere is a
quick line of reasoning that leads back to the existence of traits.79 I will briey
mention this reasoning here, but the details will emerge in the next chapter.
The idea is that situationists should also accept the importance of clusters of
interrelated beliefs and desires. My desire for food and my beliefs about where
food is available naturally tend to become activated and consciously occur in
thought together, whereas it would be odd for my belief that Mark Twain is
Samuel Clemens to be simultaneously activated along with them.
Once clusters of mental states are accepted, it seems that some of those
clusters could pertain to moral matters, that is, they could be beliefs and
desires pertaining to helping others or telling the truth. And if that is right,
then why not think of these particular clusters of mental state dispositions as
moral character traits? They may not be virtues or vices, admittedly, and if my
view about the widespread possession of Mixed Traits is correct then they will
not be. But they can be moral character traits nonetheless. They can lead to
behavior that is morally permissible or forbidden. They can be stable over
76
For additional related criticism, see Shoda 1999a: 1579.
77
Mischel 1968: 300. See also pages 176, 1789, 203, 205, 299300.
78
Ross and Nisbett 1991: 20. See also pages 12, 20, 58, 67, 96, and especially 1638.
79
For brief statements of this reasoning, see Mumford 1998: 182, Kamtekar 2004: 472, 477,
Adams 2006: 1318, Badhwar 2009: 279, Russell 2009: xii, 172, 2923, 330, Sosa 2009: 279, and
Lukes 2009: 292.
In his otherwise helpful critique of situationism, Bowers claims that traits are inventions
(1973: 325). The above discussion does not see them that way, if this means that their existence is
not an objective feature of peoples psychology. The same applies to Bowers claim that there is
behavioral consistency without a trait explanation of it (333).
time. They can be cross-situationally consistent in the behavior they cause,
provided situations are understood in terms of their psychologically relevant
features and not nominally. Indeed, Mischel, Ross, and Nisbett have done
more than most psychologists to stress precisely the importance of under-
standing how people construe situations.80 So these clusters of mental state
dispositions seem to be perfectly suited to serve as moral character traits.81
Again, this line of reasoning will be expanded upon at the end of the next
chapter. But if it is promising, then its upshot is surprisingsituationists can
accept the existence of cross-situationally consistent moral character traits. That
goes for my Mixed Traits as well.
80
See Mischel 1968: 64, 67, 18990, 285, 300, 1973: 25961, 263, 1999b: 434, 46, 2004: 15,
2007: 266, 2009: 284, Mischel and Peake 1982: 749, Shoda et al. 1993: 10245, 1029, 1994: 685,
Mischel and Shoda 1995: 248, 1998: 2478, 2008: 218, Shoda and Mischel 1996: 4212, Shoda
1999a: 163, Cervone 1999: 3236, Mischel et al. 2002: 51, Mendoza-Denton et al. 2007: 215,
Zayas and Shoda 2009: 2801, and especially Ross and Nisbett 1991: xiv, 1113, 5989, 1638,
Shoda et al. 1994: 6756, and Shoda and LeeTiernan 2002. Hence as early as 1968, Mischel wrote
that, Assessing the acquired meaning of stimuli is the core of social behavior assessment (1968:
261). See also Farber 1964: 259.
81
They will not be situation free in the sense that their activation is independent of the
properties of particular situations (the rst sense of this expression that was distinguished at the
start of this chapter). But then again, most mental states are not situation free, as well as most
traditional virtues and vices as I noted earlier.
5
The CAPS Model
In the previous chapter I suggested that when it comes to moral character we

should agree with the main negative claim being made by situationists in
psychology, namely that there is signicant evidence against the widespread
possession of folk character traits. Hence Walter Mischel seems right to me
when he remarks about moral agency that:
People develop subtler discriminations which depend on many moderating
variables, involve complex interactions, and encompass diverse components.
These components include moral judgments, voluntary delay of reward, resist-
ance to temptation, self-reactions following transgression, and self-evaluative and
self-reinforcing patterns, each of which includes rather discrete subprocesses
which tend to be only modestly and complexly interrelated, and which may be
idiosyncratically organized within each individual . . . it becomes understandable
that gross, overall, appraisals of a persons status on any single dimension of
individual differences tend to have limited utility.1
At the same time, I also suggested that we should be hesitant in accepting some
of the positive claims that are often made by situationists, such as that
behavior is largely driven by situational forces.
It turns out that even Mischel distanced himself from this positive claim as
well. For instance in his 1973 paper he writes that Personality and Assessment
has been widely misunderstood to imply that people show no consistencies,
that individual differences are unimportant, and that situations are the main
determinants of behavior, and again that it would be wasteful to create
pseudo-controversies that pit person against situation in order to see which
is more important.2 Rather than follow situationism as a positive view about
the relationship between situations and behavior, Mischel early on began
developing a version of the social-cognitive approach to the study of person-
ality which became known as the cognitive-affective personality system or
1
Mischel and Mischel 1976: 205. See also page 209.
2
Mischel 1973: 254, 2556. For other remarks critical of situationist themes, see Mischel
1973: 2546, 1984: 3524, 1999a: 456, 2004: 4, 2007: 265, 2009: 2834, 289, Mischel and Shoda
1995: 257, 260, 2008: 222, 226, 228, and Shoda and Mischel 1996: 4201.
CAPS model. Over the course of the past forty years, Mischel and others
such as Yuichi Shoda and Jack Wright have further developed the CAPS
model in greater detail.3
Anyone familiar with the CAPS model will recognize that my thinking
about moral character traits shares several central features with that approach.
Indeed, aside from one point of disagreement to be discussed below, I largely
accept the CAPS model as a plausible approach for thinking about personality
in general, and not just moral traits specically. That may seem to be a
problematic admission for me to make. For then it might seem as if all my
work does is to take the CAPS model and simply apply it specically to
the moral domain, something that Mischel and company have not yet done
at length.4 Viewed in this light, my project would just be an exercise in
application, rather than trying to make both conceptual and empirical pro-
gress in this area.
In this chapter I want to argue for what might seem to be a startling
conclusion. I claim that in fact the CAPS model is a surprisingly unoriginal
and uncontroversial view. More precisely, my central claim is this: using
technical language, the CAPS model re-describes and nds supporting evidence
for basic platitudes of commonsense folk psychology.
If this is right, then my project is a rather different one from what was
represented above. It does not start with the CAPS model and then just apply it
to moral character. Rather we both start in the same placewith basic
platitudes of commonsense folk psychology, which we then use to derive
and support our pictures of what traits look like.
In order to explore these ideas more fully, in the next section I rst outline
some of these basic platitudes, and then in the subsequent section show how
the central ideas associated with the CAPS modelsuch as cognitive-affective
units, if . . . then . . . behavioral contingencies, intraindividual behavioral signa-
tures, and so forthstraightforwardly follow from them. The third section will
note one area of potential disagreement between myself and advocates of
CAPS, and then I conclude with why I think the model as currently developed
still has a long way to go.
3
Hence the focus of this chapter will be on only one version of the social-cognitive
approach, albeit perhaps the leading contemporary version. Given limitations of space, I omit
discussion of alternative versions such as that developed by Bandura 1978, 1986, 1999. For a
range of social-cognitive views, see the papers in Cervone and Shoda 1999b. For development of
the CAPS model by other psychologists besides those mentioned above, see, e.g. the papers in
Shoda et al. 2007.
Daniel Russell (2009: 241, 245, 252, 296) prefers to label the CAPS model a situationist
theory, but given the characterization above and especially Mischels repeated criticisms of
situationist themes, I think this label is ill-advised.
4
For some preliminary remarks by Mischel, see Mischel and Mischel 1976.
The CAPS Model 109
5.1 S OME COMMONSENSE ASSUMPTIONS
The following six claims are perfectly ordinary and standard assumptions
from our ordinary lives which are captured in commonsense thinking about
the mind. Here is the rst one:
(i) We have a vast array of different mental states, including beliefs, wants,
wishes, hopes, intentions, and so forth. They can be very broadly classied
as beliefs and desires.5 These mental states can function as plans, goals,
convictions, norms, aspirations, and so forth. They are used, among other
things, to shape our interpretation of the world, and to bring about changes in
the world. Whether we can effect change in the world is limited by our
abilities, and for some actions we are not able to perform them.
Nothing much should need to be said here. I think I have certain beliefs and
desires, and so do you. Some of them have contents which involve planning
for the long-term future, whereas others involve short-term goals, or norms
about how to act. Some of my mental states are commonplace, and some of
them are unique to me. Some of them I am able to carry out in action (such
as the desire to write this chapter), whereas others I am not able to realize
(such as my desire to be a fully virtuous person, or that there be world
peace).
Here is the second assumption:
(ii) Many of our mental states are not active or occurrent at every moment. They
are dispositional states which can become activated.
Prior to writing this sentence, I had not consciously thought today about the
fact that 7+5=12. Nevertheless I still have this belief even when I am not
thinking about it, and so do you. Hence it is true to say of me that I believe that
7+5=12, even though it has not come across my radar screen all day.
The third assumption is that:
(iii) Relevant information from the situations we are in and from other parts of
our minds can activate our mental states. What counts as relevant is a
matter of what is in the content of those mental states themselves.
When I see a snake slithering by, that can activate my fear of getting bitten.
The fact that I have this state of fear with respect specically to snakes, is what
makes that particular information highly relevant. In contrast, information
that the laundry is nished is not relevant to the content of this particular fear,
5
See chapter one, section one. There I noted that I am not committing myself to the claim
that all of what goes on in our mental lives falls under the heading of either beliefs or desires.
Rather it is customary to divide all mental states with intentional objects into these two
categories.
although it certainly is relevant to various other mental states. Similarly, when
I think back on a broken promise, that can activate feelings of guilt over what
I did. When the room gets suddenly dark, that can activate my belief that the
power has gone out. These are all perfectly familiar observations.
Fourth:
(iv) Certain of our mental states tend to cluster together, and so be mutually
activated. Which mental states these are, and how strongly their intercon-
nections are, varies from person to person. But all of us have a number of
different clusters of interrelated mental states, pertaining to different facets
of our lives.6
When I see the snake, that activates in me my fear of getting bitten. It also
tends to activate various beliefs about how to not get bitten, such as by running
away, or by standing perfectly still, or by hitting the snake. Through some
psychological process, a desire to run away might be activated. And so forth.
The point is that this cluster of mental states tends to hang together and so get
activated in my mind, whereas a belief that 7+5=12 is not part of that cluster.
At the same time, this cluster of mental states is not held by everyone; other
people do not get afraid of snake bites at all, or if they do, they adopt different
avoidance strategies.
According to the fth assumption:
(v) Given that these are clusters of interrelated mental state dispositions, then
barring some signicant change to the cluster, they should tend to function
similarly when activated in similar ways, other things being equal.
Hence the next time I come across a snake, I will probably also be fearful,
form the same beliefs, and desire to run away, while not thinking about how
7+5=12.
Finally:
(vi) Since relevant information from the situations we are in and from other
parts of our minds can activate our individual mental states (claim (iii)),
relevant information can also activate the clusters of interrelated mental
states as well. Each cluster has specic kinds of information that tend to
activate it, and so for any given cluster, it may not be activated during a
variety of different situations a person comes across in a given day. Or if it is
activated regularly during the day, it may not always be activated with the
same intensity.
6
As Yuichi Shoda writes, A model of personality coherence must account for how an
individuals thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are related to each other rather than being
haphazard and independent psychological events (Shoda 1999a: 162). See also Mischel 1999b:
467.
The CAPS Model 111
My cluster of mental states associated with a fear of snakes, beliefs about how
to avoid them, and a desire to run away, will obviously be activated in certain
highly specic situations, and (I can report) is as a matter of fact rarely
activated at all. The cluster of mental states associated with satisfying feelings
of hunger, on the other hand, tends to be activated much more frequently
every day. This cluster is sensitive to various pieces of relevant information,
such as how hungry I am, how much money I have, what the nearest food
options are, whether it is important to maintain a diet, and so forth. Given
changes in these or other variables, I may or may not directly attempt to nd
the nearest food option or attempt to eat now as opposed to later.
This completes my presentation of these six basic assumptions. Note that,
while they may have been stated in more abstract or academic language than
many people might use, the ideas themselves are perfectly ordinary and
familiar, as the examples following each of them tried to show. Barring a
powerful reason to reject them, I think we should accept that these six claims
are intuitive and commonsensical assumptions that any psychological theory
of personality and behavior should accept among its rst principles.
Of course, nothing about these assumptions tells us what the specic mental
states actually are which exist in each of our minds. None of them tells us, for
instance, whether people have a basic desire to help other people or instead a
basic desire to harm other people. Rather, these assumptions just concern the
general existence and functioning of our mental states, and not their specic
contents. This point will be important at the end of the chapter.
These six assumptions have certainly informed my thinking about moral
character. Recall that Mixed Traits are clusters of interrelated mental states.
Each of the states making up a Mixed Trait is sensitive to relevant information
from the external world and other parts of the persons mental life. Some of
them are more closely connected than others, such as the desires and beliefs
associated with harming and guilt avoidance, or the desires and beliefs associ-
ated with harming and obedience to authorities. Mixed Traits tend to function
similarly over time when activated in similar ways, and they can vary in their
activation and their outputs from one situation to the next given what
psychologically relevant information arises in any given situation.
5.2 THE CAPS APPROACH
Let me now return to Mischels version of the social-cognitive theory of

personality. I intend to show that the central tenets of the CAPS model simply
involve repackaging these ordinary assumptions using more sophisticated
technical vocabulary.
(a) Cognitive-Affective Units. The conceptual starting point of the CAPS
model is with what Mischel has called cognitive-affective units or cognitive
social learning person variables.7 The idea is to take the focus in studying
personality away from broad or global traits, and put it squarely on a given
persons capacities and specic psychological states or processes.8 Here are the
ve cognitive-affective units Mischel initially outlined in 1973:9
Construction competencies
Encoding strategies and personal constructs
Behavior-outcome and stimulus-outcome expectancies in particular situations
Subjective stimulus values
Self-regulatory systems and plans
Now these might sound like exciting new categories which can help shed light
on personality and offer a promising framework for helpfully organizing the
various factors which give rise to behavior. But closely examining Mischels
characterization of each one of these variables tells a different story. For
instance, the expectancies end up just being ordinary instrumental beliefs,
that is, beliefs about the best means in order to attain a given end. They guide
the persons selection (choice) of behaviors from among the enormous
number which he is capable of constructing within any situation.10 For
instance, if I desire to avoid the snake, then my instrumental belief might be
that the best way to avoid the snake is to run away. Similarly, stimulus values
are just his stimulus preferences and aversions. This unit refers to stimuli that
have acquired the power to induce positive or negative emotional states in the
person and to function as incentives or reinforcers for his behavior.11 In other
words, this category just refers to plain old desires, such as my desire to avoid
the snake. Self-regulatory systems and plans ends up referring to goals, rules,
and plans, which are just specic kinds of beliefs and desires.12 Finally, the rst
two categories refer not to specic kinds of mental states, but rather to general
capacities and abilities, that is, to our basic dispositions to perform certain
7
For further discussion, see Mischel 1973, 1984: 353, 2004: 45, 11, 2009: 284, Mischel and
Mischel 1976, Mischel and Peake 1982: 749, Shoda and Mischel 1996: 416, Mischel and Shoda
1998: 2378, Shoda 1999a: 16571, and Mischel et al. 2002: 53.
8
As Mischel writes, The proposed cognitive social learning approach to personality shifts
the unit of study from global traits inferred from behavioral signs to the individuals cognitive
activities and behavior patterns, studied in relation to the specic conditions that evoke,
maintain, and modify them and which they, in turn, change (1973: 265).
9
Mischel 1973: 265, 275. For an updated version, see Mischel and Shoda 1995: 252, 1998:
238, 2008: 211, Shoda and Mischel 1996: 416, and Mischel 1999b: 47.
10
Mischel 1973: 269. See also Mischel 1973: 26972, Mischel and Mischel 1976: 1913,
Mischel and Shoda 1995: 252, 1998: 238, Cervone and Shoda 1999a: 19, and Shoda 1999a: 1678.
11
Mischel 1973: 273. See also Mischel 1973: 2723, Mischel and Mischel 1976: 193, and
Mischel and Shoda 1995: 252, 1998: 238.
12
Mischel 1973: 2735. See also Mischel and Mischel 1976: 1936, Mischel and Shoda 1995:
253, 259, 1998: 238, Cervone and Shoda 1999a: 19, and Shoda 1999a: 1657.
The CAPS Model 113
kinds of mental and physical actions and to interpret, encode, identify, and
categorize incoming information.13
What should be clear, then, is that these categories introduce technical
terms to label familiar phenomena from ordinary thinking. They are already
captured in the rst of the six assumptions.14
(b) If . . . Then . . . Situation-Behavior Contingencies. Another well-known
feature of the CAPS model is the claim that each individuals personality can
be represented by various if-then situation-behavior contingencies.15 The
ifs are situations, and the thens are behavioral outputs.16 In other words,
the idea is that there are true conditional statements linking the situations a
person encounters with the resulting behaviors. Furthermore, on the CAPS
model these are not highly specic conditionals, such as If student X comes to
my ofce, then . . . and If student Y comes to my ofce, then . . . Rather
they are broader conditionals which will allow for some coherence in behavior
across situations (on which more below). Finally, these contingencies vary
from person to persontwo people can be in the same nominal situation, and
yet act in very different ways. The CAPS view can explain this variability in
terms of differences in their cognitive-affective unitsdifferent people can
have different particular units, and furthermore they can be activated, can be
13
Mischel 1973: 2659. See also Mischel and Mischel 1976: 18790, Shoda et al. 1993: 1023,
1029, Mischel and Shoda 1995: 253, 1998: 238, and Shoda 1999a: 168.
14
Thus consider Shodas example to illustrate the role of goals and values: a person who
helps a homeless person on the street, but refuses to help her boss with his personal errands
probably has different values from someone who has an opposite pattern, who never pays
attention to homeless people but is helpful when asked for some personal favor by his boss
(1999a: 166). Such a passage could have come straight from a popular magazine or self-help
book; one neednt suspect that it is taken from a description of a theory of personality. This is not
intended as a criticism by any means; indeed the fact that the view is so close to commonsense
can be a mark in its favor. Another example is when Mischel and Shoda write that These units
refer to various types of mental eventsthoughts and affectsthat become activated character-
istically and stably within a given individual in relation to certain features of situations or of the
self (1998: 237). See also the example in Mischel and Shoda 1995: 255 and the discussion in
Cervone and Shoda 1999a: 1819.
15
For relevant discussion, see Mischel 1968: 189, 1984: 3601, 1999a: 459, 1999b: 43, 50,
2004: 8, 11, 16, 2007: 266, 26970, 2009: 284, Wright and Mischel 1987: 11614, Shoda et al.
1993: 1029, 1994: 675, 677, Mischel and Shoda 1995: 249, 1998: 243, 2008: 215, Vansteelandt and
Van Mechelen 1998: 7589, Shoda 1999a: 15964, Cervone and Shoda 1999a: 21, Caprara and
Cervone 2000: 80, Shoda and LeeTiernan 2002: 259, Zayas and Shoda 2009: 281, Andersen and
Thorpe 2009: 163, and Smith et al. 2009: 187, 194.
16
Typically this is how the conditionals are stated. But Mischel and Shoda also note that there
are if . . . then . . . relations in which either one or both of the relata are mental states. See Mischel
and Shoda 1995: 2512, 1998: 240, 2008: 219, 229, Shoda 1999a: 164, and Mischel 1999b: 52,
2004: 16. In some places the idea of using category structures in both relata has been explored.
See, e.g. Wright and Mischel 1987: 1161 and Shoda et al. 1993. Wright and Mischel (1987: 1161)
also consider different strengths in the linking relationship between the relata, i.e. whether it is a
probabilistic relation or not.
accessible, and can be related to each other in different ways from one person
to the next.17
The main evidence that Mischel, Shoda, and Wright have offered for there
being such true conditionals, derives from an extensive study of childrens
behavior at a summer treatment camp.18 There participants were observed by
a team of 77 trained counselors for an average of 167 hours of behavioral
observation per child during the six-week summer program. Levels of verbal
aggression, for instance, were measured in different situations, and in the
situation when teased or provoked by a peer, one child exhibited a standardized
z-score of roughly +1.0 (where 0 is the mean), whereas another child had a score
of roughly 2.0.19 So for one of these children, his personality could be partially
understood as: if teased by a peer, then unlikely to exhibit verbal aggression.20
This terminology of if . . . then . . . situation-behavior contingencies is
another label for an ordinary phenomenon. Recall from chapter one that
dispositions ground the truth of conditional statements. So if I have the
disposition to fear snake bites, then it is true of me that if I see a snake, then
I will exhibit fearful emotional behavior in my facial and other body language
(subject to all the usual qualications about background conditions and
holding other things equal). So if we have any mental state dispositions at
all which pertain to behavior, then they will ground true if . . . then . . . condi-
tionals. Furthermore, if we have clusters of mental state dispositions which
pertain to behavior, then they will ground their own if . . . then . . . conditional
statements. If I see a snake, then it is highly likely that I will run awaythis is a
familiar conditional which is made true by a particular cluster of beliefs and
desires which are connected to each other and which concern snake bites.
In other words, because of these specic beliefs and desires and their relations,
it is true of me that if I see a snake, then it is highly likely that such-and-such
behavior will follow. Finally, individual differences are to be explained in
terms of whether people possess the same mental state dispositions, and if
they do, whether they have them to the same strength and relate them to other
mental states in the same way.
17
For more on individual differences in the CAPS model, see Shoda et al. 1994: 676, Mischel
and Shoda 1995: 253, 1998: 23740, 2008: 21112, Shoda and Mischel 1996: 418, Mischel et al.
2002: 53, and Mischel 2004: 11, 2009: 284, 286.
18
For relevant data from this camp, see Mischel 1984: 3612, Wright and Mischel 1987, and
Shoda et al. 1993, 1994. For a recent study by Shoda and colleagues using youth baseball players
and coaches, see Smith et al. 2009.
19
See the gures in Shoda et al. 1994: 678. These z-scores are the standardized deviations
from the mean score for this sample of participants. They can be understood as rank orderings
for that group, behavior, and situation.
20
In addition to verbal and physical aggression, they also studied withdrawal, friendliness,
compliance, and prosocial behavior. For relevant discussion, see Mischel 1984: 35961, Wright
and Mischel 1987: 11648, Shoda, Mischel, and Wright 1993: 1025, 1994: 677, Mischel and
Shoda 1995: 249, 1998: 2445, and Shoda and LeeTiernan 2002: 245.
The CAPS Model 115
So the idea of if . . . then . . . situation-behavior contingencies also follows
straight away from commonsense assumptions.21
(c) Nominal versus Psychologically Salient Features of Situations. This aspect
of the CAPS model is always highlighted prominently, and has recently been
made much of in the philosophy literature on character too.22 It was already
introduced back in chapter two, and while it is hard to draw the distinction
precisely, a common approach is to say that the psychologically salient
features or active ingredients are the features of the situation that have
signicant meaning for a given individual or type, and that are related to
the experienced psychological situationthe thoughts and affects and goals
that become activated within the personality system.23 Nominal characteris-
tics of a situation (also sometimes labeled simply as nominal units of situ-
ations or nominal situations) are generic features such as the physical
location, time, or event, for example, being in the ofce, eating dinner, doing
homework at night, talking on the telephone with Jane, watching television,
and so forth.
The idea is that any given person might react to a variety of different
features in a given nominal situation, and furthermore react to those features
in different ways. So, for instance, the children in the summer camp studies
were observed in different situations understood in terms of their psychologic-
ally salient features, such as whether they were being teased or provoked, to see
how they would react. It was found that for some of them, being teased was
21
So it is hard to disagree with the claim made by Shoda that the unique properties of the
personality system are therefore represented in the network of relations among the cognitions
and affects that guide and constrain their activation . . . Because core beliefs and goals are likely to
be activated under many circumstances throughout an individuals life, the cognitions, affects,
and behaviors that are linked to them are likely to be activated simultaneously (1999a: 173).
Similarly, the cognitions and affects that an individual experiences can be thought of as forming
a network of if . . . then . . . relations among themselves. Such relationships can become the basis
of intraindividual coherence, so that the thoughts and feelings experienced by an individual
hang together in a pattern that is distinctive for that person (1999a: 164, emphasis his). Note
that this is a restatement of the commonsense idea from the text. The same is true of this claim:
Features of situations activate a set of internal reactionsnot just cognitive but also affective
based on the individuals prior experience with those features (Mischel and Shoda 1995: 251).
Similar remarks apply to Mischel and Shoda 1995: 253, 255, 1998: 2389, 2008: 21112, Shoda
and Mischel 1996: 417, 420, and Mischel 1999b: 46, 2009: 286. For a roughly similar observation,
see Johnson 1999: 446.
22
See, e.g. Mischel 1968: 64, 67, 18990, 285, 300, 1973: 25961, 263, 1999b: 434, 46, 2004:
15, 2007: 266, 2009: 284, Mischel and Peake 1982: 749, Shoda et al. 1993: 10245, 1029, 1994:
685, Mischel and Shoda 1995: 248, 1998: 2478, 2008: 218, Shoda and Mischel 1996: 4212,
Shoda 1999a: 163, Cervone 1999: 3236, Mischel et al. 2002: 51, Mendoza-Denton et al. 2007:
215, Zayas and Shoda 2009: 2801, and especially Shoda et al. 1994: 6756 and Shoda and
LeeTiernan 2002. For discussion in the philosophy literature, see Brandt 1988: 78, Flanagan
1991: 291, Sreenivasan 2002: 50, 5760, Doris 2002: 7685, Solomon 2003: 52, Kamtekar 2004:
4703, Upton 2009b: 178, Lukes 2009: 293, Russell 2009: chapters eight to ten, and Snow
2010: chapter one.
23
Mischel 2004: 15.
connected to states of aggression in a variety of nominal situations, and for
others it was not. Similarly to take another example, a person might be very
sensitive to perceived criticism by others, which triggers defensive psycho-
logical strategies. Such a person could think that he is being criticized on
separate occasions at the ofce, home, parties, and so forth, and have the same
strategies be activated as a result. So the claim of the CAPS model is that
studies of personality should pay close attention to what features are psycho-
logical relevant for the participants in question, and not just to the nominal
situations.24
Again, I think we should all agree with this. As noted earlier:
(iii) Relevant information from the situations we are in and from other parts of
our minds can activate our mental states. What counts as relevant is a
matter of what is in the content of those mental states themselves.
Some people are afraid of snakes, and so observing a snake slithering by is

highly relevant information that might not be captured in a description of the
situation as in the garden. For other people, though, it is completely irrele-
vant. The difference comes down to their mental statessome have a fear of
snakes, and others do not. Given this difference in their mental states, natur-
ally different features of the same nominal garden situation are going to be
relevant to them. Commonsense agrees.
(d) Intraindividual Behavioral Signatures and Cross-Situational Consist-
ency. These prior claims offered by the CAPS model can be put together to
introduce the concept of an intraindividual behavioral signature. This label
refers to the pattern of behavior that one person (hence intra individual)
exhibits in multiple situations, where the situations are distinguished by their
psychologically relevant features. For instance, each summer camper was
observed over the course of multiple situations to record patterns of aggressive
behavior. Other situations included when approached by a peer and when
warned by an adult counselor.25 In general, for any given person her behav-
ioral signature can be represented using a prole with situations on the x-axis
and some measure of behavior on the y-axis. These are the proles I used
24
As Shoda writes, analyzing and characterizing nominal situations in terms of their
functional equivalence with regard to psychological features may allow one to identify other
nominal situations to which one can generalize the available observations of behavior (1999a:
163). See also Mischel 1973: 263, 2004: 15, Mischel and Shoda 1995: 248, 1998: 248, and Shoda
and LeeTiernan 2002. The claim goes back all the way to Mischels 1968 book: Assessing the
acquired meaning of stimuli is the core of social behavior assessment (1968: 190).
There are various ways of identifying the psychologically salient features of situations. For
the different approaches that were used with the summer camp children, see Shoda et al. 1993,
1994. See also the discussion in Shoda et al. 1994: 685 and especially Shoda and LeeTiernan
2002: 247.
25
Shoda 1999a: 160.
The CAPS Model 117
many times in chapter two, and two examples of actual proles (rather than
my ctional ones) are coming soon in the next sub-section.26
Using the idea of intraindividual behavior signatures, the CAPS model can
say something about cross-situational consistency. Whereas the situationist
view might leave us with a picture of human beings as highly inconsistent and
fragmented, this model claims that there can be a kind of cross-situational
consistency with respect to the same psychologically salient features of various
nominal situations. In other words, the ofce and the gym might not seem
to have much in common, but a person might exhibit similar levels of behavior
in both in virtue of picking up on the same features in each. At other times,
when those features are not present in the ofce or gym, the same person
might act in a different way. With their data collected from the summer camp,
Shoda and company found that the consistency correlation for verbal aggres-
sion in response to the same psychologically salient feature (peer teased) in
two independent camp activities was 0.40, for this feature and whining it was
0.45, and for this feature and compliance it was 0.39.27 Furthermore, as the
number of shared features decreased, the consistency of individual differences
in behaviors also decreased.28
So a persons behavior can exhibit a form of cross-situational consistency in
virtue of adjusting and adapting to what cognitive-affective units are being
activated in a given moment. As Mischel writes, people behave in ways that
are consistent with the meanings that particular situations have for them.29
Even if these patterns do not exhibit high consistency correlations across
nominal situations and can seem to be fragmented to outside observers, they
can reect a stable and intelligible underlying system of cognitive-affective
units. Thus the CAPS model predicts that the persons behavior in a domain
will change from one situation to anotherwhen the if changes, so will the
theneven if the personality system were to remain entirely unchanged.30
26
For more on the ideas of behavioral signatures and proles in the CAPS model, see Shoda
et al. 1994: 6758, Mischel and Shoda 1995: 249, 251, 255, 258, 1998: 242, 245, 2008: 208, 224,
228, 233, Shoda and Mischel 1996: 419, Mischel 1999a: 459, 1999b: 44, 2004: 8, 1011, 16, 2009:
285, Shoda 1999a: 160, 1999b: 366, Cervone and Shoda 1999a: 21, Caprara and Cervone 2000: 80,
Shoda and LeeTiernan 2002: 245, 264, Mischel et al. 2002: 51, Fournier et al. 2008, 2009, and
Smith et al. 2009.
27
Shoda et al. 1994: 682.
28
Shoda et al. 1994: 681.
29
Mischel 2007: 266. Similarly, individuals are characterized by distinctive and stable
patterns of behavior variability across situations (2004: 7).
30
Mischel and Shoda 1995: 257, emphasis theirs. Similarly, the hypothesized personality
system allows the same person to have contradictory facets that are equally genuine. The surface
contradictions become comprehensible when one analyzes the network of relations among
cognitions and affects to identify their psychological organization (258). See also page 259.
For further elaboration of the CAPS approach to cross-situational consistency, see Mischel
1984: 3601, 1999b: 434, 2004: 7, 15, 2007: 2667, 2009: 284, Mischel and Peake 1982: 749,
Shoda et al. 1993: 10245, 10278, 1994: 6756, 684, Mischel and Shoda 1995: 2557, 1998: 248,
These claims are again in line with commonsense. Our behavior does vary
from one situation to another in virtue of the psychologically relevant features
in each.31 For someone like me, the presence of the snake in the garden is
going to be relevant and be highly correlated with eeing behavior, and so too
in a different nominal situation when I am in the ofce and a snake gets in
through the cracked windowthere again this feature of the situation is highly
relevant to my eeing behavior and explains why I am being cross-situation-
ally consistent. More generally, we might each have many different clusters of
mental states, but each of those mental states is itself sensitive to its own
relevant incoming information, and can be activated and issue in relevant
behavior in a wide variety of nominal situations.32 This follows from the
commonsense assumption (vi).
(e) Stability of Behavioral Signatures. A given persons behavioral signature
is expected to exhibit a fair amount of stability over time, barring signicant
changes in his mental life. Figure 5.1 is an example for one student which
draws on data Mischel and Philip Peake collected on the conscientiousness of
participants at Carleton College.33 Similarly, Figure 5.2 is the prole Shoda,
Mischel, and Wright found for the verbal aggression shown by Child #28 at
the summer camp in three situations and two times.34
While Child 28s level of verbal aggression differs signicantly from one
kind of situation to the next, he exhibits roughly the same pattern in these
2008: 218, Cervone and Shoda 1999a: 1011, 212, Cervone 1999: 31529, 2005: 4423, Caprara
and Cervone 2000: 110, 11821, Shoda and LeeTiernan 2002: 266, Mischel et al. 2002: 53 and
especially Shoda 1999a: 16971.
31
Here and throughout the chapter I am assuming that the focus is on people performing
intentional actions which are done for various motivating reasons, rather than mere reex
movements which are not intentional.
32
This is the same idea as what Mischel et al. express in the CAPS language when they write
that As the individual moves across situations that contain different psychological features,
different mediating units and their characteristic interrelationships become activated. When the
ifs posed by the situation change, so do the thens generated by the personality system, but the
if . . . then . . . relationships remain the same, reecting the stable organization of [cognitive-
affective units] distinctive of that individual (2002: 53, emphasis theirs). Again, Mischel puts the
same point this way: As the person experiences situations that contain different psychological
features, different [cognitive-affective units] and their characteristic interrelationships become
activated in relation to these features. Consequently, the activation of CAUs changes from one
time to another and from one situation to another . . . Although cognitions and affects that
are activated at a given time change, how they change, that is, the sequence and pattern of their
activation, remains stable, reecting the stable structure of the organization within the system.
The result is a distinctive pattern of if . . . then . . . relations, or behavioral signatures, manifested
as the individual moves across different situations (2004: 11, emphasis his). Using sophisticated
language, these passages are expressing the commonsense platitudes identied at the beginning
of this chapter. The same remarks apply to Shoda et al. 1994: 684, Mischel and Shoda 1995:
2557, 1998: 243, Shoda and Mischel 1996: 418, and Mischel 1999b: 43, 50. For a roughly similar
observation, see Johnson 1999: 448.
33
Shoda 1999b: 366. See Mischel and Peake 1982.
34
Shoda 1999a: 160.
The CAPS Model 119
1.0 Time 1
Time 2
Conscientiousness (Z score)
0.5
0.0
0.5
1.0
Situations
Figure 5.1 A conscientiousness prole for one student at two times. Shoda 1999b.
Reprinted with Permission.
Verbal
Aggression
(Z score)
1
Child #28, Time 1
Child #28, Time 2
0
When When When

approached teased or warned by
by a peer provoked an adult
by a peer counselor
Figure 5.2 A verbal aggression prole for one child at two times. Shoda 1999a.
Reprinted with Permission.
situations at two different times.35 This should not come as a surprise. We
have clusters of mental state dispositions, and they tend to persist with us over
time. When they are activated in the same way at different times, they are
going to tend to function in a similar manner.36 As I said:
(v) Given that these are clusters of interrelated mental state dispositions, then
barring some signicant change to the cluster, they should tend to function
similarly when activated in similar ways, other things being equal.
(f) Aggregation. The CAPS model rejects the idea that aggregation of a
particular kind of behavior (e.g. friendly or courageous behavior) performed
by a person in many different situations can tell us the whole story about
personality. Briey, the aggregation approach concedes that consistency cor-
relations for behaviors in a few situations are often low and not helpful for the
purpose of predicting what the person will do next in a new situation. But the
approach also argues that such correlations can increase signicantly when
many situations are taken into account. For instance, high correlations are
expected when the average of measures of a persons honesty or conscientious-
ness on even days of a year are correlated with the same persons average score
on odd days during that same year. As Seymour Epstein summarizes the view,
it may be concluded that within-subject reliability coefcients provide evi-
dence for a relatively high degree of stability of the organization of variables
within most individuals when the data are derived from sufcient observations
but provide no such evidence when the data are derived from single
observations.37
Now advocates of the CAPS model accept that aggregation data is import-
ant and useful for a number of purposes. Thus as Shoda and his colleagues
note the model recognizes the existence of broad overall average individual
35
More generally, Shoda and company found that for the 53 children who encountered all
ve situations with sufcient frequency that were being studied, the stability coefcients in their
intraindividual proles were 0.19 for prosocial talk, 0.28 for whining, 0.41 for compliance, and
0.47 for verbal aggression (1994: 679).
For further discussion of stability, see Mischel 1968: 36, 135, 28198, 1984: 362, 1999b: 43,
2004: 68, 2009: 285, Mischel and Peake 1982: 749, Shoda et al. 1993: 1023, 1994: 67585,
Mischel and Shoda 1995: 253, 1998: 2425, 2008: 208, 219, 224, 229, Shoda 1999a: 160, Shoda
and LeeTiernan 2002: 24956, Mischel et al. 2002: 52, and Smith et al. 2009.
36
This is just another way of saying that these intraindividually stable patterns of behavior
variation across situations reect underlying person variables, such as beliefs and values, and the
way different social situations are encoded by the person (Shoda et al. 1994: 683). Or again that
the pursuit of durable values and goals with stable skills and expectations for long periods of
time surely involves coherent and meaningful patternings among the individuals efforts and
enterprises (Mischel and Peake 1982: 749).
37
Epstein 1979: 1110. For more on the aggregation approach, see Epstein 1979, 1983, Mischel
and Peake 1982, and Ross and Nisbett 1991: 1079.
The CAPS Model 121
differences at the aggregate level with regard to which most people can be
compared on most dimensions . . . such overall average differences are highly
informative.38 But CAPS advocates tend to not be satised just with aggrega-
tion data across numerous situations. In particular, they reject Epsteins claims
that most single items of behavior have a high component of error of
measurement and a narrow range of generality, and that single items of
behavior, no matter how carefully measured, like single items in a test,
normally have too high a component of error of measurement to permit
demonstration of high degrees of stability.39 Rather for them, aggregation
data gives us insight into only one aspect of personality, and in addition an
individuals specic actions are important data too. Each item of behavior is
often not noise or error to be aggregated away, but rather a reection of
the persons underlying cognitive-affective units.40
Commonsense would seem to agree here too. If we have mental state
dispositions, and if when they become activated they form occurrent mental
states which can subsequently cause relevant behavior, then that behavior is
important and reveals something about ones personality. It is evidence that
can be used to attempt to identify just what these mental state dispositions are,
and with that information in hand, observers can know what I believe and
desire in this area of my life, and so try to predict when such mental states
might be activated again even in different nominal situations.
38
Shoda et al. 1994: 685. See also Mischel and Peake 1982: 738, 7478, Shoda and Mischel
1996: 421, Mischel 2004: 3, and Cervone et al. 2007: 7.
39
Epstein 1979: 1097 and 1121. Similarly they would reject Jack Blocks claim that the
reliability of many of the measures employed in personality research . . . is often poor, unneces-
sarily so. It makes no sense to use measures so unreliable that subsequent intercorrelations
among measures are constrained to be close to zero (1977: 40).
40
Hence the average summary score that results [from aggregation] allows one to ask
whether individuals are different in their overall level of a disposition, and is useful for many
purposesyet it may conceal potentially valuable information about where and when individ-
uals differ in their unique patterns of behavior (Mischel et al. 2002: 51). Similarly, one should
not assume that what is being averaged out is all random uctuation of behavior unrelated to the
personalities of the participants when the structure of behavioral consistency is characterized by
a large person situation interaction. In fact, if our goal is to predict behavior in a specic
situation, the person situation interaction is just as important a source of information as the
general behavioral tendency (Shoda 1999a: 380).
For further discussion of CAPS and aggregation, see also Mischel 1973: 258, 1984: 3589,
1999a: 459, 1999b: 412, 2004: 6, 2007: 268, Mischel and Peake 1982: 7319, 7478, Shoda et al.
1994: 6845, Mischel and Shoda 1995: 24751, 257, 260, 1998: 2434, 2008: 2224, 228, Shoda
and Mischel 1996: 4201, Shoda 1999a: 159, 1999b, Cervone and Shoda 1999a: 4, Cervone 1999:
323, Caprara and Cervone 2000: 78, 80, Shoda and LeeTiernan 2002: 242, Mischel et al. 2002: 51,
Cervone et al. 2007: 7, and Smith et al. 2009: 187.
5.3 E VALUATING THE CAPS M ODEL
So far I have found little about the CAPS model that would be inconsistent
with my approach to moral character. The claims reviewed above seem to me
to be very plausible, and that is because they follow from commonsense
platitudes about how the mind works. However, the one area where I think
we should part ways with the CAPS model, or at least with how it is sometimes
stated, has to do with how to understand the nature of traits.
Now I have already agreed with situationism in its negative claim that most
people do not have the traditional virtues and vices understood as global
dispositions of the kind outlined in the previous chapter. But just rejecting
one view of trait dispositions as empirically adequate still leaves it wide open
as to what to say more positively about whether most of us have traits
understood in some other way.
In a number of places, Mischel and company make claims which seem
to suggest that they are willing to accept the existence of trait dispositions.
For instance, they claim that dispositions, no matter how conceptualized, are
key aspects of the personality construct and that recognition of the limita-
tions of traditional global trait and state theories does not imply that people
have no dispositions.41 Unfortunately, though, the relevant passages are
usually too brief to offer a detailed positive account. But in an extensive
treatment of the issue, Wright and Mischel (1987) do distinguish between
and assess three views of traits. It is worth briey reviewing each of these
approaches.42
The causal view claims that traits are dispositions understood as stable
mental attributes or structures had by a person which, when activated, causally
give rise to relevant thoughts and (in many cases) behavior. Advocates of the
view typically expect this trait-generated behavior to be cross-situationally
consistent, although that is not a necessary feature of the view. The causal view
is historically the most famous and popular position about trait dispositions,
especially in philosophy, and is the kind of approach I outlined at the
conceptual level in chapter one. It accepts a realist view about dispositions,
claiming that there actually are such properties which are had by people who
instantiate them.43
41
Mischel and Shoda 1998: 233 and Mischel 1984: 356. Similarly, the question becomes not
do traits really exist? but when are trait constructs invoked and what are their uses and
misuses? (Mischel 1973: 262). And although it is often assumed and asserted that process-
oriented approaches to personality ignore or deny stable personality dispositions, in fact, in the
present theory they have a signicant role in the personality system itself (Mischel and Shoda
1995: 257). See also Mischel 1973: 2624, 1999a: 456 and Mischel and Shoda 1995: 263.
42
Each of the views was also mentioned earlier in chapter one, section three. For a similar set
of three views, see Zuroff 1986: 9967.
43
For more see Wright and Mischel 1987: 1160 as well as chapter one, section three.
The CAPS Model 123
In contrast, the summary view (or act-frequency view) claims that traits are
not causal entities and do not exist as mental properties of a persons mind,
but rather are just summaries of behavior. They pertain solely to actual
frequencies of a persons behavior, play no role in explaining that behavior,
and are not expected to be cross-situationally consistent. The summary view
hence denies that these dispositions exist as causal and/or explanatory entities,
and was presented and critically evaluated earlier in chapter one.44
Finally, the conditional view also denies that trait dispositions exist. Dis-
positional statements, however, are not summary statements about the general
tendencies of persons, but rather statements about probabilistic conditionals
or if . . . then . . . relations between situations and behaviors.45 On this view:
An attribution of a personality disposition (e.g. aggressive) is an implicit subjunct-
ive statement about what a person would be likely to do under appropriate
conditions (e.g. when frustrated, when aversively stimulated), not necessarily
what he or she will do on average. The fundamental unit of a disposition is therefore
not the unconditional probability of trait-relevant behaviors, p(B), as in a summary
view; rather it is the conditional probability of a certain behavior or category of
behaviors given a certain condition or set of conditions has occurred, p(B\C).46
This, not surprisingly, is the view that Wright and Mischel end up accepting
about trait dispositions in their paper.47
To make matters more complicated, though, in an earlier paper Mischel seems
to clearly endorse the summary view.48 And then in a 1999 paper, Mischel seems
to instead accept a causal view after all. For instance, he accepts the existence of a
processing disposition which is a characteristic social cognitive-affective
processing structure that underlies, and generates, distinctive processing dynam-
ics within the personality system.49 In other words, a processing disposition is
made up of one or more clusters of cognitive-affective units.
44
For more see Wright and Mischel 1987: 1160, Buss and Craik 1983, and Wiggins 1997 as
well as chapter one, section three.
45
Or put metaphysically instead of semantically, the conditional view instead posits that
a disposition is itself a set of condition-behavior relations (Wright and Mischel 1987: 1162).
46
Wright and Mischel 1987: 1161. Hence on their view, the dispositional attribution that
child is aggressive refers to a cluster of condition-behavior contingencies such as if (frustrated or
threatened or punished) then sometimes (physically aggressive or verbally abusive or impulsive)
(Wright and Mischel 1987: 1162, emphasis theirs).
47
For much further elaboration, see Wright and Mischel 1987: 11612. See also Newman and
Uleman 1989: 1634 for related discussion.
48
Mischel 1973: 262, 264. Similarly, Daniel Cervone and Shoda support what looks to be the
summary view when they accept traits understood as enduring, coherent patterns of action
that distinguish individuals from one another, but they reject traits understood as an internal
psychological structure or system that is responsible for consistencies in action across sets of
behaviors and situations (1999a: 9). See also Mischel 1968: 42, 689, 72, 189, Cervone 1999: 316,
331, Caprara and Cervone 2000: 1617, and Mischel and Shoda 2008: 235.
49
Mischel 1999b: 52. Again the dispositional qualities of individuals are represented in the
personality system in terms of particular enduring structures in the organization among
Here I do not want to get bogged down in textual interpretation; perhaps
there are ways to make these different passages t with each other. Instead
I want to argue that the causal view is perfectly consistent with the CAPS
model. In fact, I will argue for an even stronger claimthat it is problematic
for the CAPS model to accept anything other than the causal view. This will
also allow me to pick up the line of discussion at the end of the previous
chapter about how situationists should be willing to accept the existence of
causally relevant traits.
One way to argue for the causal view is to enter into a larger discussion of
realist versus anti-realist views about dispositions in general. Clearly this is not
the appropriate place for such a discussion. Besides, others have argued for
realist views far better than I can, to the point where, as I noted in chapter one,
that approach seems to be gaining the upper-hand at least in the philosophy
literature.50 Instead, all I will try to show here is that, given the other commit-
ments of the CAPS model, the advocate of that model should not only accept
that there are trait dispositions, but also understand them as having causal
powers and as being grounded in a persons mind.
The line of reasoning here is fairly simple, and was presented briey at the
end of the previous chapter.51 The CAPS model already accepts that there are
mental state dispositions, that is, dispositions to form beliefs and desires which
are labeled as cognitive-affective units. Short of adopting a form of behavior-
ism or some other unconventional and highly controversial view, the advocate
of a CAPS model should readily agree that these mental state dispositions can
be relatively enduring psychological structures in a persons mind and, when
activated, play a causal role in giving rise to occurrent beliefs and desires and
(thereby) behavior. In other words, we are caused to act the way we do, at least
in signicant part, thanks to our beliefs and desires, and what occurrent beliefs
and desires we happen to have at a given moment depend on what we are
disposed to believe and desire. Furthermore, these mental states are not
activated unconditionally or in a way that is situation free in the rst
sense of that expression from the previous chapter; rather each mental state
disposition has its own unique activating conditions, whether in the form of
information about the present situation or other mental states in the persons
mind (or both). Hence these dispositions ground the truth of if . . . then . . .
conditionals, as already explained earlier in this chapter. Given my disposition
cognitive-affective mediating units available to the person (56). See also 1999b: 46, 523, 56 and
Mischel and Shoda 2008: 217, 233. I am grateful to Nancy Snow for calling the Mischel 1999b
paper to my attention.
50
For a helpful overview of this debate, see Mumford 1998. For specic criticism of anti-
realism about traits, see Brandt 1970.
51
See also Mumford 1998: 182, Kamtekar 2004: 472, 477, Adams 2006: 1318, Badhwar 2009:
279, Russell 2009: xii, 172, 2923, 330, Sosa 2009: 279, and Lukes 2009: 292.
The CAPS Model 125
to fear snakes, it is true of me that if I see a snake, then I will exhibit signs of the
emotion of fear.
The advocate of the CAPS model also accepts that there are clusters of
interrelated mental state dispositions, which when activated tend to give rise to
multiple occurrent mental states together.52 These mental states can in turn
show up in behavior as part of that persons behavioral signature. Plus, these
mental states are not eetingas the model itself holds, a persons behavioral
signature tends to be stable over time in the same situations, which in turn is
explained in terms of stable and persisting mental state dispositions. And they
are conditional too, just like their individual mental state dispositions are.
Given the cluster of mental states associated with my disposition to fear
snakes, it is also true of me that if I see a snake, then I will believe that the
best thing to do is to run, and I will likely start to do so. Finally, some
individuals have similar clusters of mental state dispositions, and so it makes
sense to talk about there being types of people who share certain key
psychological processes.53
But then once the CAPS model accepts that people have clusters of inter-
related mental state dispositions, the causal view seems unavoidable. For
then trait dispositions can simply be identied with these clusters.54 So they
will have causal powers, given that mental state dispositions have causal
powers, and they will be grounded in mental structures in a persons mind.
52
As Mischel and Shoda write, cognitive-affective representations and affective states
interact dynamically and inuence each other reciprocally. It is the organization of the relation-
ships among them that forms the core of the personality structure and that guides and constrains
their effects (2008: 211, see also 212, 219, 233). Similarly Vivian Zayas and Shoda write that
Understanding the effects of situations means understanding how sets of cognitions and affects
are activated and inuence behaviors (2009: 281, emphasis theirs). See also Caprara and
Cervone 2000: 109.
53
Shoda et al. 1994: 683. Similarly, a personality type consists of people who share a
common organization of relations among mediating units in the processing of certain situation
features . . . identifying similarities among people in their underlying dynamics should allow
prediction of the common if . . . then . . . patterns they are likely to manifest (Mischel and Shoda
1995: 257). See also Mischel and Shoda 1998: 242, 249, 2008: 216, 226, Mischel 1999b: 52, 2004:
1415, 2007: 271, Cervone and Shoda 1999a: 20, Mischel et al. 2002: 53. For more general
discussion of personality types, see Johnson 1997: 878, Caprara and Cervone 2000: 66, and
Funder 2007: 20913, 2008: 576.
54
In several places Mischel and company seem to do precisely this. For instance, in one place
personality traits and dispositions are dened by a characteristic cognitive-affective processing
structure that underlies, and generates, distinctive processing dynamics. The processing structure
of the disposition consists of a characteristic set of cognitions, affects, and behavioral strategies in
an organization of interrelations that guides and constrains their activation (Mischel and Shoda
1995: 257, emphasis removed). This appears to exactly mirror the reasoning in the text above,
including even the causal language of generating. See also Mischel 1999a: 456 and Roberts 2009:
140. As Brent Roberts notes, the most important thing that emerges from a close examination of
the denition of personality traits is that they are indistinguishable from concepts that emerged
from the social cognitive approach to personality . . . The CAPS model is simply a reiteration and
deeper analysis of the underlying components of personality traits (2009: 140).
At the same time, they are not the broad, situation free traits rejected by
situationists; they are highly conditional trait dispositions which ground the
truth of all kinds of if . . . then . . . conditionals.55
I suspect that some psychologists might be tempted to reject a causal view of
trait dispositions because it might be thought that the view is committed to the
widespread possession of empirically inadequate global traits. But nothing of
the kind follows logically. One can accept the causal view and endorse only
highly narrow or local traits.56 Or one can accept the causal view and endorse
my unconventional view of Mixed Traits. Or, most important for my purposes
here, one can accept the causal view and endorse everything else the CAPS
model wants to say.
Hence I conclude that the CAPS model should be amended to accept the
claim that traits of at least certain kinds do exist, are empirically adequate, have
causal powers, and are grounded in enduring mental structures in our minds.
5.4 F INAL THOUGHTS ON THE CAPS MODEL
Of course there is more to the CAPS model than what I have highlighted
above. The work by Mischel, Shoda, and Wright alone is extensive, and has
also generated a vast literature.57 However, in reviewing that literature I have
not found any central claims of the view, such as the ones presented above,
which are not already captured by our commonsense understanding of how
the mind works. Hence I stand by my claim at the start of this chapter that
using technical language, the CAPS model re-describes and nds supporting
evidence for basic platitudes of commonsense folk psychology.
It turns out that I am not the rst person to make this claim. In fact the
psychologist John Johnson, in a 1999 commentary in European Journal of
Personality, makes this same point much better than I do:
One limitation of the CAPS model is its failure to advance our scientic under-
standing of personality dynamics beyond how we already understand human
action from common sense. As far as I can tell, the labeling and re-labeling of
desires, beliefs, and abilities has simply reected the psychological jargon popular
at that point in history . . . I am surprised and somewhat depressed about the
enthusiasm for the CAPS model, but not because the model is wrong. The
55
Here I am assuming the trait monist view from chapter one, according to which character
traits are simply identical to their underlying mental states. But even a trait dualist is unlikely to
want to say that character traits have no causal powers and are epiphenomenal. The challenge for
the dualist, I said in chapter one, is to explain how character traits can have causal powers
without thereby being committed to causal overdetermination. See chapter one, section four.
56
For more on local traits, see chapter eight, section two.
57
See, e.g. the papers in Cervone and Shoda 1999b.
The CAPS Model 127
problem is that settling for this model indicates that we are content to merely re-
label common sense concepts with jargon, as opposed to developing a truly
scientic model of personality dynamics.58
Johnson here seems to be focusing in particular on the component of the
CAPS model having to do with cognitive-affective units, but I think his claims
generalize to the rest of the view.
Let me stress that I have not said anything to question the truth of the CAPS
model. Indeed, barring the controversy that we just saw about how to under-
stand trait dispositions, I largely agree with the basic points the model is
making. Furthermore, it is a welcome result to nd additional empirical
support for various commitments of folk psychology.
Rather my concern in this chapter has been with the contribution of the
view to discovering the best scientic theory of personality. There are a
number of criteria that scientic theories should satisfy, other things being
equal, such as internal consistency, simplicity, and explanatory value. Two
additional criteria have been nicely articulated by Jack Block: They should
demonstrate a superior usefulness in prediction or in economy of conceptual-
ization over competing sets of constructs.59 I have suggested that the CAPS
model does not appear to have any advantages here. It does not seem to exhibit
an economy of conceptualization over commonsense theorizing about
action. It also does not appear to provide additional theoretical insight or
explanatory resources beyond what careful reection on our commonsense
platitudes already suggests. If that is right, then the model also does not seem
to generate new predictions that would not have already been expected by the
commonsense approach.60
In a particularly revealing passage, Mischel describes the CAPS model as
follows: CAPS was cast as a meta-theory of the person as an organized,
coherent system, designed to facilitate and invite questions about how the
specics of its multiple constituent components and subsystems and processes
interact and exert their inuences.61 This, I think, is exactly right. The view is
instead better understood (in my opinion) as more of a background frame-
work or meta-theory with general principles from which to start developing
58
Johnson 1999: 44950. For additional discussion, see Alston 1975: 29 n. 2 and Johnson
1999: 449.
59
Block 1995a: 188.
60
In conversation (July 3, 2012), Mischel claimed that the CAPS model makes two predictions
in particular that take us beyond commonsense: (i) it predicts that there will be stable average levels
of different types of behavior, and (ii) it predicts that for a given person there will be stable if-then
behavioral signatures. My earlier discussion in this chapter, on the contrary, is meant to suggest
that these predictions fall out of the commonsense assumptions from section one.
61
Mischel 2004: 13. Similarly, CAPS is a meta-theory for building theories to account for the
individuals characteristic cognitive-affective processing dynamics and their behavioral expres-
sions (Mischel 2009: 186). See also Mischel and Shoda 1995: 259, 2008: 213, Cervone 2005: 436,
and Mischel 2007: 271.
an actual, detailed account of personality, and so by application, of moral
character traits. But it is not an actual theory of personality itself.62
Starting with CAPS as a background framework, two things need to happen
next. First, psychologists need to work out what the mental states actually are
which form clusters in our minds that lead to a kind of consistent behavior
across time and situations.63 What, for instance, are the mental states that
would plausibly explain why Child #28 exhibits a high degree of verbal
aggression in the rst situation, but not in the second one?
Secondly, once psychologists get a good grip on these mental states and
their causal relationships, then philosophers and other normative theorists
need to come along and evaluate them. On moral grounds, for instance, are
the clusters of mental states that most people have moral virtues or vices (or
neither)? On prudential grounds having to do with our long-term self-interest,
are the clusters that most people have benecial for them or not? And so forth
for the various ways in which people can be normatively evaluated.
5.5 CONCLUSION
In this book and in Moral Character, I have tried to carry out both of these tasks
in a preliminary manner. First, I have tried to ll in some of the details about
what the clusters of interrelated mental state dispositions actually are for most
people which pertain to helping, harming, lying, and cheating. And secondly,
I have evaluated these mental state dispositions using a variety of different moral
standards, and found them to qualify as neither the basis for any moral virtue
nor the basis for any moral vice. These two steps constitute, in my opinion, the
kinds of advances we need to move deeper than mere commonsense.
62
For more on the distinction between meta-theories versus theories of personality, see
Cervone 2005: 432, 436.
63
As Mischel and Shoda write, The ultimate goal becomes to articulate the psychological
structure that underlies this organization within the personality system . . . To apply the theory to
a particular substantive domain one needs to identify the mental representations, and the
interrelationships among them (i.e. their organization) in the processing system, that underlie
the behavior of interest . . . The goal is to create a map of cognitions and affects . . . Guided by this
domain map, research is then directed to identify the particular sets of relationships within the
map that characterize an individual or a type of processing disposition (1995: 259). Similarly
the, continuing challenge then is to identify for each individual, or group or type of individuals,
the critical psychological features, to assess distinctive and stable patterns of behavior variation
across them, and to understand the psychological processes that generate them (Shoda et al.
1994: 685). See also Shoda et al. 1994: 686 and Cervone 2005: 436.
6
The Big Five
The Big Five personality traits (or Five-Factor model)1 are almost never
discussed at length in the philosophy literature, even despite the recent heated
debates which have arisen about the empirical adequacy of character traits.2
Yet in the area of personality psychology, it would not be an overstatement to
say that the Big Five have come to dominate the eld, with thousands of
relevant papers appearing in just the past ve years.3 So in contrast to the talk
of paradigm crises and burying personality psychology which surrounded
the early years of the situationist movement, today one nds very optimistic
language about a quiet revolution4 and renaissance5 with real science6
and real progress toward consensus7 after decades of oundering.8 In this
chapter, I rst briey review some of the claims made in personality psych-
ology about the Big Five trait taxonomy, before turning to the central question
of how consistent that taxonomy is with my Mixed Trait approach.
1
It is now commonplace to use the labels Big Five and Five-Factor model interchangeably
and I will do in what follows (see, e.g. Pytlik Zillig et al. 2002: 847 n. 1 and Nettle 2007: 9). But it is
worth noting that some psychologists reserve the rst label for research in the lexical tradition
and the second for research in the questionnaire tradition (see, e.g. Goldberg and Saucier 1995:
221, Digman 1996: 1, Saucier and Goldberg 1996b: 37, Caprara and Cervone 2000: 68, Lee and
Ashton 2004: 330, and Ashton and Lee 2005: 1326). These two traditions are claried next in the
text above.
Other common labels are Big Five personality dimensions, Big Five taxonomy, or simply
the Big Five. I will use these various expressions interchangeably. The label Big Five derives
from Goldberg 1981.
2
See chapter eight for these debates. For brief discussions of the Big Five taxonomy in
philosophy, see Doris 2002: 6771, Snow 2010: 1112, and Slingerland 2011: 397.
3
As Costa and McCrae write, the Five-Factor model has become a dominant paradigm in
personality (1995a: 21). See also McCrae 2001: 109. Of particular interest is the data on the
number of publications related to Big Five personality traits as reported in John et al. 2008: 116.
4
Goldberg 1992: 26.
5
McCrae and Costa 2003: 21 and Nettle 2007: 9, 35.
6
McCrae and Costa 2003: 21.
7
8
McCrae and Costa 2008: 159. For additional examples of such language see Pervin 1994:
103, Goldberg and Saucier 1995: 221, and McCrae and Costa 2003: 3. See also McAdams 1992:
32930.
6.1 THE BIG F IVE
There are two commonly cited avenues of research which each arrived at
the Big Five taxonomy.9 The rst is represented most prominently in the work
of Lewis Goldberg, who claims that over time our language has come to be
shaped by the different patterns of behavior people exhibit, and so can serve as
a reliable guide to categorizing those patterns. As he formulates the so-called
lexical hypothesis:
The most promising of the empirical approaches to systematizing personality
differences have been based on one critical assumption: Those individual differ-
ences that are of the most signicance in the daily transactions of persons with
each other will eventually become encoded in their language . . . [this] has a highly
signicant corollary: The more important is an individual difference in human
transactions, the more languages will have an item for it.10
Building on this assumption, Goldberg spent much of his career analyzing lists
of trait adjectives in ordinary language, having participants rate the degree to
which they (or their peers) are describable by those adjectives, doing factor
analyses on the data, and testing the generalizability of the ndings across
methods and data sources.11 For instance, here are three of the trait adjectives
from Goldbergs 1992 list of 100 Unipolar Markers:12
Fearful
Fretful
Generous
Participants have to rate how accurately the trait describes them on a 1
(extremely inaccurate) to 9 (extremely accurate) scale. Responses to this and
other questions can then be factor analyzed to see which adjectives are highly
correlated with each other, thereby suggested an underlying factor or latent
variable which is more basic and which can account for these relations.13 For
9
See, e.g. McCrae and John 1992: 1817 and Goldberg 1993: 30. In what follows I focus on
areas of overlap and agreement in the conclusions arrived at from these two avenues of research,
but there are some differences in the details (e.g. Goldberg 1993: 301).
10
Goldberg 1981: 1412. Goldberg also notes in the same place that we should nd a
universal order of emergence of the individual differences encoded into the set of all the worlds
languages (142). For further elaboration and renement of the hypothesis, see Saucier and
Goldberg 1996b. For related formulations and discussion of the lexical hypothesis, see McCrae
et al. 1986: 431, McAdams 1992: 3356, McCrae and John 1992: 184, 199, Goldberg 1993: 26,
Pervin 1994: 106, Block 1995a: 192, 196, McCrae and Costa 1996: 61, 1997: 510, 2003: 34, Buss
1996: 202, Piedmont 1998: 22, Saucier and Ostendorf 1999: 614, Ashton and Lee 2001: 328,
Funder 2007: 202, Nettle 2007: 18, and John et al. 2008: 11724.
11
See, e.g. Goldberg 1990, 1992, 1993 and Saucier and Goldberg 1996a.
12
Goldberg 1992: 41.
13
Factor analysis is the leading statistical approach in the Big Five literature. As Mark Leary
nicely describes it, Factor analysis attempts to identify the minimum number of factors or
The Big Five 131
instance, fearful and fretful might tend to cluster together, but not generous.
The rst two can then be related to an underlying factor often labeled
neuroticism. Note that the evidence that would be gathered in this example
(and in many of the actual studies) is self-report data involving categorizing
oneself using broad trait labels.
The second prominent avenue of research which led to the Big Five
taxonomy focused not on using trait adjectives, but on having participants
ll out personality questionnaires. There are many such questionnaires in use
today, include the NEO-FFI, HEXACO, TDA, BFAS, and BFI, but the leading
measure continues to be the NEO-PI-R, developed by Robert McCrae and
Paul Costa.14 Here are a few examples from their instrument:15
I am easily frightened
I dont get much pleasure from chatting with people
I dont take civic duties like voting very seriously
where participants respond on a 1 to 5 scale ranging from strongly disagree to
strongly agree. These items are longer than mere trait adjectives, thereby (the
thought is) serving to mitigate the errors that might result if different partici-
pants dene a trait adjective such as deep or imperturbable in different
ways.16
Numerous factor analyses have been run on self-report data using the
adjective and questionnaire scales. Comparisons have also been made between
self-reports and friend, spouse, and expert reports.17 Analyses have been done
between the NEO-PI-R and other personality instruments not tied specically
to the Big Five, such as the California Q-Set, Wigginss revised Interpersonal
Adjective Scales, Jacksons Personality Research Form, the Guilford-Zimmerman
Temperament survey, the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, the Myers-
Briggs Type Indicator, the MMPI, the Comrey Personality Scales, and the
dimensions that will do a reasonably good job of accounting for the observed relationships
among the variables (2004: 1889). For a helpful introduction, see Leary 2004: 18792. See also
Block 1995a, Caprara and Cervone 2000: 814, and McCrae and Costa 2003: 33.
14
A search of the PsychLit database between 1980 and 1998 revealed more than 400 mentions
of the NEO in citations, with the next questionnaire mentioned no more than 50 times (Pytlik
Zillig et al. 2002: 850). It initially began as the NEO (pertaining to three of the elements of the Big
Fiveneuroticism, extraversion, and openness), but in 1985 was expanded to measure agree-
ableness and conscientiousness (Costa and McCrae 1985). A revised version (R) was published
in 1992 (Costa and McCrae 1992). The NEO-FFI is a 60-item short form of the NEO-PI (Costa
and McCrae 1992). For the HEXACO, see Ashton and Lee 2001, 2005 and Lee and Ashton 2004.
For the TDA, see Goldberg 1992. For the BFAS, see DeYoung et al. 2007. For the BFI, see John
et al. 2008.
15
From the NEO-PI-R Item Booklet-Form S, p. 3.
16
These two adjectives are taken from Goldbergs 100 Unipolar Markers (Goldberg 1992: 41).
For related discussion, see Block 1995a: 197, McCrae and Costa 1997: 510, and Piedmont 1998:
289.
17
See, e.g. McCrae 1982, McCrae and Costa 1987, and Piedmont 1998: 526, chapter ve.
California Psychological Inventory.18 The trait adjectives and NEO scales have
also been translated into dozens of languages and extensive data has been
gathered using non-American participants.19 The results of all of this work
have seemed to many personality psychologists to point in the direction of ve
basic dimensions of personality. Here are the most commonly used labels for
these dimensions:20
Extraversion (also labeled Surgency, Energy, Enthusiasm)

Agreeableness (also labeled Altruism, Affection)
Conscientiousness (also labeled Constraint, Control of Impulse)
Neuroticism (also labeled Emotional Instability, Negative Emotionality, Nervousness)
Openness (also labeled Intellect, Culture, Originality, Open-Mindedness)
The idea, then, is that in a typical group there will be people who differ in their
ratings on each of these ve dimensions. Some, for instance, might be high on
extraversion, which can be interpreted as involving an energetic approach
towards social interaction manifested in, for instance, the behavior of
attending more parties and introducing themselves to strangers.21 Others
might be quite introverted instead. And perhaps some of the extraverts and
introverts are also highly conscientious, as manifested by, for instance, show-
ing up on time or cleaning the house regularly.
So a persons rating on the Big Five dimensions is believed to correlate with
certain patterns of thought and actual behavior, as well as with consequences
for oneself and others. And studies have indeed suggested that this is the
case.22 For instance, high conscientiousness has been linked to avoidance of
risky behaviors23 and success on job performance criteria.24 High neuroticism,
18
For specic studies, reviews, and discussion, see McCrae et al. 1986, McCrae and John
1992: 1803, McCrae and Costa 1996: 624, 2003: 526, Wiggins and Trapnell 1997: 747, and
John et al. 2008: 13940. See also the comparison of the NEO-PI-R, TDA, and BFI in John et al.
2008: 1308.
19
See, e.g. McCrae and Costa 1997, Piedmont 1998: 436, 734, Caprara and Cervone 2000:
735, and McCrae et al. 2000: 1767.
20
See, e.g. Wiggins and Trapnell 1997, McCrae et al. 1986: 431, McCrae and Costa 1987: 83,
1997: 509, 2003, 2008: 159, Piedmont 1998: 43, Funder 2007: 202, and especially John et al.
2008: 120.
21
John et al. 2008: 120.
22
For helpful reviews, see Caspi et al. 2005: 4706, Ozer and Benet-Martnez 2006,
Roberts et al. 2007, Funder 2007: chapter seven, and John et al. 2008: 1413. Even Cervone,
Shoda, and Downey, who are highly critical of the Big Five approach and favor a CAPS
model, concede that there can be no question that measures of context-free, average-level
personality constructs often are correlated to a nonzero degree with measures of important
psychosocial outcomes (2007: 7). The magnitude of these correlations, though, is still up for
debate (Doris 2002: 678).
23 24
Bogg and Roberts 2004. Mount and Barrick 1998.
The Big Five 133
on the other hand, positively correlates with job dissatisfaction and criminal
behavior.25
The Big Five are not the only personality traits in the picture, even if they
are the broadest and most comprehensive.26 Advocates typically have hier-
archical models of personality traits in mind, where the Big Five are subdiv-
ided into different facets that are less broad and so are claimed to have
increased accuracy.27 Unfortunately there is little consensus about how many
facets there are or even what to call them.28 Indeed on my reading of the
literature, the number of facets at times seems to be a matter of convenience as
dictated by the researcher in question.29 But to cite one example in order to
focus the discussion, here are the 30 facets from McCrae and Costas version of
the Five-Factor Model:30
Neuroticism
Anxiety, Angry Hostility, Depression, Self-Consciousness, Impulsive-
ness, Vulnerability
Extraversion
Warmth, Gregariousness, Assertiveness, Activity, Excitement-Seeking,
Positive Emotions
Openness to Experience
Fantasy, Aesthetics, Feelings, Actions, Ideas, Values
25
Ozer and Benet-Martnez 2006.
26
Although even this is controversial, as there are recent debates about an even higher level of
metatraits. For references to this literature, see DeYoung et al. 2007: 880.
27
For helpful discussions of breadth versus accuracy with respect to Big Five traits and their
facets, see Pervin 1994: 107, McAdams 1994: 338, Costa and McCrae 1995a: 446, Block 1995a:
2089, Saucier and Goldberg 1996b: 37, Saucier and Ostendorf 1999: 61314, Roberts and
Pomerantz 2004: 409, Caspi et al. 2005: 456, Ozer and Benet-Martnez 2006: 403, 416, John
et al. 2008: 1401, and especially Paunonen 1998.
28
There is no consensus about what might constitute even the beginning of a compressive
list of narrow traits (Ozer and Benet-Martnez 2006: 403). See also Caspi et al. 2005: 456.
29
As McCrae and Costa note, the ner distinctions within domains, however, are more
arbitrary . . . no one has come up with a compelling theoretical or empirical basis for identifying
facets . . . 30 constructs seemed to be pushing the limit for most users to grasp (2003: 47). And
unlike ve and seven, there is nothing magical about the number six. It was chosen because we
saw the need to make at least that many distinctions within domains and because inclusion of
more than six would soon lead to intellectual overload (Costa and McCrae 1995a: 267). See
also Costa and McCrae 1995a: 245, Block 1995a, and Piedmont 1998: 30, 401 for further
discussion.
30
Costa and McCrae 1995a: 28. This paper also provides a helpful discussion of the role of
facets in Costa and McCraes Big Five taxonomy. It is important to be clear about the following
point made by Goldberg: proponents of the ve-factor model have never intended to reduce the
rich tapestry of personality to a mere ve traits . . . Indeed, these broad domains incorporate
hundreds, if not thousands, of traits (1993: 27). See also McCrae et al. 1986: 444 and McCrae
and John 1992: 190.
To complicate matters even more, DeYoung et al. (2007) have recently argued for the
existence of 10 aspects between the Big Five domains and the facets. Each Big Five trait has
two aspects, i.e. for agreeableness these are compassion and politeness (884).
Agreeableness
Trust, Straightforwardness, Altruism, Compliance, Modesty, Tender-
Mindedness
Conscientiousness
Competence, Order, Dutifulness, Achievement-Striving, Self-Discipline,
Deliberation
In the 240-item NEO-PI-R, eight items are designed to measure each of these
facets. For instance, I keep my belongings neat and clean and I like to keep
everything in its place so I know just where it is are two items for the
conscientiousness facet of order.31 I especially want to highlight the facets of
altruism and modesty, as these labels have moral connotations which I will
return to below.
There is obviously much more that could be said in reviewing the details of
and supporting evidence for the Big Five.32 But in the remainder of this
chapter, I want to focus on the relationship between the Big Five taxonomy
and my Mixed Trait approach. As I see it, there are two main areas of conict:
(i) the Big Five are sometimes tied to claims about the existence of corres-
ponding causal dispositional traits which are said to be universally held, and
(ii) the Big Five taxonomy is often claimed to be an exhaustive classication of
personality traits. Each of these claims, if correct, would cause trouble for my
view for reasons to be explored below.
6.2 THE BIG F IVE AND CAUSAL DISPOSITIONS
Thus far I have been careful to not say anything about the metaphysical status
of the Big Five traits and their facets. This is for good reason, as there is sharp
disagreement among advocates about how to understand them. On the one
hand, they can be viewed solely as descriptive labels for people, without
claiming that they have any underlying metaphysical existence, causal powers,
or explanatory psychological role to play. In other words, they are just terms to
classify people in certain waysit is useful to describe some people as more
extraverted than others, for instance, rather than appealing to the 17,953 trait
terms in the English language.33 On this approach it is very helpful and
31
Costa and McCrae 1992: 73.
32
For helpful reviews and historical background related to the Big Five, see McCrae and John
1992, Goldberg 1993, Digman 1996, Wiggins and Trapnell 1997, Piedmont 1998, Caprara and
Cervone 2000: chapter three, McCrae and Costa 2003: chapter two and three, and John et al.
2008.
33
This list was famously compiled by Allport and Odbert 1936, although it needs consider-
able updating given new trait labels which have emerged in the subsequent years.
The Big Five 135
efcient to have a way of grouping traits into only ve categories,34 but there is
no need to go further and posit actual traits of extraversion or conscientious-
ness corresponding to these categories which are part of the causal explanation
for individual differences between people. This labeling approach to under-
standing the nature of Big Five traits is similar to the summary view of traits
that was discussed in chapter one and at the end of the last chapter.35
The labeling approach seems to me to be the right way to go. After all, it
does seem clear enough, especially in light of the empirical evidence supplied
by advocates of the Big Five, that people can be helpfully classied as more or
less extraverted, conscientious, and the like, so long as we are clear that these
are just broad labels meant to reect average or general patterns of thought
and behavior.36 This same approach can even apply to the facets which use
virtue concepts. Nothing about my view is incompatible with classifying some
people as more altruistic or modest than others, where this just amounts to
saying that comparatively speaking they seem to exhibit a more altruistic or
modest general pattern of behavior over the course of their lives. Acknowledg-
ing this does not in any way commit me to saying that these people actually are
compassionate or modest or have those traits as part of their minds. Many
more premises would be needed to get to that conclusion.
At the same time, what these trait labels are not expected to do, on this way
of understanding Big Five traits as mere summary labels, is to reliably predict
how a person will act from moment to moment.37 A person high on extraver-
sion might still act quite introverted in certain situations, and vice versa. Nor
does this approach offer any kind of casual explanation for why some people
differ from others in these respects. As Daniel Ozer and Steven Reise note, the
Big Five taxonomy provides a useful taxonomy, a hierarchical coordinate
34
See, e.g. Hogan 1996: 1703 and McCrae and Costa 2003: 36.
35
The opposing approach, naturally enough, accepts the causal view of traits. The distinction
between Big Five traits as summaries of behavior versus Big Five traits as causal dispositions, has
been made in the psychology literature in various ways, including by distinguishing between
them as surface and source traits, as phenotypic and genotypic traits, and as traits1 and traits2
(McCrae and Costa 1995: 236).
36
Even Mischel admits that it was never disputed [that] some people are more friendly than
other, some are more open-minded, some are more punctual, and so on. Such aggregate infor-
mation is useful for many goals (2007: 268) and again that the descriptive use of trait terms and
constructs as summaries of behavior tendencies has never been at issue (Mischel and Shoda
1994: 157). Remarks of his along these lines go all the way back to Mischel 1968: 502. Similarly,
Dan McAdams concedes that the ve-factor model provides a workable framework for organ-
izing a plethora of simple, comparative, one-dimensional, and virtually nonconditional observa-
tions about others (or about the self) into ve general classes (1992: 352). And Gian Caprara and
Daniel Cervone write that If the ve-factor model were construed solely as a description of
individual differences in the population in surface-level tendencies, there would be little contro-
versy (2000: 76). Similar remarks can be found in Block 1995b: 228, Mischel and Shoda 1998:
250, Cervone 1999: 331, and Caprara and Cervone 2000: 80.
37
See also McAdams 1994: 338, McCrae and Costa 1995: 234, 2003: 267, 2008: 1745,
Mischel and Shoda 1998: 250, and Nettle 2007: 44.
system, for mapping personality variables. The model is not a theory; it
organizes phenomena to be explained by theory.38 To come up with an
adequate theory, I have claimed and will elaborate on some more below,
would involve examining the actual psychological processes that are going
on in the minds of each person one at a time. For most people, I have argued
that those processes do not correspond to any virtue traits like modesty or
altruism (understood as equivalent to compassion).
In adopting this account of the nature of Big Five traits, I seem to be in
agreement with many personality psychologists who research these traits, such
as Oliver John, Richard Robins, Lewis Goldberg, Gerard Saucier, Robert
Hogan, Jerry Wiggins, Paul Trapnell, Laura Naumann, and Christopher
Soto, all of whom can be found saying similar things.39 McCrae and Costa,
however, do not just stop with a summary view, but go on and advocate a
robust causal view of Big Five traits.40 To unpack their position, let me begin
by noting that they have recently developed a Five-Factor Theory (FFT), which
is designed to provide a comprehensive theoretical account of personality and
the relationship between different variables such as external inuences, the
self-concept, genetics, behavior, emotional reactions, and personality traits.
For my purposes, the key point of the FFT is their distinction between what
they call basic tendencies and characteristic adaptations.41
Basic tendencies include, among other things, the personality traits them-
selves. Insofar as they are basic tendencies, they are objectively existing,
causal dispositional features of individuals. Furthermore, personality traits
are not culturally acquired or individually cultivated according to FFT, but
rather are endogenous, that is, they arise from our DNA and our genetic
inheritance.42 Indeed, they are universally held such that: All adults can be
characterized by their differential standing on a series of personality traits
38
Ozer and Reise 1994: 3601. Similarly McAdams claims that the Big Five are more
accurately viewed as ve basic trait categories, rather than ve basic traits (1994: 339,
emphasis his).
39
John and Robins 1994: 1389, Goldberg and Saucier 1995: 221, Saucier and Goldberg
1996b: 245, 34, 43, Hogan 1991, 1996, Wiggins and Trapnell 1996, and John et al. 2008: 140. See
also the helpful discussion in Hogan et al. 1977: 256, Mischel and Shoda 1994, 1998: 24951,
Wiggins and Trapnell 1997: 74458, and McCrae and Costa 2008: 160.
40
This was less clear in their earlier work because of ambiguities in the way they were using
the term trait, as Wiggins and Trapnell helpfully show (1997: 745). But their acceptance of a
casual view becomes unambiguous with the development of the Five-Factor Theory, as discussed
in what follows. Ralph Piedmont (1998) also accepts what seems to be the entirety of the Five-
Factor Theory (747), and explicitly rejects the summary view (389). The same can be said for
Daniel Nettle (2007). David Buss (1996) also seems to accept a causal model of Big-Five traits,
although within a different theoretical framework than that provided by Costa and McCraes
Five-Factor Theory.
41
For the Five-Factor Theory, see McCrae and Costa 1995, 1996, 2003: chapter ten, 2008,
McCrae et al. 2000, and McCrae 2001.
42
McCrae and Costa 2003: 190, 2008: 1645.
The Big Five 137
that inuence patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors . . . Traits are
organized hierarchically from narrow and specic to broad and general
dispositions; Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeable-
ness, and Conscientiousness constitute the highest level of the hierarchy.43
So the claim is not only that individual differences between people can be
usefully categorized using the Big Five, but that all people actually have such
traits to some degree or other in virtue of our biological hardwiring.44 Indeed,
McCrae and Costa go on to argue that our possession of them shows very
little change during the lifespan.45
What then are characteristic adaptations? McCrae and Costa describe
them this way: Over time, individuals react to their environments by evolving
patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are consistent with their
personality traits and earlier adaptations.46 They are characteristic because
they depend on the individuals basic tendencies, but they are also adapta-
tions to the specic details of what the individual is confronting at the
moment.47 For instance, to use one of their own examples, a persons specic
desire to go see a show at the local opera for the rst time would not itself be a
basic tendency, but it can be inuenced by her degree of Openness.48
If the list of ve broad traits and 30 facets did not include any virtue or vice
concepts, then as far as my project in this book is concerned there would be no
conict. But in fact it doesaltruism and modesty, for instance, have already
been highlighted.49 Recall my view that most people do not have virtuous
character traits such as modesty, even to a minimal degree. Rather, we have
43
McCrae and Costa 2003: 190. Similarly they write that all the traits. . . . are found in
varying degrees in all people, with distributions that approximate the familiar normal curve
(25). See also McCrae and Costa 1996: 72, 1997: 509.
44
This is in stark contrast to the summary view of the Big Five that I favor, which technically
speaking does not even need to consider the Big Five as traits in the rst place: A broad factor is
not so much one thing as a collection of many things that have something in common. It is easy
to be overly schematic, ignoring the diverse character of the variables contained within a broad
factor. A better way to understand each factor might be to characterize its crucial subcompo-
nents, which, although correlated, are conceptually distinct (Saucier and Ostendorf 1999: 613,
see also 614, 625).
45
For more on basic tendencies and the specic claims mentioned above, see McCrae 1982:
301, McCrae and John 1992: 184, 195, 199, 2012, McCrae and Costa 1995: 238, 1996: 6674,
2003: 187205, 2008: 1636, McCrae et al. 2000, and McCrae 2001: 111.
46
47
McCrae and Costa 2003: 191, 2008: 1634.
48
McCrae and Costa 2003: 1912. For more on characteristic adaptations, see McCrae and
Costa 1995: 238, 247, 1996: 6974, 2003: 187, 1902, 2008: 1636.
49
Nor is this unique to their list of 30 facets. See also Ruthless, Stingy, and Generous in
McCrae and Costa 2003: 4. Kind, Cruel, Stingy, Hard-Hearted, and Forgiving show up
in John et al. 2008: 128. Goldbergs 100 Unipolar Markers include Kind, Generous, and
Helpful (1992: 41). Callous, Stingy, Humble, and Generous appear on the list of trait
adjectives in McCrae and Costa 1987: 85. Forgiving, Generous, Kind, and Sympathetic
are on the adjective list pertaining to Agreeableness in McCrae and John 1992: 178. And plenty of
other examples could be cited.
character traits, to be sure, but typically ones which are neither virtues nor
vices. So I am committed to rejecting any view which says that all people have
modesty (and any other virtues or vices) to some degree or other.
Let me grant for the moment that the survey instruments, such as the NEO-
PI-R, do provide thorough and careful questions which help to classify
someone as modest to a certain degree (I will retract this concession soon
enough below). What concerns me is the inference from (i) someones being
described as, say, weakly modest, to (ii) the conclusion that the best explan-
ation for this is that the person actually has the trait of modesty to a weak
degree. This is what is called a top-down explanation in personality
psychologya factor is found and labeled, such as modesty, as a result of
interrelated patterns of survey data gathered from groups of people. This
factor is then explained by positing an actual trait that the person is supposed
to possess, namely modesty.
In contrast, the method that I have employed throughout this book and
Moral Character, and which is also shared with the CAPS approach as well, is
to start by understanding the particular psychological processes and mental
state dispositions (dispositions to form beliefs and desires, broadly under-
stood) which are present in each persons mind, and then on that basis
determine whether they constitute a character trait or not. If they do, then it
can be decided next on normative (rather than empirical) grounds whether the
trait is, say, a moral virtue, a vice, or a Mixed Trait. These mental state
dispositions, when activated, can give rise to patterns of thought and behavior
which might be labeled using a trait term.
My approach thus starts with the individual, not with the group of partici-
pants, and thereby tries to avoid the common complaint in psychology that
trait theorists, who so often have focused on individual differences, have so
rarely focused on individuals,50 thereby giving rise to a psychology of the
stranger.51 More precisely, the top-down approach to trait explanation starts
with measures of individual differences in groups, measures which typically
use highly simple and broad items like self-ratings on generous or I am
easily frightened. As Dan McAdams notes, the measures are used, to get a
general, supercial, and virtually nonconditional picture of your personal-
ity.52 The top-down approach then posits that a given person has the trait in
question, but in doing so sheds little light on the psychological organization
and processes that are at work in that person. What beliefs and desires
generally, and specically what goals, plans, values, schemas, strategies, and
the like are in that persons mind, all remain a mystery, whereas I hold that
mental states (and the dispositions to form them) should be at the center of
50
Pervin 1994: 110. See also Cervone 2005.
51 52
McAdams 1992: 34854, 1994. McAdams 1992: 350.
The Big Five 139
any understanding of moral character traits, and indeed of personality psych-
ology more generally.53
To be fair, it could very well turn out on my approach that some people
really do have traits like modesty or altruism. But the way to discover this is
not to start with broad labels of a persons behavior, typically supplied by self-
reports or other paper-and-pencil devices, and then reason to the existence of
an underlying trait. Rather mine is a bottom-up approach to traitsstart
with the particular psychological mechanisms that play a causal role in a
persons mind during specic situations, and construct an empirical account
of character traits out of them.54
McCrae and Costa, as should be clear at this point, would explain ratings
data of perceived modesty, for instance, by appealing to the degree to which
the person possesses the basic tendency or trait of modesty. Everyone pos-
sesses the tendency, according to their view, but each person can possess it to
different degrees. With this background in mind, let me raise some questions
about their proposal, while continuing with the example of the trait of
modesty. First of all, how should the actual trait itself be understood on
McCrae and Costas theory? Clearly it has to be explained in terms which
appeal to something other than just modest behavior, as otherwise the view
would be circular. But while McCrae and Costa have written extensively on the
nature of traits, I am still not sure what their answer is supposed to be.55 Let
53
Hence I am in basic agreement with Seymour Epstein when he writes about Big Five traits
that their units are useful for describing what people are like (structure) but not for how they
operate (process) (1994: 120). Similarly according to Jack Block, no matter how satisfying on
descriptive or other grounds the variable-centered structure of the [ve-factor model] may be, it
cannot represent a personality structure. Personality structures lie within individuals . . . it does
not offer a sense of what goes on within the structured, motivation-processing, system main-
taining individual (1995a: 188). And Lawrence Pervin claims that if we focus exclusively on
individual differences, and if we aggregate only over situations, I fear that we will miss the
essence of personalitythe dynamic interplay among the parts of a system that can be charac-
terized by varying degrees of complexity, organization, and integration (1994: 110). For relevant
discussion and similar complaints, see Hogan et al. 1977: 256, Epstein 1994, Fiske 1994: 124,
Funder 1994: 126, John and Robins 1994: 139, McAdams 1994: 34954, Ozer and Reise 1994:
367, Block 1995a: 210, 2001: 105, Hogan 1996: 1703, Cervone 1999: 30710, 2005: 426, Caprara
and Cervone 2000: 80, 83, 118, Mischel 2007: 268, Cervone et al. 2007: 4, 78, Orom and
Cervone 2009: 238, Roberts 2009: 140, Prinz 2009: 121, and, especially, Mischel and Shoda
1994, 1998: 250.
54
For related discussion of these two approaches to understanding structural units of
personality, and in particular for concerns about whether top-down models of between-person
differences should be applied to understanding individual within-person psychological struc-
tures, see Allport 1958: 2512, McAdams 1992: 34954, John and Robins 1994: 139, Caprara and
Cervone 2000: 1518, 7681, 11421, Cervone et al. 2007: 8, Mischel and Shoda 1998: 250, 2008:
216, 225, Lucas and Donnellan 2009: 147, Roberts 2009: 141, Heller et al. 2009: 1712, and
especially Cervone 1999, 2005: 42530 and Orom and Cervone 2009. For the general contrast
between top-down and bottom-up explanatory strategies, see Kitcher 1985 and Salmon 1989.
55
The most extensive discussion that I am aware of which is related to this topic can be found
in McCrae and Costa 1995.
me consider two options. On the one hand, they could treat the Big Five traits
and their facets as psychological primitives, that is, as dispositions which are
not grounded in more basic mental state dispositions, but which simply arise
genetically and have their own distinctive metaphysical existence and causal
role in everyones minds. At times this seems to be their considered view. For
instance, they write that motives, wishes and attitudes are not personality
traits, nor are patterns of motives, wishes and attitudes, and personality
traits, in our model, account (in part) for the motives, habits, and attitudes that
directly affect behavior.56
If this is indeed their position, then I am not sure I can make sense of it.
Traits would become mysterious entities, with their own ungrounded casual
powers.57 In addition, I am not sure how worries about circularity would be
avoided, since traits would then seem to be characterized only in terms of the
patterns of thoughts and behavior they give rise to.58
Suppose on the other hand that McCrae and Costa go on to provide a more
fundamental psychological account of a trait like modesty, say in terms of
relevant underlying dispositions to believe and desire. The quotes above could
56
McCrae and Costa 1995: 236, 242. Similarly this rst option would be in line with their
claim that: In FFT, traits are not patterns of behavior, nor are they the plans, skills, and desires
that lead to patterns of behavior. They are directly accessible neither to public observation nor to
private introspection. Instead, they are deeper psychological entities (McCrae and Costa 2008:
163). See also the statements that traits provide a structural basis for goals and motives (1994:
152), that the questionnaires that trait psychologists write include questions about specic
thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, but they are of interest chiey as indicators of a deeper level of
personality (151), and that motive concepts . . . can explain patterns of behavior . . . and can
themselves be explained as expressions of basic tendencies (McCrae and Costa 1995: 2467). To
be fair, these quotes do not entail the rst option, and could be made compatible with the second
option for the reasons outlined in the next footnote.
57
Immediately after the passage cited in the text above, McCrae and Costa go on to write that
the crucial word in our denition of traits is tendencies, because this term denotes the disposi-
tional core of the trait construct (1995: 236, emphasis theirs). So it could be that when they say
traits are not mental states, what they have in mind are occurrent mental states, and so they are
claiming that traits are causal dispositions to form occurrent motives, wishes, and the like. This
idea I have no difculty with at all, as should be clear from chapter one, and I go on to discuss it
next in the text above. But unfortunately I cannot tell for sure whether this really is their view.
58
For their response, see McCrae and Costa 1995: 2413. For a recent, detailed development
of the circularity concern with a focus on McCrae and Costas view, see Boag 2011: 2306. See
also Cervone 1999: 31314, Caprara and Cervone 2000: 11415, and Nettle 2007: 3640. Even if
they are identied with certain biological structures in the brain (Nettle 2007: 389), traits still
seem to be characterized in the rst place solely in behavioral terms, thereby leading to circularity
worries. And in any event, McCrae and Costa reject such an identication of traits with
biological structures: We do not equate basic dispositions with biological constructs, nor have
we offered a psychobiological theory of personality (1995: 239). For a response to the circularity
worry on behalf of McCrae and Costa, see John et al. 2008: 146.
Still another worry is that since relevant mental state dispositions exist in peoples minds and
since the basic tendencies are also supposed to cause behavior, then the threat of rampant causal
overdetermination looms large, as was discussed in chapter one. In response, McCrae and Costa
might argue that any dispositions to form beliefs and desires are themselves the causal product of
the basic tendencies.
The Big Five 141
then be interpreted as stating that traits are not themselves occurrent mental
states, but rather are dispositional properties which are either identical to (trait
monism) or at least are grounded in (trait dualism) causal mental state
dispositions to form occurrent motives, habits, attitudes, and the like. This
idea should be familiar from chapter one.
I can understand this second option and I grant that it is not circular.59 But
at the same time I claim that the resulting position is not empirically adequate.
On my view most people do not have the requisite mental states and have
them function in the ways needed in order to qualify as even minimally
virtuous. So I do not think this second option is a very promising way for
McCrae and Costa to go either if they want to claim that altruism and modesty
are universally held.
In my experience discussing these issues with personality psychologists,
I nd that they are used to thinking of Big Five traits and their facets on a
continuum of more or less, with each of them being universally held. Every-
one, in other words, has some degree of extraversion, or conscientiousness, or
(more specically) modesty, or altruism, even if they are held to small degrees
in some individuals. So I nd that my claim that the moral virtue facets are not
empirically adequate for most people, ends up not getting very far in these
discussions.
Let me try to make two points to reinforce my response. First, recall that
I am just addressing Big Five views which, like McCrae and Costas, adopt a
causal view of these traits. I have no problem at all with the (perhaps
dominant) summary view interpretation, and do not have to take a stand in
this chapter on the question of whether it is appropriate to merely label
everyones behavior as modest or altruistic to some degree.
But secondly, with respect to the causal view and as I noted in chapter two,
when it comes to the moral virtues and vices there are minimal standards that
must be met in order for any psychological structure or cluster of beliefs and
desires to qualify as a virtue. These moral standards typically if not always
include some form of virtuous motivation, virtuous thought, and virtuous
action, at least in situations where the appropriate choice is easy to discern and
the costs of acting virtuously are low for the person in question. Such stand-
ards are what I called the minimal threshold for these moral traits, and there
is no guarantee that most or even a few of us meet them. Other non-moral
traits, such as extraversion or openness to experience, might function differ-
ently, and for my purposes I do not need to take a stand on that question.
Instead, my only concern is to argue that the traits which are moral virtues
(and vices) must meet certain normative standards, and that based on the
psychological evidence most of us do not seem to be meeting them. To simply
59
Thereby blocking at least some of the concerns raised by Boag 2011.
posit that the moral virtues are universally held based on ratings scores, is to
avoid doing the hard work of evaluating whether everyone actually does have
the mental state dispositions in the rst place which meet these standards.60
Hence I conclude that the combination of a causal view about Big Five facets,
the inclusion of moral virtues among those facets, and the claim that the facets
are universally held, is empirically undermined by the existing data.
Now one response could be that the facets in the Big Five taxonomy were
never intended to be interpreted as moral virtues, at least not in my norma-
tively rich sense. Fair enough. If so, then as far as my project in this book is
concerned, I have no objection even to a causal interpretation of the Big Five
traits, so long as advocates of the view are clear about how they are using their
terms. Modesty and altruism would then not be used to stand for ordinary
moral virtues, even though that clearly seems to be how psychologists have
intended them to be understood up to this point.61
Before moving on, let me make one nal point. Earlier I assumed for the
sake of discussion that the survey instruments, such as the NEO-PI-R, serve as
thorough and careful measurement devices which can accurately evaluate the
extent to which a person has one of the virtues on the various lists of Big Five
facets. But at least for the items on the personality surveys that I have
examined, it seems to me that the questions are not extensive enough to
evaluate the possession of a moral virtue. Yet without this crucial rst step
in place, there would be no basis upon which to claim that everyone actually
has basic tendencies towards, say, modesty.
To see this, consider the facet of altruism under agreeableness in McCrae
and Costas Five-Factor Theory.62 This facet is characterized as follows:
60
Indeed, two people could have the same overall score on some rating scale for a virtue, but
have radically different underlying beliefs and desires. So while the scale might indicate that they
are, say, moderately compassionate, one or even both of them could fail to have this virtue
altogether. For a similar point, see Cervone 1999: 331, 2005: 428 and Caprara and Cervone 2000:
18, 80.
61
See, e.g. McCrae and Costa 1987, where they explicitly state that the two Big-Five traits of
agreeableness and conscientiousness in general are traits which are judged and evaluated from a
moral point of view (88, see also McCrae and John 1992: 197 and Jost and Jost 2009: 253). Surely
the same would apply to their facets too.
For an opposing view which sees the virtues as distinct from Big-Five traits, see Ozer and
Benet-Martnez 2006: 403, 4056. See also Caspi et al. 2005 who seems to equate altruism just
with levels of prosocial behavior (459). And Piedmont writes that: When interpreting scores
from the NEO-PI-R it is important to . . . not impose any value judgments on the scores. One
frequent mistake . . . has been to see some of these qualities as better than others . . . Personalities
should not be thought of as good or bad (1998: 57). See also Nettle: any level of any of the big
ve is advantageous in some ways whilst being disadvantageous in others. Thus, there is no
intrinsically better or worse personality prole to have (2007: 2445, see also page 70). Also
relevant is Prinz 2009: 121.
62
Agreeableness itself is characterized in part as follows: The agreeable person is fundamen-
tally altruistic. He or she is sympathetic to others and eager to help them, and believes that others
will be equally helpful in return (Costa and McCrae 1992: 15).
The Big Five 143
High scorers on the Altruism scale have an active concern for others welfare as
shown in generosity, consideration of others, and a willingness to assist others in
need of help. Low scorers on this scale are somewhat more self-centered and are
reluctant to get involved in the problems of other[s].63
McCrae and Costa measure altruism with these questionnaire items (where
R denotes a reversed item):64
Some people think Im selsh and egotistical. (R)
I try to be courteous to everyone I meet.
Some people think of me as cold and calculating. (R)
I generally try to be thoughtful and considerate.
Im not known for my generosity. (R)
Most people I know like me.
I think of myself as a charitable person.
I go out of my way to help others if I can.
I grant that responses to these items tend to be highly intercorrelated, and that
they give us good reason to postulate a label called altruism, provided that
this term is understood broadly as pertaining to a general tendency to be
helpful.65 What should be clear, however, is that these items do not provide
nearly enough information to properly assess whether someone has a moral
virtue such as compassion, even setting aside worries about the accuracy of
self-reports. For instance, four of the items have to do with how other people
think of me, not how I am. Two have to do primarily with manners and
politeness, and one concerns social liking. Only the last item relates directly to
helping behavior, and none of them gets at the motivation behind helping.66
By way of comparison, here are the four questions that Michael Ashton and
Kibeom Lee use in the 100-item version of their HEXACO-PI-R to measure
altruism (on a 1-to-5 scale between strongly disagree and strongly agree):67
97. I have sympathy for people who are less fortunate than I am.
98. I try to give generously to those in need.
99. It wouldnt bother me to harm someone I didnt like.
100. People see me as a hard-hearted person.
If altruism is supposed to be anything like the virtue of compassion,
kindness, or the like, then these items will not get us very far in assessing
whether a given person has it.68 The third item has to do with harming rather
63 64
Costa and McCrae 1992: 18. Costa and McCrae 1992: 72.
65
As it seems to be in Caspi et al. 2005: 459.
66
In fact, DeYoung et al. claim that no good markers for Compassion appear in the NEO-PI-
R (2007: 885).
67
Downloaded from <http://hexaco.org/downloading.html> on 13 May 2011.
68
They characterize the facet as follows: The Altruism (versus Antagonism) scale assesses a
tendency to be sympathetic and soft-hearted toward others. High scorers avoid causing harm
and react with generosity toward those who are weak or in need of help, whereas low scorers are
than helping behavior, and so pertains to the virtue of non-malevolence. The
last item concerns peoples perceptions, not how one actually is. The rst two
items start to unpack motivation, but are not sharply focused enough to
examine whether it is altruistic. Finally, none of these items has anything to
do with helping behavior.69
Ashton and Lee are well-known for arguing that the Big Five trait list
is insufcient, and needs to be expanded to include a sixth personality
dimension of honesty/humility, with four facets of sincerity, fairness,
greed-avoidance, and modesty.70 All of these labels sound robustly moral,
and I will not go over the questionnaire items for each of them. Let me just
pick fairness:71
12. If I knew that I could never get caught, I would be willing to steal a million
dollars.
36. I would be tempted to buy stolen property if I were nancially tight.
60. I would never accept a bribe, even if it were very large.
84. Id be tempted to use counterfeit money, if I were sure I could get away with it.
Someone who scores high on item 60 and low on the other three, would seem
to be a fair (perhaps better, honest) person in some respects, or at least he
might think that he is. But note that this is a far cry from actually being fair in a
morally virtuous sense. For instance, perhaps the person would not do these
wrong actions in order to avoid feeling guilty in the future; or in order to try to
earn rewards in the afterlife; or in order to enjoy the satisfaction that comes
with thinking of oneself as a moral person. None of these motives would be
virtuous ones, and without clarication here we have no basis for attributing
the virtue to him.
not upset by the prospect of hurting others and may be seen as hard-hearted (<http://hexaco.
org/scaledescriptions.html> 13 May 2011, emphasis theirs). Of course, if they do not intend
altruism to be a moral virtue, then I have no objection to the claim that altruism (so understood)
is universally possessed.
69
For different emphasizes on belief, desire, and action in the items used in various ques-
tionnaires to assess Big-Five traits, see Pytlik Zillig et al. 2002.
70
See Ashton and Lee 2001, 2005 and Lee and Ashton 2004. For criticism of the need for this
sixth dimension, see McCrae and Costa 2008: 167 and DeYoung et al. 2007: 881, 885. By
mentioning the work of Ashton and Lee here in the context of discussing causal views of Big-
Five traits and facets, I do not mean to imply that they themselves accept a causal view about
traits or any of the other details of McCrae and Costas FFT. I am only focusing on their
HEXACO questionnaire because it provides another nice illustration of the limits of these survey
instruments when it comes to assessing moral virtue and vice.
One puzzling feature of this list is that none of these labels seems to have any connection to
honesty (with respect to telling the truth), and the same is true of the 16 specic items used to
measure these facets. But leave that point aside.
71
The Fairness scale assesses a tendency to avoid fraud and corruption. Low scorers are
willing to gain by cheating or stealing, whereas high scorers are unwilling to take advantage of
other individuals or of society at large (<http://hexaco.org/scaledescriptions.html> 13 May
2011, emphasis theirs). Again, if they do not intend fairness to be a moral virtue, then I have
no objection to the claim that fairness (so understood) is universally possessed.
The Big Five 145
The concerns above are specic ones about particular questionnaires. Of
course, new surveys could always be developed, and they could have additional
items which are directly aimed at meeting these concerns.72 But that would
still leave the fundamental problem in place, namely that these are measures
designed to collect report data (self, friend, expert, spouse, or whatever) on
how people tend to be in general. Yet there are various concerns with how far
such report data can take us in assessing moral virtues and vices. For instance,
with respect to virtues such as compassion, the relevant questionnaire items
from measures like the NEO-PI-R, HEXACO-PI-R, and DeYoung et al.s
Big Five Aspect Scales are not going to be able to supply crucial information
such as:
(i) How many helping-relevant situations the person actually encoun-
tered during, say, the past month.
(ii) Of the situations he was in during the past month, how many did he
accurately recognize as being helping-relevant versus how many did
he fail to recognize as helping-relevant.
(iii) How many of these situations he thought (whether accurately or not)
were helping-relevant.
(iv) Which of those situations he actually helped in and which he did not.
(v) Of the situations in which he helped, the degree to which he was
actually helpful in those particular situations.
(vi) What his motivation for helping or not helping in any of those
situations actually was.
(vii) Whether when he did help during the past month he in fact was
helpful in general, as opposed to only thinking that he was helpful.
(viii) To what extent, if any, he was either subconsciously or consciously
misreporting or even distorting his answers to the survey questions.
72
For instance, in recent work Colin DeYoung and his colleagues (2007) have divided the
Big-Five trait of agreeableness into two aspects, compassion and politeness, and use the
following scales for compassion (887, with R denoting a reversed item):
Am not interested in other peoples problems. (R)
Feel others emotions.
Inquire about others well-being.
Cant be bothered with others needs. (R)
Sympathize with others feelings.
Am indifferent to the feelings of others. (R)
Take no time for others. (R)
Take an interest in other peoples lives.
Dont have a soft side. (R)
Like to do things for others.
Cumulatively these questions strike me as doing a far better job than those pertaining to
altruism in the text above.
More generally, I want to especially emphasize the concern that most of us
have psychological processes going on in our minds which we may not be
aware of and which can undermine our possession of the virtues and vices,
even in spite of what we ourselves (and our peers) think about our characters.
These processes can be highly inuential in causing behavior, and yet may not
often be appreciated or even recognizedhence our shock at the results found
by Milgram and other famous studies in psychology.73
So even if there ended up being good statistical reasons based on new survey
data to posit additional facets of the Big Five corresponding to the traditional
moral virtuessuch as compassion and honestyit would still be a funda-
mental mistake in my opinion to then infer that the people in question actually
have those virtues. Whether they do indeed have the virtues or not is ultim-
ately a matter of what dispositions to form beliefs and desires there are in their
minds as well as the relations between those dispositions. These psychological
facts should best be assessed not on the basis of surveys and quick paper-
and-pencil devices, but rather (if at all possible) on the basis of longitudinal
studies of actual behavior in morally relevant situations designed to shed light
on the possession of the virtue in question.74 Hence at the end of the day, I am
suspicious about how far research on the Big Five in personality psychology
can really take us in understanding our actual moral character.
6 .3 TH E S UF F I C I E N CY O F TH E BI G F I V E
The second conict with my Mixed Trait approach has to do with the scope of
what is claimed about personality using the Big Five taxonomy. Most prob-
lematic of all in my view are claims to the effect that the Big Five taxonomy or
Five Factor model offers a complete picture of personality. Hence McCrae and
Costa:
Much of what psychologists mean by the term personality is summarized by the
FFM.75
The structure of personality . . . that must be explained is, for now, best repre-
sented by the ve-factor model.76
73
For additional concerns with self-reports and the Big Five, see McAdams 1994: 340,
34954, Block 1995a: 209, Buss 1996: 1957, Hogan 1996: 1758, and Prinz 2009: 121. For
more general concerns about self-report data and moral character, see Moral Character,
chapter eight.
74
For much more on methodological principles to use in studying moral character, see Moral
Character, chapter eight.
75
76
McCrae and Costa 1987: 89. See also McCrae and Costa 1997: 509 and the references in
Block 1995a: 187.
The Big Five 147
But they are not the only ones making such claims:
Taken together, they (the Big Five) provide a good answer to the question of
personality structure.77
My opinion is that the ve-factor model of personality . . . is largely sufcient for
characterizing normal and abnormal personality functioning.78
If we have truly discovered the basic dimensions of personalityit marks a
turning point for personality psychology.79
Big Five advocates have been chastised for badly overreaching here, and
rightly so.80 Surely other variables such as beliefs and desires, including
particular values, goals, motives, self-concepts and the like, are also crucial
to personality.
But this has not stopped Big Five advocates from making bold claims about
the completeness of their pictures of personality traits. For instance Costa and
McCrae write that:
One of the chief merits of the FFM is that it offers a comprehensive yet manage-
able guide to personality traits.81
The FFM is intended to be a comprehensive taxonomy of all personality traits.82
77 78
Digman 1990: 436. Widiger 1993: 82.
79
McCrae and John 1992: 177. Similarly, Piedmont writes that we have increased condence
that the ve-factor model is indeed a comprehensive description of individual difference
variables (1998: 46). And Digman and Inouye claim that all linguistic conceptions of person-
ality, whether originating in the constructs of personality theories or coming from the language
of ordinary discourse, may be found within this ve-fold space (1986: 122). See also Ashton and
Lee 2001: 335 (with respect to their Big Six) and Nettle 2007: 9.
80
See in particular McAdams 1992, Pervin 1994, Block 1995a and, more recently, Mischel
2009: 285. For more cautious statements by Big-Five advocates, see Fiske 1994: 1234, John and
Robins 1994: 137, 139, McCrae 1994: 149, McCrae and Costa 1995: 235, Goldberg and Saucier
1995: 223, Digman 1996: 16, Saucier and Goldberg 1996b: 24, 41, Piedmont 1998: 51, and John
et al. 2008: 140.
81
McCrae and Costa 1996: 57. See also page 61.
82
Costa and McCrae 1995a: 25. As Jerry Wiggins and Paul Trapnell write: Interest in the
ve-factor model derived mainly from the claim that ve dimensions might provide an adequate
preliminary taxonomy for all nontrivial personality traitsthose whose importance in human
interaction has resulted in a descriptive label in the natural language (e.g. dominant), as well as
those reected in the constructs of personality researchers (e.g. Machiavellianism) (1997: 7567,
emphasis theirs). For similar claims, see also McCrae et al. 1986: 430, Piedmont et al. 1991: 636,
McCrae and John 1992: 176, Piedmont 1998: 31, 58, and McCrae and Costa 2003: 3, 52. For
helpful clarication of what comprehensive means for Costa and McCrae, see their 1995b:
218 n. 1.
As noted, opposition to the sufciency of the Big Five exists among personality psychologists.
Ashton and Lee (2001, 2005, Lee and Ashton 2004) have argued for a Big-Six taxonomy that
includes honesty-humility, which they take to thereby be a comprehensive taxonomy (Ashton
and Lee 2001: 350). As they write, the NEO-PI-R does not contain any facets that directly
assess greed and status-seeking, nor does it contain any facets that directly assess dishonest
tendencies of the kind measured by overt integrity tests (Ashton and Lee 2005: 1344). Paunonen
and Jackson (2000) claim that 10 additional factors need to be added to the Big Five, including
integrity and religiosity. Buss (1996) focuses on individual differences in sexuality and on
Now clearly I cannot accept these claims. For my Mixed Traits are not part of
ordinary discourse, they are unfamiliar and undertheorized entities, and they
certainly do not appear on any Big Five hierarchies. Yet I claim that they are
widespread and very important to understanding moral thought and action.
I have two simple reasons for rejecting the claim about the sufciency of the
Big Five as a comprehensive taxonomy of personality traits. First, it is not clear
that Big Five advocates have addressed the existence of moral character traits
in their taxonomy of personality traits. Earlier I raised this concern with
respect to the specic items on questionnaires such as the NEO-PI-R; it
seems to me that those items are often not specic enough to identify the
various components of a moral virtue or vice. But now I want to approach the
topic from a very different angle with respect to McCrae and Costas Five-
Factor Theory. Recall from chapter one that on one leading approach charac-
ter traits are tied to notions of responsibility and control. But on McCrae and
Costas view all personality traits in general are said to arise genetically
and serve as largely (if not entirely) xed and uncontrollable basic tenden-
cies of our personalities.83 In their visual diagram of the personality system,
for instance: Most readers will probably be startled by the conspicuous
absence . . . of an arrow from external inuences to basic tendencies. This is
not an oversight; FFT deliberately asserts that personality traits are endogen-
ous dispositions, inuenced not at all by the environment.84 And they claim
that after 30 years of age, peoples personality traits are set like plaster.85 If
this is the case, then McCrae and Costas FFT leaves no room for character, at
least on this way of thinking about the matter. For personality traits on their
view are such that we have no responsibility in acquiring them in the rst
sex-linked trait terms (2034). See also Goldberg 1993: 31, Block 1995a: 205, 2001: 101, Saucier
and Goldberg 1996b: 39, Piedmont 1998: 219, Saucier and Ostendorf 1999: 625, and Caprara and
Cervone 2000: 74.
83
For relevant discussion, see McCrae et al. 2000, Costa and McCrae 2002, and McCrae and
Costa 2003, 2008. This claim includes the 30 facets and not just the Big-Five domains, and so
includes the morally relevant facets of modesty and altruism as well. See, e.g. McCrae et al.
2000: 174, 176, 182. See also the development of this kind of position in Nettle 2007:
chapter eight.
84
McCrae et al. 2000: 175, emphasis theirs. They go on to write that the generalization that
personality traits are more or less immune to environmental inuences is supported by multiple,
converging lines of empirical evidence that signicant variables in life experience have little or no
effect on measured personality traits (1745). See also McCrae and Costa 2003: 193. The
surrounding discussion in both places does qualify these statements, but not in a way that
signicantly bears on the above. For criticism of this view, see, e.g. Cervone 2005: 434 and
Roberts 2009: 139, 1413.
85
Costa and McCrae 1994. Furthermore, on their view while there might be some change in
personality traits over time (people tend to increase slightly in agreeableness and conscientious-
ness, for instance), this change is not due to environmental inuences (not primarily, at least, if at
all), but rather to genes being activated at various points in time.
The Big Five 149
place, nor in shaping them subsequently in our lives.86 Any taxonomy of traits
which purports to be exhaustive, and yet does not have any room for moral
character traits, seems to me to be seriously incomplete.87
My second reason for rejecting the comprehensiveness of the Big Five
taxonomy of personality traits is even simpler. In my view, any scientic
approach to personality should be open to discovering new psychological
phenomena that are not part of the commonsense understanding of the
world, and that nevertheless play an important causal role. After all, many
of the leading psychologists throughout history have purported to discover
just such phenomena, with varying degrees of success. So it seems far too
premature to close the door on discovering additional traits of character
besides the ones which are familiar from ordinary language or are measured
by our current survey instruments. Indeed, I claim that only recently have
psychological studies allowed us to discover new clusters of mental states
pertaining to moral thought and action which are neither moral virtues nor
vices. These are my Mixed Traits.88
86
To be fair, McCrae and Costa would say that we have some control over the manifestation
of the trait. Extraverts, for instance, have control over whether they go to a particular party or
not. So responsibility can still be found with respect to what one does with ones personality
traits. But there would no accountability for traits one possesses in the rst place. Nettle
elaborates this idea as follows:
Whilst no-one can hold me responsible for the dispositional traits that I have, since those
are not of my choosing, I am morally and legally responsible for the behaviour patterns
I develop as an expression of those traits. There are morally good, morally neutral, and
morally bad behavioural expressions of all traits, and I am responsible for cultivating ones
that are at least morally neutral (2007: 244).
For related discussion, see Piedmont 1998: 389 and Nettle 2007: 23948.
87
And yet McCrae and John write about agreeableness and conscientiousness that: Like A,
C is a highly evaluated dimension; indeed, A and C are the classic dimensions of character,
describing good versus evil and strong-willed versus weak-willed individuals. Perhaps it was
these moral overtones that often led scientic psychologists to ignore these factors (1992: 197).
Similarly, McCrae and Costa ascribe personality traits to animals (2003: 204), but it is not clear
that animals have any character traits, especially moral ones. Cervone et al. (2007) make the
related point that since the same factor structure is replicated in non-human animals this means
that it did not capture unique psychological features of persons (4).
To be fair, the discussion in the text above relies on the rst of the two proposals I offered in
chapter one for distinguishing between character versus non-character personality traits. But
that proposal is controversial, and McCrae and Costa could very well argue that it should
be rejected.
88
For similar themes, see the discussion in McCrae and John 1992: 192 and McCrae and
Costa 1996: 61. Note that I thereby reject the lexical hypothesis, at least as formulated by
Goldberg earlier in this chapter, since I claim that there are plenty of traits which are not
reected in ordinary language. Fortunately I am in good company, as even many Big-Five
advocates reject at least common formulations of the hypothesis too, albeit for different reasons.
See, e.g. McCrae and Costa 1996: 61, 1997: 510, 2003: 29, and Saucier and Ostendorf 1999: 614.
For related discussion, see also Pervin 1994: 107, Block 1995a: 196, 209, and Saucier and
Goldberg 1996b: 334.
6.4 CONCLUSION
In Part Two, I have compared my Mixed Trait framework to three of the

leading approaches in personality and social psychology: situationism, the
CAPS model, and the Big Five. Like advocates of the rst two approaches,
I am skeptical about the widespread possession of situation free traits when
it comes to traditional moral virtues and vices. I also agree that the psycho-
logical study of character should adopt a processing approach which tries to
determine what the particular psychological processessuch as dispositions
to form beliefs and desiresare in each persons mind.
Like advocates of the Big Five approach, I also clearly accept a trait
framework. I agree that ordinary trait concepts like extroverted and con-
scientious can be used as summary labels which are important for classifying
people and their actions.89 In fact, I accept that most people also have
character traits which are causal and explanatory entities that play an import-
ant role in giving rise to behavior. It is just that these traits are not best
understood as traditional moral virtues such as altruism and modesty, if
that is what Big Five theorists have in mind by these terms.
Hence my Mixed Trait view is both a processing approachby stressing the
importance of underlying psychological processes associated with belief and
desire formationand a trait approachby claiming that various belief and
desire dispositions in fact cluster together in most of us to constitute a variety
of different Mixed Traits. Thus I try to preserve what I consider to be the
strengths of all three of these leading views in my own framework.90
89
Advocates of other approaches can and in fact do agree with this claim as well. See n. 36.
90
For general discussion of processing and trait approaches to personality, see Mischel and
Shoda 1995: 257, 263, 1998: 2302, 2008, Mischel 1999b: 52, 56, 2004: 10, 15, 2009: 286, Caprara
and Cervone 2000: 11419, Fleeson 2001: 1023, 2004, Caspi et al. 2005: 461, Fourier et al. 2008:
5313, 542, Roberts 2009, Furr 2009: 204, Lapsley and Hill 2009: 18991, and especially
Cervone 1999.
Part III
Applying the Framework
7
Errors about Character? Some

Implications for Meta-Ethics
Philosophers, especially those working in ethics, have a lot to say about what
our character should be like. But it is far less clear what philosophical import-
ance facts about what our character actually is like will end up having.
Fortunately I am not the only philosopher who is interested in psycho-
logical questions about character. In fact, one of the central developments in
ethics during the past ten years has been the extensive attention paid to the
makeup of our character.1 As I will argue in the next two chapters, empirical
questions about character do indeed have a number of important philosoph-
ical implications. I will divide them into implication for meta-ethics and
implications for normative ethical theory.
Section one of this chapter argues that my account of Mixed Traits supports
an error theory about moral character judgments. This invites comparisons
with what has been called the fundamental attribution error, which I
examine in section two. The chapter ends by considering two important
questions associated with error theories. First, how did we get to this point
of being so mistaken in most of our ascriptions of traditional virtues and vices
to people? And secondly, what should be done next once we realize the error of
our ways?
1
See, e.g., Robert Adams (2006), Mark Alfano (2011, 2013), Julia Annas (2003, 2011), Kwame
Anthony Appiah (2008), Nafsika Athanassoulis (2000), Neera Badhwar (2009), Lorraine Besser-
Jones (2008), Simon Blackburn (1998), John Campbell (1999), William Casebeer (Samuels and
Casebeer 2005), Steve Clarke (2006), Michael DePaul (1999), John Doris (1998, 2002, 2010),
Owen Flanagan (1991, 2009), Diana Fleming (2006), Peter Goldie (2004), Gilbert Harman (1999,
2000, 2001, 2003, 2009), Thomas Hurka (2006), Rachana Kamtekar (2004), Kristjn Kristjnsson
(2008), Joel Kupperman (1991, 2001, 2009), Steven Lukes (2009), Maria Merritt (2000, Merritt
et al. 2010), myself (2003, 2009a, 2009b, 2010a, 2010b, 2011a), James Montmarquet (2003), Jesse
Prinz (2009), Peter Railton (2011), Daniel Russell (2009), Hagop Sarkissian (2010), Edward
Slingerland (2011), Nancy Snow (2009, 2010), Robert Solomon (2003), Ernest Sosa (2009),
Gopal Sreenivasan (2002, 2008), Christine Swanton (2003), Chris Tucker (2004), Candace
Upton (2009a, 2009b), Peter Vranas (2005), Jonathan Webber (2006a, 2006b, 2007a, 2007b),
Eric Wielenberg (2006), and Michael Winter and John Tauer (2006), among others.
7.1 M ETA-ETHICS AND AN E RROR THEORY

ABOUT MORAL CHARACTER
It is customary in philosophical ethics to distinguish between meta-ethics and

normative ethical theory. Meta-ethics is often characterized as the non-moral
study of the metaphysics, epistemology, and semantics of the moral. Unlike
normative ethics, meta-ethical approaches are carried out at the second-order
level by examining the practice of morality from a morally disengaged per-
spective and typically refraining from making rst-order moral claims.2 In
other words, meta-ethical inquiry raises and attempts to answer questions
about morality, including:
Do moral facts and properties exist?
If so, are they objective?
If they are not objective, who or what created them?
How do we learn the content of morality, if there is such content to learn in
the rst place?
What is the meaning of moral terms, and how do they refer, if they do so in
the rst place?
Are moral statements capable of being true or false?
If so, are any of them true?
To use an analogy, a scientist arrives at rst-order scientic conclusions,
whereas a philosopher of science examines the practice of science as such,
and does not make any scientic discoveries. So too is the meta-ethicist
concerned, in the rst instance, not with arriving at new ethical claims, but
rather with the answers to various questions about morality such as these.
One of the inuential positions in contemporary meta-ethics is the moral
error theory. In general, an error theory typically starts with a claim about
something a class of people believes:
(B) Certain people have beliefs whose content involves some feature, F.
For instance, atheists will typically hold something like the following:
(B1) Most theists have religious beliefs whose content entails that God exists.
Note that the rst claim of error theories is psychologicalit pertains to what
the people in question are thinking. The second claim, on the other hand, is
metaphysical:
2
Although matters are sometimes not as straightforward as this familiar characterization
suggests. For instance, sometimes rst-order moral claims are used in objections against the
adoption of a particular meta-ethical view, such as moral relativism or the error theory. In
addition, certain meta-ethical positions may commit their advocates to afrming or denying
certain rst-order moral claims. For relevant discussion of this last point, see Fantl 2006 and
Enoch 2011: chapter two. Thanks to both Jason Baldwin and Terence Cuneo here.
Errors about Character? Some Implications for Meta-Ethics 155
(M) F fails to obtain or to be instantiated.
So here atheists would naturally claim that:
(M1) God does not exist.
Hence the conclusion of combining the psychological claim with the meta-
physical claim is that the people in question have erroneous thoughts in this
area of their lives:
(C) Certain people have beliefs whose content involves F, and those beliefs are
false.
From the atheistic perspective, the conclusion would be:
(C1) Most theists have religious beliefs which are false.
Hence atheists are error theorists with regard to the theists in the world.3
Let me turn now to morality. In the abstract, moral error theories typically
take the form of a cognitivist claim that:
(B2) Most ordinary people form moral beliefs whose content involves some
moral feature, F.
This claim is opposed to traditional non-cognitivist positions which instead
understand moral judgments as expressions of desires.4 For example, the
most famous moral error theorist, J. L. Mackie, starts with the cognitivist
claim that:
(B3) Most ordinary people believe that morality is both objective (independent of
human beings) and prescriptive (specifying what we ought to do, regardless
of whether we actually want to do that thing), or at least their moral
judgments presuppose this about morality.
Next, the moral error theorist will add the metaphysical claim that:
(M2) Moral feature F fails to obtain or to be instantiated.5
For Mackie, this claim amounts to:
(M3) There are no objectively prescriptive moral facts or properties.6
3
This is only an initial pass at stating the structure of an error theory. To see that further
renement is needed, consider a theists belief that if God exists, then human beings are not the
only persons who exist. Atheists presumably would not want to deny the truth of that condi-
tional. For more on atheism and the error theory, see Miller 2012.
4
For classic statements of such a view, see Stevenson 1937and Ayer 1952.
5
Thus as Lillehammer notes, there is a form of error theory corresponding to every claim
that moral judgements entail (2004: 93).
6
Mackie 1977: chapter one. Mackie actually argued for the stronger claim that there are no
objective values whatsoever, whether moral or not (1977: 15).
So he concludes that most ordinary people are systematically mistaken in their
moral thinking, and that their positive moral claims such as Murder is
wrong or Slavery is bad are false.
Most error theories in meta-ethics have focused on the axiological (e.g.
goodness, badness) and deontological (e.g. obligatory, optional, forbidden)
concepts, with little attention paid to character concepts such as the moral
virtues and vices.7 Here I will leave aside these rst two categories of moral
concepts, and focus just on this underexplored territory with respect to
character. When doing so, I claim that a plausible and important error theory
can be developed by starting with this initial claim using the example of the
virtue of compassion:
(B*) On the basis of observing helping behavior, most people infer (whether
consciously or not) that certain individualsperhaps family members,
friends, community leaders, politicians, or the likeare compassionate
people.
To this it adds the metaphysical claim that:
(M*) Few people actually have the virtue of compassion, and what instead plays a
signicant role with respect to most helping is often a Mixed Helping Trait.
Thus it follows that:
(C*) Most of our actual moral judgments involving the ascription of compassion
to one or more individuals turn out to be false.
Less formally, think about the people in your life whom you think are
compassionate. Perhaps they include some of your friends, or a leader in the
community. If the argument for (C*) is correct, then it is likely that these
people do not really have the virtue of compassion, but instead a Mixed
Helping Trait. So while you might think you know their character well,
many of your beliefs in this area actually turn out to be mistaken.8
Nor would my error theory just stop with compassion. The argument can
be generalized so that it applies to any traditional moral virtue, such as courage
and honesty. And I would go further stillfor the same argument applies in
parallel fashion to all the traditional moral vices as well, such as cowardice. So
the conclusion really is that:
7
In addition to Mackie 1977, see Joyce 2001, 2005, 2006.
8
In the literature in psychology on accuracy and personality judgments, there are several
different approaches for understanding what accuracy amounts to. Here is not the place to enter
into a comparative assessment of these approaches; instead I will only note that my approach
throughout this chapter ts most naturally with the Realistic Accuracy Model or RAM. For more
see Funder 1995.
(C**) Most of our actual moral judgments involving the ascription of either
traditional moral virtues (compassion, honesty, non-malevolence, etc.) or
moral vices (cold-heartedness, dishonesty, cruelty) to one or more individ-
uals turn out to be false.9
Call this particular version of a moral error theory the character error theory
(CET).
Let me note an important qualication to CET right away. As I indicated in
a footnote in chapter two, almost exclusively North American and European
participants were used in conducting the psychological studies I have con-
sulted. Hence it remains an open question whether my claims, and in this case
CET, apply more broadly. So in this chapter when I discuss our moral
judgments, this should be understood as implicitly restricted to the judgments
made by and about broadly Western individuals.10
The rst premise of the argument, generalized to all the traditional virtues
and vices, is a familiar observation from ordinary life. It seems that most
people attribute virtue and vice concepts not just to actions, and not just to
motives, but also to people themselves. We tend to think that our friends are
honest, or loyal, or trustworthy, for instance. Indeed, Bernadette Park (1986)
examined the weekly descriptions by a group of strangers who got to know
each other during a seven-week period, and the most striking result from
these data was the tremendous prevalence of traits, accounting for 65 percent
of all the information, followed by behaviors (23 percent).11 Park also found
that trait information offered by the participants increased in its prevalence
over time as the people got to know each other better.12
The second premise is just the conclusion of the previous chapters of this
book as well as of Moral Character. For a variety of different reasons I have
offered which jointly overdetermine this conclusion, the experimental evi-
dence from psychology supports the claim that most people do not have the
virtue of compassion, or indeed the traditional virtues more generally. Parallel
considerations support the conclusion that they also do not have the trad-
itional vices. Instead they have character traits which are neither virtuous nor
vicious.
9
For earlier statements of something like this claim, see Blackburn 1998: 36, Harman 1999:
316, 329, Doris 1998: 51314, 2002: 1071108, Vranas 2005: 29, Webber 2007a: 103, and Appiah
2008: 45.
10
For relevant discussion, see Choi and Nisbett 1998, Krull et al. 1999, Lieberman et al. 2005,
Knowles et al. 2001, and Balcetis and Dunning 2008. Here I have been helped by Nancy Snow.
11
Park 1986: 910.
12
Ostrom also found that, when asked for what information would be helpful in forming an
impression of another person, participants gave responses involving character traits more often
than responses involving beliefs or responses involving behavior (as reported in Park 1986: 908).
For related discussion and additional references to the literature, see also Mischel 1968: 56,
Newman and Uleman 1989: 165, Ross and Nisbett 1991: 1201, Bargh and Ferguson 2000:
9289, and Doris 2002: 93.
Before ending this section, it is worth noting that the rst premise might
need a bit more nessing. For suppose that we are more inclined to use blanket
character ascriptions to describe people whom we do not know as well. And
suppose that when it comes to our close friends and relatives, we tend to have a
deeper understanding of their traits, and often qualify the labels we use for
them.13 For instance, instead of calling my best friend courageous, I might
know him well enough to say that he is courageous when standing up for a
political cause, but not when facing a bully. Or I can think that a family
member is honest when it comes to taking tests, but also bends the truth in
gossip situations.
Even granting these more careful moral trait ascriptions, such a revision
to the rst premise would not change the overall argument in any signi-
cant way. For my positive view is that most of us have Mixed Traits and
not traditional virtues or vices, no matter how widely or narrowly the latter
are understood. In other words, people will likely be mistaken in thinking
that a friend is compassionate with respect to donating to the poor, just as
they will likely be mistaken in thinking that the friend is compassionate,
period.
Hence I want to take seriously a robust error theory about our ordinary
moral character trait ascriptions.
7.2 THE CET AND THE F UNDAMENTAL

ATTRIBU TION ERROR
If the character error theory is correct, then it follows that most of our current
moral judgments involving ascriptions of traditional character traits to people
are mistaken. But how could this be? More precisely, how could people have
continued to so readily form such judgments without realizing that they are
seriously mistaken? In other areas of life, when our beliefs are infected with
errors that have important consequences for how we live, those errors tend to
become apparent over time. Consider, for instance, errors about bloodletting
or witches or horoscopes. But so far, our character judgments seem surpris-
ingly durable.
In order to address such questions, those who are skeptical in various ways
about traits tend to adopt the following two-part story:
13
For evidence that this is indeed the case, see Wright and Mischel 1987, 1988, Shoda et al.
1989, and Mendoza-Denton et al. 2007: 21520. For related discussion, see Newman and Ule-
man 1989: 166 and Ross and Nisbett 1991: 12930.
(a) Our dispositions to form judgments about the traditional character
traits possessed by people, arise at least in part from a deeper dispos-
ition to commit the fundamental attribution error.14
(b) The development of the disposition to commit the fundamental attri-
bution error can in turn be explained by one or more hypotheses
involving the benets that would typically come to people who have
this disposition.15
In this section my concern will only be with the rst part of this story. In
particular, I will argue that this proposed explanation is inadequate, be-
cause on at least many standard formulations the fundamental attribution
error (FAE) is either incoherent or generates implausible results. Toward
the end of the section, though, I will attempt to extract two important
theses from the literature on the FAE which I believe do serve as central
elements in a plausible explanation for our ordinary ascriptions of character
traits.
While other psychologists had postulated versions of the FAE before him,16
Lee Ross provided the famous label in his 1977 paper. He dened the FAE as
the tendency for attributers to underestimate the impact of situational factors
and to overestimate the role of dispositional factors in controlling behavior.17
14
The fundamental attribution error goes by several names, including lay dispositionism
(Ross 2001: 37), overattribution and attributional bias (Quattrone 1982: 3589), and cor-
respondence bias (Gilbert and Malone 1995), although care must be taken before assuming that
these labels are used interchangeably.
Note that the disposition to commit the fundamental attribution error is not claimed to be the
only disposition responsible for the false character trait attributions that most of us make. Other
tendencies have also been postulated in the attribution literature, such as actor-observer diver-
gence and the false consensus bias (for a helpful survey in psychology, see Ross 1977; in
philosophy, see Flanagan 1991: 30611 and Alfano 2011). However, the fundamental attribution
error has received the bulk of the attention with respect to character trait attributions in both
psychology and philosophy.
15
For relevant discussion, see Ross 1977: 1837, 2001: 37, Harman 1999: 325, 2003: 90, Ross
and Nisbett 1991, Sabini et al. 2001a, 2001b, and especially Gilbert and Malone 1995.
16
See, e.g. Heider 1944, 1958and Ichheiser 1949.
17
Ross 1977: 183. See also his 1977: 184, 2001: 37 as well as Bierbrauer 1979: 68, Pietromo-
naco and Nisbett 1982: 1, Ross and Nisbett 1991: 4, 28, 52, 79, 889, 130, 133, Flanagan 1991:
306, Funder 1995: 655, Doris 2002: 93, OSullivan 2003: 1316, Miller 2004: 201, Samuels and
Casebeer 2005: 75, Appiah 2008: 42, Russell 2009: 308, Snow 2010: 71, and Alfano 2011: 124 for
similar characterizations. Compare also the following from John Sabini and his colleagues who
write that to a far greater degree than laypeople realize, and than social psychologists had
previously realized, peoples behavior is caused externally (by situations) rather than internally
(by dispositions) (2001a: 1). Hagop Sarkissian instead formulates the FAE in terms of our
tendency to think that people act autonomously (2010: 6). George Quattrone states the FAE in
terms of personal versus situational attributions (1982: 359, 376). Leonard Newman and James
Uleman characterize it as the extraction of dispositional information from behavior without
regard to its context (1989: 161).
Some of the studies cited by Ross and, later, other leading researchers in this
area to support the existence of this error include:18
Castro Essay Experiment. Edward Jones and Victor Harris (1967) had partici-
pants rate the attitudes of certain students taking an exam in which they were
instructed to write a defense of Castros Cuba, and also of other students who had
to write an essay criticizing Castros Cuba. Despite these exam instructions,
participants rated the students in the rst group as actually having signicantly
more positive attitudes about Castro than those in the second group. Similar
results were found by Jones and Harris when participants had to rate attitudes in
a debate about Castro rather than an exam, and again when the subject matter
was changed to the topic of segregation.19
Shock Experiment: Predictions about how many people would comply with the
authority gure in the standard Milgram setup were badly mistaken. Milgram
found that even trained psychiatrists estimated that most participants would stop
at 150 volts, only 4 percent would shock at 300 volts, and a miniscule 0.13 percent
would reach 450 volts.20 Bierbrauer had participants watch a careful re-enact-
ment of the standard Milgram setup, in which the teacher shocks all the way to
450 volts. Yet participants still predicted that over 80 percent of teachers would
disobey by the 450 volt level, whereas in the standard Milgram setup in experi-
ment ve only 35 percent did.21
Princeton Theological Seminary Experiment: In John Darley and Daniel Batsons
classic study (1973) the situational variable of being in a hurry to give a lecture
made a signicant difference (10 percent versus 63 percent) to whether a semin-
ary student would stop and help someone in need. Certain personality variables
such as the students religious orientation were not found to be signicant.22 Later
on Paula Pietromonaco and Richard Nisbett (1982) gave participants a con-
densed version of this study including the results, and then asked them to make
predictions about helping in two very similar situations in which hurry was varied
and someone had a knee injury or was pregnant and needed assistance with her
car. Despite having just read about the signicance difference that hurry makes,
participants estimated that 59 percent of people in a hurry would stop to help in
the situations, while 78 percent of those not in a hurry would.23
18
See Ross 1977: 1847, Ross and Nisbett 1991: chapter ve, Gilbert and Malone 1995: 24,
Sabini et al. 2001a: 38, and Doris 2002: chapter ve. For additional studies see, e.g. Ross et al.
1977, Quattrone 1982, and Ross and Nisbett 1991: chapter ve.
19
See Jones and Harris 1967. See also Ross 1977: 184, Ross and Nisbett 1991: 126, Doris 2002:
94, and Appiah 2008: 42.
20
Milgram 1974: 31. Using language that sounds just like the FAE, Milgram wrote that: They
focus on the character of the autonomous individual rather than on the situation in which he nds
himself. With this view, they are likely to expect few subjects to go along with the experimenters
orders (Milgram 1974: 31).
21
Bierbrauer 1979: 74. See also Safer 1980 who showed Milgrams obedience lm to partici-
pants. For relevant discussion, see Miller et al. 1974, Ross 1977: 1845, Ross and Nisbett 1991:
132, Doris 2002: 100, A. Miller 2004: 2089, Webber 2007a: 93, and Burger 2009: 3.
22
Darley and Batson 1973.
23
Pietromonaco and Nisbett 1982: 3. See also Ross and Nisbett 1991: 1302 and Doris
2002: 99.
The basic idea these experiments are meant to illustrate is that the observers
seized upon dispositional traits in order to either explain or predict the
behavior in question, rather than properly attending to the situational forces.
As a result their beliefs turned out to be clearly inaccurate.
The FAE can thus provide at least the rst step in an explanation for why
people so readily make the moral character trait attributions they do. The
reason would simply be that most of us (Westerners at least) are as a matter of
fact disposed in general to overestimate the role of dispositions of any kind,
whether moral or not, in giving rise to behavior, while not adequately taking
into account situational factors.
Naturally the plausibility of this explanation depends heavily upon
whether an appropriate distinction can be made between dispositional
and situational factors. And yet this is precisely where the main problems
lie with the FAE. Here I will consider ve of the leading proposals in the
literature.
(i) The Skin Proposal. This is the most obvious and natural one. Disposi-
tional factors would have to do with what is behind the scenes in a persons
head, such as his traits and mental state dispositions. Situational factors, on the
other hand, would be environmental variables external to a persons body,
such as the presence of the authority gure in the Milgram experiment. The
FAE would then amount to the claim that there is a tendency for attributers to
underestimate the impact of environmental factors and to overestimate the
role of mental factors in controlling behavior.24
But if this is the proposal, then it borders on incoherence. For any pur-
ported environmental factor is only going to have the impact it does in
inuencing intentional action, via the mediating role of mental dispositions,
whether these are individual mental states or traits.25 In the Milgram experi-
ment, for instance, the presence of the authority gure by itself has no role to
play in successfully explaining the turning of the dial; the participants could,
after all, be simply oblivious to his presence for some reason. It is only when
beliefsfor instance, a belief about the presence of the authority gureand
desiressay, a desire to obey authority or to avoid embarrassmentare
introduced into the story, that we have the basis for an adequate explanation
in the rst place. So it makes no sense to talk of overestimating the role of
mental factorstheir role is always essential, and cannot be overestimated.
Similarly, it makes no sense to talk of underestimating the environmental
24
Daniel Gilbert and Patrick Malone at times seem to employ this formulation. See, e.g. their
1995: 21.
25
For similar observations, related discussion, and additional criticism, see Ross 1977: 176,
2001: 38, Miller et al. 1981: 82, 92, White 1991: 260, Gilbert and Malone 1995: 31, Sabini et al.
2001a: 89, 2001b: 41, Funder 2001: 21, 2008: 574, and Webber 2007a: 93.
factorsthey are precisely what the mental states both typically respond to
and have a causal impact upon.26
(ii) The Frequency Proposal. Ross recognized these problems early on, and
offered another proposal for differentiating between dispositional and situ-
ational factors.27 The former would involve unusual or distinguishing personal
dispositions, whereas the latter would apply to factors which hold for most
people in general. In Rosss own example,28 the statement I was initially
attracted to Sally because she is so beautiful would appeal to a situational
factor (because most men are attracted to beautiful women), whereas the
statement I was initially attracted to Sally because her astrological sign is
Libra would appeal to a dispositional factor (because most men are not
attracted to women who have one specic sign). The latter explanation, in
other words, is dispositional because it resorts to an individual difference or
distinguishing personality variable.29
What becomes of the FAE on this proposal? It would amount to the claim
that there is a tendency for attributers to underestimate the impact of common
factors and to overestimate the role of distinctive factors in leading to behav-
ior.30 This version of the FAE is a signicant improvement in that it has the
virtue of being perfectly coherent. But it should be obvious that it also
generates highly counterintuitive consequences. Here I will mention just three.
First, the proposal implies that whether a factor is dispositional or situ-
ational can change over time depending on brute popularity. For instance, the
desire to listen to music by the Backstreet Boys would have been classied as
situational in the 1980s and dispositional in the 2000s. But surely the applic-
ability of the FAE should not change with passing fads, so that in one year
people are overestimating dispositional factors and in another year they are
not based upon what happens to be frequent or popular at the time.31
26
As Sabini and his colleagues nicely put the point: Because it is conceptually true that the
degree to which an aspect of the situation inuences behavior is exactly the same as the degree to
which the disposition with which the aspect ts (the faculty or disposition with which it makes
contact) inuences behavior, it is conceptually impossible to show that situations (or aspects of
situations) are more important than dispositions (2001b: 43).
There are cases where environmental factors may seem to bypass our mental states, for
instance when a doctor hits my knee to test my reexes. But these are cases, not of intentional
action, but of pure bodily movement. And it is explaining intentional actionssuch as in the
studies listed abovewhich is the focus of the FAE.
27
Ross 1977: 1767.
28
Ross 1977: 177.
29
Ross 1977: 177. For a similar proposal, see Mischel 1973: 262, Ross and Nisbett 1991: 889,
Gilbert and Malone 1995: 21, Gilbert 1998, Harman 1999: 323, 2000: 223, 2003: 91, Doris 2002:
934, and Webber 2007a: 94.
30
Sabini and his colleagues formulate the FAE using Rosss interpretation as the claim that
to make the FAE in a specic situation is to imagine that there is more variance in behavior in
that situation than there actually is (2001a: 10).
31
For remarks along these lines, see Sabini et al. 2001a: 9.
More importantly, this approach to formulating the FAE has the conse-
quence that all commonly held mental states are situational and not disposi-
tional factors. This would include, for example, the desire to eat or the desire to
stay alive. But that seems like an odd result, and in what sense would it be true
that we underestimate mental states like those? Similarly, imagine a different
possible world in which everyone has the virtue of honesty to some degree or
otherthis proposal would classify their trait as situational in that world, even
though this virtue is a paradigm example of a dispositional factor. And if I am
right about this world, then most people have Mixed Traits, and so they too
would be classied as situational.
But the third and most awkward consequence of this proposal is that it gives
the wrong results in the very experiments which inspired the FAE. According
to the version in question here, people tend to overestimate the role of
distinctive variables, and so expect there to be variance in a given kind of
behavior whereby some people perform the behavior and some not because
of their individual differences. But recall the predictions that ordinary people
made about what they expected participants to do in the standard Milgram
setup. They expected there to be very little if any variance, because they
predicted that participants would disobey and not turn the dial up high.
This contradicts what would be expected if we had the tendency described
by this second interpretation of the FAE.32
(iii) The Voluntary Approach. Frederick Miller and his colleagues have
offered a strikingly different proposal from these rst two. On their view,
subjects dene dispositional causality as denoting acts chosen freely by the
actor, and situational causality as denoting acts for which choice and responsi-
bility are limited.33 The FAE would then be understood as the tendency for
attributers to overemphasize the freedom of the person in question, while
underestimating the limitations on freedom and responsibility that the person
is actually under.34
Miller may or may not be on to something with his proposal about
dispositional versus situational causality. But my only interest here is whether
his proposal, when it is employed in unpacking the FAE, helps to advance our
understanding of this purported tendency while also capturing the results that
served to motivate the FAE in the rst place. And it is this last part that seems
to me to be questionable. Consider the Alice Isen and Paula Levin (1972)
phone booth experiment, for example, in which participants who found a
dime in the coin return slot tended to subsequently help pick up dropped
32
For similar claims, see Sabini et al. 2001a: 10 and Funder 2001: 22, 2008: 574.
33
Miller et al. 1981: 87. See also pages 912.
34
Miller does explicitly address the FAE, writing that it may reect cultural beliefs and
values that stress that individuals choose and are responsible for their actions, even in many
instances where the choice is in fact limited (1981: 93).
papers, whereas control subjects who did not nd a dime, tended to not help.
On the current proposal, someone who attributes compassion to the helpful
participants who found a dime in the pay phone would be accused of under-
estimating the constraints on freedom and responsibility these participants
were under. But what constraints on freedom and responsibility? Is a positive
mood brought about by nding the dime a constraint on the freedom of the
participants who picked up the papers? Similar questions would seem to arise
for other situational variables which serve to activate mood, embarrassment,
or guilt processes.
(iv) The Rationality Approach. Here is another natural proposal
dispositional factors are mental states or traits that operate at the conscious
level, and issue in actions which are intentional and done for a reason.
Situational factors are (or give rise to) mental states or traits which operate
at the subconscious level, and issue in behavior which is unintentional and not
done for reasons.35 The FAE becomes the tendency for attributers to under-
estimate the impact of non-rational factors and to overestimate the role of
rational factors in leading to behavior.
I think we can make short work of this suggestion as far as it applies to the
FAE, barring more careful renements. For again it generates the wrong
results in the experiments in question. The participants in the Princeton
seminary and Milgram experiments were acting for reasons, regardless of
whether they were morally good ones or not (e.g. to give a lecture on time,
or to obey instructions from a legitimate authority who took responsibility for
the outcome, or to satisfy the requirements of the experiment, etc.). At least
some participants were consciously aware of the considerations that were
leading them to turn up the dial or pass by the person in need, such as
(what they thought was) the importance of obeying someone in charge or
carrying out an instruction to give a lecture. Most straightforwardly of all, the
situational factors did not preclude their actions from being intentional.
(v) The Values Approach. John Sabini and colleagues have recently outlined
what I take to be the most promising approach to distinguishing between
dispositional and situational factors in developing a plausible version of the
FAE. On their account, behavior is internally [or dispositionally] caused if
and only if it follows from a persons values and (correct) beliefs. . . . the
internal-external distinction is one between causes of behavior people afrm
as part of themselves and causes they reject.36 External behavior would then
35
Such a proposal is at least suggested by passages in Buss 1978: 131416, Miller et al. 1981:
89, and White 1991: 261, 2657. Buss, though, claims that reasons explanations are not causal
explanations, something that most philosophers (myself included) would not endorse (see Locke
and Pennington 1982: 21415 for relevant criticism here).
36
Sabini et al. 2001a: 11. Hints of this proposal can also be found in Miller et al. 1981: 89, 92.
be external, not to the persons body, but to his self, and would be the kind of
behavior that is regrettable in his eyes. The FAE becomes the tendency for
attributers to underestimate the impact of factors regretted or disvalued by the
person in question and to overestimate the role of factors which are valued by
him in inuencing behavior.37
This proposal would seem to give the intuitively correct results with respect
to the desires to eat and to live, both of which would count as valued and hence
dispositional for most people. So too would a trait of honesty normally count
as dispositional, even in a world in which everyone had it. And in the Milgram
experiment, the participants mostly regretted their actions, and so the author-
ity gures instructions as well as the participants dispositions to follow them
in this instance would count as external.
The challenge for this proposal is to develop it more carefully. Sabini has
taken us to the point where the next step is to engage with the enormous
literature in the philosophy of action which tries to get clearer on what this talk
of internality and valuing amounts to. For instance, is valuing a matter of
having second-order desires of some kind, as Harry Frankfurt and Gerald
Dworkin famously argued? Or is it a matter of having certain normative
judgments, according to the early work of Gary Watson? Or is it a matter
primarily of a desire to make sense of ourselves (David Velleman) or of
higher-order policies to treat certain considerations as reason-giving (Michael
Bratman)? Taking this next step is daunting.38
But leave aside this worryperhaps any proposal for distinguishing dis-
positional from situational factors will initially be sketchy and in need of
greater renement. The real weakness for this approach, in my view, is also
what served as the primary strength of the voluntary approach. Consider
environmental factors that play a role in activating beliefs and desires, but
subconsciously and in a way that most observers would not expect. Perhaps,
for instance, one factor happens to be the smell of freshly baked cookies, as in
Robert Barons study (1997). Then it could activate a desire to maintain a
positive mood, which can start a chain of occurrent mental states leading to
the person performing a helpful action.39 Now the person in question, like
37
As Sabini and his colleagues write, what matters is not whether behavior is consistent with a
persons dispositions, but whether it is consistent with the persons regrettable dispositions. If so,
then although the behavior is consistent with dispositions, it is externalnot to the person, but to
the persons self, regardless of how many other people do it (2001a: 11, emphasis theirs). And
again, they note that: Social psychology since the Second World War has discovered that
Americans behavior is less in line with what they themselves value than they think it is. Americans
are less well behaved than they think they areless well behaved by their own lights ((2001a: 12).
38
For helpful overviews of these proposals, see Velleman 1992 and Bratman 1996. I have
developed the outlines of my own proposal in Miller 2013. The characterizations above naturally
omit many subtleties of the respective views.
39
Here I am assuming the truth of what is called the mood maintenance model of the
relationship between positive moods and helping. See Moral Character, chapter three.
most of us, might have no idea about what this desire is doing, or even that he
has it in the rst place. So it is not as if he regrets the desire, or the helping
behavior it gives rise to. And even if he did become aware of it, he may not
reject itindeed, many of us might like the fact that we desire to maintain our
good moods.
But now if ordinary observers only see this persons helpful behavior and
then try to explain it, they might appeal to, say, his having the virtue of
compassion, and in doing so they are making a mistake. They are missing
an important variablethe good smells and the desire to maintain a good
mood which they can activate. Clearly this desire should be classied as a
situational variable, and yet it need not be rejected or disvalued.40 Hence the
Sabini and Silver proposal misses what should count as a paradigm case of the
FAE, and similar concerns could be raised for other subconscious processes
which inuence moral behavior.41
I have not exhaustively canvassed all the approaches that could be used to spell
out the dispositional/situational distinction in the FAE, nor have I considered
possible renements that could be made to the ones already mentioned above.42
But I do think I have done enough to raise some important doubts about
whether the FAE really is a useful proposal in the rst place. This is a signicant
result, since the FAE is almost always cited as an important explanatory factor in
discussions of traits in both psychology and philosophy.43
To be fair, the signicance of this criticism should not be exaggerated. For
I also have advanced an error theory in section one of this chapter, and so
I agree that there is something seriously mistaken with our practices of
ascribing moral character traits to people. But what I do not yet see is how
appealing to the FAE helps to explain what that something is.
40
Of course, some people could reject or disvalue it. My only point is that plenty of other
people might not. So the fact that this desire is playing the role of a situational variable does not
seem to be connected with whether it is valued or rejected by the person who has it.
41
For additional criticism, see Funder 2001: 223. In their 2001b, Sabini and his colleagues
concede that they do not have an account of the internal/external distinction that covers all the
relevant cases in the literature or in ordinary thought (412).
42
For instance, another proposal not mentioned in the above is offered by Lee Ross and
Richard Nisbett when they claim that the study [Jones and Harris 1967] indicates that observers
are too willing to take behavior at face value, as reecting a stable disposition (1991: 126). But
we not told what face value means or how to develop this proposal more rigorously.
43
As Sabini et al. note, in answer to the question, What are the important ndings of social
psychology since World War II? Were one to survey social psychologists with that question, we
believe that many would give something like the following answer: [the FAE] (2001a: 1).
Similarly, Gilbert and Malone claim that Rosss (1977) thesis had many lasting effects. But
most important among these was that it showed the tendency to make unwarranted dispositional
inferences was not just some backwater curiosity but, rather, that it constituted the very heart of
the social psychological enterprise (1995: 24). For criticism of the use of the FAE in a
philosophical discussion of traits by Gilbert Harman, see Webber 2007a.
Fortunately, there are two other claims lurking in the same neighborhood
which could potentially shed more light. First of all, I think we are now in a
position to see that the real fundamental attribution error is just this:
(1) At least with respect to moral behavior, we have a tendencynot to overesti-
mate the impact of dispositional factors and underestimate the impact of
situational onesbut rather to overestimate the impact of certain kinds of
dispositional factors and underestimate the impact of other kinds of disposi-
tional factors.44
More precisely, given the theory of Mixed Traits advanced in this book, this
claim can be stated another way as:
(1*) At least with respect to moral behavior, we have a tendency to overestimate
the impact of traditional moral character traits and underestimate the
impact of Mixed Traits, which are neither traditional moral virtues nor
traditional moral vices.
To make matters worse, not only are people in general disposed to favor
traditional character trait explanations, but also:
(2) Most people are disposed to ascribe a traditional moral character trait to
another person based upon only one or a few instances of observed morally
relevant behavior.45
44
Note that (1) is not committed to the claim that this tendency is possessed to the same
degree in each of us; rather it comes in degrees of more or less. For a similar view as (1), see
Sabini et al. 2001a: 38, 13, 2001b: 43. As they write, the results of the Milgram experiment do
not at all demonstrate that dispositional or internal forces are weak relative to environmental
forces; rather, they suggest that specic aspects of situations (and the particular motives those
aspects engage) exert more control over behavior than do other specic aspects of situations (and
the motives they engage) (2001a: 3). See also Jonathan Webbers claim that: In the case of the
Milgram experiment, what needs to be explained is why people tend to think that anyone
reaching the maximum shock level must be unusually cruel or lacking in compassion rather
than ordinarily obedient or deferential (2007a: 96). Similarly Funder notes about the Milgram
experiment that the dispositional forces toward obedience were (again, perhaps surprisingly)
stronger than the dispositional forces toward empathy and disobedience . . . [this interpretation
does not pit] the power of dispositions against the power of situations (2008: 574, emphasis his).
45
This disposition is also one that comes in degrees, rather than being exactly the same from
one person to the next. Furthermore, research on trait attribution in general suggests that the
ascription process often happens very quickly and effortlessly, whereas revisions to an initial trait
ascription can be slow and resource consuming. As Gilbert and Malone write: Fine-grained
analyses of attributional process suggest that, under many conditions, observers spontaneously
draw trait inferences from behavior and that they draw such inferences with remarkable
efciency . . . when people attempt to understand others, they begin by inferring the presence
of a corresponding disposition. Only after having done so do they check to see whether the
actors behavior actually matched their own expectations . . . the initial dispositional inference is
relatively resource efcient (i.e. it does not require considerable effort or conscious attention) . . .
the subsequent correction is less so (1995: 29). This is not to deny that in some cases the
attribution process is more deliberate and effortful (Newman and Uleman 1989: 162).
For related discussion of (2) as well as the quickness and stubbornness of trait ascriptions in
general, see Mischel 1968: 58, 1973: 263, 1984: 352, Brandt 1970: 26, 34, Mischel and Mischel
It is undoubtedly true that most of us tend to infer what someones moral
character is like based upon insufcient evidence.46 For instance, we move
much too quickly from:
He acted compassionately in helping the starving child yesterday.
to
He is a compassionate person.
Or:
He behaved courageously in rescuing the person from the wrecked car or burning
building.
to
He is a courageous person.
Unfortunately we may have no idea how these same people would act in other
contexts with different situational variables and pressures. Without such
information, it is no surprise that our character attributions are often going
to be mistaken.47
1976: 208, Mischel and Peake 1982: 7502, Newman and Uleman 1989: 15962, Ross and
Nisbett 1991: 88, 121, 124, Doris 2002: 101, Sreenivasan 2002: 523, Goldie 2004: 55, Harman
2009: 238, and especially Gilbert 1989 and Gilbert and Malone 1995: 2930, 345.
46
Hence Ross, when speaking about an ordinary person, writes that: He too readily infers
broad personal dispositions and expects consistency in behavior or outcomes across widely
disparate situations and contexts. He jumps to hasty conclusions upon witnessing the behavior of
his peers, overlooking the impact of relevant environmental forces and constraints (1977: 184).
Similarly Ziva Kunda notes that The librarian carried the old womans groceries across the
street. The receptionist stepped in front of the old man in line. The plumber slipped an extra $50
into his wifes purse. Although you were not asked to make any inferences about any of these
characters, chances are that you inferred that the librarian is helpful, the receptionist rude, and
the plumber generous . . . we tend to spontaneously infer such traits from behavior (1999: 435).
For a similar view, see Locke and Pennington 1982: 219, although they speculate that (2) is all
that the FAE amounts to, whereas I consider (2) to only be part of the story about our erroneous
attribution tendencies. See also Mischel 1973: 2634, 1984: 352, Mischel and Mischel 1976: 208,
Ross 1977: 187, Kunda 1999: 395, Athanassoulis 2000: 220, Sabini et al. 2001b: 44, OSullivan
2003, and Webber 2007a: 95.
In his discussion of the FAE, John Doris runs together the FAE with a claim very much like (2)
above, namely that we are prone to overestimating the diagnostic value of isolated behaviors
(2002: 95). I am arguing here that these claims need to be separated, and that the latter is far
more plausible than the former. The same mistake seems to be made by Kunda and Nisbett 1986:
220 and Harman 2003: 8990.
47
Compare the above proposals in (1) and (2) with Ross and Nisbetts well-known discussion
of what they call lay dispositionism: We will show that people (1) infer dispositions from
behavior that is manifestly situationally produced, (2) overlook situational context facts of
substantial importance, and (3) make overly condent predictions when given a small amount
of information (1991: 126). This last claim agrees with my (2). The second claim is something
I also accepttemperature or fragrance, for instance, can be important to helping, although their
importance is not usually appreciated. But the rst claim is where the disagreement liesthis
claim looks like a restatement of the FAE again, but how can behavior arise without making use
of mental state dispositions of some kind? For similar remarks, see Sabini et al. 2001a: 2.
The well-known work of Ziva Kunda and Richard Nisbett supports these
assertions.48 In one of their studies, both laypeople and trained psychologists
were asked: Suppose you observed Jane and Jill in a particular situation and
found that Jane was more honest than Jill. What do you suppose is the
probability that in the next situation in which you observe them you would
also nd Jane to be more honest than Jill?49 When the probability data was
converted into correlations, the lay participants estimate was roughly 0.80 and
the estimate by psychologists was roughly 0.55. But in fact (using the Hart-
shorne and May 1928 data), the actual correlation was roughly 0.20.50
So we can see the quick move from thinking a person is more comparatively
honest in one situation, to the conclusion that she is the kind of person who
would be expected to also be more comparatively honest in the next situation.
As Kunda and Nisbett claim, If we take the data for lay subjects estimates of
the stability of social behavior at their face value, and we feel justied in doing
so, they indicate that people are enormously more condent of the expected
nature of a persons social behavior, given knowledge of the nature of their
behavior on one occasion, than reality affords them any right to be.51
48
See Kunda and Nisbett 1986. For other relevant studies and discussion, see Ross and
Nisbett 1991: 1225, Doris 2002: 957, and OSullivan 2003.
49
Kunda and Nisbett 1986: 210.
50
Kunda and Nisbett 1986: 211. I say roughly because the reader is only given a graph and
not the actual data. In addition, Kunda and Nisbett gathered data on both honesty estimates and
friendliness estimates, and then pooled the data at each level of aggregation. So we were not given
the actual data specically for honesty (210).
When the question shifts from a particular situation to 20 different situations and Jane is
said to be more honest on the average, the correlation estimates for both groups only increased
slightly, even though in fact the aggregate data has a correlation of roughly 0.85 (Kunda and
Nisbett 1986: 210). So both groups seem to be badly overestimating consistency from one
instance of behavior to another instance, while badly underestimating the substantial correl-
ations which exist between large aggregates of behavior.
In their Study 6, Kunda and Nisbett changed to a within-subject design so that participants
would instead make estimates about both the item-to-item and aggregate honesty of Jane in
comparison to Jill. Half of the participants also had to justify their answers. The results showed
much more sensitive to aggregation and to the dangers of extrapolating from just one situation to
another. At the item-to-item level, the correlation for traits dropped from 0.77 to 0.51 for the
pooled data on honesty and friendliness (216). Furthermore, here is an example of one of the
justications that a participant gave: It is very possible for one to misjudge a person in a given
situation. However, after observing many more situations the average reaction to ones actions
becomes more accurate (216).
Unfortunately, this is little comfort for two reasons. First, in our ordinary lives we are
normally presented with a small number of relevant situations when making character judg-
ments, not large quantities of data. As they write, Life . . . has a between design, and we all too
rarely conduct thought experiments having a within design (217). And secondly, the reduced
correlation of 0.51 is still far higher than the 0.200.30 correlations one typically nds in the trait
literature.
51
Kunda and Nisbett 1986: 221. Similarly, Maureen OSullivan found that amongst her
participants, if they thought a person was truthful in one specic instance, then they tended to
judge him to be generally trustworthy too. The same trend was even more pronounced in the
opposite direction with an act of lying and being generally untrustworthy (2003: 1320, 1324).
Note that these claims in (1) and (2) are consistent with the experiments
which motivated the FAE in the rst place. To take just one example, when
predicting how participants would behave in the standard Milgram setup,
observers exhibited the tendency in (1)if they had instead possessed a good
understanding of Mixed Traits (and specically of the potentially powerful
role of desires to avoid personal responsibility for harming or to obey legitim-
ate authority gures), then they could have predicted that many more partici-
pants would likely conform to the authoritys wishes.
So a better explanation for our erroneous moral trait attributions is twofold:
rst we make a mistake in our choice of dispositional explanations by
employing the categories of traditional virtues and vices rather than Mixed
Traits, and then we amplify that mistake by too liberally ascribing virtues and
vices to others based upon insufcient evidence. As a result, and for reasons to
be explored in the next section, I claim that most people tend to readily appeal
to traditional character traits even though their beliefs usually prove to be
empirically mistaken.
7 .3 TWO I M PO RT A N T Q U ES T I O N S I N L I G HT OF CE T
Suppose that my character error theory is correct and that indeed there is
massive error in our current thinking about peoples character traits. Then two
new questions come to the fore: (i) why did we get ourselves into the position
of being so mistaken, and in particular of having the dispositional tendencies
just noted at the end of the last section, and (ii) once we realize our mistake,
what should we do next?52 I want to say something, albeit briey, about each
of these questions, with the rst one considered in this section and the second
one in the next.
Why did we develop the tendencies outlined in (1) and (2)? All of us have
dozens of moral character concepts, and yet if the CET is correct, we misapply
them on a regular basis and using insufcient evidence. Furthermore, to make
matters worse, according to my theory of Mixed Traits we instead have a
number of cross-situationally consistent and stable traits as part of our
character which lead to morally relevant actions, but in chapter two
I claimed that surprisingly:
The moral character traits which most adult human beings possess, do not
correspond to any of the ordinary words or concepts people have for traits.
52
These questions are familiar from the literature on moral error theories. While Mackie had
a few brief suggestions (1977: 426), similar questions have been taken up at length by Richard
Joyce (2001: chapter six and 2006). Neither of them, though, was primarily interested in
developing an error theory with respect to moral character judgments.
So for the moral trait concepts we do have, we usually do not attribute them to
people correctly. Meanwhile the moral trait concepts we do not have, seem like
the ones we really need in order to actually understand ourselves and others
better.
In the previous section, I suggested that the beginning of an explanation for
this phenomenon would appeal, not to the FAE, but rather to the tendencies
noted in claims (1) and (2). But then, even if this is on track, the next question
simply becomes: why did we get to the point where we have such erroneous
dispositions?
Another way to get clearer on the issues in this discussion is to recall the
earlier remark that for many psychologists and philosophers working in this
area:
(a) Our dispositions to form judgments about the traditional moral character
traits possessed by people, arise at least in part from a deeper disposition to
commit the fundamental attribution error.
(b) The development of the disposition to commit the fundamental attribution
error can in turn be explained by one or more hypotheses involving the
benets that would typically come to people who have this disposition.
I have rejected (a) and replaced it with:
(a*) Our dispositions to form judgments about the traditional moral character
traits possessed by people, arise at least in part from the tendencies outlined
in (1) and (2), namely the tendency to overestimate the impact of certain
kinds of dispositional factors and underestimate the impact of other kinds of
dispositional factors, and the tendency to ascribe a traditional moral char-
acter trait to another person based upon only one or a few instances of
observed morally relevant behavior.
But now it is time to tackle, not (b), but (b*):
(b*) The development of the tendencies in (1) and (2) can in turn be explained
by one or more hypotheses involving the benets that would typically come
to people who have these tendencies.
Why, in other words, would we have acquired the tendencies outlined at the
end of the previous section, when they seem to lead us so far astray?53
A proper treatment of this question would require a book in its own right,
but here let me briey make four points:
53
Note that this is a different question from trying to explain the actual underlying psycho-
logical processes which are at work in these tendencies (1) and (2). I do not try to develop such an
explanatory model here, which would be a signicant undertaking (see Gilbert 1989: 191).
However, the four explanatory considerations offered by Gilbert and Malone (1995: 2430)
in their well-known discussion would make for a good starting point. See also Webber
2007a: 1012.
(a) Even if they are not descriptively accurate in most cases, the traditional
character concepts can still be very important normatively. Indeed, that
is perhaps their primary roleto capture the various ways of thinking,
feeling, and acting which, most people tend to think, we should strive to
emulate or avoid.54 So the fact that they have played a major role in
popular moral thinking throughout history, need not be traced primar-
ily to their descriptive but rather to their normative function.
(b) As I have noted, these concepts may also be descriptively accurate when
it comes to certain individuals who do end up being compassionate,
honest, or cruel. Furthermore, they can also be imbedded in true moral
judgments about peoples actions (he acted courageously) and mo-
tives (that was a selsh reason for helping), so long as these judg-
ments can be true without the actual possession of the corresponding
virtues or vices. Indeed, I think an error theory about these kinds of
judgments involving the traditional moral character concepts would be
highly implausible. So it turns out that they have an important descrip-
tive as well as normative role to play in ordinary thought, and even if
my CET is correct these concepts can still be employed in such contexts
just as readily and without widespread error.
(c) Claim (2) holds that we often ascribe traditional character traits based
upon insufcient evidence such as a few observations of moral behav-
ior. Why do we make these hasty inferences? Well, I have just said that
the virtue and vice concepts already play normatively important roles
including providing ethical standards for people to emulate or avoid, as
well as normative categories for the evaluation of actions and motives.
To this I can add the further point that ascribing moral traits to peoples
character is highly convenient.55 We often do not have either the time,
ability, or opportunity needed to carefully observe and then evaluate
how someone behaves in a number of different situations. Furthermore,
trying to conduct thorough evaluations of all the people we come across
on a daily basis would severely strain our cognitive resources, not to
mention our time.
Rather, as is well documented in various areas of the psychology
literature, we employ certain heuristics to make our cognitive lives
operate faster and more efciently.56 One such heuristic device is
ascribing traditional character traits to people. So long as these quick
54
Goldie 2004: 60, 6970, 767.
55
For relevant discussion, see Mischel 1968: 54, 689, Alston 1970: 89, Mischel and Mischel
1976: 208, Gilbert 1989: 207, Ross and Nisbett 1991: 767, Flanagan 1991: 2779, Gilbert and
Malone 1995: 32, 345, Doris 2002: 101, OSullivan 2003: 1325, Goldie 2004: 67, and Russell
2009: 313.
56
For a comprehensive recent collection of papers on heuristics, see Gigerenzer et al. 2011.
and dirty judgments do a reasonably good job of predicting how
people will likely behave in the familiar situations where we normally
see them, then having the dispositional capacity to make such judg-
ments rapidly and effortlessly will be highly benecial to our social
functioning. On the other hand, the price of these quick judgments is
that sometimes they can lead us badly astray. I will return to these issues
again in the next section.
(d) None of these rst three points, though, really gets to the heart of the
matter, which is claim (1). For these points might go some way towards
explaining why traditional virtues and vices have played an important
role in our thinking and why we might ascribe them to a person even
based on clearly insufcient evidence, as (2) claims. But nothing has
been said yet about (1) and (1*)why do we tend to rely so much on
traditional character traits while ignoring that it is in fact Mixed Traits
(so I claim) which are the basis for how most of us are actually put
together morally speaking? And why, at the very least, dont we even
have ordinary concepts to capture these Mixed Traits?
Here, I think, the best explanation to offer appeals to scientic
progress. For it is only in the last fty years that even trained researchers
have been in a position to appreciate, in a systematic and rigorous way,
that these Mixed Traits might exist. What changed? The answer is that
psychologists began to perform the kinds of controlled experiments
which have helped us to discover what the psychological processes are
that lead most people to behave in morally relevant ways.
Of course there have been powerful clues from world events about
what some of these processes might be. But it was not until psychologists
performed careful, replicable studies such as those done by Milgram that
they could experimentally demonstrate what a powerful motivator de-
sires to obey seemingly legitimate authority gures really are in most
ordinary people, and how unlikely it is that they actually have the
virtue of non-malevolence. Similarly, in our ordinary lives we have a
hard time discerning what other peoples underlying motives for morally
relevant action are, and so without the experimental data on the roles
of guilt relief, embarrassment avoidance, mood maintenance, and so
forth, we might miss the work of these processes altogether and the
challenge they pose to the possession of the virtue of compassion.57 As
evidence for this explanation, consider again how wildly mistaken pre-
dictions were for how participants would behave in the Milgram and
Darley and Batson studies.58 Or consider how participants were almost
57
For extensive discussion of these processes, see Moral Character, chapters two through four.
58
Sabini and Silver echo what I claim above when they write that social psychology since the
Second World War has indeed discovered something, something more specic, something
certainly unaware of the psychological effects in motivating helping that
were brought about by the broken camera in Regan et al. (1972), the
shopping mall fragrances in Baron (1997), the dime in the phone booth
in Isen and Levin (1972), or the therapeutic pad in Williams and Bargh
(2008). Our ordinary experience does not readily disclose to us these
underlying psychological processes either in ourselves or others.
Hence, the basic story offered here about why we have come to develop the
erroneous tendencies outlined in (1) and (1*), and thereby how we have come
to be so mistaken in our ascriptions of traditional character traits, is simply
one of ignorance about the existence and power of certain psychological
processes that end up playing an important causal role in inuencing behav-
ior.59 Without an adequate understanding of these processes, an understand-
ing which psychological research has only recently begun to provide us with in
a rigorous way, we will miss out on the Mixed Character Traits which those
processes play a role in constituting, and how those traits fall far short of being
either traditional moral virtues or vices.
7.4 WHAT SHO ULD WE DO N EXT GIVEN CET?
Okay, suppose I am right about the situation we are in and how we got there.
Then the next question iswhat should happen to ordinary thinking about
character which turns out to be so erroneous?
When it comes to religion, atheists almost always adopt one answer to the
parallel question about theiststhe eliminativist answer that theists should
cease to have any positive attitude towards the existence of God, and instead
come to believe that God does not exist. But, while the leading answer in that
area, it is not the only one. Atheists could instead be preservationists, choosing
to not promote atheism among theists, or to even hide their arguments from
everyone except fellow atheists. This position could have something to be said
for it if, in a comprehensive cost-benet analysis, it was found to be all-things
important about character and morally signicant action . . . [it] has revealed just how weak,
morally weak, we are when confronted with a resolute authority or a unanimous group of other
seemingly normal people who seem to see the social, moral, and even physical world differently
from the way we do (2005: 560). Similarly Ross and Nisbett claim that: Social psychology rivals
philosophy in its ability to teach people that they do not truly understand the nature of the
world (1991: 1).
59
As Sabini and his colleagues write, Americans (at least) think that they should, and that
they do, treat as unimportant certain motives that are in fact not at all trivial, such as the motive
to save face (for oneself and others) and to avoid embarrassment. It is in part because Americans
do not acknowledge how important these motives are to them, we argue, that they miss them in
predicting behavior (2001a: 2). See also Appiah 2008: 425 and Badhwar 2009: 266, 2689.
considered benecial to keep theists believing what they do. Finally, a third
option, theistic ctionalism, holds that theists should abandon their straight-
forward belief in the existence of God, and replace it with some other positive
attitude such as a belief that according to the theistic ction God exists, or an
attitude of make-believe or pretend that God exists.60
The same broad options arise with respect to any error theory, and have
been explored most extensively in developing versions of a moral error theory
with respect to the property of moral obligation.61 My question in this section
is what should be done, not with respect to current thinking about God or our
moral obligations, but with respect to current thinking about the traditional
character traits supposedly had by other people.
First of all, what is meant by the should here? It refers to an all-things-
considered obligation. So in exhaustively treating the question of what
should be done, at least the following normative considerations might
have to be collectively weighed:
Moral considerations
Epistemic considerations
60
For more on these positions, see Miller 2012. A fourth option, which I also discuss at length
in that paper, is the revisionary option (Burgess 1998: 545, 551, Lillehammer 2004: 98, and
Hussain 2004: 1601, 16971). Recall that I formulated the moral error theory abstractly as the
conjunction of:
(B2) Most ordinary people form moral beliefs whose content involves some moral feature, F.
with the claim that:
(M2) Moral feature F fails to obtain or to be instantiated.
Given (B2) and (M2), the error theorist could, rather than adopting one of the options we have
already seen, simply argue that the folk should just abandon their commitment to F. For
example, F might be the non-natural status of morality, and the revisionist can argue that the
folk should replace this with a commitment to a naturalist form of moral realism (such a move is
explored briey in Hussain 2004: 16971).
This is certainly an option worth taking seriously in the broader discussion of an error theory
in meta-ethics. But I am not sure that it is a serious contender here in the context of traditional
character trait attributions. For the revisions that would be needed in order to change most of the
relevant folk beliefs from false to true, would have to be extensive. More precisely, they would
involve abandoning a number of different claims about traditional virtues and vices when
making trait attributions. The upshot would be attributions that barely resembled the usual
ascriptions of compassion or honesty or courage. If we are going to go down this road, it seems to
me, then we might as well adopt an eliminativist position as described later in this section.
Finally, in addition to revisionism, there is also a fth option, briey mentioned by Richard
Joyce, where moral claims are (somehow) believed, despite the fact that evidence of the falsity of
such beliefs are glaring [to those very same people] (2001: 214, see also his 2005: 2989). Like
Joyce, I set this doxastic inconsistency option to one side.
61
For eliminativist views, see Hinckfuss 1987: 21, Garner 1994. For ctionalist views, see
Mackie 1977: 239, Joyce 2001: chapter eight, 2005, Kalderon 2005, and Nolan, Restall, and West
2005, although on Mackie see Hussain 2004: 180 n. 16. As far as I know, no moral error theorist
has advocated preservationism in the literature. For quick dismissals of the preservationist
option, see Joyce 2001: 21415 and 2005: 299.
Aesthetic considerations
Etiquette considerations
Legal considerations
Prudential considerations
Note that since I am not adopting an error theory about all of morality, even
considerations about what would be morally good or appropriate can enter
into this all-things-considered assessment. Clearly I will not be able to carry
out an exhaustive assessment using all these different kinds of considerations
here, and so will be selective in what follows.
Of the three options, the preservationist optionat a minimum not disclos-
ing the truth to the people who continue to make frequent and erroneous trait
attributions62may look like it has little going for it. Preservationists need to
be careful to carry out each of these three tasks:
(a) Argue that there are signicant benets attached with keeping the
current system of making traditional character trait attributions in
place (perhaps with an attempt at being more cautious in making
those attributions), as opposed to jettisoning the system entirely.
(b) Argue that there are additional benets attached with keeping the folk
belief in people having traditional character traits, as opposed to re-
placing that belief with some other ctional psychological stance such
as only pretending that they have those traits.
(c) Argue that, all things considered, the benets in (a) and (b) outweigh
the epistemic (and any other) costs of preserving erroneous folk beliefs
in the possession of traditional character traits.
This might seem like a difcult task to pull off. Yet it would be hasty to dismiss
the view without argument. On the one hand, it has the disadvantage of
perpetuating many false beliefs about peoples characters, and so has epistemic
considerations weighing against it. But on the other hand, it is still true that
labeling others using traditional trait concepts in a quick manner based upon
insufcient evidence is a highly useful heuristic device, as mentioned earlier in
this chapter. Hence Gilbert and Malone note that if an inferential process
produces an occasional logical error but also a signicant savings of time and
energy, it may provide a net benet to the mental system that uses it . . . The
time and energy that one saves by using such heuristics is probably worth the
cost of their rare failures.63 At the same time, the Mixed Trait framework is far
62
There are different versions of the view. Another version would hold that information
about our actual moral character should be suppressed. Yet another version would hold that
current thinking in terms of traditional character traits should be even more actively encouraged.
Clearly some of these versions might be more plausible than others.
63
Gilbert and Malone 1995: 32. See also pages 345.
more complicated and unwieldy, and with so many different psychological
processes to keep track of, employing that framework on a daily basis will
predictably lead to confusion and frequent misattribution as well. Furthermore,
there would be enormous educational costs involved in convincing people to
abandon their current attributional practices and training them in this new
Mixed Trait perspective. And it would not just be a matter of intellectual
persuasion, as their reexive habits of attributing virtues and vices to people
would require signicant retraining over lengthy periods of time.
So while a virtue or vice label may not hold up when the person in question
is in unusual circumstances such as the Milgram experiment, we only interact
with many of the people in our lives in controlled and repeatable situations
like the ofce or the classroom. So long as our traditional character attribu-
tions serve as helpful predictors of their likely future behavior in those
particular situations, the prudential benets in the form of the ease and
usefulness in making such quick and dirty trait attributions might outweigh
the epistemic costs of preserving what are literally false beliefs. More con-
cretely, I might consider a fellow co-worker to be honest, and this judgment
may function just ne in my interactions with him, since the only relevant
context as far as I am practically concerned is at the ofce, even if (unbe-
knownst to me) this person lies or steals in other situations outside of work.64
Furthermore, situations do not just work on people; people also select
certain situations over others based upon what they believe and desire. In
particular, similar kinds of people tend to select the same kinds of situations,
professions, and environments. As Mark Snyder and William Ickes write,
individuals appear to gravitate actively toward social situations that will foster
and encourage the behavioral expression of their own characteristic dispos-
itions and interpersonal orientations.65 People with more conservative
personalities, broadly speaking, tend to gravitate towards certain professions
such as real estate or investment banking, and a particular individual in a
given profession can often interact well with and be able to fairly accurately
64
As Ross and Nisbett put the point, the performances we observe more often than not will
conrm our predictions and justify the relevant trait ascriptionprofessional, dictatorial, or
servileprovided, of course, that we continue to observe the actors in circumstances where the
privileges and constraints of their roles remain in effect, and provided that no other powerful
situational factors suddenly intrude (1991: 150). Similarly Gilbert and Malone write that the
situational forces that shape an actors behavior in one instance may continue to shape that
behavior in every instance in which one observes it; thus, one may neither wish nor need to
subtract out the effects of these forces on behavior . . . When the person and situation are
perfectly confounded and the observer is willing to settle for circumscribed accuracy rather
than global accuracy (Swann 1984), it may not matter whether the situation or the actors
disposition is the true cause of the actors behavior. In such cases, a dispositional inference
delivers a lot of bang for the buck (1995: 33). See also Ross and Nisbett 1991: 14750, 154 and
Doris 2002: 1012, 104.
65
Snyder and Ickes 1985: 918. See also Wachtel 1973: 330, Ross and Nisbett 1991: 1546, and
Gilbert and Malone 1995: 33.
predict the behavior of others in that professional work environment given
their overlapping dispositions. So labeling a co-worker cooperative might
still be a useful and accurate basis for predicting his future behavior, if the
particular profession in question attracts people who are higher on this trait in
the rst place, and so increases the chances that any given co-worker will be
cooperative.
A second important consideration in favor of the preservationist option is
that there is some research favoring the thesis that labeling a person with a
traditional trait concept can have a signicant causal impact on her subse-
quently behaving in accordance with that concept. If this is correct, then
numerous opportunities to increase the frequency of moral behavior would
be lost if such concepts were no longer attributed to others in ordinary thought
and discourse, baring exceptional cases.66
The classic experiment in this literature was done by Richard Miller and
his colleagues in 1975, who found that fth graders told that they are tidy,
subsequently became tidier in their actual classroom behavior than did a
control group and a group of children for whom persuasion was used to try
to get them to become tidier.67 In another frequently cited study, Roger
Jensen and Shirley Moore found that children who had been labeled using
cooperative language, placed twice as many blocks in a tower-building
game as did children described using competitive language, even though
many of them in both groups did not remember the earlier attributions.68
More recently, Gert Cornelissen and his colleagues found that consumers
labeled very concerned with the environment and ecologically conscious69
with respect to their choice between competing TVs, were subsequently
more likely to make environmentally friendly purchasing decisions in
comparison to both a control group and a group that received an explicit
plea for environmentally conscious consumer purchasing. And this is true,
even if environmental impact was not the primary reason for why they had
chosen that particular TV.70
66
Of course the phenomenon works both wayslabeling someone with a vice concept can
promote more vicious behavior (for relevant discussion, see Kraut 1973and Strenta and DeJong
1981: 146). But note that the preservationist is not committed to preserving everything about our
current practices. One version of the view, for instance, could encourage the use of positive trait
labels and discourage the use of negative ones.
67
Miller et al. 1975.
68
Jensen and Moore 1977.
69
Cornelissen et al. 2007: 281.
70
As they write: The label invites a consumer who engaged in a pro-environmental act for an
alternative motivationlike nancial concerns or the preference for another intrinsic product
qualityto re-attribute that behavior to their value of caring for the environment (Cornelissen
et al. 2007: 280). For qualications and further details, see Cornelissen et al. 2006, 2007. For
additional studies on activated trait constructs and increased relevant behavior, see Bargh et al.
2001: 1019.
But the most relevant and fascinating work on labeling, in my opinion, has
to do with moral trait labels, and here too similar patterns have been found. In
an early study, Robert Kraut asked participants at home during the day to
make a donation to the Heart Association. For those who did donate, half were
labeled, You are a generous person. I wish more of the people I met were as
charitable as you, and half were not labeled.71 For non-donors, half were
labeled uncharitable and half were not. A week letter, the same participants
were asked to donate to a local funding-raising campaign for multiple sclerosis
(MS). Here were the results:72
Average amount of
donation to MS research
Donor, charitable label $0.70

Donor, no label $0.41
Non-donor, uncharitable label $0.23
Non-donor, no label $0.33
The key point to note is the dramatic difference in donation amount in the
rst two lines, a difference which seems to have been brought about by the
use of a trait label. In another study, Angelo Strenta and William DeJong used
the label kind, thoughtful person, and when a few minutes later a confeder-
ate dropped a stack of 500 computer cards, these labeled participants helped to
pick up an average of 163.5 cards and spent 30.1 seconds doing so, compared
to 84.4 cards and 21.6 seconds for controls!73
What accounts for these results? There seems to be some degree of consen-
sus that the new label brings about a change in the persons self-conception, so
that now he thinks of himself as actually having the characteristic disposition
in question and his behavior as conforming to that disposition.74 Furthermore,
71
Kraut 1973: 554.
72
Kraut 1973: 556.
73
Strenta and DeJong 1981: 145. For additional studies using moral trait labels, see Grusec,
Kuczynski et al. 1978, Grusec and Redler 1980, and Mills and Grusec 1989. For a related study in
which teachers were told by a third party that certain students were late bloomers and so were
thereby labeled indirectly, see Rosenthal and Jacobson 1968. It turned out that these students in
turn performed better than controls, even though (unbeknownst to the teacher) the assignment
of the students to this category was perfectly random.
74
For relevant discussion, qualications, and elaboration, see Kraut 1973: 552, 559, Jensen
and Moore 1977: 307, Grusec and Redler 1980: 5256, 529, Strenta and Dejong 1981: 1423, 146,
Mills and Grusec 1989: 3001, Lapsley 1996: 1724, and Cornelissen et al. 2007: 279. For self-
perception theory more generally, see Bem 1972. For discussion of the variables which can
moderate this effect, see Cornelissen et al. 2007: 27980 and Alfano 2013.
Note that in the case of the Kraut study above, a competing explanation could be, not that the
participants believed that they were generous, but rather that they believed others thought that
they were generous and they wanted to live up to this label in the future. Thanks to Eranda
Jayawickreme for pointing this out to me.
this change and its subsequent effects need not be operating at the level of
conscious awarenessas noted, many participants may not even recall the
earlier labeling when they subsequently donated, picked up the cards, or
made an environmentally responsible purchase.75 Finally, it is natural to
postulate desires concerned with acting in accordance with the label (at least
for positive ones), since the label is publically bestowed, we tend to desire to
act in accordance with how we conceive ourselves to be, others will be
expecting our future behavior to conform to the label, and we generally
want to satisfy other peoples positive expectations of us and continue to be
thought highly of by them.76 Beyond these preliminary observations, though,
there does not seem to be a well-developed and widely accepted model on offer
yet in the psychology literature to explain the impact of trait labeling on
behavior.77
So I claim that there are at least two signicant considerations in favor of
preservationisma prudential one having to do with the convenience of
traditional trait concepts together with the importance of minimizing the
confusion involved in switching to a Mixed Trait framework, and a moral
one having to do with increased promotion of good forms of behavior.
Nevertheless, despite these considerations the preservationist approach is
almost never taken seriously in this area, or indeed in any other area where
an error theory is defended.78 Instead the usual approach is the eliminativist
one.79 In this context, eliminativism can be stated as follows:
(E1) We should refrain from attributing any of the traditional virtues or vices to
any human being, unless we have excellent evidence gathered from multiple
75
As Jensen and Moore write about their study of children and the tower-building game,
one would have to suspect that the behavioral dispositions displayed by the boys were not
mediated by conscious changes in self-perception following attribution. Other mechanisms must
be considered (1977: 307).
76
For relevant discussion, see Mischel 1968: 284, Jensen and Moore 1977: 307, and Corne-
lissen et al. 2007: 279.
77
As a leading contributor to this literature, Joan Grusec, writes: Subjects who are told that
they are the kind of people who like to help whenever they can may infer that prosocial behaviors
across a variety of situations are expected of them . . . The mechanism whereby attributional
statements function, then, is not yet clear. That such statements are effective, however, is
evident (Grusec and Redler 1980: 533). For additional discussion, see Mischel 1968: 230,
2847, Grusec and Redler 1980, Mills and Grusec 1989, Ross and Nisbett 1991: 22830, Lapsley
1996: 1714, Henderlong and Lepper 2002: 7812, Doris 2002: 126, Kamtekar 2004: 490,
Cornelissen et al. 2007: 27980, Upton 2009a: 612, Prinz 2009: 1278, and especially Alfano
2013, which discusses the literature on trait labeling and issues related to the preservationist
option in detail.
78
For an exception with respect to character traits, see Alfano 2013. See also Jesse Prinz
(2009) who claims that eliminativism about efcacious global character traits is an extremely
radical view (127, see also 128).
79
For versions of eliminativism about traditional virtues and vices, see Harman 1999, 2000,
2009, Doris 1998, 2002 especially 1078, and Vranas 2005: 30.
observations of her moral behavior in both similar and different circum-
stances, and in the face of various moderate pressures and temptations, for
thinking that she has the relevant trait.
(E2) We should be disposed to initially attribute one or more Mixed Traits to
people, unless we have evidence of the kind in (E1) for thinking that instead
a person has one or more traditional virtues or vices, or no moral character
traits at all.
The main argumentative task for the eliminativist is to try to show the
following:
(a) The overall costs associated with keeping the current system of making
traditional character trait attributions, outweigh the overall benets that
such a system brings, regardless of whether the folk believe that people
have traditional character traits or replace that belief with some ctional
psychological stance such as only pretending that they have these traits.
The eliminativist approach gets to count the epistemic considerations in its
favor, since if successfully implemented it purports to signicantly reduce the
number of false beliefs we have about peoples characters.80
But I think the main reason for adopting the position has typically been
predictive. If we attribute a virtue such as compassion to a person without
adequate evidence, then that person could fail to help us or other people when
even a moderate need arises. Note that, in contrast to the rst argument given
for preservationism, this may happen not only in new or exotic situations, but
also in our familiar work and home environments. The other person could, for
instance, be inuenced by one of the enhancers or inhibitors, and so be acting
in a way that seems inconsistent with his recent behavior. We could then be
disappointed and confused, frustrated that we relied on him, while still having
our original need unmet. Or even worsepeople whom we think of as honest,
or caring, or trustworthy can catch us by complete surprise and steal from us,
cause emotional and physical pain, or even inict serious bodily injury. So for
the eliminativist, our use of traditional character traits can lead to mistaken
attributions and so erroneous predictions that end up giving rise to all kinds of
problems.81
Here are some illustrations. You think your good friend from work is
compassionate. One day you trip in your ofce and break your wrist. You
cry out in pain, hoping to attract your friends attention. But your friend is in
80
One signicant cost of eliminativism, though, is achieving successful implementation, as it
will be difcult to convince a large number of people that there is a widespread mistake being
made with their traditional character trait ascriptions, as well as to get them to change their
habits in this regard.
81
For a statement of this reasoning, see Doris 2002: 104, 106. See also Ross and Nisbett 1991:
8, 77, 1339, 14950.
the next room with other people who do not seem to hear your cries, and so he
does nothing himself. Later you get angry at your friend, call into question his
compassion, and threaten to end your friendship. All of this because you do
not appreciate how most people think, feel, and act in this regard, which is not
best described by the concept of compassion.82
Or you believe your friend is honest. After all, in the ofce he seems to
always tell you the truth. So you trust him with information about your
personal life. But one day you happen to overhear him at a party, spreading
lies about you and blabbing about your deepest secrets to people who look like
casual acquaintances of his, just so he can endear himself to them.83
Or consider some examples offered by Kunda and Nisbett when they note
that such errors mean that we will be constantly surprised at outcomes. We
will be surprised when the woman who seemed so nice when the realtor
introduced her turns out to be such an undesirable neighbor. We will be
surprised when the man who made such a poor impression in his job interview
turns out to be a rising star at the institution that (uproariously, we thought at
the time) hired him. We will be astonished that two such eminent scientists
could have such different views of the same manuscript. And we will be
dubious when psychological research shows low cross-situational consistency
for trait-related behaviors.84
While more details would need to be lled in for all of these cases, let us
suppose that they each involve a mistaken trait attribution being made, an
attribution which leads to subsequent problems that plausibly could have been
avoided had the person in question been more cautious in making it in the rst
place.85 Hence for the eliminativist, along with the epistemic costs there are
signicant moral and prudential costs to preserving the status quo.
82
For discussion of group effects and their implications for the possession of compassion, see
Moral Character, chapter six.
83
For discussion of research on lying and its implications for the possession of honesty, see
Moral Character, chapter ten.
84
Kunda and Nisbett 1986: 220. They go on to note that of course our predictions often have
consequences beyond mere surprise. Our predictions, and the choices they engender, often will
produce outcomes that are undesirable and that could have been avoided, in principle and on the
average (Kunda and Nisbett 1986: 220, emphasis theirs). Similarly, Walter Mischel and Harriet
Mischel write that the discriminativeness of prosocial behavior, and its idiosyncratic organiza-
tion within each person . . . should alert us to the fact that the same individual who espouses high
moral principles may engage in harmful aggressive actions against others who violate his
conceptions of justice (1976: 209).
One question the above raises is that, if we are so often surprised to nd people acting
differently from what our trait label for them would lead us to expect, then why do we continue
to use these labels, especially for the very same people? For discussion of some answers, see Doris
2002: 1024.
85
For additional purported examples and discussion, see Ross and Nisbett 1991: 127, 1339,
14950, Harman 1999: 32830, 2000: 224, 2009: 237, 241, Vranas 2005: 30, and Upton 2009a:
512, 62, 801. Mistaken trait attributions could have especially damaging consequences in
military contexts if, for instance, a country believes that its soldiers would never engage in
As an alternative, the eliminativist can hold that people should instead
refrain from making traditional moral character attributions unless there is
excellent evidence for doing so, combined with developing a better under-
standing of the mental state dispositions which instead are often at work in
leading to morally relevant behavior for most people. Together such an
outlook tries to help us make better sense of other peoples behavior and
more accurately predict it in the future.86
Finally, unlike the rst two options, there seems to be little to recommend a
ctionalist approach in this area.87 Fictionalists claim that the folk should
adopt an alternative psychological stance in place of their erroneous beliefs
about peoples traditional character traits. Unfortunately there is no consensus
among contemporary moral ctionalists about what this stance might be, but
for the case of moral obligation the following two options are frequently
mentioned:88
Belief in a Fiction: When saying Murder is wrong, we should be really asserting
that According to the story of morality, murder is wrong, and expressing the
psychological state of belief that according to the story of morality, murder is
wrong, while also believing that this story is in fact ctional.89
Representationalist Noncognitivism: When saying Murder is wrong, we are not
to assert that Murder is wrong, but to express a certain non-cognitive psycho-
logical state with moral propositional content. For example, Richard Joyce pro-
poses a view roughly according to which the psychological state is one of having a
humiliation of prisoners or objectionable forms of torture. Thanks to an anonymous referee for

noting this.
86
What Mischel says about the trait of aggression could apply equally well to moral character
traits:
Thus rather than describe the person as aggressive, it would be necessary to qualify the
mode of aggressive behavior (e.g. verbal insults but not physical attacks) and the specic
contingencies (e.g. when criticized for poor athletic performance on playground but not in
class). Such cumbersome, hyphenated descriptions would lack the thumbnail sketch
appeal of global trait portraits. But they would remind us of the discriminativeness and
complexity of the individuals behavior, its idiosyncratic organization, its dependence on
conditions, and the hazards of attempting to abbreviate it grossly (1973: 278).
However, as will become clear in section two of the next chapter, I do not believe that most people
have virtues or vices even in these highly qualied ways.
87
More precisely, the focus is on revolutionary versions of ctionalism. Fictionalist views in
the literature are, following John Burgess terminology (1983), commonly divided into hermen-
eutic versus revolutionary ctionalism. The former is a descriptive view about how the folk
actually treat some subject matter, whereas the latter is a normative view about what attitude they
should adopt towards it. My concern in this chapter is only with revolutionary ctionalism, and
all references to ctionalist positions assume that this version of ctionalism is in question.
88
The labels which follow are mine, rather than those of the cited authors.
89
For discussion, see Joyce 2001: 200 and 2005: 2913. Gideon Rosen (1990) has advocated a
similar view when it comes to modal discourse, and Daniel Nolan and his colleagues (2005) at
times seem to side with this version in advocating moral ctionalism (although see the following
footnote for a complication with this reading).
non-cognitive thought that murder is wrong which involves an act of make-
believe or pretending that murder is wrong.90
Analogous versions could be developed for our attitudes towards someones
purported honesty or cruelty.
For the ctionalist about traditional character traits, the cost-benet analy-
sis needs to be carried out this way:
(a) Argue that there are signicant benets attached with keeping the
place (perhaps with an attempt at being more cautious in making
those attributions), as opposed to jettisoning the system entirely.
(b) Concede that there are additional benets attached with keeping the
folk belief in people having traditional character traits, as opposed to
replacing that belief with some other ctional psychological stance such
as only pretending that they have these traits.
(c) Argue that all-things considered the benets in (a) justify keeping the
place. But the epistemic (and any other) costs of preserving erroneous
folk beliefs signicantly outweigh the additional benets in (b) of
having the folk keep their belief in people having traditional character
traits, as opposed to replacing that belief with some other ctional
psychological stance such as only pretending that they have these traits.
How likely is it that the ctionalist will be able to pull off this argument?
Granted, ctionalism would avoid the same epistemic costs that eliminativism
does by jettisoning beliefs about peoples virtues or vices except under excel-
lent evidential conditions. But on the other hand, what is there to recommend
merely pretending that another person is compassionate, or believing that
according to the traditional ction about character, she is compassionate?
Those kinds of attitudes are not going to lead many people to trust the person
in any signicant way, or depend upon her, or emulate her, or look to her for
advice or leadership, or even praise her for being such a person. Merely
pretending that someone is compassionate may not have any serious positive
bearing on our moral thinking and behavior towards her. Plus, it does not help
us better understand her actual character. And the benets of labeling would
not seem to be there either, since the view is not that you should pretend that
90
Joyce 2001: 185205 and 2005: 2918. Joyces positive account is sketched very briey,
however, and I am not condent as to exactly how it should be stated. For a much more detailed
description of a similar psychological stance, see Kalderon 2005: chapter three. Nolan and his
colleagues (2005) also seem to hint at this view when they write that we should employ a moral
ction and continue to assert apparently morally committed claims while withholding belief
from them (322, italics removed).
other people are just or honest, while sincerely believing that you yourself are
virtuous. Rather the view is that we should pretend other people and we
ourselves are just, honest, or the like. Hence, while no doubt arguments
could be marshaled to make the ctionalist position look more appealing,
for now it does not appear to be as defensible as the other two.91
So leaving aside this option, does the preservationist or the eliminativist
approach have more going for it? This question amounts to whether, when all
the relevant normative considerations are taken into account, the balance of
consideration favors one of these options over the other. Unfortunately at this
early stage of the discussion, I simply do not think we have enough evidence in
hand to use in carrying out the assessment. In particular, more research needs
to be done on the effects of self-labeling using traditional virtue concepts. Does
a virtue label encourage more virtuous behavior only in the short run, or does
the effect linger?92 What is the nature of the motivation involved in the
resulting moral behavior, and do people who have been labeled as compas-
sionate or honest over time come to cultivate the right kinds of motives that
are essential to being compassionate or honest? In other words, do people who
are labeled as virtuous tend to not just increasingly perform virtuous actions,
but also tend to actually become more virtuous people?93 There are certain
ways that the answers to these questions might turn out which can make the
preservationist option look highly appealing. But we have nothing approach-
ing the research data needed here. For now, then, my only conclusion is that
it is worth taking preservationism far more seriously than has typically
been done.
7. 5 CON CLU SI ON
In this chapter, I have tried to show that indeed my picture of moral character
does have important philosophical implications. In particular, it supports an
error theory in meta-ethics with regard to many of our beliefs about the
91
In addition, the ctionalist has the cost of convincing people that there is an error being
made in their traditional character-trait attributions, which would be a signicant undertaking.
For discussion of this issue with regard to moral ctionalist views in general, see Cuneo and
Christy 2011.
92
For studies which found the effects lasted at least one to two weeks, see Kraut 1973 and
Grusec and Redler 1980. For speculation that the effects may only be short-lived, see Strenta and
DeJong 1981: 146.
93
For discussion, although without any empirical evidence, see Alfano 2013. Nancy Snow
also pointed out to me that some virtue ethicists might wonder whether using labeling as a means
of cultivating the virtues involves forms of manipulation that violate the persons autonomy and
are morally problematic.
character traits that people supposedly possess, ourselves included. Much of
our ordinary thinking in the area of character attribution is fraught with error,
but it does not necessarily follow that the best option for most people going
forward is to signicantly revise that thinking to bring it more in line with the
picture of Mixed Traits.
8
Trouble for Virtue Ethics? Some

Implications for Normative Ethics
In this chapter I turn to the eld of normative ethical theory, and in particular
to the view known as virtue ethics. Section one begins with the line of criticism
by Gilbert Harman and John Doris which has been leveled against the
empirical adequacy of virtue ethics using studies of morally relevant behavior
in psychology. Section two assesses the positive account of local character
traits that Harman and Doris propose we adopt as a more empirically
informed alternative. The next section then turns to what in my view is the
best response for virtue ethicists to make to the Harman/Doris challenge.
Ultimately, however, I use this response as a springboard to formulate what
I take to be the real challenge to virtue ethics arising from the experimental
results. In section four, I argue that the other responses offered in the literature
to Harman and Doris do not succeed on their own, and neither do they
adequately face my own challenge.
8.1 NORMATIVE ETHICAL THEORY AND

THE HARMAN/DORIS ARGUMENT
In contrast to meta-ethics, the central task of the normative ethical theorist

(hereafter just ethical theorist for short) is to develop an understanding of
the relationship between moral properties and their underlying non-moral
properties. For instance, there are many candidates for what makes it the case
that slavery is wrong, and the ethical theorist attempts to sort through them
and arrive at the most promising account of the feature(s) which grounds its
wrongness.1 A hedonistic utilitarian, for instance, might cite the pain that
1
Of course there may be other important goals for an ethical theory. Perhaps it will
strengthen our condence in our moral convictions, especially in the face of temptation. Perhaps
it will help us criticize and improve aspects of ourselves, our friends and families, and our society.
slavery causes, whereas a Kantian might appeal to the rational capacities of
slaves. In doing so, such philosophers do not avoid making rst-order moral
evaluations, and carry out their work in large part by directly employing moral
concepts and forming moral judgments.2
It is common to claim that there are three leading frameworks in contem-
porary ethical theoryconsequentialist approaches, Kantian approaches, and
virtue ethical approaches. Most leading versions of these approaches today
outline some role for traditional character traitssuch as honesty, compas-
sion, or courageto play in their theory.3 For instance and very roughly, one
version of a consequentialist theory might require the cultivation of those
character traits which would dispose us to maximize the best consequences, or
(on a different approach) which would dispose us to follow those rules which
have an acceptance utility that ranks higher than the acceptance utility
associated with any alternative set of moral rules applying to the circum-
stances. Some Kantians, again very roughly, might support the development of
character traits which dispose us to treat persons with dignity and respect as
ends and never merely as means.4
Traditional character traits are particularly important in virtue ethical
approaches, especially those which appeal to Aristotle for their inspiration.5
Such Aristotelian approaches take as their central notion the concept of a
virtue (naturally enough), or a stable trait of character that is related in certain
appropriate ways to desire, belief, and action. They then attempt to use the
virtues to ground other normative concepts, such as the deontological status of
And perhaps there is simply the goal of attaining satisfaction at discovering how one part of the
world works (Hinman 2008: 201). But the theoretical goal outlined above is widely regarded as
central. See e.g. Timmons 2002: 36.
2
While meta-ethics is usually taken to be a separate branch of ethics from normative ethical
theory, the two are also closely related. If we discover where morality came from and how
objective it is, that information can have signicant implications for our attempt to better
understand the underlying nature of moral properties. Similarly, some meta-ethical positions
might imply that no theoretically informative and practically relevant ethical theories are
available in the rst place. And what the source of morality turns out to besuch as God,
evolution, or our cultural opinionscould have a signicant impact on our motivation to
comply with our best ethical theory. For related discussion, see also Sturgeon 1986, Brink
1989: chapter eight, and Darwall 1998: 1213.
3
For a similar point, see Doris 1998: 513, 2002: 107, Swanton 2003: 5, Upton 2005: 1334,
Besser-Jones 2008: 311, and Flanagan 2009: 59. It may be helpful to distinguish between virtue
theory and virtue ethics; most of the leading ethical theories today are virtue theories, since they
each offer their own accounts of the virtues and ascribe some normative role to them. But at the
same time, many of these ethical theories are best understood as consequentialist or Kantian
views, and their advocates also tend to reject some of the central claims of virtue ethics. For more
on this distinction, see Swanton 2003: 5, 28 and Snow 2010: 12.
4
For a careful treatment of Kants own view, see Baxley 2010.
5
See e.g. Hursthouse 1999.
Trouble for Virtue Ethics? Some Implications for Normative Ethics 189
actions or the goodness of consequences.6 For instance, according to one
formulation used by some virtue ethicists:
(1) An action A is right for a person to perform if and only if (and because) A is
the action that a virtuous person, acting in character, would perform in the
circumstances.7
So on this proposal the rightness of an action depends upon a conceptually
prior account of virtuous character traits.
For my purposes I do not need to try and carefully formulate the various
differences between these three leading approaches in contemporary ethics,
nor do I need to show exactly what role character traits play in different
versions of each of them. Thank goodness, too, since that would be an
enormous undertaking! All I need is just the claim that:
(2) One or more of the traditional character traits plays an important role of
some kind in most of the leading contemporary ethical theories, and espe-
cially in Aristotelian versions of virtue ethics.
This claim seems undeniable.
In the recent philosophical literature there has been a widely discussed
attack on using traditional character traits in ethical theorizing. The main
philosophers leading this attack have been Gilbert Harman in a series of
papers dating back to 1999, and John Doris in several papers and most
importantly in his 2002 book, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral
Behavior.8 I will devote much of the rest of this chapter to examining issues
raised by their work. The reason I have chosen their arguments is twofold: (i)
these arguments have garnered more attention in philosophy than any other
issue directly pertaining to the topic of character in the last ten years, and (ii)
they rely heavily on experimental results in psychology. So given the preceding
chapters of this book as well as my earlier work in Moral Character, I think we
will be in an excellent position to evaluate what they have to say.
In the remainder of this section I will focus on Doriss view in particular, as
it is more thoroughly developed. His focus is on what he calls a globalist
conception of character, which is one that accepts the following two theses:
6
Although there are virtue ethicists who are suspicious of certain deontological notions
altogether, such as moral obligation, and have recommended that they be jettisoned from
normative ethical theorizing. For early suspicions along these lines, see Anscombe 1958.
7
Compare Oakley 1996: 129 and Hursthouse 1999: 28.
8
See Harman 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2009, Doris 1998, 2002, 2010, and Merritt et al. 2010.
For others in philosophy who show some sympathy for their arguments or have developed
similar ones, see Blackburn 1998: 367, Campbell 1999 (with respect to the virtue of compas-
sion), Hurka 2001: 44, Goldie 2004: chapter three, Vranas 2005, Appiah 2008: chapter two,
Upton 2009b, Badhwar 2009, Sarkissian 2010, and Alfano 2011.
1. Consistency. Character traits are reliably manifested in trait-relevant
behavior across a diversity of trait-relevant eliciting conditions that
may vary widely in their conduciveness to the manifestation of the
trait in question.
2. Stability. Character traits are reliably manifested in trait-relevant behav-
iors over iterated trials of similar trait-relevant eliciting conditions.9
I have already mentioned these features in chapter two, where the second one
was labeled Single-Situation Trait Stability.
A global character trait, then, is a character trait which exhibits both cross-
situational consistency in a wide variety of trait-relevant circumstances, as well
as stability in repeated instances of the same kind of trait-relevant circum-
stances. To take an example, someone who is courageous is expected to exhibit
courage in a wide variety of relevant situations (i.e. the battleeld, the court-
room, the sports eld, etc.), as well as in repeated instances of the same kind of
situation (i.e. many battles over multiple years). All the traits I am calling
traditional character traits, namely the ones familiar from ordinary moral
thinking such as greed or bravery, count as global traits.
Harman and Doris maintain that experimental results from social psych-
ology show that, to a surprising extent, our behavior is not the product of
traditional global traits of character which are part of our psychological lives,
but rather the product of situation inuences in our environments. To this
negative claim about global traits, they add a positive claim about the existence
of local character traits which will be examined in detail in the next section.10
Now ethical theories in general and virtue ethics in particular are not
necessarily wedded to a global view of character traits,11 but it is certainly
true that most theories have been inclined towards such a view when it comes
to understanding the virtues and vices. Indeed, with respect to virtue ethics,
Owen Flanagan puts the point a bit stronger than I would when he writes that
9
Doris 2002: 22. Doris also mentions a third globalist thesis, evaluative integration (1998:
506, 2002: 22), but as he does in much of his discussion, I leave it to one side in what follows. In a
recent article, talk of global character traits has been replaced with talk of robust character
traits (Merritt et al. 2010: 356). The terminology of global traits is not original to Doris; it has
been used for decades in psychology, as was illustrated in chapter four.
10
See Doris 1998: 5078, 2002: 25 and Harman 2003: 92. Hence it is a mistake to characterize
the Harman/Doris position as rejecting the existence of character traits in general (as Flanagan
2009 does). This mistake can be excused to some extent in the case of Harman, especially when
he titles his papers, The Nonexistence of Character Traits (2000) and No Character or
Personality (2003), and makes remarks which could be construed as critical of the existence
of certain traits specically (e.g. 1999: 326) and of character traits in general (2000: 224). But
Doris repeatedly stresses in his 1998 and especially his 2002 that he does not reject the existence
of local traits.
11
As both Harman and Doris readily acknowledge. See, e.g. Thomson 1996, 1997, who
develops a version of virtue ethics centered on virtuous action rather than on the cultivation
of virtuous character dispositions.
the entire enterprise of virtue ethics depends on there being individual traits
of character which are causally effective in the production of behavior across
situations of a kind.12 For the remainder of this chapter I will only focus on
Aristotelian versions of virtue ethics, which are standardly committed to
traditional global traits, since they have been the central target of Harman
and Doriss discussion. But the positive claims which are defended below
apply to any other view in ethical theory which makes use of global traits too.
Aristotelian virtue ethicists, then, accept the existence of traditional traits of
character such as courage, greed, and honesty, and they take the cultivation of
those traits which are virtues to be one of the main goals of the ethical life.13
Furthermore, Aristotelians typically accept that, for people who have these
traits to a signicant degree, they often serve as (partial) explanations for trait-
relevant behavior.14 The just man, for instance, when acting in character
performs the relevant actions because he is just, and his just actions can be
explained in light of his just character.15
These functional roles for global traits are crucial to Doriss argument, since
they create certain expectations which can be tested using studies in psych-
ology. If a trait is global, then one such expectation is that an individual who
has the trait will behave in a way that is consistent with that trait, even if the
situations vary widely in their nominal features.16 Call this the Consistency
Expectation:
If a person has global character trait T to a signicant degree, then he would likely
attempt to behave in a variety of T-relevant situations in such a way that is
consistent with possessing T, other things being equal.
For instance, we expect it to be likely that a deeply courageous person would
behave courageously in various circumstances in which courage is required.
Secondly, consider the Predictive Expectation:
If a person has global character trait T to a signicant degree, then third party
observers who understand this about the person, could often accurately predict
what kind of action he would likely attempt to perform in T-relevant situations,
other things being equal.17
12
Flanagan 1991: 282. See also Hursthouse 1999: 1112, 29 and Annas 2003: 6.
13
See, e.g. MacIntyre 1984, Hursthouse 1999, and Taylor 2006.
14
Hence MacIntyre writes that: From an Aristotelian standpoint to identify certain actions
as manifesting or failing to manifest a virtue or virtues is never only to evaluate; it is also to take
the rst step towards explaining why those actions rather than some others were performed
(1984: 199). See also Hudson 1980: 539, 542, Moody-Adams 1990: 111, Flanagan 1991: 2789,
and Harman 1999: 317.
15
See, e.g. Brandt 1988: 64, Mumford 1998: 1112, and Harman 1999: 317.
16
See, e.g. Mischel 1968: 9, 13, Dent 1975: 3278, Moody-Adams 1990: 118, Harman 1999:
318, Merritt 2000: 365, Winter and Tauer 2006: 74, Appiah 2008: 39, Upton 2009a: xii, 1216,
2009b: 17880, Doris 2010: 136, and Merritt et al. 2010: 356, 358.
17
See Mischel 1968: 10, Moody-Adams 1990: 118, Mumford 1998: 11, and Merritt et al. 2010:
357.
Hence, for instance, we could predict what a deeply honest person is likely to
do when he takes the witness stand in a trial if we knew this fact about his
character.
As I understand it, given the above assumptions Doriss argument against
virtue ethics proceeds in two stages. First, Doris argues that:
(i) If there is widespread possession of the traditional virtues and vices
understood as global character traits and if the Consistency and
Predictive Expectations are true,18 then systematic empirical observa-
tion using appropriate psychological studies will reveal many people
behaving in a certain kind of way.19
(ii) However, systematic empirical observation using appropriate psycho-
logical studies fails to reveal that many people act in this kind of way.
(iii) Therefore, there is not widespread possession of the traditional virtues
and vices understood as global character traits.20
Less formally, if many people are compassionate, then we would expect them
to at least perform a variety of simple helping tasks, and we could reliably
predict when they would help in the future. But in study after study, a
signicant number of participants did not help, and our predictions are
often badly mistaken.
This does not quite capture the concern, though. For in some studies, a
majority of participants in one group did indeed help. But then there would be
another group in which very few people helped. The only relevant difference
18
For Doriss appeal to both consistency and prediction, see his 1998: 505, 5079, 522 n. 14;
2002: 2, 15, 18, 20. For instance, he writes that if a person has a robust trait, they can be
condently expected to display trait-relevant behavior across a wide variety of trait-relevant
situations, even where some or all of these situations are not optimally conducive to such
behavior (2002: 18).
19
Doris 2002: 523 n. 23.
20
While he does not formulate the argument this explicitly in either his 1998 or 2002,
something like the above reconstruction seems to be what Doris has in mind. See in particular
his 1998: 5057 and his recent co-authored paper, Merritt et al. 2010: 3578. For similar
reconstructions, see Montmarquet 2003: 356, Winter and Tauer 2006: 75, and Upton 2009a:
778. For a formulation stated in terms of inference to the best explanation, see Fleming 2006:
347. Merritt et al. (2010: 357 n. 5) acknowledge that the argument can be stated in abductive
terms. For a very different reconstruction not reected in the rest of the secondary literature on
Doris, see Webber 2006b: 2024.
An additional premise might also be added to the argument:
(ii*) Furthermore, what behavioral consistency we do nd which is in line with the
Consistency Expectation, can be better explained by appealing to situational factors
rather than the traditional virtues or vices.
See Merritt 2000: 373 and Fleming 2006: 36 for helpful discussion. I can remain neutral on this
premise, since I would not attempt to explain such behavioral consistency in terms of either
situational factors (by themselves) or traditional virtues and vices, but rather in terms of Mixed
Traits responding to situational stimuli.
between the two groups was a morally insignicant change in the situation,
such as a change in the smell or temperature. These are not changes that
should make a difference to compassionate people. But they clearly resulted in
signicant differences in behavior. Hence most people do not have the virtue
of compassion because, as premise (i) indicates, they are not behaving in the
kind of way that people with such a virtue would. Finally, the claim is that
similar results can be found for the other traditional virtues besides compas-
sion, and for the vices as well.21
The studies that Harman and Doris primarily appeal to are familiar ones
from previous chapters, namely the Darley and Batson Princeton Theological
Seminary hurry study, the Milgram shock experiments, the Isen and Levin
dime phone booth study, and the Latan and Darley group effect studies.22 All
of these studies are intended by Harman and Doris to bear specically on the
extent to which people have the virtue of compassion.
The above line of reasoning by Harman and Doris should sound familiar.
Indeed, it parallels some of the situationist reasoning used over forty years ago
in social psychologysubtle situational features are capable of having a
signicant impact on our behavior in ways that are inconsistent with the
robust possession of global personality traits. As far as I can see, the key
differences from this earlier discussion are twofold: (i) the Harman/Doris
reasoning is used to arrive at a conclusion which is specically focused on
the extent to which people have traditional moral character traits, as opposed
to global personality traits in general, and (ii) this conclusion is then used to
assess the plausibility of Aristotelian virtue ethics, and more generally any
theory in normative ethics which relies on global character traits.
I want to get clearer about what exactly the Harman/Doris conclusion is
supposed to be. It is not anything like:
(i) On metaphysical grounds the properties of being compassionate or being
honest do not exist.
That would not be the kind of claim that psychology experiments could
establish. Furthermore, they are not arguing that:
21
Hence, both disappointing omissions and appalling actions are readily induced through
seemingly minor situations. What makes these ndings so striking is just how insubstantial the
situational inuences that produce troubling moral failures seem to be (Merritt et al. 2010: 357,
emphasis theirs). See also Doris 1998: 507, 2002: 2, 28, 356 and Harman 2003: 90. For similar
statements of the idea, see Merritt 2000: 366, Winter and Tauer 2006: 77, Webber 2006a: 652,
654, Adams 2006: 117, Wielenberg 2006: 468, Appiah 2008: 40, Arjoon 2008: 225, Besser-Jones
2008: 31213, and Badhwar 2009: 266, 268.
22
For these last studies, see Latan and Rodin 1969 and Latan and Darley 1970 as well as
Moral Character, chapter six. In one of the famous variations, the Lady in Distress group effect
study, a woman is heard crying out in pain in the next room, but when a single participant was
with a stranger who did nothing in response to the cries, only 7 percent of participants did
anything helpful themselves.
(ii) No human being has ever had any of the traditional virtues or vices such as
courage or compassion, either as a matter of psychological necessity or as a
matter of contingent fact.
Indeed, Doris in several places concedes that the psychological evidence is
compatible with a few people having the virtues and a few other people having
the vices.23
On the other hand, they clearly are not just after as weak of a claim as:
(iii) Given the psychological evidence, we are not justied in believing on the
basis of that evidence that most people possess the traditional virtues or
vices.
While they would readily accept this claim, it is only a claim about the absence
of evidence, namely that we currently lack support from psychology for the
widespread possession of these traits. But Harman and Doris repeatedly make
stronger claims than this based on their reading of the psychology literature.
Indeed, the title of one of Harmans early papers is The Nonexistence of
Character Traits,24 and he claims that it may even be the case that there is no
such thing as character.25 Doris argues that people typically lack charac-
ter.26 And together they have written that behavior is not typically ordered
by robust traits.27
So instead, I think the right interpretation of their conclusion is this:
(iv) Given the psychological evidence, we are justied in believing on the basis of
that evidence that most people do not possess the traditional virtues or vices.
What should be made of this conclusion?
Well, it should come as no surprise that this is precisely the same conclusion
I have already defended at length here and in Moral Character, and by drawing
on far more work in psychology to support it. Even though I have arrived
23
Doris 2002: 60, 65, 112, 122. See also Vranas 2005: 16. Hence Kwame Anthony Appiah
mistakenly construes the debate when he represents the Harman/Doris position as claiming that
experimental psychology shows that people cannot have the sorts of character traits that the
virtue theorist has identied as required for eudaimonia (2008: 47).
Neera Badhwar seems to take (ii) to be the correct conclusion to infer from the psychological
research (2009: 261, 26672), although she limits this conclusion to the virtues but not the vices
(275). Mark Alfano (2011: 122) also seems to accept the interpretation in (ii).
24
Harman 2000.
25
Harman 1999: 328. Similarly he writes that Aristotelian style virtue ethics shares with folk
psychology a commitment to broad-based character traits of a sort that people simply do not
have (2003: 93). For recent qualications to this kind of claim, see Harman 2009: 238, 241.
26
Doris 1998: 506, 2002: 2. Similarly speaking for the situationist position which he supports,
Doris writes that the situationist denies that people typically have highly general personality
traits that effect behavior manifesting a high degree of cross-situational consistency (2002: 39).
See also his 2002: 6, 64, 115 and, for related discussion, Goldie 2004: 64, Wielenberg 2006: 474,
Appiah 2008: 38, Upton 2009b: 181, and Sosa 2009: 2789.
27
Merritt et al. 2010: 358, emphasis theirs.
at (iv) using a number of considerations of my own, such as by appealing to
the different kinds of motives involved in morally relevant behavior and to the
moral appropriateness of certain enhancers and inhibitors, (iv) is a claim that
I think we have excellent reason to accept.
So far so good. Where Harman and Doris go astray, in my view, is when
they broaden the scope of (iv) beyond just traditional virtues and vices, and
include all global character traits as such. In order words, they often say things
which imply that their intended conclusion is not supposed to be (iv) but
rather something like this:
(v) Given the psychological evidence, we are justied in believing on the basis of
that evidence that most people do not possess any global character traits.28
Now clearly this is a conclusion that I cannot accept. I have argued that:
(vi) Most people have a variety of Mixed Traits as part of their character (at some
level of generality and to some degree), and not a variety of traditional virtues
or vices.29
Recall that Mixed Traits, while not part of our ordinary conceptual repertoire,
are nevertheless both stable over time and consistent (in certain important
ways) across situations.
Harman and Doris do not provide any reason to accept the stronger claim
in (v) rather than the much more plausible claim in (iv).30 To be fair, Mixed
Traits were not mentioned in the literature at the time they were writing, and it
seems likely that Harman and Doris simply assumed that all global character
traits would have to be either traditional virtues or vices.31 In doing so, they
28
Hence Harman writes that there is no evidence that people differ in character traits
(1999: 329), our ordinary views about character traits can be explained without supposing that
there are such traits (1999: 329), and, we need to abandon all talk of virtue and character, not
nd a way to save it by reinterpreting it (2000: 224). Similarly for Doris, systematic observation
typically fails to reveal the behavior patterns expected by globalism; globalist conceptions of
personality are empirically inadequate (2002: 23, emphasis his). See also Doris 1998: 508 and
Upton 2009a: 73.
29
See chapter two.
30
Eric Wielenberg offers the following, rather different reconstruction of Doriss argument
which would have (v) in the text above as its conclusion:
(a) Apparently insubstantial situational factors have substantial effects on behavior.
(b) Psychologists have been unable to explain the truth of (a) in terms of robust, consistent
character traits.
(c) The best explanation of (a) and (b) is that people typically lack robust, consistent
character traits.
(d) Therefore, people typically lack robust, consistent character traits (2006: 468).
Setting aside the question of whether this is the best interpretation of Doris, as far as the
argument itself goes I can gladly accept the rst two premises. But if my Mixed Traits count as
robust, consistent character traits then I would reject premise (c). Wielenberg himself adopts
the same strategy of questioning (c), but he uses a Kantian account of character traits to argue
that experiments like Milgrams teach us that apparently insubstantial situational features are
are not the only onessuch an assumption seems to be widespread, and it is
entirely reasonable that they would have employed it in this context. But in my
own work, I have argued that this assumption is false. Most of us possess
global traits which are neither traditional virtues nor vices.32
Indeed, Harman and Doris at times say things which could be interpreted as
allowing for the existence of global traits of a certain kind. For instance
Harman notes that people have different innate temperaments, different
knowledge, different goals, different abilities, and tend to be in or think they
are in different situations. All such differences can affect what people will do,
and again that people differ in their situations and in their perceptions of
their situations. They differ in their goals, strategies, neuroses, optimism,
etc.33 But once these mental dispositions are accepted, and once it is
assumedplausibly enoughthat they can be activated in multiple situations,
then it seems like we have all the building blocks needed for the existence of
global character traits, regardless of whether they are virtues or not.34
This then is the rst stage of their argument against virtue ethics. The
upshot is that they arrive at a conclusion in (iv) about the possession of the
traditional virtues and vices which, when properly understood, I think we have
excellent reason to accept. So let me turn to the second stage of their argument.
substantial after all and [reveal] differences in the character of its subjects (480, emphasis his).
I too am very sympathetic to this point, but unfortunately do not have a clear enough handle on
his Kantian account of character traits to say exactly where it differs (if it does) from my Mixed
Trait account.
31
The following passage from Harman suggests this: it may even be the case that there is no
such thing as character, no ordinary character traits of the sort people think there are, none of the
usual moral virtues and vices (1999: 316). But later on the same page he notes that on his view
talkativeness and friendliness are both character traits which are neither virtues nor vices.
Similarly John Campbell (see footnote 8) seems to make the assumption in the text above
when he writes about the Darley and Batson seminary study that helping does not depend on
the individuals character, e.g. on whether the individual is compassionate or callous (1999: 31).
Later he writes that the problem is in thinking that it is persons character (whether compas-
sionate or callous) that determines whether they engage in helping behaviour . . . (1999: 42).
32
Note that this is entirely compatible with Doriss claim that when it comes to the empirical
adequacy of character traits, the question is whether the behavioral regularity we observe is to be
primarily explained by reference to robust dispositional structures or situational regularity
(2002: 26). I have argued that we have good reason to opt for the former.
33
Harman 2001: 122, 1999: 329. Similarly when discussing the CAPS model, Doris seems to
allow for the existence of cross-situational consistency in moral behavior, so long as this is not
consistency with respect to nominal features but rather psychologically relevant ones. His main
point is that the clusters of cognitive-affective states responsible for such consistency may not
satisfy the normative standards of the virtues (2002: 7685). Naturally I agree with this point, but
it does not threaten the widespread existence of global character traits which are neither virtues
nor vices.
34
For a similar point, see Kupperman 2001: 245, Kamtekar 2004: 472, Russell 2009: 293, 298,
Sosa 2009: 279, and Lukes 2009: 292. This parallels the line of reasoning used in chapters four
and ve when arguing that those associated with situationism or the CAPS model in psychology
can still accept the existence of cross-situationally consistent traits.
Here they use the conclusion in (iv) to assess the plausibility of Aristotelian
virtue ethics, along with any other theories in ethics which rely on such traits.
According to Harman, this sort of virtue ethics presupposes that there are
character traits of the relevant sort, that people differ in what character traits
they have, and these traits help to explain differences in the way people
behave.35 This does seem accurate as a description of certain commitments
of standard forms of virtue ethics. But note that none of these claims seems to
be threatened by the empirical results as presented above. Simply denying that
there is widespread possession of the virtues and vices is straightforwardly
compatible with, for example, still thinking that these traits exist and that
people differ in whether they have them or not. Some people might have one
virtue, others one vice, and still others several virtues or vices, while perhaps
the majority do not have any virtues or vices at all.36
Doris claims in his 1998 paper that Aristotelian virtue ethics, when con-
strued as invoking a generally applicable descriptive psychology . . . [is] subject
to damaging empirical criticism.37 Here I think is where we get to the heart of
the matter. This quote isolates the key assumption that must be a doing a lot of
work for Harman and Doris, namely that Aristotelian virtue ethics is commit-
ted in some way to a descriptive account of our psychologies which attributes
the virtues or vices to most people. However, I am not aware of any virtue
ethicist who accepts this assumption, and as I will suggest in section three, they
should in fact reject it.38
Indeed, by his 2002 book Doris does not seem to be offering any arguments
connecting (i) the denial of the widespread possession of traditional character
35
Harman 1999: 319. Later he writes that Character based virtue ethics may offer a
reasonable account of ordinary moral views. But to that extent, these ordinary views rest on
error (327).
36
In her response to Harman 1999, Nafsika Athanassoulis writes that If Harman is correct
in his analysis that these two experiments [Darley and Batson, and Milgram] provide good
evidence for rejecting the supposition that there are such things as character traits, then this
would pose a major problem for most virtue ethical theories (2000: 216). But she does not
explain what that problem would be. Furthermore, as Doris concedes, the experiments only
suggest that most people do not have traditional character traits, not that no one does.
37
Doris 1998: 520.
38
For a potential exception, see Annas 2003, 2011: 173. Echoing Doris, Sabini and Silver
claim that virtue ethics will be troubled if the data show that there arent many people who do
(or are) what virtue ethics says they should (be) (2005: 538). So too Gopal Sreenivasan states
that I shall also assume that a theory of virtue should conform to certain standards of empirical
psychological adequacy, standards which would be violated if next to no one actually turned out
to have a character trait in the relevant sense (2002: 48). And again that it is a virtue-theoretic
assumption that certain people actually have character traits in the relevant sense (48; but see
also page 57, 63). And here is Maria Merritt on situationism: It seems to present a challenge to
virtue ethics . . . undermining too our beliefs about the psychological nature of the virtues (2000:
366). But none of them offers an explanation for why the virtue ethicist would need to be
committed to any of these claims. As I go on to note in section three, they look highly
contestable.
traits, to (ii) an assessment of the truth of Aristotelian virtue ethics as a
normative theory. Instead the main project seems to have evolved into show-
ing, rst, that approaches in moral psychology which appeal to traditional
character traits are empirically inadequate as descriptive accounts of most
people, and secondly, to then raising concerns about how practically relevant
virtue ethics would be if most of us do not have such traits.39 I will return to
questions about practical relevance in detail in section three.
8.2 L OCAL CHARACTER TRAITS
First, though, I should say something about the positive view of local traits
which Harman and especially Doris are advancing as an alternative to global
character traits. For it would be an unfortunate result for me if, after all the
work that has been done in this book and in Moral Character, it turned out
that their positive view has been better supported by the experimental evi-
dence all along.
Local traits as Doris understands them are stable over time but not consist-
ent across situations. While he does not give any rigorous conditions for
individuating situations, Doris does say that he intends them to be differenti-
ated in terms of environmental features characterizable independently of
individual psychological particularities.40 In other words, these traits are
not consistent across nominally dened situations, which is a feature that
serves to sharply distinguish them from my Mixed Traits. Examples might
include local traits such as courage in the courtroom or honesty in taking
tests.41 For the virtue of compassion, Doris rejects the claim that this trait
plays a signicant role in explaining the helping of most people, but he can at
the same time accept that some people might have the local trait of
39 40
See his 2002: chapter six. Doris 2002: 76.
41
Doris 1998: 5078, 2002: 23, 25, 64. Harmans positive view is a bit harder to pin down,
since as noted in footnote 10, he at times seems to reject the existence of character traits in
general and in some places seems skeptical of local character traits in particular. For instance, he
writes that We need to abandon all talk of virtue and character, not nd a way to save it by
reinterpreting it (2000: 224; but see his 2003: 92). For my purposes here I do not need to take a
stand on this interpretative issue. Robert Adams also seems to advocate something like a local
trait view, although he also claims that there might be composite traits made up of different
specic modules or fragmentary traitsfor instance, specic modules associated with telling
the truth can come together to form a composite trait referred to as honesty (2006: 12530).
Neera Badhwar holds a view about domain-specic or compartmentalized virtues, while
claiming that global virtues are psychologically impossible but also that Doriss local traits
are conceptually impossible (2009: 259, 260). See also Goldie 2004: chapter three, Vranas 2005:
30, Upton 2005, 2009a, 2009b, and Kupperman 2009: 253 for additional claims which seem to be
broadly in line with a local trait picture, although not necessarily Doriss own specic version of
that picture.
Most people today have all the traditional moral

Option One
virtues to some degree.
Most people today have all the traditional moral

Option Two vices to some degree.
Most people today have either all the traditional
Option Three moral virtues to some degree or all the traditional
moral vices to some degree.
Most people today have both some of the traditional
Option Four moral virtues to some degree and some of the
traditional moral vices to some degree.
Most people today have various Mixed Traits to
Option Five
some degree.
Most people today have various local virtues/vices

Option Six to some degree.
Most people today do not have any moral character

Option Seven
traits of any kind and to any degree.
Figure 8.1 Various options for thinking about most peoples actual moral character
compassion at the ofce or compassion at home. Finally, Doris does not

clarify the scope of his view, that is, how widely held these local virtues and
vices are supposed to be. Presumably, though, for it to be an interesting
alternative to the Aristotelian position, these traits cannot merely be held
rarelythat is something that Aristotelians can gladly accept too.
Before evaluating the local trait proposal, it might be helpful to rst take a
step back and summarize the main options that have been distinguished in
this book for thinking about the moral character of most people. Figure 8.1
does just that. Each of these options is meant to be exclusive, that is, the rst
option implies that most people do not have the traditional vices, Mixed
Traits, or local traits.42 On the other hand, they are not being put forward as
exhaustive; other options could be imagined.43
I have already given several reasons in my work for rejecting the rst four
options. The seventh option is too extreme, and as I said in chapter four even
the main focus of the situationist criticisms in the 1960s and 1970s tended to
42
Theoretically, of course, one could hold a blended position, i.e. that most people possess
both some of the traditional virtues and some Mixed Traits. I have not seen any such blended
position in either the philosophical or psychological literatures, but it does seem to be worth
considering in future work. Also, thanks to Alicia Jenkins for distinguishing option four in
discussion.
43
Peter Vranas, for instance, has argued that most people are indeterminate such that they
have no character status, understood as status on the good/intermediate/bad scale (2005: 16,
emphasis removed). In the process, he rejects the claim that most people are morally good, and
also the claim that most people are morally bad (17).
be on only one particular understanding of traits, not personality traits in
general.44 But that still leaves the choice between options ve and six. To
evaluate them properly, it would be best to have thorough longitudinal studies
which follow the same participants over time as they proceed from one
situation to another. Unfortunately, however, longitudinal studies of morally
relevant behavior are hard to come by in psychology.45
Nevertheless, if our character merely consisted of a collection of various
local traits, I think we should expect morally relevant behavior to be highly
disjointed in a certain way based upon the persons possession of the relevant
traits. Many people, for instance, might help in one kind of helping-relevant
situation but not in another because they lack the distinct trait associated with
the latter circumstances. They might have compassion in shopping malls,
say, but not compassion in restaurants.
Yet repeatedly in the experimental literature participants exhibit the same
patterns of signicantly augmented and inhibited helping (and harming)
behavior as compared to controls when factors such as positive mood, nega-
tive mood, guilt, embarrassment, empathy, anger, fear of embarrassment, fear
of blame, and the like are at work. Despite the studies being carried out using
different participants, locations, and time periods, these patterns reliably
persist from one experimental helping task to another, such as volunteering
for a charity organization, donating blood, helping someone who has fallen in
another room, making change for a dollar, looking for lost contact lenses,
picking up dropped books, and so forth. While it is true that peoples helping
behavior can look very disjointed, once we learn more with the aid of the latest
psychology research about the psychological processes that are responsible for
such behavior, intelligible patterns emerge which do not support a local trait
framework.46
Let me develop this thought further. Given the current understanding of the
psychological processes responsible for helping, there is good reason to pos-
tulate fairly generic and widely held mental state dispositions to form certain
Since Vranas does not carry out his discussion directly in terms of the virtues and vices, I nd
it hard to map his view onto Figure 8.1, and in particular to compare it to my Mixed Trait
position. If he similarly rejects the claim that most people are virtuous, vicious, or some
combination of the two, then we are in agreement. I am condent that he would reject this
claim. What I am less sure of is whether my Mixed Trait position implies that, in his terms, most
people are indeterminate or whether most people are intermediate, once these notions are
reformulated to apply to virtues and vices and not goodness and badness.
44
Although to be fair, passages can be found in these writings which are less than careful in
noting this difference, and instead conate personality traits in general with this one particular
view about them.
45
See Moral Character, chapter eight for a discussion of why this is the case.
46
Doris might respond that situational forces have habituated many people into having
roughly the same set of various local traits for each of these different circumstances associated
with helping. Now admittedly such a response would account for the results, but it also seems
rather difcult to believe. For is it really plausible to think that many of us have, through a
beliefs and desires. For instance, consider the disposition to desire to help, if by
helping I can alleviate my negative mood. This desire is attributed to people by
many psychologists working on mood and helping.47 Furthermore, and what
is central for my point here, it can signicantly motivate helping behavior in a
number of nominally different situations. Other things being equal, it does not
matter to this desire what the situational properties are, so long as the act of
helping is expected to function in this way. So over the course of a given
month, for instance, this one desire could (at least partially) motivate helping
in a variety of different situations, and in a way that is cross-situationally
consistent once its functioning is recognized.
Indeed, these patterns of helping already allow psychologists to make
predictions about the results of new experiments involving helping tasks
that have not yet been studied. For example, I would predict that other things
being equal, participants in a moderately positive mood would be more likely
to hold the door for someone walking with crutches, or would volunteer to
work more hours at a nearby homeless shelter, than would control partici-
pants. Such predictions would be made on the assumption that the helping
patterns that have been observed in different circumstances in the past would
likely continue to be exhibited in the future in these new circumstances, an
assumption that seems to involve a commitment to some degree of cross-
situational consistency in helping behavior.
There is one nal point I want to make about the local trait proposal, and it
involves one of the most controversial and perhaps most alarming claims of
this book. On the local trait view as I understand it, to the extent that we have
moral character traits at all, most of us (barring the few exceptional cases
Doris allows) will possess local virtues, local vices, or both local virtues and
local vices. But what reason is there to think that most people have even local
virtues or vices? In my work the target has been the widespread possession of
traditional global virtues and vices. But the same arguments would apply
against local virtues as well. For instance, suppose someone is said to have
the local trait of compassion while working at the food bank. In order for this
trait to qualify as a virtue on traditional ways of thinking about the matter, it
must still satisfy the relevant normative standards for appropriate belief, desire,
and action. Yet the psychological processes I outline in Part Two of Moral
process of gradual habituation, acquired one trait for picking up dropped papers, another for
making change, another for donating blood, another for volunteering for charity work, and so
forth? After all, it is not even clear that many people have been exposed to even a few, much less a
signicant number of repeated instances of these situation types so that they could have
developed the relevant local character trait through habituation. Thus it might seem mysterious
how we could have come to acquire so many discrete and ne-grained local helping traits in the
rst place.
47
For discussion of the psychological research, see Moral Character, chapter six.
Character, such as guilt relief, embarrassment relief, embarrassment avoidance,
positive mood maintenance, and so forth, are widespread in our psychological
lives, and so would be expected to play a role in inuencing helping behavior at
food banks as well. Hence the same kinds of considerations could also tell
against the widespread possession of local virtues pertaining to helping. From
there, the argument could generalize to local virtues and vices connected to a
wide variety of different nominal situations and kinds of moral behavior. So if
this line of reasoning is plausible, then it could turn out that Doriss own view is
empirically threatened by the psychological research as well.48
The considerations advanced in the last few paragraphs suggest that absent
longitudinal studies, my view of Mixed Traits might have an initial explana-
tory and predictive advantage over a theory limited just to a collection of
various local traits.49
8.3 THE RARITY RESPONSE AND THE REAL

CHALLENGE TO VIRTUE E THICS
FROM PSYCHOLOGY
Let me get back to normative ethics. Harman and Doris have argued that
Aristotelian virtue ethics is, in some way, threatened by ndings in psychology.
The Harman/Doris concern seems to center on the idea that the theory is
committed to the widespread possession of traditional virtues or vices, and that
this commitment, once rendered empirically inadequate, somehow threatens the
plausibility of the view. To this there is a now familiar response, which I call the
rarity response. It is to deny that any reasonable form of virtue ethics is committed
on descriptive grounds to the widespread possession of the virtues.50, 51
There is good precedence for this response. Acquiring a particular virtue
has typically been thought throughout Western ethics to be a very gradual
process as a person struggles to overcome character defects and obstacles. For
48
This claim also applies to other local trait views, such as the account of situational traits
developed by Upton 2009a, where these are virtuous and vicious traits that have a narrower
range of application than the traditional virtues and vices do. Upton does concede at one point,
though, that these traits might be rarely possessed (85). See also Vranas 2005: 30.
49
For additional concerns about local traits, especially as understood in Doriss work, see
Annas 2003: 1621, Webber 2007b, Upton 2009a: chapter four, 2009b: 1823, Russell 2009:
1712, 3212, Badhwar 2009: 2758, Snow 2010: 29, 323, and Slingerland 2011: 399400.
50
Michael DePaul was perhaps the rst to develop this response to Harman and Doris in his
1999: 1503, and I explore it at length in Miller 2003. Athanassoulis uses it in response to
Harman 1999 when she writes that Virtue ethics presumably requires that moral behaviour, in
the form of possessing virtuous character traits, is a possibility, rather than an actuality for the
majority of people . . . Virtue ethicists do not and need not argue that most people are indeed
virtuous or could in principle become virtuous (2000: 21718). Similarly according to Sreeni-
vasan, the correct theory of virtue is a theory of what Aristotle called full virtue, which only
the Plato of The Republic, for instance, it is recommended that virtue be
cultivated through participation in a long and demanding educational process
out of which only a few might emerge successfully.52 Similarly for Aristotle,
the virtues are traits that must be habituated in children and positively
reinforced in adults over extended periods of time.53
Thus according to this line of response, virtue ethicists can readily agree
that experiments in psychology justify the belief that there currently is not
widespread possession of the virtuesthere was never any expectation
some people need have. These people are models of virtue and ordinary people will only
approximate them in varying degrees, including zero (2002: 57).
Diana Fleming in my view best formulates the minimal degree of psychological realism that
virtue ethics needs to accept as it should be possible, in principle for a human being to become a
virtuous agent, even if there do not happen to be, or to have been, any living human beings who
are capable of doing so (2006: 27). Similarly she writes that I take a conception of virtue to be
psychologically realistic if the condition that it models is such that some number of human
beings might, with sufcient training and so forth, achieve, or at least hope to approximate, it
(2006: 31 n. 11).
For additional use of the rarity response, see Athanassoulis 2000: 21920, Kupperman 2001:
2423, 250, 2009: 2489, Kamtekar 2004: 466, Fleming 2006: 412, Winter and Tauer 2006:
789, Wielenberg 2006: 490, Appiah 2008: 489, Arjoon 2008: 227, Kristjnsson 2008: 667,
Russell 2009: 170, and Sosa 2009: 287. For criticism of the rarity response from virtue ethicists,
see Annas 2003, 2011: 173 and Russell 2009: 284. Annas, for instance, writes that Some versions
of virtue ethics do take generosity, compassion and so on to be possessed only by a very few
people, but most have a more complex view which rejects this, so that [the rarity response] alone
would in fact undermine the idea that virtue ethics does presuppose a realistic psychology
(2003: 13). If Annas is right about most versions of virtue ethics, then I would agree with Harman
and Doris that these versions, at least, are empirically inadequate.
For additional criticism of the rarity response, see also Adams 2006: 119 and Prinz 2009: 125.
Prinz argues that It would be perfectly reasonable to say that virtue is rare if most people were
driven by character traits that were not virtuous. But situationist psychology purports to show
that people are not ordinarily driven by character traits at all (125). As I have suggested, there is
plenty of reason to think that most people are driven by character traits that are not virtuous.
51
What about the vices? Here there seem to be different options available to the virtue
ethicist. Plato in the Republic, for instance, seems to consider the four categories of non-virtuous
peoplethe democratic, the oligarchic, the timocratic, and the tyrannical to have vicious
characters. But, not surprisingly, I think the wiser option for the virtue ethicist to endorse here
is to say that possession of the traditional vices can be just as rare in a given society as possession
of the virtuesmost people have characters which are neither virtuous nor vicious. For helpful
discussion of Platos view in this context, see DePaul 1999: 1503.
52
As DePaul writes, The Republic so obviously presents the view that virtue is hard to
acquire and rare that one almost feels embarrassed making a case for the claim (1999: 150). For
further discussion of Platos view in the context of responding to Harman and Doris, see DePaul
1999: 1503 and Kupperman 2001: 242, 250.
53
See in particular Aristotle 1985: 1099b2932, 1103b1631, 1152a3034, 1179b2529,
1180a15, 1519, Burnyeat 1980: 6992, and Williams 1985: 389 for Aristotles account of
moral development. The claim in the text above is intended to apply to what Aristotle calls full
as opposed to natural virtue (1144b116). Natural virtues are said to be possessed by everyone
at birth (1144b5), but can be harmful (1144b10) and are not character traits as I understood such
traits in chapter one. In particular they are not the moral virtues that are the concern of ethical
theorizing and moral development. See also Irwin 1996: 523, Zagzebski 1996: 103, Kamtekar
2004: 480, Russell 2009: 1920, 170, Badhwar 2009: 270, and Annas 2011: 11, 256.
otherwise.54 As Aristotle himself writes, the many naturally obey fear, not
shame; they avoid what is base because of the penalties, not because it is
disgraceful. For since they live by their feelings, they pursue their proper
pleasures and the sources of them, and avoid the opposed pains, and have not
even a notion of what is ne and truly pleasant, since they have had no taste
of it.55 While contemporary virtue ethicists need not commit themselves to
these particular empirical claims, they can accept that people have characters
which are for the most part Mixed, continent, incontinent, or in some other
way non-virtuous.
Doris anticipates this response, and seems to even concede that it is suf-
cient to block the alleged threat from psychology to virtue ethics. But then in
his view, new problems would emerge for the virtue ethicist who makes use of
it.56 As he writes, while the empirical critique is disarmed . . . virtue theory no
longer has the selling point of a compelling descriptive psychology.57 In
particular, the view can no longer lay claim to three important advantages it
purports to have over its Kantian and consequentialist rivals, starting with the
rst:
(a) An account of moral development and education which emphasizes the sort
of character agents may inculcate, rather than the advantages of reection on
a rareed ideal.58
However, in response the virtue ethicist can claim that it is hard to see why
simply acknowledging that most people are not virtuous would preclude
emphasizing character development and education. Admittedly, there is no
54
In light of the above, it is odd that John Campbell formulates his version of a Harman/
Doris style argument from social psychology as an attack on what he takes to be the popular
Kantian and virtue ethical commitment to powerful forces toward helping behaviour that are
widespread if not universal, and which occupy a central place in many persons motivational
constitution (1999: 41).
55
Aristotle 1985: 1179b1116. Aristotle seems to locate most people somewhere between
continence and incontinence when he writes that incontinence and continence are concerned
with what exceeds the state of most people; the continent person abides [by reason] more than
most people are capable of doing, the incontinent person less (1985: 1152a2527). See also
Aristotle 1985: 1150a15, Doris 1998: 511 fn. 32, and Kristjnsson 2008: 667.
56
In fact, I think the best way to read his argument against Aristotelian virtue ethics is as a
dilemma. Either virtue ethics is committed to the descriptive claim about widespread possession
of traditional virtues or vices, in which case the view is empirically inadequate, or it denies this
claim, in which case the view gives rise to the three concerns that follow. This seems to be the line
of reasoning in particular in his 1998: 520 and 2002: 11011. See also Merritt 2000: 3679 and
Fleming 2006: 37.
In a recent article with Merritt and Harman, Doris again seems to concede that character
psychologists need not be in the business of articulating a widely applicable psychological theory,
in which case it is possible to insist that the classic situationist experiments show only that their
subjects are defective practical reasoners. This line of argument is not implausible (Merritt et al.
2010: 362). They go on to then develop a preliminary version of the challenge I also raise for
virtue ethics at the end of this section. See also Doris 2010: 137.
57 58
Doris 1998: 520. See also 2002: 111. Doris 1998: 512.
guarantee that any given person will succeed in attaining a moderately virtu-
ous character; in fact, many will probably fail. But some might, as Doris
himself has already conceded. So more needs to be said about this concern.
What about the second advantage? According to Doris, virtue ethicists
could no longer lay claim to:
(b) An account which permits our ordinary practice of appealing to virtues in
the explanation of behavior.59
But rst of all, since it has been conceded that some people might still be
virtuous and others vicious in certain respects, this kind of explanation can
still be useful and accurate in a few cases. In addition, nothing would preclude
continuing to call specic actions and motives virtuous or vicious, even if
they do not stem from the corresponding character traits. In other words, we
can still refer to Joness action as honest, or to Smith as exhibiting a
compassionate state of mind, even if neither of them yet has the underlying
virtue. We can even say that Smith acted that way because he was a compas-
sionate person, so long as this just means he had the constellation of mental
states appropriate to the virtue of compassion for that one instant.
To be fair, if traditional character traits are only rarely possessed, then we
should be much more cautious when making ascriptions of virtues or vices to
people based upon insufcient motivational and behavioral evidence. No
doubt our ordinary practices go much too far in this direction and more
caution is warranted, as I noted in the previous chapter. To the extent that
virtue ethics would no longer support these practices, it may lose out to some
extent on this potential advantage that Doris cites. But I doubt many virtue
ethicists would have considered this particular point about trait ascriptions to
be a signicant advantage over rival views in the rst place.
Finally, Doris thinks that an empirically modest virtue ethic cannot be:
(c) An account which avoids problems associated with theoretical mediation.60
Since practical deliberation by the majority of people who do not possess the
traditional virtues would have to involve appealing to an ideal of virtue and to
what, for instance, a fully virtuous individual would do, virtue ethics would
become susceptible to some of the same kinds of worries about practical
reasoning which allegedly plague other normative theories. More specically,
a person might help another because that is what a fully virtuous person
would do, which is a motivating reason that is no more morally praiseworthy
and deserving of moral worth than are other reasons like because it would
maximize utility or because it is what duty requires. Yet according to Doris,
one of the main selling points of virtue ethics is that it can give an account of
59 60
Doris 1998: 512. Doris 1998: 520.
moral motivation which is supposed to appeal only to familiar, unproblematic
considerations such as because he was sick or because I love him.61
This concern is more forceful than the rst two in my opinion, but here is a
potential response. Presumably issues about theoretical mediation do not arise
for someone who is already virtuous to a sufcient degree, as Doris himself
admits.62 Instead the primary case in which theoretical mediation might seem
to be a problem, is one in which a person who is non-virtuous or even weakly
virtuous is confronted with a novel situation and is uncertain about what to
do. Here problems may or may not arise for virtue ethics in much the same
way as they do for other normative theories; I will leave that as an open
question for each specic version of virtue ethics to address. The only general
point I want to make here is that unless the virtue ethicist wants to maintain
that everyone is sufciently virtuous, which of course none does, then giving
action guidance in novel circumstances without theoretical mediation will be a
problem for any form of virtue ethics. Since action guidance is a perfectly
general problem for any virtue ethical approach to confront, it is not clear how
the considerations Doris has raised against this third advantage fall directly
out of his arguments from social psychology. Perhaps they are instead motiv-
ated by independent concerns he has with virtue ethics.63
Nevertheless suppose that, despite what has been said above, each of these
responses to Doris is not promising after all. Even then, the costs for the virtue
ethicist would be surprisingly minimal. For these concerns are not raised as
objections to virtue ethics. Rather, they are raised as considerations which
eliminate three purported advantages of the view. So nothing yet would give
the virtue ethicist any reason to be concerned that her view is false. Further-
more, even if Doris is right that these would no longer be three areas where
virtue ethics comes out ahead, there is no shortage in the virtue ethical
literature of other purported advantages that the view is supposed to have.
Not to mention as well that there is an increasing movement against rigidly
61
In addition, that account of motivation is supposed to allow for spontaneous and
automatic virtuous action, and avoid alienating forms of motivation of the kind famously
outlined by Stocker 1976 (Doris 1998: 520). But if we are instead supposed to rst deliberate
about ideally virtue agents, then cognitive processing slows down and moral motivation
becomes abstract and impersonal. Thus according to Doris, Theoretical mediation through
an ideal of virtue is no less obviously problematic than through an ideal of rationality, duty, or
maximizing happiness, and alienation, if it is a genuine difculty, may plague character-based
ideals no less than other ideals (1998: 520). See also Prinz 2009: 1256. For relevant back-
ground on the issues associated with theoretical mediation, see Williams 1973: 116, 131, 1985:
5470, Stocker 1976, and Railton 1984.
62
Hence, the properly habituated person behaves as she should, without reference to theory,
and so escapes the alienating effects of theoretical mediation (Doris 1998: 520).
63
For a different and likely better response to Doris on theoretical mediation, see Merritt
2000: 3701. See also the helpful points in Kamtekar 2004: 488. For additional responses to
Doriss three concerns, see Kristjnsson 2008: 72.
opposing virtue ethics to other leading ethical theories, and instead to incorp-
orate the strengths of Kantian and consequentialist approaches.64
So for now at least, the rarity strategy developed in this section for the virtue
ethicist to use looks particularly promising. But I do not think the Aristotelian
is completely in the clear just yet. In fact, I want to switch gears here and
ultimately agree with Harman and Doris that there is a potential concern for
virtue ethics lurking in this neighborhood, and to try to do a better job of
identifying exactly what it is.
To begin, we can note the basic point that Aristotelian approaches to moral
psychology which appeal to traditional character traits, can be understood
primarily either as descriptive accounts of the relevant portions of our mental
lives, or as normative accounts which we should strive to embody. Clearly if
the picture of Mixed Traits outlined in this book is accurate for most of us,
then the rst option is off the tableAristotelian virtue ethics will have failed
to offer an empirically adequate account of our moral lives.
But virtue ethicists might not be worried about this result; they can simply
replace any outdated descriptive claims about moral psychology with claims
that are better informed by the psychological literature. In fact they could
simply embrace the framework of Mixed Traits itself, while insisting that they
are offering a normative view about the traits, reasons, motives, emotions, and
the like that we should strive to instantiate. It might not be surprising how
many people have failed to do so.
A new worry arises here. For now the burden is on the Aristotelian to show
how realizing such a normative ideal is psychologically realistic for beings like
us.65 This concern has been alluded to briey in the literature. Harman, for
instance, writes that if we know that there is no such thing as a character trait
and we know that virtue would require having character traits, how can we
aim at becoming a virtuous agent? If there are no character traits, there is
nothing one can do to acquire character traits that are more like those
possessed by a virtuous agent.66 It may also be what Doris intends as his
primary criticism of virtue ethics in Lack of Character. At one place he does
say that a practically relevant character ethics should have something to say
about securing ethically desirable behavior.67 But this is a claim about
behavior, not about character traits themselves.
64
For two illustrations, see Hursthouse 1999 and Swanton 2003.
65
For discussion of psychological realism, see Flanagan 1991: 32 and Kristjnsson
2008: 60.
66
Harman 2000: 224. See also Campbell 1999: 38, Merritt 2000: 3715, Kamtekar 2004: 460,
Sabini and Silver 2005: 538, Webber 2006b: 213, Appiah 2008: 4550, 70, Badhwar 2009: 259,
261, 267, 272, Prinz 2009: 120, 125, and Merritt et al. 2010: 3623 for related points.
67
Doris 2002: 110. And again in the chapter on ethical theory he claims that the present
question concerns whether there are modes of moral training that could produce more in the
Given the prior discussion in this book, I am now in a position to make
this concern more precise. In order to do so, it is important to appreciate
again just how stark the contrast is between the Mixed Traits most
people actually have, and the virtuous character traits they should have.68
On the one hand, the following are platitudes about virtue (other things being
equal):
(i) A person who is virtuous, when acting in character, will typically attempt to
perform virtuous actions when, at the very least, the need to do so is obvious
and the effort involved is very minimal.
(ii) A persons virtuous trait will not be dependent on the presence (or absence)
of certain morally problematic enhancers or inhibitors in leading him to
perform virtuous actions, such that if they were or were not present, then
his frequency of acting virtuously would signicantly increase or decrease
in the same nominal situations.
(iii) A persons virtuous trait will typically lead to virtuous behavior that is done
at least primarily for motivating reasons which are morally admirable and
deserving of moral praise, and not primarily for motivating reasons which
are either morally problematic or morally neutral.
(iv) A virtuous person, when acting in character, does not regularly act from
egoistic motives which are often powerful enough that, were they not
present, he would not continue to reliably act virtuously, as his virtuous
motives are not strong enough to motivate such behavior by themselves.
But now, drawing on my work in both this book and in Moral Character,
consider the following four claims about how, according to my Mixed Trait
approach, most of us are currently put together, with the brief mention of a
study following each claim in order to serve only as an illustration of some of
the evidence which supports these claims. The rst claim is that:
(i*) Most people have Mixed Traits and so, when acting in character, will
sometimes not attempt to perform virtuous actions even when the need to
do so is obvious and the effort involved is very minimal.
For instance, in a study by Dennis Regan and his colleagues (1972), only three
of the 20 control participants made any attempt to help a woman with a torn
bag. The other 17 simply let the candy continue to fall.
Here is a second claim:
way of sturdy good character than systematic observation presently reveals (2002: 122). See also
Doris 2002: 123, 2010: 138.
68
What follows could be stated equally well in terms of the vices instead of the virtues. It is
not as if Mixed Traits approximate the vices any better than they do the virtues.
(ii*) Most people have Mixed Traits which will be dependent on the presence (or
absence) of certain morally problematic enhancers or inhibitors in leading
him to perform virtuous actions, such that if they were or were not present,
then his frequency of acting virtuously would signicantly increase or
decrease in the same nominal situations.
Helping has been found to increase signicantly with the presence of such
enhancers as positive moods, guilt, embarrassment, and even negative moods.
It has also been found to decrease signicantly with the presence of such
inhibitors as anger, anticipated embarrassment, anticipated guilt, and (again)
negative moods.69 For instance, Michael Cunningham and his colleagues
(1980) used a similar setup to that developed by Regan but with the helping
task being to assist a confederate pick up dropped papers. The results were:70
Guilt No guilt
Positive mood 33% 73%

No positive mood 80% 40%
Positive mood and guilt each had a dramatic impact in elevating helping when
operating on their own, and together they seemed to cancel each other out.
The third claim is this:
(iii*) Most people have Mixed Traits which will often lead to morally relevant
behavior that is done primarily for motivating reasons that are either
morally problematic or morally neutral, and not primarily for motivating
reasons which are morally admirable and deserving of moral praise.
For instance, in James Weyants (1978) study of mood and helping, it was only
in the high benet/low cost scenario that participants in a negative mood
exhibited a greater degree of helping than controls, a result which has been
interpreted as support for the view that they were at least partially motivated
to help in order to improve their mood.71
Finally, I claim that:
(iv*) Most people have Mixed Traits which can regularly lead them to act from
egoistic motives which are often powerful enough that, were they not
present, the person would not continue to reliably act virtuously, as his
virtuous motives are not strong enough to motivate such behavior by
themselves.
69 70
See Moral Character, Part Two. Cunningham et al. 1980: 184.
71
See Moral Character, chapter six.
A study by Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist (2006) can be mentioned
here: after being told to recall an unethical action they had performed in their
past, 74 percent of participants who did not use antiseptic wipes to clean their
hands volunteered to help a desperate graduate student, whereas only 41
percent who used the wipes volunteered.72
Given this contrast between some of the standards required for having the
virtues in (i) through (iv) and the claims made by my Mixed Trait approach in
(i*) through (iv*), what I take to be the real challenge to virtue ethics can be
stated as follows:
(1) The central ethical goal according to Aristotelian virtue ethics is to
become a virtuous person.
(2) Four important features of being a virtuous person are outlined in (i)
through (iv) above.
(3) But most of us have Mixed Traits of character and not the virtues, and
because of this we fall far short of being virtuous people in the ways
outlined in (i*) through (iv*) above, among others.
(4) Hence advocates of Aristotelian virtue ethics need to outline realistic
and empirically informed ways for most human beings to improve their
Mixed Traits, and so far they have not done so.
(5) Therefore the view faces an important challenge that it needs to
address.
Call this the realism challenge. Less formally, the idea is that the Aristotelian
needs to develop some account of how we can start with most people whose
character is decient in these ways, and outline steps to best help them
gradually transform into virtuous people who, for instance, reliably help
when needed for the right reasons and independently of what mood or state
of guilt they happen to be in.73
72
Zhong and Liljenquist 2006: 1452. See Moral Character, chapter two for discussion.
73
Julia Annas has pointed out to me that this way of developing the realism challenge is a bit
misleading in that Aristotelians will typically want to develop, not an account of how to improve
adults as they already are today, but an account of ways of raising children which will set them on
the path to becoming virtuous. By the time people rst think about virtue, they have already been
brought up by their families and society, and so already have a character in place which may face
all kinds of obstacles to realizing the virtues.
This strikes me as an entirely reasonable point for the virtue ethicist to make, but a revised
version of the realism challenge would still remain. In particular, premise (4) could be restated as:
(4*) Hence advocates of Aristotelian virtue ethics need to outline realistic and empirically
informed ways for most human beings to not develop Mixed Traits in the rst place,
or if they have already developed these Traits, to improve them so that they are
transformed into virtues. So far they have not provided such an account.
How, for instance, are children to be educated in such a way that over time they become disposed
to reliably help or tell the truth or refrain from harming others, to reliably do these things for the
The realism challenge should not be underestimated. Habituating oneself to
resist immediate and familiar forms of temptation (or to not have them serve
as temptations in the rst place) is one thing. Perhaps most of us have
techniques to strengthen our wills against temptation to, for instance, eat
excessively or look inappropriately at an attractive person. But the real con-
cern here is with trying to regulate the subtle and often subconscious inu-
ences on our moral behavior.74 These include mood, guilt, and embarrassment
enhancers, and negative mood, anticipated guilt, and anticipated embarrass-
ment inhibitors, which can lead to a vast array of powerful egoistic motives,
many of which are working subconsciously. To use just one illustration, in the
group effect literature the last thing that tends to come to mind is the effect
that a stranger has on inhibiting helping, and yet it can act as a powerful
inhibitor which generates egoistic motivation to not help.
The realism challenge applies far more broadly than just to Aristotelian
virtue ethics. As noted already, most leading ethical theories would accept a
modied version of (1) which claims that at least one central ethical goal is to
become a virtuous person. In addition, I take the features of being virtuous
which are outlined in (i) through (iv) to be platitudes of ethical thought
commonsense and largely uncontroversial features that are not specic to any
particular ethical theory, but rather can serve as constraints when thinking
about virtue that any such theory should respect (other things being equal).
But we should not stop just with professional ethicists. While I have no
empirical evidence to support the claim, I suspect that most people in general,
regardless of whether they have studied ethics or not, already accept that one
central ethical goal is to become virtuous or a person of good moral character,
and that the virtues involve, among other things, something roughly like the
features in (i) though (iv). So if I am right at the descriptive level about most of
us possessing Mixed Traits, then just about everyone, whether an ethical
theorist or not, has to address this challenge. It needs far more work than
it has received so far, and calling attention to it is one of the main goals of
this book.
It is important to stress that the above argument in (1) through (5) is only
stated as a challenge, not as an objection to the truth of virtue ethical accounts.
I have offered no reason to think that the realism challenge could not
eventually be met, only that it will be very difcult to do so. Unfortunately,
appropriate motives, and to reliably not be signicantly inuenced by certain morally problem-
atic enhancers and inhibitors?
74
As Flanagan writes, In addition to fantastic scenarios involving unrestricted license, and in
addition to those everyday and well-understood situations in which the temptation to knavery is
expectable, and thus a certain amount of knavery is too, there are subtle, mundane, and largely
unnoticed forces that produce odd moral effects (1991: 292).
it is also a challenge that has gone almost completely neglected in the virtue
ethics literature, and indeed in the philosophical literature on moral develop-
ment more generally.75, 76
75
For an exception, see Samuels and Casebeer 2005, whose approach will be presented in the
next chapter. For some brief remarks, see Adams 2006: chapter twelve, Appiah 2008: 5662,
Besser-Jones 2008: 32830, Slingerland 2011: 40415, and Railton 2011. Rachana Kamtekar also
briey raises the topic of character building, and mentions the following strategies found in
ancient writings on character (2004: 4879):
(i) Adopting a personal role model.
(ii) Imagining yourself in different situations, especially morally challenging ones.
(iii) Breaking a situation into what is given and what you are contributing to it.
(iv) Following the goal of living consistently.
But each of these strategies is only gestured at in a few sentences, and none is supported with
experimental testing or results. Furthermore, they are only intended to be used when a person
feels conicted or unsure as to what one should do (488), but clearly most of our characters
need vast improvement in their normal default or automatic operations as well. Hence these
proposals, while perhaps a good starting point, do not seem nearly sufcient to tackle the various
obstacles to the cultivation of virtue which I have outlined in my work.
76
Lorraine Besser-Jones has raised a similar kind of realism challenge for virtue ethics based
on the same studies in psychology that Harman and Doris typically cite. In her view these studies
show, not that people typically have mistaken beliefs about what is the morally appropriate thing
to do in a given situation, but that their desires and actions sometimes do not align with these
commitments. As she writes, the empirical evidence:
Really shows that knowing what is the right thing to do is simply not enough to
guarantee right action. There is a frequent gap between peoples moral commitments
and behavioral dispositions . . . [moral theories] need to focus on closing this gap. . . .
This, I think is, or should be, the distinctive task of character-based moral theories
(2008: 328, italics removed).
While I agree that this should be one focus, it may oversimplify the challenge here in a number
of respects. To take just one respect, even if it comes about that a persons moral beliefs and
actions more frequently align, that says nothing about the moral worth of the motivation which
leads to a given action. It could be that this motivation has to do with guilt relief or mood
maintenance, for instance. As suggested in Parts Two and Three of Moral Character, much
morally appropriate behavior is done for motivating reasons that are morally problematic or
morally neutral, and not for motivating reasons which are morally admirable and deserving of
moral praise.
Similarly, Maria Merritt (2000) has raised yet another version of the realism challenge. The
central idea is that Aristotelian views of virtue have committed themselves to what she calls the
motivational self-sufciency of character, or the idea that a virtuous persons motivation for
morally relevant action is independent of factors outside of herself, such as relationships and
social context (374). But, according to Merritt, what the psychological evidence supports is a
descriptive picture of our moral psychology according to which, on a rst pass, we have a variety
of situation-specic dispositions which are potentially alterable with changes in important
social relationships and settings . . . . dispositions to make ethically admirable choices are for
the most part socially sustained in most peopleeven in most of us who understand ourselves as
caring seriously and consistently about ethical considerations (374). Hence, What situationist
psychology makes problematic is not as such the recommendation to have the virtues, but the
normative ideal of the virtues as qualities that must be possessed in a strongly self-sufcient
form (375).
This is certainly an interesting approach to developing the challenge, and I agree that if
Aristotelian views are committed to the self-sufciency thesis then a realism challenge emerges
Let me end this section by mentioning two of the options for responding to
the realism challenge. The rst is to simply deny premise (1). The idea would
be to take seriously the distinction between a moral criterion and a way of life,
and to argue that virtue ethics should only be understood as invoking the
virtues to ground a criterion for morally right action. For instance, we saw in
section one that on a leading approach, moral rightness is grounded in what a
fully virtuous person, acting in character, would do in the circumstances. This
could indeed be the correct account even if we reject (1) and so reject the goal
of becoming virtuous people ourselves.
There is nothing strictly contradictory or conceptually incoherent about
this response, and I grant that such an approach could be correct in
theory. But virtue ethicists should be the last ones to employ it. One of
their leading slogans has always been to emphasize being over doing.
In other words, the moral life starts for them with becoming a virtuous
person, rather than with simply performing virtuous actions. As Aristotle
himself famously said, the purpose of our examination is not to know
what virtue is, but to become good, since otherwise the inquiry would be of
no benet to us.77 Furthermore, although it might not be inconsistent,
there is still something very odd about claiming that a fully virtuous
person is the basis for a central part of morality, but at the same time is
not the kind of person whom we should strive to become in our own lives.
This concern becomes even more pronounced from the perspective of
ordinary moralityit would take a serious revision to our ordinary think-
ing in order to believe that we do not need to try to emulate the character
of our moral heroes and saints such as Jesus, Gandhi, or one of our
admirable friends or family members.
The second option for addressing what I take to be the real challenge to
virtue ethics, is to dive right into the messy empirical work of devising and
testing approaches to character development which purport to be able to help
make us more virtuous. I will take some small steps towards doing this in the
next chapter. In the nal section of this chapter, though, I briey assess the
responses that others have offered to Harman and Doris.
here. But I have chosen to not follow Merritts approach for two reasons. First, she develops it in
terms of highly specic local traits, which in my view are not what the experimental evidence
calls for in many cases. But second and more importantly, it neglects all the other features of
virtue outlined in (i) through (iv) that are, in my opinion, more central to theories of the virtues,
and also are not tied only to an Aristotelian approach. It is those features which, in my opinion,
form the main realism challenge.
What this discussion of Besser-Joness and Merritts views does make clear, though, is that
there is not one realism challenge, but a variety of different challenges depending upon what
feature(s) of the virtues is in question.
77
Aristotle 1103b2930. See also Williams 1985: 1, Doris 1998: 519, Merritt 2000: 3701,
Annas 2003: 21, and Sabini and Silver 2005: 536.
8.4 L EADING ALTERNATIVE RESPONSES

TO HARMAN AND D ORIS
The arguments offered by Harman and Doris have inspired a great deal of
critical scrutiny, with dozens of articles and signicant sections of at least four
important recent books aimed at providing responses.78 But over time I have
come to think that, aside from the rarity response, the other published
responses are insufcient as currently stated, and precisely because of the
realism challenge raised in the previous section. So here I briey explain why
I think this with respect to at least the leading responses.79
The Wrong Conception of Character Response, Part One. Perhaps the most
common response by Aristotelian virtue ethicists has been to argue that
Harman and Doris are working with an uncharitable or overly simplistic
conception of character, which may indeed be threatened by the experimental
results, but which is not the conception that comes down to us from Aristotle.
As Rachana Kamtekar nicely summarizes the strategy, the character traits
conceived of as debunked by situationist social psychological studies have very
little to do with character as it is conceived of in traditional virtue ethics.
Traditional virtue ethics offers a conception of character far superior to the
one under attack by situationism.80 In addition to Kamtekar, Michael De-
Paul, Joel Kupperman, Christine Swanton, Diana Fleming, Jonathan Webber,
Lorraine Besser-Jones, Kristjn Kristjnsson, Steven Lukes, and Julia Annas
have also employed this strategy.81
What are supposed to be some of the features of character traits on a more
charitable understanding of the Aristotelian framework? Following Kamte-
kars presentation, we need to start with the virtues in particular, which are
78
For (most of) the articles, see DePaul 1999, Athanassoulis 2000, Kupperman 2001, 2009,
Sreenivasan 2002, 2008, Annas 2003, Montmarquet 2003, Solomon 2003, Tucker 2004, Kamte-
kar 2004, Sabini and Silver 2005, Samuels and Casebeer 2005, Fleming 2006, Webber 2006a,
2006b, 2007a, 2007b, Winter and Tauer 2006, Wielenberg 2006, Arjoon 2008, Kristjnsson 2008,
Besser-Jones 2008, Flanagan 2009, Prinz 2009, Slingerland 2011, and Railton 2011. For (most of)
the books, see Adams 2006, Upton 2009a, Russell 2009, and Snow 2010. See also Swanton 2003:
303 and Annas 2011: 1726. For my own earlier attempt at criticism, see Miller 2003.
79
One response I do not consider is to appeal to research on the Big Five as support for the
existence of moral character traits. So far as I know, no philosopher has developed this response
at length in print. Perhaps this is wise, for reasons I have provided in chapter six. For additional
criticism of such a potential response, see Prinz 2009: 1202 and Railton 2011: 3014.
80
Kamtekar 2004: 460.
81
See DePaul 1999: 14950, Kupperman 2001: 2413, Annas 2003: 13, 2011: 1726, Swanton
2003: 303, Fleming 2006: 38, Webber 2006b: 2058, 2007b: 431, Besser-Jones 2008: 31328,
Kristjnsson 2008: 6771, and Lukes 2009: 293. Not everyone on this list is committed to a
traditional Aristotelian form of virtue ethics in general (such as Swanton), but in the context of
responding to Harman and Doris they are all suggesting that the kinds of claims which, as a
matter of fact, would be accepted by Aristotelian virtue ethicists have not been adequately
addressed.
dispositions to respond appropriatelyin judgment, feeling, and actionto
ones situation.82 According to Aristotle, they require practical wisdom, a
disposition to deliberate well about what conduces to the good life in gen-
eral.83 And they can give rise to consistent behavior, but where consistency
is to be understood in terms of the individuals own goals, constraints, options,
and the like.84
Kamtekar has much more to say in spelling out this picture of virtue in
detail, as do the others mentioned above. But I do not need those details for
my purposes. Nor do I need to entertain the question of whether in fact
Harman and Doris were employing a distinct and less charitable understand-
ing of character in criticizing virtue ethics. I will just suppose that they were.
The immediate problem with this strategy for responding is that the alterna-
tive picture of virtue that is being presented does not fare any better (and
perhaps, fares even worse) than the original account that Harman and Doris
had in mind. For given the experimental evidence, most people do not seem to
come close to approximating Kamtekars conditions for being virtuous.85 They
sometimes do not respond appropriately even when the opportunity to do so
is obvious and relatively costless, and if they do, their judgments or feelings are
frequently not morally praiseworthy.
At one point Kamtekar seems to even concede the insufciency of her
response when she anticipates the objection that the experiments nd people
inconsistent in situations where behavior consistency would not be maladap-
tive, or particularly difcult; it is easy to see, and the virtuous person would
surely see, that one should defy the experimenter [in the Milgram experiment]
rather than continuing to shock an experimental subject.86 This objection
seems exactly right to me, and so too does her response that perhaps there
was no virtuous person among the subjects of these experiments: if virtue
requires practical wisdom, one would expect virtuous persons to be rare.87
But this is just to accept the rarity response from the previous section, and for
that there does not need to be a discussion of different conceptions of virtue.88
The Wrong Conception of Character Response, Part Two. Perhaps Aristo-
telian accounts of character are indeed empirically inadequate with respect to
most of us. But it does not follow that all conceptions of character involving
global character traits fall victim to the same problem. For instance, Maria
82 83 84
Kamtekar 2004: 477. Kamtekar 2004: 480. Kamtekar 2004: 485.
85
Although I will not argue for this here, it seems clear to me that much the same applies to
the other views of virtue offered in the works cited in footnote 81.
86
Kamtekar 2004: 4845.
87
Kamtekar 2004: 485.
88
For a helpful elaboration of the wrong conception of character response, followed by a
closely related objection, see Adams 2006: 121 and Sosa 2009: 2803. For additional criticism of
this response, see Prinz 2009: 1267, Badhwar 2009: 2645, Doris 2010: 1404, and Merritt et al.
2010: 35860.
Merritt argues for the plausibility of a Humean account, Eric Wielenberg for a
Kantian account, and Edward Slingerland for a Confucian account.89
I will not comment on the comparative plausibility of these alternative
accounts of character (and specically virtue) in relation to the Aristotelian
approach. Here I am only interested in whether they offer conditions for being
virtuous which obtain any more regularly as a matter of fact than the Aristo-
telian conditions do. While I do not want to take the space to consider each of
these approaches in detail, my view is that none of them ends up implying
that, given the evidence from psychology, there is anything approaching
widespread possession of the virtues as the approach understands them.
Indeed, Wielenberg seems to admit as much when he writes that, despite his
alternative Kantian approach, Doriss experiments in the end are compatible
with the ancient idea that virtue is rare but real.90 And the same is true for
Slingerland: it is an open question whether or not one could achieve an
effective enough combination of virtue training and situational control within
the context of modern, secular democracy.91
The Mental States are Important Too Response. One common interpret-
ation of situationist arguments of the kind that Harman and Doris also seem
to accept is that it is situational forces which primarily inuence behavior,
rather than a persons traits or even ordinary mental states such as beliefs
and desires.92 John Sabini and Maury Silver, in a 2005 paper, respond to such
arguments by closely re-examining the central studies in question, in par-
ticular the Milgram studies, the Asch conformity studies, the Latan and
Darley bystander studies, and the Darley and Batson seminary study. One
conclusion that they draw from all these studies is that mental states did
89
See Merritt 2000, Wielenberg 2006: 466, 469, and Slingerland 2011. Robert Adams at times
seems to employ this kind of response as well (see, e.g. his 2006: 1318).
90
Wielenberg 2006: 490.
91
Slingerland 2011: 418. On Slingerlands reading, the normative requirements involved in
the early Confucian concept of virtue are highly demanding, and so necessitate intensive, life-
long, highly regimented training (2011: 404, see also 413). To his credit, Slingerland does devote
the second half of his paper to briey highlighting different strategies from within that tradition
for cultivating these virtues.
Consider as well Merritts Humean approach. Following the initial discussion of her view in
n. 76, the Humean approach denies the Aristotelian demand of the motivational self-sufciency
of character, and instead claims that if an otherwise admirable structure of motivation were
stable in a person only because it was in large part socially sustained, it would be no less a genuine
virtue for that (2000: 378). In this respect, I agree that the Humean view will have an easier time
being empirically adequate. But of course, that is only one condition for being virtuous out of
many. And the view does not fare any better with respect to the four features (i) through (iv) that
were outlined in stating the realism challenge. So overall it seems to me to do little better
on empirical grounds than its Aristotelian rivals.
92
See, e.g. Ross and Nisbett 1991: 59 and Sabini and Silver 2005: 5468. This claim about
situational forces was considered at length with respect to the psychology literature in chapter
four.
indeed have an important role to play in explaining the behavior exhibited by
participants;93 in particular, people who must act in such circumstances are
confused and inhibited by the anticipation of embarrassment, and that we argue
is the lesson to be drawn from social psychological research. People are also,
we suggest, unaware of how potent fear of embarrassment is as a motivation
for behavior.94
I do not need to evaluate the plausibility of this explanation.95 What I want
to examine here is only what Sabini and Silver think follows if their explan-
ation is correct. The answer seems to be an initial picture of our actual
character that, in broad outline, is very similar to my own. For instance,
they conclude that mental states do play an important role in producing
morally relevant behavior. They also accept that such behavior is affected by
features of the immediate situation which are not in themselves of moral
signicance.96 So we seem to agree that character exists, that it is grounded in
mental state dispositions, and that it is not often virtuous.
The obvious question that remains, however, is thisare the points made
by Sabini and Silver sufcient as a response on behalf of virtue ethics to the
Harman/Doris challenge? It would be one thing if they never claimed to be
addressing the relevance of situationism to virtue ethics. But Sabini and Silver
explicitly state at the very beginning of their article that their overall aim is to
show that virtue ethics can survive the challenge from social psychology.97
Yet surprisingly, as far as I can tell the only place where they end up
addressing this aim is in the nal footnote of their paper, where almost as
an afterthought they note that:
A question remains: does our narrow conception save virtue ethics? Advocates
of virtue ethics have always understood that the application of virtue requires
the exercise of practical intelligence. We think that the import of the social
inuence studies is that the exercise of practical intelligence is, in specic
circumstances, harder than the commonsense view expects. This fact might
give us reason to believe that virtuous characters are rarer than we might have
imagined, but it does not trouble the notion of character or show that virtue is
unattainable.98
93
For a similar line of response, see Kupperman 2001: 2457, Solomon 2003: 48, 56, and
Wielenberg 2006: 47190, although in Wielenbergs case he is out to defend a Kantian rather
than an Aristotelian approach to character. For criticism, see Prinz 2009: 1245.
94
Sabini and Silver 2005: 559. Wielenberg 2006: 486 endorses this proposal.
95
But I also agree with Lee Ross that a lot of research in the situationist tradition involves
interpersonal factors that could hardly be termed embarrassment or face-saving (2001: 39). See
also Merritt et al. 2010: 3679 for a similar point. For other criticisms of the Sabini and Silver
proposal, see Russell 2009: 288 and Alfano 2011: 125.
96
Sabini and Silver 2005: 561.
97 98
Sabini and Silver 2005: 536. Sabini and Silver 2005: 562 n. 59.
And this just takes us back to the same response, and the same unresolved
challenge, from the previous section.
The CAPS Response. An emerging trend in the philosophy literature to
respond to Harman and Doris has been to draw on Walter Mischel and
companys work on the CAPS model that was examined in detail in
chapter ve. I might have been the rst one in print to try to use this model
as a basis for responding, and recently Daniel Russell and Nancy Snow have
devoted signicant portions of recent monographs to doing the same.99
It should be easy to guess why I have since soured on this response. For one
thing, in chapter ve I argued at length that the CAPS model just uses
technical language to re-describe and nd supporting evidence for basic
platitudes of commonsense folk psychology. Now to be fair, Harman and
Doris have called into question certain specic folk commitments concerning
the possession of traditional virtues and vices. So if the CAPS model ends up
vindicating other folk platitudes about the role of clusters of beliefs and desires
across time and situations, then at least it holds out the promise of providing a
defense of the possession of the traditional virtues and vices which starts from
an empirically secure foundation.100
But, and this is my second point, the CAPS model by itself does nothing to
support the widespread possession of either the traditional virtues or vices.
Even if it could be argued (as I did in chapter ve) that the CAPS model
supports the existence of some character traits or other, that does nothing to
show that the possession of the virtues or vices is any more empirically
adequate. For all we are told, the CAPS model could be used to support my
Mixed Trait framework, or a local trait approach instead. Indeed, advocates of
CAPS like to emphasize the high degree of within-person variability exhibited
by each persons behavior from one situation to the next. It is true that they
could quickly point out that such variability is compatible with a high degree
of cross-situational consistency with respect to features of the situation which
are psychologically relevant to the person in question (as opposed to nominal
features). But in order to vindicate the possession of the moral virtues, it needs
to be shown that at least for some people, those features are also the morally
appropriate ones. Throughout my work I have raised numerous doubts about
99
See Miller 2003, Russell 2009: chapters eight to ten, and Snow 2010: chapter one. For a
brief connection, see also Adams 2006: 1318. Slingerland calls the CAPS model a version of
situationism (2011: 395), as does Russell throughout his discussion (2009: chapters eight to ten),
but this is a claim that many psychologists would strongly reject, including Mischel himself. See
the beginning of chapter ve.
100
Even so, my concern from chapter ve was that the CAPS model is not a theoretical
advance over commonsense. For instance, it does not seem to generate new predictions beyond
what careful reection on our folk platitudes would suggest. It also does not appear to provide a
simpler conceptual framework, nor does it offer any additional explanatory insight. Thanks to
Jonathan Webber for helpful discussion here.
whether most people are in fact consistently responding to the morally
appropriate features of situations.101
Finally, I noted earlier that there is much disagreement among CAPS
theorists about how to understand trait dispositions, with Wright and Mischel
in one place even rejecting the causal view and so denying that traits have
causal powers, are grounded in psychological structures, and play an explana-
tory role in behavior. But presumably no advocate of standard philosophical
conceptions of virtue or vice would be willing to go in this direction. To do so
would require a highly revisionary account.102
The Deciencies of Particular Experiments for Evaluating Character Re-
sponse. Another common strategy has been to argue that, for various reasons,
the central experiments cited by Harman and Doris do not in fact lend support
to thinking that the participants in question either did or did not have a given
traditional virtue.
For instance, Gopal Sreenivasan considers at length the Hartshorne and
May (1928) experiments on stealing, lying, and cheating, and raises a number
of doubts about whether they can tell us much about the extent to which those
participants possessed the virtue of honesty. To take just one of his points, the
situation Hartshorne and May used to test lying behavior was one in which
the intention to mislead serves to achieve a genuine good, namely, preventing
another child from getting into trouble.103 Sreenivasan then notes that this
serves as a highly contestable behavioral measure of honestytelling a lie in
such a situation could in fact be justied.104 In an earlier paper, I raised
concerns about the Isen and Levin (1972) phone booth experiment.105 Others
have questioned the relevance of the Milgram experiments and the Darley and
101
For a similar criticism, see Doris 2002: 7685 and Alfano 2011: 128. For a response to
Doris on behalf of virtue ethics and the CAPS model, see Russell 2009: 32331. But as far as I can
tell, Russell does not supply any empirical evidence to show that people are reliably sensitive to
morally appropriate features of situations, and so I am not clear how he does in fact purport to
meet Doriss challenge. Instead, he seems to be primarily interested in showing that his version of
Aristotelian virtue ethics is compatible with the CAPS model, rather than showing that anyone
actually does (or could in a psychologically realistic manner) live up to its standards. See in
particular Russell 2009: 3301.
102
At the end of chapter ve, I did argue that the CAPS model can and indeed should accept a
causal view of trait dispositions. Presumably philosophers like Russell and Snow would try to
offer similar arguments on behalf of virtue ethics. In fact, Snow did just this at the 2011 American
Philosophical Association Pacic Division Meeting during an author-meets-critics session on
her 2010 book. So this nal concern in the text above is one that advocates of the CAPS response
need to address in detail, but one for which they can come up with plausible responses.
103
Sreenivasan 2002: 59.
104
Sreenivasan 2002: 60. For other concerns, see Flanagan 1991: 291, Kamtekar 2004: 466 n.
30, Sabini and Silver 2005: 5404, Sreenivasan 2008, and Kristjnsson 2008: 623. To be fair to
Doris, he never used the Hartshorne and May studies as evidence for the conclusions
I summarized in section one (2002: 63; see also Webber 2006b: 1978).
105
See Miller 2003, 2009a and Moral Character, chapter three. See also Montmarquet 2003:
366 n. 17, Kristjnsson 2008: 63, and Snow 2010: 1012.
Batson seminary experiment as measures of the extent to which those partici-
pants possessed the virtue of compassion.106
This line of response might initially look to be promising. If the concerns
are legitimate, then they can call into question the main grounds Harman and
Doris provide for being skeptical about the widespread possession of trad-
itional virtues. Thus, whatever exactly their challenge is supposed to be to
virtue ethics, it would not even be able to get off the ground.
The concerns raised by Sreenivasan and others about the details of these
particular experiments are often, in my opinion, worth taking seriously. I will
not pause here to evaluate each of them, and indeed in fact agree with many of
the points that have been raised.107 This explains why in constructing my
positive theory of moral character, I have largely refrained from appealing to
these particular studies (with the exception of Milgram), even though they
have received so much attention in the philosophy literature. Instead, I have
tried to amass an extensive array of other studies of morally relevant behavior
with a specic eye to avoiding the same concerns. For instance, in the studies
I have used involving participants who failed to help even when the need was
apparent, there did not appear to be any stronger reason or greater good which
at the time could morally justify their not helping. Thus, while the particular
evidence Harman and Doris have provided to be skeptical about the wide-
spread possession of traditional virtues might be suspect in some instances, in
my opinion there is more than ample evidence from elsewhere in psychology
to arrive at the same conclusion.108
After examining the work of Hartshorne and May, Sreenivasan offers three
general requirements which, in his view, a behavioural measure must satisfy
in order properly to operationalize a character trait:109
(i) Each behavioural measure must specify a response that represents a
central or paradigm case of what that trait requires.
(ii) The concrete situation each species must not have any features that
defeat the reason on account of which that trait requires the response
in question; and
106
On Darley and Batson, see Flanagan 1991: 302, Sreenivasan 2002: 601, Annas 2003: 14,
Adams 2006: 147, and Snow 2010: 1037. On Milgram, see Athanassoulis 2000: 21617, 21920,
Swanton 2003: 301, Montmarquet 2003: 3656, Kristjnsson 2008: 63, Sreenivasan 2008:
60611, Kupperman 2009: 246, and Snow 2010: 11116. On Zimbardos prison experiment,
see Webber 2006b: 1967. For general discussion of this line of response, see Montmarquet 2003:
3658, Fleming 2006: 389, Arjoon 2008: 231, Upton 2009a: 80, and Russell 2009: 27987.
107
Although for a recent defense of the Milgram experiments and the Darley and Batson
seminary experiment from many of these concerns, see Russell 2009: 27987.
108
As we have seen in chapter three. See also Moral Character, Parts Two and Four.
109
Sreenivasan 2002: 61.
(iii) The subject and the observer must agree on these characterizations of
the specied responses and situations.110
The rst requirement seems straightforward and obviously right. The idea
behind the second requirement is that it is no failing of a persons possessing
the virtue of compassion, for instance, if in a particular instance he responds to
a weightier moral reason for him to not help rather than help. This require-
ment also seems plausiblethe situation above from Hartshorne and May
involving lying to prevent another person from getting in trouble could serve
as an example which violates this requirement and so calls into question the
usefulness of this part of their experimental design with respect to testing for
the possession of honesty. Finally, the third requirement emphasizes the
importance of the participants point of view and not just the experimenters,
which is something that I stressed in chapter two.
Now I am certainly not going to take the time to apply these standards to
the studies I have cited in my work, such as in chapter three. But I hope it is
plain enough that at least many of them do respect these requirements, and
hence in my view provide better evidence for the same empirical conclusion
that Harman and Doris also advanced.111
The Competing Virtues Response. This nal approach to be considered
here is an extension of the previous strategy. Perhaps the studies cited by
Harman and Doris do not really show the rarity of the virtues, but just serve to
illustrate how we can have multiple virtues at work (whether moral or non-
moral) that can be outweighed by each other. Virtues are character traits,
character traits are dispositions, and dispositions can be masked by out-
weighing forces.112 For instance, perhaps many participants in the standard
Milgram experiment still had the virtue of compassion, as evidenced by the
various signs of inward struggle and conict, but simply had it outweighed by
110
Sreenivasan 2002: 612, emphasis his. For criticism of these three requirements, see
Montmarquet 2003: 3589, although I think Sreenivasan could come up with plausible replies.
See also Webber 2006a.
111
Sreenivasan claims that What a theory of virtue presupposes, in my view, is that there is
some non-trivial number of people whose honesty is cross-situationally consistent across a range
of behavioural measures that satisfy all three generic requirements; and likewise for such other
virtues as it recognizes. A theory of virtue committed to some such presupposition is vulnerable
to empirical falsication. I submit, however, that no such theory of virtue has as yet actually been
falsied (2002: 63). Clearly, I disagree. Part of the disagreement may just be terminological
what exactly counts as non-trivial? But part of the disagreement seems to be principledI do
not see why there could not, as a matter of contingent fact, be a time in history when no one
happened to have the virtues. Why would that happen to call into question in any way the best
theory of virtue or the truth of the leading virtue ethical approaches? For a similar point, see
Fleming 2006: 27.
112
For recent discussion of masking and dispositions, see Manley and Wasserman 2008. The
use of the language of masking is not intended to correspond exactly to how that terminology
is used in the metaphysics of dispositions literature, where it can refer to cases where the
disposition is not manifested or activated at all in the rst place.
other virtues such as trust, obedience, or cooperativeness. Similarly perhaps
participants in the Good Samaritan experiment had their compassion out-
weighed by the virtues of punctuality or responsibility. And so on for the other
experiments.113
I admit there is some plausibility to this strategyone should not immedi-
ately infer a lack of virtue in these particular experiments if there is a coherent
and defensible competing hypothesis about how one virtue can mask another.
In order to evaluate the hypothesis adequately, empirical predictions need to
be generated and then assessed using an array of additional studies. For
instance, the competing virtues response would predict that:
(a) In moderately demanding situations relevant to helping where (i) there are no
competing virtues at work, (ii) the need for help is obvious, and (iii) the effort
involved is minimal, most participants will likely help and do so from
compassionate motives.
But this prediction does not hold up well in light of the data, as hundreds of
studies on helping have involved ordinary situations in which the majority of
control participants do not help.114
In addition, Aristotelian views typically make a connection between virtue
and practical wisdom. But if having the virtues requires having practical
wisdom, and if part of what practical wisdom involves is that:
(W) A person with practical wisdom is disposed so as to be reliably motivated to
act in a way that is appropriately responsive to the good reasons there are to
act in a given set of circumstances.115
then studies like the Milgram and Princeton seminary experiments do suggest
that many of these participants did not have the virtues after all, because they
clearly did not exhibit practical wisdom. Naturally the reasons in favor of not
shocking to death an innocent test-taker outweigh the reasons for obeying the
experimenter, and naturally the reasons in favor of checking on someone
slumped over against a wall outweigh giving a lecture as part of a study. These
are serious breakdowns in practical reasoning that, given enough similar
113
See, e.g. Solomon 2003: 53, 556, Swanton 2003: 31, Kamtekar 2004: 473, Webber 2007b:
431, Kristjnsson 2008: 645, Lukes 2009: 294, and Snow 2010: 106.
114
For some of these studies, see Moral Character, Part Two. Of course it is open to the
advocate of this response to claim that in the studies, there were always competing virtues which
were in fact outweighing compassion. This is a possible move, but now one might worry that the
view starts to look empirically unfalsiable. In addition, Daniel Russell makes the nice point
about the Milgram and Darley and Batson studies that the question was never whether the
subjects faced conicting pressuresthe experiment was designed to ensure that they didbut
whether their supposed behavioral dispositions would be elicited by forces that were intuitively
stronger than the opposing forces (2009: 286, emphasis his).
115
Ernest Sosa expresses a similar point when he writes that one manifests practical wisdom
in any given situation to the degree that ones motivational structure reects the relevant rational
structure in that situation (2009: 282).
studies, call into question how widespread the possession of practical wisdom
is, and so thereby, at least according to traditional Aristotelian views, the
virtues themselves. The upshot of this last concern is that the competing
virtues response is too quick to assume that there is a conict of virtues,
without some good reason for thinking that the participants have practical
wisdom in the rst place.
Even regardless of any connection to practical wisdom, the virtues as
traditionally understood are expected to enable a person to recognize and be
appropriately motivated by morally relevant considerations. A compassionate
person, for instance, is expected to recognize and be appropriately motivated
to address a close friends suffering. A non-malevolent person is similarly
expected to recognize that his behavior is causing harm to, say, his spouse and
be appropriately motivated to stop doing it. Yet clearly participants were not
functioning in these ways in, say, the standard Milgram setup, as well as in
dozens of other studies of moral behavior.116
8. 5 CON CLU SI ON
Of course none of these responses needs to be given in isolation. In fact and in

contrast to what my presentation of them may have misleadingly suggested,
many of the philosophers mentioned above often combined their responses in
a variety of ways. But in my view, even these combined responses do not help
the virtue ethicist unless the rarity response from section three is included
in the combination. And the rarity response still leaves us with the realism
challenge.
116
For further development of this line of reasoning involving practical wisdom, see Moral
Character, chapter seven, section seven. For additional criticism of the competing virtues strategy
when applied to the Milgram and Darley and Batson studies, see Harman 2003: 91, Prinz 2009:
123, and Russell 2009: 2823, 286.
Part IV
The Next Step
9
Looking Forward
At the end of the last chapter, we were left with a serious challenge which
I called the realism challenge. Most of us believe that cultivating the virtues is
important to living a morally excellent life, and so I think we should care about
how to address this challenge. In addition, most leading ethical theories take
the virtues to be important, and so it is not just the Aristotelian virtue ethicist
who will have to face this challenge head on.
Naturally a proper treatment of moral education and character develop-
ment would need another book entirely, one which considers still further
areas of the psychology literature. But in this nal chapter, I want to
outline in a preliminary way some of the strategies that, for the time
being, seem to me to show some promise. I will divide them into two
typesstrategies for the cultivation of a particular virtue, in this case the
virtue of compassion, and strategies for the cultivation of the virtues in
general. I will not be claiming that the strategies I mention below are the
only promising ones.
9.1 CULTIVATING THE VIRTUE OF COMPASSION
My hunch is that the most promising strategy for addressing the realism
challenge is to examine each virtue on a case-by-case basis. Since each virtue
is grounded in its own distinctive mental state dispositions, the challenge
becomes determining how best to cultivate each of these particular dispos-
itions over time and in a gradual manner. Here I will just focus on the virtue of
compassion.
The central mental state dispositions with respect to the virtue of
compassion, in my view, have to do with the motivation to help other
people in need:
(C) The virtue of compassion gives rise to compassionate motivation to help
another person, and that motivation is altruistic motivation to help which is
ultimately aimed at the good of another person for his or her own sake.1
If this is right, then I think we should turn to the psychology literature to see
what, if any, psychological processes might help cultivate altruistic motivation
to help.
Empathy. One natural answer is empathetic processes. According to Daniel
Batsons empathy-altruism hypothesis, empathy evokes motivation directed
toward the ultimate goal of reducing the needy persons suffering; the more
empathy felt for a person in need, the more altruistic motivation to have that
need reduced.2 Over the course of the past thirty years, Batson has repeatedly
found results which are consistent with this hypothesis and inconsistent with
competing empathy-egoism hypotheses. So there is good reason at this point
to examine ways of fostering empathy in order to develop one of the central
building blocks for the virtue of compassion. Indeed, at this point empathy
looks to be the only hope for cultivating this virtue, as no other altruism
hypothesis in psychology has much support.3
Suppose the empathy-altruism hypothesis is correct. Then the prospects for
cultivating the virtue of compassion might seem promising, since so many of
us are already disposed to feel empathy towards others in a variety of different
situations. Perhaps all that is neededat least as far as the motivational story
about compassion is concernedis just to work towards cultivating our
empathetic capacities to a greater extent.
But we know that matters are more complicated than this. In particular, in
Moral Character I said that:4
Many of us are motivated to avoid empathy. By implicitly knowing that empathy
can lead us to help someone in need, we can be motivated to avoid this feeling in
the rst place so as to not bear the helping burden.
Empathy-induced motivation is extremely fragile. Empathetic feelings are such
that participants in relevant studies become easily distracted from thinking about
what another person in need is feeling. When made to think about themselves
instead, not only will these participants typically lose altruistic motivation to help,
but any remaining motivation will ordinarily become self-interested.
Empathy is highly partial. Research has found that, among participants today,
empathy is often highly partial to the group membership of the person(s) in need,
in a way that is morally problematic.
1 2
For more, see Moral Character, chapter two. Batson 2002: 92.
3
For a similar claim, see Batson et al. 2003a: 287. For brief suggestions of another possibility,
see Grusec and Redler 1980: 529 and also Batson 2011: 9.
4
See chapter ve.
Looking Forward 229
Empathy can lead to immoral behavior. Empathy can give rise to helping behavior
that is morally acceptable, but it can also lead people away from behaving
morally, and even by their own moral principles. It seems to be, not a moral or
an immoral emotion, but a non-moral or morally neutral one.
Each of these four observations suggests that there is a realism challenge
specically with respect to the virtue of compassion and our ability to attain
it by cultivating our empathetic dispositions.
Of course, this too is only a challenge and not an objection. More precisely,
the primary challenge with respect to the virtue of compassion, in my opinion,
is to outline concrete ways in which each of these four obstacles can be
overcome on the path to becoming a compassionate person. Much additional
work is needed here.5
Elevation. In Moral Character I also briey discussed the emotion of eleva-
tion, which can result from an appreciation of something morally relevant
about another person (e.g. her moral behavior, motivation, or character). I said
that there is initial support for an elevation-helping hypothesis, whereby the
former can give rise to increased performance of the latter. And I mentioned
that little work has been done to examine the nature of this motivation to help,
but that the following desires have all been postulated in the literature:
My desire to be a better person morally and to act better.
My desire that I act virtuously or live the life of a virtuous person.
My desire that there be more charity, benevolence, or kindness promoted in
the world.
My desire to help people in general.
My desire to love other people in general.
My desire to afliate myself more closely with and emulate those who are
morally virtuous or admirable.6
Now some of these desiressuch as the rst one to be a better person
morallyare what I consider to be moralistic desires rather than altruistic
ones, since they are not concerned ultimately with what benets another
person. But other of these desiressuch as the desire to love other people
can plausibly count as altruistic desires.
So the idea here is thatif elevation leads to increased helping by giving rise
to altruistic desires for the good of other peopleone strategy for aiding in the
development of the virtue of compassion is to increasingly promote the stories
of moral exemplars and their helpful acts. These can be stories about actual
people such as Mother Theresa, or stories about ctional people such as
Sydney Carton. Furthermore, as Simone Schnall and her colleagues note,
5
For one project designed to foster empathy in school children, see Batson 2011: 1767.
6
For references to discussions of these desires, see Moral Character, chapter four.
creating an empathic connection is often difcult in large societies character-
ized by anonymity and cultural heterogeneity. In contrast . . . it is relatively
easy to publicize acts of moral excellence . . . [B]y eliciting elevation, even brief
exposure to other individuals prosocial behavior motivates [altruistic behav-
ior], thus potentially providing an avenue for increasing the general level of
prosociality in society.7
Of course, this is a big if, and much further work in psychology is needed
before I think we can be very condent about this strategy. Furthermore, note
that there is nothing which says that elevation has to be limited just to
promoting helping. An emotion of elevation can foster a desire to improve
in various areas of ones life, such as by becoming more honest like Abraham
Lincoln or more courageous like Joan of Arc. So this strategy might be of use
in developing other virtues as well.
9.2 CULTIVATING THE VIRTUES IN GENERAL
While I have stated my hunch that the most promising strategy to use in
addressing the realism challenge is to focus on what it takes to cultivate each
virtue individually, there also do seem to be various strategies which might be
useful more generally for fostering the virtues as such. Here I just mention a
few of them.8
Models of Moral Behavior. It has long been a theme in both lay and
philosophical thinking about cultivating the virtues that models of virtue
should play a signicant role. What exactly this role might be is not easy to
say. It could, for instance, involve actually seeing a person in front of you
demonstrate what it is to act virtuously in a given situation. Or it could involve
news reports of what others are doing today, or historical records of how
people have handled difcult situations in a virtuous manner in the past.
These kinds of models are all based in the actual world. But many have
stressed the use of what might be called counterfactual modelsthinking
about how a given person of strong moral character would behave in a
particular situation can give us guidance as to what I should do as well. For
instance here is Epictetus: When you are about to meet someone, especially
someone who seems to be distinguished, put to yourself the question, What
would Socrates or Zeno have done in these circumstances? and you will not be
7
Schnall et al. 2010: 319.
8
In addition to the strategies which follow, another one worth investigating is attributing
virtue labels to people, which was discussed at length in chapter seven as a means to increase the
relevant kind of virtuous behavior. However, I also noted there that it is far too early to know
whether such a procedure would really be instrumental in cultivating actual virtuous traits,
rather than just (perhaps short-lived) virtuous behavior.
Looking Forward 231
at a loss as to how to deal with the occasion.9 Today that specic question
might not be as common as it once was, but most of us have seen the WWJD
(What Would Jesus Do?) wristbands that some Christians wear. We can also
look to narratives, works of ction, stories, plays, poetry, movies, television
programs, and the like to nd still other instances of models of morally
appropriate (and, of course, inappropriate) behavior.10 Finally note that all
of the above pertains to models of specic actions. But a certain persons life
(whether actual or ctional) can serve as a powerful model as well for the type
of person I might strive to become.11
There is a longstanding literature on models in the psychology literature,
especially with respect to helping.12 Stephen Holloway and his colleagues, for
instance, found that participants who had just been exposed to a news report
involving someone bringing about good in the world, were more cooperative
in one round of a nonzero-sum game, as compared both with participants
who heard a news report involving a person doing great harm, as well as
other participants who heard reports about good or bad events brought
about solely by natural forces.13 John Wilson and Richard Petruska, drawing
on the group-effect literature, staged an ambiguous accident in the room
next to where a participant was working, followed by a confederate crying
out in pain that he had broken his foot. Helping behavior was evaluated on a
scale of 1 to 10 with 1 = staying in your seat and saying nothing, and 10 =
walking in the other room and offering assistance. Participants in the
presence of an active model (who looked up from his work and said,
Jesus, what was that? and walked into the control room and asked, What
happened? Are you okay? Let me help you! 14) helped at a mean level of
9.05, while those with a passive model (who remained in his seat and
essentially ignored the crash15) helped at a mean level of 6.21.16 Finally,
J. Philippe Rushton and Anne Campbell found that, when a model rst
signed up for a blood donation, 18 of 27 participants did so as well, and
nine of them actually went through with the donation later, compared to
none of the participants who actually donated blood in the no-model
9
Epictetus 1983: 33.1213.
10
For an interesting discussion by a psychologist of stories and moral development, see Vitz
1990. According to Vitz, a very effective way to introduce children to the moral life, short of
actually placing them in morally challenging situations, is to have them hear, read, or watch
morally challenging narratives (1990: 716). See also Coles 1986 for the role of Biblical stories
during desegregation in the 1960s.
11
For philosophical discussion of the importance of moral models and exemplars, see
Aristotle 1991: 1388a3035, Hursthouse 1999: 356, Kamtekar 2004: 487, Kristjnsson 2008:
72, Annas 2011: 23, and Slingerland 2011: 41112.
12
For modeling and aggression, see Adelson 1969: 240 for a review of early studies. For a
review of early studies with a focus on helping, see Krebs 1970: 26777.
13 14
Holloway et al. 1977. Wilson and Petruska 1984: 461.
15 16
Wilson and Petruska 1984: 462. Wilson and Petruska 1984: 464.
condition.17 So these studies, and plenty of others besides them, provide
good initial support for this strategy to improve ones actions and
character.18
Admittedly, it seems that many cases of modeling-inuenced moral behav-
ior could involve some process of elevation as well, and so the difference
between these two strategies may not be clear. One proposal is that models can
have the effect they do through cognitive mechanisms such as modeling,
priming, self-perception, or changes in social outlook,19 whereas elevation is
more of an emotional rather than a cognitive response. But at the end of the
day I have no stake in maintaining that there is a signicant difference
between these two strategies.
While cognitive mechanisms are commonly cited in the literature on
models, there does not yet seem to be a detailed account of how they
function.20 Without such an account, it is difcult to evaluate the moral
worth of the motivation which arises from exposure to models to see whether
it is compatible with virtuous motivation.21 So here too much more needs to
be done.
Increase the Salience of Moral Norms. In the discussion of cheating in
chapter three, I noted that participants in controlled studies who were given
an opportunity to cheat without any risk of getting caught, typically did so
at least to a limited extent. At the same time, they seemed to be morally
17
Rushton and Campbell 1977: 303. Similarly Cashton Spivey and Steven Prentice-Dunn
(1990) report that participants who, in person, saw a model donate money to an experimental
assistant at a high level during 20 trials of a particular task, were themselves much more likely to
do so at a comparatively high level.
18
See also Bandura and McDonald 1963, Bryan and Test 1967, Rosenhan and White 1967,
White 1972, Hornstein et al. 1975, Mischel and Mischel 1976: 188, 1912, 2023, Rushton and
Campbell 1977: 298, Peterson 1982, Aronson and OLeary 1983, Ross and Nisbett 1991: 223, and
Simkin and McLeod 2010: 450.
In chapter three, it was briey noted that one of the main variables inuencing academic
cheating is the perception of peer cheating (Smith et al. 1972: 655, Haines et al. 1986: 3501,
McCabe and Trevio 1993: 5278, 5323, 1997: 3834, 3912, Newstead et al. 1996: 233, 239,
McCabe et al. 2001: 222, Taradi et al. 2010: 669, DeSteno and Valdesolo 2011: 1725, and
especially ORourke et al. 2010). A plausible psychological explanation for this effect seems
clearly related to the role of models and the inuence of examples.
19
Algoe and Haidt 2009: 106, my emphasis.
20
For modeling and social outlook, for instance, see Holloway et al. 1977.
21
In addition, there is some evidence that modeling effects do not generalize beyond the
situation or environment in which the modeling occurred, a result which would not be condu-
cive to the cultivation of cross-situationally consistent moral virtues. See, e.g. Grusec, Saas-
Kortsaak, and Simutis 1978 and Grusec and Redler 1980: 529. On the other hand, Albert
Bandura and Frederick McDonald report that the ndings of the present study reveal . . . that
a general class of behavior may be readily acquired through observation of social models and
consequently, the observer responds to new stimulus sensations in a manner consistent with the
models predisposition even though the subject had never observed the model respond to the
same stimuli. These results illustrate the potency of modeling cues for shaping generalized
patterns of social behavior (1963: 281). Clearly this is a topic which needs further study.
Looking Forward 233
opposed to cheating. And if their moral norms were made salient to them,
most of the participants did not cheat. So the challenge is to develop
techniques to make individuals own moral norms more salient to them
on a regular basis so that they can function as enhancers for moral
behavior.22
Techniques for doing so can perhaps be developed by studying the effects of
honor codes. As noted in the same chapter, research suggests that colleges with
a robust honor code that is actually internalized by the student body have
much lower levels of self-reported cheating behavior. Indeed there is some
data to suggest that the effect of an honor code carries on after college into the
workplace as well.23 Furthermore, technically it is not having an honor code
itself which matters. For instance, McCabe and Trevio found that a school
without an honor code had very low rates of cheating because administrators
and faculty clearly conveyed their beliefs about the seriousness of cheating,
communicated expectations regarding high standards of integrity, and en-
couraged students to know and abide by rules of proper conduct.24 This
school was able to create a culture where refraining from cheating was
reinforced and internalized.25 Perhaps a similar model can be extended to
other communities and moral norms as well.
Getting the Word Out. If there are a number of psychological processes
which (i) often operate subconsciously or outside our conscious awareness,
(ii) have important implications for moral behavior, and (iii) can prevent
that behavior from having moral worth or can even lead to the performance
of morally forbidden actions, then a natural strategy to use in trying to
become a more virtuous person is to rst become better aware of and
familiar with these processes. Once we recognize their presence, the thought
is that we can then be more attuned to situations in which they might be
activated, and work to compensate for, correct, or counterbalance them.26
As Aristotle himself noted long ago, We must also examine what we
ourselves drift into easily. For different people have different natural
22
For relevant discussion, see Mazar et al. 2008a, 2008b and Shu et al. 2011.
23
McCabe et al. 1996.
24
McCabe et al. 2001: 224.
25
McCabe and Trevio 1993: 526, 5345. Similarly, they found that a school with a long-
standing honor code had one of the higher rates of cheating, because it turned out that the school
did little to enforce or even communicate it to the students (534).
26
As Steven Samuels and William Casebeer argue, effective deliberation is enhanced by
knowing both how human beings tend to react in certain environments and what stimuli reliably
activate those dispositions . . . Once they are able to see what environmental factors have the
potential to inuence, they may be better prepared to make a decision based on their true beliefs
and feelings (2005: 77). Similarly Mischel and Shoda claim that metacognitive knowledge may
help the person to recognize some of the key internal or external stimuli that activate or
deactivate the problematic affects, cognitions, and behaviors and the dynamics that occur in
relation to those stimuli (1995: 261). See also Sabini and Silver 2005: 562, Appiah 2008: 49,
Badhwar 2009: 266, and Merritt et al. 2010: 3889.
tendencies toward different goals, and we shall come to know our own
tendencies from the pleasure or pain that arises in us. We must drag
ourselves off in the contrary direction; for if we pull far away from error,
as they do in straightening bent wood, we shall reach the intermediate
condition.27 To take an example of how this might go in practice, if we
become aware of the processes responsible for the group effect on helping,
for instance, we might become more alert to the negative moral effect that
non-responding others can have in emergency situations, and so try to
focus more on our moral principles and less on the fear, say, of what others
might think if we tried to help.28
A similar idea would apply, not just to our own morally relevant behavior,
but also to our attributions of traditional moral traits to others. If we better
understand the processes that went into such attributions and the dangers that
might result from making them too hastily, then we might be able to counter
our natural tendencies or use information about how they work as a check on
the judgments we make about other peoples character.29
A study by Lee Ross and his colleagues provides some initial data that is
suggestive of these proposals.30 Participants were presented with 25 cards,
each containing a real and a fake suicide note, and were asked to pick out the
real one. In the success condition, participants were told that they had gotten
24 correct answers, whereas participants in the failure condition were told
they got only 10 correct answers. Participants in each of these groups were
then further divided into a no-debrieng condition, an outcome-debrieng
condition (where they were told that they had actually been randomly
assigned to the success or failure groups), and a process-debrieng condition
(where they received this same outcome information, but also were told
about how psychologically impressions have been found to persevere and
what processes and costs are associated with this perseverance).31 Finally all
participants were given a questionnaire and asked to estimate, among other
things, how many questions the person thinks she would get right if faced
with another, equally difcult set of 25 cards. Here were the results for this
question:32
27
Aristotle 1985: 1109b28.
28
The group effect is discussed in some detail in Moral Character, chapter six.
29
For doubts about how successful this strategy will be, see OSullivan 2003: 13251326 (but
she does advance a positive suggestion which is very much in line with my approach, namely to,
develop more sophisticated dispositional descriptors (1326)).
For related discussion of the above strategy, see Samuels and Casebeer 2005: 7780, although
they put the point in terms of our disposition to commit the fundamental attribution error,
which is unfortunate for the reasons outlined in chapter seven.
30 31 32
See Ross et al. 1975. Ross et al. 1975: 885. Ross et al. 1975: 886.
Looking Forward 235
Predicted number
of correct answers
No debrieng
Success 21.08
Failure 11.42
Outcome debrieng
Success 18.33
Failure 14.25
Process debrieng
Success 16.33
Failure 16.08
Note that with the outcome debrieng, even despite the experimenter stressing to
the subject that her score contained absolutely no information about the subjects
actual task performance,33 still the participants continued to have a mistaken
impression of their own abilities. It was only when they were told about the
psychological processes that can produce such mistaken impressions in the
process debrieng, that it seems they were able to prevent this bias from working.
The hope, then, is that similar education about the work of psychological
biases and subconscious forces with respect to moral behavior can help correct
for their operation. For instance, in two studies Arthur Beaman and his
colleagues had college students hear a social psychology lecture explaining
the Latan and Darley model of group effects. They were subsequently pre-
sented with a staged emergencya victim of a bicycle accident in the one case,
and a man sprawled against a wall in the other. Helping in the presence of a
nonresponsive confederate was 67 percent versus 27 percent for controls in
the rst study, and 42.5 percent versus 25 percent in the second (even though
in this study the helping opportunity was two weeks later than the lecture).34
In a less rigorous study, Steven Samuels and William Casebeer contacted
students from a social psychology class up to two years later, and for the
question, Did learning about helping behaviour lead you to help in any
situation in which you believe you would not have otherwise helped?
72 percent answered positively.35
33 34
Ross et al. 1975: 886. Beaman et al. 1978: 4078, 410.
35
Samuels and Casebeer 2005: 80. Recall, though, that as mentioned in chapter seven even
trained psychiatrists badly underestimated rates of disobedience in the standard Milgram setup
(Milgram 1974: 301), and Bierbrauer found that observance of a re-enactment of full compli-
ance with the experimenter in Milgrams experiment ve still led participants to greatly overesti-
mate levels of disobedience (1979). So this might raise some doubt about the effectiveness of the
educational strategy. However, note that in neither case had the participants been educated about
the psychological processes at work in disposing people to obey seemingly legitimate authority
gures. So these studies do not exactly bear on the proposal above.
Once again, though, the data that is relevant to this strategy for becoming
more virtuous is only at a preliminary stage.36
Selecting Situations. A further extension of the previous strategy is to not
only better understand the psychological processes at work in inuencing
morally relevant behavior, but also to actively seek out those situations
which are conducive to those processes leading to morally admirable behavior,
and to actively avoid those situations which are conducive to those processes
leading to immoral behavior. For instance and drawing on an earlier strategy,
one might actively try to associate with positive role models and surround
oneself with actual and ctional examples of virtuous lives. At the same time,
to take John Doriss well-known example, one might actively avoid a secluded
dinner with a irtatious colleague while ones spouse is out of town.37
This strategy is obviously promising in one sensesurely we should self-
consciously try to put ourselves in positive situations with morally conducive
inuences. It is the avoidance side of the strategy, though, that makes it seem
limited. For it seems overly simplistic to think that we are going to be even
remotely successful in avoiding all the subtle situational inuences that can
translate into signicant effects on behavior. Keep in mind that these environ-
mental variables can include hot weather, pleasant smells, using hand wipes, a
See also Kunda and Nisbett 1986, who found that trained psychologists still badly overesti-
mated the correlations between one person being more honest than another in one situation, and
the same relation obtaining in the next situation. And this was the case even despite Walter
Mischel seated prominently in front of the room! (1986: 210). Yet they concluded that it
would be premature to be pessimistic about the possibility that training might improve peoples
ability (222), and offered some suggestions for improvement (2212).
Perhaps the most serious challenge to the proposal comes from Pietromonaco and Nisbetts
1982 study using the Darley and Batson (1973) seminary results. As mention in chapter seven,
even though they had just read how hurry is a signicant situational variable that led to
differences in helping of 10 percent versus 63 percent, participants in the Pietromonaco and
Nisbett study still estimated that 59 percent of people in a hurry would stop to help in two closely
related situations, while 78 percent of people who are not in a hurry would stop (1982: 3). As
Pietromonaco and Nisbett note, In view of the perseverance of this error, we cannot assume that
students are learning what we want them to learn when evidence presented in class conicts with
their prior assumptions. Social psychologists may face almost unique educational problems:
prior beliefs about such subject matter are so strong that ordinary instructional techniques may
not be adequate (4). However, their experiment did not involve actually educating the partici-
pants about what the fundamental attribution error is and what the psychological processes are
by which it functions. As they note, such a thorough process debrieng along the lines of the
Lee Ross study mentioned in the text above, may be more effective (4).
For relevant discussion, see also Doris 2002: 99100.
36
For related discussion of this strategy, see Staub 1974: 337, Flanagan 1991: 314, Arjoon
2008: 232, Merritt et al. 2010: 3889, and especially Samuels and Casebeer 2005. For more
general discussion of ethics instruction and improved moral behavior especially with respect to
cheating, see Bloodgood et al. 2008 and the references cited therein.
37
Doris 2002: 147. For elaboration of this strategy, although not necessarily in the service of
cultivating the virtues, see Mischel and Shoda 1995: 261, Doris 1998: 517, 2002, Merritt 2000,
Harman 2003: 91, Funder 2008: 575, Sosa 2009: 288, Russell 2009: 327, Merritt et al. 2010:
38991, and Slingerland 2011: 41415.
Looking Forward 237
room cleaned with Windex, someones camera breaking, coming out of the
bathroom, and so forth. These kinds of inuences seem unavoidable.38 And
they are important ones for which we need to develop strategies to appropri-
ately regulate them. At least in cases like the irtatious colleague, the moral
dangers should be obvious to most people.39
There is an interesting variant of this strategy, though. As the psychologist
Paul Wachtel noted long ago, situations do not present themselves to us
independently of our own impact upon them:
The understanding of any one persons behavior in an interpersonal situation
solely in terms of the stimuli presented to him gives only a partial and misleading
picture. For to a very large extent, these stimuli are created by him. They are
responses to his own behavior, events he has played a role in bringing about,
rather than occurrences independent of who he is and over which he has no
control.40
But if this is right, then we can play an active role in creating which situations
to be in, at least to some extent, by choosing how we are going to shape our
environment through both our obvious and subtle behaviors. As Hagop
Sarkissian writes, inuencing how situations unfold begins with minding
the cues arising from ones person.41 So mindfully selecting morally positive
cues might help call forth positive responses in others, which in turn can be
reected back on ourselves, leading to their joint reinforcement.42 I do not
know of any studies which have tested these claims about specically moral
reinforcement, but they certainly seem worth conducting.43
Learning from the Stereotype Literature. A literature which can offer helpful
parallels for a discussion of improving moral character is the literature on
stereotype activation and control.44 The most immediate parallel, I suspect, is
to our attributions of traditional character traits to others. Stereotypes are used
as shorthand heuristic devices. As C. Neil Macrae and his colleagues write,
38
For these specic inuences, see Moral Character, chapters two through six.
39
For additional criticism of this strategy, see Sabini and Silver 2005: 561 and Sarkissian 2010: 5.
40
Wachtel 1973: 330, emphasis removed. See also Bowers 1973: 329 and Funder 2008: 575.
41
Sarkissian 2010: 9. See pages 612 for development of this idea.
42
As Sarkissian writes, We hardly notice it, but oftentimes a kind smile from a friend, a
playful wink from a stranger, or a meaningful handshake from a supportive colleague can
completely change our attitudes. Such minor acts can have great effects. If we mind them, we
can foster a form of ethical bootstrappingthat is, we can prompt or lift one another toward our
joint moral ends (2010: 12, emphasis his). Of course while this might promote moral action, it is
much less clear that it can help promote moral virtue. For instance, in these examples our mood
might be elevated, but in Moral Character, chapter three I note that positive moods often do not
promote helping done for morally admirable reasons.
43
The broader claim about transmission of emotions is, on the other hand, well known.
I touch on this topic briey in Moral Character, chapter ve when distinguishing emotional
contagion from projective empathy and empathy proper.
44
For a similar observation, see Snow 2010: 347 and Slingerland 2011: 405, 41112.
stereotypes serve to simplify perception, judgment, and action. As energy
saving devices, they spare perceivers the ordeal of responding to an almost
incomprehensively complex social world.45 Similarly, moral trait attributions
serve as convenient labeling devices, as I claimed in the chapter seven. Both
stereotypes and trait labels are often employed quickly using minimal cogni-
tive resources, whereas their correction can be slower and more demanding.
Furthermore, both stereotypes and traditional trait attributions are often
mistaken, and in ways that can have all kinds of seriously harmful
consequences.
But the parallels do not cease there. Stereotypes typically exhibit several
features of automatic processing, including functioning effortlessly, lacking
explicit intentions, and occurring outside of conscious awareness.46 As I have
suggested in Moral Character, many psychological processes underlying
Mixed Traits operate automatically in these very same ways. So too can both
sets of processes be subconsciously primed, and they also seem stubbornly
resistant to conscious control in various ways. We often are not aware of the
very existence of at least some of our own stereotypes, just as we are ignorant
of various features of our own Mixed Traits. They both have powerful causal
inuences on subsequent behavior, and they tend to prevent us from being the
kinds of people we should strive to become. Hence I claim that another
underexplored area in addressing the realism challenge is psychological re-
search on stereotyping.47
Let me briey mention a few potentially suggestive ndings on stereotype
activation and stereotype control. For instance, Irene Blair and Mahzarin
Banaji found that the automatic activation of stereotypes could be reversed
when a conscious intention is formed to replace them with contrary
thoughts.48 Under conditions of high cognitive demand, activation can be
prevented.49 Even once a stereotype has been activated, it can be overridden
when social norms are activated,50 or when explicit instructions are given to
do so.51 It can also be corrected given awareness that the bias is present,
motivation to correct it, and some understanding of the stereotypes effect on
the persons responses.52 Other strategies for correction involving gathering
additional information, replacing stereotypes with egalitarian responses,
45
Macrae et al. 1994: 37. See also Allport 1954 and Devine and Monteith 1999: 340.
46
These are three of the standard features discussed in relation to automatic processing
(Bargh 1989, 1994). Another feature, involuntary control, is far more controversial in the
stereotype literature (compare Devine and Monteith 1999, who are optimistic about control,
with Bargh 1999, who is pessimistic), and I tend to side with the optimistic crowd.
47
For helpful reviews of the stereotype literature where the above claims can be found, see
Devine and Monteith 1999 and Bargh 1999. In this section I have been especially helped by
Devine and Monteith 1999. Nancy Snow suggested some years ago that I take a look at this
literature. As usual, her suggestion was a wise one.
48 49
Blair and Banaji 1996. Gilbert and Hixon 1991.
50 51 52
Plant and Devine 1998. Macrae et al. 1994. Wegener and Petty 1997.
Looking Forward 239
employing processes of learning and self-regulation, and suppressing them,
have also been discussed.53
From Local to Global. The last strategy I will mention here is to devise ways
of starting with local virtues, and then transforming them into more global
virtues. For instance, Nancy Snow writes that though our virtues might start
out by being local, they need not remain so.54 Similarly, Edward Slingerland
calls the process of extending local virtues the central strategy of early
Confucian moral education,55 and provides textual illustrations of how this
might be done.
This strikes me as a coherent and promising strategy. But it depends on the
prior possession of one or more local virtues as the psychological building
blocks. In section two of the previous chapter, I raised doubts about whether
there is widespread possession of even these local virtues. So if those doubts
are legitimate, then this strategy will rst need to be supplemented with a prior
account of how most of us are supposed to acquire the local virtues to begin
with. Otherwise the strategy cannot even get off the ground.
9. 3 CON CLU SI ON
By way of concluding, let me step back and reect on the bigger picture. My
focus in this book has been on exploring the implications of my view that most
people today possess a moral character that consists of traits which are neither
virtues nor vices. They are what I have called Mixed Character Traits, with
some positive moral features and some negative ones. Most of us are neither
nearly as bad as we could be nor nearly as good as we should be.
In contrast, on normative grounds both academics and non-academics alike
tend to agree that we should cultivate the moral virtues, which would reliably
dispose us to exhibit morally appropriate thought and behavior in the relevant
circumstances. If so, then the empirical data suggests that we have a long way
to go in realizing this normative goal. And the next question becomes devising
the most promising, empirically informed strategies for reducing the gap
between what our actual moral character looks like, and what it should
look like.
Clearly, another whole book is needed here. This is one of the main areas
I hope both philosophers and psychologists will explore in the future as they
continue to try to better understand moral character.
53
See Devine and Monteith 1999: 34750 for an overview.
54
Snow 2010: 37. See her discussion of the strategy on pages 318 as well as Adams 2006:
1279, chapter twelve.
55
Slingerland 2011: 406.
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Allport, Gordon 89 n. 23 and CAPS model 1246

Aristotelian virtue ethics, see virtue ethics v. conditional probabilities 123
Aristotle 2034, 2334 dualism v. monism 2831
Ashton, Michael 1434 functional role 201, 234
grounded in further dispositions 2632
Batson, Daniel 99, 160, 228 realist view of 213
Beaman, Arthur 235 v. summary labels 1820
behaviorism 98 global v. local conception 190202
beliefs 67 mixed 436
Besser-Jones, Lorraine 32 n. 77, 212 n. 76 nature of 832
Bierbrauer, Gnter 160 not exclusively moral 325
Big Five model 12950 as requiring responsibility 1114
criticism 13849 as subject to normative assessment 1417
employs inadequate instruments 1424 top-down v. bottom-up approach 1389
ignores minimal thresholds for virtues as subset of 335
virtues 1412 see also Big Five model; CAPS model;
incomplete 1469 character error theory; Mixed Traits;
relies on self-reports 1456 situationism; virtues
endogenous view of traits 1367, 148 cheating 6282
ve dimensions 132 altruistic 812
labeling v. causal interpretations 1347 behavior 625
lexical approach 1301 and honor codes 668
v. Mixed Traits 13749 and moral beliefs 66, 701
questionnaire approach 131 motivation 6672
as top-down approach 1389 and self-image 6972
see also Mixed Cheating Trait
Campbell, Anne 2312 compassion, cultivation of 22730
CAPS model 10728, 21819 via elevation 22930
aggregated v. single behaviors 1201 via empathy 2289
behavioral signatures 11620 Cornelissen, Gert 178
and causal power of traits 1246 Costa, Paul 131, 1334, 1367, 13943,
cognitive-affective units 11213 1469; see also Big Five model
cross-situational consistency 11618 cruelty 412
as folk psychology 11121, 1267 Cunningham, Michael 209
as meta-theory 1278
nominal v. psychological salience 11516 Darley, John 989, 160
situation-behavior contingencies 11315 DeJong, William 179
Casebeer, William 235 desires 67
character error theory 1568 DeYoung, Colin 145
nature of error 16770 Diener, Edward 645, 70
reasons for error 1714 dishonesty, see Mixed Cheating Trait
responses to error 17485 Doris, John 16 n. 34, 189207, 21423;
eliminativism 1803 see also virtue ethics
ctionalism 1835 dualism, property 2831
preservationism 17680 and causal overdetermination 301
see also error theory; fundamental
attribution error elevation 22930
character traits empathy 2289
as dispositions 1832 Epictetus 2301
268 Index
Epstein, Seymour 1201 v. dishonesty 801
error theory 1548 v. honesty 7780
responses to error 1745 Mixed Traits 4361
see also character error theory and behavior 469
v. Big Five model 13749
Faulkender, Patricia 64 from bottom-up analysis 1389
ctionalism 1835 as challenge to virtue ethics 20713
folk psychology consistency across situations 547
assumptions of 10911 nominal v. psychologically
CAPS model as 11121, 1267 salient 547
fundamental attribution error 104, 15870 differences among individuals 5861
dispositional v. situational factors 1616 disclosed by science 1734
see also character error theory enhancers and inhibitors 4952
Funder, David 1023 v. local trait view 198202
Mixed Cheating Trait 7282
Goldberg, Lewis 130 and motivation 4952
stability 524
Harman, Gilbert 189204, 21423; see also models of virtue 2302
virtue ethics monism, property 2931
Harris, Victor 160 Moore, Shirley 178
Holloway, Stephen 231
honesty, see Mixed Cheating Trait Nisbett, Richard 160, 169, 182; see also
situationism
Isen, Alice 1634 non-malevolence 3841
normative ethics 187223
Jensen, Roger 178 nature of 1878
Johnson, John 1267 see also virtue ethics
Jones, Edward 160
Ozer, Daniel 1023
Kamtekar, Rachana 21415
Kraut, Robert 179 Peake, Phillip 11819
Kunda, Ziva 169, 182 personality traits 48
as dispositions 57
labeling effect 17880 see also character traits; Mixed Traits;
Lamiell, James 97 n. 51 virtues
Lee, Kibeom 1434 Petruska, Richard 231
Levin, Paula 1634 Pietromonaco, Paula 160
Liljenquist, Katie 210 Plato 203
McAdams, Dan 28 n. 65 Raaijmakers, Quinten 3940, 42

McCabe, Donald 667, 233 Regan, Dennis 208
McCrae, Robert 131, 1334, 1367, 13943, Ross, Lee 15960, 162, 2345; see also
1469; see also Big Five model fundamental attribution error;
Mackie, John 1556 situationism
Mazar, Nina 66, 678, 69 Rushton, J. Philippe 2312
Meeus, Wim 3940, 42
Merritt, Maria 21213 n. 76 Sabini, John 967, 1645, 21618
meta-ethics 15386 Samuels, Steven 235
nature of 154 Sarkissian, Hagop 237
see also character error theory; error theory Schnall, Simone 22930
Milgram, Stanley 39, 160 Shoda, Yuichi 114, 115, 11819, 125; see also
Miller, Frederick 163 CAPS model
Miller, Richard 178 Shu, Lisa 65, 769
Mischel, Walter 11121, 1223, 125, 1278; Silver, Maury 967, 21618
see also CAPS model; situationism situationism 85106
Mixed Cheating Trait 7282 correlation coefcients and 917, 1023
Index 269
criticism 94106 cultivation of 22739
evidence for 914 elevation 22930
Sreenivasan, Gopal 21921 empathy 2289
Strenta, Angelo 179 globalizing local virtues 239
models of virtue 2302
Taradi, S. Kukolja 63 moral norm salience 2323
traits, see character traits; Mixed Traits; parallels to stereotype reduction 2379
personality traits; virtues self-awareness 2336
Trevio, Linda 667, 233 situation selection 2367
limitations of self-reports 1456
virtue ethics 188223 minimal threshold 38, 1412
Doris/Harman challenge 189207, 21423 rarity of 3843
alternative responses to 21423
denial of global traits 18998 Wachtel, Paul 101, 237
local trait view 198202 Wallbom, Mark 645, 70
rarity response to 2027 Weyant, James 209
realism challenge to 20713 Wilson, John 231
responses to 22739 Wright, Jack 114, 11819, 1223
virtues
as character traits 325 Zhong, Chen-Bo 210

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C H A R A C T E R A N D M O R A L PS Y C H O L O G Y

PART I THE MIXED TRAIT FRAMEWORK

PART II ENGAGING OTHER FRAMEWORKS

PART III APPLYING THE FRAMEWORK

PART IV THE NEXT STEP

THE THEME OF THE BOOK

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THIS BOOK

My previous book considered a bunch of empirical research in psychology on

As with Moral Character, this book is intended to be a contribution to our

PLAN OF THE BOOK

1.1 Two kinds of traits 4

The Conceptual Background

1.1 TRAITS AND PERSONALITY TRAITS 1

Personality Traits Non-Personality Traits

Figure 1.1 Two kinds of traits

Here are some examples of personality traits:

1.2 PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER TRAITS

There are hundreds of different concepts which we use to describe someones

Personality Traits Non-Personality Traits

Character Traits Non-Character Traits

Figure 1.2 Two kinds of personality traits

Admittedly, there is nothing approaching consensus about how to use the

1.3 DISPOSITIONS AND CHARACTER TRAITS

According to my proposal, character traits are dispositions of a certain kind.

1.4 CHARACTER TRAIT DISPOSITIONS

Relevant Stimuli (such as the perception of someone as being in need)

Compassionate Occurrent Beliefs and Desires

Figure 1.3 The causal activity of the trait of compassion

states of various kinds that are appropriate to the virtue of compassion. As

Trait Dispositions Trait Dispositions

Figure 1.4 Property monist and dualist approaches

In the broader literature on dispositions, property dualist and monist views

Figure 1.5 Property dualism

The above argument is a version of a familiar strategy that is well known

Personality Traits Non-Personality Traits

Character Traits Non-Character Traits

Moral Character Traits83 Non-Moral Character Traits

Figure 1.6 Two kinds of character traits

I have covered a lot of ground in this chapter in order to develop the

The Framework of Mixed Traits

The goal of this chapter is to summarize my empirical framework for thinking

Personality Traits Non-Personality Traits

Character Traits Non-Character Traits

Moral Character Traits15 Non-Moral Character Traits

Associated with Aggression Associated with Lying, Stealing, Helping, etc.

Harming Relevant Virtues Harming Relevant Vices Mixed Aggression Traits

2.2 MIXED TRAITS AND BEHAVIOR

Figure 2.2 Larrys aggression prole (peer ratings)

Figure 2.3 Larrys aggression prole for many situations

Figure 2.4 Larrys frequency of harming at different levels of aggressiveness during a

2.3 M IXED TRAITS AND MOTIVATION

Appropriate enhancer is activated

Relevant motive is formed (such as a motive to harm the

Activation of a Mixed Aggression Trait

Increased motivation to harm

Increased aggressive behavior

Of course much of this psychological activity is not going to be carried out in a

Figure 2.5 Larrys aggression prole (peer ratings)

As we noted in section two, Larrys behavior uctuates dramatically in its

This looks to be as cross-situationally inconsistent as you can get! And it is,

Figure 2.8 Two aggression proles in three situations

Figure 2.9 Two aggression proles in three situations

Figure 2.10 Two aggression proles in three situations

Average Level of Aggressiveness 5