NDLI: Situationism, going mental, and modal akrasia

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Murray, Dylan
Copyright Year	2014
Abstract	Virtue ethics prescribes cultivating global and behaviorally efficacious character traits, but John Doris (Noûs 32:504–530, 1998; Lack of character: personality and moral behavior. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002) and others argue that situationist social psychology shows this to be infeasible. Here, I show how certain versions of virtue ethics that ‘go mental’ can withstand this challenge as well as Doris’ (Philos Stud 148:135–146, 2010) further objections. The defense turns on an account of which psychological materials constitute character traits and which the situationist research shows to be problematically variable. Many situationist results may be driven by impulsive akrasia produced by low-level (in some cases even perceptual), emotionally induced ignorance about one’s situation, and some may be driven by a further subtype: modal akrasia. Many subjects in the infamous Milgram experiments, e.g., seem to have recognized what the virtuous thing to do was and that they should do it, and only failed to do it because their emotions prevented them from seeing (or at least from recognizing, at the level of deliberation) that they could. If the primary constituents of character traits are higher-level mental dispositions involved in deliberation, though, then the results don’t show that these psychological materials are problematically variable.
Starting Page	711
Ending Page	736
Page Count	26
File Format	PDF
ISSN	00318116
Journal	Philosophical Studies
Volume Number	172
Issue Number	3
e-ISSN	15730883
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Netherlands
Publisher Date	2014-05-31
Publisher Place	Dordrecht
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Situationism Virtue ethics Character traits Deliberation Modal akrasia Philosophy Epistemology Philosophy of Mind Ethics Metaphysics Philosophy of Language
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Philosophy

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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