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Character, Global and Local

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 November 2007

JONATHAN WEBBER
JONATHAN WEBBER*
Affiliation:
University of [email protected]
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Abstract

Philosophers have recently argued that we should revise our understanding of character. An individual's behaviour is governed not by a set of ‘global’ traits, each elicited by a certain kind of situational feature, they argue, but by a much larger array of ‘local’ traits, each elicited by a certain combination of situational features. But the data cited by these philosophers support their theory only if we conceive of traits purely in terms of stimulus and response, rather than in the more traditional terms of inner mental items such as inclinations. We should not adopt the former conception, moreover, since doing so would impede pursuit of the ethical aims for which we need a theory of character, whereas retaining the latter conception will facilitate this pursuit. So we should not revise our understanding of character in the way proposed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , December 2007 , pp. 430 - 434
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1 Doris, John, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chs 1–5, sailing example on p. 115; Goldie, Peter, On Personality (London, 2004), chs 3–4Google Scholar; Merritt, Maria, ‘Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 2 (2000)Google Scholar. (Merritt cites as influence an earlier, less detailed formulation by Doris.)

2 See Doris, Lack of Character, pp. 32–51; Goldie, On Personality, pp. 61–3; Merritt, ‘Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology’, p. 366.

3 Sreenivasan, Gopal, ‘Errors about Errors: Virtue Theory and Trait Attribution’, Mind 111 (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sabini, John and Silver, Maury, ‘Lack of Character? Situationism Critiqued’, Ethics 115 (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Michael DePaul, ‘Character Traits, Virtues, and Vices: Are There None?’, Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, vol. 9: Philosophy of Mind, ed. Bernard Elevitch (Bowling Green, 2000); Miller, Christian, ‘Social Psychology and Virtue Ethics’, The Journal of Ethics 7 (2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kamtekar, Rachana, ‘Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character’, Ethics 114 (2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Doris, Lack of Character, p. 22; Merritt, ‘Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology’, pp. 365–6; Goldie, On Personality, p. 50.

6 See Doris, Lack of Character, pp. 146–7; Merritt, ‘Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology’, throughout.

7 This article has benefited greatly from seminar discussions of earlier drafts at the University of Sheffield and the University of Birmingham.