virtue and personality

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Virtue and Personality John Hacker-‐Wright Department of Philosophy University of Guelph Guelph, ON N1G2W1 [email protected] Abstract Over the past three decades, philosophers have challenged the moral psychology behind virtue ethics, either by denying that there are any character traits or denying that there are character traits that resemble moral virtues. Among various responses to this line of argument, a recent development is to push back against the empirical basis of the critique and to argue that psychology in fact shows that there are significant character traits, specifically character traits studied by social-‐cognitive psychologists that are grounded in subjective construal of situations. Daniel Russell and Nancy Snow argue that because this approach to personality traits takes seriously the way that people construe the situations they are in, it can supply an empirical foundation for a virtue theory compatible with Aristotelian virtue ethics. I argue that social-‐cognitive personality traits and Aristotelian virtues appear instead to be significantly different trait concepts and that there are serious obstacles to overcome if some social-‐cognitive personality traits are to be construed as virtues or taken to supporting the existence of Aristotelian virtues. Keywords: Virtue theory; Virtue Ethics; Personality traits; Situationism

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Virtue and Personality 1. Introduction

Over the past three decades, philosophers have challenged the moral psychology

behind virtue ethics, either by denying that there are any character traits or denying

that there are character traits that resemble moral virtues (Harman 1999, 2000,

2003; Doris 1998, 2002). These arguments draw on empirical research in social

psychology supporting the idea that how people act is influenced by differences in

their situations to a greater extent than by distinctive character traits inherent to

them as individuals. If individual behavior were determined largely by broad

character traits, we might expect them to act with some consistency across

situations, but, situationists contend, we do not, and this is held to tell against the

idea that character is widespread. At best, it is very rare.

A recent development in response to this line of thought pushes back against

the empirical basis of the critique, and argues that psychology in fact supports the

existence of personality traits. On this argument, Doris and Harman unfairly

discount a line of psychological research that supports the existence of a kind of

personality trait not investigated by the original situationist studies. When human

behavior is observed across objectively defined situations, that is, situations defined

by the investigator, human behavior appears to be inconsistent; people act

aggressively in one situation, say, and docilely in another. Yet, significant

consistency reappears when situations are defined in terms of their psychological

salience for individual subjects: hence, one might act aggressively whenever there is

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a threat of rejection by an intimate partner, but compassionately in the absence of

such a threat. The latter sort of consistency is the discovery of psychologists

working within a social-‐cognitivist approach to psychology that places great weight

on agent’s subjective construal of situations. One very developed version of this

view pioneered by Walter Mischel and colleagues treats personality as a cognitive

affective processing system (CAPS) and personality traits as components of that

cognitive and affective processing system (Michel 1973; Mischel and Shoda 1995,

1998; Mischel, Shoda, and Ayduk 2008). On this view, people have distinctive

approaches to processing information about their social situations, which define

their distinctive personalities. Daniel Russell and Nancy Snow argue that because

this approach to personality traits takes seriously the way that people construe the

situations they are in, it can supply an empirical foundation for a virtue theory

compatible with Aristotelian virtue ethics. It is distinctively amenable to Aristotelian

virtue because that virtue theory emphasizes the importance of the virtuous agent’s

distinctive perception, affects, and reasoning about situations. On the proposed

view, a virtue is an ethically significant personality trait in the sense given to it by

CAPS theory (Russell 2009: 330, 2014: 53; Snow 2010: 85).

My aim in this paper is to cast doubt on whether personality traits so

understood can provide empirical support for Aristotelian virtue theory, as Russell

and Snow contend. I will argue that there are reasons to doubt that any personality

trait as the CAPS theory defines them can either be identified with a virtue or taken

as evidence for the existence of virtues. That is, I will argue that these two sorts of

traits are different trait concepts so that there are obstacles to construing any

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subset of CAPS personality traits as virtues or taking them to support the existence

of virtues.1 I will argue that given the way that personality traits are conceived in the

CAPS approach, there are conceptual difficulties in matching them up with the kind

of responsiveness to good reasons that is essential to virtue, at least on the

Aristotelian approach, and this is the notion of virtue embraced by Russell, Snow,

and many other virtue ethicists. I will argue, first, that Aristotelian virtue has a

distinctive goal, the noble, that requires a specific relation between the trait and the

goal that is not available to CAPS traits. Second, on the broadly held assumption that

virtue is non-‐codifiable, Aristotelian virtue integrates reasoning in a way that cannot

be captured by the CAPS approach to personality. Beyond challenging this particular

approach to defending the empirical credentials of virtue ethics, I take my argument

to underscore how difficult it is to look for virtue empirically.

In Section 2, I will outline the CAPS approach to personality traits. Then, in

Section 3, I will explain the attempt to grounds virtues on personality traits so

conceived, drawing on arguments by Russell and Snow. Then, I will show, in Section

4, that the social-‐cognitive approach to personality must define the goals of

personality traits in ways that seem to preclude the possibility of their being aimed

at the noble. As I will argue in Section 5, this is related to the distinctive role that

reasoning plays in virtue that seemingly cannot be captured by the traits posited by

social-‐cognitive psychology.

2. The Social-‐Cognitive Approach to Personality Traits 1 Hence, my objection is conceptual rather than empirical. This is in contrast with both John Doris and Christian Miller. Doris’ stance on social-‐cognitive personality

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Social-‐cognitive approaches to personality traits emerged as an alternative to

dispositionist accounts of personality traits. A dispositionist account of personality

seeks to explain behavior through underlying mental structures that exert a general,

causal influence over behavior (Mischel 1968: 8). The classic situationist studies

called the existence of such traits into question; studies such as Hartshorne and

May’s investigation of dishonesty in schoolchildren, Darley and Batson’s “Good

Samaritan” studies, and Milgram’s obedience experiments seem to support the view

that most of us are determined more by the situations we are placed in than by

traits that determine us to a certain sort of behavior irrespective of the situation.2

The social-‐cognitivist psychologists showed us that this shift in emphasis

from personality to situation is too quick because there is an unexplored way of

thinking about personality. Their investigations were inspired by the thought that

there could be traits that are escaping detection because of the assumption that

traits would exert a general causal influence on behavior. On a dispositionist

account of personality, variability in an individual’s behavior should show no

stability over time; after all, if behavior is to be explained by the general causal

influence of underlying traits, variability should be due to noise. Yet that is not what

empirical studies have found. Individuals behave inconsistently, but when the

situations are defined in terms of what matters to these individuals, we see that the

variability forms stable patterns (Mischel and Shoda 1995: 250). An individual will

exhibit a distinctive behavioral profile such that she will behave consistently more

aggressively than the mean in one type of situation type, and consistently less 2 For a recent survey of this literature and responses to it from the perspective of virtue ethics, see Sreenivasan 2013.

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aggressively than the mean in another type of situation, when these situations are

divided in ways that matter psychologically to the subject.

The key methodological insight of this social-‐cognitive approach to

personality is that it is essential to the study of personality to take account of the

individual subjects’ construals of situations. They attempt to study the characteristic

pattern of responses to situations as predictable if… then… patterns, where the

antecedent identifies something psychologically salient for the subject and the

consequent names the resultant behavior. The result is an “if… then…” or “situation-‐

behavior” signature, that yields insight into the “underlying system that generates

them” (Mischel, Shoda, and Ayduk 2008: 76). Whereas the dispositionist must count

variability as noise, variability across situations is central to this account of

personality. Mischel and Shoda thus take this approach to personality to resolve the

person-‐situation debate by “conceptualizing the personality system in ways that

make variability of behavior across situations an essential aspect of its behavioral

expression and underlying stability” (Mischel and Shoda 1995: 257).

This account of personality is further developed by conceiving the

personality system as a “cognitive-‐affective processing system” or CAPS (Mischel,

Shoda, and Ayduk 2008: 415). On this view, the personality system is cognitive in

that the personality shapes how the individual represents the world and processes

information; it is affective in that it deals with how individuals process ‘hot’

emotion-‐laden events and feelings. The personality system is conceived of as

comprising a structure of mental representations or schemas they call “cognitive

affective units” that are linked together in the form of a network, wherein one

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cognitive affective unit, a type of thought or feeling, will tend with a certain

probability to give rise to another in a given context. The stable pattern of

relationships among these units constitutes the personality structure, which

explains the inter-‐ and intra-‐individual differences in responses to situations.

The CAPS theory also speaks to personality dispositions, which are

characteristic ways of dealing with certain types of psychological situation. Studies

on rejection-‐sensitivity and narcissism have shown the fruits of approaching

personality through the lens of this approach. Rejection-‐sensitivity (RS) is explicitly

defined in terms of a cognitive-‐affective processing dynamic “whereby individuals

anxiously expect, readily perceive, and overreact (emotionally and behaviorally) to

rejection” (Ayduk and Gyurak 2008: 2021; see also Downey and Feldman 1996:

1328). High-‐RS people tend to perceive rejection in ambiguous interactions with

strangers, and in insensitive behavior from intimate partners, which often leads to

feelings of dissatisfaction with relationships (Downey and Feldman 1996: 1333,

1335, 1338). High-‐RS people are likely to exhibit aggressive behavior in situations of

perceived rejection (Ayduk, et. al., 1999: 255; Romero-‐Canyas, et. al., 2010: 134). A

typical snapshot of the processing dynamic of someone with high rejection

sensitivity can be schematized as as follows: 1) construal of a situation as presenting

uncaring behavior from partner 2) thoughts of “she doesn’t love me” which trigger

3) expectations of rejection abandonment together with feelings of anger, anxiety,

and rage at the prospect which in turn activate 4) aggressive behavior (Mischel and

Shoda 1995: 258).

This research underscores the conditional nature of the behavioral responses

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central to the social-‐cognitive theory: high-‐RS people are actually less aggressive

and more accommodating than low-‐RS people in situations where rejection is not

perceived (Ayduk and Gyurak 2008: 2026). As Mischel and Shoda put this point, the

high-‐RS individual is both “hurtful and kind, caring and uncaring, violent and gentle”

(Mischel and Shoda 1995: 258). But these contrary qualities are exhibited in an

orderly pattern in situations that are meaningful to the individual, in terms of

whether or not signs of rejection are perceived.

Narcissism is another personality disposition that has been studied in some

detail from the perspective of CAPS personality theory. Within the CAPS approach,

narcissism is conceived as an approach to processing, a dynamic system that is

driven by a chronic goal of seeking external affirmation of a grandiose, yet

vulnerable self-‐concept (Morf and Rhodewalt 2001: 178). The narcissist’s

conditional behavior is to pursue, whenever a situation presents itself,

opportunities to demonstrate superiority, often through competitive behavior (see

Morf and Rhodewalt 2001: 190). As with rejection-‐sensitivity, narcissists present

widely variable behavior dependent on the situation, turning from exhibitionism

when there is an opportunity for attention, to rage when there is a threat to self-‐

esteem (Morf and Rhodewalt 2001: 177). Narcissists present another puzzle: their

goal pursuit seems to be drastically self-‐undermining, inasmuch as they quickly

alienate those from whom they seek adulation. Morf and Rhodewalt unravel this

puzzle by arguing that the behavior in fact meets the narcissist’s goals. What

matters to them, more than long term supportive relationships, is the short-‐term

adulation: narcissist regulate their behavior intelligently so as to bring that goal

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about reliably (2001: 190).

Both rejection-‐sensitivity and narcissism show that an important component

of the personality on the CAPS theory is the individual’s goals. Indeed, Morf makes

self-‐regulation to achieving valued ends a central concern of her study of narcissism

and proposes an interpretation of CAPS theory on which different self-‐regulation

strategies are central to individuals’ distinctive personalities (Morf 2006). On her

view, the self “is defined as a coherent interplay and configuration of self-‐relevant

processes (or strategies) that unfold in social interaction” (2006: 1533). This makes

good sense, as the schemas one employs are surely adapted to attaining certain

ends, whether one has explicitly endorsed those ends or not. Within those schemas,

behaviors are selected as means to achieve those ends when a situation is perceived

as affording the opportunity. Our affects and cognitions likewise are shaped by our

chronically accessible goals on this view.

CAPS theory as developed on these lines gives empirical support the general

hypothesis that there are substantive personality traits that produce consistent

though highly situation sensitive behaviors.

3. From Personality to Virtue

Because of the emphasis that the social-‐cognitive approach places on discriminative

responses to varying situations, it can be understood as a situationist approach to

personality. Daniel Russell discusses it under this heading and declares that

situationist personality psychology is not a threat to virtue but rather “positively

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friendly to virtue theory” (2009: 241; 2014: 37). Let us now examine how this is so,

on his view.3

The social-‐cognitive theory emphasizes the importance of understanding

how an individual construes situations as an important part of one’s personality. A

distinctive way of construing situations is likewise a central feature of virtue, at

least on an Aristotelian account. As Russell argues, situational construal is a

explicitly an aspect of Aristotle’s account of anger: it is part of an adequate

explanation of someone’s anger that he believes himself to be, say, commanded by

an inferior (2014: 47, referring to Rhet. II.1 1378a19-‐29). Indeed, in order to

understand actions adequately, one must understand an agent’s inner state, which

involves grasping the agent’s emotions and therefore, how they are construing the

situation. Someone who walks away from an insult may be doing one of various

things: he may interpret the insult as deserved or fitting and his walking away is

simply going on with his business. Or he may be avoiding a direct confrontation to

plot a later revenge. Deciding which of these responses has occurred depends on

insight into the inner state of the subject; and if one does have such insight, the

response will also reveal something about the agent’s character. The person who

walks away without registering a wrong when one has been done is ‘slavish,’ failing

to value himself sufficiently and so failing to construe the situation as one in which

he is slighted, or he may be ‘sulky,’ having a tendency to repress anger, though he in

fact feels it (NE IV.5 1126a18). 3 It should be noted that Russell is qualified in his commitment to this approach; he regards the social-‐cognitive approach as a “representative illustration” and that his “way of thinking about the virtues does not stand or fall with social-‐cognitive theory” (2015).

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A crucial point about virtue that Russell makes in this discussion is that an

action can be attributed to a trait even when it is not stereotypical of that trait.

Backing down from a fight is certainly not stereotypical of courage, yet it may be the

courageous thing to do if the fight is hopeless or unlikely to achieve any good. In

such cases, the action (backing down) is taken with the appropriate amount of fear;

the courageous agent backs down with a due appreciation of the threat to his person

as well as correct appreciation of the other goods that could be attained in the

situation. Further, an act may be stereotypical of a trait, but not due to the trait. A

well-‐seasoned soldier may march into battle calmly, but his calm is due to his

knowledge that there is no genuine threat, not due to courage (NE III.8 1116b15-‐

24). Again, these points seem consistent with social-‐cognitivist views, since to

determine whether someone is acting from a trait and which trait they are acting

from, we must see how they are construing the situation. As seen above, high-‐RS

individuals are sometimes aggressive, but sometimes ingratiating, depending on

how they construe the situation; it is evident from Morf’s research that people with

diverse personality dispositions, such as high-‐RS individuals, narcissists, and high-‐

dependency individuals may all demonstrate ingratiating behavior under

circumstances in which they do not feel under threat and have the opportunity for

furthering their various ends in a relationship (Morf 2006).

As Russell is quick to acknowledge, there is a crucial additional feature of the

virtues that is not necessarily a part of the traits studied by social-‐cognitive

psychologists: the virtuous individual construes situations correctly (2014: 54). On

Russell’s view, this means that the virtuous agent acts for reasons that are good. The

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virtuous agent construes situations appropriately, deliberates well about how to act,

and then acts well. Russell believes that the materials for virtue are all present in the

social-‐cognitive account. As he puts it:

…the empirical evidence suggests that personality can be well understood in terms of basic cognitive and affective elements, such as the possession of certain goals, certain ways of attaching salience to the various features of actions and environments, and so on. Consequently, a virtue theory can be empirically adequate as long as it understands the virtues as certain forms of responsiveness to reasons. (2009: 242)

A key step here lies in identifying the mechanisms at play in the social-‐cognitive

account of personality with responsiveness to reasons. This is crucial in order to

establish the possibility of integrating the master virtue of practical wisdom with

this account of personality. Someone with practical wisdom has insight into what it

is to live well, and can deliberate excellently about how to realize that conception in

particular situations; the phronimos, then, correctly identifies occasions for acting

well as they present themselves to her in the world and reasons to the proper

sequence of actions to be done.

Russell outlines a program by which CAPS traits could be shown to be

identical with virtues (2009: 330). The program starts with an empirically adequate

theory of personality, which appears to be the cognitive-‐affective theory. Next, we

define character in terms of that personality theory. Character is the personality

insofar as it is normatively significant: either as a subset of personality or as the

whole personality considered from a moral point of view. Third, a character trait

can be defined as a cohesive bundle of cognitive-‐affective character attributes.

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Finally, a virtue can be defined as a character trait by which “one regularly, and with

phronesis acts for reasons that we can take to be good reasons from within an

overall ethical perspective.”

Snow illustrates the postulated mechanics of a virtue in action from the point

of view of CAPS traits. She writes:

… when a virtue is activated by a stimulus, say, by seeing another in need, the

motivational variables that are integral components of the virtue (or vice)

influence the activation of other variables, including cognitions and affective

responses, thereby shaping a kind of entrainment of activated linked

variables. If the motivations intrinsic to virtues were removed or replaced,

the other variables activated in the entrainment would also change. (Snow

2010: 91)

Hence, on Russell and Snow’s view, there is a distinctive pattern of motivation and

thought in the virtuous agent that is potentially captured by a situation-‐behavior

signature, and that potentially exhibits responsiveness to good reasons.

It should be pointed out that this is a program: it outlines the possibility of an

empirically based virtue theory, but does not claim there is presently empirical

support for any particular virtues. Snow’s program for an empirically grounded

virtue theory offers some indirect empirical support through appealing to the notion

of social intelligence. Snow takes Mischel and Shoda’s CAPS personality theory and

the social intelligence research to be complementary. Social intelligence has

empirical support through psychometric studies as a form of intelligence distinct

from academic intelligence (Snow 2010: 64-‐69). Social intelligence Snow defines as:

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… a complex, multidimensional set of knowledge, skills, and abilities, comprised of perception or insight, knowledge, and behavioral ability, that, other things being equal, enables us to perform well or be successful in social or interpersonal affairs. (2010: 69)

Here, ‘performing well’ is to be understood instrumentally, relative to the

individual’s goals. Hence, Morf can define narcissism as a form of social intelligence,

even though it looks very much like a form of self-‐undermining irrationality: we may

find the narcissists goals perplexing, but that does not mean that they are

ineffectively pursuing their goals. As Snow acknowledges, one can even be socially

intelligent in the pursuit of cruelty (2010: 95). Yet, the virtuous agent has distinctive

motives and deploys social intelligence in pursuit of those motives. On the

assumption that there are some well-‐motivated socially intelligent people there is

then indirect empirical support for the existence of virtues: since the existence of

social intelligence is supported by psychometric studies, given the probability that

at least some of the people who have social intelligence also have good motives,

virtues must exist. But the force of this argument depends on whether Snow is

correct to say that virtue is equivalent to social intelligence plus good motives. It is

quite plausible to think that someone with social intelligence and good motives will

be effective detecting opportunities for achieving morally praiseworthy goals and

carrying through with them, just as a virtuous agent would. Further, social

intelligence yields an empirically grounded theory of executive control or self-‐

regulation in social contexts that, on Snow’s view, should give us insight into what is

going on in a virtuous agent, when the social intelligence is deployed on behalf of

her good motives. On Snow’s view, this account also meshes well with traditional

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eudaimonist accounts inasmuch as social intelligence enables us to address

important life tasks that are essential to human flourishing (2010: 75).

4. CAPS Traits, Self-‐regulation, and Virtue

In this section, I will begin to raise questions about the program that Russell and

Snow endorse for an empirically grounded virtue theory, drawing on the CAPS

personality theory. On my view, despite the arguments of Russell and Snow, the sort

of traits that the CAPS approach provides evidence for is distinct from the sort of

traits that virtues are, at least on the Aristotelian account. My first argument is that

CAPS traits cannot be interpreted as aiming at the noble, and must have different

content. This is partly because the relation between the trait and the goals that it

serves are significantly different on these views. More fundamentally, the

explanatory program of social-‐cognitive psychology is such that it cannot seem to

yield the sort of explanation one needs to give of virtuous action and the virtues

themselves if they are genuine Aristotelian virtues.

Part of the explanatory power of CAPS traits comes from situating the traits

in terms of the goals of the personality of which they are a part: the traits process

information about the world with a view to maintaining a desired self (Morf 2006;

Mischel and Morf 2012) or to attaining beneficial consequences, where this is

understood as subjectively valued outcomes (Mischel 1973: 267, 270). The

situational sensitivity of the traits is explained as a function of attempting to attain

the good consequences (Mischel 1973: 272). As such, they can be thought of as self-‐

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regulation strategies or components of such strategies. The self-‐regulation

strategies studied in social-‐cognitive psychology are always instrumental to further

desired aims of the agent. That is to say, the goal of the trait is to serve the

subjectively valued goals of the agent. Virtues, on the other hand, are non-‐

instrumentally related to the goal of acting well; possessing moral virtues in

particular are a crucial component of acting well; and so the virtues themselves

constitute a goal of which they are a partial fulfillment. One acts well, in part, when

one acts with the appropriate feeling, which is what the possession of virtue tends

to effect. The courageous agent does not seek to feel a certain level of fear or

confidence for the sake of some further end, but simply does feel a certain degree of

those feelings, and it is the amount that it is noble to feel in response to the present

situation. The explanatory story to be told about the virtues culminates in Aristotle’s

claim that virtues “make a human being good and make him carry out his

characteristic activity well” (NE II.6 1106a24). The virtues are not merely an

expedient means to an end that could be attained otherwise than through virtues.

Virtue is internally related to the goal of the noble: acting from virtue is what it is to

live well. This point about the aims of the respective traits also, as we will see,

impacts how the CAPS account and the virtue account respectively would describe

the aims of the virtuous agent in acting.

Take the case of narcissism as studied in the social-‐cognitive approach: as we

saw above, the narcissist is defined partly through the peculiar aim he has of short-‐

term self-‐esteem enhancement, even at the expense of long-‐term supportive

relationships. An effective narcissist employs strategies intelligently to meet that

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goal. We can think of narcissism as not unlike a skill for dealing with fragile self-‐

esteem in social situations through recruiting others to help maintain an inflated

idea of one’s competencies. What satisfies the narcissist’s efforts is relatively

specific and unambiguous: a recognized demonstration of superiority in a

competition or an expression of admiration elicited from an interlocutor. One might

think that virtues are similar: for example, courage seems to deal with one’s sense of

fear and, if one follows Aristotle’s account, boldness or confidence. Specifically, it

seems to be a self-‐regulation strategy that brings these affects into alignment with a

goal: the mean state. Courage looks like what social-‐cognitive psychologists call an

“intra-‐personal regulatory strategy” (Morf 2006). There are various ways that one

could interpret courage as such a strategy, in light of different goals it might aim to

bring about. On one such view, courage would be a self-‐regulatory strategy or set of

strategies to bring fear and confidence into a mean state with a view to achieving

other valued goals, whatever they might be, by not allowing these affects to interfere

with those other goals. Hence, there might be strategies that allow people to move

from ‘hot’ cognitions about fearful stimuli to relatively ‘cool’ cognitions, so as to

bring distractingly high levels of fear down to manageable levels for the purposes of

achieving other goals. Hence, courage would be a skill of dealing with potentially

disruptive feelings of fear.

There might well be such a trait, but it is not the Aristotelian virtue of

courage. A courageous agent has characteristic goals, which can be divided into

“internal goals” and “external goals” (Pears 1980). The external goals of a

courageous agent could encompass any morally appropriate goal; for example

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protecting one’s city and family. Courage is not compatible with immoral goals, or

even with the goal of seeking honor or to avoid shame, as these are not sufficiently

valuable (NE III.8 1116a 18-‐30). The courageous agent faces down danger for the

sake of something greater than adulation. So, not just any external goal is

appropriate to a courageous agent. More importantly, there is more to courage than

not interfering with one’s external goals. The internal goal of courage is achieving

the noble in action, part of which consists in realizing the appropriate levels of fear

and confidence as one acts, a level of fear commensurate with the danger faced. For

this reason, Aristotle says that the end of courageous actions is conformity to the

virtue of courage (NE 1115b20).4 Aristotle speaks of courage bringing fear and

confidence into a mean; the mean state of these affects is precisely one by which we

live well. Living well involves feeling appropriate amounts of fear and confidence. As

Aristotle puts it, courage is a part of excellence (Rhet. 1366b1). But excellence in

humans is just what enables us to live well, as rational animals. Hence, courage on

the Aristotelian view is not a trait by which we regulate ourselves to whatever level

of fear might permit us to achieve whatever other goals we have, but a trait by

which we realize an amount of fear and confidence that is appropriate in our actions

and thereby realize a goal that consists of action in conformity with that trait.

Courage is not instrumental to the internal goal, but constitutive of it. The goal isn’t

just a certain action, or the set of actions by which we would realize other goals, but

doing an action with the appropriate feelings of fear and courage, which is

4 For helpful discussion of this passage see Curzer 2012: 35.

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determined by a conception of what it is to live well as a whole, brought to bear on

this particular situation through deliberation.

On an alternative social-‐cognitive interpretation of courage, one might think

that courage is just the same set of self-‐regulatory strategies taken up by someone

with specifically moral goals. There are two problems with this approach. As just

argued, there is a characteristic range of external goals for courage, but it is difficult

to delimit that range. There may be some standing goals that one must have in order

to count as virtuous, such as that of helping others when one finds someone in need,

but courage can be demonstrated even outside the range of the fulfillment of such

goals: the aim can be defined negatively as not immoral or self-‐serving. Second, the

internal goal of the virtuous agent is nobility, or acting well, which is not a matter of

facilitating the attainment of separate morally good ends. The internal goal of

achieving the appropriate state with regard to courage and boldness is itself part of

excellence. A fully courageous agent does not only have his fear and confidence at

levels necessary for the achievement of a particular purpose, or range of purposes,

even moral purposes. Rather, the courageous agent simply has the right level of

these passions, and determining this level will be a matter that takes into account

living well as a whole (NE III.7 1115b18).

One might wonder whether the self-‐regulatory strategy could constitute or

shape the standard of the ‘right level.’ If one has repeated encounters with a bully at

work and develops a self-‐regulatory strategy for dealing with the bully through

keeping one’s fear in check, this strategy might be taken to achieve the right level

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inasmuch as it enables one to achieve an even keel in the situation.5 While it is true

that a courageous agent will keep an even keel in the situation, that behavioral

standard is compatible with a wide range of inner states and does not get us to a

normative standard for the state that constitutes virtue. The standard for the right

level as it is understood in Aristotelian virtue theory depends on insight into living

well overall that a self-‐regulatory strategy for dealing with a bully at work does

neither requires nor provides.

On a third social-‐cognitive interpretation of the trait of courage, it is a

strategy to bring one’s fear into alignment with an internalized sense of appropriate

fear or confidence in a given situation. On this interpretation, there are

representations of levels of fear and confidence in response to various situations

that are part of an individual’s ‘desired self,’ and the courage is a self-‐regulatory

strategy that enables the agent to achieve those levels consistently.6 This

interpretation gets closer to the nature of courage inasmuch as it captures the fact

that the courageous agent values achieving certain levels of fear and confidence. Yet

because courage is conceived as a strategy in service of a valued self-‐concept, this

interpretation misconstrues the goal of virtue and places the agent in the wrong

relation to it. Courage is not a strategy for achieving a desired self, but rather, in

part, a state that enables activity in which one attains an appropriate level of

courage and fear for the situation.

5 I owe the objection and the example of the bully to Nancy Snow. 6 The language of the ‘desired self’ as the aim of self-‐regulatory strategies comes from Morf 2006. What she says seems to be an extension of the basic program on self-‐regulatory strategies laid out by Mischel in 1973: 273-‐275.

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One might think that these explanations could come together: virtue could

aim at the noble and at the self that one desires to be, provided one desires to be the

sort of person who feels the right level of fear and confidence. That is surely

possible, but the question is whether this account is able to represent the essential

feature of virtue: the internal goal of activity attaining the appropriate level of fear

and confidence for its own sake. Representing the virtues as serving the end of

attaining a desired self is not equivalent with taking the traits as aimed at the

correct level of fear and confidence, even if they coincide in some individuals.

Further, the virtuous agent doesn’t have a targeted goal for feeling fear and

confidence and then aim to bring his fear and confidence into alignment with that

goal. Rather, the virtue of courage enables the virtuous agent to register an

appropriate amount of fear and confidence for the situation. It is the fact of his

registering fear and confidence in this way that enables him to act well. One might

be tempted to chalk this up to the strong identification of the virtuous agent with

the standards of his desired self: the commitment is expressed as taking these levels

of fear and confidence to be ‘the’ appropriate level of fear and confidence for this

situation, and these are standards with which the psychological investigator need

not identify. Instead, the investigator can represent the traits as serving the goals of

achieving a desired self, and leave it an open question, perhaps to be resolved by a

moral philosopher, whether the desired self gets those standards right. But the

question we are faced with here does not concern who desires the right self, but

rather concerns whether the account represents the motives of the virtuous agent

correctly. If we are aiming, as Russell puts it, at “drawing back the curtain as far as

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we can on the subject’s patterns of practical thought and reasoning,” with a view to

finding virtue, then we must see whether what the empirical account posits as

happening within the agent can in principle match up with virtue (Russell 2014: 44).

To attribute a goal of feeling in accordance with an internalized standard of

appropriateness to the virtuous agent attributes one thought too many to the

virtuous agent: a degree of self-‐consciousness about feeling that is incompatible

with genuine virtue.7

These appear to me to be the most obvious ways of interpreting virtue that

would be compatible with the explanatory framework of CAPS. On my view, this

social-‐cognitive interpretation of virtue fails to capture Aristotelian virtue in part

because CAPS traits and Aristotelian virtues differ structurally: virtues constitute an

end that is acting nobly and enable one to act on that end for its own sake, whereas

CAPS traits are components of a strategy that aims at achieving a desired end

external to them.

One might wonder whether self-‐regulatory mechanisms in CAPS could be

constitutive of certain ends. For example, perhaps regulating oneself so as to be able

to be consider and share work equally or spend time with my children is partly

constitutive of being a good spouse.8 In that case, it would seem that the CAPS traits

that make up being considerate or fair are partly constitutive of the further desired

end of being a good spouse. It is certainly true that being considerate and just or

equitable are parts of being a good spouse, but it is not equally clear that these traits

7 There may be a degree of self-‐consciousness about someone developing virtue, but it is crucial that the account can represent someone as exhibiting full virtue. 8 This objection and the examples of the good spouse are due to Nancy Snow.

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as CAPS theory conceives them would be constitutive of being a good spouse. The

good spouse in an Aristotelian sense does not regulate herself to the end of being

considerate or sharing work equally. Rather, what she perceives to be considerate to

her spouse will silence other reasons (outside, say, an urgent need to attend to a

child’s safety) such that there is no longer a matter of regulating oneself to that end.

Yet again, if one wants to take a more expansive conception of self-‐regulation such

that it includes what happens in silencing the other considerations, it is not clear

that there is a basis in the CAPS model for drawing the crucial distinction between

the continent agent, who must contend with desires to act contrary to virtue, and

the virtuous agent, who does not. If I must struggle against countervailing desires to

act considerately, my considerate action is not constitutive of being a good spouse.

An Aristotelian virtue theory must preserve this distinction. Hence, there is good

reason to distinguish someone who must regulate himself to achieve a desired end,

a continent agent, and a fully virtuous agent, who does not face that particular

difficulty.

A virtue is not a self-‐regulatory strategy, at least not in the sense this term

carries in social-‐cognitive psychology. That is because the goal of virtue is not

something separate from the state that the state enables one to achieve, but rather,

one is acting virtuously simply when one is acting from the state in question; as

Aristotle puts it, “the end of every activity is being in accordance with its state”

(1115b20). One who possesses a moral virtue does not engage in the attempt to

bring about a certain level of affect that she sees as appropriate, but aims at the

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noble and achieves the appropriate level of the relevant feeling or feelings as a

result of possessing the virtue.

5. Virtue, Norms, and Practical Reasoning

In this section, I will raise questions about whether the CAPS personality theory can,

in principle, make room for reason to play the role in traits that it needs to play if

the traits it posits can be identified with Aristotelian virtues. As many philosophers

commenting on the situationist debate have emphasized, Aristotelian virtue must be

understood as an achievement of practical reason rather than a tendency to act in a

certain stereotypical way, across situations or in a certain sort of situation.9 On an

Aristotelian account of virtue, stereotypical behaviors take a decidedly back seat to

grasping how the agent reasons about a situation. There are situations in which

courage will dictate acting in ways stereotypical of courage and situations in which

it will not. A key attraction of the CAPS theory as an empirical foundation for the

virtues is the fact that it incorporates variability into its account of traits. Just as the

rejection-‐sensitive individual will behave aggressively in one situation and

ingratiatingly in another, the courageous agent will exhibit courage-‐typical

aggressive behavior in one situation and courage-‐atypical docility in another. In this

regard, CAPS traits seem to have an important similarity to Aristotelian virtues.

Of course, not just any variability will suffice for virtue; rather, it must be

variability in accord with right reasons. This creates the difficulty for an empirically 9 See Annas 2003; Athanassoulis 2001: 218; Kamtekar 2004: 460; Kristjánsson 2008: 62; Russell 2009: 242; Russell 2014: 46; Sreenivasan 2002: 59.

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grounded virtue theory of specifying the right reasons. Can the correct response to

reasons be specified? There is good reason to reject strong codifiability: that there is

some decision procedure specifying what is the right action in every case that can be

applied by non-‐virtuous agents (Russell 2009: 19; Hursthouse 1999: 39-‐40). First, it

seems impossible to generate a list of the sorts of actions that are required by virtue

across all the sorts of situations to which it might pertain. The number of factors

that may influence our judgment about what is to be done is open-‐ended; and most

virtues may be required in any number of different situations. Further, judgments

about what is to be done are holistic and so considerations relevant to different

virtues may be present, influencing our judgment about what is to be done. As

Rosalind Hursthouse puts this point:

… rules that articulate in detail [the fully virtuous agent’s] special understanding of “Do what is courageous” would have to have written into them something that connected them (some of them?) essentially with the other sets that articulate his understanding of the other virtue and vice terms. (2011: 49)

Of course, these considerations are compatible with the idea that virtue is still

weakly codifiable. This means that although we can provide rules for virtue, those

rules hold only for the most part and cannot be applied correctly applied without a

certain amount of virtue (Hursthouse 1999: 40; Swanton 2015). But to the extent

that we can supply rules specifying the behavior required by a virtue (called v-‐

rules), the rules would be irreducibly normative. For example, Howard Curzer

suggest the following formulation of a v-‐rule for courage:

… an action risking death, injury, and/or physical pain should be performed whenever the following relationship holds: (value of the potential gains) X

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(probability of achieving those gains) > (disvalue of potential losses) X (probability of not-‐avoiding those losses) (2012: 34)

Unlike the sort of rule that would be required for strong codifiability, applying this

v-‐rule requires sorting out gains, losses and their relative value, and so it is not the

sort of rule that could be applied in the absence of insight into what is worth seeking

and what is worth avoiding. Absent a full specification of those values, it would not

be the sort of rule that could be correctly applied without possessing some degree of

virtue.

If virtuous conduct is only weakly codifiable, then these considerations raise

doubts about whether we could map out for any given virtue a definitive ‘if…, then…’

situation-‐behavior signature. The idea of capturing a virtue with a situation-‐

behavior signature seems to presuppose that virtue can be codified. When John

McDowell formulates the generalist view according to which virtue can be codified,

he states:

The idea is that a conception of doing well… can be spelled out as a set of rules of conduct, presumably in some such form as this: “In such-‐and-‐such conditions, one should do such-‐and such… (McDowell 1998: 27)

The generalist’s rules, as McDowell presents them, and the situation-‐behavior

signatures of the CAPS theory are roughly of the same form: one in a normative

register, telling us what we should do, the other in a descriptive register, telling us

how a person with a virtue or the virtues will behave. Of course, the generalist’s

rules could be quite fine-‐grained and prescribe highly variable behavior in light of

subtle situational differences. They could then provide a map to virtue that one

could apply, though perhaps very awkwardly, to at least mimic virtuous behavior.

Those opposed to strong codifiability, including Russell, are committed to denying

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the possibility of such a code. On that view, then, such rules would prove impossible

to generate, and it would follow as well that one could not formulate a situation-‐

behavior signature, no matter how subtle and variable, that captures virtue.

Yet perhaps the situation-‐behavior signature could itself be open-‐ended and

general, holding only for the most part.10 In that case, the situation-‐behavior

signature would capture the general contour of virtue, but not the specific action

that would be performed by a virtuous agent in each case. The situation-‐behavior

signatures may therefore be analogous to the v-‐rules. Situation-‐behavior signatures

may yield only rough predictions of behavior that would be expected by virtuous

agents across different kinds of situation meaningful to virtuous agents. They should

almost invariably rush to see whether someone slumped over on the ground and

moaning is in need of assistance.

But it is quite unclear that such a general, open-‐ended situation-‐behavioral

signature could suffice for executing Russell’s program for going from an empirically

attributable trait to virtue. To execute Russell’s program, we must isolate a trait and

then construe it as morally significant. But if we want to isolate a trait empirically

and then construe it as having moral significance we must be able to develop a

signature, and the trait that we isolate must then be matched up with virtue through

being interpreted as morally significant. But if subtle situational features influence a

virtuous agent’s reasoning about what is to be done, then traits resembling virtue

may be equated with virtue absent an adequate empirical specification. To identify

genuine virtue rather than conventional adherence to received ideas of good

10 As Nancy Snow proposed to me in personal correspondence.

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behavior, we would, I would think, want to examine someone’s responsiveness to a

range of different situations to see if there is responsiveness to a range of

considerations. So, while it is certainly the case that a virtuous agent would come to

the aid of someone slumped over and moaning, so too would other agents, including

decent but merely conventionally guided persons and perhaps some self-‐serving

agents who stand to benefit from being seen as moral. To distinguish virtue from

these other cases, we would surely need some sort of elaborate profile, and a

general profile analogous to a v-‐rule would not seem to meet these desiderata.

Further, the aspiration of the psychologists studying traits does not seem to

be limited to a descriptive analogue of a v-‐rule. Lapsley and Narvaez take it that the

situation-‐behavior signatures tap into a “lawful” situational variability that would

provide the basis for rebutting one of Lawrence Kohlberg’s objections to virtue,

namely, that it hinges on numerous situational factors (2004: 198). The suggestion

that the situation-‐behavior signature might reveal lawful situational variability

hearkens to Cronbach and Meehl’s classic treatment of theoretical constructs in

psychology. On their view, a construct is not fully known unless all the laws that

govern it are known (1955: 290). Even if this idea is in practice unachievable in the

study of human behavior, it reveals an aspiration that is at odds with the thesis of

non-‐codifiability: we should, on that view, be able to situate trait constructs within a

nomological network that would capture all the causal laws involving it, either

statistically or deterministically. In either case, the aspiration runs against the thesis

of non-‐codifiability since it would specify a behavior that is at least statistically

probable given a specific condition confronting the agent.

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It is useful to consider the contrast between virtue and the personality

dispositions that the CAPS personality theory has been effectively deployed to study,

such as narcissism and rejection-‐sensitivity; these dispositions do not exhibit the

qualities that give us reason to think virtue is non-‐codifiable: the holism of

judgments about what is overall virtuous and the irreducibly normative content of

v-‐rules. That is because the traits have goals that can be straightforwardly specified

without reference to norms, viz., eliciting praise and avoiding social rejection, and

that may give agents with these traits reason to seek them that do not stand in

complex relations with other traits. For example, the narcissist’s goal of winning

others’ adulation is clear by contrast with the goal of acting well; it is clearly

specifiable independently of one’s possession of that trait or other traits.

Since the goal is independently specifiable, the sort of reasoning that is

required to get to the narcissist’s goal is instrumental. By contrast, the reasoning

involved in virtue has been labeled as ‘specificationist’ or ‘constituent-‐means’

reasoning.11 On this view, there is a sense in which the virtuous agent’s aims are

fixed: she aims at the noble or a life of virtuous activity. But given that this aim is

quite indeterminate, the agent must often engage in deliberation so as to determine

what would constitute acting virtuously in her circumstances. The specification of

what is to be done occurs “occasion by occasion” (McDowell 1998: 30; see also Moss

2011: 222; Hursthouse 2011: 46). If this is so, then anyone assessing another’s

character must worry about whether they have correctly deliberated about what

would constitute acting well in that situation, noting that our construals of the 11 The interpretation has its origins in Wiggins (1981) and it is elaborated in McDowell (1998). Russell also endorses this view of deliberation (2009: 9).

30

situation may differ (Sreenivasan 2002: 52; Kamtekar 2004: 470-‐473). But although

the CAPS theory accounts for subjective construal, it could not in principle allow for

the ‘occasion by occasion’ specification of what is to be done that would characterize

the practically wise person. That occasion by occasion specification could not be

captured by the sort of descriptive generalization of the situation-‐behavior

signature, which provides evidence for the traits that it posits in a form that

specifies a behavior corresponding to psychological significant situation. For

example, though we might expect a virtuous agent to be giving in situations that

(rightly) strike her as apt for giving, there are many factors that might exclude or

switch off the reason to be generous: for example, a promise to someone else or

insight into the impact of a gift on this particular person (Swanton 2015).12

Here one might wonder whether the concept of social intelligence, appealed

to by Snow, would help. Indeed, the pioneers of this concept emphasize that

“intelligence … involves the ability to handle novel task demands or familiar tasks in

novel circumstances” (Cantor and Kihlstrom 1987: 65). Yet, this view is not a

fundamental departure from the social-‐cognitive approach, and explicitly aims to

build on work by George Kelly, Walter Mischel, and Albert Bandura (1987: 22-‐46).

Indeed, Kihlstrom and Cantor identify Mischel’s cognitive affective units with

intelligence, which is plausible given that the units are mental representations that

function in processing information about the self and the world (Kihlstrom and

Cantor 2000: 370). The social intelligence research appears to be distinctive in that

takes on very broad competencies at tasks that are avowedly “ill defined” in that

12 Thanks to …

31

they deal with situations that do not present a clearly defined problem with a clear

preferred solution (1987: 162-‐163). One challenge of Cantor and Kihlstrom’s

research program was to find tasks that presented enough challenge and range of

possible approaches so that different individual problem-‐solving approaches could

be discerned, without being so ill defined that there could not be seen to be

representative styles of responses. Their studies focus on people engaged at what

they call “life tasks” which are tasks that a person explicitly sees himself as working

on and devoting energy to at a specific period of life (1987: 168-‐169). Focusing on

university students facing transition to living independently, they pursued an

idiographic study of their approaches to the self-‐defined problems such as

integrating socially and succeeding academically, and they delineated different

styles of achievement strategies based on these approaches (1987: 182-‐184). So,

although these are challenging tasks with a diverse array of approaches to

addressing them, there are also fairly clear success criteria at these tasks: making

sufficient friends and getting good enough grades.

Snow’s approach of defining virtue as social intelligence employed by

someone with virtuous motives does not seem to offer distinct advantages over

Russell’s approach in regard to integrating reason into the specification of traits. As

noted earlier, Snow defines social intelligence as:

… a complex, multidimensional set of knowledge, skills, and abilities, comprised of perception or insight, knowledge, and behavioral ability, that, other things being equal, enables us to perform well or be successful in social or interpersonal affairs. (2010: 69)

32

Of course, the virtuous agent will define success or good performance in a

distinctive manner, but if virtue is indeed non-‐codifiable, then it will also be defined

occasion by occasion and we will not be able to define virtue in terms of successful

outcomes that can be defined for individual situations in advance, independently of

the possession of virtue. There may not be a distinctive situation-‐behavior profile of

the well-‐motivated socially intelligent agent. If this argument is correct, and it

depends on the idea that the virtues are non-‐codifiable, then it would not follow

from the empirically supported existence of social intelligence and the plausibility

that some of the people who possess social intelligence are well-‐motivated that

there is indirect empirical support for virtue, as Snow contends.

6. Conclusion

John Doris and Christian Miller have both noted that the CAPS framework by

itself does nothing to support the claim that anyone possesses traditional virtues

and vices; it only shows that people have some character traits or other (Doris 2002:

85; Miller 2014: 218). No research done employing the CAPS framework supports

the possession of appropriate responsiveness to morally relevant features, and

Miller’s own research supports that most people possess what he calls ‘mixed traits’

which have some morally good qualities and some morally bad qualities.13 Of

13 Snow claims (personal correspondence) that the studies at the Wediko summer camp by Shoda, Mischel, and Wright (1994), which generated personality profiles for children who perceived being teased and being threatened, and documented behavioral reactions of aggression and fearfulness reveal “morally relevant construals of situational features and morally relevant reactions.” While I think it is

33

course, it is still open to Russell and Snow to claim, in light of Miller’s research, that

virtue possession is rare. But as I have argued, there is reason to think that the

existence of CAPS traits does not support the existence of Aristotelian virtue.

My purpose in making this argument is not to further the situationist attempt

to debunk virtue, but rather to underscore that virtue is difficult to look for

empirically, more difficult to look for than even the CAPS framework captures. It is

unsurprising that so many studies would be negative, demonstrating our lack of

virtue, since a non-‐virtuous agent may go wrong in reliable ways in service of goals

that are much more determinate than the noble, and thus relatively easy to capture

empirically. The study of virtue would perhaps have to be idiographic in the

extreme, perhaps resembling careful biography, carried out with a novelistic insight

into an individual and her situation; in other words, it requires us to confront an

individual and her situation in their particularity with full engagement of our own

moral discernment.14

Works Cited Annas J (2003) Virtue Ethics and Social Psychology. A Priori 2:20-‐34 Athanassoulis N (2001) A response to Harman: Virtue ethics and character traits. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2):215–221 true that these responses might be pertinent to moral evaluation of the children, as far as I can tell no attempt was made to sort out whether the signatures of the youth corresponded to specific traits, much less virtues. 14 As Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum forcefully argued early on in the revival of virtue ethics.

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McDowell, J. (1998). Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Miller, C. (2014). Character and Moral Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mischel, W. (1968). Personality and Assessment. New York: Wiley. Mischel, W. (1973). Toward a cognitive social learning reconceptualization of personality. Psychological Review, 80(4), 252-‐283 Mischel, W., & Morf, C. C. (2003). The self as a psycho-‐social dynamic processing system: A meta-‐perspective on a century of the self in psychology. In Handbook of self and identity. Ed. M. R. Leary & J. P. Tangney. New York: Guilford Press,15-‐43 Mischel, W., & Shoda, Y. (1995). A cognitive-‐affective system theory of personality: reconceptualizing situations, dispositions, dynamics, and invariance in personality structure. Psychological review, 102(2), 246-‐68 Mischel, W., & Shoda, Y. (1998). Reconciling processing dynamics and personality dispositions. Annual review of psychology, 49, 229-‐258. Mischel, W., Shoda, Y., & Ayduk, O. (2008). Introduction to Personality: Toward an Integrative Science of the Person, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Morf, C. C. (2006). Personality reflected in a coherent idiosyncratic interplay of intra-‐ and interpersonal self-‐regulatory processes. Journal of Personality, 74(6), 1527-‐1556. Morf, C. C., & Rhodewalt, F. (2001). Unraveling the Paradoxes of Narcissism: A Dynamic Self-‐Regulatory Processing Model. Psychological Inquiry, 12(4), 177-‐196. Moss, J. (2011). “Virtue Makes the Goal Right”: Virtue and Phronesis in Aristotleʼs Ethics. Phronesis, 56(3), 204-‐261. Pears, D. (1980). Courage as a Mean. In Essays on Arisotle’s Ethics. Ed. A. Rorty. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 171-‐187. Romero-‐Canyas, R., Downey, G., Berenson, K., Ayduk, O., & Kang, N. J. (2010). Rejection sensitivity and the rejection-‐hostility link in romantic relationships. Journal of Personality, 78(1), 119-‐14 Russell, D.C. (2009). Practical Intelligence and the Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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