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The Journal of Value Inquiry (2005) 39: 507512DOI: 10.1007/s10790-006-8393-5 C
BOOK REVIEW
John Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 272 pp. (indexed). ISBN 0-521-63116-5, $65.
Seventy years of research in social psychology has served to demonstrate that human behavior is malleable. Aspects of the physical circumstances in which we live have profound effects on our behavior. Being in a hurry decreases the likelihood that we will stop to help an ailing stranger. The goading of an authority gure increases the likelihood that we will harm a stranger. In the last several years, such research has attracted the attention of moral philosophers.
The proponents of traditional virtue ethics hold that if we are altruistic, e.g., we would display altruistic behavior across a broad range of different kinds of situation, since proponents of traditional virtue ethics hold that character traits are global. But recent psychological research suggests that most humans would not behave altruistically across a broad range of different kinds of situation. Globally, altruistic persons would neither fail to help nor harm strangers, even if they were in a hurry or under the inuence of an authority gure. Some moral philosophers conclude that most people are not globally altruistic and, by extension, that most people do not possess global character traits. The view that there are global character traits is hence, it seems, empirically inadequate.
John Doris, in Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior participates in the debate over the empirical adequacy of globalism, the view that there are global character traits. He rejects the empirical adequacy of the view that persons possess global character traits, but his argument moves too quickly. The social psychology upon which Doris draws fails to establish that subjects possess the states of mind, the beliefs, desires, emotions, processes of reasoning, judgment, and willpower, that are distinctive of moral traits. Even if research establishes that most people do not possess certain kinds of behavioral disposition, it does not establish that most people do not possess the kind of traits that traditional virtue ethicists endorse. But Doris shifts the discussion from the empirical adequacy of globalism to its ethical adequacy. His arguments that globalism is ethically inadequate force us to reexamine and...