Customer Reviews

Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior

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In Lack of character Doris investigates the implications of research into character psychology on moral theorizing, and specifically virtue ethics. The elephant in the virtue-ethical room is that psychological experiments have shown that people do not have something that can remotely be described as a global overarching character. People's decisions to help others in distress may depend on such trivialities of just having found a quarter in the phone box, or being in a hurry for a not-so-important appointment. Milgram has demonstrated that under relatively modest pressure from authority, people are willing to give others lethal shocks. Doris concludes that we cannot say people are good or evil, trustworthy or cheating. We can only be confident that people have `local' traits that predict behavior only in rather specific situations. Doris sets out to investigate the consequences for virtue ethics, the branch of moral theory that is concerned achieving a good life through building a moral character.

It is surprising that we had to wait 57 years after Nazism and some 25 years after Milgram's experiments before someone took the implications of situationism for ethics seriously (with possibly the exception of Hannah Arendt.) Moral theorists have contended themselves too much with conjuring up armchair `oughts' without asking whether their concepts have any empirical content. Thus, Doris should be commended for his choice of topic. Unfortunately the book is not as interesting as it could have been, because Doris shies away from some fundamental questions. Given that virtue ethics is concerned with an ideal of character, and not with our mundane attempts to achieve it, what is the relevance of experimental work for ethics? Doris mentions this issue but never delves deep into it. Another interesting question is how we should make people behave better: can we trust them at all, or should our efforts be focused instead on the design of environments that rule out possibilities for misbehaving? Rather Doris contents himself with some rather modest amendments (or so he says himself) to virtue theory. For example, it can be helpful to be aware of your own character flaws, so that you know to avoid ethically difficult situations.

Another problem with the book is the style. Instead of defending a clear position, Doris is engaged in a never-ending dialogue with imaginary critics in which he continually amends and nuances his statements, and each claim seems temporary.

But maybe I am being too harsh, because Doris' starting point raises more questions than a single book can answer. Testimony to the scope and importance of the argument is that 7 years after the publication of this book, a `naturalistic turn' in ethics is finally taking place.