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Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior

4.5 out of 5 stars 4 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-0521608909
ISBN-10: 0521608902
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 288 pages
  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press (March 7, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0521608902
  • ISBN-13: 978-0521608909
  • Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.6 x 9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #581,090 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

Format: Paperback
As the first reviewer was indeed too harsh in their overall assessment, and mistaken in some of their descriptions and criticisms of this book, I think it's only fair to set things straight by giving a bit of a review myself in which I also respond to a few of their pseudo-criticisms in what follows:

Empirical studies of behavior from various academic disciplines seem to strongly indicate that it's oftentimes the case that seemingly insignificant situational factors, as opposed to character traits, are better predictors of our behavior. From this situationist finding, and other premises, John Doris argues to the conclusion that there aren't such things as global character traits as understood by both traditional virtue theory and our folk psychology. That is, there aren't traits which are both 1) inter-situationally consistent across a wide range of situations of varying conduciveness to that trait, and also 2) stably manifested over iterations of similar conditions.*

This conclusion is problematic for virtue theory, he argues, insomuch as the traditional concept of virtue central to such accounts is understood as being global; and so if global traits don't exist then, a fortiori, neither can virtues. And it's likewise problematic for our folk psychology because, among other things, it suggests that our everyday attributions of character traits, which we tacitly understand as being global ("compassionate," for example), don't robustly generalize across dissimilar situations in such a manner as to allow us to confidently expect the behavioral consistency we do in fact tend to predict (as shown in studies thoroughly discussed by Doris).
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Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
A very influential book that has spawned a veritable minor industry of criticism – dubbed the "response to the Situationist challenge." Anyone in philosophical ethics who wants to rely on an account of robustly effective virtues now has to take this sort of challenge seriously, and reading this book is remains a good start.
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Format: Paperback
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.
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Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
Excellent book on how we are influenced by every situation.
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