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Empirical Adequacy and Virtue Ethics

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Abstract

Situationists contend that virtue ethics is empirically inadequate. However, it is my contention that there is much confusion over what “empirical adequacy” or “empirical inadequacy” actually means in this context. My aim in this paper is to clarify the meanings of empirical adequacy in order to see to what extent virtue ethics might fail to meet this standard. I argue that the situationists frequently misconstrue the empirical commitments of virtue ethics. More importantly, depending on what we mean by empirical adequacy, either virtue ethics has no need to be empirically adequate or where it does have such a need, the psychological evidence fails to show that it is empirically inadequate. An additional contribution the paper intends to make is to provide a more detailed discussion of the explanatory nature of virtue ethics.

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Notes

  1. I am concerned in this paper only with philosophical situationists (Harman, Doris, Alfano) rather than with psychologists who call themselves situationists (on this distinction, see e.g. Snow 2010: 2).

  2. Aristotelian virtue theories are my only concern for this paper, though I do think much of what I have to say can apply to any ethical theory that gives an important place to virtue understood as a global trait. I do not distinguish virtue theories from virtue ethics in the paper.

  3. I have nothing to say here about local traits, which are supposed to be indexed to a specific situation (see Doris 2002).

  4. If virtues are not real, then arguably a virtue theory could be empirically inadequate in the other three senses identified above. Space precludes a discussion of the logical relations between the four kinds of empirical adequacy.

  5. Harman himself seems to back off from the strong claim (2009: 241).

  6. Snow (2010) and Russell (2009) make the empirical case for virtues and traits; Miller (2013, 2014) makes the empirical case for traits. Cf. Miller 2003: 372–3.

  7. I do not wish to put any weight at all on the significance of “most people.” One can read this phrase as “many” or a “sizeable portion” of people, or something similar, if one prefers, here and throughout the paper.

  8. For a thorough discussion of and case for the issue of the rarity of the virtues see Miller 2014: chapter 8; see also DePaul 1999.

  9. They are perhaps most explicit in Alfano 2013: “at least in their more optimistic moments, [virtue ethicists] do say that a critical mass of people really are virtuous” (23); given a “tendency of virtue ethicists to say that much of human behavior would be inexplicable and unpredictable without reference to virtues and vices, the idea seems to be that for any given virtue, a sizeable plurality…of people will be sufficiently saturated with it as to make the attribution of the virtue conversationally permissible” (32); cf. Alfano 2012: 225.

  10. See e.g. Alfano 2013: 32 and Doris 1998: 512.

  11. See also his reference to the passage twice on 30 and then again on 32 (though he omits MacIntyre’s name there).

  12. I do not make any distinction here between behavior, conduct, or action.

  13. See especially Kawall 2009.

  14. See, e.g., Annas 2011: ch. 3 and Russell 2009: ch. 4 and also §3 below.

  15. On the importance of reasons to an explanation, see also §4 below.

  16. For a careful discussion of this idea, see the “saturation metaphor” in Alfano 2013: 29 ff.

  17. However, in terms of explanation of garden variety behavior, virtue ethics can accept that most people too often and too quickly attribute the possession of virtues to others. See e.g. Miller 2014: chapter 7; Russell 2009: 307–314.

  18. For some of these explanans, see MacIntyre 1976.

  19. Miller (2014) accepts the idea that virtue ethics is not committed to the widespread possession of the virtues, but he also seems to understand “empirical adequacy” in the dispersive sense; see, e.g., 218, where he uses “empirical adequacy” and “widespread possession of virtues” as synonyms.

  20. Russell insists that “virtue theorists, whether they like it or not, must be in the business of assessing the empirical adequacy of theories of personality” (2009: 319); Snow insists that “virtue ethics needs firmer empirical grounding” (2010: 2).

  21. Parallels to the debate about eliminativism are instructive; see, e.g., Jackson and Pettit (1990).

  22. Miller writes that “it seems likely that Harman and Doris simply assumed that all global character traits would have to be either traditional virtues or vices” (2014: 195).

  23. The idea that the virtues are rare may pose other concerns for the virtue ethicist, such as a concern about theoretical mediation (see Doris 1998: 520), but as these are not relevant to the issue of empirical adequacy, they are not my concern here.

  24. Several points in this section broadly follow Sreenivasan’s discussion (2013: 296–7).

  25. Doris writes that if virtue is rare, it is not clear what are “the practical advantages enjoyed by ideals of virtue.” (1998: 512); see also, e.g., Doris and Stich 2005: 120–121; Alfano 2013: 63; Sabini and Silver 2005: 538.

  26. Alternatively, the virtue ethicist could concede that many people cannot fully possess virtue; but that would not mean that approximating virtue as best we can is somehow morally unimportant.

  27. Miller says “the burden is on the Aristotelian to show how realizing such a normative ideal is psychologically realistic for beings like us” (2014: 207). See also Prinz 2009: 120 and Doris and Stich 2005: 121 and cf. Doris 2002: 121–127.

  28. Miller writes that “one might reasonably doubt whether all explanations have to be causal or whether the virtue ethicist is committed to giving a causal account of trait-based action” (2003: 374, n. 27), but he does not pursue the matter there or in his Mixed Trait Theory, instead adopting the strictly causal account.

  29. See esp. 2013: “explanatorily powerful properties support lawlike generalizations”; “explanatory power is grounded in causal mechanisms” (30).

  30. Alfano (2013: 30 n.6) gives four other virtue theorists who are supposedly committed to understanding the explanatory power of virtue ethics in terms of causal mechanisms. Three of these do not mention the explanatory nature of virtue ethics at all: two (Annas 2011: 8–10; Dent 1975: 328) suggest that virtues reliably lead to virtuous behavior, which does not tell us what kind of explanation precisely is at work, and the third (Wallace 1974) is, as far as I can tell, not relevant to causal mechanisms or the issue of explanation.

  31. McDowell goes on to mention that this point applies equally well in the case of explaining a virtuous action. Cf. MacIntyre 1984: 84 and 209.

  32. These are sometimes distinguished as the nominal or objective features of the situation versus the psychological or subjective features of the situation (see, e.g. Miller 2014: 54–57, Russell 2009: ch. 8; Snow 2010: 17–31).

  33. One concern might be that explaining behavior in terms of an agent’s reasons is misguided because the agent in many cases is not aware of her own reasons for acting. But explaining action in terms of reasons does not commit one to explaining actions in terms of conscious reasons.

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Acknowledgments

I’m grateful to the Character Project for allowing me to pursue the issues in this paper during the summer seminar at Wake Forest University in 2013. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at “Virtue, Medicine, and Modern Moral Philosophy: A Conference in Honor of W. David Solomon” at the University of Notre Dame in May 2014 and the Felician Ethics Conference in April 2015 at Felician College; I thank both audiences for their feedback. Thanks to Mark Alfano, Anne Baril, Aaron Cobb, Micah Lott, Christian Miller, Nancy Snow, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

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    Philip A. Reed

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Reed, P.A. Empirical Adequacy and Virtue Ethics. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 19, 343–357 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-015-9623-3

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