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Edit notes: Tom’s comments (below) have been generally incorporated into this post. His second point resulted in a correction, his third a modification. We have discusses in great detail his first point. The first part was simple a correction of my misreading Doris. The second has turned to be much more. I will elaborate much more in the next post on the masking problem and the conceptual side of Doris’ work.

This post is the first of a series. This series is tied to an independent study course that seeks to understand the traditional explanation of character traits as put forward by advocates of virtue theory and the challenges posed to it by modern psychology. The first text examined in the series is Lack of Character by John M. Doris. Dorris writes to contest a dangerous “renaissance of virtue” that started in 1958 with Elizabeth Anscombe’s article “Modern Moral Philosophy” and has been especially active in the 1990’s.¹ It is Doris’ contention that much of the modern study of virtue theory is generally based in old, and incorrect, assumptions made by the ancients. Doris sees situation as something far more predictive than character traits.²

Doris aims for an empirically-informed ethic, his claim is that the character traits required by virtue theorists are “empirically discredited.”³ Before I continue, however, it would be worthwhile to examine how Doris understands character traits. He views the mere claim of character traits as something empirically verifiable, and he sees the presentation as something that tries to describe, explain and predict human behavior.⁴ When properly formulated, it generates a claim ripe for empirical testing. After trying multiple formulations, Doris settles on his final formulation.

If a person possesses a trait, that person will engage in trait-relevant behaviors in trait-relevant eliciting conditions with markedly above chance probability p.⁵

This formulation provides a basis for character traits to be easily expressed and tested in experimental social psychological terms. Doris also finds that this formulation provides certain masking problems⁶. He mentions the masking problem as a problem admitted by the first formulation he uses, but it seems likewise relevant to the final formulation. The problem exists in conditions “where a disposition is present together with a countervailing disposition, manifest in identical circumstances, that prevents the first disposition from being manifested”⁷ Doris’ annotations refer the reader to three papers: 1) “Finkish Dispositions” by David Lewis published in The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 47 Issue 187, Pages 143 - 158; 2) “Dispositions and Conditionals” by C. B. Martin published in The Philosophical Quarterly Volume 44, Pages 1-8; and 3) “How to Speak of the Colors” by Mark Johnston, Philosophical Studies, Volume 68, Number 3 / December, 1992. Doris does not long dwell on the conceptual issues complicating character traits, his main thrust is to explore the empirical verification of character traits. Even though he ultimately discounts the issue, the topic was one of the most fascinating and provided hours of discussion during the meetings Mr. Louvier and I had. After a little thinking, Tom suggested some potential solutions to the masking problem. It would seem that in order for masking to occur, it would evince some sort of conflict. Consider an example inspired by Doris. A person who is shy but friendly goes to a party. It would be easy to hypothesize that he might show some sorts of nervousness during conversation, for example, he may not make eye contact, might seem jittery, or seem otherwise uncomfortable. He would likely not be rude, curt, or unkind. This combination may lead an observer who only had one interaction with the shy person to believe that the person was shy, but certainly not unfriendly. Masking only presents a problem to characterological explanations if one understands character traits to be all-or-nothing rather than fuzzy. Furthermore, the conditional analysis is still workable. Doris believes that his last formulation is sufficient, but we have in mind revisions of our own. Regarding the masking problem, we believe this can be resolved by a slight reformulation. If a person possesses a masked trait, that person will evince conflicted engagement in dominant-trait-relevant behaviors in trait-relevant eliciting conditions with markedly above chance probability p.

We also noted that if we did not have a domain-general notion of character, the diction of actions that tend to be consistent would have to be expressed in only situation-specific terms. We questioned what the conceptual meaning situationalism provided since meaningful statements could only made in the context of a situation. We found the following reductio ad absurdum argument expressed this concern quite well.

Why was Alice sociable at the office party? The average Joe would say, “Oh, she’s a friendly gal.” Doris would say, “Alice was sociable at the office party because she is office-party-sociable.”… Furthermore, where do you draw the line? What if Alice is only sociable when drunk? And say she only likes one brand of vodka, Cloudmir. She’ll only be sociable at office parties with Cloudmir then, right? Doris would then say (I can only guess, he never elaborates on this in the book), that Alice is “office-parties-with-Cloudmir-Vodka-sociable”. Fun. Let’s further say that Alice is only really sociable around white males, and rich ones at that. So now Alice is “office-parties-with-Cloudmir-Vodka -and-white-rich-males-sociable”. Quite a mouthful, huh? More importantly, are our character traits really that localized? If someone asked me on the street what our dear Alice is like, I wouldn’t say that. I’d say that she’s only sociable when drunk, and is a bit of a racist and a gold-digger too. Isn’t that a much more elegant way to describe people than what Doris suggests? Combinations of traits seem to do a better job of explaining complex behaviors that humorously localized ones.⁸

In addition to being a conditional that yields expected responses, Doris identifies more properties of character traits– what Doris calls robust. To capture what has been discussed already and what Doris goes on to say, he considers the following as defining features of globalism.

1. Character traits, are, in their purest form expressible in a testable conditional: If a person possesses a trait, that person will engage in trait-relevant behaviors in trait-relevant eliciting conditions with markedly above chance probability p.⁹
2. Character traits are consistent. “Character and personality traits are reliably manifested in trait relevant behavior across a diversity of trait-relevant eliciting conditions that may vary wildly in their conduciveness to the manifestation of the trait in question.”¹⁰
3. Character traits are stable. “Character and personality traits are reliably manifested in trait-relevant behaviors over iterated trials of similar trait-relevant eliciting conditions.”¹¹
4. Character traits have a property called evaluative integration: “In a given character or personality the occurrence of a trait with a particular evaluative valence is probabilistically related to the occurrence of other traits with similar evaluative valences.”¹²Put simply, one would expect character traits to have complementary traits to exist together.
5. Virtues, or positively-valanced character traits, are robust. Doris puts it thus: “if a person has a robust trait, they can be confidentially expected to display trait-relevant behavior across a wide verity of trait-relevant situations, even where some or all of these situations are not optimally conductive to such behavior.”¹³

Doris indicates that much of the philosophical heavy-lifting is done by moral psychologists.¹⁴ Moral psychology is a branch of philosophy that deals with the motiviational, affective, and cognative capacities of moral actors in morally-relevant circumstances.¹⁵ The biggest problem is that, by Doris’ account, ethical philosophers have generally ignored psychology.¹⁶ However, other philosophers, like epistimologists, have worked with experimental psychologists.¹⁷ The most common reason Doris indicates that moral philosophers often claim there is a logical gap between the “is” statements of psychology and the “ought” statements of philosophy.¹⁸ In the next post I will explore the problems Doris says experimental social psychology poses the character traits required by virtue theory.