Heated agreement: Lack of Character as Being for the Good

• DOI: 10.1007/s11098-010-9507-2
• Publication Date: 2010-03-02T06:29:33Z
• Authors: John M. Doris
• Keywords: 06 humanities and the arts; 0603 philosophy, ethics and religion

While there are many things to admire about Robert Adams' A Theory of Virtue, I'm most impressed by the moral psychology. Attention to empirical issues in the moral psychology of virtue has become increasingly commonplace over the past decade or so, but much of the detailed development has come from critics of virtue ethics, while defenders of virtue ethics have often sought to blunt the force of empirical critiques, either by voicing skepticism about the experimental social psychology from which the criticism is drawn, or by denying that the evidence, even if taken over uncritically, adversely impacts virtue ethics. Adams' (p. 118)1 approach is different; he insists that we "must take. . .[the psychological] data into account in our thinking about virtue," and develops his moral psychology out of the available empirical material. Adams' project therefore contrasts with many previous contributions to the virtue ethics literature, where the tactic has frequently been to develop a theory with relatively scant attention to the empirical literature, and then (if at all) attempt to show how the theory so developed can survive an encounter with the psychological facts. Moreover, Adams' understanding of the empirical issues is in many regards more similar to the critics' than the defenders'. Yet Adams construes his task as a defense of virtue ethics: he thinks the psychological facts, rightly understood, constrain the development of virtue ethics, but he insists that virtue ethics, rightly understood, can flourish within these constraints. As one of the empirically motivated critics, I've got a dog in the fight. I've argued that virtue ethics has too often been innocent of the empirical literature, and I've wondered how much of virtue ethics is left when this innocence is sullied