“According to most versions of virtue ethics, an agent’s primary ethical goal is to cultivate the virtues. The fully virtuous person possesses all the virtues, and so is disposed to do the appropriate thing in all circumstances. [...]
Yet skeptics such as Doris (1998, 2002) and Harman (1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2006) argue that situational influences swamp dispositional ones, rendering them predictively and explanatorily impotent. And in both science and philosophy, it is but a single step from such impotence to the dustbin.
We can precisify the skeptics’ argument in the following way. If someone possesses a character trait like a virtue, she is disposed to behave in trait-relevant ways in both actual and counterfactual circumstances. However, exceedingly few people—even the seemingly virtuous—would behave in virtue-relevant ways in both actual and counterfactual circumstances. Seemingly (and normatively) irrelevant situational features like ambient smells, ambient sounds, and degree of hurry overpower whatever feeble dispositions inhere in people’s moral psychology, making them passive pawns of forces they themselves typically do not recognize or consider.
Are individual dispositions really so frail? A firestorm followed the publication of Doris’s and Harman’s arguments that virtue ethics is empirically inadequate. If they are right, virtue ethics is in dire straits: it cannot reasonably recommend that people acquire the virtues if they are not possible properties of “creatures like us”
This seems obviously false to me. It may well be true that, in general, situational influences swamp dispositional ones. But that doesn’t mean that it’s pointless to try to cultivate virtue and teach yourself to behave virtuously. You might not always succeed, but as long as the effect of dispositional influences isn’t entirely neglible, you will succeed more often than if you didn’t cultivate virtue.
You could use the same reasoning to argue that consequentialism is in dire straits: Wanting to act in a consequentialist manner is a human disposition, but situational influences swamp dispositional ones. Thus, consequentialism cannot reasonably recommend that people act in a consequentialist manner, because that is not a possible property of “creatures like us”.
This seems obviously false to me. It may well be true that, in general, situational influences swamp dispositional ones. But that doesn’t mean that it’s pointless to try to cultivate virtue and teach yourself to behave virtuously. You might not always succeed, but as long as the effect of dispositional influences isn’t entirely neglible, you will succeed more often than if you didn’t cultivate virtue.
You could use the same reasoning to argue that consequentialism is in dire straits: Wanting to act in a consequentialist manner is a human disposition, but situational influences swamp dispositional ones. Thus, consequentialism cannot reasonably recommend that people act in a consequentialist manner, because that is not a possible property of “creatures like us”.