An attempt to ‘explain away’ virtue ethics

[lukeprog]

Recently I summarized Joshua Greene’s attempt to ‘explain away’ deontological ethics by revealing the cognitive algorithms that generate deontological judgments and showing that the causes of our deontological judgments are inconsistent with normative principles we would endorse.

Mark Alfano has recently done the same thing with virtue ethics (which generally requires a fairly robust theory of character trait possession) in his March 2011 article on the topic:

I discuss the attribution errors, which are peculiar to our folk intuitions about traits. Next, I turn to the input heuristics and biases, which — though they apply more broadly than just to reasoning about traits — entail further errors in our judgments about trait-possession. After that, I discuss the processing heuristics and biases, which again apply more broadly than the attribution errors but are nevertheless relevant to intuitions about traits… I explain what the biases are, cite the relevant authorities, and draw inferences from them in order to show their relevance to the dialectic about virtue ethics. At the end of the article, I evaluate knowledge-claims about virtues in light of these attribution biases, input heuristics and biases, and processing heuristics and biases. Every widely accepted theory of knowledge must reject such knowledge-claims when they are based merely on folk intuitions.

An overview of the ‘situationist’ attack on character trait possession can be found in Doris’ book Lack of Character.