Material quoted here is drawn from the paper by Edward Slingerland, Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada, which was published in “Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology and Psychology” edited by Nancy E. Snow, Oxford University Press, 2015.
The first part of Slingerland’s paper discusses situationism and the “situationist critique” of not only virtue ethics but essentially all primary forms and systems of morality. The situationist critique proposes that situations play a far greater role in determining behavior than has been thought.
If that is the case, the argument goes, the value of any specific system of morality or behavior is significantly diminished. And, if that is true there is no need to spend as much time and effort or to rely as heavily upon those systems as philosophers, ethicists and theologians have for millennia.
The situationists gained ground in the argument on the basis of a few surprising studies done in the 70’s.
Slingerland writes:
“…suggestions that social psychological findings concerning the apparent weakness of character traits in the face of situational pressures might call into question the very possibility of virtues as stable character traits. This criticism has become even more focused and pointed in the work of Gilbert Harman and John Doris, who argue that the very notion of moral “character”—the bedrock of any virtue ethic—has been empirically discredited. It has, therefore, become quite clear that any contemporary attempt to defend virtue ethics on empirical grounds must address this “situationist critique.”
If the situationist critique were to prevail and the value of discussion of virtue ethics is degraded, Slingerland implies that it would be less useful to present his work on Confucian values. So, he brings arguments intended to dismiss the situationists before moving on to his real topic.
He quotes David Funder, who wrote, that the person-situation debate “ended as a serious scientific conversation decades ago.”
According to Slingerland:
“This is partially because the dichotomous nature of the debate has been recognized as fundamentally mistaken: persons and situations are no more separable than genes and environments, and a strong form of the person– situation contrast is as conceptually muddled as a strong form of the nature–nurture debate.
The vast bulk of the situationist literature demonstrating that broad character traits have negligible predictive power is based upon one-off assessments of subjects’ behaviors in a particular experimental environment. The problem with this approach is that it misses the aggregation effect: the extent to which a clear correlation between character traits and behavior may only begin to emerge over repeated observations over a long period of time.”
This is the key argument against the initial studies that were the basis for the ascendency of the situationist position.
Slingerland continues:
“However, in part as a reaction to situationism, personality psychologists in the last few decades have accumulated a wealth of evidence from longitudinal studies demonstrating the reality of broad character traits. For instance, few now would dispute that the so-called “Big Five” personality traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—are “real” in the sense that they are stable over time, although not entirely unalterable or context insensitive; appear to have a considerable genetic component; and predict substantive life outcomes, such as mortality, health, marital satisfaction, divorce, and occupational success.
The core claim of the situationist critique—what we might call the “high bar” argument—is that virtue ethics demands a correlation between virtue possession and actual behavior of close to 1.0, and anything short of that is a fatal problem.”
In a nutshell this situationist claim is that if a person is said to possess a certain virtue, he should be expected to act in accordance with that virtue in every circumstance in which it is relevant. And Slingerland acknowledges that it might appear that early Confucian views on virtue ethics is based on the same implicit assumption. But that is not actually the case.
The Confucian view, like the Aristotelian one, is that we acquire virtues over time by diligent study and practice and reflection. While some will posses to a greater or lesser degree a tendency toward a virtue, its development is by no means assured without the long cultivation prescribed. Clearly during a lifelong process of virtue acquisition we will fall well short of a 100% situational success rate. That fact does not negate the value of the effort or the virtue.
Slingerland concludes his first section with two points:
“To begin with, it may certainly be the case that, even with extensive training, nothing anywhere near a 1.0 correlation between character traits and behavior is attainable.
Second, it is important to realize that the entire process of Confucian character training was portrayed as occurring in a context of intense environmental manipulation, accomplished through immersion in and submission to traditional cultural forms. It is… not at all clear that…it was envisioned that even a fully trained individual was expected to function reliably outside of this buffer of environmental control.”
So, the “situation” within which the Confucian virtues were cultivated and practiced was highly controlled.
Slingerland does not see the situationist critique as a meaningful threat to the value or place of Confucian virtue ethics.
Moving on to the Confucian virtue ethics, he writes:
“The early Confucians clearly believed in the possibility of developing robust, global character traits that could endow an individual with a degree of independence from situational forces. The perfected Confucian gentleman is thought to possess an expansive compassion that would reliably produce benevolent behavior with regard to his inferiors and people in his charge; a degree of moral rectitude and inner strength that would convey stoic invulnerability to external temptations and vicissitudes such as social reputation, wealth, or sickness; a degree of wisdom and ritual propriety that would allow him to stand apart from and judge the cultural practices of his contemporaries; and a forthright courage in the face of corruption or immorality that would allow him to speak out against social superiors and those in power.
In their rhetoric concerning the incorruptible, lofty gentleman or sage, the early Confucians may have been as vulnerable as Aristotle to the “fundamental attribution error.” In fact, work in social psychology suggests that this attribution error is a basic, deeply engrained human cognitive tendency. What I hope to suggest here is that, whatever their explicit claims or assumptions, Confucian practices as envisioned by early thinkers did not rely entirely upon fully internalized, 100 percent reliable, and environmentally impervious character traits. At some level, the Confucians were exquisitely aware of the power of the situation, and their methods of self-cultivation—their techniques for producing relatively independent character traits—thus focused heavily on the manipulation of all aspects of the learner’s physical, linguistic, and social environment.”
Note: We have discussed the Confucian view of the acquisition of virtue in another post and, while Slingerland provides a different perspective on the process, which is interesting, the process itself is as we’ve previously seen. So, rather than repeat material that appears in prior posts, I’ll move to his concluding thoughts.
He writes:
“I will therefore keep my conclusion fairly modest: the early Confucian form of virtue ethics seems as if it could survive even the strongest and most plausible form of the situationist critique, which means that proclamations of the death of virtue ethics are rather premature. We can frame this a bit more strongly by observing that our current understanding of human cognition suggests that rationalist, cognitive-control–based models of ethics, such as deontology or utilitarianism, appear profoundly psychologically unrealistic. This, in turn, suggests that some form of virtue ethics is our best hope—if, that is, empirical plausibility is deemed a desirable feature when it comes to ethics.”
And, further:
“…ethical traditions such as early Confucianism help us to fill in enormous blind spots—the importance of the body, emotions, cultural training, the unconscious, and the social environment—that have hindered modern Western ethical thinking for the past several hundred years. They are thus of more than merely antiquarian interest, and can potentially help us in developing an ethic that will meet the challenges of the twenty-first century…”
So, Slingerland raises, analyzes and puts aside the situationist critique as it might attach to Confucian virtue ethics specifically and virtue ethics more generally.
However, he also in a very pointed way argues that virtue ethics are of greater importance for our time than are either the deontological or teleological systems. To label them “profoundly psychologically unrealistic” is a strong statement. Whether he thinks they are more vulnerable to the situationist critique than virtue ethics is not clear.
I would just note that different individuals favor different tools, whether they are cultivating a garden or their own characters. To dismiss the non-virtue systems as completely as Slingerland does seems to ignore this fact.
©Charles R. Lightner