Lack of Character

One response to my position is an incredulous stare: It would be more than remarkable, this unflinching gaze implies, if our time-honored notions of character were so empirically undersupported. At the same time, I risk bored yawns: The sort of behavioral variability I've been going on about is familiar to everyone, including the character theorist. Then I must beware the dreaded “Oh yeah?”/“So what?” dilemma: All philosophical positions look false on some readings and uninteresting on the others (Sturgeon 1986). In this case, the “oh yeah”er flatly rejects situationism, while the “so what”er denies that situationism pressures a suitably nuanced reading of characterological moral psychology. Given the evidence, I'm confident that “oh yeah” represents a doomed heroism; the situationist tradition has progressed beyond a point where cavalier dismissal is an intellectually responsible retort. Nor does “so what” seem particularly promising; major strains of both characterological moral psychology and personality psychology feature commitments unsettled by situationism. But this is not yet to say that these commitments are widespread outside the academy; maybe people's everyday conception of moral personality is more sophisticated than that of those who write about character for a living. Rather than making arguments with broad resonance, perhaps I've merely scored a few points in a game of academic ping-pong. This conjecture evinces an appealing populism, but it wants for evidential support, as will become clear with a survey of the experimental literature on person perception.