High-Fidelity Experiments, Situationism, and the Measurement of Virtue
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High‑Fidelity Experiments, Situationism, and the Measurement of Virtue Matthew Wilson1,2 Accepted: 26 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Mark Alfano proposes an interesting distinction between high-fidelity and low-fidelity virtues.1 The distinction purports to show that some virtues are more susceptible to empirical disconfirmation than others. In the context of Alfano’s larger project, this distinction is consequential for his argument in favor of situationism, which, roughly, is the thesis that cross-situationally consistent or global virtues do not exist. But the distinction is also potentially important for those who think global virtues do exist, because it pertains to the question of how social science may attempt to measure virtue. This question is of significance to educators, politicians, philosophers, and even public health officials.2 In this essay, I argue that Alfano’s proposed distinction is a distinction without a difference with respect to virtues, but I reconstruct the distinction as one that holds between types of experiments that measure for virtue. High-fidelity experiments, I propose, are those that can provide strong evidence against the presence of virtue in test subjects, merely through the observation of a single behavior that is contrary to a virtue. Low-fidelity experiments do not provide disconfirming evidence in this way. My proposed distinction between high-fidelity and low-fidelity experiments is important for two reasons. First, it shows that it is incorrect to think that one-time behavioral experiments cannot, in principle, provide strong disconfirming evidence of a virtue. This has been a complaint of some who have argued against situationism.3 Although high-fidelity experiments may be difficult to engineer, they are not 1
See Mark Alfano, Character as Moral Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). This is a recent development in public health. See, for example, Tyler J. VanderWeele, “On the Promotion of Human Flourishing,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114, no. 31 (2017): 8148–56. 3 See Gopal Sreenivasan, “Character and Consistency: Still More Errors,” Mind 117, no. 467 (2008): 607. 2
* Matthew Wilson [email protected]; [email protected] 1
John Brown University, 2000 West University Street, Siloam Springs, AR 72761, USA
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Human Flourishing Program, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University, 129 Mt. Auburn St., Ste 1, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
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impossible, and this essay sketches out an example of what a high-fidelity experiment might look like, at least for the virtue of justice. Second, the discussion illuminates further why most social psychology experiments cited by philosophers in the situationist debate fail to be disconfirming of virtue, even for control groups. Most of these one-off or cross-sectional experiments are low-fidelity because they fail to meet the desiderata of a high-fidelity experiment, which I outline in the se
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