Book Reviews
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Book Reviews Mark Alfano
Published online: 5 February 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Russell, Daniel. Practical Intelligence and the Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. xvii + 439 pp. Indexed. ISBN 0199565791 $99.00 (Hbk). Snow, Nancy. Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory. New York: Routledge, 2008. x + 134 pp. Indexed. ISBN 0415999103 $110 (Hbk); $29.95 (Pbk). Starting with Flanagan (1991), Harman (1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2006), and Doris (1998, 2002), reconciling ethics – especially virtue ethics – with the deliverances of psychology has become a hot topic. Two monographs recently joined the fray: Daniel Russell’s Practical Intelligence and the Virtues and Nancy Snow’s Virtue as Social Intelligence. Though these books exhibit marked differences, their similarities are a sign of the future direction of and problems for virtue ethics. They recognize that if Harman and Doris are right that character and virtue as traditionally conceived are “chimerical” (Snow, p. 2), then “there is no more point to theorizing about the moral qualities of character traits than there would be to theorizing about the moral qualities of ‘phlegmatic’ and ‘choleric’ personalities” (Russell, p. xii). Russell and Snow begin their constructions of a defensible conception of character by distinguishing psychological situationists like Ross and Nisbett (2011) from philosophical situationists like Harman and Doris, then argue that the former have been misinterpreted by the latter. Philosophical situationists survey the plethora of studies showing that most people do not display consistent behavior across different types of situations and draw the conclusion that virtue ethics lacks empirical support. The same person may cheat on a spelling test but not a math test, or may lie to peers but not to authority figures. Seemingly irrelevant external variables are often better predictors of behavior than internal dispositions like honesty and courage. This surprising fact leads philosophical situationists to argue that virtue ethics, with its commitment to causally efficacious dispositions, is empirically inadequate. Snow and Russell respond by citing recent research by psychologists, focusing on Mischel and Shoda’s (1995) cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS). According to the CAPS theory, personality traits are complexes of behaviors, construals, expectations, M. Alfano (*) Center for Human Values, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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goals, affects, skills, and higher-order evaluations and beliefs. Character traits like virtues, then, are such complexes considered from an ethical point of view. The key to this move is construals: cross-situational consistency depends crucially on the individuation of situations. What counts as a situation of the same sort? For philosophical situationists and earlier generations of virtue ethicists, the answer is framed in terms of the way the world actually is. According to the CAPS theory,
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