>>Linda Zagzebski: Today I want to talk to
about whether ordinary people are virtuous.
By ordinary, I mean people like you and me—people
in your class or neighborhood, or the people
who participate in empirical studies. When
psychologists ask this question, they usually
focus on easily identifiable virtuous behavior
and set up an experiment to see whether people
act in that way in the situations the experimenters
create. Some studies seem to indicate that
most people are not consistently honest in
their behavior, but they are not consistently
dishonest either. They are honest in some
situations and dishonest in others. For instance,
in a classic study by Hartshorne and May in
1928, children were put in a variety of situations
in which they could lie or cheat or steal
without being caught. What the researchers
found was that there was little correlation
between the honesty of children across these
different situations. Very few were consistently
honest or consistently dishonest. Other studies
have been done with adults and with some other
traits. In a study done in 1980 by Levin and
Isen, some subjects found a dime in a phone
booth and some did not. When they emerged
from the booth, a confederate of the experimenters
walked by and dropped a pile of papers in
front of them. Most of the subjects who found
the dime stopped to help pick up the papers.
Most of the subjects who did not find the
dime did not stop. The conclusion some people
drew from this experiment is that a person’s
mood is a better predictor of helping behavior
than the trait of kindness. This was used
to support a view called situationism. In
its extreme form, philosophers Gilbert Harman
and John Doris argued that studies like these
show that virtues are either non-existent
or very rare. But, if they are so rare, why
do we talk about them? Why have a theory of
virtue if so few people have virtue? There
are lots of different reactions to these studies,
as you might expect. Some people criticize
the construction or interpretation of the
experiment itself. For instance, repetitions
of the dime experiment did not give the same
result, showing no connection between finding
money and helping a person who dropped papers.
Other critics of situationism argue that people’s
behavior is much more consistent than it appears
when consistency is judged as the situations
are perceived by the people in the situation
rather than by the people designing the experiment.
It seems to me that the degree of behavioral
consistency depends a lot on the particular
virtue or vice we’re talking about. Very
few traits have been studied. What if we studied
the virtue of punctuality and its opposite?
Are there people who are consistently on time,
or consistently late? Are there people who
consistently overspend or consistently hoard
their money? What about open-mindedness and
close-mindedness? It would be interesting
to find out if people can have a habit of
considering the viewpoints of others, and
act that way about many different subjects.
I suspect that there is a lot of behavioral
consistency in these traits. But honesty is
an interesting virtue because it covers a
lot of different behaviors with perhaps different
motives. Compare the feeling that motivates
you to tell the truth to someone asking you
directions to the library with the motive
not to cheat on your income tax, and the motive
not to steal somebody’s iPad. The emotions
and attitudes that give rise to honest behavior
may be different in each case, and if so,
maybe we should conclude that these are three
different virtues. That would be an interesting
outcome. The virtues of benevolence are another
interesting kind of virtue because generosity,
compassion, and kindness require an emotional
disposition that may be hard to maintain continuously.
It’s not surprising that people are more
inclined to act kindly when they’re in a
good mood. But we know that some people behave
consistently whether or not they‘re in a
good mood. Think of the people who spend years
of their lives working as aid workers or missionaries.
The volunteers in L’Arche communities all
over the world live with the mentally disabled,
caring for them as family. Their first hand
reports reveal people who are often tired
and discouraged, and struggling to deal with
their own problems, but they continue to love
and care for the disabled men in their care.
But of course these people are exceptional.
Does it matter if only a few people are virtuous?
The philosopher Dan Russell argues that the
studies cited by the situationists are completely
consistent with Aristotelian virtue ethics
because virtue is a model concept, the concept
of a kind of ideal that we aim for, and it
is not surprising that few people are ideal.
That does not mean it is not useful to talk
about the ideal. I agree with Russell. It’s
the same with any excellence, like terrific
cooking. Very few cooks are consistently great
cook. Maybe they are much better when they’re
cooking for other people than for themselves,
or vice versa, or maybe they do not cook well
when they are in a bad mood, but that does
not mean there is no such thing as a good
cook. The really superb cooks are exemplars
for the rest of us. It does not take very
many exemplars to inspire us to become better
even if we never get very close to their level
of excellence. How good are we at judging
the virtue or vice of other people? Some studies
indicate that we are not very good at it at
all. If you drop your papers and someone walks
by without helping you pick them up, it is
tempting to say that that is an inconsiderate
person. If someone sees you drop a 20-dollar
bill and gives it to you, it is tempting to
say that that’s an honest person. But that
person might be dishonest in other situations,
and the person who did not help you when you
dropped a bunch of papers might be very helpful
to someone else the next day. We overgeneralize
people’s character traits the same way we
overgeneralize lots of things. I go to a super
market and am annoyed that their mushrooms
are not good, and tell my friends that that
store has bad produce. My friend is delighted
that she got her favorite cereal at a low
price at another store and tells me that that
store has low prices. We need to have a more
sophisticated way to identify and measure
virtue, especially if we are going to start
programs like the new institute at OU that
aims to foster virtues in our university community
and to take a leadership role in research
on virtue. In the next lecture I’ll talk
about different methods for measuring virtue.
