Mark Alfano's Character as Moral Fiction represents a novel contribution to the burgeoning interdisciplinary literature on virtue. Though Alfano's conclusions belong to moral philosophy, one of its main achievements is an impressive survey of the psychological literature on moral and intellectual virtue. An arresting and novel conclusion vis-à-vis the development of a moral technology is presented, which slightly overshadows the rigorous reimagining and defence of virtue in response to the challenge of situationism, which stands out as the main achievement of the book.
After an introductory outline of Alfano's broader project, the work is divided into three parts: ‘factitious moral virtue’, ‘factitious intellectual virtue’ and ‘programmatic conclusion’. The first of these parts begins by claiming that the revival of virtue ethics finds its inception with Elizabeth Anscombe's criticism of the obsession in moral philosophy with duty. The resulting disappearance of the discipline into abstract discussions of particular actions left it without a proper understanding of how human beings actually behave (17). He spends the rest of the chapter summarising the ‘hard core’ of virtue ethics, and finds nine claims that are essential to virtue ethics (34). The common theme to these is that they all spring from the defining advantage of virtue ethics: virtue is a better description of normative moral behaviour than the observance of rules and duty. It is precisely this claim to normativity that Alfano seeks to challenge by introducing the ‘situationist challenge’ to the notion of virtue.
The situationist challenge finds support from a number of studies that show that morally irrelevant situational factors, such as the presence of certain sounds and smells can have a surprising impact upon the likelihood that a person will behave morally (44–5), and also that moral behaviour is more closely associated with situations than with individuals (38). In short, there is little evidence for – and plenty against – the existence of virtue, traditionally understood. It might well be, Alfano notes, that virtue is simply rare, but this means that one of virtue ethics' principle advantages is lost: its capacity to explain moral behaviour (63). The studies he uses cannot prove the non-existence of rare saints, but the force of Alfano's argument remains: most people are influenced more by the situation than by their own traits. Virtue ethics, therefore, might not represent the best paradigm for dealing with normative ethics. After considering this first response to the situationist challenge (which he terms the ‘dodge’) he deftly dispenses with the next two (the ‘retreat’ and the ‘counterattack’), albeit with the caveat that, strictly speaking, it could be the case that ‘local virtues’ such as ‘battlefield-physical-courage-in-the-face-of-rifle-fire’ (66) remain hidden from studies, and that ‘low-fidelity virtues’ such as generosity (72) do not figure, because participants really are generous broadly speaking, just not in these particular studies. In other words, the only really compelling defence of virtue ethics is the ‘dodge’.
Following this, Alfano recommends a way in which virtue ethics might harness the situationist challenge in constructing an improved account of virtue. He calls upon a wide array of studies to support the notion that being labelled as virtuous can act as a self-fulfilling prophecy (88), provided it is plausible (92). So, as long as a person's self-concept can be continually supported with the praise that it follows patterns of social-acceptable behaviour, then that person has the motivation to maintain their self-concept by acting virtuously (101). Interestingly, Alfano then goes on to speculate that this factitious moral virtue, in which good behaviour is socially reinforced by way of the manipulation of one's self-concept, might represent a stage on the way to the development of genuine virtue (104–5). In other words, he stipulates to the aforementioned ‘dodge’, but suggests that more of these rare saints might be generated by exploiting factitious moral virtue. This is no surrender – the majority of people, and even those hypothetical individuals who might come close to possessing true virtue as a result, are still motivated by the desire to keep their self-concept matching the concept of the moral person that is socially supported.
In the second part of the book, Alfano follows much the same argument with respect to virtue epistemology, which is to say he turns from character traits relating to the search for the good life to character traits relating to the search for truth. He identifies three forms of virtue epistemology: reliabilism, responsibilism and ‘mixed virtue epistemology’ – a hybrid of the former two (111). Reliabilism, identified with Alvin Goldman, John Greco and Ernest Sosa, maintains that intellectual virtues are stable dispositions that result in a higher proportion of true belief in their possessor (e.g. memory). Responsibilism, identified with John Montmarquet and Linda Lagzebski, presents intellectual virtues as motivational, so that they are character traits, possessed by someone who desires to know the truth (e.g. curiosity, and Alfano gives conscientiousness as the cardinal virtue). The hybrid will be dispensed with because, as it turns out, reliabilism is more adequate empirically, and gains nothing from being mixed with responsibilism (117).
Just like the situationist challenge to moral virtue, responsibilism is held to be an undesirable position because of the sensitivity of intellectual traits to epistemically irrelevant aspects of the situation. Several studies demonstrate the effect of mood elevators on performance in tasks that require creativity and flexibility, which he deems responsibilist virtues. However, the very fact that people were able to solve some of these tasks indicates some degree of creativity and flexibility. What turns out to be most compelling about the studies is the extent of the improvement situational influences make possible. In any case, the conclusion to which the evidence lends itself is that intellectual virtues exert a lower influence on success rates than epistemically irrelevant situational factors. The next study he deploys perhaps permits a stronger conclusion, and that is Stanley Milgram's study in which he demonstrates the extent of the conformity inspired by unanimity, even when nonconformity was incentivised. Alfano does, therefore, show that intellectual courage is ‘empirically inadequate’ (136), but it is not clear that he demonstrates this for curiosity.
Turning to reliabilism, Alfano launches a more complex situationist challenge than that launched against responsibilism. Alfano draws upon a study in which participants are asked to guess how many words in four pages of a novel have letters ending ‘ing’ on the one hand, and seven letters with the penultimate latter being ‘n’ on the other. Most guess that the latter category has far fewer words in it, even though all the words that fit the former category also fit the latter category. These guesses – regardless of whether one is correct – are inconsistent with each another. This indicates the use of the ‘availability heuristic’, in which the ‘ease with which examples can be brought to mind’ is believed to correlate to the probability of the event occurring (142).
Alfano then turns to the ‘representative heuristic’ (143), in which people think that, because a descriptor is representative of a sample that is presented to them, it is therefore statistically more likely to be found in the wider population. He cites various forms of the same study – in penultimate version of the study that he cites, participants are asked to read a short statement about ‘Linda’ and then rank the probability of two statements: ‘(B) Linda is a bank teller’ and ‘(B&F): Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.’ (144–5). The respondents overwhelmingly ranked B&F more likely than B, with 85 percent committing the ‘conjunction fallacy’ that the conjunction of two conjuncts is more likely to appear than one of the conjuncts. An even stronger iteration of the study showed that 65 percent still chose the wrong answer when presented with extremely clear presentation of the claims, in which the possible reasoning behind each choice is spelled out. Still the incorrect option, with the steps of the faulty reasoning carefully spelled out, is more popular (145).
However, in both cases, Alfano needs to demonstrate that the availability and representative heuristics are commonly used. In the former example, he cites a peculiar situation in which participants are asked to make guesses when the participants themselves know full well that they have very little information on which to base their guesses. Under these conditions, the participants make inconsistent guesses, using the unreliable availability heuristic. However, Alfano needs to demonstrate that a significant proportion of day-to-day belief-formation relies upon these heuristics, if he wants to argue that reliabilism provides an inaccurate picture of the norms of human belief-formation. As such, it is not clear that Alfano has been successful in debunking either responsibilism or reliabilism, though he has shown both the rarity of intellectual courage, and the significance of epistemically irrelevant factors in intellectual performance.
Mirroring the section on factitious moral virtue, Alfano cites studies in which the socially reinforced self-perception of responsibilist virtues like diligence produced improved performance, though the opposite effect was recorded for reliabilist virtues such as intelligence (165). He concludes that the effect can be harnessed through the use of a ‘moral technology’. Moral technology ‘attempts to bridge the gap between moral psychology and normative theory by proposing ways in which we, as moral psychology describes us, can become more as we should be, as normative theory prescribes for us’ (9).
The moral technology he has principally explored is the use of the noble lie, but he introduces ‘social distance heuristics’ in the third part of the book. He cites Plato's Republic, in which Gyges' acts immorally following discovery and use of a ring that grants him invisibility. It is ‘immunity from the monitoring gaze of others’ (187) that explains his degeneration. A real world example is given in the form of the Milgram experiment, in which the physical presence of the experimenter telling the participant to continue in an apparently cruel experiment is far more effective in inducing continuing participation than when orders are communicated by phone. Of course, in this case, reducing social distance, which is ‘the inclination to treat another's desires and preferences as one's own…’ and therefore submit to social norms, worsens moral behaviour – the experiment simply demonstrates the power of the tool (196–7). Reducing social distance for the purpose of improvement is demonstrated in a study in which a small photograph of human eyes increased the amount people place in an honesty box (199). A similar improvement is seen when social distance is lowered by placing people in groups – even when the grouping is known to be arbitrary – and generosity within the group increases (201).
While Alfano concludes that face-to-face engagement should be encouraged as a moral technology, this is uncontroversial and no specific strategy is outlined. The other moral technology, however, is both clearly outlined and more controversial. While it might raise eyebrows amongst those who doubt that virtue ethics can really be served by advocating dishonesty, Alfano is consistent: he is offering a naturalistic ethic that follows norms, and so he has no a priori commitment to truth-telling. However, therein lies a different inconsistency: he is committed to normativity, but surely the kind of moral technology he advocates represents as abstract imposition? If, however, Alfano wished to delve into the area of moral technology then a better approach might have been to explore some of the practices of socially-reinforcing virtue that already exist. The result could be the endorsement of practices with the level of empirical support from which his thesis concerning the nature of character benefits. He could continue in the same vein to search for empirical support from social psychologists, though the insights of social anthropologists might be useful in identifying such practices. Given the lengths to which Alfano goes in providing an empirical foundation for his understanding of factitious virtue, it is disappointing that he does not present a similar foundation for the moral technology that he advocates.
