Search

Several philosophers have recently claimed to have discovered a new and rather significant problem with virtue ethics. According to them, virtue ethics generates certain expectations about the behavior of human beings which are subject to empirical testing. But when the relevant experimental work is done in social psychology, the results fall remarkably short of meeting those expectations. So, these philosophers think, despite its recent success, virtue ethics has far less to offer to contemporary ethical theory than might have been initially thought. I argue that there are plausible ways in which virtue ethicists can resist arguments based on empirical work in social psychology. In the first three sections of the paper, I reconstruct the line of reasoning being used against virtue ethics by looking at the recent work of Gilbert Harman and John Doris. The remainder of the paper is then devoted both to responding to their challenge as well as to briefly sketching a positive account of character trait possession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many sociologists believe that behavioral sociology is alien to traditional sociological thought, and some have questioned its legitimacy as a sociological perspective. This paper takes the position that behavioral sociology is very much in accord with basic tenets of sociology. The belief that it is not results from misunderstanding and confusion about the foundations and practice of behavioral sociology. Three key concerns about behavioral sociology are addressed: (1) the subject matter of behavioral sociology and its distinction from behavioral psychology; (2) the unexplained "givens" of behavioral sociology (the origins of existing reward systems), and (3) the concern that behaviorists view human behavior as mechanistic and unfeeling. The paper concludes that many differences between behavioral sociology and other sociological perspectives have been exaggerated, that behavioral sociology does exhibit most traditional characteristics of the discipline, and that the concern with the legitimacy of behavioral theory in sociology has obscured the one significant difference that does exist disagreement over the goals and conduct of a science of human behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]