The Situationist Challenge

It is time to turn our focus again from self-concept to the actual full self, in whose existence self-realists believe. Self-realists tend to be moral objectivists, as explained in Section 1.2. Among the tenets of such objectivism is the psychological assumption that human beings are capable of forming intentions to honour objective moral properties, and to do so, with time, by developing stable, self-shaping, virtuous dispositions. Aristotle says of such dispositions that ‘no human achievement has the stability of activities that express virtue, since these seem to be more enduring even than our knowledge of the sciences’. The virtuous person is indeed no human ‘chameleon, insecurely based’, but rather a human who ‘keeps the character he has throughout his life’ – even in the face of severe misfortunes – ‘good, foursquare and blameless’ (1985, pp. 25–26 [1100b1–35]).

Most moral philosophers have assumed that, on this issue at least, Aristotle should be trusted. Persons have moral characters, and those characters dispose them to good or evil deeds. Folk psychology concurs; in everyday conversation, we typically explain and predict actions on the basis of people's long-term personality traits – blissfully prized commodities in our fractured times. Similarly, virtue ethics, so prominent in today's ethical discourse, focuses on the cultivation of moral virtues qua stable dispositions conducive to human flourishing.