Mark Alfano, “Character as Moral Fiction” (Cambridge UP, 2013)

According to a longstanding tradition in ethical theory, the primary subject of moral evaluation is the person, or, more specifically, the person’s character. Aristotle stands at the head of this tradition, and he held that moral theory must take as its center a theory of the good man; he hence devised an elaborate conception of the virtues–those dispositions and traits constitutive of the good life for human beings. Virtue ethics thrives to this day. In fact, virtue theorizing has been applied to other normative domains, including especially epistemology.

In Character as Moral Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Mark Alfano investigates the ways in which virtue ethics and epistemology are affected by recent results from behavioral sciences that call into question the idea that humans sustain stable and robust character traits. Drawing on a range of empirical data, Alfano suggests a reinterpretation of the virtues. Rather than seeing them as steady and fixed dispositions to act across a broad range of situations, Alfano argues that virtue attributions be seen more as self-fulfilling prophecies: when we properly attribute courage to a person, we heighten her tendency to behave in courageous ways. Alfano then extends this account to the intellectual virtues discussed by virtue epistemologists.