Guilt, Embarrassment, and the Existence of Character Traits

New Waves in Ethics. Ed. Thom Brooks. Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming) Introduction Much has been written in recent years about the bearing of experimental results in social psychology on the existence of character traits. Gilbert Harman and John Doris are what we might call global trait eliminativists – on the basis of the psychological data, they reject the existence of all character traits which are cross-situationally consistent and iteratively stable over time. A number of advocates of Aristotelian virtue ethics, on the other hand, are global trait realists – they argue in various ways that the experimental results are compatible with the existence and at least modest possession of global character traits such as compassion and honesty. In a number of recent papers, I have avoided this debate between eliminativists and Aristotelians, and instead focused on developing a novel positive story about character traits that is informed by the empirical literature. 1 Like others in this discussion, I have chosen to focus on helping behavior and acts of kindness and charity, and have outlined an account of character traits associated with helping which is a form of global trait realism. At the same time, what I call “global helpings traits” are rather different from how Aristotelians understand the virtue of compassion. Thus I see my view as an intermediate position between global trait eliminativism and the traditional Aristotelian form of global trait realism. The first section of this paper briefly summarizes my positive view of global helping traits. The remaining sections then develop the view in two new directions by examining the