The Possibility of Character Development1

Because people often act out of character, some have suggested that character traits do not exist or that they have a negligible impact on our actions. It is situational factors, they argue, that are the primary determinants of our actions, for even minute and irrelevant details of situations have a significant effect on our behavior. Proponents of this view (situationists) suggest that numerous social psychology experiments provide support for this claim. Situationists also claim that because virtue ethics is grounded in the claim that a strong relationship exists between character traits and action, virtue ethics is grounded in an empirical mistake. In addition to its impact on virtue ethics, the situationist argument has clear implications for moral education. If character traits do not exist, or have little effect on behavior, then, the situationist argues, character development as a means of moral education is ineffective; that is, because character development is not possible, it should not be employed as a means of moral education. The situationist would level a similar indictment against teaching ethics, perhaps suggesting that the endeavor is strictly an academic affair with its primary value being that it introduces students to influential historical ideas and ethical issues associated with various disciplines. The situationist would argue that social psychology experiments undermine the claim that teaching ethics promotes better ethical decision making and actions, because even if a person recognized one form of ethical reasoning as appropriate to a situation, say the utilitarian approach, situational factors would determine how the person acted rather than the desire to adhere to the judgments derived from utilitarian reasoning. Even though the situationist argument has some merit, these claims, that character development is not possible and that the teaching of ethics is not useful, are not supported by the situationist argument. In this paper I argue that even if many of the fundamental claims of the situationist argument are accepted, character development is still conceptually possible and teaching ethics is still useful