Virtue as Social Intelligence

by Nancy E. Snow

Virtue as Social An Empirically Grounded Theory takes on the claims of philosophical situationism, the ethical theory that is skeptical about the possibility of human virtue. Influenced by social psychological studies, philosophical situationists argue that human personality is too fluid and fragmented to support a stable set of virtues. They claim that virtue cannot be grounded in empirical psychology. This book argues otherwise. Drawing on the work of psychologists Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda, Nancy E. Snow argues that the social psychological experiments that philosophical situationists rely on look at the wrong kinds of situations to test for behavioral consistency. Rather than looking at situations that are objectively similar, researchers need to compare situations that have similar meanings for the subject . When this is done, subjects exhibit behavioral consistencies that warrant the attribution of enduring traits, and virtues are a subset of these traits. Virtue can therefore be empirically grounded and virtue ethics has nothing to fear from philosophical situationism.

144 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2009

Reviews

[Caleb · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this short book Snow responds to the situationist challenge to virtue theory. She offers compelling arguments illustrating the limitations of previous experimental research that some of have claimed provided strong evidence against the existence of traits, including virtues, that span different objective situations. Much of this research ignored the role of individual interpretations of situations as a key factor explaining behavior in a given situation and because of this it is unable to address the question of the existence of virtues.

Snow's constructive project is to draw upon empirical research that supports the existence of context-spanning traits and to argue that virtues can be understood as subset of this type of trait. She also draws upon research in social intelligence to provide further empirical grounding to her neo-Aristotelian notion of virtue. The book could have been improved if an additional chapter was included to address explicitly questions concerns the relationship between her empirically grounded neo-Aristotelian theory of virtue and normative questions concerning the nature of human flourishing.

[Todd Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

We cultivate virtue through cognitive processing routines. Virtue is a form of social intelligence.