not detract from the value of efforts to live well and in ways that add to the possibility
of human flourishing. Even in the absence of full virtue, fewer impediments to
flourishing are likely than in the absence of any attempts at virtuous behaviour. The
admitted circularity of this argument should not detract from the fact that virtues such as
those of courage, honesty and justice are recognisable as virtues.
Harman’s challenge to virtue ethics
Harman (1999) poses a particularly serious challenge to virtue ethics when he claims
that we may be mistaken about the whole idea of character. In his view it is likely that
what we take to be character is an illusion brought about by a wish to be convinced by
our moral intuitions. In a thinly disguised attack on Aristotle, Harman argues that we
should be as wary of our moral intuitions as we have learned to be about our intuitions
of the physical world. Wolpert (1992) illustrates how far removed from common sense
scientific thinking actually is, and argues that it was the attachment to common sense
(that is, our intuitions) about the physical world that prevented the development of
science until recent times. Harman claims that if character traits do exist then studies to
identify them would not have been so spectacularly unsuccessful. On the basis of this
lack of evidence, Harman concludes that what we have is a failure of interpretation; we
have fallen into the trap of ‘the fundamental attribution error’ in explaining actions in
terms of permanency of character whereas (he says) the evidence points to the important
role of situation in determining behaviour. Noting that character defect explanations of
conformity in Milgram’s experiment and of failure to assist in the parable of the Good
Samaritan are unconvincing and undermined by empirical evidence, Harman proceeds
to offer alternative interpretations of the data in which features of the situation are
brought to the fore. He concludes that our tendency to seek evidence to confirm our
existing beliefs leads us astray in inferring character traits from actions, and in
generalising from narrow and context bound regularities in behaviour. He uses an
example where the failure to acknowledge a friend is interpreted as coldness even when
there may be other valid reasons for not saying hello; not wearing contact lenses may
well result in an inability to recognise, and thereby ignore, a friend in the street yet we
latch on to defects of character almost by default. Harman does not deny that people
have dispositions; rather he denies that people’s dispositions are morally significant in
the sense implied by virtue ethics. It is not that people do not want to act courageously,
honestly orjustly and for the most part, given the situations in which people find
themselves, such ‘virtuous’ actions are possible. If one is usually in a situation in which
29