Liberals, race, religion, bigots, essentialism (8-4-22)

The Left derides conservatives who want to ascribe essential qualities to Jews, Christians, Muslims, blacks, whites, Anglos, Germans, Japanese, Nigerians. And the Left is right. Just because somebody is a member of one of these groups does not determine their essential qualities. There is no true Jew, Christian, Muslim, etc. Situations and incentives affect how people behave. So too, just because someone says something ugly on a podcast does not make them a hater or a bigot. The Left wants to ascribe essential qualities to people who say things impolitic.

Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139670

Philosopher John M. Doris writes in this respected 2005 book:

* I regard this renaissance of virtue with concern. Like many others, I find the lore of virtue deeply compelling, yet I cannot help noticing that much of this lore rests on psychological theory that is some 2,500 years old. A theory is not bad simply because it is old, but in this case developments of more recent vintage suggest that the old ideas are in trouble. In particular, modern experimental psychology has discovered that circumstance has surprisingly more to do with how people behave than traditional images of character and virtue allow.

* It’s commonly presumed that good character inoculates against shifting fortune, and English has a rich vocabulary for expressing this belief: steady, dependable, steadfast, unwavering, unflinching. Conversely, the language generously supplies terms of abuse marking lack of character: weak, fickle, disloyal, faithless, irresolute. Such locutions imply that character will have regular behavioral manifestations: the person of good character will do well, even under substantial pressure to moral failure, while the person of bad character is someone on whom it would be foolish to rely. In this view it’s character, more than circumstance, that decides the moral texture of a life; as the old saw has it, character is destiny.

* Behavior is – contra the old saw about character and destiny – extraordinarily sensitive to variation in circumstance. Numerous studies have demonstrated that minor situational variations have powerful effects on helping behavior: hurried passersby step over a stricken person in their path, while unhurried passersby stop to help…The experimental record suggests that situational factors are often better predictors of behavior than personal factors, and this impression is reinforced by careful examination of behavior outside the confines of the laboratory. In very many situations it looks as though personality is less than robustly determinative of behavior. To put things crudely, people typically lack character.

* When compared with advances in the natural sciences, psychology has exhibited little uncontroversial progress.

* Moreover, it’s not even clear that the experimentalist is well situated to tell us much about behavior; critics insist that laboratory manipulations involving small numbers of subjects on isolated occasions cannot be expected to tell us what people are likely to do outside the lab’s pretend universe. Although a balanced look at the experimental literature – or at least the best of it -makes this rhetoric look hyperbolic, charges of experimental artificiality ring of truth. But how much truth can be decided only by considering the details of the experiments in question, so a final verdict awaits more concrete discussion. For now, I’ll readily admit it: Experimental psychology is perhaps the worst available method for understanding human life. Except, I hasten to add, for all the other methods.

* As one psychologist laments, it’s “hard to avoid the conclusion that psychology is a kind of shambling, poor relation of the natural sciences” (Lykken 1991: 14). If this is the self-image of psychologists, why should philosophers look to them for help?

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