Moral Psychology, Volume 5: Virtue and Character

Moral Psychology

Volume 5: Virtue and Character

edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Christian B. Miller

A Bradford Book

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moral psychology / edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong.

v. cm.

A Bradford Book.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents: v. 1. The evolution of morality : adaptations and innateness -- v. 2. The cognitive science of morality : intuition and diversity -- v. 3. The neuroscience of morality : emotion, disease, and development. -- v. 4. Free will and moral responsibility

ISBN 978-0-262-19561-4 (vol. 1 : hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-262-69354-7 (vol. 1 : pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-262-19569-0 (vol. 2 : hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-262-69357-8 (vol. 2 : pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-262-19564-5 (vol. 3 : hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-262-69355-4 (vol. 3 : pbk. : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-262-02668-0 (vol. 4 : hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-262-52547-3 (vol. 4 : pbk : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-262-03557-6 (vol. 5 : hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-262-53318-8 (vol. 5 : pbk : alk. paper)

eISBN 9780262337274

1. Ethics. 2. Psychology and philosophy. 3. Neurosciences. I. Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, 1955-

BJ45.M66 2007

170--dc22

ePub Version 1.0

d_r0

Walter is happy to dedicate this volume to all of his golfing buddies because they have built his character and overlooked his vices.

Christian would like to dedicate this volume to the Wake Forest University philosophy department, which has been such a joy to be a part of for the past twelve years.

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Getting Cynical about Character: A Social-Psychological Perspective

1.1 Getting Less Cynical about Virtue

1.2 In Defense of (a Little) Moral Hypocrisy

1.3 Help Thou My Unbelief: A Reply to May and Aquino

2 Does Whole Trait Theory Work for the Virtues?

2.1 Virtue Traits and Personality Traits

2.2 Personality Is Not Destiny, but It’s Still Real

2.3 Whole Trait Theory Can Explain Virtues

3 Character Education and the Rearguard of Situationism

3.1 Virtue, the Right, and the Good: Comment on Sreenivasan

3.2 Situationism and the Pyrrhic Defense of Character Education: Commentary on Sreenivasan

3.3 Battlefields and Bogeymen: A Reply to Hurka and Lapsley

4 Of Marshmallows and Moderation

4.1 Willpower as Won’t-power and the Challenges of Measuring Trait Self-Control

4.2 Self-Control and Character

4.3 Trading in the Trait? Response to Masicampo and Sripada

5 Honesty

5.1 Honesty’s Threshold

5.2 The Gift of Dishonesty

5.3 Honesty Revisited: More Conceptual and Empirical Reflections

6 The Twin Dimensions of the Virtue of Humility: Low Self-Focus and High Other-Focus

6.1 Assessing Humility Is a Humbling Experience: Commentary on Nadelhoffer and Wright

6.2 The Nature of Humility: A Critical Perspective on Nadelhoffer and Wright

6.3 Response to Schrader & Tangney and Snow Commentaries

7 Compassion Is a Motivated Choice

7.1 Compassion Is Not Always a Motivated Choice: A Multiple Decision Systems Perspective

7.2 Varieties of Compassion in Buddhist Philosophy: Comments on Cameron and Rapier

7.3 Response to Comments

8 From Mimicry to Morality: The Role of Prosociality

8.1 Prosociality Is Not Morality

8.2 The Dark Side of Mimicry: Comments on Duffy and Chartrand

8.3 Reply to Goodwin and Nahmias

9 Personality Disorders and Character

9.1 Sympathy, Identity, and the Psychology of Psychopathy and Moral Atrocities

9.2 Psychopathy, Explanatory Pluralism, and Moral Responsibility

9.3 Circumstances and Responsibility in Psychopathy: Replies to Pickard and Graham

10 Does Virtue Make Us Happy? A New Theory for an Old Question

10.1 Who Does What? The Psychology–Philosophy Division of Labor on Virtue and Happiness

10.2 A Tale of Two Default Approaches: Some Old Answers for a New Theory

10.3 On the Division of Labor between Philosophers and Psychologists: A Goldilocksian Reply to Comments from Saucedo & Gruber and Kristjánsson

Contributors

Index

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Slices of ham

Table 5.2.1 Percentage of participants who explicitly said they liked or disliked the paintings they actually did dislike or like

Table 6.1 Differences in moral attributes, psychological well-being, and religiosity by humility ranking

Table 9.1 Items on the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (Hare, 2003)

List of Illustrations

Figure 2.1 How compassionately the person acted. This distribution depicts a single (hypothetical) person’s compassion-relevant behaviors over many occasions of a week. In this figure, compassion is viewed as a matter of degree rather than as an all-or-none phenomenon. Thus, the x-axis shows the degree of compassion of a single behavior, with the behaviors farther to the right indicating greater compassion. The person on the left can be considered a more compassionate person compared to the person on the right.

Figure 2.2 Stability of behavior over time. Each point in this graph represents one person’s average level of extraversion in two different weeks. How people act on average in one week is highly similar to how they act on average in another week.

Figure 2.3 Whole trait theory. TraitDES, the descriptive part of traits; TraitEXP, the explanatory part of traits.

Figure 2.4 Scatterplot of 10,000 individuals with varying degrees of aggregate compassion.

Figure 3.1 Degrees of reliability in acting kindly.

Figure 3.2 Degrees of reliability in acting kindly.

Figure 3.3 Degrees of reliability in acting kindly.

Figure 5.1 The unification challenge for honesty and its subvirtues.

Figure 5.2 The overlapping taxonomy.

Figure 5.3 The threshold taxonomy.

Figure 5.4 The empirical picture of honesty.

Figure 6.1 Low self-focus and high other-focus across grade-level/age groups.

Acknowledgments

The main papers in this volume arose from a conference at Wake Forest University in May of 2015. The conference was part of the Developing Character Project (www.thecharacterproject.com), directed by Christian B. Miller, which was funded by a very generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation. Additional funding for the conference was provided by the Wake Forest Philosophy Department’s Thomas Jack Lynch fund.

For support while preparing this volume, Christian would like to thank the Templeton World Charity Foundation. The opinions expressed here and throughout the volume are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation. For help in organizing the conference, Christian is very grateful to Julia Blackwell and Kathleen Stimely, who made everything run very smoothly. Win-Chiat Lee, Jessie Lee Miller, Charles Miller, and Joyous Miller were also tremendously supportive during the entire process of putting this volume together. Finally, a very special thanks to Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. He was very generous in asking me to come onboard and coedit this volume with him, and he has been absolutely phenomenal to work with. We have spent countless hours together planning the chapters, inviting contributors, editing drafts, organizing the material, and doing all the other things that come with a large project like this. Unfailingly, Walter has been tremendous, and I could not ask for a better collaborator. Here and in many other ways, he exhibits much virtue.

Walter would like to thank all who helped fund and organize the conference (listed above) as well as Duke University and the Kenan Institute for Ethics in particular for supporting MADLAB (Moral Attitudes and Decision-Making lab) and the members of MADLAB for many discussions about the issues in this volume. Walter is also very grateful to Christian B. Miller for going far above and beyond the call of duty in arranging the conference and for his admirable care in editing the numerous and diverse materials collected here. His efficiency, insights, patience, and good cheer made editing this volume a pleasant learning experience. Here and in many other ways, he exhibits extremely good character.

Introduction

Christian B. Miller and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Volumes 1–4 of this series focused on moral judgments about actions: Which actions are morally right or wrong? Are actions ever freely willed? Are agents ever morally responsible for their actions? Volume 5 turns to another important area of moral psychology, namely virtues, vices, and character. Here the focus is on general character traits instead of specific actions.

There has been a resurgence of interest in virtues, vices, and character during the past forty years in philosophy. Psychology has also seen a vigorous debate about the relative contributions of personality traits and social circumstances to individual decisions. Unfortunately, most moral philosophers worked in relative isolation from the sciences. In recent years, however, psychology and philosophy have been brought together.

This volume is an outgrowth of the new wave of interest in interdisciplinary work on virtue, vice, and character. The chapters that follow all raise philosophical issues in light of empirical work in psychology, some of which was conducted by the authors themselves. Each chapter provides new and exciting avenues for better understanding virtue, vice, and character in ways that could not be achieved by philosophy or psychology alone.

This introduction will briefly summarize the chapters. Each chapter is followed by two commentators and a reply, with one commentator being a philosopher and the other a psychologist.

The opening chapters provide rich discussions of two recent challenges to the very notion of character traits as well as virtues and vices: an eliminativist challenge about the need for character traits and a situationist challenge about the empirical adequacy of traditional accounts of virtues and vices. In the first chapter, the psychologist C. Daniel Batson advocates the eliminativist challenge. Specifically, he questions the scientific usefulness of the concept of character, preferring to jettison it in favor of familiar folk psychological notions like goals and values. In addition, by drawing on his own extensive research on what he calls moral hypocrisy, Batson questions the prevalence and power of good character.

Both of Batson’s commentators focus on his discussion of moral hypocrisy. Joshua May argues that, even in light of the moral hypocrisy research, there is good reason to think that we are more virtuous and morally motivated than Batson suggests. Specifically, he tries to show that the data may provide evidence for certain forms of moral integrity and that the scope of moral hypocrisy may be limited. Karl Aquino similarly takes Batson’s data to warrant a less cynical interpretation about the goodness of people’s character. His strategy in arguing for this response is different than May’s, as Aquino sees hypocrisy as an outcome of the self’s maintaining a belief in its own goodness alongside a desire for consistency. In Aquino’s eyes, this provides for a more positive interpretation of the hypocrisy results as demonstrating a form of identity work. In his reply to May and Aquino, Batson appreciates their original and thoughtful suggestions but explains why his cynicism about good character remains.

The next two chapters engage with situationist challenges to character. Situationists in social psychology first raised doubts about the existence and role of cross-situationally consistent character traits back in the 1960s, culminating in the publication of Walter Mischel’s landmark 1968 book Personality and Assessment. In philosophy, Gilbert Harman (1999, 2000) and John Doris (1998, 2002) raised a similar challenge at the turn of the century. Their focus was more specifically on the empirical adequacy of traditional virtues and vices, such as compassion and honesty.

In the second chapter, psychologists Eranda Jayawickreme and William Fleeson summarize virtue ethics and then present evidence for the kind of character traits that virtue ethics assumes, namely, somewhat stable internal personality traits that affect how people act and are motivated to act. They criticize Doris’s arguments and then explain whole trait theory. This novel view is supported by experience sampling analyzed in terms of density distributions. They find that individuals vary across circumstances, as situationists claim, but individuals also differ significantly in their distributions of actions and motivations. These distributions for individuals are fairly stable, can be explained by interpretive and motivational processes among others, and hence can be seen as character traits. By understanding moral virtues as such traits instead of as mere aggregates of behaviors, whole trait theory is supposed to reconcile the claims of situationists with virtue theory and to point toward a promising avenue for future research.

In her comment, Lorraine L. Besser admits that whole trait theory is promising for personality traits but denies that it works for virtue traits. Virtues concern not just behavior but also what is going on inside the agent’s head, including practical reasoning and emotions, whereas the experience sampling method that supports whole trait theory tracks only dispositions to act. Simine Vazire also grants that whole trait theory is impressive and might be our best means of predicting human behavior, which is one main goal of ascribing personality traits. Nonetheless, she argues, the research does not yet show differences in the processes behind different behavioral patterns. If the underlying processes are not similar across individuals, then it is not clear why citing personality traits explains behaviors as opposed to merely predicting them. In their reply, Jayawickreme and Fleeson argue that whole trait theory can incorporate emotional and motivational processes behind behavior, including goals, plans, and rules. As a result, they claim, whole trait theory can explain not only personality traits but also virtues.

Gopal Sreenivasan has been one of the leading critics of situationist arguments in philosophy. In his chapter here, he explores issues about character education that have largely been neglected in the situationist literature. He begins by noting that advocates of Aristotelian virtue ethics and other views supposedly threatened by Harman and Doris’s argument can concede the point that most people do not have traditional virtues such as compassion. They need only be committed to the claim that a few people serve as models of virtue, a claim that is not ruled out by the empirical literature. Nevertheless, situationists can reply by arguing that positions that emphasize the rarity of the virtues will still be implausible if they also affirm the claim that everyone should acquire some virtues. Sreenivasan’s main contribution is to unpack this claim in more detail. He distinguishes between two interpretations of the claim, which he connects to two different models of virtue acquisition. Ultimately, he tries to show that situationist criticisms are implausible on either interpretation.

In the first set of comments, Thomas Hurka highlights the distinction between using virtue terms in connection to the good and in connection to the right. In carefully examining Sreenivasan’s arguments, Hurka attempts to show that these arguments end up focusing only on right action and have the problematic consequence, for Sreenivasan, of denying a central role to character traits. The psychologist Daniel Lapsley instead draws on his decades of work on character education to raise a variety of worries for Sreenivasan’s strategy of defending virtue ethical approaches. One such worry is that Sreenivasan’s two models of virtue education are, according to Lapsley, not viable options in the character education literature today. In his reply, Sreenivasan reorients the focus of his discussion away from situationism and examines two main claims in detail, using kindness as the example: Only a few people are models of kindness, and for any agent, whenever there is some kind act that is possible and permissible for the agent to perform, the agent should perform it. In response to both critics, Sreenivasan argues that there is still an important role for traditional character traits to play with respect to the second claim. He then goes on to further elaborate what he earlier called the ham-fisted Aristotelian model for acquiring the virtues.

It is one thing to talk about the virtues in general and try to determine what their common features are, but much is also to be learned by taking each virtue individually and trying to understand it better on both conceptual and empirical grounds. The next four chapters in this section do just this with respect to the virtues of self-control, honesty, humility, and compassion.

It is common to see self-control as a character trait or even a virtue that makes people less likely to act impulsively and more likely to succeed in achieving their goals. Many theorists then assume that self-control depends on willpower—the ability to resist a temptation—and they argue that willpower is a depletable resource like muscle power. Against this popular view, Neil Levy discusses evidence that people who succeed in achieving their goals often have less willpower than others. Instead of resisting temptation, they usually structure their environments so as to avoid temptation. This revisionary account suggests to Levy that self-control is not really an internal character trait and should instead be understood in terms of strategies.

In his comment on Levy, E. J. Masicampo points out some shortcomings of Levy’s evidence, especially insofar as his evidence depends on self-reports. Nonetheless, Masicampo cites his own research as a different reason to doubt that self-control is a character trait, namely, that self-control is more predictive of the absence of bad behavior than the presence of good behavior. Chandra Sripada then reframes Levy’s point not as the claim that self-control is not a character trait but, instead, as the claim that the character trait of self-control often depends on indirect strategies of avoiding temptation. By analogy, Sripada argues that kindness is a character trait, even if it depends on strategies and not proprietary mechanisms, so this same observation cannot keep self-control from being a character trait. Levy’s reply points out that he defined trait self-control in terms of success in achieving goals rather than in terms of how such success is achieved, so his main point did not depend on any self-report of internal processes, as Masicampo suggested. In reply to Sripada, Levy argues for disanalogies between kindness and self-control that could explain why kindness is a character trait when self-control is not.

In the following chapter, Christian B. Miller explores a different character trait and virtue: honesty. Miller begins by noting that the virtue of honesty has been almost completely neglected by philosophers in the past fifty years. The main goals of his chapter are twofold. First, he aims to sketch some of the conceptual parameters of the virtue of honesty in general, as well as its various subordinate virtues. Here, his positive proposal understands honesty as centrally involving not intentionally distorting the facts. In the second half of his chapter, he then draws on leading work in psychology to determine, at least in a preliminary way, whether most people instantiate this virtue or not.

In the first commentary, Jason Baehr raises a dilemma for Miller’s conceptual account of honesty. Baehr also offers counterexamples to one of his criteria for determining whether a character trait qualifies as honesty, as well as some grounds for skepticism about whether the psychology literature gives us good reason to think that most of us are not honest people. Finally Baehr presses Miller to spell out an important feature of his mixed trait position in more detail. The psychologist Bella M. DePaulo brings into the discussion two of her studies on the question of whether people will tend to tell the truth to another person about how they view that person’s work, in this case a painting the person made. Miller replies by welcoming DePaulo’s additional studies as support for his own position, and he tries to respond to Baehr’s objections, in some cases conceding that revisions to his proposals are needed.

Next the philosopher Thomas Nadelhoffer and psychologist Jennifer Cole Wright team up to investigate the virtue of humility. Their conceptual account of humility involves two dimensions, low self-focus and high other-focus, and they discuss what they take to be the advantages of this approach. From there the discussion turns more empirical, as they report results of their work on the folk concept of humility, the development of a self-report scale, linguistic analyses of how humble people write, and the relationship between humility and well-being indicators. They end with the striking claim that humility may be necessary for acquiring and/or fully developing the other virtues.

Shannon W. Schrader and June P. Tangney raise concerns about both the conceptual and the empirical work done by Nadelhoffer and Wright. Conceptually, among other things, they doubt that high other-focus is a constitutive feature of the virtue rather than a downstream consequence. Empirically, they raise worries about self-report methods, about social desirability confounds, and about several of the subscales Nadelhoffer and Wright include in their measure. Nancy E. Snow is similarly doubtful about the role of high other-focus as a constitutive element of humility. She also engages with the claim that humility is a gateway or foundational virtue for the full development of the virtues. Snow claims that the argument offered for this claim is too strong, and she offers a way of thinking about virtue acquisition that emphasizes the modular nature of the virtues. Finally, Nadelhoffer and Wright respond to the same concern in both commentaries by clarifying what they mean by high other-focus and why they think that it is indeed essential to humility. They then go on to respond to the specific methodological, empirical, and philosophical claims made by Schrader and Tangney and by Snow.

C. Daryl Cameron and Katie Rapier devote their chapter to compassion. Their central proposal is that compassion, which for them includes both emotion and action, is a motivated choice. There are costs and benefits associated with acting compassionately, and being compassionate in their view depends on motivated choices about how to weigh various goals in specific situations. Cameron and Rapier use this framework to better understand the relationship of compassion to cases involving (1) large numbers of victims, (2) dissimilar victims, and (3) the application of moral principles such as justice.

In the first commentary, M. A. Montgomery, Andreas Kappes, and M. J. Crockett question whether compassion is always a deliberative choice and offer evidence to suggest that it is often not. They distinguish between goal-directed, habitual, and Pavlovian decision systems and argue that more attention has to be paid to how compassion can be exhibited as a result of the latter two systems. Charles Goodman, in the second commentary, draws on Buddhist perspectives on compassion and notes that there is a great deal of overlap between at least some of those perspectives and the account offered by Cameron and Rapier. He introduces several distinctions, such as that between great compassion and sentimental compassion, and between genuine compassion and idiot compassion, which he thinks can help to defend compassion against well-known objections and add additional nuance to both the conceptual and the empirical approaches offered by Cameron and Rapier. In their reply to these commentators, Cameron and Rapier emphasize points of agreement. They acknowledge that compassion does not have to be conscious or deliberative. They also agree that their approach is consistent with many of the points Goodman offered about compassion from a Buddhist perspective.

Compassion is closely related to prosociality, which is the topic of the next chapter. Korrina A. Duffy and Tanya L. Chartrand explain their groundbreaking research into the many ways in which human dyadic mimicry supports prosocial affect, cognition, and behavior. Human dyadic mimicry occurs when one person mimics something perceived in another person. Although such mimicry is often unconscious, the research reviewed in this chapter shows how such mimicry decreases prejudice and victim blaming and increases liking, trust, convergence, affective and cognitive empathy, and also voluntary acts intended to help others. These examples show how much even unconscious processes can initiate, reinforce, and maintain moral virtue and character.

Geoffrey P. Goodwin’s comment accepts Duffy and Chartrand’s claims about the connection between mimicry and prosociality but questions the relevance to morality. Goodwin shows how mimicry and prosociality can also lead to immorality when they are used to defraud (by creating trust), to cement criminal conspiracies (by creating liking and loyalty), to foster partiality and prejudice (by creating empathy for those like us rather than outsiders), and to undermine honesty (in cases of prosocial lying). Eddy Nahmias continues this line of questioning by showing various ways in which mimicry can enhance people’s ability to achieve immoral goals. Nahmias then discusses difficulties in counteracting unconscious influences of mimicry and in drawing normative conclusions from descriptive premises. Duffy and Chartrand reply that their commentators’ criticisms lose force when we distinguish prosociality from sociability. They admit that mimicry has a dark side, but they conclude that mimicry is more likely to promote than to undermine morality, both because mimicry of immoral people does not increase liking and also because mimicry is facilitated by prosocial orientation.

The opposite of compassion and prosociality is found in personality disorders, including psychopathy. These mental disorders also serve as examples where personality or character traits seem stable over time and circumstance, so they challenge eliminativism and situationism. In her chapter Andrea L. Glenn discusses antisocial personality disorder, which she contrasts with psychopathy. She explains this diagnosis and summarizes evidence that psychopaths have relatively normal moral judgment despite their immoral behavior. This puzzle is resolved by her findings that psychopaths show a reduced sense of moral identity (or tendency to base self-concept on moral traits), perhaps because of deficits in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala (crucial for emotions) along with hyperactivity of the striatum (central to the reward system). Glenn discusses whether these brain conditions undermine psychopaths’ responsibility, but she concludes that responsibility is less important than forward-looking considerations like crime reduction, restorative justice, and treatment.

In her comment, Hanna Pickard emphasizes the diversity of individuals diagnosed with psychopathy and personality disorders. She compares psychopaths to perpetrators of large-scale moral atrocities and to individuals whose misbehaviors are related to psycho-socioeconomic adversity, concluding that we need more recognition of the possibility of successful treatment. George Graham then shows why psychopathic behavior is best explained not by brain deficits but by multiple levels in various sciences. In light of this pluralistic explanation, Graham argues that psychopaths are partially responsible for some of their misbehaviors because they are reasons-responsive enough, even if they recognize and react to reasons in abnormal ways. In her reply, Glenn extends Pickard’s analogies to mass atrocities and to environmentally conditioned violence as well as her discussion of potential treatments, and Glenn asks how the nuanced degrees of responsibility that Graham mentions could be incorporated into the legal system.

In the final chapter, the philosopher Valerie Tiberius takes up the long-standing question of whether the virtues contribute substantially to well-being. She notes that much work in the area of positive psychology in recent years can be taken to suggest an affirmative answer. Tiberius’s focus is on the prescriptive theorizing that goes on in this literature when positive psychologists try to help people live better lives. She notes that such theorizing often assumes, at least implicitly, a subjectivist metaethic which grounds the relevant prescriptions in people’s desires. An alternative Aristotelian approach would appeal to an objective account of well-being. However, Tiberius holds that both of these approaches face serious difficulties, so she outlines a third, broadly constructivist approach that starts with human values and refines them using norms such as viability, sustainability, and epistemic reasonableness. Additional topics such as friendship, life satisfaction, and reflective wisdom are also explored.

Raul Saucedo and June Gruber focus on the methodological issue of whether psychology is concerned with thick notions of virtue and well-being. They interpret Tiberius as holding that the relevant research in positive psychology is partly prescriptive. In contrast, Saucedo and Gruber offer a picture of the division of labor between psychology and philosophy whereby psychology is concerned only with descriptive associations between things like prosocial spending and positive affect, as well as with explanations for those associations. Prescriptive work, on this way of thinking, falls under the heading of philosophy instead. In the second set of comments, Kristján Kristjánsson questions Tiberius’s characterization of positive psychologists as largely assuming a subjectivist approach, noting more Aristotelian objectivist tendencies in the recent work of Martin Seligman, among others. But Kristjánsson’s main focus is the conceptual claim about moral judgments known as motivational internalism, which he sees as needlessly saddling more objectively inclined positive psychologists with worries about objectionable moralism. Fortunately for these psychologists, Kristjánsson thinks motivational internalism should be rejected on independent grounds anyway. In reply to these commentators, Tiberius raises further points about the division of labor between psychology and philosophy. She also questions whether psychologists are moving toward an objectivist metaethic and offers further support for her constructivist approach.

We believe that these chapters demonstrate the novelty and fruitfulness of investigating virtue and character from the perspectives of philosophy and psychology together. May they serve to inspire much future work in this area going forward.

References

Doris, J. (1998). Persons, situations, and virtue ethics. Noûs, 32, 504–530.

Doris, J. (2002). Lack of character: Personality and moral behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Harman, G. (1999). Moral philosophy meets social psychology: Virtue ethics and the fundamental attribution error. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 99, 315–331.

Harman, G. (2000). The nonexistence of character traits. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 100, 223–226.

Mischel, W. (1968). Personality and assessment. New York: John J. Wiley and Sons.

1

Getting Cynical about Character: A Social-Psychological Perspective

C. Daniel Batson

This volume probably isn’t the best place to confess to cynicism about moral character. In the hope of escaping some of the tar and feathers, let me say right off that my doubts are scientific, not normative or ethical. I don’t question the desirability of having what people talk about as good character or virtue. I would like to be brave, honest, just, caring, temperate, patient, and humble. Perhaps even more, I would like to have such people around me. My questions are instead about, first, the scientific usefulness of the concept of character and, second, the prevalence and power of what’s thought of as good character. I approach these questions from an unrepentantly social-psychological perspective. But even that needs some clarification because this perspective may not be what you expect.

A Social-Psychological Perspective

One recurrent finding of social psychologists over the past fifty years has been that situational factors can more powerfully affect behavior than people think. Research cited to support this claim includes Milgram’s (1963, 1974) famous obedience studies, the Stanford prison experiment (Haney, Banks, and Zimbardo, 1973), the Good Samaritan study (Darley and Batson, 1973), and much more. At least in the Western world, we seem chronically prone to overestimate the role of personality and character as causes of behavior (Ross and Nisbett, 1991). Despite these findings, and despite occasional assertions that situational factors are more important than personal dispositions, I know of no social psychologist who would claim that the situation alone accounts for behavior—just as no one would claim that the person alone does. As Walter Mischel (1973) pointed out long ago, it’s not meaningful to say the situation is more important than the person. Nor is it meaningful to say the opposite.

Kurt Lewin, the father of experimental social psychology, is well-known for his equation B = f(P,E). Behavior is a function of the person and his or her environment (Lewin, 1935, p. 73). But Lewin didn’t think of the person and the environment (situation) as competing causes of behavior. He didn’t even think of them as two joint contributors:

In this equation, the person (P) and his environment (E) have to be viewed as variables which are mutually dependent upon each other. In other words, to understand or to predict behavior, the person and his environment have to be considered as one constellation of interdependent factors. (Lewin, 1951, pp. 239–240, italics in original)

Thus, Lewin could—and did—write, E = f(P). The environment is a function of the person. He wrote this because for him the environment is the total situation as understood and experienced by the person at the time. It includes present, past, and future. It also includes both what’s experienced as real and what’s imagined. Further, Lewin could—and did—also write, P = f(E). The person is a function of his or her situation. The latter is true not only developmentally and culturally but also more immediately. A person is, for example, different after encouragement than after discouragement (Lewin, 1951, p. 239). Person and situation are inextricably entwined in one constellation of interdependent factors.

Less well-known, Lewin (1951) wasn’t content with his famous equation, which is little more than a reminder of the obvious. Building on Ernst Cassirer’s (1910/1921) philosophy of science, he offered an interlocking set of concepts for psychology. I believe this less-known framework is more useful than the person–situation framework for understanding the psychological antecedents of moral behavior. It allows us to get inside a concept like character to focus on dynamics.

Aristotelian and Galilean Science

Lewin (1931) was inspired by Cassirer’s distinction between Aristotelian and Galilean approaches to science. Aristotelian science attempts to explain natural phenomena by beginning with observation of the behavior of particulars. It classifies these particulars into types according to their characteristic attributes. These attributes are then used to explain the behavior of the particulars. (Cassirer’s focus was on Aristotle’s physics, not his ethics.) In contrast, Galilean science begins with development of an explanatory model of dynamic processes thought to account for the observed behavior. Then empirical predictions that differentiate this model from other possible models are derived. Finally, these predictions are tested through empirical observation. To provide an example from Galileo’s own work, motion of objects is no longer explained in terms of Aristotelian attributes—light objects rise, heavy objects fall—but in terms of intangible yet still empirical dynamic concepts—velocity and acceleration—whose relation can be clearly specified: Velocity is change in location over time (d/t). Acceleration is change in velocity over time (d/t²). Lewin (1935) thought Aristotelian science was still common in the psychology of his day. I think it still is. I also think—as did he—that Galilean science is far more likely to provide insight and understanding.

Lewin called the dynamic concepts that are at the heart of Galilean science conditional-genetic or genotypic because they specify the underlying conditions for generating observable, phenotypic events. As he explained:

For Aristotle the immediate perceptible appearance, that which present-day biology terms the phenotype, was hardly distinguished from the properties that determine the object’s dynamic relations. The fact, for example, that light objects relatively frequently go upward sufficed for him to ascribe to them an upward tendency. With the differentiation of phenotype from genotype, or more generally, of descriptive from conditional-genetic concepts and the shifting of emphasis to the latter, many old class distinctions lost their significance. The orbits of the planets, the free falling of a stone, the movement of a body on an inclined plane, the oscillation of a pendulum, which if classified according to their phenotypes would fall into quite different, indeed into antithetical classes, prove to be simply various expressions of the same law. (Lewin, 1931, p. 149, italics in original)

Lewin’s Conditional-Genetic Framework for Psychology

To explain human behavior in terms of person attributes—including character traits—is phenotypic or Aristotelian. Seeking instead a set of Galilean, conditional-genetic concepts for psychology, Lewin (1951, pp. 30–41) turned his attention to three psychological constructs that underlie behavior—motives, values, and goals—and to how they interrelate.

Relating Motives to Values and Goals

In Lewin’s (1938, 1951) scheme, motives are goal-directed forces induced by opportunities or threats related to our values. Values are what we care about. They shouldn’t be equated with observed preferences—to do so would be phenotypic. Yet such preferences are often diagnostic of underlying values. Typically, Mary values State A more than State B if she would consistently choose State A over State B, other things being equal. Further, the assessment of value is subjective, not objective. That is, assessment is made by the valuing individual in his or her perceived reality—what Lewin called the person’s life space. Values include not only capital-V values such as Freedom, Justice, Loyalty, and Honesty. There are also more mundane ones, like valuing quiet weekends, clean clothes, and cabernet.

If a negative discrepancy is perceived between a current or anticipated state and a valued state—we’re down to our last bottle—then obtaining or maintaining the valued state is likely to become a goal—we need another case. A goal-directed force, or motive, impels us toward this end—I want to get one on the way home. Some values are relatively stable, capable of producing a motive whenever threatened (e.g., the value of air to breathe). For others, an opportunity to obtain or maintain the state elicits a motive only under certain circumstances (the value of wearing a warm coat). Sometimes, we are aware of our values, goals, and motives. Sometimes we aren’t. They can exist without being conscious.

In his field theory, Lewin (1951, pp. 39–41) borrowed terms applied to electromagnetic fields to suggest that values have the status of power fields. They represent potential energy or potential desire. When activated by opportunity or threat, they produce goals. Goals have the status of force fields. They represent kinetic energy or actual desire. Goal-directed motives are vectors in these force fields. They reflect the strength of the desire to move toward a positively valenced goal or away from a negatively valenced one. Behavior is movement within the present set of force fields. Thus, the dynamic status of each of the four constructs—values, goals, motives, and behavior—is specified. So is their conceptual relation to one another. (For further discussion of Lewin’s framework, see Batson, Shaw, and Oleson, 1992; Lewin, 1951; Verplanken and Holland, 2002.)

Distinguishing Ultimate Goals from Instrumental Goals and Unintended Consequences

In Lewin’s framework, it’s important to distinguish ultimate goals from both instrumental goals and unintended consequences (Heider, 1958; Lewin, 1951). Ultimate goals are the valued states we seek to obtain or maintain as ends in themselves. Ultimate isn’t used here to mean cosmic or most important. Nor does it refer to a metaphysical first or final cause. Nor to evolutionary function. It simply refers to a state the person is seeking as an end in itself in his or her current life space—fair treatment, world peace, a quiet weekend, cabernet.

A person could have a motive with the ultimate goal of promoting some moral standard, principle, or ideal—be fair, tell the truth, care for the needy, and so on. Because the ultimate goal is to uphold a moral standard, principle, or ideal, I call this kind of motive for acting morally moral integrity. However, moral action can be the product of motives that aren’t themselves moral, motives that have a nonmoral ultimate goal. For example, the motivation of a young boy who refrains from stealing candy in order to avoid being punished isn’t truly moral. It’s egoistic. The ultimate goal is to increase his own welfare by accepting the lesser of two evils—no candy rather than punishment.

Instrumental goals are sought because they’re stepping-stones to ultimate goals. If the ultimate goal can be reached more efficiently by other means, an instrumental goal is likely to be bypassed. The young boy just described, motivated as he is, should feel free to steal if he knows he won’t get caught. The distinction between instrumental and ultimate goals shouldn’t be confused with Milton Rokeach’s (1973) distinction between instrumental and terminal values. All of the values named by Rokeach could induce either instrumental or ultimate goals, depending on whether the value (e.g., a world at peace) is sought as an end in itself or as a means to some other end (e.g., personal safety). More relevant is Gordon Allport’s (1961) distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic values. Intrinsic values—those valued as ends in themselves—induce ultimate goals. Extrinsic values—valued as means to other ends—induce instrumental goals.

Pursuit of a goal, whether instrumental or ultimate, can produce effects that aren’t themselves goals. These are unintended consequences. It’s possible to act morally as an unintended consequence of pursuing some other goal. A business executive motivated to maximize profit may move a factory into a depressed area to take advantage of the cheap labor. Quite unintentionally, this profit-driven action may promote the public good by providing jobs. We may, in turn, judge this result moral even though it wasn’t morally motivated.

Motives Can Cooperate or Conflict, and Motives Can Change

Often, an individual has more than one ultimate goal at a time, and so more than one motive. When this occurs, the different motives can either cooperate or conflict. Moreover, a person’s goal-directed motives can change—sometimes quickly.

Motives as Current Goal-Directed Forces, Not as Dispositions or Needs

Lewin’s goal-directed motives are current psychological forces, not enduring personality types or dispositions. In this regard, his perspective on motivation differs from that of another pioneer in research on motivation, Henry Murray (1938). Murray and his followers treated motives as relatively stable dispositions or needs (need for achievement, need for affiliation, etc.). Murray’s motives thus have the status of persistent values and goals, not motives, in Lewin’s framework. Lewin emphasized the distinctions among instrumental goals, ultimate goals, and unintended consequences. Murray gave little attention to these distinctions. For Lewin, the list of our potential motives is long—as long as the list of states we intrinsically value. Murray and his followers attempted to identify a relatively small number of primary motives.

Focus on Motives, Not Behavior

A major implication that Lewin (1935, 1938, 1951) wished to draw from distinguishing ultimate goals, instrumental goals, and unintended consequences is the importance for psychology of focusing on goal-directed motives rather than on either behavior or consequences. This focus is important even when we want to explain behavior. Behavior is highly variable. Occurrence of a particular behavior depends on the strength of the motive or motives that might evoke that behavior, as well as on the strength of competing motives, on how the behavior relates to each of these motives, and on other behavioral options at the time. The more directly a given behavior promotes an ultimate goal, the more uniquely it does so among the behavioral options available, the more stable and important the underlying value, and the more vulnerable the value is to threat, the more likely the behavior is to occur.

Behavior that promotes an instrumental goal can easily change if either the causal association between the instrumental and ultimate goal changes or a less costly behavioral route to the ultimate goal arises. Unintended consequences of pursuing a given motive also can easily change—unless these consequences are a product of some behavior that directly and uniquely promotes the ultimate goal.

Other Conditional-Genetic Frameworks

Lewin (1951, pp. 31–33) didn’t consider his conditional-genetic framework to be the only possible one. Although quite different, he thought the stimulus–response learning theory of his day was also conditional-genetic. More recently, Walter Mischel, colleagues, and followers have developed a social-cognitive analysis of personality that employs conditional-genetic constructs, but again different ones from Lewin’s (see especially Mischel, 1973, 1990; Mischel and Shoda, 1995, 1998). Mischel’s framework employs constructs such as scripts, schemas, prototypes, self-reflection, and self-regulation to address a how question—how personally consistent patterns of situationally variant behavior occur. Lewin’s framework instead addresses a why question—why these patterns are as they are. Although each framework gives attention to both cognitive/perceptual and motivational processes, Mischel’s primary focus is cognitive/perceptual whereas Lewin’s is motivational.

Several versions of a social-cognitive framework have been applied to the study of character, providing alternatives to traditional trait models (see Lapsley and Hill, 2009, for a review). However, to deal with motivational issues such as lack of character—that is, failure to act in accord with personally espoused moral standards and ideals—I find Lewin’s framework more useful than either social-cognitive or trait models.

Implications for Moral Psychology

Lewin’s conditional-genetic framework shifts our focus from more Aristotelian concepts like character traits (whether global or local) and situational variation to a more dynamic Galilean analysis based on the relation of values, goals, motives, and behavior. The notion of character traits or virtues as attributes of a person that produce moral behavior is replaced by moral values (power fields). When threatened or violated, or when an opportunity to promote these values is perceived, they induce moral goals (force fields) and goal-directed motives (forces), which—depending on other motives activated and the options and constraints of the present situation—can lead to moral behavior. The same aspects of our moral life that have been talked about in terms of character and virtue are still talked about, but in a more dynamic conceptual framework.

Specifically, Lewin’s framework can, I think, accommodate Aristotle’s (1976) person who wisely pursues the virtuous course of action appropriate to the situation, as well as Aristotle’s vicious, continent, and incontinent persons. Moreover, it can render these distinctions amenable to scientific analysis. (The framework remains mute, however, regarding Aristotle’s metaphysical claim that pursuit of virtue fulfills the function of Man—Aristotle, 1976, pp. 75–76 and 87–90 [Bekker numbers 1097b–1098a and 1102a–1103a].) Lewin’s framework does this by highlighting the question of exactly what value or values lie behind any given moral action. And it offers a strategy for uncovering these values. The strategy is to work backward through the sequence of conditional-genetic relations—using the pattern of behavior across systematically varying circumstances to infer the underlying motives, their goals, and, crucially, whether a given goal is ultimate or instrumental. This provides the opportunity to address empirically Kant’s question—and ours—of whether morality is ever valued in its own right or only as an instrumental means in the service of other values.

Recall that when Kant (1785/1898) briefly shifted his attention from what ought to be to what is—from the normative to the descriptive—he admitted that behavior thought to be truly morally motivated may actually be prompted by self-love (i.e., egoism):

Sometimes it happens that with the sharpest self-examination we can find nothing beside the moral principle of duty which could have been powerful enough to move us to this or that action and to so great a sacrifice; yet we cannot from this infer with certainty that it was not really some secret impulse of self-love, under the false appearance of duty, that was the actual determining cause of the will. We like to flatter ourselves by falsely taking credit for a more noble motive; whereas in fact we can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action. … A cool observer, one that does not mistake the wish for good, however lively, for its reality, may sometimes doubt whether true virtue is actually found anywhere in the world, and this especially as years increase and the judgment is partly made wiser by experience and partly, also, more acute in observation. (section 2, paras. 2–3)

Conspicuous self-benefits arise from acting morally. We gain the social and self-rewards of being seen and seeing ourselves as just, caring, honest, trustworthy people. We avoid the social and self-punishments for failing to do the right thing. Are these self-benefits unintended consequences, or is one or more the ultimate goal of our moral action? Perhaps, as Freud (1930/1961) suggested, society inculcates moral principles in us when young to bridle our antisocial impulses by making it in our own best interest to act in accord.

However, even if moral principles are learned in this way as extrinsic values, perhaps they can come to function autonomously (Allport, 1961). Perhaps they can come to be valued intrinsically and not simply as instrumental means to self-serving ends—at least by some people (Colby and Damon, 1992, offer possible examples).

At issue is the nature of the goal. Is promotion of the moral standard, principle, or ideal an instrumental goal on the way to the ultimate goal of self-benefit? If so, the motive is a form of egoism. Is it an ultimate goal, with the ensuing self-benefits unintended consequences? If so, it’s meaningful to speak of intrinsic moral value, truly moral motivation, and moral integrity—that is, to speak of Aristotle’s good character and Kant’s true virtue.

Two Ways of Internalizing Moral Standards

Social-learning theorists, as well as social-cognitive theorists (e.g., Bandura, 1991; Mischel and Mischel, 1976), typically assume that adherence to internalized moral standards is an instrumental, not an ultimate, goal. Self-regulated moral action depends on expected consequences, although the consequences are often temporally distant, are not in the immediate external environment, are not easily identified, and reside in the actor himself rather than in social agents (Mischel and Mischel, 1976, p. 98; also see Bandura, 1991; Hoffman, 1977). From this perspective, we don’t toe the moral line because we intrinsically value the standard or ideal, but in order to avoid self-censure (guilt) and to gain self-esteem (pride). Our moral motivation is instrumental in the service of egoistic motives.

Is it possible for internalization to go beyond this instrumental morality? Deci, Eghrari, Patrick, and Leone (1994) provide an affirmative answer by distinguishing between two forms of internalization. They adopt the term that Freud (1923/1960) used when describing formation of the superego—introjection—to speak of internalization of moral standards valued extrinsically. They use integration to speak of internalization to the level where moral standards are valued in their own right, intrinsically:

Introjection refers to partial or suboptimal internalization … in which the person takes in a value or regulatory process but does not identify with and accept it as his or her own. Instead, it becomes an inner control—a rule for action that is enforced by sanctions such as threats of guilt or promises of self-approval. In a metaphorical sense, when a regulation is merely introjected, it is as if the regulatory process and the person being regulated were still separate even though both are within the same skin.

Integration, in contrast, refers to internalization in which the person identifies with the value of an activity and accepts full responsibility for doing it. … As such, one’s behavior emanates from one’s self; it is self-determined. One does the behavior wholly voluntarily. … With integrated regulation, the person would not experience the conflict and tension associated with introjection. (Deci et al., 1994, pp. 120–121)

For similar ideas about internalization to the level of integration, see the discussions of moral identity by Blasi (1984) and Glover (2000).

Even though accepted as part of who we should be, introjected moral values aren’t fully a part of who we are. They’re in conflict with more core values and personal desires. Integrated moral values aren’t in conflict with personal desires; they are personal desires. They produce moral integrity—motivation to promote moral standards and ideals as ultimate goals. Of course, integrated moral desires may still conflict with other personal desires—unless Aristotle was right that moral conflict disappears for the truly virtuous and wise person (Aristotle, 1976, pp. 87–90 [Bekker numbers 1102a–1103a]).

Focusing on the Nature of Moral Motivation

Acting morally—behaving in a way that promotes some moral standard, principle, or ideal—may, then, be an ultimate goal or an instrumental goal. If I seek to be fair, kind, honest, loyal, and so forth, as an ultimate goal, it seems appropriate to call the motive truly moral and speak of moral integrity. However, if I act morally as a means to some other end, we should speak instead of instrumental moral motivation. As a young child, right conduct was a means for me to gain material rewards (treats) and avoid material punishments (time-outs). As I matured, doing right became a means to gain social and self-rewards (praise, esteem) and to avoid social and self-punishments (censure, guilt). Still instrumental.

Acting morally can also be an unintended consequence. When it is, the motivation shouldn’t be called moral at all. It should be labeled to reflect the intended goal (which, again, may be conscious or unconscious). Of course, even though my motive isn’t moral, you may call the result moral if it accords with your moral values.

It’s easy to think of examples of moral action that fall into each category—ultimate goal, instrumental goal, and unintended consequence. There are even examples in which the action is the same across categories. Consider a robber who divides the loot equally with his accomplices. If he does so because he wants to be fair and preserve honor among thieves, he displays truly moral motivation. If he divides equally to avoid the inevitable fight an unequal division would produce, he displays instrumental moral motivation. And if he divides equally as the best way to manage a successful getaway, he provides a moral result as an unintended consequence. Simply to observe behavior judged moral tells us little about the nature of the underlying motivation. (For a similar analysis of moral motivation, see Blasi, 2004.)

So, what’s the nature of our moral motivation? Is acting in accord with some standard, principle, or ideal an ultimate goal (moral integrity), with the self-benefits unintended consequences? If so, this would indicate that the standard or ideal is an integrated, intrinsic value. Or is acting in accord a means to reach the ultimate goal of gaining one or more self-benefits (instrumental moral motivation)? If so, the standard or ideal is an introjected, extrinsic value.

Moral Hypocrisy: A Subtle Form of Instrumental Moral Motivation

To illustrate the potential fruitfulness of Lewin’s conditional-genetic framework to address such questions, let me contrast moral integrity with one specific form of instrumental moral motivation. Setting aside the harsh connotations of the term, I call this form moral hypocrisy. (Webster’s, 1990, defines hypocrisy as a pretense of having desirable or publicly approved attitudes, beliefs, principles, etc., that one does not actually possess—p. 444.) In contrast to moral integrity, moral hypocrisy is an egoistic motive with the ultimate goal of gaining the self-benefits of being moral with minimal cost. Or, said more pointedly, moral hypocrisy is motivation to appear moral while, if possible, avoiding the cost of actually being moral. (For reviews of Western thought on moral hypocrisy, see Crisp and Cowton, 1994; Kittay, 1992; McKinnon, 1991.)

Seven quick points of clarification about moral hypocrisy. First, I mean more by this term than either a discrepancy between our moral standards and our behavior (Lammers, Stapel, and Galinsky, 2010; Lerner and Clayton, 2011) or a tendency to judge our own moral lapses more leniently than other people’s (Valdesolo and DeSteno, 2007, 2008). Although each of these phenomena has been called moral hypocrisy, each could occur for a number of reasons other than a desire to appear moral yet, if possible, avoid the cost of being moral. Most obviously, a behavior–standard discrepancy could arise because of the overpowering strength of other motives (i.e., weakness of will). Self-leniency could be the result of our having insider knowledge of our intent and of extenuating circumstances—knowledge that we often lack about other people.

Second, reflecting the dictionary’s emphasis on pretense, moral hypocrisy is concerned with appearance. Sometimes, the only way to appear a certain way is to be that way. The only way to appear moral is to be moral. At such times, hypocrisy will promote morality. However, if being moral involves personal cost, as it often does, and if it’s possible to appear moral yet avoid the cost, a person motivated by hypocrisy should do just that. Then hypocrisy won’t promote the person’s moral standards, principles, and ideals.

Third, for people who consider any act of pretense immoral, moral hypocrisy may seem an oxymoron. I use the adjective to specify that the domain of pretense is morality rather than, for example, science, politics, or religion—not to claim that hypocrisy is moral.

Fourth, moral hypocrisy is an especially important form of instrumental moral motivation, for two reasons. One reason is that its goal is to masquerade as moral integrity in order to get the social and self-benefits associated with being truly moral. So, hypocrisy can lead us to believe that a person is motivated by moral integrity when he or she is not. Indeed, that’s its goal. The other reason is that, because the goal is not to actually be moral, moral hypocrisy can lead seemingly good, moral people to fail to act morally. If provided sufficient wiggle room, a person motivated by hypocrisy may strongly endorse some moral principle or ideal, may judge it relevant to matters at hand, and may be under no particular situational pressure, yet still fail to act in accord. There will be a lack of integrity.

Fifth, although I’ve defined moral hypocrisy as motivation to appear moral, I use this definition to cover two versions of hypocrisy. In what might be called the high-bar version, the goal is to appear moral—to obtain the rewards of virtue, the social and self-esteem for doing right. In the low-bar version, the goal is to not appear immoral—to avoid social and self-censure, the criticism and guilt for doing wrong. The full benefits of moral hypocrisy accrue only to those who make it over the high bar and appear moral. But it’s easier to clear the low bar, and many of us seem satisfied with that (Janoff-Bulman, Sheikh, and Hepp, 2009).

Sixth, many moral philosophers consider the generality and abstractness of universal moral standards, including principles of fairness, justice, and the greatest good for the greatest number, to be major strengths (e.g., Kant, 1785/1898; Mill, 1861/1987; Rawls, 1971). After all, universal principles expand our moral circle beyond the narrow partialities of self-interest, kinship, friendship, and group membership. However, from the perspective of moral motivation, generality and abstractness can be an Achilles’ heel. The more general and abstract the standard or ideal, the more vulnerable it is to rationalization (Tsang, 2002; Uhlmann, Pizarro, Tannenbaum, and Ditto, 2009). Indicative of such rationalization, Valdesolo and DeSteno (2007, 2008) found that when people thought back on a morally questionable act they had committed, they judged their behavior more moral than they judged the same behavior committed by someone else (also see Messick, Bloom, Boldizar, and Samuelson, 1985; Shu, Gino, and Bazerman, 2011).

But, seventh, there’s more to moral hypocrisy than retrospective rationalization of our misdeeds. As defined, moral hypocrisy is a goal-directed motive that can lead us to act. How, you may ask, can we believe we’re acting for moral reasons when we aren’t? Economist Robert Frank (1988) provided a popular and optimistic answer. Building on biologist Robert Trivers’s (1971) ideas about reciprocal altruism and the need for trust, he suggested that people are motivated to present themselves as passionately committed to morality in order to gain the self-benefits that the ensuing trust provides—a form of moral hypocrisy. Frank further suggested that, because of humans’ highly developed ability to detect deception, shamming this commitment is difficult. The more evolutionary stable strategy is genuine commitment. So, although our ancient ancestors may have taken up morality lightly as part of a masquerade, over time natural selection came to favor those whose appearance of morality is genuine. Only they got the rewards of being moral. For Frank, primordial hypocrisy has bred modern moral integrity.

Trivers himself (Trivers, 1985, pp. 415–420; von Hippel and Trivers, 2011) suggested a less sanguine scenario—one in which primordial hypocrisy has bred a more subtle form of hypocrisy (also see Alexander, 1987, pp. 114–125): If we can deceive ourselves into believing that we’re motivated by integrity when we aren’t, there’s no need to sham. We can honestly appear moral, giving off no signals of deceit. Thus, self-deception may be a major asset in hypocrisy’s moral masquerade. It can provide access to all of the social and self-benefits that moral integrity offers—free of charge. This possibility takes us beyond Plato’s analysis of moral deceit in The Republic (1999). Rather than a Ring of Gyges that makes our moral lapses invisible to others, self-deception makes them invisible not only to others but also to ourselves.

Of course, Trivers’s cynical scenario may be wrong. Those, including Frank (1988), from Plato and Aristotle on who have argued for the existence of moral integrity may be right. Even though our morality may be acquired in childhood through the carrot and stick of reward and punishment that produce internalization to the level of introjection, we may move beyond that. By late adolescence internalization may reach the level of integration, where being moral