Character as moral fiction / Mark Alfano.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Alfano, Mark, 1983- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Character.

Virtue.

Normativity (Ethics).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (ix, 226 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Everyone wants to be virtuous, but recent psychological investigations suggest that this may not be possible. Mark Alfano challenges this theory and asks, not whether character is empirically adequate, but what characters human beings could have and develop. Although psychology suggests that most people do not have robust character traits such as courage, honesty and open-mindedness, Alfano argues that we have reason to attribute these virtues to people because such attributions function as self-fulfilling prophecies - children become more studious if they are told that they are hard-working and adults become more generous if they are told that they are generous. He argues that we should think of virtue and character as social constructs: there is no such thing as virtue without social reinforcement. His original and provocative book will interest a wide range of readers in contemporary ethics, epistemology, moral psychology and empirically informed philosophy.

Contents:

Introduction: tripartite naturalistic ethics

Identifying the hard core of virtue ethics

Rearticulating the situationist challenge

Attempts to defend virtue ethics

Factitious moral virtue

Expanding the situationist challenge to responsibilist virtue epistemology

Expanding the situationist challenge to reliabilist virtue epistemology

Factitious intellectual virtue

To see as we are seen: a n investigation of social distance heuristics.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-107-23665-7

1-139-61079-1

1-139-60906-8

1-139-61265-4

1-139-62195-5

1-283-98668-X

1-139-62567-5

1-139-20853-5

1-139-61637-4

OCLC:

827212238