Given the enduring kinship of false belief and moral disaster, ethical perspectives associated with demonstrably inaccurate descriptive claims invite skepticism. For instance, the difficulty with racism is not necessarily the ethical proposition that groups having different attributes are due differential treatment — no problem about so distinguishing children and adults — but rather that the descriptive theories motivating differential treatment, as in the case of race and intelligence, have tended to gross error. I've been saying that character ethics is likewise associated with an erroneous descriptive theory: an empirically inadequate moral psychology. But in cases more philosophically delicate than racial pseudoscience, such as the case at hand, the appropriate relation between descriptive and ethical claims is difficult to ascertain. To loosely paraphrase Hume (1978/1740: 469), the situationist Is does not straightforwardly imply any ethical Oughts. Nevertheless, I'm convinced that situationism does matter for ethics. In the concluding chapters, I explain why.

Ethical Revisionism

Character is not the proprietary interest of Aristotelianism, but also figures in Kantian (Darwall 1986: 310—11; Herman 1993: 111), contractualist (Rawls 1971: 440—6), and consequentialist (Railton 1984: 157—8) ethics, as well as in prephilosophical ethical thought.