Grok says:
John M. Doris’s situationist approach to morality shakes up the traditional view of character by arguing that our actions owe more to context than to some fixed, internal moral compass. It’s a compelling take—rooted in psych experiments like Milgram’s obedience study or Zimbardo’s Stanford prison fiasco, where regular folks did awful things because the situation nudged them there. Doris says traits like “honesty” or “courage” aren’t stable; they bend under social pressure, fatigue, or even a bad mood. His book Lack of Character (2002) leans hard on this, claiming the old-school virtue ethics crowd—think Aristotle—overrates consistency and underrates circumstance.
It’s got teeth. Studies back him up—take the Hartshorne and May experiments from the 1920s, where kids cheated or stole depending on opportunity, not some innate “goodness.” Or Darley and Batson’s Good Samaritan test: divinity students ignored a guy in need if they were late, showing time crunch trumps compassion. Doris argues this means we should ditch the myth of robust character and focus on managing situations—tweak the environment, not the soul.
But it’s not airtight. Critics—like virtue ethicists or even Kantians—say he overplays the data. People do show patterns over time; a coward in one spot might still be brave in another if stakes align with their values. Situationism risks excusing too much—blaming the room instead of the person dodges accountability. Plus, Doris’s fix (engineering better contexts) assumes we can predict and control human messiness, which feels optimistic—governments and HR departments have been trying that forever with mixed results.
I lean toward it being half-right. Context absolutely sways us—marketing, peer pressure, a tight deadline can flip anyone’s script. But there’s still something sticky in people—call it habit or wiring—that resists total situational sway. Doris nails how fragile our moral swagger is, but he might undersell the slow grind of who we become.
