{"id":182911,"date":"2026-04-17T08:35:24","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T16:35:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=182911"},"modified":"2026-04-17T09:21:40","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T17:21:40","slug":"what-then-shall-we-do-the-work-doris-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=182911","title":{"rendered":"What Then Shall We Do: The Work Doris Left"},"content":{"rendered":"

John M. Doris argues<\/a> two claims that sit at the root of moral psychology. Character traits as Aristotle and his descendants describe them do not exist, or exist in forms too weak to carry the weight the tradition places on them. And reflection does not give us the access to our own reasoning that we assume. The evidence runs through Milgram, Darley and Batson’s Good Samaritan study, Isen’s dime-in-phone-booth, Hartshorne and May’s 1920s studies of schoolchildren cheating, and decades of social psychology showing situation predicts behavior better than disposition.
\nTwo books lay this out. Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior by John M. Doris. The 2002 book argues the cross-situational consistency virtue ethics requires does not show up in the data. Talking to Our Selves: Reflection, Ignorance, and Agency by John M. Doris. The 2015 book extends the argument inward, arguing we confabulate our reasons and the reflective self rules less than folk psychology claims.
\nVirtue ethics collapses. Aristotle, Aquinas, Anscombe, MacIntyre, Hursthouse, Hauerwas all build on a picture of character the evidence does not support. The neo-Aristotelian revival of the last fifty years rests on a false empirical premise. Cultivation of virtue cannot produce what does not exist in the form the cultivators claim to produce. What cultivation produces is something thinner, more local, more tied to the situations where the cultivation takes place.
\nReligion runs into the same wall. Sanctification as character formation. The fruits of the Spirit. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions build moral evaluation on character inference from behavior. If the inference does not go through, the evaluation does not go through. Adventism promises a transformed life, a new creature in Christ, progressive sanctification toward Christ-likeness. What Adventism can deliver is a situation. The compound of camp meeting, sanitarium, school, church, and family produces behavior when the compound holds. Outside the compound the behavior drifts. The tradition reads this as backsliding and calls for more sanctification.
\nThe legal system prices character heavily. Mens rea. Character evidence at sentencing. Parole decisions built on assessments of who the prisoner has become. A fearless reader of Doris might note that character evidence is weak evidence, that self-reported remorse is confabulation as often as not, that predictions of future behavior from character assessments track poorly. The system runs on character talk because the alternatives feel cold. A court that said we sentence based on situation and we release based on situation would offend the moral intuitions the court exists to express.
\nProfessional life runs on similar inferences. Hiring for culture fit. Reference letters describing the kind of person the candidate is. Promotion based on leadership qualities. The research on employment interviews, reference checks, and performance prediction has shown for decades that these instruments add little above structured tests of specific skills. Organizations keep using them because the coalition needs the character vocabulary to justify decisions it would otherwise have to justify on cruder grounds.
\nBiography and history become harder. We read Lincoln’s life for Lincoln’s character. We read Churchill for Churchill’s character. We read our parents’ lives for our parents’ character. A fearless researcher following Doris asks whether what we reconstruct is pattern imposed on noise. The situations that produced Lincoln’s behavior were particular, unrepeatable, and shaped by forces Lincoln did not see.
\nSelf-knowledge takes the hit next. Doris’s second book pushes the claim that we do not know our reasons. We construct reasons after the fact. The therapeutic project of knowing yourself, the spiritual project of examining your conscience, the Socratic project of the examined life all assume an examiner with access to the examined. Doris says the access is partial, confabulated, and shaped by forces the examiner does not track. A fearless researcher might press this into areas therapists, spiritual directors, and philosophers find uncomfortable. The autobiographical essay, the conversion narrative, the deathbed reflection all produce testimony whose reliability the research does not support.
\nMoral responsibility gets harder to ground. Doris tries to save a thinner responsibility grounded in what he calls collaborative agency. A fearless researcher might push past this. If behavior is situational and reflection confabulatory, praise and blame might be coordination devices rather than tracking devices. We praise to encourage. We blame to deter. We admire to signal alliance with the admired. We despise to signal alliance against the despised.
\nCharacter talk does coalition work once the tracking function weakens. We call a man of good character when he serves our coalition. We call him a man of bad character when he threatens it. The evaluations track alliance better than they track cross-situational behavior. Moral judgments of public figures flip when coalitions shift. The man was a hero. The man is now a cautionary tale. His behavior did not change. The coalition did.
\nInstitutional design replaces moral formation. If situation dominates disposition, the lever is the situation. Militaries that want brave soldiers build situations where soldiers act brave. Schools that want studious students build situations where students study. Churches that want holy members build situations where members act holy. The institutions that work well already know this. They say they build character because saying so is part of the situation they build.
\nThe fearless researcher reaches a point where the discipline stops following. Doris stops short of the coalition analysis. Most moral philosophers stop much shorter than Doris. The profession tolerates situationism as a technical debate within philosophy of action. It does not tolerate the conclusion that moral psychology as practiced is coalition maintenance. The coalition of moral philosophers might have to face the question of what its own moral talk is doing. Turner’s convenient beliefs framework predicts the profession will not face this question. The belief that moral philosophy tracks moral truth is convenient for moral philosophers.
\nCharles Taylor’s buffered self, the self that owns its reasons and authors its acts, cannot survive Doris. The porous self, shaped by situation and unaware of its own reasons, fits the evidence. The porous self is also what Becker’s hero systems presuppose, what Pinsof’s alliances presuppose, what Trivers’s self-deception presupposes. The self-help industry, the therapy industry, the memoir industry, the confession booth, the analyst’s couch all presuppose the buffered self.
\nA fearless researcher finishes the book and finds fewer readers than expected. The coalition that funds moral psychology research wants conclusions that support the moral vocabulary the coalition uses. Conclusions Doris points toward, followed without fear or favor, do not support that vocabulary. They describe it as something other than what it claims to be. The researcher then faces the choice every honest social scientist faces at some point. Publish the conclusions and accept the career cost. Soften the conclusions and keep the career. Most soften. People outside the discipline read the few who do not, and wonder why the discipline did not get there first.<\/p>\n

Doris spends two books arguing that behavior is situational, that reflection confabulates, that character attributions track less than they claim. He does not turn the tools on the man holding them. He writes as if Doris-the-philosopher stands outside the evidence, reports it accurately, reasons about it reliably, and reaches conclusions his readers can evaluate on the merits. The buffered self he dismantles in theory he reinstates in practice every time he signs his name to a paper.
\nThe situational account of Doris runs easily. He trained at Michigan and Rutgers, fields populated by naturalist philosophers hostile to neo-Aristotelian revival. His teachers included Peter Railton and Stephen Stich, men who reward empirically grounded attacks on armchair ethics. His career advanced through journals, conferences, and departments where situationism was a rising program with openings for ambitious young philosophers. The situation produced the argument. Had the young Doris landed at Notre Dame under MacIntyre, the same intelligence might have produced a defense of virtue ethics against the psychological literature.
\nThe confabulation point runs harder. Doris presents his reasons for situationism as reasons. The research shows X. The philosophical tradition claims Y. X contradicts Y. Therefore Y fails. A Doris-style analysis of Doris asks whether these are his reasons or his reconstructions. The coalition he joined needed the argument. The argument appeared. The reasons he gives for the argument are the reasons the coalition accepts. Whether those reasons are the causes of his belief or the post-hoc justifications his brain supplied, his own framework cannot tell him. He does not ask.
\nThe coalition point runs hardest. Situationist moral psychology forms a coalition. It has journals, conferences, citation networks, hiring pipelines, and a shared enemy in the neo-Aristotelians. Members of the coalition cite each other, review each other favorably, hire each other’s students, and treat objections from outside as evidence the outsiders do not understand the research. A Pinsof reading notes the alliance structure. A Turner reading notes the convenient belief: situationism is convenient for a coalition of empirically minded philosophers who want to claim territory virtue ethicists held. A Becker reading notes the hero system: the situationist presents himself as the hard-nosed realist facing uncomfortable truths while the virtue ethicist clings to flattering illusions. This is a status move inside a coalition, not a view from nowhere.
\nDoris does not run any of these readings on himself. He could. His framework supplies the tools. He does not pick them up because picking them up would cost him the argument. If his own reasoning confabulates, his argument against virtue ethics confabulates. If his behavior tracks his coalition rather than his character, his defense of situationism tracks his coalition rather than the evidence.
\nPhilosophers have noticed. Candace Vogler, Julia Annas, Daniel Russell, and Nancy Snow have pushed versions of this objection. Doris and his allies respond that the objection proves too much, that if it defeats situationism it defeats all reasoning, that the self-refutation charge is a debater’s trick. The response dodges. The charge is not that all reasoning fails. The charge is that Doris applies his framework selectively. He applies it to Aristotelians and exempts himself.
\nEvery critical framework faces this test. Marx faced it. Freud faced it. The sociology of knowledge faced it. Foucault faced it. The question each framework must answer is whether it can be applied to the man holding it without destroying his authority to hold it. Marx tried. Freud tried badly. Foucault tried and then stopped trying. Doris does not try. He writes as if the question does not apply to him.
\nDoris writes two books exposing the self-knowledge problem and does not notice his own. The blind spot is not an oversight. It is the condition of the work getting written. A fully reflexive Doris would have written a different book, or no book, and would have held a different career, or no career. The career requires the blind spot. The blind spot is situational. His framework predicts this. He does not see it because seeing it would end the game he is playing and the game is what pays him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John M. Doris argues two claims that sit at the root of moral psychology. Character traits as Aristotle and his descendants describe them do not exist, or exist in forms too weak to carry the weight the tradition places on … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43215],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-john-m-doris"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=182911"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":182927,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182911\/revisions\/182927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=182911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=182911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=182911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}