境况主义挑战与美德伦理

The Situationist Challenge and Virtue Ethics

认知科学的发展在为伦理研究带来一系列重要机遇的同时,也为伦理学的传统研究和某些伦理观点带来了挑战。自从上个世纪20年代以来,社会心理学和个性心理学中的境况主义实验就被认为消解了品格概念;最近20年,某些哲学家更试图利用认知科学的有关研究成果进一步表明,将品格作为核心基础的美德伦理学在经验上是不适当的。本文旨在表明,无论从经验研究还是哲学反思的角度看,这个主张都不是结论性的;并且,亚里士多德式的美德伦理学有思想资源回答境况主义者提出的挑战。本文也试图以此为案例来探究一个重要问题:究竟应该如何理解经验科学和哲学反思之间的关系?

While advances in cognitive science have provided a series of significant opportunities for ethical inquiry,they also bring about challenges to traditional approaches to ethics and to some ethical views.Since the 1920s,situationist experiments in social and personality psychology have been deemed to”dissolve”the concept of character,and in the last twenty years,some philosophers have gone on to argue,using relevant results in cognitive science,that virtue ethics is empirically inadequate when it takes character to be central to ethics.This paper aims to show that this claim is not decisive from the perspective of either empirical research or philosophical reflection,and that the Aristotelian virtue ethics is endowed with adequate conceptual resources to answer this kind of challenge.In addition,by focusing on the case of the situationist challenge,this paper is further intended to inquire into the question of how the relationship between empirical science and philosophical reflection is to be construed.