Zhu Xi and the Debate between Virtue Ethicists and Situationists: Virtue Cultivation as a Possible, Practical, and Necessary Enterprise

A Xunzian theory of moral cultivation: a critique of situationism and a reconstruction of the ethics in the Xunzi

“…Basically, these responses can be divided into three groups: (1) situationism misunderstands the concept of virtue or character traits in Aristotle; (2) truly virtuous people are rare, so situationism does not undermine the foundation of virtue ethics but only proves the rarity of virtues; (3) some experiments that Doris and Harman cite are problematic and are insufficient to support their arguments. 7 Moreover, some scholars of Chinese philosophy participate in the debate by responding to situationism from the perspective of Confucianism (Hutton 2006 Leung 2018Leung , 2020. As Richard Kim observes, these articles more or less share four main characteristics: (1) the process of Confucian moral cultivation or development is long and tough, requiring people's ceaseless efforts and persevering spirit; (2) "the activities of everyday social life" is crucial because that is how Confucians accumulate goodness and build up their character traits; (3) Xunzi in particular notices the importance of situational factors while discussing the influences of mourning garments, music, and social 6 Harman, "Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology," 315-331.…”

“…One may question my example of the Big Five factors above because most of the studies are based on self-report questionnaires. 97 Who we think we are sometimes does not reflect who we really are. The second example of the personality trait of shyness may be helpful here, for 93 Kuo-shu Yang, Michael H. Bong, "Exploring implicit personality theories with indigenous or imported constructs: The Chinese case."…”

“…I will return to this point later in this chapter. 97 Prinz, "The Normativity Challenge," 117-144. the several longitudinal studies I shall quote adopt self-report questionnaire, parent-rated report, laboratorial observation, face-to-face interview, and psychobiological test as main methods. In other words, the conclusions of those studies do not merely depend on self-report questionnaires.…”