Answering the Situationist Challenge: A Defense of Virtue Ethics as Preferable to Other Ethical Theories
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a well-known paper, John Doris argues that situationist psychology impugns Aristotelian virtue ethics, which presupposes the existence of stable, situation-independent virtues. Maria Merritt responds that a Humean conception of virtue, which is situation-dependent, is immune to this criticism. However, she does not directly address two of Doris’ more trenchant objections, which he presents in the form of a dilemma. In this paper, I respond to Doris’ dilemma, using recent research in psychology and cognitive science to show that virtue ethics, as a dispositionalist, non-codifiable theory, represents a more empirically adequate moral psychology than the leading alternatives.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it