Comments Elsewhere

A lot of psychological situationists* like to push social-psychology experiments as proof that most people don’t have, or perhaps even couldn’t have, robust character traits. So, for example, they’ll cite the Milgram experiment, supposedly to show how people mostly do not stick to traits of compassion or kindness towards the “learner” when the lab-coat authority tells them that they have to hurt him. And maybe this does show that a lot of middle-class Americans aren’t as reliably compassionate and as kind as you might hope. But hell man, I already knew that. But if you’re trying to push the idea that the study undermines the idea that people have, or could form, robust character traits, that seems like a non sequitur. One of the obvious results that Milgram himself took from his study is that a lot of people (including a lot of middle-class Americans) have a really robust, situationally-insensitive character trait of *obedience*, which is so robust that for a large minority it persisted even up to the point where they honestly believed they were torturing or killing a person in the other room. The fact that this character trait is a *vice* doesn’t mean it’s not a robust and stable character trait. It looks like a hella robust and stable character trait. The question is whether it’s possible to make that trait less robust, and whether it’s possible to cultivate different traits, which might look more like decency and virtues. If it’s possible to be so hella committed to obedience at all costs, then maybe it’s possible to become committed to other things which are you know not genocidally awful.