The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.Yes, that’s what I like about me, at least one of the things, that I can say, Up the Republic!, for example, or, Sweetheart!, for example, without having to wonder whether I should not rather have cut my tongue out, or said something else.  The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.  — Samuel Beckett, “Malone Dies”  What is character? Ordinarily, we envision character as a set of stable and unified dispositions: we expect the timid employee to be shy on a regular basis, not just on some days, and we picture him as a mellow father, not as a tyrant at home. Since we suppose that characters are unified in these ways, we are almost invariably surprised when it turns out that the different aspects of someone’s personality stand in tension with one another. It is news to us that Tolstoy’s attitude toward his own illegitimate son was worse than aloof, notwithstanding the humanism and sensitivity of Tolstoy’s writings, or that Richard Nixon was rather a good father and husband despite his mendacity in other contexts.  In art, this type of incongruence between reality and expectations is often used to generate a comic effect, as when the powerful C.E.O. who is feared by all his underlings and appears to respect no authority gets a call from his mother and, with the intonation of a 10-year old schoolboy, says, “Yes, Mom.” Or a dramatic effect, as when the seemingly kind and charming hostess initiates a bitter quarrel with her husband as soon as the guests are gone. In the context of art, it is surely a good thing that we expect unity of character and uniformity of behavior since much of art depends on either reaffirming or frustrating those expectations, and thus, on their very existence.  In real life, drawing false inferences with regard to a person’s character may have serious practical consequences: a mother who firmly believes that her daughter cannot be taking drugs because she is just not that kind of girl may end up losing her daughter to an overdose. It may even lead to injustice: a judge who fails to see that the convict is a reformed man may keep that convict in prison for no good reason. What is the basis for our assumptions that people’s characters are unified, and that their behavior in one context will resemble their behavior in other contexts? Drawing on social psychology, some philosophers, most notably Gilbert Harman and John Doris, have proposed that the perception of unity is a result of biases and systematic errors, not of the actual qualities of the people observed. I do not think the skeptical conclusion they draw is warranted, but the challenge is worth taking seriously. There are, indeed, various features of our perception of other people’s characters that make us prone to expect unity.  Consider first what I would call the “privileged perspective” bias. We tend to give priority to our own interactions with and feelings for the person we are called upon to judge, and since people are usually consistent in their behavior toward us, we form unfounded beliefs in the stability of their dispositions. There is something puzzling about the fact that the girlfriend of the repeated criminal offender often manages to hold on to her belief in her lover’s intrinsic goodness; something puzzling, yes, but also something deeply familiar. The criminal is good to his girlfriend, and that leads her to perceive him as good by nature. She sees his tenderness toward her as essential to who he is, and his abuse of others as accidental, or somehow minor. This is what we all do, to one degree or another, when assessing the characters of others in our lives.  Think of a person who has always been kind to you, perhaps a colleague, a relative, or a neighbor. Imagine also that you are asked to describe that person. You will probably say he is kind. You won’t say he is kind to you, you will say he is kind, period. You may continue to think of him as kind even if you hear his employees, co-workers, or spouse call him difficult, obstinate or quarrelsome. There are limits, of course. If you learn that the kind-to-you colleague beats his daughter with a belt, for instance, you will most certainly reconsider the kindness attribution. But the point remains: Revisions tend to lag behind the evidence because of the privileged perspective bias.  Here, I wish merely to document this bias, not to denounce it. It may well be that we see something about the kind-to-us person that others whose relationship with him is less amicable are missing, just as it may be that the criminal’s girlfriend sees something about him that we are missing. The point is simply that even when our own perspective on someone’s character happens to be insightful, consistency in relation to us is not yet good enough evidence for stable character dispositions in others.  There is another, more general limitation on ordinary observation that inclines us to find unity where none is to be found. Everyday experience rarely affords us grounds to discover what people are capable of and how they would behave in novel contexts. And the truth about what they are capable of may well contradict our beliefs about them. For instance, we may think that most people are decent and that no decent person would cause pain to another for no good reason. The results of Stanley Milgram’s much discussed experiment on obedience and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment, however, suggest otherwise: ordinary people can be led to administer painful electric shocks to one another for the sake of pleasing an experimenter or may cruelly humiliate their fellows if invited to play the role of prison guards. These are striking results, and while there is considerable controversy over how they are to be interpreted, there is no doubt that in order to make a convincing case for the existence of character we have to accommodate those results in some way.  It is precisely such studies that have led philosophers like Harman and Doris to deny the existence of character as ordinarily conceived. What are we to say in response? The first thing to point out is that it cannot simply be that “situations” rather than character determine behavior, since some sort of human tendency will always be part of the explanation of action. If humans had no tendency to obey, for example, the Milgram experiment would not have delivered the results it delivered. But to make this point is not yet to give an argument for the existence of character. For we think of character traits as stable dispositions that tend to influence behavior regardless of external provocation; not invariably, of course, but often enough. Thus, the composed person tends not to get angry even when provoked; the decent person refuses to engage in acts of cruelty even under pressure. To have tendencies that will manifest themselves only when provoked, or that fail to manifest when there is external pressure to behave otherwise, is not yet to have traits.  It could be, however, that the seemingly contradictory bits of evidence reveal not the lack of character but people’s deeper tendencies. This is a line suggested by the psychologist Gordon Allport in his response to early attacks on character mounted by stimulus-response theorists. Allport tells a story of an ordinarily honest boy who spends the summer with older boys who don’t give him the respect he’d like; the younger boy then steals candy from a store to get the others’ approval. In Allport’s interpretation, the boy, while he may appear inconsistent with regard to the trait of honesty, is really consistent with himself, since his desire for peer approval has all along been the stronger motive.  Some such explanation will often help. Consider again the case of Tolstoy. It may be that Tolstoy, too, was consistent with himself. Perhaps, both Tolstoy’s compassion for his characters and his aloofness toward his illegitimate son are aspects of one master motive: perfectionism. Suppose Tolstoy was a perfectionist, as seems likely given the number of times he rewrote his novels. Perfectionism may have led him to develop compassion for his characters in the course of writing and rewriting his novels, while simultaneously rendering him unable to own up to the mistakes in his own life. Tolstoy, it seems, dealt with his illegitimate child as one might deal with a manuscript rough draft:— by discarding it and hiding his authorship of it from others.  But there is a problem with applying the master motive explanation to the Milgram experiment: the tendency to obey, while in one sense an aspect of character, is in another sense a sign of the lack of character. For think about what we mean when we say that someone “has no character”: we mean just that he can be led in any direction and pressured to do all sorts of things. It would be a poor defense of the existence of his character if we said that really, his deeper tendency to obey united the seemingly incongruent bits of his behavior. To lack character is to lack principles, to fail to be, as it were, internally motivated.  Of course, tendencies ordinarily antithetical to what we mean by “real character” — like the tendency to obey — may, in some contexts, be a part of character. A samurai who has made a commitment to do everything his master commands may very well be showing precisely character in fulfilling an order. But more often than not, this will not be so. Still, the Allport response to skepticism about character will help much of the time.  My second point in defense of character is this: even if people are fragmented, as we all are to some extent, there must be a difference between ordinary and pathological fragmentation. People who are fragmented in a way incompatible with unity of any sort are usually suffering from a dissociative identity disorder or have some other psychiatric condition. The rest of us are what I would call ordinarily fragmented. And ordinary fragmentation — much like ordinary irrationality, which differs from madness because, in the words of one philosopher, it exists “in the house of reason” — exists in the house of unity.  Read previous contributions to this series.  This type of unity is a far cry from the idea of unity inherent in our ordinary notions of character. And many of us are inclined to stick to the ordinary notions. This may help explain some people’s resistance to absurdist theater and literature. Absurdist theater, unlike traditional narrative art, presents characters who are inconstant not upon occasion, but as a rule and the details of the lives of whom never add up to a coherent picture. But the fault, no doubt, lies in part with those viewers, not with absurdist art. If traditional art seems more “realistic,” that may just be because of the various biases of our perception.  But however fragmented we may in fact be, we can always strive for more unification. This is my main point. Unity in character is an achievement. And we have a better chance of attaining it if we take it to be a goal, rather than an existing state of affairs. If we want pronouncements like “Up the Republic!” and “Sweetheart!” to really mean something, we’d better take these pronouncements as commitments to live up to, not as expressions of who we already are. When I declare I will be faithful to you, there is, strictly speaking, something wishful about my declaration. I do not know from where I shall get the strength to do as I promise. It is certainly not the case that I possess a “faithfulness” property that can guarantee my success. But this is not a pessimistic conclusion. For there is nothing that guarantees failure either; my past failures, in particular, do not. And would you really prefer that my success be guaranteed? I would conjecture that the answer is “no.” The power of my declaration lies, for you, precisely in that I make a promise that I can keep only if I make an effort. Nothing about my character can ensure success. There is inevitable precariousness in human interaction that stems from the very way in which we are built. But perhaps this is just what, in our dealings with one another, gives both our success and our failure to live up to our commitments real meaning.  Iskra Fileva is a visiting assistant professor of philosophy and faculty fellow of the Parr Center for Ethics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She works primarily on topics in moral psychology and philosophy of psychology.
When we discover that the criminal has a soft side, or that the charming hostess has a mean streak, why are we surprised?