From Personality to Virtue ─ Essays on the Philosophy of Character

Character plays a central role in our everyday understanding and evaluation of ourselves and one another. It informs the expectations that ground our plans and projects, our moral responses to other people's behaviour and to opportunities we ourselves face, and our political decisions concerning formal education, criminal punishment, and other aspects of social organisation. The very idea that people have persisting character traits that explain their behaviour is woven throughout the fabric of our culture. These philosophical essays clarify this idea of character, analyse its relation with the findings of experimental psychology, and draw out the implications of this for education and for criminal punishment. They bring together a range of issues in contemporary philosophy, including the nature of agency, the modelling of behavioural cognition, ethical implications of personal necessity, moral responsibility for implicit bias, the prospects for character education, and the nature of rightful criminal punishment. The essays emphasise that character is inherently dynamic, challenging the tendency among personality psychologists and virtue ethicists alike to focus on static snapshots of traits, and they emphasise the close integration of character with the individual's social context, seeking to accommodate the situationist experimental findings within a picture of behaviour as manifesting stable character traits. The volume is intended to demonstrate the deep conceptual affinity of moral philosophy and social psychology and the consequent potential for each to benefit from the other.

Alberto Masala, Paris-Sorbonne University,Jonathan Webber, Cardiff University

Alberto Masala is Post-doctoral researcher at the Sciences, Normes, Decision research centre, Paris-Sorbonne University. He works primarily in empirically informed moral psychology, at the intersection of virtue ethics, social and personality psychology, psychology of expertise, and cognitive learning sciences. He defended his PhD dissertation on empirical approaches to the psychology of virtue and wisdom at the Sorbonne in 2009.


Jonathan Webber is Reader in Philosophy at Cardiff University. He works primarily on the ethics of character, informed by empirical social psychology and twentieth-century existentialist philosophy. He has published papers inAnalysis, European Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Moral Philosophy,Mind, Philosophical Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is the author of the monographThe Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, editor of the collection of essaysReading Sartre: on Phenomenology and Existentialism, and translator of Sartre's bookThe Imaginary.