Peter Goldie, currently professor of philosophy at the
University of Manchester, in the UK, has written a clear, lively, illuminating,
urbane and thoughtful little book on personality and character. In a little
under hundred and thirty pages (main text) Goldie goes into our everyday
concept of personality, the set of mental traits that stick as opposed to just
occurrent thoughts or moods, and the notion of character, which concerns
deeper-laying, reason-responsive mental traits, such as kindness. He next
considers the fragility of character, the intellectual virtues and
responsibility and the idea of life as a narrative. In what follows I shall
largely limit myself to a brief description of the main argument of the book.

The concepts of personality and character are fraught
with difficulties. We, that is at least everyone who is not conversant with recent work in
social psychology, like to think that someone who has certain traits, such as
being considerate, will show such traits through a wide range of different
situations. We think of character traits as steady and consistent — or robust —
dispositions to action. This unreflective dispositionism however, has
empirically been shown to rest on fairly wobbly assumptions. The social
psychologists Nisbett and Ross have shown that what one does, is to a
surprisingly large extent dependent on the situation in which one finds oneself.
Furthermore, it is not only romantic novelists and film directors who tend to
think of people on the model of what E.M. Forster called the "flat
character". We are all likely to flatten each other and ourselves out.
This tendency carries some dangers with it. We jump to conclusions about
someone’s personality and character on scant evidence and we come to have
expectations through our inveterate inclination to dispositionism.  

These snags notwithstanding, personality and
character are indispensable for our talk and thought about human beings. We use
them to describe, explain and predict what someone will do. There is an easy
way, in my view – I don’t know if it’s Goldie’s view too, of finding the truth
of this thought out for oneself. Try thinking of a friend, a relative or a
lover at all without thinking of her personality-traits: of what she is like:
except perhaps for conjuring up a superficial image of her physical appearance
it cannot be done. We also use the concept of character to understand and to
judge what someone has done, will do, ought to do or must do. For character is
a moral notion: what kind of character I have is a matter of how I am disposed
reliably to respond to reasons for acting thus-and-so. Character, as Aristotle would
presumably have told us if he had spoken English, is a question of virtues and
vices. There obviously is a tension here. On the one hand character and
personality are fragile. That is to say, personality traits and character
traits are stable — we most of the time respond to the same kind of situation
in the same way — but they are not consistent – we do not respond in the same
way across different kind of situations. On the other hand we are bound to be
idealists about such traits. We form expectations of what someone will do on
the basis of what we have come to conceive of as the way he would respond to
this kind of situation. Surely our thinking about the ways humans are in terms
of their personalities would be neither here nor there if we could not make
sense of them this way. The thought that characters are fragile, however, is
not meant to lead to a radical version of what we could, after Sir Peter
Strawson, call revisionism about character. We cannot do without the concept of
character or the concept of personality. Keeping in mind what we have learnt
from Nisbett & Ross, Forster and other novelists such as Virginia Woolf and
Joseph Conrad it would be too conservative to say that the common-or-garden
variety of the concept of character is not in any need of cultivation. As has
been remarked above, the concept of character turns on the (Aristotelian) idea
that character traits are dispositions reliably to respond to certain occurrent
thoughts, namely reasons so to respond (although to the agent these reasons
often don’t come under the description someone else would give them).  This idea about the reason-responsiveness of
character-traits leads to the perhaps provocative conclusion that one is
responsible for one’s character. This is so because one is responsible for any
(character)-trait one has if and only if in exercising this trait, or in coming
or growing to exercise it, one responds to reasons. Since character-traits have
been defined as dispositions reliably to respond to certain reasons and given
the intuitive idea that one is responsible, so to speak, for what one can help,
it should not come as a surprise that one is responsible for one’s character.
Still, if considered in isolation it is a surprising thought. It also is a
thought that might seem to fit a climate of toughness on those who have done
less well in life’s lottery. But this does not follow. Responsibility for
reason-responsive dispositions does not entail responsibility for
non-reason-responsive personality traits. As with character, the right
conception of responsibility flourishes on poised reflection rather than on
radical revisionism.

© 2005 Sjoerd
van Hoorn

Sjoerd van Hoorn read philosophy at the University
of Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He is currently working on a doctoral
dissertation in legal philosophy on responsibility and the criminal law.

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology