I just came across an interesting study in which researchers found a correlation between socially conservative views* and psychopathic, narcissistic and Machiavellian traits or what the writers call “dark triad personality traits”. (I’ve linked to the article below). Liberal thinkers, of course (and I confess I am resisting such an impulse) will no doubt celebrate and make much ado over any finding that suggests their (okay, ‘our’) opponents are a bunch of psychopaths. Reading this, once I again I am rueing the fact that philosophy lays no great emphasis on reading stats, which is something of a deficit. Sure, there’s some Baysian analysis here and there, but in philosophy deductive logic gets a lot more attention. Nevertheless, the writers say that they analysed the hell out of their data and that their findings passed a high threshold for significance, so I’m just going to just take their word for it.
Marcus Arvan, the writer, ends up making a connection between his findings and virtue ethics, which caught my attention given that unbeknownst to myself, I may myself be a closet virtue theorist. This possibility arose at the CPA conference where I presented a paper on psychology and phronesis or moral wisdom (it can be found above the banner here). In the paper I was pointing out certain cognitive biases that could distort moral perception and one commentator noted that I was suggesting that good moral reasoning relies as much on introspection and the cultivation of own cognitive processes as it does on the production of sound moral arguments. This, in turn, it would appear, could represent a turn towards virtue ethics. Arvan, however, is far more explicit about this turn, and argues that what appear as ad hominem arguments (“He’s just a narcissist, don’t accept his condemnation of a social safety net”) may not actually be fallacious. In fact, Arvan seems to implicitly suggest that good moral views may depend on favorable personality traits, and voila, enter virtue ethics.
I’ve made the case in a pretty circular fashion here, which is to presume the truth that social nets and the like are morally good. Actually, though, as I write, I’m realising that the problem might be Arvan’s, not mine. To show this, I’ve done up a little argument below. Now his conclusions are much more tentative than the ones I’ve stated below. For instance, Arvan would not endorse my first premise, as it appears to be an overt causal claim between personality and moral judgement (as with any good researcher, his conclusions on the connection between these factors are far more tentative). Nevertheless, it’s easier to illustrate the underlying logic of the argument by using unequivocal claims, and thereby bring out the missing premise that is being presumed rather than defended.
The argument
If a person has psychopathic (P), narcissistic (N) or Machiavellian traits (M), then they will produce conservative moral claims.
P, N and M are negative personality traits (Arvan takes time to show this in his paper).
Negative personality traits give rise to poor moral judgement.
_________________________________________
Therefore, since negative personality traits give rise to poor moral judgement, then we can appeal to a person’s negative personality traits to refute their moral judgements.
Then, the whole argument is offered as support for the legitimacy of virtue ethics.
Now even if all these premises were true, we’re still missing one. Namely, what is missing is a premise showing that conservative moral judgments are instances of poor judgements. We already have to believe that one (and I do) for this argument to hold. The fact that negative personality traits give rise to a particular brand of moral judgements, is not sufficient to show that these judgements are mistaken. Unless of course, we are already virtue ethicists, and then we take this as a given. But again, it appears the question is being begged here. I can say to someone, you’re a narcissistic jerk with no empathy, that’s why you’re arguing that we should throw the fat man onto the trolley tracks, and we might even be right about the genesis of our opponent’s claim. But, this is not enough to show that we ought not toss the fat guy onto the trolley tracks. Rather, some further independent grounds are required for that claim.
The second thing that occurred to me while reading this argument (and I can’t emphasise enough how sympathetic I am to the ideas being presented here) was the possibility of priming distorting results. According to Arvan, subjects were asked to identify their political leanings at some point in the study. What I really want to know is whether they did so before or after they answered the other questions. From what I recall, some studies have shown that female and African-American test-takers, for instance, tend to do more poorly on tests in which they are asked to identify their gender or race beforehand. Something, I know not what, is going on in these cases, where identifying one’s social location can affect test results. Is it not possible then, that identifying oneself as a conservative thinker or liberal thinker in advance might not prime a thinker in a particular fashion and thereby influence the manner in which they answer the questions?
It’s just a thought, and in spite of these prima facie problems, no doubt I will be gleefully citing this study at the next cocktail party I attend.
*It appears there was less of a correlation between fiscal conservatives and personality.
Fragile Virtue 
Hi Marnina,
Thanks so much for your interest in my work, and for giving it a sympathetic reading. If you don’t mind, I’d like to address the two worries you raise in your post. As to your question of whether my results could be due to priming effects, respondents were only asked to self-report their political leanings at the very end of the study — so I think there’s no reason to think that the kind of priming effect you are worried about could have occurred.
As to your worry that my virtue-ethical argument is question-begging, here’s the basic idea. Moral inquiry has to begin with *someone’s* judgments. That’s just the way moral inquiry works. We have to begin with judgments about what is good, bad, right, and wrong, and proceed from there. Compare this to sense-perception of the external world and empirical science. Empirical science is based on sense perception. Scientific theories aim to explain the way the world *appears* to us. By a similar token, a moral theory should explain the way the *moral* world appears to us.
So, now, if we have to begin with someone’s moral judgments, we have to ask *whose* moral judgments we should begin with. There are no reasons offhand to think that all persons’ moral judgments are epistemically (or evidentially) equal. Nobody thinks this. We wouldn’t begin moral inquiry with Hitler’s moral judgments; or a selfish person’s moral judgments; or a liar’s judgments; etc. Why? Because (A) we recognize that a person’s moral judgments are likely to be affected by their moral goodness or badness as persons, and (B) there is an *enormous* amount of cross-cultural and cross-historical agreement about what constitutes goods and bad people. Good people are honest, compassionate, empathetic, trustworthy; etc. Bad people are liars, cheats, remorseless, etc. Okay, so, if (1) we have to begin moral inquiry with *someone’s* moral judgments, and (2) there is an enormous amount of cross-cultural agreement that *good* people are likely to make the right moral judgments and bad people wrong moral judgments, then (3) for any moral judgment a person makes, X, X is more likely to be true if it is a judgment made by a good person than if it made by a bad person. Notice that claim (3) here is really the point that addresses your worry. My claim is that if we show that person A has a bad moral compass, then, for any moral belief they might have, B, their moral badness as a person casts some doubt on B (particularly if good people reject B!).
Anyway, I don’t think this is question-begging. All arguments must begin *somewhere*, and I think each step in the argument is one that we have cross-cultural and cross-historical reasons to accept. [Sorry if this was badly written and/or confusing. I really wanted to respond to your post but only had a few minutes to do so. I look forward to hearing your thoughts in response, should you take the time!].
All the best,
Marcus
Hi Marcus,
I’m delighted that you took the time to respond to this. I see from recent Google hits that your paper is gaining you a certain amount of notoriety! As for the the analogy with sense perception, it seems to me that what causes us to examine the sensory apparatus of a given person, is the observation that their perceptions are erroneous. Similarly, with Hitler and say dreadful liars, we make assumptions about their inner moral character based on observations of their obviously immoral actions. That is, in both cases we tend to reverse engineer, as it were, and make assumptions about inner character based on our evaluations of their externally observable actions. The problem with the external actions of say, social conservatives, is that their external actions, for instance upholding the right to bear arms, or condemning the use of taxation to redistribute wealth are not undeniably immoral. That is, there is a question about the moral status of such judgements. By contrast, saying that a liar (or a cheater) is immoral is virtually a tautology. If, on the other hand, we could show that people with the ‘dark triad’ traits consistently formed judgments that are unequivocally immoral, say condoning lying or see mass genocide as a-ok, then the link between personality and moral judgement seems much stronger.
It also seems that the judgements of a narcissistic, Machiavellian psychopath could be deemed good moral judgments. Perhaps for the sake of career advancement, for example, said agent has decided to endorse and consistently apply some brand of utilitarianism or Kantianism to her deliberations, or she employs Rawl’s viel of ignorance consistently when deciding how to act. So long as the output, or her observable actions, are consistent with said system, would we not have to say that she is moral?
But perhaps in these musings I’m just pointing to the disconnect between virtue ethics and other rationalistic, universal moral systems. It seem to me that an underlying assumption held by the proponents of such systems is that there are moral truths our there that can be apprehended by reason alone. Certainly Kant saw compassion as interfering with good moral judgement, meanwhile the veil of ignorance simply seems to require good faculties of instrumental reasoning, as does utilitarianism (along with the ability to calculate levels of welfare over harm). I myself don’t endorse this approach to morality, but it seems to me a lot of folks doing moral philosophy do. But then again, perhaps we just don’t see a lot of nice people endorsing this approach to moral philosophy 😉