The Virtue and the Problem of the Fundamental Error of Attribution

With the emergence of virtue ethics in recent years, many people tackled with its weaknesses and strengths. One of the most important fundamental objections to virtue ethics is to doubt or deny internal moral attributes (virtues and vices). Some moral philosophers based such an objection on social psychology, and thus considered the attribution of internal attributes to human moral conducts as a fundamental error in attribution. Gilbert Harman and John Doris appealed to some experiments in social psychology, such as the Milgram experiment, benevolent Samurai, and Zimbardo prison, to deny internal moral attributes. They hold that it is a mistake to base a moral theory on such attributes, and thus virtue ethics is not a plausible normative theory. Proponents of virtue ethics provided several negative and positive replies to this objection. We believe that the best reply is the one based on rareness. In this paper, we delineate the problem and then examine it in detail.