Alfano says:

At the end of the article, I evaluate knowledge-claims about virtues in light of these attribution biases, input heuristics and biases, and processing heuristics and biases. Every widely accepted theory of knowledge must reject such knowledge-claims when they are based merely on folk intuitions.

This sounds absurd on its face. If Alfano finds out that someone has a history of cheating and stealing, will he avoid having any business with this person, expecting similar behavior in the future, or will he "reject such knowledge-claims... based merely on folk intuitions"?

Are his claims really so silly, or am I missing something?

Some excerpts:

Why do we have so many trait terms and feel so comfortable navigating the language of traits if actual correlations between traits and individual actions (typically <0.30, as Mischel 1968 persuasively argues)1 are undetectable without the use of sophisticated statistical methodologies (Jennings et al. 1982)?

1 See also Mischel and Peake (1982). Epstein (1983), a personality psychologist, admits that predicting particular behaviors on the basis of trait variables is “usually hopeless.” Fleeson (2001, p. 1013), an interactionist, likewise endorses the 0.30 ceiling.

To answer this question, situationists invoke a veritable pantheon of gods of ignorance and error. Some, like the fundamental attribution error, the false consensus effect, and the power of construal, pertain directly to trait attributions. Others are more general cognitive heuristics and biases, whose relevance to trait attributions requires explanation. These more general heuristics and biases can be classed under the headings of input heuristics and biases and processing heuristics and biases. Input heuristics and biases include selection bias, availability bias, availability cascade, and anchoring. Processing heuristics and biases include disregard of base rates, disregard of regression to the mean, and confirmation bias.

According to Jones and Nisbett (1971, p. 93), the unique breakdown of the fundamental attribution error occurs when we explain what we ourselves have done: instead of underemphasizing the influence of environmental factors, we overemphasize them. Especially when the outcome is negative, we attribute our actions to external factors. This bias seems to tell against situationism, since it suggests that we can recognize the power of situations at least in some cases. However, the existence of such an actor-observer bias has recently come in for trenchant criticism from Malle (2006), whose meta-analysis of three decades worth of data fails to demonstrate a consistent actor-observer asymmetry.2 Malle’s meta-analysis only strengthens the case for the fundamental attribution error. Whereas Jones & Nisbett had argued that it admitted of certain exceptions at least in first-personal cases, Malle shows their exceptionalism to be ungrounded.

In one variation of the [Milgram] obedience experiment, a second experimenter played the role of the victim and begged to be released from the electrodes. Participants in this version of the study had to disagree with one of the experimenters, so a desire to avoid embarrassment and save face would give them no preference for obedience to one experimenter over the other. Nevertheless, in this condition 65% of the participants were maximally obedient to the experimenter in authority, shocking the other experimenter with what they took to be 450 volts three times in a row while he slumped over unconscious (Milgram, p. 95).

When people use the availability heuristic, they take the first few examples of a type that come to mind as emblematic of the whole population. This process can lead to surprisingly accurate conclusions (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 28), but it can also lead to preposterously inaccurate guesses (Tversky and Kahnemann 1973, p. 241). We remember the one time Maria acted benevolently and forget all the times when she failed to show supererogatory kindness, leading us to infer that she must be a benevolent person. Since extremely virtuous and vicious actions are more memorable than ordinary actions, they will typically be the ones we remember when we consider whether someone possesses a trait, leading to over-attribution of both virtues and vices.

In her defense of virtue ethics, Kupperman (2001, p. 243) mentions word-of-mouth testimony that “the one student who, when the Milgram experiment was performed at Princeton, walked out at the start was also the person who in Viet Nam blew the whistle on the My Lai massacre.” Such tales are comforting: perhaps a few people really are compassionate in all kinds of circumstances, whether the battlefield or the lab. But while anecdotes about character may be soothing, it should be clear that anecdotal evidence is at best skewed and biased, as well as prone to misinterpretation. We should focus on the fact that most experimental subjects are easily swayed by normatively irrelevant factors, not the fact that one person might be virtuous.

The existence of these biases does not prove that no one has traits, nor does it demonstrate that no arguments could warrant the conclusion that people have traits. What it instead shows it that regardless of whether people have traits, folk intuitions would lead us to attribute traits to them.

It should be noted here that many of psychologists, such as Fleeson (2001), do believe in traits, and not merely on the basis of folk intuitions. It is beyond the scope of this article to assess the success of their arguments and the extent to which those arguments apply to virtues (which are a distinctive subspecies of traits individuated not merely causally but by their characteristic reasons).

It seems plausible that our capacity for moral judgment might mirror our capacity for belief formation in that it includes crude but efficient algorithms like what we call cognitive biases in belief formation. But I don't think it follows that we can make our moral judgments 'more accurate' by removing moral 'biases' in favor of some idealized moral formula. What our crude but efficient moral heuristics are approximating is evolutionarily advantageous strategies for our memes and genes. But I don't really care about replicating the things that programmed me-- I just care about what they programmed me to care about.

In belief formation there are likely biases that have evolutionary benefits too- it is easier to deceive others if you sincerely believe you will cooperate when you are in a position to defect without retaliation, for example. But we have an outside standard to check our beliefs against-- experience. We know after many iterations of prediction and experiment which reasons for beliefs are reliable and which are not. Obviously, a good epistemology is a lot trickier than I've made it sound but it seems like, in principle, we can make our beliefs more accurate by checking them against reality.

I can't see an analogous standard for moral judgments. This wouldn't be a big problem if our brains were cleanly divided into value-parts and belief-parts. We could then just fix the belief parts and keep the crude-but-hey-that's-how-evolution-made-us value parts. But it seems like our values and beliefs are all mixed up in our cognitive soup. We need a sieve.