認知科學的發展在為倫理研究帶來一系列重要機遇的同時,也為倫理學的傳統研究和某些倫理觀點帶來了挑戰。自從上個世紀20年代以來,社會心理學和個性心理學中的境況主義實驗就被認為消解了品格概念;最近20年,某些哲學家更試圖利用認知科學的有關研究成果進一步表明,將品格作為核心基礎的美德倫理學在經驗上是不適當的。本文旨在表明,無論從經驗研究還是哲學反思的角度看,這個主張都不是結論性的;并且,亞里士多德式的美德倫理學有思想資源回答境況主義者提出的挑戰。本文也試圖以此為案例來探究一個重要問題:究竟應該如何理解經驗科學和哲學反思之間的關系?

While advances in cognitive science have provided a series of significant opportunities for ethical inquiry,they also bring about challenges to traditional approaches to ethics and to some ethical views. Since the 1920 s,situationist experiments in social and personality psychology have been deemed to"dissolve"the concept of character,and in the last twenty years,some philosophers have gone on to argue,using relevant results in cognitive science,that virtue ethics is empirically inadequate when it takes character to be central to ethics.This paper aims to show that this claim is not decisive from the perspective of either empirical research or philosophical reflection,and that the Aristotelian virtue ethics is endowed with adequate conceptual resources to answer this kind of challenge. In addition,by focusing on the case of the situationist challenge,this paper is further intended to inquire into the question of how the relationship between empirical science and philosophical reflection is to be construed.