Dilemmas for the Rarity Thesis in Virtue Ethics and Virtue Epistemology

"Situationists" such as Gilbert Harman and John Doris have accused virtue ethicists as having an "empirically inadequate" theory, arguing that much of social science research suggests that people do not have robust character traits (e.g., virtues or vices) as traditionally thought. By far, the most common response to this challenge has been what I refer to as "the rarity response" or the "rarity thesis". Rarity responders (such as Ernest Sosa and Gopal Sreenivasan) deny that situationism poses any sort of threat to virtue ethics since there is no reason to suppose that the moral virtues are typical or widespread. But, far from being its saving grace, I will argue, the rarity thesis forces virtue ethicists into positions that are incompatible with their theoretical foundations or render their theory normatively irrelevant. The more the virtue ethicists modify their thesis to fit the empirical evidence and to be normatively relevant, the less they retain a virtue ethical theory. This is also the case for virtue epistemologists.