 This section will begin with a brief discussion of some recent philosophical work on character that relies on results in experimental social psychology. This philosophical work calls into question the conceptions of character and virtue that are of concern especially to the ancient Greek moralists and to contemporary philosophers whose work derives from ancient views. Philosophers impressed by this tradition in experimental social psychology – which is often labeled “situationism”– have denied that traits of character are stable, consistent, or evaluatively integrated in the way that ancient or contemporary philosophers suggest. The ancient moralists assumed that virtues are, in John Doris’s description, “robust traits: if a person has a robust trait, they can be confidently expected to display trait-relevant behavior across a wide variety of trait-relevant situations, even where some or all of these situations are not optimally conducive to such behavior” (2002, 18). Doris and others argue that traits are not robust in this sense. They are not stable or consistent and are wrongly invoked to explain why people act as they do. Rather, these philosophers argue, and as the experimental tradition indicates, much of human behavior is attributable to seemingly trivial features of the situations in which persons find themselves. Hence the appropriateness of the label “situationist” for the philosophers espousing these views. For variations on this view, see Harman (1999, 2000), Doris (2002), and Vranas (2005). 