Opacity of Character: Virtue Ethics and the Legal Admissibility of Character Evidence

Abstract

Many jurisdictions prohibit or severely restrict the use of evidence about a defendant’s character to prove legal culpability. Situationists, who argue that conduct is largely determined by situational features rather than character, can easily defend this prohibition. According to situationism, character evidence is misleading or paltry evidence. But proscriptions on character evidence seem harder to justify on virtue ethical accounts. It appears that excluding character evidence either denies the centrality of character for explaining conduct—the situationist position—or omits probative evidence. Situationism, after all, is antithetical to virtue ethics. This essay provides a virtue ethical defense of character evidence exclusion rules. We show that existing virtue ethical rebuttals to situationism themselves support prohibitions on character evidence; even if behavior arises from stable character traits, character evidence should be prohibited. In building our case, we provide a taxonomy of kinds of character judgment and reconcile the ubiquity and reasonableness of character judgements in ordinary life with the epistemic legitimacy of character evidence prohibitions in law.