Abstract:The central worry of this article is one not widely discussed in the literature. Seth Robertson identifies it as the “indirect situationist critique”. Rather than make the broad and overly controversial claim that we do not have virtues at all, the situationist challenges whether the programme of moral education, developing and improving moral character that virtue ethics prides itself on is the best strategy at all. Instead they claim that situationism, with its greater focus on morally trivial situational influences such as the effect of mood on behaviour and that a more effective strategy would be to instead focus on how to manipulate situations.

In this article I concentrate specifically on situationist experiments related to mood. While those defending virtue ethics often bring up their own arsenal of social psychological experiments, in this article, I examine two methodological sources not found in this literature. First, I argue for ethnography as an empirical method through which to study virtue. I draw on ethnography of the Islamic women’s dawa movement to show how a contemporary virtue movement’s practices can answer the indirect situationist challenge. As an Islamic group, dawa practitioners likewise fill a gap as a less-explored virtue tradition, and they employ a specific moral technology (the veil) that is also somewhat controversial—and perhaps misunderstood in the West. Secondly, because I concentrate on the worry that mood subtly influences our ethical actions, I look at another ignored empirical source, the work in the philosophy of mind on “affective scaffolding.” One new direction Miller argues that empirically informed virtue ethics should head is to broaden discussion beyond Christian and dominant Aristotelian virtue ethics. My contribution attempts to bridge this gap,

I begin the first part by showing how situationism should make us question traditional understandings of virtues as intrinsic dispositions. I then introduce Islamic virtue ethics and the dawa movement. I also clarify why I chose that specific movement and why I use ethnography. In parts two and three I examine ethnography of the dawa movement to explore how they deal with worries about the influence of mood on their virtue. In part two I show how they train their habits in very traditional virtue ethics ways in order to be more resilient when faced with virtue-diminishing affective situations. In part three I show how the situation, rather than hindering practitioners, is recruited into helping these women achieve piety. I conclude, in part four, by showing the dawa movement’s creative use of the Islamic veil as a way to help these women deal with the objection that one cannot avoid all bad situations.