This provocative contribution to ethics and epistemology argues that virtue attributions are self-fulfilling prophecies.

Mark Alfano is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. In 2011, he received his doctorate from the philosophy program of the City University of New York Graduate Center (CUNY GC). He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study and the Princeton University Center for Human Values. Alfano works on moral psychology, broadly construed to include ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychology. He also maintains an interest in Nietzsche, focusing on Nietzsche's psychological views. Alfano has authored papers for such venues as Philosophical Quarterly, The Monist, Erkenntnis, Synthese, and the British Journal for the History of Philosophy. Character as Moral Fiction, his first book, argues that the situationist challenge to virtue ethics spearheaded by John Doris and Gilbert Harman should be co-opted, not resisted. He is currently writing a moral psychology textbook and editing three volumes on virtue ethics and virtue epistemology.

Introduction: Tripartite naturalistic ethics; Part I. Factitious Moral Virtue: 1. Identifying the hard core of virtue ethics; 2. Rearticulating the situationist challenge to virtue ethics; 3. Attempts to defend virtue ethics; 4. Factitious moral virtue; Part II. Factitious Intellectual Virtue: 5. Extending the situationist challenge to responsibilist virtue epistemology; 6. Extending the situationist challenge to reliabilist virtue epistemology; 7. Factitious intellectual virtue; Part III. Programmatic Conclusion: 8. To see as we are seen: an investigation of social distance heuristics.