Generosity, as a character trait, would incline a person to notice opportunities for supererogatory giving, deliberate effectively about how and to whom to give, feel motivated to give, and follow through on those decisions.

Starting with Owen Flanagan’s Varieties of Moral Personality (1993), philosophers began to worry that empirical results from social psychology were inconsistent with the structure of human agency presupposed by virtue theory. In this framework, people are conceived as having more or less fixed traits of character that systematically order their perception, cognition, emotion, reasoning, decision-making, and behavior. For example, a generous person is inclined to notice and seek out opportunities