I have received the following comment from Peter Wicks of Villanova University. I post it here with his permission.
I don't want to fall into the trap of assuming that just because you didn't mention something in a blog post that means that you must not know about it, but are you aware of Gilbert Ryle's essay 'Jane Austen and the Moralists'? Ryle published it in the Oxford Review in 1966 and while Ryle's love of Jane Austen is well-known (an oft-repeated anecdote tells that when he was asked if he ever read novels Ryle replied 'Oh, yes. All six, every year.') my impression is that his essay about her is not, either amongst philosophers who are familiar with Ryle's influential work in the philosophy of mind or amongst philosophers who write on literature. Alasdair MacIntyre alludes to Ryle's views on Austen in After Virtue, but without naming the essay in which Ryle expressed them.
Put simply, Ryle's view is that Austen's moral vision is fundamentally Aristotelian in so far as her focus is on where the golden mean is to be found with regard to various qualities of character, and on the different ways in which we can deviate from the mean. Ryle contrasts this with a moral sensibility that he refers to as 'Calvinist' and associates with writers like Samuel Johnson. The Calvinist sensibility divides people into good and bad, white and black, saved and damned - 'arctic paragons' as Ryle puts it. I don't think Ryle was suggesting that Austen's characters were 'moral rather than psychological constructs' as Thomas Rodham claims in the article that you wrote about today. On the contrary, I think that Ryle is suggesting that it is part of Austen's achievement to explore in a realistic way what virtues and vices actually look like in the complexity of human character and human life. Or, to put it another way, while her characters are intended to illustrate certain virtues and vices, they could not succeed in doing so if they were not psychologically rich constructions, characters who live (although Ryle does allow that not all of Austen's characters are successful creations in that sense).