The goal of this chapter is to offer the first detailed critical assessments of the CAPS model from a philosophical perspective. I will argue for the following claim: using technical language, the CAPS model re-describes and finds supporting evidence for basic platitudes of commonsense folk psychology.

The goal of this book is to develop a new framework for thinking about what moral character looks like today. My central claim will be that most people have moral character traits, but at the same time they do not have either the traditional  ...

This book first reviews Miller's theory of Mixed Traits, as developed in his 2013 book Moral Character: An Empirical Theory. It then engages extensively with situations, the CAPS model in social psychology, and the Big Five Model in personality psychology. It ends by taking up implications for his view in meta-ethics (a modified error theory) and normative ethics (a challenge for virtue ethics).

"Honesty is clearly an important virtue. Parents want to develop it in their children. Close relationships typically depend upon it. Employers value it in their employees. Yet philosophers have said almost nothing about the virtue of honesty in the past fifty years. This book aims to draw attention to this surprisingly neglected virtue. Part One looks at the concept of honesty. It takes up questions such as what does honesty involve, what are the motives of an honest person, how does (...) practical wisdom relate to honesty, and is there anything that connects all the different sides of honesty, including not lying, not stealing, not breaking promises, not misleading others, and not cheating. A central idea is that the honest person reliably does not intentionally distort the facts as she takes them to be. Part Two looks at the empirical psychology of honesty. It takes up the question of whether most people are honest, dishonest, or somewhere in-between. Drawing extensively on recent studies of cheating and lying in particular, the emerging model ends up implying that most of us have a long way to go to reach an honest character"--. (shrink)

We like to think of ourselves, our friends, and our families as decent people. We may not be saints, but we are still honest, relatively kind, and mostly trustworthy. Miller argues here that we are badly mistaken in thinking this. Hundreds of recent studies in psychology tell a different story: that we all have serious character flaws that prevent us from being as good as we think we are - and that we do not even recognize that these flaws (...) exist. But neither are most of us cruel or dishonest. Instead, Miller argues, we are a mixed bag. On the one hand, most of us in a group of bystanders will do nothing as someone cries out for help in an emergency. Yet it is also true that there will be many times when we will selflessly come to the aid of a complete stranger - and resist the urge to lie, cheat, or steal even if we could get away with it. Much depends on cues in our social environment. Miller uses this recent psychological literature to explain what the notion of "character" really means today, and how we can use this new understanding to develop a character better in sync with the kind of people we want to be. (shrink)

There have only been three articles in mainstream philosophy journals going back at least to the 1970s on generosity. In this paper, I hope to draw attention to this neglected virtue. By building on what work has already been done, and trying to advance that discussion along several different dimensions, I hope that others will take a closer look at this important and surprisingly complex virtue. More specifically, I formulate three important necessary conditions for what is involved in possessing the (...) virtue of generosity, and consider other contenders as well. (shrink)

The central virtue at issue in recent philosophical discussions of the empirical adequacy of virtue ethics has been the virtue of compassion. Opponents of virtue ethics such as Gilbert Harman and John Doris argue that experimental results from social psychology concerning helping behavior are best explained not by appealing to so-called ‘global’ character traits like compassion, but rather by appealing to external situational forces or, at best, to highly individualized ‘local’ character traits. In response, a number of philosophers have argued (...) that virtue ethics can accommodate the empirical results in question. My own view is that neither side of this debate is looking in the right direction. For there is an impressive array of evidence from the social psychology literature which suggests that many people do possess one or more robust global character traits pertaining to helping others in need. But at the same time, such traits are noticeably different from a traditional virtue like compassion. (shrink)

The virtue of honesty has been stunningly neglected in contemporary philosophy, with only two papers appearing in the last 40 years. The first half of this paper is a conceptual exploration of one aspect of the virtue, namely the honest person’s motivational profile. I argue that egoistic motives for telling the truth or not cheating are incompatible with honest motivation. At the same time, there is no one specific motive that is required for a person to be motivated in a (...) virtuously honest way. Instead I advance a pluralistic theory of honest motivation, which allows for motives of caring, fairness, and virtue, among others. The second half of the paper then turns briefly to the empirical literature in psychology and behavioral economics on cheating, to see to what extent honest motives appear to be operative. The upshot is that we have good preliminary evidence for the claim that most people are not virtuously honest. (shrink)

The focus of this special issue is on moral psychology and the goals of moral education. My focus will be considerably narrower in addressing the following question: In light of the situationist movement in psychology and philosophy, what should be the goal(s) of character education? The main conclusion will be that the central goal of character education should be modified in a certain way to make it more empirically informed. But not to worry, as this modification should be amenable to (...) most contemporary supporters of character education. (shrink)

Until recently, almost nothing had been written about the moral virtue of honesty in the past 50 years of Western analytic philosophy. Slowly, this is beginning to change. But moral honesty is not the only kind of honesty there is. In this paper, I focus specifically on the intellectual cousin to moral honesty, and offer a preliminary account of its behavioral and motivational dimensions. The account will be centered on not intentionally distorting the facts as the person takes them to (...) be, for one of a variety of intellectually virtuous motivating reasons. (shrink)

This Element provides an overview of some of the central issues in contemporary moral psychology. It explores what moral psychology is, whether we are always motivated by self-interest, what good character looks like and whether anyone has it, whether moral judgments always motivate us to act, whether what motivates action is always a desire of some kind, and what the role is of reasoning and deliberation in moral judgment and action. This Element is aimed at a general audience including undergraduate (...) students without an extensive background in philosophy. (shrink)

The situationist movement in psychology and, more recently, in philosophy has been associated with a number of striking claims, including that most people do not have the moral virtues and vices, that any ethical theory which is wedded to such character traits is empirically inadequate, and that much of our behavior is causally influenced, to significant degrees, by psychological influences about which we are often unaware. Yet Christian philosophers have had virtually nothing to say about situationist claims. The goal (...) of this paper is to consider whether Christians should start to be worried about them. (shrink)

What views are the primary target of Moore’s fallacy and his open question argument? A common answer, I suspect, would be naturalistic approaches to morality. It is the naturalistic fallacy, after all. But in fact both his fallacy and his argument apply just as straightforwardly to supernatural approaches to morality as well. In this chapter, I focus specifically on how philosophers of religion have tried to grounds morality in God in ways that are clearly relevant to Moore’s project.

Critics of Rorty’s views on truth, objectivity, and value often take them to imply some form of untenable relativism.1 While it would be worthwhile to investigate whether Rorty is in fact committed to what might be called global relativism, or relativism in most if not all domains of investigation, for our purposes in this paper we must proceed more selectively. By focusing on Rorty’s view of moral objectivity, we can hopefully shed some new light on the now stale charge of (...) Rortian relativism. In the process, we can also go quite a long way towards articulating what a Rortian approach to meta-ethics might look like. (shrink)

Integrity, honesty, and truth seeking are important virtues that most people care about and want to see promoted in society. Yet surprisingly, there has been relatively little work among scholars today aimed at helping us better understand this cluster of virtues related to truth. This volume incorporates the insights and perspectives of experts working in a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, law, communication and rhetorical studies, theology, psychology, history, and education. For each virtue, there is a conceptual chapter, an application (...) chapter, and a developmental chapter. The resulting volume significantly deepens our knowledge about and appreciation for these central virtues. (shrink)

The early work by Gilbert Harman and John Doris on character and situationism has fostered a vast literature over the past 15 years. Yet despite all this work, there are many important issues which remain largely unexplored. The goal of this paper is to briefly outline eight promising research directions: neglected moral virtues, neglected non-moral virtues, virtue assessment and measurement, replication, non-Aristotelian virtue ethics, positive accounts of character trait possession, prescriptive situationism, and virtue cultivation.

There has been almost nothing written in philosophy on honesty in the past fifty years. This paper contributes one piece to a larger project of trying to change this unfortunate state of affairs. In section one, I outline an original account of the behavioural component of honesty as involving being disposed to not intentionally distort the facts as the person sees them. Section two turns to the vice of deficiency, namely dishonesty, which I suggest is the only vice corresponding to (...) honesty. It has at least five different dimensions, and a person’s character needs to be assessed along all of them before an overall judgment as to her dishonesty can justifiably be made. (shrink)

This paper brings together the social intuitionist view of the psychology of moral judgments developed by Jonathan Haidt, and the recent morphological rationalist position of Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons. I will end up suggesting that Horgan and Timmons have offered us a more plausible account of the psychology of moral judgment formation. But the view is not without its own difficulties. Indeed, one of them might prove to be quite serious, as it could support a form of skepticism about (...) understanding our own motivating reasons. (shrink)

This book contains new work on character from the perspectives of philosophy, theology, and psychology. From a virtual reality simulation of the Milgram shock experiments, to understanding the virtue of modesty in Muslim societies, to defending soldiers’ moral responsibility for committing war crimes, these chapters break new ground and significantly advance our understanding of character. The main topics covered fall under the heading of our beliefs about character, the existence and nature of character traits, character and ethical theory, virtue epistemology, (...) the nature of particular virtues, character development, and challenges to character and virtue from neuroscience and situationism. The book significantly shapes discussions of character in scholarship. (shrink)

Gopal Sreenivasan’s new book, Emotion and Virtue, is an incredibly rich and impressive achievement. It is required reading for anyone working on issues related to character. In the spirit of book discussions in this journal, I will focus less on raising objections and more on exploring how the discussion could be extended in new directions or connected with related topics. The plan is to focus on four topics: (i) the scope of Sreenivasan’s project, (ii) his response to the situationist challenge, (...) (iii) some implications of his view for practical wisdom, and (iv) his account of virtue conflicts. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Abstract Introduction Psychological Studies of Folk Moral Judgments From Expressivism to Moral Relativism From Sentimental Rules to Moral Relativism From Constructive Sentimentalism to Moral Relativism References.

These are early days in the philosophical study of character. We know very little about what most peoples’ character looks like. Important virtues are surprisingly neglected. There are almost no strategies advanced by philosophers today for improving character. We have a long way to go.

John peteet, charlotte witvliet, and c. stephen evans are to be commended for drawing our attention to the relatively neglected virtue of accountability, and for making the case that it is an important virtue to cultivate in general and specifically within the context of psychiatry. I find little to object to in their discussion, and so my comments here will be more of an invitation for them to address in greater detail two important issues: the relationship between accountability and autonomy, (...) and the role of motivation in the virtue of accountability.According to Peteet et al., a person with the virtue of accountable is someone who “embraces being accountable”. The virtue is said to... (shrink)

There have only been three articles in mainstream philosophy journals going back at least to the 1970s on generosity. This paper hopes to draw attention to this neglected virtue. By building on what work has already been done, and trying to advance that discussion along several different dimensions, it hopes that others will take a closer look at this important and surprisingly complex virtue. More specifically, it formulates three important necessary conditions for what is involved in possessing the virtue of (...) generosity, and considers other contenders as well. The necessary conditions have to do with whether what is given must be of value to the giver, whether the giver's primary motivation has to be altruistic, and whether the act of giving has to be supererogatory. (shrink)

This chapter considers recent work in ethics that takes seriously empirical work in moral psychology, and from that starting point ends up drawing certain conclusions in metaethics that go against traditional moral realist positions. In particular, it considers the work of four leading naturalistic moral psychologists: Joshua Greene, Shaun Nichols, Jesse Prinz, and John Doris.

To provide some background for the commentaries by Nancy Snow and Jennifer Cole Wright, I summarize the main ideas from the three parts of my book, The Character Gap: How Good Are We?

I reply to the excellent commentaries by Nancy Snow and Jennifer Cole Wright on my book, The Character Gap: How Good Are We? Topics discussed include the criteria of virtue, kinds of virtuous motives, vicious motivation and behavior, continence and incontinence, the possibility of widespread vice, and a recent meta-analysis of helping behavior.

This is my contribution to a symposium on David Wong’s paper, “Early Confucian Philosophy and the Development of Compassion.” I simply grant Wong his reading of the relevant texts and consider the merits of the ideas about ethical development on their own terms. In particular, my aim is to see how fruitful these ideas might be in the contemporary philosophical landscape.

Updated and expanded to represent the fundamental questions at the heart of philosophical ethics today, the 2nd edition of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Ethics covers the key topics in metaethics and normative ethical theory. This edition includes 13 fully revised chapters, and 4 newly commissioned contributions from a range of esteemed academics who provide accessible introductions to their own areas of expertise. The first part of the book covers the field of metaethics, including subjects such as moral realism, moral psychology, (...) experimental ethics, and evolutionary ethics, as well as two new chapters that respond to ethical debates within moral relativism and moral responsibility that enable students and scholars to better navigate this complicated ethical terrain. Moving onto normative ethical theory, the second part of the book ranges across morality and religion, consequentialism, and particularism, as well as Kantian, virtue, and feminist ethics. Two new chapters on Buddhist ethics and Confucian ethics challenge the constraints of the Western philosophical canon on the field of ethics and helpfully widen the scope of this reference work. This comprehensive edition provides a one-stop resource for students of ethics, which includes updated introductory overviews of the field, and methodological issues, as well as an appendix of additional resources, including technical terms in ethics. (shrink)

With the explosion of interest in virtue and virtue ethics, one set of issues that has been comparatively neglected is how to categorize moral character traits. This paper distinguishes three approaches—what I call the Stoic, personality psychology, and Aristotelian—and critically assesses each of them. The Stoic approaches denies that virtues come in degrees. There is perfect virtue or nothing at all. The personality psychology approach denies that virtues have thresholds. So everyone has all the virtues to some degree or other. (...) The Aristotelian approach accepts both degrees and thresholds. So some people might not have the virtues, and if they do, they might have them to various degrees. In addition, each of these positions takes a different stand on how to understand the vices as well. Using the virtue of honesty as the central example, the paper ends up favoring the Aristotelian approach but notes some of the complexities involved in adopting it. (shrink)

Virtue theorists have recently been focusing on the important question of how virtues are developed, and doing so in a way that is informed by empirical research from psychology. However, almost all of this recent work has dealt exclusively with the moral virtues. In this paper, we present three empirically-informed accounts of how virtues can be developed, and we assess the merits of these accounts when applied specifically to intellectual (or epistemic) virtues.

This introduction describes the origins and rationale behind the papers that comprise this special issue of Studies in Christian Ethics. These papers represent several recent contributions to scholarship on the theology of character.

The rise of the phenomenon of virtue ethics in recent years has increased at a rapid pace. Such an explosion carries with it a number of great possibilities, as well as risks. This volume has been written to contribute a multi-faceted perspective to the current conversation about virtue. Among many other thought-provoking questions, the collection addresses the following: What are the virtues, and how are they enumerated? What are the internal problems among ethicists, and what are the objections and replies (...) to contemporary virtue ethics? Additionally, the practical implications following from the answers to these questions are discussed in new and fascinating research. Fundamental concepts such as teleology and eudaimonism are addressed from both a historical and dialectical approach. This tome will contribute not only to providing further clarity to the current horizons in virtue ethics, but also to the practical conclusion following from the study: to challenge the reader toward a greater pursuit of the virtuous life. (shrink)

This essay critically examines justificatory arguments on behalf of justice for nonmainstream groups, focusing on two demands. The first is for mainstream groups to provide recognition by "fusing horizons" with the oral traditions of nonmainstream groups. Fusing horizons requires members of mainstream cultures to be transformed by the study of the other and thus to avoid ethnocentric evaluations of others. This demand involves the problematic idea that mainstream cultural norms and traditions are a priori morally deficient to evaluate alternative cultural (...) norms. The second demand is to provide group-differentiated rights on terms that aim to protect disadvantaged minority cultures because they provide a horizon for autonomous choice, not because their customs make a presumptive claim for others' recognition. This demand may produce legal rights, but not recognition in a psychologically robust sense insofar as it secures rights on terms that are foreign to the comprehensive goods according to which minority cultures understand and esteem themselves. The aim of this paper is to distinguish between these two demands, explain each as resulting from different specifications of equality, and suggest how the need to balance recognition and rights might occur in political practical reasoning. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Like an Elephant Pricked by a Thorn:Buddhist Meditation Instructions as a Door to Deep ListeningWilla B. MillerThe phrase “deep listening” has been circulating in recent years in the contexts of contemplative education, psychotherapy, pastoral care, and the arts. This article is a reflection on deep listening from a Buddhist perspective, as it might support the ongoing development of career educators, although this reflection might apply equally well to ministers (...) and (in the Buddhist world) dharma teachers. My motivation to contribute to this discourse of listening is spurred by the belief that the effectiveness of educators, ministers, and dharma teachers might be enhanced by training in the art of listening. These career professionals share a key aspect of their role in common: They get up in front of groups of people to teach or preach. In this performative role, it is possible for teachers (or preachers) to become so accustomed to being the source of information that a dynamic is created, inside and outside the classroom or pulpit, in which discourse is weighted primarily in one direction. This dynamic, I would argue, prevents optimal learning and stunts the feedback loop necessary for pedagogical health, both for students and for their educators.Listening, as a valued pedagogical discipline on the part of the teacher, has the potential to rebalance this dynamic. To educate effectively, we need to come to know the hearts and minds of those we educating, not as a theoretical group but as individuals. It takes time, effort, patience, and a dose of curiosity to listen attentively to students, to get to know them. But this effort is worth it. Only once we begin to listen to the voice of their interests, passions, and history can we begin to understand or assess their needs. Every human being is in formation. Every human being is completely unique. Listening, with curiosity and attention, is a window into the formation of the human being in his or her uniqueness. To the degree that we become familiar with the unique in our students is the degree to which we can effectively meet them where they are.There are as many definitions of deep listening as there are theorists. On a panel on the topic of deep listening at the 2013 American Academy of Religions meeting, Duane Bidwell of the Claremont School of Theology aptly noted that deep listening is [End Page 15] “an undertheorized category.” It is not a term that has been claimed by only one field or person, but it has become popular in some religious circles and psychotherapeutic circles as a term that implies that listening can dive below the surface contents of a narrative. Two years ago, in a chapter of an anthology titled The Arts of Contemplative Care, I proposed that Buddhist practices of self-cultivation may provide models that can be adapted for applications of deep listening in a context of spiritual care.1 In that chapter, I noted that Patrul Rinpoche’s three points of “how not to listen” found in The Words of My Perfect Teacher (Kun bzang bla med zhal lung)2 can help us reflect on the difference between poor and effective listening techniques in the context of spiritual care. In this article, taking a similar approach but with different material, I will explore how instructions on meditation culled from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition can be adapted to develop a discipline of deep listening for educators. In exploring this topic, I will also propose a definition of deep listening to act as support for the discipline itself. Specifically, I draw on religious instructions found in a Tibetan genre called “māhamudrā meditation instructions” (phyag chen sgom khrid), from within the Kagyu (‘brug pa bka’ brgyud) school of Tibetan Buddhism, to construct a definition of deep listening for use in educational contexts.The term “deep” (zab mo) often appears in Tibetan religious exegesis as an adjective modifying the word “dharma” (teaching). There, we find the term “deep teaching” (chos zab mo) juxtaposed with the term “vast teaching” (chos rgya che ba) in Tibetan commentaries. To say that a teaching is deep (zab mo) in the Buddhist context is to indicate that it... (shrink)