In this paper I defend a form of epistocracy I call limited epistocracy— rule by institutions housing expertise in non-political areas that become politically relevant. This kind of limited epistocracy, I argue, isn’t a far-off fiction. With increasing frequency, governments are outsourcing political power to expert institutions to solve urgent, multidimensional problems because they outperform ordinary democratic decision-making. I consider the objection that limited epistocracy, while more effective than its competitors, lacks a fundamental intrinsic value that its competitors have; namely, (...) political inclusion. After explaining this challenge, I suggest that limited epistocracies can be made compatible with robust political inclusion if specialized institutions are confined to issuing directives that give citizens multiple actionable options. I explain how this safeguards citizens’ inclusion through rational deliberation, choice, and contestation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper I defend a form of epistocracy I call limited epistocracy – rule by institutions housing expertise in non-political areas that become politically relevant. This kind of limited epistocracy, I argue, isn't a far-off fiction. With increasing frequency, governments are outsourcing political power to expert institutions to solve urgent, multidimensional problems because they outperform ordinary democratic decision-making. I consider the objection that limited epistocracy, while more effective than its competitors, lacks a fundamental intrinsic value that its competitors have; (...) namely, political inclusion. After explaining this challenge, I suggest that limited epistocracies can be made compatible with robust political inclusion if specialized institutions are confined to issuing directives that give citizens multiple actionable options. I explain how this safeguards citizens’ inclusion through rational deliberation, choice, and contestation. (shrink)

We compare the definition of virtue in philosophy with the definition and operationalization of virtue in psychology. We articulate characteristics that virtue is presented as possessing in the perennial western philosophical tradition. Virtues are typically understood as (a) dispositional (b) deep-seated (c) habits (d) that contribute to flourishing and (e) that produce activities with the following three features: they are (f) done well, (g) not done poorly, and (h) in accordance with the right motivation and reason. We form a definition (...) from these characteristics and defend our exclusion of some other characteristics from the definition. Using our definition as a rubric, we evaluate conceptions of virtue in psychology, showing how many fall short at operationalizing at least one component of the philosophical notion of virtue. (shrink)

Debates in metaethics about metanormative realism, quasi-realism, anti-realism, and nihilism mostly focus on epistemic reasons for beliefs about values. Very little has been said about our practical reasons for metaethical beliefs, and even less is said about practical reasons for other attitudes we might take toward metaethical views. This paper shows why a recent argument bucking that trend fails to show that we have practical reasons to believe realism over nihilism, but that for many of us, we do have practical (...) reason to hope that what I call Optimistic Realism is true. (shrink)

One task of moral theory is to answer the question, “Why be moral?” This paper describes a particular theistic theory’s account of moral motivation, which I call the Divine Friendship Theory. I illustrate its plausibility and promise by showing how well the theory does along two dimensions along which an answer to the why-be-moral question can fare better or worse, namely, being psychologically realistic and supporting recognizably moral actions and attitudes. of the answer to the why-be-moral question. Given that the (...) Divine Friendship Theory does well on each dimension, it deserves serious consideration. (shrink)

It seems like people have character traits that explain a good deal of their behavior. Call a theory character realism just in case it vindicates this folk assumption. Recently, Christian Miller has argued that the way to reconcile character realism with decades of psychological research is to adopt metaphysical reductivism about character traits. Some contemporary psychological theories of character and virtue seem to implicitly endorse such reductivism; others resist reduction of traits to finer-grained mental components or processes; and still others (...) remain silent on the metaphysics of traits. In this paper we argue that character realists do not have to, and in fact should not, be reductivists. We introduce a theoretical dilemma for reductivist character realism. Then we explain how nonreductivists can meet the standards for empirical adequacy laid out by Miller and others. Further, we argue, hylomorphic nonreductivism avoids the theoretical dilemma that threatens reductivism. It also fits nicely the major commitments of recent models of virtue in psychology. Thus, character realists should not be reductivists. (shrink)

This Element has two aims. The first is to discuss arguments philosophers have made about the difference God's existence might make to questions of general interest in metaethics. The second is to argue that it is a mistake to think we can get very far in answering these questions by assuming a thin conception of God, and to suggest that exploring the implications of thick theisms for metaethics would be more fruitful.

In this essay I aim to illuminate the nature of Christian hope by looking at the tradition’s answers to three philosophical questions and then comparing them to those of contemporary secular accounts. First, What are the possible objects of hope? Next, What are the psychological conditions a person must meet to have hope? Finally, What makes a hope rational and what makes it good for human life? I conclude by suggesting that the role of hope in bringing about social goods (...) (or evils) might be reconsidered in light of challenges presented by recent secular work on the social dimensions of hope. (shrink)

Much attention in philosophy of religion has been devoted to the question of whether faith is epistemically rational. But is it morally and practically permissible? This paper explores a response to a family of arguments that Christian faith is morally impermissible or practically irrational, even if epistemically justified. After articulating the arguments, I consider how they would fare if they took seriously the traditional notion that genuine faith is always accompanied by Christian hope. I show how the norms of hope (...) regulate Christian faith in such a way that it does not involve, and certainly does not entail, the morally and practically problematic attitudes and behaviors with which it is associated. (shrink)

Research on interventions that aim to cultivate character strengths, or virtues, has been conducted primarily among highly resourced, predominantly White communities, and the interventions have been developed to reflect the values of those communities. The purpose of this study was to use a participatory action research approach to develop a virtue intervention focused on addressing the community-identified problem of violence in a predominantly Black community, and to test its effectiveness in a pilot study. Participants were 37 youth (M age = (...) 12.1 years old; 97% Black) who attended summer programs in two sites (on intervention, one control condition). Participants in the intervention group had greater increases in effective nonviolent behavior than participants in the comparison group according to teacher report. Overall, the results of this pilot test suggest it is possible to build a feasible, attractive, evidence-based intervention to promote character strengths using participatory action research. (shrink)

A number of important religious views entail that the ontological and epistemic relations between religion and morality are tighter than most secular thinkers suppose. We will focus on three theistic metaethical accounts of moral phenomena and moral knowledge: natural law theories, divine command theories, and divine will theories. These three types of accounts are among the most dominant in the philosophical literature on theistic ethics in contemporary anglophone philosophy, perhaps owing to their connection to major Western religions such as Christianity, (...) Islam, and Judaism. It is important to note, however, that they hardly exhaust the conceptual space. Intellectual traditions of other religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, traditional Chinese religions, and African religions raise distinct philosophical questions about and offer a host of alternative views on the relationship between religion and morality (Jeffrey 2019). We close by offering a few such examples, though it is outside the scope of this chapter to provide a comprehensive survey of available views. (shrink)

Character strengths research has the potential to imply that youth have character deficits or moral failings that cause their problematic behavior. This ignores the impact of context, especially for youth who are members of historically marginalized groups in under resourced communities. On the other hand, framing youth who are members of underrepresented groups solely as products of oppression undermines their agency and the power of collective action. It may be possible to promote character development in a contextually relevant, culturally grounded (...) way through a transdisciplinary, participatory action approach. We engaged in this work in three phases: goal specification; logic model identification; and intervention development and testing. Lessons learned included the need for intensive trust-building and identifying the limitations in scope and capacity. Overall, a transdisciplinary, participatory action approach is a promising strategy to overcome the existing bias in virtue development research and to leverage positive psychology to address health disparities. (shrink)

We advance an argument that the virtue of hope holds pride of place in development of psychological traits that promote one’s flourishing. We define hope, the virtue, as the disposition to envision future good possibilities for oneself and one’s community and to move towards those possibilities. Our argument is partly theoretical and partly empirical. On the theoretical side, we show that hope is not simply one virtue among many, but rather, hope is a necessary condition for the development of other (...) virtues, and so for flourishing. We then draw on empirical data from psychology to argue that early in development, we need relationships of trust with caregivers to develop the future orientation and features of agency constitutive of hope, the virtue. It follows that hope and its components need to be fostered partly through trusting relationships early on for a person to flourish. (shrink)

Neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics identifies the virtues with the traits the fully virtuous person possesses. Further, it depicts the fully virtuous person as having all the cognitive perfections necessary for possessing practical wisdom. This paper argues that these two theses disqualify faith as trust, as construed on contemporary accounts of faith, as a virtue. For faith’s role as a virtue depends on limitations of its possessor that are incompatible with the psychological profile of the fully virtuous person on the neo-Aristotelian picture. (...) I argue that because of tensions internal to the standard neo-Aristotelian view and the compelling arguments in recent literature that faith is a virtue, the neo-Aristotelian has good reason to revise her account of virtue and picture of the fully virtuous person. (shrink)

One of the major contemporary challenges to Thomistic moral psychology is that it is incompatible with the most up-to-date psychological science. Here Thomistic psychology is in good company, targeted along with most virtue-ethical views by philosophical situationism, which uses replicated psychological studies to suggest that our behaviors are best explained by situational pressures rather than by stable traits (like virtues and vices). In this essay we explain how this body of psychological research poses a much deeper threat to Thomistic moral (...) psychology in particular. For Thomistic moral psychology includes descriptive claims about causal connections between certain cognitive processes and behaviors, even independent of whether those processes emerge from habits like virtues. Psychological studies of correlations between these can provide evidence against those causal claims. We offer a new programmatic response to this deeper challenge: empirical studies are relevant only if they investigate behaviors under intentional descriptions, such that the correlations discovered are between cognition and what Aquinas calls human acts. Psychological research on aggression already emphasizes correlations between cognition and intentional behavior, or human acts, and so is positioned to shed light on how well Thomistic moral psychology fits with empirical data. Surprisingly, Aquinas’s views have quite a lot in common with a leading model of aggression, the social information processing (SIP) model. We close by suggesting how we might examine claims of Thomistic moral psychology from an empirical perspective further using research on social information processing and aggression. (shrink)

Does theism make a difference to whether there are moral facts? In this paper I suggest that, despite how much uptake this question gets in philosophical literature, it is not well formed. “Theism” leaves too indeterminate what God is like for us to discern what difference God’s existence would make to moral facts. Arguments like the explanans-driven argument for theistic moral realism and the explanationist argument for naturalist moral realism both require extra substantive assumptions about God in order to be (...) valid and compelling. Specifically, the arguments must take a stand on whether God is personal or a-personal, and how this affects God’s relation to the natural world. (shrink)

Aristotle (384-322 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Plato, and tutor of Alexander the Great. His works span the topics of biology, metaphysics, mind, logic, language, science, epistemology, ethics, and politics. Aristotle held that there are many divine beings, but a supremely divine being is the first cause of the universe and the goodness of all other beings. This divine being plays a fundamental explanatory role in Aristotle’s thought.

This paper explores a variety of perfect being theism that combines Yujin Nagasawa’s maximal God thesis with the view that God is not atemporal. We argue that the original maximal God thesis still implicitly relies on a “static” view of divine perfections. Instead, following the recent re-evaluation of divine immutability by analytic philosophers, we propose that thinking of divine great-making properties as fluctuating but nevertheless remaining maximal either for every time t or across all times strengthens the original maximal God (...) thesis. Furthermore, we show that “temporalising” Nagasawa’s maximal God and adopting what we call the fluctuating maximal God thesis provides more effective ways of responding to objections to perfect being theism, in particular, the argument from evil and some conceptual problems pertaining to the Incarnation. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposal is compatible with Christian Scriptures and coheres with numerous biblical passages better than Nagasawa’s original proposal does. (shrink)

Debates in metaethics about metanormative realism, quasi-realism, anti-realism, and nihilism mostly focus on epistemic reasons for beliefs about values. Very little has been said about our practical reasons for metaethical beliefs, and even less is said about practical reasons for other attitudes we might take toward metaethical views. This paper shows why a recent argument bucking that trend fails to show that we have practical reasons to believe realism over nihilism, but that for many of us, we do have practical (...) reason to hope that what I call Optimistic Realism is true. (shrink)

In her impressive Atonement, Eleonore Stump claims that her novel Marian theory of the atonement meets a desideratum for a successful theory that Aquinas's theory does not, namely, showing that Christ's passion and death are essential to the solution to the problem of human sin. Here I suggest reasons to side with Aquinas, who says that Christ's suffering and death are not necessary, but merely a fitting way of solving the problem. If the fittingness of Christ's passion and death is (...) a good enough justification for it, we lose a motivation for adopting the Marian theory over the Thomistic one. (shrink)

According to the Conscience Principle, it is never morally permissible to act contrary to conscience. The plausibility of this being a genuine moral principle depends on what conscience is, whether it can be mistaken, and what its role is in general moral psychology. Thomas Aquinas endorses and defends a unique version of the Conscience Principle. What’s especially interesting about his unorthodox (for his time) view on conscience is that it seems to split the difference between the views we might expect (...) to support the Conscience Principle: On the one hand, thoroughgoing subjectivism on which all moral facts and obligations are a function of agents’ mental states, and on the other hand, objectivist intuitionism on which there is an external moral law but a faculty of conscience gives us inerrant access to it. Aquinas claims that there are objective moral truths, that conscience fallibly represents those truths, and yet, conscience always generates moral obligations, whether it is correct or incorrect. Aquinas’s view will strike many initially as puzzling, perhaps even incoherent. To make sense of it, we must understand that for Aquinas the Conscience Principle is not just one moral principle among many; instead, it falls out of a novel and philosophically powerful metaethical view of moral obligations (or what we might call requiring moral reasons). (shrink)