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73Quinn's philosophy of religionIn Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, Clarendon Press. 2006.My goal in this brief introduction is twofold: first, to briefly sketch some of the life of this remarkable man; and second, to provide an overview of the papers that make up this collection. The papers themselves have been organized around the following central topics in Quinn’s research: religious ethics, religion and tragic dilemmas, religious epistemology, religion and political liberalism, Christian philosophy of religion, and religious diversity.
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1Lack of Virtue and Vice: Studies of Aggression and Their Implications for the Empirical Adequacy of CharacterIn Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 2, Oxford University Press. pp. 80-112. 2012.In two recent books, I have drawn on hundreds of studies in psychology in order to systematically develop and empirically support a new conception of the character traits which I claim most people possess. Here I will focus on just one underexplored area of the psychological literature – research on harmful as opposed to helpful behavior – and use it in a preliminary way to further support my positive view.
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12HonestyIn Walter Sinnott-Armstrong & Christian Miller (eds.), Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character, Mit Press. pp. 237-273. 2017.No one in philosophy has paid much attention to the virtue of honesty in recent years. Here is a trait for which it is easy to find consensus that it is a virtue, and furthermore, a very important virtue. It also has obvious relevance to what we see going on in contemporary politics, for instance, or in sports, the entertainment world, and education. Yet as far as I can tell, only one article in a philosophy journal has appeared in several decades which discusses this virtue at any length. In t…Read more
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58Furlong and Santos on Desire and ChoiceIn Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology: Freedom and Responsibility, Mit Press. pp. 367-374. 2014.Ellen Furlong and Laurie Santos helpfully summarize a number of fascinating studies of certain influences on both human and monkey behavior. As someone who works primarily in philosophy, I am not in a position to dispute the details of the studies themselves. But in this brief commentary I do want to raise some questions about the inferences Furlong and Santos make on the basis of those studies. In general, I worry that they may be overreaching beyond what their own data suggests.
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67Defining Empathy: Thoughts on Coplan's ApproachSouthern Journal of Philosophy 49 (s1): 66-72. 2011.In this paper, I raise three sets of issues inspired by Amy Coplan's paper, “Will the Real Empathy Please Stand Up.” They concern whether we need to distinguish between the three phenomena as Coplan suggests, what method(s) should be used in making those distinctions, and whether they are in fact made correctly.
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211The Real Challenge to Virtue Ethics from PsychologyIn Snow Nancy & Trivigno Franco (eds.), The Philosophy and Psychology of Virtue: An Empirical Approach to Character and Happiness, Routledge. pp. 15-34. 2014.In section one, I briefly review the Harman/Doris argument and outline the most promising response. Then in section two I develop what I take the real challenge to virtue ethics to be. The final section of the chapter suggests two strategies for beginning to address this challenge.
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113Assessing two competing approaches to the psychology of moral judgmentsPhilosophical Explorations 19 (1): 28-47. 2016.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 underst…Read more
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92Social Psychology, Mood, and Helping: Mixed Results for Virtue EthicsThe Journal of Ethics 13 (2): 145-173. 2009.I first summarize the central issues in the debate about the empirical adequacy of virtue ethics, and then examine the role that social psychologists claim positive and negative mood have in influencing compassionate helping behavior. I argue that this psychological research is compatible with the claim that many people might instantiate certain character traits after all which allow them to help others in a wide variety of circumstances. Unfortunately for the virtue ethicist, however, it turns …Read more
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40The Moral Animal: Virtue, Vice, and Human NatureAnnals of the New York Academy of Sciences 39-56. 2016.Steve Paulson, executive producer and host of To the Best of Our Knowledge, moderated a discussion with philosopher Christian Miller, neuroscientist Heather Berlin, and historian of science Michael Shermer to examine our moral ecology and its influence on our underlying assumptions about human nature.
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37Review of Joshua Gert, Brute Rationality: Normativity and Human Action (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2005 (3). 2005.This is the first book by Joshua Gert, son of the well-known moral philosopher Bernard Gert. Among other things, Gert argues for a novel account of both objective and subjective rationality, a new theory of normative reasons, and a distinctive approach to construing the relationship between reasons for action and rationality. The result is an impressive book filled with interesting arguments and objections, which should advance philosophical discussions on a number of important issues.
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
| Philosophy of Action |
| Philosophy of Religion |
| Meta-Ethics |
| Normative Ethics |