Christian Miller

While Richard Rorty's general views on truth, objectivity, and relativism continue to attract much attention from professional philosophers, some of his contributions to ethical theory have thus far been remarkably neglected. In other work, I have begun the task of sketching what a Rortyan approach to traditional questions in meta-ethics might look like.1 Here, however, I shall attempt to summarize and evaluate some of the contributions that Rorty has made to important debates in first-order normative theory. More specifically, my attention will be devoted primarily to the question of what moral obligations of respect and tolerance, if any, we have towards those who act out of moral frameworks which are divergent from our own.

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.

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.

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.

"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"--

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...

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.

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.

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.

This paper maps out various options for thinking about two issues: the structural relationship between practical wisdom and the moral virtues, and the various functions of practical wisdom. With the help of a case study of the virtue of honesty, three main concerns are raised for what I call the Standard Model of practical wisdom. Two other models, the Socratic Model and the Fragmentation Model, are also critically evaluated. I end by taking seriously an eliminativist approach according to which the trait of practical wisdom does not exist.

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.

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.

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.

The turn of the century saw a significant increase in the amount of attention being paid by philosophers to empirical issues about moral character. Dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle in the West, and Confucius in the East, philosophers have traditionally drawn on empirical data to some extent in their theorizing about character. One of the main differences in recent years has been the source of this empirical data, namely the work of social and personality psychologists on morally relevant thought and action. This entry briefly examines four recent empirical approaches to moral character. It will draw on the psychology literature where appropriate, but the main focus will be on the significance of that work for philosophers interested in better understanding moral character. The four areas are situationism, the CAPS model, the Big Five model, and the VIA. The remainder of this entry devotes a section to each of them.

Constructivist positions in meta-ethics are on the rise in recent years. Similarly, there has been a flurry of activity amongst theistic philosophers examining the relationship between God and normative facts. But so far as I am aware, these two literatures have almost never intersected with each other. Constructivists have said very little about God, and theists working on religious ethics have said very little about constructivist views in meta-ethics. In this paper, I draw some connections between the two literatures, and hopefully will inspire others to continue to investigate this sadly neglected area. My main conclusion will be that theists should be hesitant about accepting any of the leading versions of constructivism in the contemporary meta-ethics literature.

Written from the perspective of a philosopher, this paper raises a number of potential concerns with how the VIA classifies and the VIA-IS measures character traits. With respect to the 24 character strengths, concerns are raised about missing strengths, the lack of vices, conflicting character strengths, the unclear connection between character strengths and virtues, and the misclassification of some character strengths under certain virtues. With respect to the 6 virtues, concerns are raised about conflicting virtues, the absence of practical wisdom, and factor analyses that do not find a 6 factor structure. With respect to the VIA-IS, concerns are raised about its neglect of motivation and about the underlying assumptions it makes about character traits. The paper ends by sketching a significantly improved classification which omits the 6 virtues and introduces additional strengths, vices, and a conflict resolution trait.

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.

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.