Christian Miller

Integrity is one of the leading normative concepts employed in our society. We frequently talk about the degree of integrity of community leaders and famous historical figures, and we highly value integrity in our elected public officials. But philosophers have had a difficult time arriving at consensus about what integrity consists in. Some claim that it is a purely formal relation of consistency, others that it has to do primarily with one‟s identity, and still others that it involves subjective or objective moral requirements. The primarily goal here is to outline the leading facets of integrity in the contemporary philosophical literature.

Colleges and universities need to first develop an empirically informed understanding of their students when it comes to their honesty and cheating, so as to be in a better position to develop policies which can try to help them not become more disposed to cheat during their college years. In section one of this paper, I review some of the leading research on cheating behavior, and in section two I do the same for cheating motivation. Section three then draws some implications from this research, both about what faculty can typically expect the characters of their students to be like when it comes to cheating, and what colleges might try to do to help foster character improvement in this area of their students’ lives.

Philosophers have discussed virtue and character since Socrates, but many traditional views have been challenged by recent findings in psychology and neuroscience. This fifth volume of Moral Psychology grows out of this new wave of interdisciplinary work on virtue, vice, and character. It offers essays, commentaries, and replies by leading philosophers and scientists who explain and use empirical findings from psychology and neuroscience to illuminate virtue and character and related issues in moral philosophy. The contributors discuss such topics as eliminativist and situationist challenges to character; investigate the conceptual and empirical foundations of self-control, honesty, humility, and compassion; and consider whether the virtues contribute to well-being.

In section one of this paper, I review some of the leading research on cheating behavior, and in section two I do the same for cheating motivation. Section three then outlines several requirements for honesty and dishonesty, and I explain why, in light of the current psychological evidence, these requirements do not seem to be met. Finally in section four I step back and present some of the details of my Mixed Trait approach to thinking about the character traits which, I claim, most people actually do possess.

Much attention in the recent resurgence of interest in virtue ethics has been paid to the virtues. At the same time, however, comparatively little has been written about vices. In Deadly Vices, Gabriele Taylor aims to remedy this by offering a detailed discussion of the vices that are traditionally labeled the seven deadly sins: sloth, envy, avarice, pride, anger, lust, and gluttony. Among her central claims about them is that they are each focused primarily on the self, and that they lead to self-destruction and inhibit our flourishing in ways that we can understand without having to appeal to an objective account of flourishing. Taylor takes her conclusions to “offer at least negative support for some central claims of an Aristotelian-type virtue-theory” (p. 1).

In this paper my goal is to extend my earlier discussion, at least in a preliminary way, to two additional areas – fairness and stealing. In doing so, I will consider whether the existing research is compatible with my Mixed Trait model, or whether instead it gives me reason to be concerned with how broadly applicable the model really is. My conclusion will be that the results are, so to speak, a mixed bag. With respect to fairness research, some careful conceived studies have been done which do in fact provide additional support for my model. But in the area of research of stealing, it will turn out that we are badly in need of new behavioral studies before we can draw any reasonable conclusions about people’s characters in this area.

The aim of William Casebeer’s book is ‘to show that, theoretically speaking, there is no reason to rule out a scientific naturalized ethics tout court, and that, practical speaking, by taking into account recent developments in evolutionary biology and the cognitive sciences, the outlines of one promising form of such an ethics can be sketched’ (p. 1-2). The result is an interesting treatment of a wide variety of issues at the intersection of cognitive science, meta-ethics, normative theory, and evolutionary psychology, a treatment that is often suggestive but also frequently lacking in detailed argumentation.

In a number of recent papers, I have begun to develop a new theory of character which is conceptually distinct both from traditional Aristotelian accounts as well as from the positive view of local traits outlined by John Doris. On my view, many human beings do have robust traits of character which play an important explanatory and predictive role, but which are triggered by certain situational variables which preclude them from counting as genuine Aristotelian virtues. Like others in this discussion, I have focused on helping behavior in particular, and have gone on to argue that much of the social psychology literature is compatible with this new approach. The goal of this paper is to develop the model as it pertains to helping behavior further by examining how helping-relevant traits can serve as impediments to helping behavior.

Much of the literature in contemporary analytic metaethics has grown rather stale – the range of possible positions seems to have been exhaustively delineated, and most of the important arguments on all sides have been clearly articulated and evaluated. In order to advance discussion in this area, I examine more fundamental issues about the nature of agency. In my view, the heart of what it is to exhibit intentional agency in the world is to identify with the relevant components of practical reasoning from the first person perspective. Chapter one attempts to arrive at sufficient conditions for desire identification by examining the structure of instrumental practical reasoning. But it turns out that this story about identification cannot be told until we first have available a separate account of norm identification. The best way of developing this latter account is by understanding the phenomenon of first person volitional impossibility. With the resources in hand from the first two chapters, we can articulate sufficient conditions in chapter three for desire, norm, and action identification, as well as critically evaluate rival hierarchical views. Finally, chapter four is devoted to a preliminary consideration of our sense of our own wills as free.

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 out that these helping traits fall well short of exhibiting certain central features of compassion.

In this paper, I hope to provide an account of the conditions of moral realism whereby there are still significant metaphysical commitments made by the realist which set the view apart as a distinct position in the contemporary meta-ethical landscape. In order to do so, I will be appealing to a general account of what it is for realism to be true in any domain of experience, whether it be realism about universals, realism about unobservable scientific entities, realism about artifacts, and so forth.

This chapter surveys work in meta-ethics in the past fifty years which explicitly deals with issues associated with evil. It discusses two examples from secular discussions: the argument developed by Gilbert Harman on the explanatory role of moral facts, and the argument developed by Gilbert Harman and John Doris on the empirical inadequacy of the virtues. The chapter then turns to two topics related to theistic meta-ethics: the problem of evil and moral realism, and theological voluntarism and evil.

A number of philosophers have become convinced that the best way of trying to understand human agency is by arriving at an account of identification. My goal here is not to criticize particular views about identification, but rather to examine several assumptions which have been widely held in the literature and yet which, in my view, render implausible any account of identification that takes them on board. In particular, I argue that typically identification does not involve either reflective consideration of our mental states or endorsement of those states. If it did, we would rarely be agents