•  67
    Defining Empathy: Thoughts on Coplan's Approach
    Southern 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.
  •  113
    Assessing two competing approaches to the psychology of moral judgments
    Philosophical 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
  •  92
    Social Psychology, Mood, and Helping: Mixed Results for Virtue Ethics
    The 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
  •  40
    The Moral Animal: Virtue, Vice, and Human Nature
    with Berlin Heather and Shermer Michael
    Annals 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.
  •  37
    Review 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.
  •  44
    On Shermer On Morality
    Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 63-68. 2016.
    This paper is part of a six paper exchange with Michael Shermer. This is my critical commentary on Michael Shermer's paper “Morality is real, objective, and natural.” Shermer and I agree that morality is both real and objective. Here I raise serious reservations about both Shermer's account of where morality comes from and his account of what morality tells us to do. His approach to the foundations of morality would allow some very disturbing behaviors to count as moral, and his approach to what…Read more
  •  153
    Moral Character: An Empirical Theory
    Oxford University Press. 2013.
    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  ...
  •  67
    In Defense of a Supernatural Foundation to Morality: Reply to Shermer
    Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 91-96. 2016.
    In my original paper, I claimed that our moral obligations are real, objective, and grounded in the supernatural. In particular, I endorsed the claim that God's will is the basis or source of our moral obligations, where “God” is to be understood as the theistic being who is omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent, who created the universe, and who is still actively involved in the universe after creating it. In his critical article, Michael Shermer has raised a number of important challenges…Read more
  •  96
    Guilt and Helping
    Ethics 6 (2/3): 231-252. 2008.
    A wealth of research in social psychology over the past twenty years has examined the role that guilt plays in our mental lives. In this paper, I examine just one aspect of this vast literature, namely the relationship between guilt and prosocial behavior. Researchers have typically found a robust positive correlation between feelings of guilt and helping, and have advanced psychological models to explain why guilt seems to have this effect. Here I present some of their results as well as draw o…Read more