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1Russell on Acquiring VirtueIn Alfano Mark (ed.), Current Controversies in Virtue Theory, Routledge. pp. 106-117. 2015.This is a response paper to Daniel Russell's paper in the same volume. I raise some challenges to Russell's model of virtue acquisition which draws extensively on the CAPS model in psychology and on parallels between virtues and skills.
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73My 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. 2015.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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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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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.
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
| Philosophy of Action |
| Philosophy of Religion |
| Meta-Ethics |
| Normative Ethics |