-
99Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character (edited book)MIT Press. 2017.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 m…Read more
-
Honesty Revisited: More Conceptual and Empirical ReflectionsIn Walter Sinnott-Armstrong & Christian Miller (eds.), Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character, Mit Press. pp. 295-307. 2017.I am very grateful to Jason Baehr and Bella DePaulo for the careful attention they have paid to my chapter. As I noted, this is my initial foray into providing a conceptual account of the virtue of honesty, and for that matter it is about the only such attempt any philosopher has offered in the past forty years. If others start to go down this road too, I would be thrilled. Following the structure of my paper, I will start with conceptual matters before turning to the implications of the empiric…Read more
-
259Empathy, social psychology, and global helping traitsPhilosophical Studies 142 (2): 247-275. 2009.The central virtue at issue in recent philosophical discussions of the empirical adequacy of virtue ethics has been the virtue of compassion. Opponents of virtue ethics such as Gilbert Harman and John Doris argue that experimental results from social psychology concerning helping behavior are best explained not by appealing to so-called ‘global’ character traits like compassion, but rather by appealing to external situational forces or, at best, to highly individualized ‘local’ character traits.…Read more
-
210The Conditions of RealismJournal of Philosophical Research 32 95-132. 2007.The concern of this paper is not with the truth of any particular realist or anti-realist view, but rather with determining what it is to be a realist or anti-realist in the first place. While much skepticism has been voiced in recent years about the viability of such a project, my goal is to articulate interesting and informative conditions whereby any view in any domain of experience can count as either a realist or an anti-realist position.
-
3Categorizing Character: Moving Beyond the Aristotelian FrameworkIn David Carr (ed.), Varieties of Virtue Ethics, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 143-162. 2016.Philosophers have inherited a familiar taxonomy of character types from Aristotle. We are all acquainted with the labels of the virtuous, vicious, continent, and incontinent person. The goal of this paper is to argue that we should jettison this framework. The main reason is that psychological research in the past fifty years has suggested a much more complex picture of moral character than what can be usefully captured by these four categories. In its place, I will suggest a better taxonomy tha…Read more
-
119Character and Situationism: New DirectionsEthical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (3): 459-471. 2017.The early work by Gilbert Harman and John Doris on character and situationism has fostered a vast literature over the past 15 years. Yet despite all this work, there are many important issues which remain largely unexplored. The goal of this paper is to briefly outline eight promising research directions: neglected moral virtues, neglected non-moral virtues, virtue assessment and measurement, replication, non-Aristotelian virtue ethics, positive accounts of character trait possession, prescripti…Read more
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Religion |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |