•  9
    Recent work in positive psychology demonstrates the importance of self-transcendence: understanding oneself to be part of something greater than the self, such as a family, community, or tradition of sacred practice. Self-transcendence is positively associated with wellbeing and a sense of meaning and purpose. Philosophers have argued that self-transcendent motivation has a central role in good character, or virtue. Positive psychologists are just now beginning to integrate the aim of developing…Read more
  •  11
    Conceptualizing "positive attributes" across psychological perspectives
    with Danielle Wilson, Vincent Ng, Nicole Alonso, and Louis Tay
    Journal of Personality 1-14. 2023.
    The growth of positive psychology has birthed debate on the nature of what “positive” really means. Conceptualizations of positive attributes vary across psychological perspectives, and it appears these definitional differences stem from standards for “positive” espoused by three normative ethical frameworks: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. When definitions of “positive” do not align with one of these ethical schools, it appears researchers rely on preference to distinguish posi…Read more
  •  371
    What Is Virtue?
    with Tim Pawl, Sarah Schnitker, and Juliette Ratchford
    Philosophical Psychology. 2023.
    We compare the definition of virtue in philosophy with the definition and operationalization of virtue in psychology. We articulate characteristics that virtue is presented as possessing in the perennial western philosophical tradition. Virtues are typically understood as (a) dispositional (b) deep-seated (c) habits (d) that contribute to flourishing and (e) that produce activities with the following three features: they are (f) done well, (g) not done poorly, and (h) in accordance with the righ…Read more
  •  32
    Impact of a Participatory Action Approach to Virtue Promotion Among Early Adolescents
    with Krista Mehari, Marie Chastang, Megan Blanton, and Joseph Currier
    Journal of Positive Psychology 2023. 2023.
    Research on interventions that aim to cultivate character strengths, or virtues, has been conducted primarily among highly resourced, predominantly White communities, and the interventions have been developed to reflect the values of those communities. The purpose of this study was to use a participatory action research approach to develop a virtue intervention focused on addressing the community-identified problem of violence in a predominantly Black community, and to test its effectiveness in …Read more
  •  27
    Character strengths research has the potential to imply that youth have character deficits or moral failings that cause their problematic behavior. This ignores the impact of context, especially for youth who are members of historically marginalized groups in under resourced communities. On the other hand, framing youth who are members of underrepresented groups solely as products of oppression undermines their agency and the power of collective action. It may be possible to promote character de…Read more
  •  24
    The Argument from Good Friendship to Character Realism
    The Journal of Ethics (3): 1-14. 2023.
    Character realism is the view that many people have and act from character. This short paper attempts to articulate and draw attention to the underappreciated connection between our commonplaces about good friendship and character realism.
  •  558
    Against reductivist character realism
    Philosophical Psychology 36 (1): 186-213. 2022.
    It seems like people have character traits that explain a good deal of their behavior. Call a theory character realism just in case it vindicates this folk assumption. Recently, Christian Miller has argued that the way to reconcile character realism with decades of psychological research is to adopt metaphysical reductivism about character traits. Some contemporary psychological theories of character and virtue seem to implicitly endorse such reductivism; others resist reduction of traits to fin…Read more
  •  267
    The Divine Friendship Theory of Moral Motivation
    Faith and Philosophy 39 (3): 366-387. 2022.
    One task of moral theory is to answer the question, “Why be moral?” This paper describes a particular theistic theory’s account of moral motivation, which I call the Divine Friendship Theory. I illustrate its plausibility and promise by showing how well the theory does along two dimensions along which an answer to the why-be-moral question can fare better or worse, namely, being psychologically realistic and supporting recognizably moral actions and attitudes. of the answer to the why-be-moral q…Read more
  •  326
    The Primacy of Hope for Human Flourishing
    with Krista Mehari
    The Monist 106 (1): 12-24. 2023.
    In this paper we argue that the eudaimonist virtue of hope holds pride of place in development of psychological traits that promote human flourishing. The argument is part theoretical and part empirical. On the theoretical side, hope, the virtue, is the disposition to envision future good possibilities for oneself and one’s community and to move towards those possibilities. This renders hope necessary for any agent’s self-conscious pursuit of the goods that constitute flourishing, and also for t…Read more
  •  302
    Morality and Religion
    with William Wainwright
    In Christian Miller (ed.), Bloomsbury Handbook of Ethics, Bloomsbury. forthcoming.
    A number of important religious views entail that the ontological and epistemic relations between religion and morality are tighter than most secular thinkers suppose. We will focus on three theistic metaethical accounts of moral phenomena and moral knowledge: natural law theories, divine command theories, and divine will theories. These three types of accounts are among the most dominant in the philosophical literature on theistic ethics in contemporary anglophone philosophy, perhaps owing t…Read more
  •  78
    Hoping for Metanormative Realism
    Erkenntnis 86 (1): 1-15. 2021.
    Debates in metaethics about metanormative realism, quasi-realism, anti-realism, and nihilism mostly focus on epistemic reasons for beliefs about values. Very little has been said about our practical reasons for metaethical beliefs, and even less is said about practical reasons for other attitudes we might take toward metaethical views. This paper shows why a recent argument bucking that trend fails to show that we have practical reasons to believe realism over nihilism, but that for many of us, …Read more
  •  200
    Aristotle
    In Stewart Goetz & Charles Taliaferro (eds.), Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion, Wiley-blackwell. 2021.
    Aristotle (384-322 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Plato, and tutor of Alexander the Great. His works span the topics of biology, metaphysics, mind, logic, language, science, epistemology, ethics, and politics. Aristotle held that there are many divine beings, but a supremely divine being is the first cause of the universe and the goodness of all other beings. This divine being plays a fundamental explanatory role in Aristotle’s thought.
  •  62
    Surprising Empirical Directions for Thomistic Moral Psychology: Social Information Processing and Aggression Research
    with Krista Mehari
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 96 (2): 263-289. 2022.
    One of the major contemporary challenges to Thomistic moral psychology is that it is incompatible with the most up-to-date psychological science. Here Thomistic psychology is in good company, targeted along with most virtue-ethical views by philosophical situationism, which uses replicated psychological studies to suggest that our behaviors are best explained by situational pressures rather than by stable traits (like virtues and vices). In this essay we explain how this body of psychological re…Read more
  •  405
    Varieties of Theism and Explanations of Moral Realism
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 13 (1): 25-50. 2021.
    Does theism make a difference to whether there are moral facts? In this paper I suggest that, despite how much uptake this question gets in philosophical literature, it is not well formed. “Theism” leaves too indeterminate what God is like for us to discern what difference God’s existence would make to moral facts. Arguments like the explanans-driven argument for theistic moral realism and the explanationist argument for naturalist moral realism both require extra substantive assumptions about G…Read more
  •  66
    Fluctuating maximal God
    International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 88 (3): 231-47. 2020.
    This paper explores a variety of perfect being theism that combines Yujin Nagasawa’s maximal God thesis with the view that God is not atemporal. We argue that the original maximal God thesis still implicitly relies on a “static” view of divine perfections. Instead, following the recent re-evaluation of divine immutability by analytic philosophers, we propose that thinking of divine great-making properties as fluctuating but nevertheless remaining maximal either for every time t or across all tim…Read more
  •  32
    Hope in Christianity
    In Claudia Blöser & Titus Stahl (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Hope: An Introduction (The Moral Psychology of the Emotions), Rowman & Littlefield International. pp. 37-56. 2019.
    In this essay I aim to illuminate the nature of Christian hope by looking at the tradition’s answers to three philosophical questions and then comparing them to those of contemporary secular accounts. First, What are the possible objects of hope? Next, What are the psychological conditions a person must meet to have hope? Finally, What makes a hope rational and what makes it good for human life? I conclude by suggesting that the role of hope in bringing about social goods (or evils) might be rec…Read more
  •  29
    A Thomistic View of Conscience and Guilt
    In Corey Maley & Bradford Cokelet (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Guilt, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 243-268. 2019.
    According to the Conscience Principle, it is never morally permissible to act contrary to conscience. The plausibility of this being a genuine moral principle depends on what conscience is, whether it can be mistaken, and what its role is in general moral psychology. Thomas Aquinas endorses and defends a unique version of the Conscience Principle. What’s especially interesting about his unorthodox (for his time) view on conscience is that it seems to split the difference between the views we mig…Read more
  •  40
    Is the atonement necessary or fitting?
    Religious Studies 57 1-9. 2021.
    In her impressive Atonement, Eleonore Stump claims that her novel Marian theory of the atonement meets a desideratum for a successful theory that Aquinas's theory does not, namely, showing that Christ's passion and death are essential to the solution to the problem of human sin. Here I suggest reasons to side with Aquinas, who says that Christ's suffering and death are not necessary, but merely a fitting way of solving the problem. If the fittingness of Christ's passion and death is a good enoug…Read more
  •  95
    God and Morality
    Cambridge University Press. 2019.
    This Element has two aims. The first is to discuss arguments philosophers have made about the difference God's existence might make to questions of general interest in metaethics. The second is to argue that it is a mistake to think we can get very far in answering these questions by assuming a thin conception of God, and to suggest that exploring the implications of thick theisms for metaethics would be more fruitful.
  •  1189
    Limited epistocracy and political inclusion
    Episteme 15 (4): 412-432. 2017.
    ABSTRACTIn this paper I defend a form of epistocracy I call limited epistocracy – rule by institutions housing expertise in non-political areas that become politically relevant. This kind of limited epistocracy, I argue, isn't a far-off fiction. With increasing frequency, governments are outsourcing political power to expert institutions to solve urgent, multidimensional problems because they outperform ordinary democratic decision-making. I consider the objection that limited epistocracy, while…Read more
  •  60
    Does hope morally vindicate faith?
    International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 81 (1-2): 193-211. 2017.
    Much attention in philosophy of religion has been devoted to the question of whether faith is epistemically rational. But is it morally and practically permissible? This paper explores a response to a family of arguments that Christian faith is morally impermissible or practically irrational, even if epistemically justified. After articulating the arguments, I consider how they would fare if they took seriously the traditional notion that genuine faith is always accompanied by Christian hope. I …Read more
  •  85
    How Aristotelians Can Make Faith a Virtue
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (2): 393-409. 2017.
    Neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics identifies the virtues with the traits the fully virtuous person possesses. Further, it depicts the fully virtuous person as having all the cognitive perfections necessary for possessing practical wisdom. This paper argues that these two theses disqualify faith as trust, as construed on contemporary accounts of faith, as a virtue. For faith’s role as a virtue depends on limitations of its possessor that are incompatible with the psychological profile of the fully v…Read more