Christian Miller

Honesty is people’s most treasured virtue. Research has found that honesty is the single most important characteristic a person can have when it comes to liking them, respecting them, and understanding them. But honesty is eroding at a frightening rate in many areas of society today, as we are confronted with a number of honesty crises. These include: in education, many students are using AI to complete their writing assignments for them with little chance of being detected by their professors; in our relationships, with the easy availability of pornography, anonymous chatrooms, and infidelity websites like Ashley Madison, cheating has never been easier; in politics, social media helps with the dissemination of fake news, and polarization reduces our tendency to condemn political dishonesty if it aligns with our own views; in online spaces, the frequency of deepfakes has skyrocketed now that they are simple to make and basically untraceable; in public spaces, it is easier to become a celebrity than it has ever been in human history, and the allure of celebrity is stronger than ever too; and in religion, religious leaders are increasingly confronted by temptations to engage in sermon plagiarism, to have inappropriate emotional and sexual relationships, and to fall into the trappings of celebrity. Fortunately, there are concrete steps we can take to try to reign in at least many of these crises. The sooner we implement them, the better, as the stakes are high.

It has been 40 years since the publication of Alvin Plantinga’s highly influential “Advice to Christian Philosophers.” Our goal is to follow in Plantinga’s footsteps by setting out advice for the next generation of Christians taking up the vocation of philosophy. In the process, we seek to dramatically broaden the scope of Plantinga’s advice. He focused on thinking about how best to carry out academic research in philosophy as a Christian. We explore the life of a Christian philosopher in the context of the profession, the classroom, public philosophy, and, yes, research as well. We end by thinking about the next forty years and what Christian philosophy might look like in the future.

In recent years there has been a great deal of interest in experimental findings from psychology and their implications for better understanding character. This interest has focused almost exclusively on certain well-known studies of helping behavior—such as the Darley and Batson Princeton Theological Seminary study and the Isen and Levin phone book experiment—which allegedly have some bearing on the extent to which people possess the virtue of compassion. This chapter focuses on an underexplored area of the psychological literature—research on harmful as opposed to helpful behavior—and uses it in a preliminary way to further develop and support a new conception of the character traits which most people actually possess.

This chapter shows that despite its popularity, eliminativism is not the only option for the atheist to adopt. It draws on recent work in sociology, psychology, economics, and other related fields to begin to sketch some reasons why atheists should reconsider the eliminativist approach. The chapter is structured as follows. Section I starts with recent work in meta-ethics by providing an overview of the leading options the moral error theorist has in responding to what (in her mind) are widely held false ethical beliefs. Section II then takes this error's theoretic framework from meta-ethics and shows how a parallel set of issues arises for the atheist with respect to genuine theistic believers. Section III summarizes a range of empirical research which suggests that theistic beliefs and practices are positively correlated with a number of widely held social goods. This research is used to argue that, all things considered, perhaps atheists should not work towards the promotion of a broadly secular society. Section IV considers a number of objections to this claim, and Section V concludes with a discussion of an additional option for the atheist to consider.

Chapter 7 expands on the Mixed Trait Model for understanding moral character traits. On this model, most people have neither any moral virtues nor any moral vices but, rather, traits of character that are morally positive in some respects but negative in others. The chapter moves beyond the model’s earlier focus on empirical work pertaining to the moral domains of helping, physical aggression, lying, and cheating. It extends the Mixed Trait Model in two additional areas—resource distribution and theft—and in so doing, considers whether the existing research is compatible with the Mixed Trait Model in order to determine how broadly applicable the model really is. The conclusion is that the results are, so to speak, a mixed bag.

This chapter provides an overview of some of the foundational questions in philosophy about character and provides some broad conceptual background on the topic of character for the chapters which follow. Those questions include: what are character traits, what makes up a character trait, what are the features of character traits, why do we appeal to them, what are some normative differences between them, do they actually exist, what do most of our character traits actually look like, and how can good or virtuous character traits be cultivated.

This book contains new work on character from the perspectives of philosophy, theology, and psychology. From a virtual reality simulation of the Milgram shock experiments, to understanding the virtue of modesty in Muslim societies, to defending soldiers’ moral responsibility for committing war crimes, these chapters break new ground and significantly advance our understanding of character. The main topics covered fall under the heading of our beliefs about character, the existence and nature of character traits, character and ethical theory, virtue epistemology, the nature of particular virtues, character development, and challenges to character and virtue from neuroscience and situationism. The book significantly shapes discussions of character in scholarship.

I pursue three of the many lines of thought that were raised in my mind by Kristjánsson’s engaging book. In the first section, I try to get clearer on what exactly Aristotelian character education (ACE) is, and suggest areas where I hope the view is developed in more detail. In the second and longest section, I draw some lessons from social psychology about the pervasive role of what I call ‘Surprising Dispositions,’ and invite Kristjánsson to take up the difficult challenge of clarifying how ACE would help to address their influence on our thought and action. Finally, in section three I consider whether there is any robust empirical support for ACE, and if not, where that leaves us.

As work on practical wisdom and medicine accelerates, now is a good time to outline some important challenges that any approach to developing an account of this virtue faces. More specifically, I develop five challenges having to do with the existence and nature of practical wisdom, and whether it connects with objective and general normative truths. The main goal is to provide a guide to the challenges themselves and some of the options available for tackling them, rather than trying to resolve them here.

As work on practical wisdom and medicine accelerates, now is a good time to outline some important challenges that any approach to developing an account of this virtue faces. More specifically, I develop five challenges having to do with the existence and nature of practical wisdom, and whether it connects with objective and general normative truths. The main goal is to provide a guide to the challenges themselves and some of the options available for tackling them, rather than trying to resolve them here.

As work on practical wisdom and medicine accelerates, now is a good time to outline some important challenges that any approach to developing an account of this virtue faces. More specifically, I develop five challenges having to do with the existence and nature of practical wisdom, and whether it connects with objective and general normative truths. The main goal is to provide a guide to the challenges themselves and some of the options available for tackling them, rather than trying to resolve them here.

The goal of this article is to outline a new account of the virtue of patience. To help build the account, we focus on five important issues pertaining to patience: (i) goals and time, (ii) emotion, (iii) continence versus virtue, (iv) motivation, and (v) good ends. The heart of the resulting account is that patience is a cross-situational and stable disposition to react, both internally and externally, to slower than desired progress toward goal achievement with a reasonable level of calmness. The article ends with an application of the account to better understanding the vices associated with patience.

Deepfakes raise various concerns: risks of political destabilization, depictions of persons without consent and causing them harms, erosion of trust in video and audio as reliable sources of evidence, and more. These concerns have been the focus of recent work in the philosophical literature on deepfakes. However, there has been almost no sustained philosophical analysis of deepfakes from the perspective of concerns about honesty and dishonesty. That deepfakes are potentially deceptive is unsurprising and has been noted. But under what conditions does the use of deepfakes fail to be honest? And which human agents, involved in one way or another in a deepfake, fail to be honest, and in what ways? If we are to understand better the morality of deepfakes, these questions need answering. Our first goal in this paper, therefore, is to offer an analysis of paradigmatic cases of deepfakes in light of the philosophy of honesty. While it is clear that many deepfakes are morally problematic, there has been a rising counter-chorus claiming that deepfakes are not essentially morally bad, since there might be uses of deepfakes that are not morally wrong, or even that are morally salutary, for instance, in education, entertainment, activism, and other areas. However, while there are reasons to think that deepfakes can supply or support moral goods, it is nevertheless possible that even these uses of deepfakes are dishonest. Our second goal in this paper, therefore, is to apply our analysis of deepfakes and honesty to the sorts of deepfakes hoped to be morally good or at least neutral. We conclude that, perhaps surprisingly, in many of these cases the use of deepfakes will be dishonest in some respects. Of course, there will be cases of deepfakes for which verdicts about honesty and moral permissibility do not line up. While we will sometimes suggest reasons why moral permissibility verdicts might diverge from honesty verdicts, we will not aim to settle matters of moral permissibility.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Ethics offers the definitive guide to this key area of contemporary philosophy. Covering all the fundamental questions asked by meta-ethics and normative ethical theory, thirteen specially commissioned chapters from an international team of experts explore the central ideas, terms and case studies in the field, and new directions in ethics as a whole. Now available in paperback, the Companion to Ethics covers issues such as moral methodology, moral realism, ethical expressivism, constructivism and the error theory, morality and practical reason, moral psychology, morality and religion, consequentialism, Kantian ethics, virtue ethics, feminist ethics, moral particularism, experimental ethics, and biology, evolution and ethics. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including key technical terms, a historical chronology, a detailed list of internet resources for research in ethics, and a thorough list of recommended works for further study, this is the essential resource for anyone studying, researching and writing in contemporary philosophical ethics.

There have only been three articles in mainstream philosophy journals going back at least to the 1970s on generosity. This paper hopes to draw attention to this neglected virtue. By building on what work has already been done, and trying to advance that discussion along several different dimensions, it hopes that others will take a closer look at this important and surprisingly complex virtue. More specifically, it formulates three important necessary conditions for what is involved in possessing the virtue of generosity, and considers other contenders as well. The necessary conditions have to do with whether what is given must be of value to the giver, whether the giver's primary motivation has to be altruistic, and whether the act of giving has to be supererogatory.