Character Matters

After five plus years of the podcast, we finally get around to a proper discussion of virtue ethics. We do so with the leading active scholar in America today: Christian Miller of Wake Forest University. (The Roman Catholic Alisdair McIntyre and Lutheran Gilbert Meilaender have both recently retired, so we don't think this claim is hyperbolic.) Miller is the author of several books and articles, but his recent book The Character Gap: How Good Are We? is a gem. And it is both good at handling scholarship--including scholarship from the field of social psychology--and presenting it in an understandable way to a non-technical audience.  If you've been listening for a while and want a good presentation of virtue theory, this is the place to go. 

Miller holds a B.A. in philosophy from Princeton University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. His main areas of research are meta-ethics, moral psychology, moral character, action theory, and philosophy of religion. He is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and Philosophy Director of the Beacon Project (http://www.moralbeacons.org/), funded by the Templeton Religion Trust. He was the Director of the Character Project (www.thecharacterproject.com), which was funded by $5.6 million in grants from the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is the author of over 80 papers as well as three books with Oxford University Press, Moral Character: An Empirical Theory(2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), and The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (forthcoming 2017). He is also the editor or co-editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford University Press), Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (Oxford University Press), Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character (MIT Press), Integrity, Honesty, and Truth-Seeking (Oxford University Press), and The Continuum Companion to Ethics (Continuum Press).