Ethicists and psychologists have become increasingly interested in the development of virtue in recent years, approaching the topic from the perspectives of virtue ethics and developmental psychology respectively. Such interest in virtue development has spread beyond academia, as teachers and parents have increasingly striven to cultivate virtue as part of education and child-rearing. Looking at these parallel trends in the study and practice of virtue development, the essays in this volume explore such questions as: How can philosophical work on virtue development inform psychological work on it, and vice versa? How should we understand virtue as a dimension of human personality? What is the developmental foundation of virtue? What are the evolutionary aspects of virtue and its development? How is virtue fostered? How is virtue exemplified in behavior and action? How is our conception of virtue influenced by context and by developmental and social experiences? What are the tensions, impediments and prospects for an integrative field of virtue study? Rather than centering on each discipline, the essays in this volume are orgnaized around themes and engage each other in a broader dialogue. The volume begins with an introductory essay from the editors that explains the full range of philosophical and empirical issues that have surrounded the notion of virtue in recent years.

Though virtue ethics is enjoying a resurgence, the topic of virtue cultivation has been largely neglected by philosophers. This volume remedies this gap, featuring mostly new essays, commissioned for this collection, by philosophers, theologians, and psychologists at the forefront of research into virtue. Each contribution focuses on some aspect of virtue development, either by highlighting virtue cultivation within distinctive traditions of ethical or religious thought, or by taking a developmental perspective to yield fresh insights into criticisms of virtue ethics, or by examining the science that explains virtue development. The essays by Russell and Driver investigate virtue cultivation or problems associated with it from Aristotelian and utilitarian perspectives. Slote addresses virtue development from the sentimentalist standpoint. Swanton and Cureton and Hill explore self-improvement, the former with an eye to offering solutions to critiques of virtue ethics, the latter from a Kantian ethical vantage point. Slingerland examines contemporary psychology as well as virtue development in the Confucian tradition to counter situationist criticisms of virtue ethics. Flanagan, Bucar, and Herdt examine how virtue is cultivated in the Buddhist, Islamic, and Christian traditions, respectively. Narvaez, Thompson, and McAdams offer descriptive insights from psychology into virtue development. The result is a collection of extremely creative essays that not only fills the current gap but also promises to stimulate new work on a philosophically neglected yet vital topic.

This book addresses current threats to citizenship and democratic values posed by the spread of post-truth communication. The contributors apply research on moral, civic, and epistemic virtues to issues involving post-truth culture. The spread of post-truth communication affects ordinary citizens’ commitment to truth and attitudes toward information sources, thereby threatening the promotion of democratic ideals in public debate. The chapters in this volume investigate the importance of helping citizens improve the quality of their online agency and raise awareness of the risks social media poses to democratic values. This book moves from two initial chapters that provide historical background and overview of the present post-truth malaise, through a series of chapters that feature mainly diagnostic accounts of the epistemic and ethical issues we face, to the complexities of virtue-theoretic analyses of specific virtues and vices. Virtues, Democracy, and Online Media will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in virtue ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, and media studies.

This volume features new findings by nine interdisciplinary teams of researchers on the topics of self, motivation, and virtue. Nine chapters bringing together scholars from the fields of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and sociology advance our substantive understanding of these important topics, and showcase a variety of research methods of interdisciplinary interest. Essays on Buddhism and the self in the context of romantic relationships, the development of personal projects and virtue, the notion of self-distancing and its moral impact, virtues as self-integrated traits, humility and the self in loving encounter, the importance of nation and faith in motivating virtue in western and non-western countries, roles for the self and virtue in eudaimonic growth, overcoming spiritual violence and sacramental shame in Christian communities, and an investigation into the moral self highlight the range and diversity of topics explored in this volume. The concept of deep integration also characterizes this work: each member of the interdisciplinary teams was fully and equally invested in their project from inception to completion. This approach invites teams to examine their disciplinary assumptions, rethink familiar concepts, and adjust methodologies in order to view their topics with fresh eyes. The result is not only new findings of substantive and methodological interest, but also an interesting glimpse into the thinking of the researchers as they sought interdisciplinary common ground in their research. Self, Motivation, and Virtue will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, moral psychology, neuroscience, and sociology who are working on these topics.

Since ancient times, character, virtue, and happiness have been central to thinking about how to live well. Yet until recently, philosophers have thought about these topics in an empirical vacuum. Taking up the general challenge of situationism - that philosophers should pay attention to empirical psychology - this interdisciplinary volume presents new essays from empirically informed perspectives by philosophers and psychologists on western as well as eastern conceptions of character, virtue, and happiness, and related issues such as personality, emotion and cognition, attitudes and automaticity. Researchers at the top of their fields offer exciting work that expands the horizons of empirically informed research on topics central to virtue ethics.

Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory takes on the claims of philosophical situationism, the ethical theory that is skeptical about the possibility of human virtue. Influenced by social psychological studies, philosophical situationists argue that human personality is too fluid and fragmented to support a stable set of virtues. They claim that virtue cannot be grounded in empirical psychology. This book argues otherwise.

Drawing on the work of psychologists Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda, Nancy E. Snow argues that the social psychological experiments that philosophical situationists rely on look at the wrong kinds of situations to test for behavioral consistency. Rather than looking at situations that are objectively similar, researchers need to compare situations that have similar meanings for the subject. When this is done, subjects exhibit behavioral consistencies that warrant the attribution of enduring traits, and virtues are a subset of these traits. Virtue can therefore be empirically grounded and virtue ethics has nothing to fear from philosophical situationism.

This book addresses current threats to citizenship and democratic values posed by the spread of post-truth communication. The contributors apply research on moral, civic, and epistemic virtues to issues involving post-truth culture. The spread of post-truth communication affects ordinary citizens' commitment to truth and attitudes toward information sources, thereby threatening the promotion of democratic ideals in public debate. The chapters in this volume investigate the importance of helping citizens improve the quality of their online agency and raise awareness of the risks social media poses to democratic values. This book moves from two initial chapters that provide historical background and overview of the present post-truth malaise, through a series of chapters that feature mainly diagnostic accounts of the epistemic and ethical issues we face, to the complexities of virtue-theoretic analyses of specific virtues and vices. Virtues, Democracy, and Online Media will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in virtue ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, and media studies.

This Element provides an overview of the central components of recent work in virtue ethics. The first section explores central themes in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, while the second turns the discussion to major alternative theoretical perspectives. The third section focuses on two challenges to virtue ethics. The first challenge is the self-centeredness or egoism objection, which is the notion that certain kinds of virtue ethics are inadequate because they advocate a focus on the person's own virtue and flourishing at the expense of, or at least without due regard for, the concerns of others. The second is situationist challenges to the ideas that there are indeed virtues and that personality is integrated enough to support virtues.

The last thirty years have seen a resurgence of interest in virtue among philosophers, psychologists, and educators. Over time, this interdisciplinary conversation has included character cultivation and education, in addition to more abstract, theoretical discussions of virtue. As is often the case when various disciplinary endeavors become entwined, this renewed interest in virtue cultivation faces an important challenge-namely, meeting the varying requirements imposed by different disciplinary standards. For virtue in particular, this means developing an account that practitioners from multiple disciplines find sufficiently rigorous, substantive, and useful. This volume represents a response to this interdisciplinary challenge. This co-authored book not only provides a framework for quantifying virtues, but also explores how we can understand virtue in a philosophically-informed way that is compatible with the best thinking available in personality psychology. Its objective is twofold: first, drawing on whole trait theory in psychology and Aristotelian virtue ethics, it offers accounts of virtue and character that are both philosophically sound and psychologically realistic. Second, the volume presents strategies for how virtue and character can be translated into empirically measurable variables and, thus, measured systematically, relying on the insights from the latest research in personality, social, developmental, and cognitive psychology, and psychological science more broadly. This volume presents a major contribution to the emerging science of virtue measurement and character, demonstrating just how philosophical understanding and psychological research can enrich each other.

Since ancient times, character, virtue, and happiness have been central to thinking about how to live well. Yet until recently, philosophers have thought about these topics in an empirical vacuum. Taking up the general challenge of situationism - that philosophers should pay attention to empirical psychology - this interdisciplinary volume presents new essays from empirically informed perspectives by philosophers and psychologists on western as well as eastern conceptions of character, virtue, and happiness, and related issues such as personality, emotion and cognition, attitudes and automaticity. Researchers at the top of their fields offer exciting work that expands the horizons of empirically informed research on topics central to virtue ethics.

This volume features new findings by nine interdisciplinary teams of researchers on the topics of self, motivation, and virtue. Nine chapters bringing together scholars from the fields of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and sociology advance our substantive understanding of these important topics, and showcase a variety of research methods of interdisciplinary interest. Essays on Buddhism and the self in the context of romantic relationships, the development of personal projects and virtue, the notion of self-distancing and its moral impact, virtues as self-integrated traits, humility and the self in loving encounter, the importance of nation and faith in motivating virtue in western and non-western countries, roles for the self and virtue in eudaimonic growth, overcoming spiritual violence and sacramental shame in Christian communities, and an investigation into the moral self highlight the range and diversity of topics explored in this volume. The concept of deep integration also characterizes this work: each member of the interdisciplinary teams was fully and equally invested in their project from inception to completion. This approach invites teams to examine their disciplinary assumptions, rethink familiar concepts, and adjust methodologies in order to view their topics with fresh eyes. The result is not only new findings of substantive and methodological interest, but also an interesting glimpse into the thinking of the researchers as they sought interdisciplinary common ground in their research. Self, Motivation, and Virtue will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, moral psychology, neuroscience, and sociology who are working on these topics.

Though virtue ethics is enjoying a resurgence, the topic of virtue cultivation has been largely neglected by philosophers. This volume remedies this gap, featuring mostly new essays, commissioned for this collection, by philosophers, theologians, and psychologists at the forefront of research into virtue. Each contribution focuses on some aspect of virtue development, either by highlighting virtue cultivation within distinctive traditions of ethical or religious thought, or by taking a developmental perspective to yield fresh insights into criticisms of virtue ethics, or by examining the science that explains virtue development. The essays by Russell and Driver investigate virtue cultivation or problems associated with it from Aristotelian and utilitarian perspectives. Slote addresses virtue development from the sentimentalist standpoint. Swanton and Cureton and Hill explore self-improvement, the former with an eye to offering solutions to critiques of virtue ethics, the latter from a Kantian ethical vantage point. Slingerland examines contemporary psychology as well as virtue development in the Confucian tradition to counter situationist criticisms of virtue ethics. Flanagan, Bucar, and Herdt examine how virtue is cultivated in the Buddhist, Islamic, and Christian traditions, respectively. Narvaez, Thompson, and McAdams offer descriptive insights from psychology into virtue development. The result is a collection of extremely creative essays that not only fills the current gap but also promises to stimulate new work on a philosophically neglected yet vital topic.

This timely volume brings together essays by an internationally distinguished and diverse group of scholars. Contributors thoughtfully explore the ethical, public policy, and scientific implications of embryonic and adult stem cell research. Part one of the book offers a variety of scientific and public policy perspectives, including essays on stem cell plasticity and using umbilical cord blood as an alternative source of pluripotent stem cells. Part two vigorously examines the ethics of stem cell research and considers issues of social justice, morality, and public policy. Scientific alternatives, a natural law perspective regarding federal funding, and a discussion of the possible moral complicity of Catholic researchers are among the distinctive contributions made to the stem cell research debate by this collection. The objective and balanced discussions contained in this volume serve as an accessible introduction to the bioethical questions, issues, and problems surrounding stem cell research.

Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory takes on the claims of philosophical situationism, the ethical theory that is skeptical about the possibility of human virtue. Influenced by social psychological studies, philosophical situationists argue that human personality is too fluid and fragmented to support a stable set of virtues. They claim that virtue cannot be grounded in empirical psychology. This book argues otherwise.

Drawing on the work of psychologists Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda, Nancy E. Snow argues that the social psychological experiments that philosophical situationists rely on look at the wrong kinds of situations to test for behavioral consistency. Rather than looking at situations that are objectively similar, researchers need to compare situations that have similar meanings for the subject. When this is done, subjects exhibit behavioral consistencies that warrant the attribution of enduring traits, and virtues are a subset of these traits. Virtue can therefore be empirically grounded and virtue ethics has nothing to fear from philosophical situationism.