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During the last decade, intellectual humility has gone from a topic of philosophical inquiry to one of serious scientific investigation. It has been variously described as a remedy for political polarization, a tool for advancing scientific credibility, and a disposition that promotes learning. However, less attention has been paid to how intellectual humility has been defined and measured or how well psychologists' definitions and measures align with one another or with philosophers' accounts. Through a systematic review of empirical intellectual humility research, we identified 18 separate definitions and 20 measures including16 unique questionnaires. We then synthesized this research to advance a new framework of intellectual humility. Implications of this framework for measurement and future research on intellectual humility are discussed.

My remarks will outline, from a philosopher’s perspective, challenges and opportunities that I see for a science of virtue. I will touch on three topics: (1) ensuring that the studies are philosoph...

Our primary aim in this paper is to sketch the account of virtue that we think most amenable to virtue measurement. Our account integrates Whole Trait Theory (WTT) from psychology with a broadly neo-Aristotelian approach to virtue. Our account is ‘ecumenical’ in that it has appeal for a wide range of virtue ethicists. According to WTT, a personality trait is composed of a set of situation-specific trait-appropriate responses, which are produced when certain “social-cognitive” mechanisms (cognitive/affective/motivational processes and dispositions) are triggered by the perception of trait-relevant stimuli in a person’s external and/or internal environment. Moving from this starting point, we discuss our conception of a virtue and respects in which it both aligns with and diverges from Aristotle’s conception. We discuss roles for practical wisdom and motivation in our conception of virtue, and highlight respects in which WTT provides an amenable empirical framework into which key Aristotelian elements can be integrated. We conclude with brief remarks about our conception as an empirically adequate and measurable account.

Chapter 1, “Our Working Model of Virtue,” presents the conception of virtue that informs the authors’ thinking throughout the volume. This is a modified Aristotelianism, which the authors seek to integrate with Whole Trait Theory (WTT), an empirical account of traits recently developed by Will Fleeson and Eranda Jayawickreme. The authors argue that WTT provides an attractive framework within which to situate a robust account of virtue inspired by Aristotle, whose work on virtue has been especially influential in contemporary virtue ethics. They develop this integrated account of virtue in Chapter 1. They regard it as “ecumenical” in the sense that their account should appeal to a large number of virtue ethicists and virtue theorists, namely, those who endorse a conception of virtue as a type of global trait.

Chapter 2 provides a review and evaluation of work that has been and is currently being done on virtue measurement. It is divided into five parts. The first provides a brief primer on quantitative measurement. The second discusses strategies for measuring discrete, single virtues, namely, gratitude, courage, honesty, compassion, and humility. The third section takes up strategies for measuring clusters of virtues, and the fourth, the few efforts that have been made to measure virtues comprehensively. The fifth section concludes by evaluating the conceptual and methodological strengths and weakness of these approaches. The chapter highlights the need for the more thorough and theoretically framed approach offered throughout the rest of the book.

Chapter 4 moves beyond providing an account of individual virtues to advance a conception of character. Here “character” means the integration of a constellation of virtues within personality. The chapter presents and defends an “integration” thesis, which means that the distinctiveness of individual characters can be explained by investigating interrelations among the unique arrays of virtues that people possess and display. The integration thesis is essentially practical, maintaining that virtues develop together uniquely in individual personalities as people respond to the virtue-relevant circumstances of their daily lives. Character has been much discussed in the history of philosophy, especially in debates about the unity or reciprocity of the virtues. The chapter situates the integration thesis vis-à-vis this literature, arguing that it is preferable to a number of views on the virtues and how they are unified (or not) to form character.

Neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics is one of the most well-developed approaches to virtue currently on offer. From that perspective, questions as to whether virtues are global or local, universal or culturally relative, are answered as follows: genuine virtues are global, and they are universal because they are grounded in human nature. Thus far, the central challenge to the universality of virtues has been based on the fact of cultural diversity. The presupposition of this debate is that nature and culture combine in the articulation of goods and virtues. Cultural variability is typically seen as the primary agent of change in what count as goods and virtues within societies, but manipulations of nature through technologies and cultural factors have wrought changes, too. Germline genome editing is a new kind of technology that can produce heritable changes in members of many kinds of species. The speed, flexibility, and kind of heritability made possible by genome editing make it important to consider carefully its implications for human goods and virtues. In light of germline genome editing, this chapter raises questions for the universality of virtues, conceptualizations of goods and virtues, and neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism.

Both historically and in contemporary times, the virtue of humility has received attention from theologians as well as from philosophers. In this chapter, I offer an overview of philosophical theories of humility. A brief nod to the history of philosophical thinking about humility is given in the first section, with an eye to highlighting its influence on contemporary theories. In the second section, a review of work on humility in contemporary philosophy from 1985 to the present is offered. It should be noted that Julia Driver’s work gave rise to a separate stream of philosophical thinking about ‘modesty,’ in which that term is used interchangeably with ‘humility.’ The third section of the chapter examines this line of thought, in which a number of philosophers use Driver’s work as starting points for developing their own ideas. Throughout the chapter, efforts are made to identify convergent themes, areas of overlap, and issues for further investigation.

This essay raises concerns about positive psychology’s classification of character strengths and virtues and issues of measurement. Part I examines the process whereby the classification was compil...

One of Owen Flanagan’s great recent contributions has been his work in comparative philosophy. Specifically, his provocative book, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (2011) and before that, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World (2007), opened conversations between analytic philosophers and scholars interested in Buddhism. In The Bodhisattva’s Brain, Flanagan argues that Buddhism can be understood as a kind of virtue eudaimonism. In the spirit of this enterprise, Snow offers a comparison and contrast between key Aristotelian and Buddhist metaphysical and ethical concepts. This exercise yields several pay-offs. First, for each view, we reach a deeper understanding of the extent to which virtues and eudaimonia are influenced by metaphysical presuppositions. Second, we gain a better grasp of the purpose of the virtues within each view, of what work they are meant to do for the agent, what they are supposed to help her attain, and why. Third, we’re afforded some insight into how different conceptions of eudaimonia can shape a life, and affect how we see ourselves and others. Finally, we get a sense of where different theorists think moral pitfalls lie, and how we can best indemnify ourselves against them.

Aristotelian-inspired accounts of virtue acquisition stress guided practice and habituated action to develop virtue. This emphasis on action can lead to the ‘paradox of striving’. The paradox occurs when we try too hard to act well and thereby spoil our efforts. I identify four forms of striving—forcing, impulsivity, overthinking, and holding oneself to too high a standard—and explain how they can cause our actions to miss the virtuous mark. Though neo-Aristotelians can offer remedies for these ills, I turn in the rest of this article to explore an approach to virtue inspired by the life and work of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi stresses receptivity to personal transformation and turning inward through meditative practice as ways in which we can attain the inner states needed for virtuous action. In consequence, a Gandhian approach offers a rather different analysis of the paradox of striving than that given by neo-Aristotelianism.

The psychological construct of ‘generativity’ was introduced by Erik Erikson in Childhood and Society in 1950. This rich and complex notion encompasses the constellation of desires, concerns and commitments that motivate individuals and societies to pass on legacies to future generations. ‘Flourishing,’ which means, very roughly, living life well, is another rich and complex notion, interpretations of which are found in ancient philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics. In this article I relate interpretations of these two concepts by arguing that certain forms of generativity can be considered an Aristotelian-type virtue, and that the virtue of generativity is necessary, but not sufficient, for flourishing in the Aristotelian sense. In other words, one can be generative without flourishing. The reverse, however, does not seem true: it is hard to see how one can fully flourish without being generative.

It is difficult to find fault with Aristotelian Character Education by Kristjan Kristjansson. In eight engagingly written and thoroughly researched chapters, he introduces the reader to Aristotelia...

The Moral Psychology Handbook is a contribution to a relatively new genre of philosophical writing, the “handbook.” In the first section, I comment on an expectation about handbooks, namely that handbooks contain works representative of a field, and raise concerns about The Moral Psychology Handbook in this regard. In the rest of the article I comment in detail on two Handbook articles, “Moral Motivation” by Timothy Schroeder, Adina Roskies, and Shaun Nichols, and “Character” by Maria W. Merritt, John M. Doris, and Gilbert Harman. Both articles illustrate the perils as well as the promise of reliance on empirical studies for philosophers who work in moral psychology.

Abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq confront us with the question of how seemingly ordinary soldiers could have perpetrated harms against prisoners. In this essay I argue that a Stoic approach to the virtues can provide a bulwark against the social and personal forces that can lead to abusive behavior. In part one, I discuss Abu Ghraib. In two, I examine social psychological explanations of how ordinary, apparently decent people are able to commit atrocities. In three, I address a series of questions: why should we turn to ethics for help with these problems, and why, in particular, to Stoicism instead of other ethical theories, such as utilitarianism or Kantianism? Given the power of situations in influencing behavior, is a turn to character ethics a viable response to problems such as those at Abu Ghraib? I argue in part four that character formation drawing on Stoic values can provide soldiers with the inner resilience to resist the situational factors that press them to unwarranted aggression.

A mother, whom I shall call M, feels hostility to her daughter-inlaw, whom I shall call D. M finds D quite a good-hearted girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement. D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile. M does not like D’s accent or the way D dresses. M feels that her son has married beneath him. Let us assume for the purposes of the example that the mother, who is a very ‘‘correct’’ person, behaves beautifully to the girl throughout, not allowing her real opinion to appear in any way. We might underline this aspect of the example by supposing that the young couple have emigrated or that D is now dead: the point being to ensure that whatever is in question as happening happens entirely in M’s mind.

In the history of philosophy and theology down to contemporary times, hope has been regarded as a passion or as a moral or theological virtue.1 Here I propose to explore hope as an intellectual virtue, thereby following the lead of Roberts and Wood in developing profiles of the intellectual virtues as part of the approach that they call “regulative epistemology.”2 As opposed to analytic epistemology, which attempts to develop a theory of knowledge, regulative epistemology aims to give epistemic guidance about how to formulate beliefs and understandings.3 Virtue epistemology is a type of regulative epistemology that focuses on the virtues a person should have in order to be an excellent intellectual agent. Part I develops a conception of hope, and parts II and III outline respects in which hope so construed can be considered an intellectual virtue. Part IV concludes with a brief mention of some perils associated with hoping.

In his article, "Beyond Knowledge: Paradigms in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy,"' C. G. Luckhardt argues that mathematical proofs, standards, and a certain class of empirical propositions, those which G. E. Moore claimed to know in "A Defence of Common Sense,"' are all kinds of paradigms, that is, groundings for frameworks or systems of representation/justification which are themselves beyond knowledge and justification. They provide the frames of reference within which systems of knowledge and activities can be developed and justified. Luckhardt attributes three essential characteristics to paradigms: "(i) they are standards by which particular cases are judged, (z) agreement in them is necessary for engaging in any practice which employs them, and (3) they can never be said to be (or not to be) what particular cases judged according to them can be said to be (or not to be)."3 Although the class of empirical propositions shares some of the characteristics of paradigms, I will try to show that Luckhardt's attempt to draw a strict parallel between this class and paradigms forces the former into too narrow a role. Examples of such empirical propositions include: "Cats do not grow on trees" (OC z8z), "The earth is round" (OC 29i, 299), "The earth has existed for many years past" (OC 41 i), and "This is my hand" (OC 9).4 Using Luckhardt's own criteria, we should examine