Search

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 5 takes offers strategies for the measurement of character as a whole, not just of specific virtues. Specifically, it discusses measuring virtue constellations to describe the co-manifestation of multiple virtues that (in part) constitute a person’s character; the measurement of the regulative function of practical wisdom (or phronēsis) as one way of explaining interrelations among virtues, and the measurement of the reflective function of practical wisdom as it contributes to conscious awareness of the dynamics among virtues and manifests in virtue-relevant goals, values, and identity.

In Chapter 3 we use our working conception of virtue developed in Chapter 1 to anchor an integrated proposal for virtue measurement. More specifically, we argue that what is needed to accurately measure any virtue is a multilayered research program that allows us to track the degree to which a person exhibits each of several aspects of trait manifestation: (1) the perception of virtue-relevant stimuli (the “inputs”); (2) the processing of those inputs by various social-cognitive systems (the “intermediates”); and (3) the production of situation-specific virtue-appropriate behaviors (the “outputs”). Sensitivity to the connections between these components is of prime importance for accurately measuring virtue. We provide an inclusive overview of these elements of virtue and strategies for their measurement.

The last thirty years has seen a resurgence of interest in virtue among philosophers, psychologists, and educators. As is often the case with interdisciplinary endeavors, this renewed interest in virtue faces an important challenge—namely, successfully standing up to the requirements imposed by different disciplinary standards. For virtue, this means developing an account that practitioners from multiple disciplines will find sufficiently rigorous, substantive, and useful. Our volume was born in response to this interdisciplinary challenge. Its objective here 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—and thus, able to be meaningfully operationalized into empirically measurable variables. Second, it offers a range of strategies for how virtue and character (so conceived) can be systematically measured, relying on the insights from the latest research in personality, social, developmental, and cognitive psychology, and psychological science more broadly. It thereby seeks to contribute to the emerging science of the measurement of virtue and character.

The interdisciplinary science of virtue and character measurement is in its infancy. In this volume, we hope to have moved the conversation forward. We took the first step toward this in Chapter 1 by introducing our working conception of virtue. This is a modified Aristotelianism which we integrated with Whole Trait Theory (WTT). The point of doing this was to combine the richness of an extremely influential philosophical approach to virtue with a promising empirical framework of personality traits that allows for the psychological measurement of virtue. In ...

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.

The Introduction discusses the main objectives of the book, describes who it will be relevant for and why, and lays out the plan for each chapter. The main objective of the book is twofold. First, it offers accounts of virtue and character that are both philosophically sound and psychologically realistic—and thus, able to be operationalized into empirically measurable variables. Second, it offers a range of strategies for how virtue and character (so conceived) can be systematically measured. This work will be of interest to philosophers, psychologists and education theorists who are interested in virtue and character.

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.

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.

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.

We introduce a special issue of articles that emerged from teams of interdisciplinary researchers, social scientists and philosophers, who were funded under the auspices of the Self, Motivation and...

This book is an important example of how philosophers can make their work better known to the nonacademic public without sacrificing too much by way of rigor. Miller’s academic work stands at the intersection of philosophy and psychology: he draws on a wide array of psychological studies to help make the case for ‘mixed traits.’ He does the same here, though in a very accessible way. Here I remark on ways in which I think the book might have been stronger, and engage with some of the psychological studies. Finally, I introduce a recent meta-analysis of 24,512 controlled psychological studies of helping behavior (Lefevor et al., “To What Degree Do Situational Influences Explain Spontaneous Helping Behaviour?” 2017). I am curious whether Lefevor et al.’s conclusions will induce Miller to rethink his approach to helping studies or will have other implications for his future research.

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...

Against the backdrop of the recent emergence of disturbing currents of populism in several countries, including the United States, this article argues for a conception of hope as a democratic civic virtue. In section 1, it offers a general overview of hope and sketches an initial conception of hope as a democratic civic virtue. In section 2, the stage is set for further theorizing of this conception in the present American context. Drawing on the work of Ghassan Hage, the article makes the point that the United States is in the process of becoming a nation of worriers in part because of the failure of the government to distribute social hope. Section 3 fleshes out what hope as a democratic civic virtue could look like in the United States today. Section 4 concludes with brief comments about theorizing civic hope in the context of a modified pragmatism.