- Wednesday, March 8, 2017
- 7:30 PM–9:30 PM
- Meeter Center Lecture Hall
Christian B. Miller is the A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and Director of the Character Project. He will be delivering two lectures for the Jellema Lecture Series: "Test of Character: How Good (or Bad) Are We?," and “Test of Character: Improving Our Character.”
Christian Miller
Christian B. Miller is Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and 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 75 papers as well as two books with Oxford University Press, Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013) and Character and Moral Psychology (2014). A third book, Test of Character, is under contract with Oxford. 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).
Lecture Abstract
"Test of Character: How Good (or Bad) Are We?"
Are most people today pretty good - honest, compassionate, and trustworthy, for example? Or are most of us fairly bad - dishonest, cruel, and deceptive, say? Research in psychology is beginning to paint a picture about what our characters actually look like. It is a surprisingly complex picture, where for the most part we are neither good nor bad. Rather, our characters are very much a mixed bag. In this lecture, I summarize some of this fascinating research and begin to sketch the emerging picture of character which it suggests.
