Christian B. Miller is an astute analytic philosopher who can be relied upon to write penetratingly about any subject he addresses. To appreciate fully the quality and thrust of this new work—a follow-up to his 2013 Oxford University Press book Moral Character—the reader must, however, overcome two initial obstacles. One is the disappointment, elicited by the sweeping title, that this is not the all-you-have-ever-wanted-to-know-but-never-dared-to-ask critical review of the fields of character and moral psychology that we have all been waiting for. Under the broad remit, Miller tackles quite specific questions, mostly having to do with situationist challenges to the notion of moral character; but he does so with a degree of clarity, insight and originality rarely seen before in the field. The second obstacle is that readers need to develop tolerance for Miller’s idiosyncratic presentational style, which involves writing two books in tandem: one in the main text and another in footnotes, often equally long. The footnotes comprise extended references to relevant writings, which are rarely engaged with directly and will only benefit students in search of reading lists, and observations which should ideally have been incorporated into the main text.
A book which is as rich and has such a tightly woven tapestry as this one is difficult to summarize briefly. Let it suffice to say here that Miller deconstructs intelligently both the situationist claim that people possess no robust character traits—or at best only local, situation-specific ones—and the globalist, virtue ethical claim that people do possess—or at least can be realistically seen on a developmental track towards possessing—robust moral virtues or vices. After disposing of those two contrasting options, Miller offers his own novel theory of people typically possessing ‘mixed traits’: traits that do not coincide with the traditional distinctions between individual virtues or individual vices, but incorporate various person-specific and interrelated mental-state dispositions pertaining to the relevant domains (for example, the domain of honesty). Most importantly, each mixed trait embodies certain ‘enhancers and inhibitors’ (p. 52) which influence motivation in trait-relevant ways. Each person thus possesses, so to speak, a different cluster of dispositions, relevant to a moral domain (such as truth-telling), and presents herself to the outside world with a unique individual character profile of psycho-moral preferences and saliences under whose sway her behaviour oscillates. This theory explains both the apparent unpredictability of behaviour with respect to standard virtues, such as honesty, found in psychological experiments, and the common-sense intuition that our behaviour is almost tediously predictable for those who know us well.
Consider person A, who can be almost invariably counted on to tell the truth in a paradigmatic situation such as in the witness box. One day, when filing a loan application at a local bank, A sees the bank employee who gave her such bad investment advice in the past that A lost her life-savings in the banking crash. Triggered by her strong anger-enhancer, A decides to be less than truthful about her income in filling out the loan form, in order to wreak revenge on the employee and the bank. In Miller’s account, A neither possesses the trait of honesty with a glitch, as Aristotelians might want to argue, nor does she possess a mere local trait, engendered by the specific situation, as situationists would contend. Rather, A can be expected to react in similar ways across situations as long as a similar mix of enhancers and inhibitors is triggered. The beauty of this middle-ground theory is that it seems to account for the fundamental insights of both situationism and globalism in ways that are simpler and more parsimonious—and, indeed, more plausible—than those offered by the two contrasting standard theories.
Along the way of arguing for his mixed-trait theory, Miller offers helpful conceptual analyses of a number of relevant terms (Chapter 1), summarizes the empirical background (Chapter 2), illustrates the theory through the example of cheating (Chapter 3), and provides debunking critiques of both situationist and Big-Five alternative frameworks (Chapters 4–5). He is more sympathetic to the cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS) model (Chapter 6), but only because it does little more than perpetuate the common-sense intuitions from which Miller himself starts. Chapters 7–8 will be of greatest interest to moral philosophers as Miller explains there the implications of his theory for meta-ethics and the trouble it creates for virtue ethics in particular. Virtue ethicists are, in Miller’s view, faced with a serious ‘realist challenge’ (p. 210): to outline realistic, empirically informed ways for human beings to improve their mixed traits towards what is commonly known as ‘virtue’. In all events, virtue ethicists who pay heed to Miller’s message will never be able to treat the concept of character virtue as cavalierly as they have done in the past.
This is one of those books that is difficult to overpraise. Leaving aside minor quibbles, I find it hard to lodge major complaints. I will briefly suggest two, however. Firstly, it seems quite possible to put an Aristotelian spin on Miller’s theory by noting that the complexity of individual psycho-moral make-ups and the conflicted situations in which we find ourselves, noted by Miller, is precisely the reason why Aristotle does not focus all that much on individual virtues in his theory of post-childhood moral development, but rather on the cultivation of the intellectual virtue of phronesis as a moral integrator and adjudicator. Miller is aware of this ‘competing-virtues response’, but he addresses it uncharacteristically curtly and not entirely successfully on pages 221–223. Secondly, a mixed-trait theory does not rule out moral education towards a better mix, as Miller correctly notes. However, compared to the quality of the preceding discussion, the concluding Chapter 9 on moral education will seem rather weak to readers of the present journal, as it adds little new to methods already well-known and much practised in the field. Miller admits that ‘a proper treatment of moral education and character development would need another book entirely’ (p. 227). One can only hope that Miller himself takes on that task as the final step in completing a trilogy of books on moral character.
Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, School of Education
University of Birmingham, UK
Email: [email protected]
© 2014, Kristján Kristjánsson
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2014.923133