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Book Club: The Character Gap, 1, What is character and why is it important?
Time to start a new book in our general philosophy book club (as distinct from our Stoic book club). For the next three installments we are going to discuss Christian Miller’s The Character Gap. Miller is the A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and the Director of the Character Project, funded by the John Templeton 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). 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), and several other volumes.
The official book descriptions reads as follows: we like to think of ourselves, our friends, and our families as decent people. We may not be saints, but we are still honest, relatively kind, and mostly trustworthy. Miller argues here that we are badly mistaken in thinking this. Hundreds of recent studies in psychology tell a different story: that we all have serious character flaws that prevent us from being as good as we think we are — and that we do not even recognize that these flaws exist. But neither are most of us cruel or dishonest. Instead, Miller argues, we are a mixed bag. On the one hand, most of us in a group of bystanders will do nothing as someone cries out for help in an emergency. Yet it is also true that there will be many times when we will selflessly come to the aid of a complete stranger — and resist the urge to lie, cheat, or steal even if we could get away with it. Much depends on cues in our social environment. Miller uses this recent psychological literature to explain what the notion of “character” really means today, and how we can use this new understanding to develop a character better in sync with the kind of people we want to be.
The volume is organized in three parts: What is character and why is it important? (chapters 1 and 2), What does our character actually look like today? (chapters 3–7), and What can we do to improve our characters? (chapters 8–10). This essay is devoted to the first section, comprising the first two chapters.
