Cultivating Virtue Cultivating Virtue Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology  Edited by Nancy E. Snow 1 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 2015 All rights reserved. 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BJ1521.C87 2014 179'.9—dc23 2014018467 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper CONTENTS Contributors vii Introduction 1 1. Aristotle on Cultivating Virtue 17 Daniel C. Russell 2. Mill, Moral Sentimentalism, and the Cultivation of Virtue 49 Julia Driver 3. The Roots of Empathy 65 Michael Slote 4. Kant on Virtue and the Virtues 87 Adam Cureton and Thomas E. Hill 5. Cultivating Virtue: Two Problems for Virtue Ethics 111 Christine Swanton 6. The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics 135 Edward Slingerland 7. It Takes a Metaphysics: Raising Virtuous Buddhists 171 Owen Flanagan 8. Islam and the Cultivation of Character: Ibn Miskawayh’s Synthesis and the Case of the Veil 197 Elizabeth M. Bucar 9. Frailty, Fragmentation, and Social Dependency in the Cultivation of Christian Virtue 227 Jennifer A. Herdt 10. The Co-Construction of Virtue: Epigenetics, Development, and Culture 251 Darcia Narvaez ( v ) ( vi ) Contents 11. The Development of Virtue: A Perspective from Developmental Psychology 279 Ross A. Thompson 12. Psychological Science and the Nicomachean Ethics: Virtuous Actors, Agents, and Authors 307 Dan P. McAdams Index 337 CONTRIBUTORS Elizabeth M. Bucar is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Northeastern University. Adam Cureton is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Julia Driver is Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School. Owen Flanagan is the James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. Jennifer A. Herdt is Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School. Thomas E. Hill is Kenan Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Dan P. McAdams is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor and Chair of the Psychology Department at Northwestern University. Darcia Narvaez is Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA. Daniel C. Russell is Professor of Philosophy in the University of Arizona’s Center for the Philosophy of Freedom and the Percy Seymour Reader in Ancient Philosophy at Ormond College, University of Melbourne. Edward Slingerland is Professor of Asian Studies, Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition, and Associate Member, Depart- ments of Philosophy and Psychology, at the University of British Columbia. Michael Slote is UST Professor of Ethics in the Philosophy Department at the University of Miami. Nancy E. Snow is Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Christine Swanton is professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Ross A. Thompson is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis ( vii ) Introduction The last thirty years have seen a resurgence of interest in virtue in Anglo-American philosophy. Virtue ethics, an approach to norma- tive theory that focuses on the character of the agent, has estab- lished itself as a legitimate alternative to consequentialism and deontology.1 Work elucidating theories of virtue within these competing traditions has also moved forward.2 Despite the rising interest in virtue, however, little attention has been paid to the question of how virtue is developed.3 This volume aims to address that gap in the literature. It is a collection of mostly new essays solicited from philosophers, psychologists, and theologians, all in the forefront of research on virtue.4 Each of their contributions focuses on some aspect of virtue development, either by highlighting virtue culti- vation within distinctive traditions of psychological, ethical, or religious thought, by taking a developmental perspective to yield fresh insights into criticisms of virtue ethics, or by examining the science that explains virtue development. Russell and Driver investigate virtue cultivation or problems associated with it from Aristotelian and utilitarian perspectives, the latter focusing on sentimentalist virtue development, a theme taken up by Slote. Cureton and Hill and Swanton explore self-improvement, the former from a Kantian vantage point, the latter with an eye toward offering solutions to the problems of self-centeredness and virtue ethical right action. Slinger- land examines contemporary psychology as well as virtue development in the Confucian tradition to counter situationist criticisms of virtue ethics. Flanagan, Bucar, and Herdt examine virtue cultivation in the Buddhist, Islamic, and Christian traditions, respectively. The essays by Narvaez, Thomp- son, and McAdams offer descriptive insights from psychology into virtue development. The result is a collection of extremely creative essays that not ( 1 )