We tend to admire people who stay true to their convictions in the face of opposition, who are not tempted to twist or withhold the truth for selfish reasons, and who seek the truth even when it means giving up their cherished views. Indeed, integrity, honesty, and truth seeking are crucial virtues on both intimate and global scales, significant in everything from our relationships to our politicians' accountability. The past forty years have witnessed a dramatic resurgence of philosophical interest in the virtues. And yet there has been surprisingly little work among philosophers aimed at helping us better understand these three truth-related virtues.
Edited by philosophers Christian B. Miller and Ryan West, this interdisciplinary volume significantly advances the discussion of integrity, honesty, and truth seeking by incorporating the insights and perspectives of experts in philosophy, law, communication and rhetorical studies, theology, psychology, history, and education. Each of the volume's three sections is devoted to one virtue, and comprises a conceptual chapter about the nature of the virtue in question, an application chapter that explores the virtue's central role in an area of human life, and a developmental chapter covering some of the ways people can foster the virtue. Additionally, the volume addresses experimental work on honest and dishonest behavior, one of the fastest growing and most important research areas in the field of moral psychology today.
Every reader will come away from this volume with a deepened knowledge of and appreciation for the essential roles of these three virtues in our world, and rich resources for developing and sustaining them in life.
Christian B. Miller is A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He was the Philosophy Director of the Beacon Project and the Director of the Character Project. He is the author of over 80 academic papers as well as three books with Oxford University Press, Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), and The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (2017). His writings have also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon, and Christianity Today. Miller is the editor or co-editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (OUP, 2006), Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (OUP, 2015), Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character (MIT Press, 2017), and The Continuum Companion to Ethics (Continuum Press, 2011).
Ryan West is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Grove City College. His research areas include ethics, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of religion. His work has appeared in such journals as
Canadian Journal of Philosophy,
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly,
Synthese,
Faith and Philosophy, and
Journal of Religious Ethics.
