The Art of Manliness - #445： How to Close the Character Gap

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00:01:08.360 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. So are people

00:01:27.200 mostly good or mostly bad? Now we're out to think of ourselves as good people while thinking of the

00:01:32.240 general population as not so stellar. My guest today argues that most people, including yourself,

00:01:36.960 are really best described as a mixed bag. His name is Christian Miller. He's a professor of

00:01:40.900 moral philosophy and religion at Wake Forest University. And today on the show, we discuss

00:01:44.860 his new book, The Character Gap. How good are we? We begin our conversation discussing how Christian

00:01:49.740 defines the extreme ends of the character spectrum and why very few people can be described as entirely

00:01:54.400 virtuous or vicious. Christian then highlights psychological studies that highlight both bad news

00:01:59.120 and good news at whether humans tend to have praiseworthy or blameworthy character. And these studies

00:02:03.760 also suggest that whether we behave virtuously or viciously often depends on the context we find

00:02:08.860 ourselves in. We then discuss how to close the gap between how we should act and how we do act,

00:02:12.980 including practices that strengthen our ability and desire to do the right thing. We end our

00:02:16.720 conversation discussing how all world religions provide structured moral development and why we

00:02:20.500 should be slow to call ourselves and others good or bad people. After the show's over,

00:02:24.500 check out the show notes at aom.is slash character gap.

00:02:38.100 Christian Miller, welcome to the show.

00:02:40.260 Thank you so much for having me on.

00:02:41.440 So you're a professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University and your focus is contemporary ethics and

00:02:46.920 philosophy of religion. What's contemporary ethics? I took an ethics class in college and we,

00:02:51.540 sort of like a overview as we talked about utilitarianism, Aristotelian virtue ethics,

00:02:57.160 Kant. So what's contemporary ethics?

00:02:59.400 Sure. So the contrast is really with historical ethics. So I don't study too much what people said

00:03:06.180 in the past going back and kind of digging into Plato or Aristotle or Kant. I'm really much more

00:03:11.320 interested in ethical debates that are going on today and what we as philosophers might contribute to

00:03:17.640 them. And the way I see contemporary ethics is kind of dividing up into three areas.

00:03:23.420 There's what's called meta ethics, which has to do with the foundations of morality. Where does

00:03:28.640 morality come from? What is the source of morality? Is it objective for all human beings or is it just a

00:03:34.040 matter of social or individual construction? That's a relativist position. Another area of contemporary

00:03:39.600 ethics is what we might call ethical theory or normative ethics. And that's what you were alluding

00:03:44.640 to. That's where we look at different accounts of moral right and wrong, different theories,

00:03:50.060 which try to give us guidance to figure out what the right thing to do is and the wrong thing to do

00:03:55.060 is. So you would give examples like utilitarianism or Immanuel Kant's ethics or Aristotelian virtue ethics.

00:04:02.360 And then there's a third side to contemporary ethics, which is applied ethics, where you really get

00:04:07.040 into some of the controversial issues of the day, like abortion or death penalty or stem cells or cloning

00:04:13.420 with these kind of things. So it's a huge field and way more than any one philosopher can really

00:04:19.280 get a handle on. And I just kind of pick and choose what interests me the most. And that tends to be

00:04:25.500 matters of character, matters of virtue, and also issues at the foundation of morality. Where does

00:04:30.640 morality come from?

00:04:32.060 And it seems from the book, we'll talk about the book here in a minute, like that you take a look a lot

00:04:36.600 at psychological research and looking at ethics.

00:04:41.100 Right, that's correct. And that's a little bit unusual, especially maybe like 50 years ago or 30 years ago,

00:04:47.700 philosophers weren't doing that much at all. But in the last 10 to 15 years, there's been a kind of

00:04:53.920 a groundswell of interest in drawing on psychological research to help philosophers do ethics. Now, you might

00:04:59.860 wonder, well, how? I mean, what relevance does it have to play? In my own research on character,

00:05:05.860 it works like this. As a philosopher doing ethics, I can kind of think about questions that are more

00:05:13.040 normative or more evaluative. Questions like, what kind of character should we have? What does a virtue

00:05:20.700 look like? What is an honest person? But I can't get much insight into another set of questions, which are

00:05:27.720 ones about how we're actually doing today. So as a matter of fact, what does most people's character

00:05:33.000 look like? Is it a good character? Is it a bad character? Is it somewhere in between? Are we,

00:05:37.500 by and large, virtuous, vicious, or neither? So for that more empirical question, more descriptive

00:05:43.740 question, I can't sit here in my armchair, which I'm sitting in right now, and kind of pontificate about

00:05:49.160 the deep questions. I need some hard data to wrap my mind around. And for that, I could go

00:05:56.000 to different places. I could go to religion. I could go to history. I could go to current events,

00:06:01.560 plenty of things going on today that could be useful to think about what our character looks like

00:06:06.560 in politics, for example. But what I prefer to do is to consult psychology and look to very carefully

00:06:14.080 constructed psychological experiments, which put people into morally relevant situations. For example,

00:06:22.060 give them an opportunity to cheat or not cheat, steal or not steal, lie or not lie, hurt or not

00:06:28.280 hurt, help or not help, and find out what happens. So do these participants in this study actually step

00:06:35.400 up to the plate and help someone when there's a need or not? Or when they think they can get away

00:06:41.580 with it, do they cheat or not? And so after looking at not just one study, because that wouldn't tell us

00:06:46.460 much. But after looking at a whole wealth of studies, hundreds and hundreds of studies going

00:06:51.020 back in psychology to the 1950s and 1960s, I can kind of craft a picture of what our character actually

00:06:57.860 likes, looks like, and then compare that as a philosopher to what I think our character should

00:07:03.120 look like and see what the difference is. All right. So this is a good segue to the book because

00:07:08.280 it's called The Character Gap. So it's, you're basically looking at what we think, how we should

00:07:13.820 behave, but then what really what, how do we behave on a day to day basis? So before we get into

00:07:19.280 the gap that you say exists, let's, how do you define what it means to have good character or bad

00:07:26.500 character? I think that's a word, you know, those are, it's a word that gets thrown out around a lot

00:07:29.940 since you're a kid, like you got to be a person of good character, but no one really tells you

00:07:34.340 exactly what it means, but you have a rough idea. So as a, as an academic, you want to get very

00:07:39.540 specific. So how do you define someone with good character? Sure. That's a great question. And

00:07:43.680 I guess even more confusing because people talk about character in other ways too. Like they talk

00:07:47.920 about characters in novels, they talk about characters in plays. And I even, you know,

00:07:52.140 when I'm talking about my research, I get people looking at me oddly. They think, do I go to a lot

00:07:57.160 of plays or read a lot of novels to do my research? And I say, wait, wait, wait, no, let's start at the

00:08:01.560 very beginning by defining our terms so that we're not talking past each other. That's, that's what

00:08:05.580 philosophers should always do. So here I'm not talking about things like that. I'm talking about

00:08:09.200 moral character and moral character comes in two varieties. There's a good moral character, which

00:08:15.000 is, which are the virtues. And then there's bad moral character, which are the vices. So examples

00:08:20.100 of virtues include things like compassion, honesty, courage, bravery, temperance, justice, fortitude,

00:08:27.660 generosity, and the like. Now, merely saying that good character is to be understood as the

00:08:34.340 virtues just shifts the question over to what is a virtue. And I think of a virtue as having two

00:08:41.940 main components or parts to it. There's our behavior, and then there's the underlying psychology

00:08:48.820 behind our behavior. And both are really essential to being a virtuous person. So to make it a little

00:08:55.600 bit more concrete, let's take a particular virtue like honesty. So an honest person is expected to

00:09:01.900 display honest behavior. Not just once, like, you know, as if I telling the truth one time gets me

00:09:09.040 enough credit to count as honest in general. No, it's not just once, but repeatedly over time.

00:09:14.840 And not just in one type of situation either. So I don't get to count as honest just because I'm

00:09:19.420 honest in the courtroom. I have to be stably honest in my behavior over time and across a variety of

00:09:27.340 situations relevant to honesty. So the courtroom, the party, the office, the home, school, wherever

00:09:35.640 those might be. So that's, in a nutshell, the kind of behavioral side of having good character,

00:09:40.960 which I'm understanding as virtuous character. But there's more to it than that. Mere behavior,

00:09:46.620 even if it's admirable and praiseworthy, isn't enough to qualify as being virtuous. Why? Well,

00:09:53.920 because underlying motivation in particular matters too. If we just exhibit good behavior,

00:10:00.440 but for poor reasons, morally disadmirable or unfortunate reasons, then we don't get to qualify

00:10:08.940 as virtuous. So again, let's make it a little bit more concrete with an example. We said honest

00:10:13.660 behavior, that's one part of it. But if I'm just telling the truth so that I don't get punished

00:10:19.480 or so that I just make a good impression on some people I'm trying to impress, those aren't the

00:10:26.180 kind of reasons we would expect a virtuous person to be acting upon. They're merely self-interested,

00:10:32.980 focused on myself and my own benefits, and they're not good enough, praiseworthy, to count as virtuous

00:10:39.320 motives, which you need in order to have a virtuous character. So to sum it up and kind of boil it down

00:10:45.320 to one sentence, having good character involves having the virtues, and the virtues require

00:10:50.260 virtuous motivation and virtuous behavior as well. Gotcha. And so I imagine someone who's a

00:10:57.020 vicious person would be just the same thing, right? Yep. It's pretty interesting how you can just

00:11:02.080 flip that and get a vicious person. So a vicious person is also kind of reliable in their behavior,

00:11:08.820 repeatedly doing vicious things, and across a variety of situations. So the cruel person

00:11:14.200 isn't just cruel, you know, in the forest or at the office or anything like that in one kind of

00:11:20.220 narrow situation, it's across a variety of situations, and for underlying cruel motivation

00:11:26.080 as well, because they want to hurt other people, or because they, you know, take pleasure in the

00:11:31.660 suffering of others. So the one caveat to all that, though, is vicious people who are somewhat

00:11:38.540 careful about it, who have some kind of, you know, cleverness about being vicious, they won't advertise

00:11:45.140 their vice. So whereas you might see a virtuous person, you know, telling the truth in a lot of

00:11:50.980 different situations, or being generous to others in lots of different situations, you may not see a

00:11:56.000 cruel person being cruel in a lot of different situations when others are watching them, because

00:12:01.740 they know they're liable to get punished. They'll get in trouble, go to jail, or whatnot. So they're

00:12:06.720 reliable in their behavior, but typically when they think they can get away with it, and no one's

00:12:12.000 looking. Gotcha. So I mean, that's interesting, an interesting definition of virtue, because it's

00:12:15.960 very stringent. And particularly the motivation part, I'm sure gets really tricky, because okay,

00:12:22.560 I went to law school, and you know, some crimes, you have to figure out intent, motivation, and that's

00:12:28.100 really hard to do. It's like mens re, to get inside someone's mind. So how do you, as a philosopher,

00:12:33.780 using psychology, figure out the intent of people? Because people can say, well, I did it for,

00:12:39.340 you know, X altruistic reason, but like really the reason was the other, something else that was

00:12:45.180 more self-motivated. Right, exactly. And I mean, let's be upfront about it. It's very, very hard,

00:12:51.160 and there are no easy answers here. Let me, instead of talking in the abstract, let me give you an actual

00:12:56.380 illustration of how a psychologist has gone about doing this in the case of a really important

00:13:02.840 moral situation. So this psychologist, whose name is Batson, wanted to understand why people

00:13:10.060 who feel empathy are much more likely to help those in need. So this is a long-standing phenomenon

00:13:16.480 of psychology, well-documented going back 50 years, that when you empathize with the suffering of others,

00:13:22.820 you're much more likely to help them than if you don't empathize. Their empathy here,

00:13:27.740 adopting their mindset and trying to understand the world from their perspective.

00:13:31.300 So why is that? You know, what's the underlying psychological or motivational explanation?

00:13:37.940 And there are, you know, dozens of possibilities here. Many of them have to do with self-interest.

00:13:44.060 So maybe you help because you want to make a good impression, or maybe you help because you want to

00:13:48.520 get some kind of reward. Maybe you help because you want to avoid some kind of punishment. Lots and

00:13:52.120 lots of different explanations. So what Batson did is he tried to kind of map them out, all the

00:13:57.680 possibilities, and then test them to see which one was the correct one. And how do you, how can you

00:14:05.400 test them? Well, you could see what predictions each explanation will give. So if this explanation

00:14:13.540 is correct, it would predict people would behave this way. If this other explanation is correct,

00:14:17.660 it would be, predict that people would behave in another way, and another way, and another way,

00:14:21.480 another way. So different psychological explanations of motivation generate different predictions about

00:14:28.900 how we would behave. So what he did was he got people together, put them in these different

00:14:34.140 situations, and see, did they behave the way that was predicted? What's the upshot of it? Well, time and

00:14:42.120 again, the predictions failed. Every single prediction that was based on an egoistic motivation,

00:14:49.640 a motivation that says, I'm helping others so that I might benefit in some way, failed in the lab.

00:14:57.240 The only explanation was a different motivational one that had to do with selflessness, being altruistic,

00:15:05.380 caring about the good of others for their own sake. That explanation time and time again lined up with how

00:15:12.100 people actually behaved in different situations. So his conclusion, after 30 years of research and

00:15:19.460 well over 30 different experiments, okay, I kind of lost track how many it was, was that the most

00:15:25.740 plausible explanation in this particular instance, is that people are motivated by selfless, non-egoistic

00:15:32.660 motives to help others when they feel empathy for their suffering.

00:15:37.820 Well, so I hear that. And the thing that came to my mind when I read that was, what about like

00:15:42.460 objectivist, right? Like sort of Anne Rind folks who say like, well, yeah, people are altruistic,

00:15:48.020 but they're altruistic for selfishly. Like it feels good. So in the end, even altruistic

00:15:52.820 motivations are selfish because yeah, I mean, it does, it feels good when you help people. Like

00:15:57.980 I feel good whenever I help somebody.

00:16:00.100 Great, great. So there are a couple of things to disentangle here. A quick aside about

00:16:04.740 Ayn Rand and objectivist, what they, I'm not an expert on their views, but what I see them

00:16:10.400 typically being interested in is a different question about what we should do. So rather

00:16:17.260 than the empirical question, are we always, as a matter of fact, motivated by self-interest?

00:16:22.980 What they were often trying to convince us is that we should be motivated by self-interest,

00:16:28.200 whether we are in fact motivated by self-interest. So their position is what's called ethical

00:16:32.880 egoism. This is a ethical theory about how we in fact should live our lives. Whether we want to get

00:16:39.660 into that or not, I'm perfectly happy to. I personally think that's a really, really hard

00:16:44.000 theory to accept. Very, very problematic theory. But that's not the main focus of your question.

00:16:49.160 You're saying, well, isn't it often the case that when we help others, we often feel good as well

00:16:55.460 in the process. And so doesn't that ultimately render all of our helpful behavior egoistic,

00:17:02.100 kind of benefiting ourselves. And the key distinction I want to make here, and this is

00:17:08.100 one I actually like to use with my students, and I think it's really valuable, is the difference

00:17:12.500 between a goal and a mere side effect or byproduct. So to take an analogy, when I'm driving my car,

00:17:21.320 my goal is to get to my office or wherever I happen to be going. A byproduct is that my car is

00:17:28.320 emitting exhaust into the environment. That's not my goal, unless I was some kind of weird

00:17:34.180 polluter. You know, like my goal was to pollute the atmosphere as much as possible. That sounds

00:17:38.580 really strange. That's not my goal. It's just a byproduct or side effect of driving my car is that

00:17:42.960 it pollutes the environment. Well, apply that distinction and analogy here. When we help others,

00:17:49.640 it is true that oftentimes it is for egoistic or selfish reasons. You can't deny that. But what

00:17:57.720 is interesting is that Batson's research and others have found that in certain cases, it seems like

00:18:03.960 we care about the good of others selflessly, independent of whether we benefit or not.

00:18:11.240 And if we happen to benefit, if we happen to feel good about it, pleased that we did it,

00:18:19.040 that's great, but it's a mere side effect or byproduct. Our goal, just like in driving the

00:18:25.700 car, is to get to the destination. Here the destination is helping my friends or relieving

00:18:31.960 that person suffering in Africa. And a side effect or byproduct like the exhaust is I get to feel good 1.00

00:18:39.340 or pleased about it in the process. So altruism needn't be, you know, kind of drudgery and needn't

00:18:47.360 be like, I have to put myself through this with no benefit at all. You can benefit. It's just not

00:18:52.640 your goal. It comes along for the ride. Gotcha. And that reminds me of, I think something Victor

00:18:57.360 Frankel wrote about in Man's Search for Meaning. He says like, if you aim for happiness or joy or

00:19:03.400 satisfaction, like you usually miss it. So like, I imagine if you, you go into an ethical decision

00:19:09.580 thinking, well, I'm going to do the right things to make me feel good. Like you probably won't feel

00:19:13.060 good. Right. Right. Exactly. So that's, that quote is, is absolutely in line with what I was just

00:19:19.900 saying. So if you're trying in life to find happiness and that's your, your goal, your own

00:19:24.720 happiness, that may be a frustrating way to become actually happy. Better to invest yourself in other

00:19:31.020 pursuits, which have as a by-product or side effect that you become happy, much more reliable way to

00:19:37.620 actually become happy in life. So a good person with good character, virtuous person does the right

00:19:43.040 thing consistently, you know, for the right reasons. Right. So who are some examples, some

00:19:48.880 conquering examples, flesh and blood examples of you would say, well, yeah, they're probably a

00:19:52.820 virtuous person. Good. And, and that probably is important. As we've talked about already, you know,

00:19:58.380 we can't kind of peer into the minds of others. And since motivation is essential to, you know,

00:20:02.640 we really can't be sure, but I think we can agree on some likely examples. So we can go in a variety

00:20:09.160 of different directions here. You can actually kind of go to, to fiction and look at some exemplars from

00:20:14.580 works of fiction. For example, the, uh, in Les Mis, the bishop who helps out Jean Valjean and gives

00:20:20.660 him the candlesticks instead of sending him to prison. You can go to religious exemplars and, and heroes

00:20:26.320 throughout different religions, people like, you know, Jesus or Confucius or Buddha. You can just

00:20:33.060 talk about heroes and moral saints and exemplars from the histories of different countries. So in

00:20:38.840 our case, we like to point to people like Abraham Lincoln or Harriet Tubman. The one, the other way 0.99

00:20:44.960 to go though, is to kind of look in your own life and people who maybe don't have a lot of celebrity

00:20:50.260 status, but who you deeply admire for some aspect of their character. Maybe they're not perfect in every

00:20:56.900 respect, but in one respect, they show a lot of integrity or they, they exhibit a lot of courage in

00:21:02.660 this case, or they stood up for something that they thought was just, and this might, you know, this could

00:21:07.000 be your neighbor. It could be, you know, someone, a coworker, it could be a family member. So there, there may

00:21:14.320 be, and I hope there are virtuous people in our day-to-day lives, and they actually can have a

00:21:20.120 big psychological impact on our becoming better people too. Gotcha. And so a vicious people, I think

00:21:25.220 the obvious, you know, Hitler would probably be one that people would say was a vicious person, probably

00:21:31.160 a vicious person. Right. So that, that's, that's, that's a pretty safe one. I think that's my, my kind 0.51

00:21:35.940 of go-to one of my ethics classes. It's on the cover. You got Hitler there at the bottom there. 0.85

00:21:39.300 Yeah. Yeah. That helps too. That's right on the cover of my book as the exemplar of, of vice. But

00:21:45.560 you know, plenty of other ones we could talk about too. If you want to do political leaders, Stalin,

00:21:50.940 Mao, Pol Pot. Again, if you want to go kind of fictional, you can say like some fun ones to talk 0.79

00:21:57.820 about are people like Scrooge, for example, or the Grinch. And before he, you know, later at the end of

00:22:03.520 the book, before he has his conversion, the Grinch who wants to steal Christmas. And then, you know,

00:22:08.020 some ones that are a little closer to home in American society, I'm not going to get into any

00:22:12.780 kind of political matters here, but serial murderers and rapists, Ted Bundy and the like come to mind.

00:22:18.820 So sadly, it's easy to come up with examples of vice as it is easy to come up with examples of

00:22:23.720 virtue. All right. So those are the like extremes, right? People who are virtuous, exemplars of people

00:22:30.160 who are vicious. What about just most people? Are most people good? Are most people vicious? Because

00:22:36.960 there's a lot of people have different approaches to that. Like, well, yeah, people are just terrible 0.90

00:22:41.360 for the most part. And then they do good occasionally. Or no, people are inherently

00:22:46.120 good for the most part. And then sometimes they do bad things. What's your take?

00:22:49.800 Right. So, I mean, first we'd have to kind of talk about what good and bad mean. Well,

00:22:53.660 we've already done that. And then we'd have to next ask, well, how are we going to decide

00:22:59.340 how most people are? And I've already indicated I'm going to look to the psychological evidence,

00:23:03.620 but that's only one way to go here. You might want to look to other sources of information. But

00:23:07.460 being clear that I'm going to turn to psychology here, two things emerge to me. First of all,

00:23:14.180 psychological research on what people think they're like, and then psychological research,

00:23:19.560 which I think reflects how people actually are. So on the first one, people tend to have a high

00:23:25.720 opinion of their own moral characters. So if you give people a survey, say, from one to five,

00:23:32.640 where one is kind of core character and five is very good character, most people will say they're

00:23:38.860 about a four out of five. They're not going to say they're perfect or they're really, really good,

00:23:42.560 but they say they've got a pretty good character. And that's true not just in general, but on specific

00:23:46.540 virtues like honesty and generosity. It's also cross-culturally been demonstrated. So it's true

00:23:51.280 in Brazil, just as it's true in the United States. Now, is that accurate? Are people's 0.71

00:23:57.300 self-assessments reflecting what their underlying character is like? And my takeaway from the

00:24:02.760 psychology research, where you actually put people into different situations and see,

00:24:07.240 lo and behold, what do they do? I tend to think that the assessments are inflated. My own as well,

00:24:13.700 I should say that. And I'm not standing up here as some exception from the crowd who's got it all

00:24:19.140 figured out. I thought I had a pretty good character before I got into this research too,

00:24:22.640 and I've had to ratchet it down. So what I end up concluding is that we have what I call a mixed 1.00

00:24:29.620 character, one which is not vicious. So that's good news there. Let's not overlook the fact that

00:24:38.200 it's not vicious. But on the other hand, it's not virtuous either. So our character is not good

00:24:43.320 enough to qualify as virtuous, but not bad enough to qualify as vicious. It's a mixed bag of some good

00:24:49.740 features, which will in many situations lead us to behave quite admirably. But on the other hand,

00:24:57.120 some other features which are morally quite disadmirable or unfortunate, which will in certain

00:25:03.520 situations lead us to do terrible things. I'd be happy to give some examples of each, but as far as

00:25:08.580 what my overall conclusion is, that's what I understand most people to be like, where the most

00:25:13.840 is important. I think of this as a bell curve, with some exceptions, as we've already talked about.

00:25:18.960 There's some outliers on the virtue side, like Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Tubman. And there's 0.81

00:25:23.640 some outliers on the vicious side, people like Ted Bundy and Hitler. But most of us, I think,

00:25:28.940 are in this kind of murky middle.

00:25:31.260 So let's look at some of the experiments in psychology that bolsters this argument that people

00:25:36.000 are not either really virtuous or vicious. We could be either depending on sometimes the situation,

00:25:42.340 right?

00:25:42.540 That's right. Right. So do you want the more positive? Should we do the more positive or the

00:25:47.080 more negative first?

00:25:48.220 Let's do more. Let's do bad news first, good news last.

00:25:52.360 Get it out of the way.

00:25:53.080 Right.

00:25:53.280 Okay. Well, I'll give you one. And if you want some more examples, you can ask me for more. But

00:25:58.220 let's take this one because it's pretty well established in the psychological research. Some

00:26:02.840 other studies, there's some concerns these days about whether they're replicating or whether they

00:26:07.660 were just kind of one-off, not really kind of illuminative about our character. But this one

00:26:12.700 goes back to the 1960s. And it's been replicated time and time again. So it's pretty solid. It has

00:26:19.060 to do with helping, or in this case, not helping, when an emergency is going on. These are the early

00:26:26.420 studies were what led to what's now called the bystander effect or the group effect. And they involve

00:26:32.000 you coming into the lab, signing up and agreeing to be part of a study, taken into a room, given

00:26:38.620 some materials to fill out, a survey. Your task is to fill out the survey. The person in charge

00:26:44.800 leaves, comes back a few minutes later with another person who looks like they're a different

00:26:49.020 volunteer for the same study. They're given the same materials to fill out and told to sit at the

00:26:54.500 same desk or same table you're at. So the two of you are working away at your survey materials.

00:26:59.640 The person in charge has left, gone into her office, and so far so good. But then after a

00:27:06.480 few minutes, you hear a loud crash and then screams of pain. And the person in charge is saying things

00:27:13.920 like, ouch, ouch, this bookshelf has fallen on top of me. Ouch, I can't get it off. My leg,

00:27:19.860 my leg, my leg. What would you do? Well, I'm not going to ask you. I'm not going to put you on the

00:27:25.800 spot. But overwhelmingly, I think we would say, yeah, I would do something, right? People would

00:27:30.800 say, of course I would come to the assistance of the person who just had this emergency in the next

00:27:35.320 room. Well, it depends. If the stranger who's with you in the room doesn't do anything and continues

00:27:44.480 to fill out that survey as if nothing's happened, it's overwhelmingly likely that you will do nothing

00:27:49.800 yourself. In the original study from 1969, only 7% of participants did anything to help when that

00:27:59.600 emergency happened in the next room, whether that was getting up and opening the door or even just

00:28:04.500 calling out and saying, do you need help? Only 7% did anything. In contrast, when participants were by

00:28:12.920 themselves, these are different people, different day, different study, when they were brought into

00:28:19.320 the room and put in the room by themselves, filling out the survey, and then an emergency happens in

00:28:25.380 the next room, 70% helped in that kind of situation. So, 70 versus 7, that's a huge effect in psychology.

00:28:34.880 And it's nice that the 70% helped, but really unfortunate, and I think a bad reflection on our

00:28:41.660 character, that only 7% were willing to help when there was lack of helping seen by a stranger.

00:28:49.940 That's one illustration.

00:28:50.980 Right. We've seen this in real life. Not too long ago, there was that guy who had a heart attack

00:28:55.660 during the middle of Black Friday cell at Target, and he keeled over, and people just stepped over him.

00:29:01.340 That's right. Yep. So, I talk about that example, and just to make sure that these studies are not

00:29:07.500 something we're treating as just academic, you know, exercises or something like that, that have

00:29:11.480 no real-world implications, this is a study that has clear real-world implications. The particular

00:29:18.920 one I'll elaborate a little bit more that you're referring to is just one of hundreds of instances

00:29:23.620 in our society where an emergency happens and there's no helping because people are in a group

00:29:29.480 and they kind of defer to what the group's doing as opposed to rising to the challenge.

00:29:34.000 So, in this particular instance, this man in his 60s had a heart attack in a store. It was a Target

00:29:41.860 store, Black Friday. There were lots of shoppers trying to get the best deals for themselves,

00:29:46.220 and he was doing some Christmas shopping in advance of Christmas. And, you know, if you saw that

00:29:51.460 happen, what would you do? Well, again, you would expect that you and others would come to the

00:29:55.160 assistance of this man. But it was a crowded store, you know, and the deals were, you know, flying off the

00:30:00.420 shelves pretty fast. So, what ended up happening is that the shoppers just ignored him. It's not

00:30:06.060 that they didn't see him. They saw him, but they didn't do anything. In fact, in some cases, they

00:30:10.860 would turn around and go in the other direction, or even more dramatically, they would step over his

00:30:15.980 body to make sure that they got to where they wanted to go. And it was only after quite some time

00:30:21.160 that some nurses recognized what was going on and stepped up to the plate, called 911, but

00:30:26.600 unfortunately, he died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. So, a real-world demonstration of

00:30:31.820 a failure of character. Right. And you see that, and you're like, man, people are just terrible.

00:30:35.980 Like, people suck. You could think that. And in that particular instance, their behavior was not 1.00

00:30:43.380 admirable. I mean, we just, we should accept that, be upfront about that. But it's a jump to go from

00:30:50.080 one behavior to how a person is in general. That's a bad philosophical inference. It's a bad behavior,

00:30:59.020 but that does not automatically make a person a bad person. And it needs to be weighed against other

00:31:05.320 kinds of behavior, other instances where perhaps people are behaving quite admirably. So, if you like,

00:31:11.140 I'd be happy to switch to some more positive news. We're going to take a quick break for a word from

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00:33:32.920 Yeah, let's get the positive. All right. So in some situations when there's lots of people,

00:33:36.860 we tend to do the not good thing. What's something like an example of, you know, people shows that

00:33:43.460 people are, no, people have the capability of doing good. Yeah. So this will actually reference

00:33:48.180 back to the example that comes to mind most immediately references back to our earlier

00:33:51.700 discussion of empathy. So in Batson's research on empathy, we have already said that he's seen how

00:33:59.120 adopting an empathetic state of mind can lead to vastly increased helping. So let me give you a

00:34:06.860 more specific illustration of this. In one of his studies, the participants were students in a class

00:34:13.820 at a university and the professor went into the class and described what had happened to another

00:34:21.260 student at the university, not in a class, but just at the, some student that no one knew had been in a

00:34:26.720 terrible car wreck and needed a lot of help. And well, what happened? Would the students in the

00:34:33.940 class step up to the plate and help or not? Well, it depended, uh, if they were, and this is, um,

00:34:41.160 let me do a little bit more setup first. If a group of those students have been given an empathy

00:34:46.620 manipulation, in other words, they have been told to try to kind of think about the world from the

00:34:52.180 perspective of the student who's been in this terrible car wreck and think about the suffering she's

00:34:56.420 undergoing. And those students were very willing to help out. 76% of them were willing to volunteer

00:35:05.240 to help the student, Katie Banks, and on average, donate an hour and a half of their time.

00:35:12.320 Now, this is a student who they've never met. They're probably never going to come across in their,

00:35:17.060 you know, four years of college. They have got a lot on their plates, but they were willing to do that

00:35:20.900 as compared to another group of the students in the class who had just been the control group who told,

00:35:26.420 you know, just think about what had happened to Katie, but had been told nothing about adopting

00:35:31.140 her perspective. Only 33% of them were willing to volunteer to help Katie. So 33% versus 76%

00:35:40.240 volunteering to help a stranger at their school based upon whether they empathized with their

00:35:46.940 suffering or not. That's really impressive. I think really admirable. And then you add to that,

00:35:53.780 the second thing we talked about already, when it came to empathy, that their willingness to

00:35:59.100 volunteer and help likely stemmed from selfless motivation, generally altruistic motivation,

00:36:06.020 because they were concerned about the suffering of Katie for its own sake and helping her in her

00:36:10.900 difficult situation. That just makes it even better. So this is not limited to universities or to

00:36:18.800 Katie banks or anything like that. It looks like we have, as part of our character,

00:36:22.840 a genuine capacity to help others selflessly in a variety of situations, but that's alongside

00:36:30.800 different capacities, which will lead us to not help others in other situations. So it's a pretty

00:36:36.820 mixed bag. Yeah. Another kind of mixed bag thing that you highlighted, some of the research you

00:36:41.740 highlighted. So everyone's probably seen or read about the research that was done in the fifties and

00:36:45.500 sixties with electric shocks. Is that Milligram who did that? That's right.

00:36:49.080 Right. So yeah, everyone probably has read that. So like some guy, you went in and you were told

00:36:54.660 that someone on the other side was taking a test and they got the answer wrong. You're supposed to

00:36:58.180 give them a shock and the shocks got progressively higher and higher until basically you killed the

00:37:03.060 person. And someone like the experimenter was over this participant's shoulder and said,

00:37:07.660 you know, initiate the shock. And like people kept doing it. And I guess this was the show that,

00:37:11.920 you know, explain why people during the Holocaust, right, were willing to murder people because they 0.89

00:37:18.760 were, they were ordered. Basically they were putting the responsibility on the higher up for

00:37:23.060 the bad behavior. They were taking personal responsibility. But you even highlight, so this

00:37:27.840 experiment shows, yeah, people, if they're put in that situation, they're going to do terrible things.

00:37:32.080 But you say that, no, actually the research, if you look at it more carefully, it's a lot more,

00:37:36.480 it's a mixed bag. Because when people were doing, you know, turning the notch up on this,

00:37:41.540 this shock thing, like they were distressed that they were doing it. So that indicates like,

00:37:46.640 no, these people weren't terrible. They weren't psychopaths. Like they felt really bad about doing

00:37:50.500 this, but you know, nonetheless, they did it anyway. That's right. And that's really,

00:37:54.400 really a helpful presentation. So I think there are a couple respects in which the Milgram studies,

00:37:59.780 which seem like kind of paradigm studies of bad character, don't actually warrant that inference.

00:38:06.000 So what you've highlighted is the struggle that the participants went through. A vicious person,

00:38:12.580 as we highlighted earlier, is someone who's kind of wholeheartedly invested in doing what they're

00:38:18.620 doing, whether it's being cruel or being selfish or whatnot. So they're, they're not very conflicted

00:38:22.820 about it. They're just kind of on board with it. They're ready to go. Well, the participants in this

00:38:27.320 study, they, first of all, many of them verbally said things like, you know, do I have to continue?

00:38:34.600 Can I stop now? And then the authority figure would put more pressure on them. They would say things

00:38:39.880 like, please continue, or we need these results, or you must go on. So they were already showing

00:38:45.800 verbal signs of hesitancy and conflict. But then there were also some kind of more internal

00:38:51.880 psychological signs too. They would, you know, they would shake or they would be nervous or afterwards

00:38:57.860 they would be sweating a lot. Sometimes they would have kind of breakdowns or they would be crying or

00:39:02.860 whatnot. Not, not everyone, but enough of them to suggest that this is not the picture of a vicious

00:39:08.180 person. It's a person, picture of a conflicted person, a person who's really struggling with what

00:39:11.880 the right thing to do is in a very, very challenging situation. And there's, there's another way you can

00:39:16.500 also take it in a more positive direction too, which is that Milgram didn't just do the famous

00:39:21.000 version, which we all know about. So the one where the participant comes in, turns up the dial under

00:39:26.740 pressure from the authority figure, and about 66% of participants go all the way to the XXX or the

00:39:33.820 lethal level of shock. He'd try that all kinds of other variations. For example, where there's no

00:39:39.280 authority figure at all, and it's just the participants and the test taker in the other room.

00:39:44.260 Well, in that kind of case, if people were really vicious, they, they could, you know, turn up that

00:39:49.540 shock dial as much as they wanted. It's not like, you know, anything's really changed as far as

00:39:54.400 inflicting pain on the other person if they wanted to do that. But lo and behold, without the authority

00:39:59.820 figure, participants overwhelmingly just went up a little bit. They turned up the shock dial a little

00:40:04.200 bit, but then they, they stopped after it got clear that they were causing some harm or so they

00:40:09.540 thought to the test taker. So I think there are multiple respects in which this study

00:40:13.840 actually helps support my mixed picture of character as opposed to a really kind of depressing

00:40:19.420 picture of vicious character. So as I've been hearing you describe these experiments, you know,

00:40:24.460 one thing that pops up is that context matters, but that also raises another ethical question,

00:40:29.460 a big one, like does free will exist or do we just do what we do based on the situation we're in

00:40:35.320 and we don't really choose? So I imagine you have to think about that too, as a, as a philosopher.

00:40:40.080 Right. And that's, that's a huge question. And, uh, maybe you should have me back for that one.

00:40:45.260 Yeah. We're not going to get that done in the podcast here. Let's, let's, let's solve the

00:40:48.120 free will problem here in, uh, in five minutes. So, so being clear that this is a huge question and

00:40:54.060 we know, you know, I'll just give you the most preliminary answer I can. You're, you're right.

00:40:58.380 It raises all kinds of interesting questions. One of which is free will and related to that very

00:41:03.060 closely is more responsibility and praise and blame. So let me, let me give you my take real

00:41:09.820 quick take on it. Yes. These studies illustrate how much context matters. So in one context where

00:41:17.240 there's the authority figures next to you, that might lead someone to behave in a certain way.

00:41:22.400 When there's no authority figure in a Milgram study leads to different behavior. When there's a stranger

00:41:26.600 in the room who's doing nothing, you might do nothing yourself. When there's no stranger in the room,

00:41:30.960 you might rise to the occasion and help in an emergency. So, but in a sense, we kind of knew

00:41:37.540 this all along. The context matters. I mean, you know, what you do from moment to moment in your

00:41:44.760 just ordinary life is very much a function of what kind of context you're in. You know, what,

00:41:51.180 whether you're going to eat or not, or whether you're going to stand up or not, or whether you're

00:41:55.020 going to speak or not be very appropriate to speak in certain instances. Context allows for it

00:42:00.340 encourages it. But in other instances, it would be very inappropriate. The context does not allow

00:42:05.400 us, say at a funeral, to just get up and start pontificating about something. So we already

00:42:10.820 know the context matters a lot. But one thing that these studies illustrate is that context might

00:42:15.240 matter in ways that are surprising, quite surprising that we didn't recognize before. We might not

00:42:20.220 appreciate how the stranger's behavior impacts us or how the authority figure's behavior impacts us so

00:42:28.140 much. Okay, so that's one takeaway. On directly the question of free will and responsibility,

00:42:35.200 let me give you a kind of general consensus about what's going on in philosophy and then tie it to

00:42:41.280 character more specifically. So these days in philosophy, there's a large consensus that free

00:42:47.220 will actually exists, despite what you might have heard from other sources, maybe in the popular media

00:42:51.480 or not. A few people deny free will outright, but like I said, the overwhelming majority of

00:42:57.960 philosophers are on board with free will. Now, it's crucial, though, in a longer discussion,

00:43:03.480 we'd have to really parse this out, to settle what we mean by free will. And people mean different

00:43:08.860 things, and there's more inflated notions and more deflated notions, so more robust notions and more

00:43:15.040 kind of minimal notions. And so some people think that certain kinds of free will are available and

00:43:20.120 other kinds of free will are not available. My own take on this, and this is now coming back to the

00:43:25.720 character literature too, is that situation matters a lot and environment matters and context matters a

00:43:31.380 lot. But it's not like it determines completely what we're going to do. It's an input into our

00:43:40.680 psychology, it gives us information, but that our psychology then reflects on it, can reflect on it, can

00:43:48.120 think about it, can process it, and can weigh up different choices as to how to proceed next. So I can get

00:43:56.700 this information about my situation now, and then I can ask myself the question, should I tell the truth, or

00:44:02.340 should I tell a lie? And I can weigh different considerations for telling the truth and against

00:44:07.060 telling the truth, et cetera, et cetera, and come to a conclusion about what I think is the right thing

00:44:11.200 to do in that situation, and then subsequently perform that action. And the upshot and the summary

00:44:18.960 now is that I think I can do that in a way that's free and that's praiseworthy or blameworthy, depending

00:44:26.240 on whether I do the right thing or not. So there's still hope for agency in our psychology, even though our

00:44:32.940 agency is very much influenced by what's going on in our situations.

00:44:37.860 Okay, so if context matters, plays a role in how we behave, and we do have agency in what we do, doesn't have

00:44:47.100 complete control, what can we do to close that character gap, right? Like, I think I'm going to say 99% of my

00:44:52.780 of our listeners here, they want to be good people. What can they do to become more virtuous?

00:44:58.060 Great, great. So let me just say real quickly, explain what the character gap is, and why I

00:45:04.080 titled the book The Character Gap. I mean by the character gap, just the gap between how we actually

00:45:10.600 are, which I say is a mixed bag, and how we should be as people, which I say is virtuous. So there's a

00:45:18.700 gap, a character gap, between how most of us are, in fact, not virtuous, myself included, and how we

00:45:25.480 should be, which I say is a virtuous person. So given that gap, and I think it's pretty sizable,

00:45:30.240 and the studies reflect that, we're not just helpless. It would be really a shame if I had

00:45:35.760 ended the book by saying, there's this gap, and sorry, you know, see you later, you know, time to

00:45:39.400 go home. But fortunately, I think there are some concrete steps we can take to try and bridge the

00:45:45.000 gap, or reduce the gap, or whatever metaphor you want to use. And in the final section of the book,

00:45:50.000 I outline some strategies, which I think are not so promising. And I go into some strategies,

00:45:56.620 strategies, which I think are much more promising. So the key idea here, though, is that I don't think

00:46:01.400 there's any magic formula. There's no 10-step procedure. If you just did this, this, this,

00:46:07.580 this, this, bam, you're going to be an honest person, or take some, you know, metaphorically,

00:46:12.540 some pill that'll turn you into an honest person overnight. It's a slow, gradual process

00:46:18.640 that takes months, years, and really an entire lifetime. So having said that, what is available?

00:46:27.000 Well, I could focus on three strategies, not as competitors, but actually, I think we need all three

00:46:32.000 and probably more as well. Maybe I'll, I'll give you one or two of them. And you can, you can tell me

00:46:36.360 how much further you want to get into them. So one, to start us off, has to do with exemplars. And going

00:46:43.060 back to our earlier conversation about good people, are there any examples of good people?

00:46:47.480 So there's research that suggests that if we look to exemplars and moral saints, people who seem to

00:46:58.080 have the virtues, and we admire them, we can also want to become more like them. So I look to Abraham

00:47:08.240 Lincoln, and I admire how honest he was. But I'm not just doing that at a distance, or maybe sometimes I

00:47:13.520 am, you know, just kind of treating him as some kind of interesting curiosity. It could also have

00:47:18.320 a psychological impact on me in inspiring me to emulate him, inspiring me to become more like him,

00:47:25.400 not in every respect, but when it comes to matters of telling the truth. And that's been found to be

00:47:31.880 true for more historical exemplars, but the most impactful ones tend to be those who are in our daily

00:47:37.660 lives. You know, the co-worker or the family member or the neighbor who exhibits courage or exhibits

00:47:46.220 honesty or compassion for the poor. And then I see that, and that has a direct impact on my own

00:47:53.500 character too. So one strategy for bridging the character gap has to do with seeking out and finding

00:48:01.460 and then emulating people who are already doing much better than us. Another strategy, and I'll stop

00:48:09.100 with this one, has to do with learning more about our character so that we are more aware of the

00:48:16.300 obstacles inside of us to becoming virtuous. So when you read the psychological research, you're,

00:48:23.560 at least I am, impressed that there are all kinds of ways in which we fall short of virtue that I didn't

00:48:28.400 even know we're there. And all these obstacles, like the group effect, for example. I was surprised

00:48:35.400 to learn the impact that being in a group can have on my not helping others. Well, what I call the

00:48:42.320 getting the word out strategy involves learning more about these obstacles, whether it's by reading

00:48:48.360 the research, well, that's hard for people in our busy lives, but, you know, reading summaries of the

00:48:53.020 research, reading popular presentations of the research, reading, listening to podcasts about the

00:48:57.160 research, learning more about these obstacles, so that we are more aware of them and can combat them

00:49:05.000 when we need to. So that the next time I'm in a group and I see an emergency happening, someone's,

00:49:12.800 you know, fallen off their bike or is having a heart attack or whatnot, and the rest of the shoppers or

00:49:19.100 the people at the park are just acting like nothing happened, initially I might hesitate, not do anything

00:49:24.740 myself, but then I might be reminded, wait a minute, why am I hesitating? This isn't for any

00:49:30.440 good reason. It may have to do with fear of embarrassment or something like that, or diffusion

00:49:35.000 of responsibility onto other people. That's not legitimate. That's not admirable. I need to step

00:49:40.760 up to the plate here, even though other people aren't helping, that doesn't justify my not helping.

00:49:46.240 And so hopefully I will be more motivated to intervene. And then in fact, there's some,

00:49:50.380 some, but not many studies, which I found out to be the case.

00:49:53.660 And then you talk about in also in the book that a chapter dedicated, like religion seems to do all

00:49:59.000 sort of these things in a, in a systematic way, right? There's like exemplars, moral exemplars,

00:50:03.940 Christianity has Jesus, Buddhism has the Buddha. So you look at these people, they inspire you.

00:50:09.020 There might even be individuals within your congregation or whatever that inspire you to

00:50:13.040 live virtuously. And even like scripture in different religions, they, they play it. They play up the

00:50:18.280 fact that you have a tendency to do the wrong thing in certain situations. So understand that

00:50:23.520 so you can do the right thing.

00:50:25.220 Right. That's exactly right. So at the end of the book, I have a final chapter on religion.

00:50:29.480 And what I am thinking there is, look, most people these days report that they're religious.

00:50:36.260 And this is also true throughout human history. And at least the major world religions have had a lot

00:50:41.840 to say about character. So it would be a shame to not least take a look at some of their writings

00:50:48.180 and see if there are some helpful insights, which we can glean from them, whether we're religious or

00:50:53.040 not. So prior to that chapter, I had just been discussing character improvement from a secular

00:50:58.220 perspective. And then I switched to this religious perspective for different audiences. I think it can

00:51:03.520 still be helpful for a secular audience. It can be helpful for them to see if there are some

00:51:08.240 insights which might be applicable to them, be kind of translated into more secular vocabulary

00:51:14.080 and still be useful for character improvement. But also for religious audiences, let's take a look at

00:51:21.320 some of the ideas in your particular religious tradition that could be helpful supplements or

00:51:28.200 additions to more secular approaches. And in this chapter, I focus specifically on Christianity

00:51:34.040 because I didn't want to just do a really cursory overview of a variety of different religions,

00:51:39.880 like spend five pages on Hinduism and five pages on Confucianism and five pages on Judaism. I thought

00:51:45.040 that would be so superficial and kind of insulting to the different religions. So I wanted to dive deeper 0.95

00:51:50.740 into one religion, but then also stress that a lot of what I say maps on to other religions as well.

00:51:57.700 So it's not by any means suggesting, and I would strongly oppose the suggestion,

00:52:01.700 that Christianity has some kind of, you know, unique role to play when it comes to character

00:52:06.820 building as if no other religion has anything valuable to offer. So with that kind of framing

00:52:12.620 and background in mind, you're quite right. Christianity, but also other religions have

00:52:16.120 lots to say about exemplars. They point to, say, Jesus as the role model to follow. And also

00:52:21.600 in Christianity, often the dimension of saints as well and the early followers of Jesus, like the

00:52:27.660 apostles. They'll have some things to say about what the obstacles are to becoming a better person

00:52:34.120 and how we might combat them. They'll have often a lot to say about what specific practices we can

00:52:41.720 engage in, in our daily lives or in our weekly lives, what concrete things we can do, things like

00:52:48.480 fasting or tithing, which in Christianity is a kind of commitment to give away a certain percentage of

00:52:54.900 your income to charity or prayer or volunteer work, these kind of specific practices. Confession is

00:53:04.780 another one, which if you commit to them, can in the long run have character building implications.

00:53:13.980 So something like confession would involve telling others, a priest, friends, minister, or whatever,

00:53:21.920 about the wrongdoings in one's life, which can foster things like humility, forgiveness, and

00:53:29.400 compassion. So they have concrete, the point is, practices that could be implemented and utilized

00:53:35.600 as a means of kind of getting us further on the path of bridging the character gap.

00:53:41.700 And I imagine the community aspect is a big role too, right? You're around other people who are all

00:53:46.100 trying to motivate each other to do good.

00:53:48.960 That's right. And that can be true in a secular context too, but it's especially true in a religious

00:53:54.400 context because the religions I'm familiar with the most, I wouldn't want to say all religions are

00:53:59.080 like this, but the ones I'm familiar with the most, outline practices for believers or followers to

00:54:05.520 engage in. But they rarely say that you're supposed to do that on your own, as if you're to kind of,

00:54:11.180 here's what to do and, you know, see you later, do your best. It's rather, here are some things to do,

00:54:17.340 which could be helpful. And lo and behold, you're not left to your own devices. You're going to be

00:54:22.420 surrounded by a community of other people who are going to be doing the same thing. And that can be

00:54:26.900 valuable in all kinds of ways. They can kind of mutually support each other. They can encourage

00:54:31.540 each other. They can also provide exemplars and role models to each other in some respect or other.

00:54:37.780 They can, in a kind of different way, be helpful in discipling and discipling, words we may not,

00:54:44.300 may make us a little bit uncomfortable, but just kind of calling out ways we might fall short in a

00:54:49.560 loving, you know, hopefully in a loving and encouraging way. So it's engaging in religious

00:54:54.520 practices as part of a larger community, which is also engaging in those practices in a mutually

00:55:01.120 reinforcing and supportive way.

00:55:02.800 Right. And I also imagine too, there's the idea, you know, all these different religions,

00:55:06.440 there's a belief that you can change, that you can get better, right? They don't assume like you're

00:55:11.920 just stuck like this. No, there is a bit, you have the power with maybe the help of divine assistance

00:55:18.160 to transcend.

00:55:20.120 That's right. That's right. And it better be like that way because most of these religions also

00:55:25.460 bribe moral praise and blame to people. So, you know, they'll praise you for certain good acts and

00:55:33.020 blame you for certain bad acts, whether that's God's going to do that or the gods are going to do that

00:55:37.660 or karma is going to do that or something. So it looks like we're going to be held responsible.

00:55:42.460 Well, if we can't do anything to change our characters, then that's pretty, you know, it might be unfair.

00:55:47.700 But, you know, fortunately, the good news is that according to these religions, again, that I'm familiar with, 0.99

00:55:52.380 I don't want to say all, we have a certain kind of character, but that character is malleable.

00:55:58.040 And the expectation is that we, or perhaps we in conjunction with some divine assistance,

00:56:03.980 are supposed to move our characters along in the direction that God or the gods or the religious

00:56:11.880 authority intends that character to be and want that character to be in the first place.

00:56:16.660 And this is, thankfully, a commitment that's backed up as well by the psychological research.

00:56:23.340 So, you know, again, it would be unfortunate if religious view said, you can change your character

00:56:28.640 and here's some steps to do it. And the psychological research said, oh, well, actually, when we do the

00:56:33.480 studies, it turns out that you can't change your character. It's stuck. Well, that would be unfortunate,

00:56:38.220 but it's not the case. Psychological research backs up on empirical, purely secular empirical

00:56:43.140 grounds. The idea that character can change slowly, gradually, but still change over time.

00:56:50.100 So another takeaway from your research and your study of character that I think is important that

00:56:57.460 I took away from it is that, okay, none of us, like we don't, there's a character gap. Like there's

00:57:02.780 a way we think we should behave, but we fall short of it. We can bridge the character gap. It's going to

00:57:07.500 take a while. But I think an important takeaway from that is we should cut each other some slack,

00:57:13.580 like everybody, some slack. I mean, grace, maybe have some grace for, because like, you know,

00:57:18.280 there, other people are going to be, do, you know, bad things in certain situations, but they're also

00:57:23.000 going to do praiseworthy things in certain situations. So, so instead of thinking like,

00:57:27.660 man, that person's terrible, well, maybe not. They might not be a terrible person, just the context

00:57:33.520 and they're, maybe they're trying to do better. That's right. That's very, very, very well put.

00:57:38.300 And I actually wish I had said more about that in the book. I think that's, that is definitely what

00:57:42.480 I believe, but I think I didn't emphasize it enough as, as I should have. So there are a couple

00:57:47.220 things strike me right off the bat. I would really commend the idea that we should not go from one

00:57:54.260 action to a conclusion about someone's character. So, you know, just seeing someone cheat on a test,

00:58:01.660 I wish we should be very nervous or careful to go from that to the conclusion of that person's a 0.93

00:58:08.580 cheater in general. So action is one thing, character is another. In order to really get a good

00:58:14.240 assessment of someone's character, we need to see how they behave over time and in a variety of

00:58:21.000 situations. We need a lot, a kind of rich mosaic of their behavior and, you know, ideally also of their

00:58:28.300 underlying psychology before we can reasonably make conclusions about their character. And then the

00:58:35.260 other thing that really struck me about what you said is that don't be so sure that you wouldn't do

00:58:40.060 the same thing yourself, right? So, you know, the, the Milgram experiments, they, Milgram, before he ran

00:58:47.200 those experiments, kind of asked people on the streets, what do you think you would do if you were in that

00:58:52.720 kind of situation where you had the chance to turn up that shock dial and, you know, under pressure from

00:58:57.340 an authority figure? Well, those people said what a lot of us would say, which is, you know, I would

00:59:02.840 never do that, or I would only turn up to a, you know, a moderate amount, but I would never turn all

00:59:07.000 the way up to the lethal amount and kill someone. Well, you know, don't be so sure about that. If you're

00:59:13.960 actually in that situation, you might behave deplorably too, just like participants actually did, 66% of them,

00:59:20.780 it turned out when they were put in this situation that Milgram constructed. So I think your, your

00:59:27.120 choice of the word grace is, is very appropriate here. I know we don't want to go too far on the

00:59:31.480 opposite extreme and just kind of excuse. Right. Okay. You know, you're off the hook or not that

00:59:38.120 big a deal, you know, go about your business. But when it comes to judging and forming conclusions

00:59:44.220 based upon our judgment of other people's character, let's have some grace and let's have some caution.

00:59:48.920 Humility. Yeah. Like you don't, yeah. Have some humility as you approach it with yourself and

00:59:53.660 with other people. That's exactly right. I should have, I should have used the virtue term. Humility

00:59:58.040 is the best virtue term there. Yep. Well, Christian, this has been a great conversation. There's some

01:00:02.280 places people can go to learn more about your work because, you know, you've done a lot of research

01:00:06.000 in writing about morality and ethics. I imagine there's more. Sure. Well, you know, based on our

01:00:11.380 conversation, the natural starting point would be this book that we've talked about, The Character

01:00:14.880 Gap. Beyond that, I would recommend that people perhaps visit my, my website, which they can find

01:00:20.780 at Wake Forest just by Googling my name and Wake Forest. I also I'm on Twitter and on Facebook at

01:00:27.120 Character Gap. That's one word, no space, Character Gap. But then finally, I'm, I welcome kind of people

01:00:33.480 reaching out to me directly. So my email address is on my website too. And if someone has a question

01:00:39.740 about character or ethics, more generally speaking, you know, I can't promise I will get back to you

01:00:45.040 the very same day, but I, I will work really hard to get back to you within a few days and, you know,

01:00:50.700 help either say some things of a, of a hopefully helpful manner or point the person to some readings,

01:00:58.640 which might be useful for that person. So I'm happy to be a resource in thinking about these matters.

01:01:02.880 You know, someone's going to ask you about free will if it exists.

01:01:05.160 Go read some books. Right. Yeah. There, there, there, there are a couple of good books out there,

01:01:11.860 which would be a great starting point. Great. Well, hey, Christian, thanks so much for coming on.

01:01:15.360 This has been great. Thank you so much for having me on. My guest today was Dr. Christian Miller.

01:01:19.060 He's the author of the book, The Character Gap. How Good Are We? It's available on amazon.com.

01:01:23.560 Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash character gap where you can find links to resources

01:01:29.320 where you can delve deeper into this topic.

01:01:35.160 Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice,

01:01:48.320 make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. We got over 4,000 articles

01:01:52.840 there. Also, if you haven't done so already, really appreciate if you guys review on iTunes or Stitcher

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01:02:06.020 your continued support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.

The Art of Manliness - October 01, 2018

#445： How to Close the Character Gap

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