Character and Moral Psychology by Christian Miller (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 663 scientific expert—has unlimited dominion over himself or others. Human beings are limited stewards, not absolute masters. Human fulfillment does not come through unlimited autonomy but through respecting the fundamental inclinations to the good, which every person has, being created in the image and likeness of God. Throughout this study, one runs up against secular ethics, which justifies the termination of human life and the alteration of the human genome in the name of palliative care, freedom, or science. The length and technicality of this volume make it a formidable challenge, but the thematic inter-chapter cross-referencing significantly facilitates wading through the moral difficulties and solutions presented. Many medical terms may be unknown to readers, but with internet searches such a problem is easily surmountable, and it is rarely essential to know these terms in great detail in order to understand the argument. My only criticism of this wonderful work is that it does not take into account some of the arguments which emerged in the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly over the last five years concerning plan B, craniotomy, vital conflicts, and the like. While this long study may be a bit ambitious for beginners in theology or bioethics, it is a must-read for professors of medical moral theology and should not be ruled out for practicing doctors and nurses. BASIL COLE, O.P. Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception Washington, D.C. Character and Moral Psychology. By Christian Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. 288. $55.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-19967436 -7. Christian Miller directs the Character Project, which is funded by the Templeton Foundation and whose purpose is to advance and promote the study of character in philosophical, psychological, and theological disciplines. As part of this work, Miller has recently completed two books, the second of which is the subject of this review. This book comprises four parts, the first of which, it should be noted, is a compressed version of the previous and more comprehensive Moral Character (OUP, 2013) with an additional discussion of cheating. 664 BOOK REVIEWS In the first part of the book, Miller notes that across six studies on cheating involving 791 participants who could not possibly get caught, only five participants cheated as much as possible (Mazar, 2008). Although Miller does not spell this out, from these statistics we may conjecture that roughly less than 1 percent of the population are truly vicious (real cheaters), and if virtue is as rare as vice, then less than 1 percent are truly virtuous (see the discussion of the study on nonmalevolence by Meeus and Raaijimakers below). That suggests that roughly 98 percent of the population are neither truly virtuous nor truly vicious. There are hundreds of similar studies on moral behavior and Miller argues that they confirm that the vast majority of human beings are neither virtuous nor vicious. Although the numbers are staggering, this should not be too surprising for anyone in the Aristotelian tradition, since virtue, that is, excellence, is by definition rare. For Aristotle the story of the moral space between virtue and vice is that of continence, incontinence, and the many. But Miller claims that there is far more to the moral story for most of us. He argues that this middle space is littered with clusters of interrelated dispositions that are the principles of moral actions. These dispositions are neither good nor bad (neither virtues nor vices) but “mixed,” and will reliably cause particular kinds of moral acts for good and for ill. Most people’s moral character is constituted precisely by such a group of mixed-trait dispositions, and such character needs to be further studied from the perspective of psychology, philosophy, and theology (37-52). In other words, the study of moral character vis-à-vis habits and dispositions is not only about the virtues and vices. Miller’s position on mixed traits is illustrated by his treatment of aggression. In this case the vice is cruelty and the virtue is non-malevolence. (One might wonder whether non-malevolence, that is, being disposed not to harm others, is a real virtue, but Miller only considers in detail those moral character traits about...