The Character Gap, Christian B. Miller
The Character Gap, Christian B. Miller
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The Character Gap
How Good Are We?

Author: Christian B. Miller

Narrator: Johnny Heller

Unabridged: 5 hr 54 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/19/2018


Synopsis

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.

About Christian B. Miller

Christian B. Miller is A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and Director of the Character Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is the author of over 75 papers as well as two books, Moral Character: An Empirical Theory and Character and Moral Psychology. He is also the editor or coeditor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology, and several other volumes.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kendall

Simplistic philosophical and ethical analysis. Seems that if you're not a sociopath, then you can't really be a truly unvirtuous person to the author, which seems like a bit of a low bar. His takes on Christianity at the end felt out of place and were mildly offensive only because of how oversimplis......more

Goodreads review by Chris

After finishing Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk by Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, I loved it so much that I asked Justin for some recommendations on similar books, and he recommended this one. I’m so glad he recommended it because it’s now one of my favorite books that covers both mo......more

The cover of Christian B. Miller’s book, The Character Gap, has a picture of Gandhi at the top and Hitler at the bottom with a graded spectrum between them. The picture is fitting, for one of Miller’s central theses is that most people are neither as bad as we could be nor as good as we should be. W......more