This is a provocative contribution to contemporary ethical theory challenging foundational conceptions of character.

The man Paul Auster called "A master of bewitchments" and a founder of the fiction collective returns to the novel after 20 years In the spirit of "transcendent buffoonery" Curtis White's miraculous return to fiction is fun in the extreme. When a masked man arrives in N---, Illinois bearing a letter and claiming its contents a matter of life or death, the small town--and the fabric of reality--will never be the same.

John M. Doris has been a leading proponent of interdisciplinary approaches to moral psychology for decades. His work has transformed the way in which philosophers approach questions of character, virtue, and agency. This selection of his work focuses on the ways in which human personality orders (or fails to order) moral cognition and behaviour.

This book is a provocative contribution to contemporary ethical theory challenging foundational conceptions of character that date back to Aristotle. John Doris draws on behavioral science, especially social psychology, to argue that we misattribute the causes of behavior to personality traits and other fixed aspects of character rather than to the situational context. More often than not it is the situation not the nature of the personality that really counts. The author elaborates the philosophical consequences of this research for a whole array of ethical theories and shows that, once rid of the misleading conception of motivation, moral psychology can support more robust ethical theories and more humane ethical practices.

Christian Miller explores ethical implications of his new theory of character, which holds that our characters are made up of mixed traits with some morally positive and some morally negative aspects. He examines whether judgements of character are systematically erroneous, and assesses the challenge to virtue ethics from scepticism about virtue.

Most of us are not virtuous people; but neither are we vicious. Instead, our characters are decidedly mixed, and much more complex than we might have thought. Christian Miller presents a new account of moral character based on Mixed Character Traits. He explores how most of us are less than virtuous people but also morally better than the vicious.

We like to think of ourselves and our friends and families as pretty good people. The more we put our characters to the test, however, the more we see that we are decidedly a mixed bag. Fortunately there are some promising strategies - both secular and religious - for developing better characters.