TODAY, November 12, Dr. Blaine Flowers, a Professor at University of Miami, will be a giving talk at CBBSG 12-1pm in Corbett E378. Details about his talk are below. Free food for attendees will be served from 11:50am.
The Emerging Science of Virtue
Social scientists have begun to test the claims that positive ethical traits such as virtues are important elements of human psychology and behavior and that positive ethical traits can be studied empirically. Despite scores of published studies, this research is far from a mature science of virtue due to unresolved theoretical and methods challenges. In addition, some are concerned that virtue science violates the fact-value dichotomy. I present the STRIVE-4 Model of virtue to guide the resolution of the theoretical and methods challenges of virtue research. The Model depicts virtues as empirically verifiable, acquired scalar traits that are role sensitive, involve situation by trait interactions, and relate to important values that partly constitute eudaimonia (human flourishing). The Model also holds that virtue traits have 4 components: knowledge, behavior, emotion/motivation, and disposition. I discuss the heuristic value of the STRIVE-4 Model for a science of virtue and indicate some representative research paradigms for assessing the Model’s hypotheses.