For the best part of two decades, a tense dialogue has been underway between philosophers and empirical scientists on the topic of character. Correcting for a longstanding philosophical habit of cavalier neglect for hard facts, spokesmen for the empirical sciences have brought the findings of psychology and social science to the philosophers’ door to unsettling effect. A key catalyst for debate has been the work of Gilbert Harman and John Doris, who drew on the situationist approach to personality to propose that character, as moral philosophers have understood it, is less fact than fiction, with empirical research showing that people lack the robust traits of moral character in which virtue theorists would appear to be invested. Could virtue ethics survive the hard glare of these facts? The intervening period has seen a boom in philosophical responses to such challenges.

Combining empirical expertise with philosophical literacy, this book—along with the author’s earlier Moral Character (2013)—offers a robust new contribution to this debate. Having set out his positive empirical account of character in his first book, Miller’s aim in this one is to engage in diplomacy, placing his account in critical conversation with several other frameworks, including situationism. At the heart of his view is the empirically grounded claim that the majority of people indeed lack qualities of character that correspond to what moral philosophers would recognise as virtues or vices. But—and here is where his account parts ways with several other commentators’—this is not to say they lack moral character simpliciter, that is, real dispositions that manifest themselves stably and consistently in morally relevant patterns of thought, desire, and action. What most of us possess are ‘mixed traits,’ traits that are neither virtues nor vices, but rather granulated patterns of response based on highly specific modules of belief and desire.

Part 1 of the book sets out the main concepts, summarises the ‘mixed traits’ account, and illustrates it with the case of cheating. Part 2 relates the ‘mixed traits’ account to three prominent views of personality traits: situationism, the cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS) model, and the Big Five model. It is Part 3 that philosophers will take the greatest interest in (and that I will focus on here). This is where Miller’s diplomacy touches on the broader implications of his view, with Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 respectively spelling out what it entails for our ordinary practice of making descriptive use of the language of character and for our philosophical practice of producing normative theories about character. The account of mixed traits reveals our ordinary practice of attributing character traits to people to be deeply flawed. When we ascribe virtues or vices to each other, our judgements will usually be false. Conversely, the moral character traits of most people are such that we lack the linguistic tools to describe them. Does that mean we should abandon this language and look for a better one? Interestingly, Miller does not adopt this view, and allows for the possibility that the services performed by this language may be an argument for its retention.

Turning to normative theory, Miller surveys the responses generated by situationist views among virtue ethicists, isolating the ‘rarity response’ as the flagship. To subscribe to a normative ideal about character is to make no commitment about the actual realisation of this ideal in practice; historically, most philosophers have acknowledged that perfect virtue is rarely found. Yet this way of carving the normative and the actual apart, Miller argues, does not exempt virtue theory from having to meet the challenge of psychological realism. This means establishing whether, and how, the ideals spun out in the ivory towers of philosophy can be realised in practice by beings as far from virtue as empirical evidence has shown them to be. This demand for a ‘how’ is a demand to articulate a plausible model of character education that bridges real and ideal.

The scope of Miller’s scholarly engagements is impressive, and the quality of argument high throughout. Yet one of the things that struck me in going through the book was my persistent failure to be surprised or antagonised by the main empirical thesis. For a theory that claims to reveal the error of ordinary judgement, its inability to surprise will seem interesting. Bracketing the familiarity of situationist views in academic circles, Miller’s account meshes naturally with my sense that the people who surround me are not paragons of virtue, but all-too-human even in their better qualities. As I doubt this perception reflects mere personal idiosyncrasy, this raises the question whether unqualified ascriptions of the virtues are as deeply embedded in our ordinary practice as Miller indicates. In everyday social interactions, certainly, I continually call upon an implicit notion of what people are like and how they are likely to react. Yet could this notion be analysed into a set of unqualified propositions couched in terms of virtue or vice (‘my father is generous,’ ‘my friend is honest’), propositions I take to represent psychological realities with mirror-like fidelity and generate robust predictions about behaviour in all trait-relevant situations, as Miller suggests? Insofar as I apply these concepts, I do not do so as a detached scientific inquirer into character. In gauging the traction of Miller’s position, I felt the need for a closer (empirical) reflection on the place of the vocabulary of virtues and vices within our ordinary practice.

The main challenge Miller outlines for virtue theory points to a broader question about whether ethics should be realistic that is calculated to expose deep rifts among different theorists. Yet it is a question that has certainly had a glorious history of negative response. Among several stripes of philosophers and theologians in both the Christian and Muslim contexts, the moral life has been thought of as a pursuit of godlikeness. Was the pursuit of this ideal premised on a belief in the realistic possibility of achieving it? On the contrary, the excess of the ideal was critical to the moral aspiration it generated. Even if such programmes of transcending the measure of humanity no longer command our sympathy, it seems to me that the realistic spirit needs to be calibrated by the insight that ethical aspiration is specially oriented by the beautiful and the great.