Research indicates that a segment of the lawyer population is impaired by mental illness, such as anxiety, depression, substance misuse, or suicide risk. A much higher number of lawyers likely fall on the languishing end of the mental health spectrum. If you are languishing, you may be at a higher risk of sliding into impairment. Mental health is assessed on a continuum, ranging from languishing to flourishing. Languishing has been described as feeling uninspired, joyless, and lacking the power to function at full capacity. And languishing may increase your risk of mental illness, such as major depressive episode, generalized anxiety, panic attacks, or substance use disorder. Lawyers may suffer from several obstacles to mental strength, including lack of self-awareness, perfectionism, imposter syndrome, social comparisons, trained pessimism, inability to regulate emotions, and inauthenticity from a failure to understand or leverage their temperament and personality strengths. Features of the lawyering culture may augment these obstacles and lead to lawyer languishing.

The book concludes with a discussion of the ways that virtue science can influence the discipline of psychology. First, it reiterates that virtue science is off to a good start. The success of virtue science calls the fact–value dichotomy into question because scientifically studying virtues is deeply imbued with value commitments. Virtue science is more interdisciplinary than psychology, and the value of working across disciplinary lines in virtue science recommends greater interdisciplinarity among psychologists. This interdisciplinarity in virtue science has helped to clarify the many philosophical contentions that tend to be ignored by psychologists or just built in as contentious assumptions. The STRIVE-4 Model clarifies how much improved conceptualization can enhance a research area, suggesting that psychology, as a discipline, can benefit from more systematic theory. Virtue science also calls for improved research, especially person-centered research and transcending self-report measures. Finally, virtue science calls for the recognition of the centrality of the aspiration to live well as human beings. Greater attention to this core aim can help psychologists to be much clearer and more direct about their objectives.

The introduction asks the question of why social scientists should study virtues empirically. It offers five reasons: (1) humans are moral animals, (2) moral behavior can be understood as an expression of acquired traits, (3) it is psychologically realistic to think that ordinary humans can acquire and express virtue traits, (4) moral education is valuable, and (5) virtues are often taken to be essential to a good life. The Introduction then addresses three challenges that virtue scientists must face: (1) the absence of empirically oriented virtue theory, (2) the overreliance of simple survey design in psychology, and (3) virtue skeptics. The Introduction concludes with an outline of the chapters of the book and how these chapters comprise the sections of the book.

This chapter discusses the field of moral development and explores what this research field can tell us about virtue development, which is a relatively neglected topic in virtue theory. The chapter is primarily about moral development in children, both because there is substantial scientific interest in this population and because virtue development must begin in childhood. Moral development research illuminates three apparently naturally developing preconditions for virtue development: (1) the ability to choose, (2) an interest in collective welfare, and (3) an interest in ethical normativity. Moral development research is also compatible with the STRIVE-4 Model in that it is primarily quantitative. Moral development generally does not focus on traits, with the exception of some research on moral identity, moral emotions, and moral exemplars. The chapter concludes by exploring how virtue science can contribute to moral development research, including an increased emphasis on (1) person-centered research, (2) the contextualizing of development in situations and roles, (3) flourishing, and (4) practical wisdom.

Some neo-Aristotelians see a strong link between virtues and eudaimonia or flourishing, but others do not. After acknowledging this difference, the chapter explores some of the possible implications of this link. The view explored in this chapter is that virtues contribute to success in goal and good pursuit, which, in turn, contributes to a flourishing life. The neo-Aristotelian view examined holds that there are things that are good for humans qua humans (e.g., close personal relationships, group belonging). Success in pursuing these goods is hypothesized to be correlated with eudaimonia. It explores several challenges in studying eudaimonia, but concludes that eudaimonia research should continue and be updated as conceptualization and measurement improves. The chapter concludes with a discussion of three well-documented human goods (close personal relationships, group belonging, and meaning) and their hypothesized relationships with specific virtues (e.g., loyalty, forgiveness, honesty).

This chapter concerns the pursuit of aretē among the sophists. It argues that such pursuit did not mean what it came to mean to Plato and his heirs. For the latter, the goal of human life, called eudaimonia, is personal flourishing; and aretē is used to refer to some highly valued psychological condition crucial to achieving eudaimonia. The sophists use aretē to refer to a psychological condition once. Predominantly, they use aretē to refer to a life of civic success, conceived as success in public affairs, saliently involving the agent’s making significant positive contributions to his fellow citizens and polis. As such, sophistic ethics tends to be civic ethics. Granted this, there is limited evidence of anti-civic ethics among the Sophists. Given traditional views of the Sophists, the locus of this evidence is ironic. It consists of attributions to the Socratic Aristippus and content in the Athenian Antiphon’s On Truth.

This chapter focuses on relational practices of care to nurture prosociality in children and adolescents. We begin by introducing care as an ethical stance toward another that requires attention and commitment to another, as well as sensitivity to the developmental needs and uniqueness of every child. We then outline the practices of relational care, and how they matter for efforts aimed at nurturing children and adolescents’ prosocial orientations. It is argued how recognition of and careful attention to children and adolescents and their ethical development can move humanity forward, and how true commitment to others and an ethical self can contribute to the flourishing of all children. We present examples of nurturing care, including community-based and organizational initiatives as well as existing research-based psychological programs, and we discuss implications for policy. We conclude by outlining next steps for a future agenda of transforming nurturing care for all children and adolescents.

Abstract: Democratic ideas and habits do not arise automatically; they have taken centuries to develop, and stitching democracy together after its fault lines have been exposed, as they recently have been in the United States, is a long-term affair. Citizenship education requires contributions from an extended curriculum – math and science, art, and the humanities, as well as social studies and civics – focused on the specific needs of rising citizens. One place to begin is by taking the idea of citizenship as an office seriously and then asking what kind of education is needed to make that office effective in advancing democratic culture.

This chapter addresses Aristotle’s conception of the civic purposes of education, how the education he proposes would serve those purposes, his stance toward democracy and democratic education, and the compatibility of the education he proposes with a democratic society and system of government. It argues that his educational proposals aim to facilitate a partnership of all citizens in living the best kind of life and are thus focused on cultivating moral and intellectual virtues and educating diverse children together with a view to nurturing civic friendship. It concludes that Aristotle defends forms of shared governance in the common interest that would qualify as limited forms of democracy and that the education he proposes is recognizably democratic. Despite their elitist limitations, his works offer significant resources for understanding democracy and democratic education, most notably his conception of the role of common schools in promoting civic friendship and shared governance.

I argue that one of the basic tenets of classical liberalism is that, if left free, people will cooperate and reciprocate with others as a means to pursue their own individual desires. Yet, if one is not careful, the rules and institutions that evolve within society over time may crowd out the motivation for people to reciprocate, and may instead crowd in their tendency towards selfish egoism. Policy makers therefore have a role to play in nurturing the conditions that, ideally, protect and foster the intrinsic human tendency to reciprocate. However, one should not try to force people to be cooperative; the tendency to reciprocate ought to be autonomously driven, and the extent to which people are driven to reciprocate – both positively and negatively – will often be influenced heavily by perceptions of desert. I finish by proposing a few ways for reciprocity to be nurtured: namely, for policy makers to emphasise the importance of this basic human tendency in their rhetoric; to address the extreme concentrations in income and wealth that have been allowed to accumulate in many countries over recent decades; and to decentralise, as far as possible, public policy decision making.

This chapter explores the broader topic of creativity and positive outcomes, of which positive emotions are one. The other positive outcomes we focus on include socialization, personal growth, meaning/legacy, and flow. We first describe the various models of well-being that feature these outcomes, such as subjective well-being (SWB; Diener, 1984), psychological well-being (Ryff, 1995), flourishing (Seligman, 2011), and self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2017). In the bulk of this chapter, we discuss the existing research in the creativity field related to each of these five outcomes. Major progress on this topic has been made in recent years, offering much to discuss.

If Aristotle understood virtue (aretē) to refer to the realization of a potential capacity or telos, then how might we understand the world to reach its virtuous potential? What might it mean to view our own global present as not an apex but as a passing stage within a broader process of worlding? Understanding the world as a live entity that perpetually worlds its way into new actualizations -- manifesting the dynamic capacities, potential, and striving of “virtue” -- this chapter turns to Shakespeare as a source for alternative models of world that awaken us to its inherent potentiality. For example, in As You Like It, the condition of exile unlocks a paradigm of seeing otherwise -- and often optimistically -- that runs throughout the play, enabling characters to form new bonds that serve as the basis for individual and communal flourishing. I examine the extent to which the play’s new community of relationships makes a place for nonhuman animals as well as for the pessimism and self-exile of Jaques. Such models enable us to not only see around and beyond the realities of our globalized world but also to perceive alternative formulations of world as already present and alive in the world we live in.

This chapter examines relationality objections to intervention in nature. It starts by reconstructing Clare Palmer’s contextual approach, according to which we are not usually required to assist wild animals due to the lack of prior morally relevant entanglements with them. It rejects these grounds for determining positive obligations, arguing that it implausibly implies there is no requirement to help distant human beings in need due to natural causes or to benefit others at no cost. Next, it offers a case for construing Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s account in Zoopolis of our political duties toward wild animals in a way that much more pervasive interventions in nature may be required. If we have a duty to ensure that the environment meets wild animals’ needs, facts suggest that the satisfaction of wild animals’ needs does not depend on the preservation of their natural environments. Instead, we should favor some form of environmental enhancement, that is, any modification of environmental conditions with a net positive effect on nonhuman well-being.

In the minds of many parents and in the eyes of the law in many countries, becoming an adult is signified by turning age 18. As nice as it might be to think that simply turning a certain age automatically equips an individual with all of the knowledge, skills, and abilities requisite to independently and successfully navigate adulthood, the reality is that becoming an adult is a process. As such, parents continue to play an important role in the process of their children becoming adults. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the many important ways that parents still matter in the lives of their children during emerging adulthood. In order to do this, first, a theoretical and developmental foundation will be provided for why it is important to consider the contributions of parents during emerging adulthood (ages 18-29). Next, a review of the literature will show the specific ways in which parenting is linked to emerging adults’ flourishing and floundering, respectively, including the role that culture may play in these relations. Finally, the chapter will include a framework for parents to think about how to parent during this time.

Contemporary thought on human rights is rooted in significant part in the soil of natural law theory. Some natural law theorists embrace the idea of enforceable rights to a range of desirable socioeconomic outcomes. But natural law theory is best understood as grounding rights that foster these outcomes indirectly. Such rights, as I envision them, qualify as socioeconomic rights because they directly concern the socioeconomic sphere and because they further those aspects of flourishing which alternative schemes of socioeconomic rights are often intended to protect. There is, I suggest, a plausible natural law case to be made for indirectly promoting these dimensions of well-being by enforcing legal rights to bodily integrity, property, and labor, and so accepting robust limits on the use of force. In this chapter, I lay the groundwork for an exploration of that case by elaborating the variety of natural law theory in which I seek to ground my understanding of socioeconomic rights. I go on to discuss norms germane to the institutional context of socioeconomic life and to propose a set of fundamental socioeconomic rights and briefly consider the significance of these rights.