Philosophy Book Club: The Character Gap, 3, What can we do to improve our characters?

There is a lot of talk these days about ethics and building character. Which is why I have been so keenly interested in Christian Miller’s The Character Gap, a science-based examination of what character is and how it works. (part I of my discussion is here, part II here) Besides, the whole framework of Stoicism, and virtue ethics more generally, is predicated on the notion that we can improve our character, so this is highly relevant to whoever adopts that particular approach as a compass to navigate life.

Having discussed what character is (part I), and having shown that there is a gap between where most people are and where they would like to be (part II), the last third of Miller’s book is devoted to the most practical question of them all: how do we improve our character? The discussion comprises three chapters: what doesn’t seem to work, what does seem to work, and the special case of “divine” assistance. I have written at the beginning of this series that I was going to skip that last chapter, since I don’t find the whole notion of divine assistance very meaningful, but after having read it, I will in fact devote to it the next and last entry in this series (spoiler alert: I think that one is by far the weakest of Miller’s chapters).

So, first off, what doesn’t seem to work, when the goal is to improve our character? Three strategies: do nothing, virtue labeling, and nudging.

You may not be surprised to find out that doing nothing (first strategy) doesn’t help, but in fact that conclusion is not as obvious as it may at first appear. The idea is that we improve naturally, while aging, simply because we accumulate life experiences and mature in the process. Indeed, there is some empirical evidence that traits like conscientiousness do change and get better with age. The problem is that, at the same time, the older we get the more we get set in our ways, with the chances of real improvement getting smaller and smaller. More generally, we have pretty good evidence from a number of other domains that one hardly achieves excellence at something by not actively working at it, and since we begin life with a fairly large gap between where our characters are and where they should be, doing nothing doesn’t seem a good way to go.