Wilson Center Experts

My current work focuses on the moral psychology of soldiering. In particular, I am interested in the moral emotions of being a warrior - what is the nature of a soldier's fear, anger, grief, regret, remorse, pride, shame, and revenge. And what is the nature of resilience in the face of war's brutality. A warrior's emotions may seem to some an oxymoron. But the stoic face of a soldier belies a complex emotional and moral drama that often only literature exposes. As a philosopher trained in the history of moral philosophy (both ancient and modern) and more recently, in psychoanalysis, I look at the challenges of soldiering through those lenses. I come to military ethics in a roundabout way.

In 1994, in the wake of a massive cheating scandal at the U.S. Naval Academy, I was recruited as an ethics consultant. This later led to an appointment as the Inaugural Holder of the Distinguished Chair in Ethics from January 1997 to June 1999. The course I helped design and taught was addressed initially to the 133 midshipmen implicated in cheating but later to the Brigade as a whole. Leadership courses, with their mix of management and motivational psychology, were standard fare at the Academy. A course on the ancient subject of ethics was initially met with skepticism: how dare I try to teach what ought to be bred in the bones? The prejudice was soon dropped once the officers began to read the Stoics, Epictetus in particular. Epictetus spoke to their "suck it up" culture. Reflections on that fit of ancient Stoicism and military culture is at the heart of my recent book, Stoic Warriors. That book captures in a nutshell my mix of interests.

I have a B.A. magna cum laude with honors in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College, an M. Litt. in philosophy from the University of Edinburgh, and a Ph.D. from Harvard in moral philosophy (1981), where I received Harvard's George Plympton Adams' Prize (1982) for the most distinguished Ph.D. thesis in the subject area of History of Philosophy. My thesis, on Aristotle's theory of moral education, eventually led to my book, The Fabric of Character. My two advisors, Martha Nussbaum and John Rawls, planted in me a dialogue between Aristotle and Kant on ethics, worked out, one might say, in my next book, Making a Necessity of Virtue. In both those works, I found myself focusing on questions of moral emotions and their development in the making of character.

Roughly ten years ago, I realized that to understand these issues more adequately, I needed the framework of a "deep" moral psychology, and so sought out research training in psychoanalysis at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. After five years, I completed that training, with certification from the American Psychoanalytic Association, as well as the Washington Institute's Gary O. Morris prize for the most distinguished essay (1999). A few more pieces fill out the intellectual biography.

In 2001 I was appointed University Professor at Georgetown, having been at Georgetown since 1989. Before that I taught at Yale, where I was an assistant and associate professor of philosophy (1982-1989). In addition to my visiting appointment at the Naval Academy, I have also held visiting appointments at Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland. As University Professor at Georgetown, I have the privilege of teaching the wider university community, and since 2004, have held an adjunct position at the Law Center. One of my greatest thrills is to have started a joint law and philosophy seminar as a way of building bridges between the Law Center and Main Campus, which are in separate parts of town. In 2004-2005, the topic was war; last year the topic was emotion, cognition, and the law. Like a kid in a toy store, I continue to be dazzled by the new possibilities for collegial friendship and research that the law affiliation has afforded me.

Over the years, my work has been generously supported by fellowships and grants. At Harvard I received Teschemacher fellowships in classics and philosophy as well as the Woodrow Wilson's Newcombe Doctoral Fellowship in 1980-1981. During my seven years at Yale, I received three major grants: a National Endowments for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship, Sept. 1984-Sept. 1985; an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship, July-Dec. 1987; and a Mellon Fellowship, Jan.-July 1988 given in conjunction with Yale's Whitney Humanities Center Fellowship program. Once at Georgetown, I received a Mellon Summer Fellowship, Summer 1992; an NEH fellowship, July-Dec.1996; and an American Philosophical Society Fellowship, 2002-03. In addition, I have received competitive Georgetown summer fellowships in 1990, 1991, 1994, 1995, and 2001. All of these fellowships have been absolutely indispensable for my research and publication. My gratitude to these institutions is great, as is my gratitude to the Woodrow Wilson Center for my current fellowship.