Anne Jeffrey
Biographic Data
| ID | 3602128 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Anne Jeffrey |
| GIVEN NAMES | Anne |
| FAMILY NAME | Jeffrey |
| SIGNATURE | JEFFREY A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Baylor University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0145-906X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Anscombe, Anarchism, and Authority
A priori philosophical anarchism says that a right to be obeyed would run up against the duty to act autonomously, so there must be no one with a right to be obeyed. More recently, a parallel criticism of moral testimony has been advanced according to which there can be no right to be believed about moral matters because it would lead us to fail in our duty to form our moral beliefs for ourselves, and thus to bear responsibility for the beliefs a…
A puzzle about loving your enemy
The ideal of loving our enemies figures in a range of traditions and political movements even if it is an ethical principle most of us fail to live up to. That does not keep us from thinking of the person who loves their enemies as exceptionally admirable; and we might think enemy love is good and good for us, not least because of its promise to restore relationships broken by trust and move us toward each other amidst polarization. But if we dig…
Grounding Moral Obligations in Aquinas's Metaethics
Philosophers across a range of historical traditions and in contemporary metaethics have debated how nature relates to moral obligations. This debate among interpreters of Aquinas has seemed particularly intransigent. The present essay proposes an interpretation of Aquinas's view of moral obligations that embraces elements of both the neoscholastic view and the New Natural Law view, standard moral naturalism and non-naturalism, by holding togethe…
Reappraisal as a means to self-transcendence
Recent work in positive psychology demonstrates the importance of self-transcendence: understanding oneself to be part of something greater than the self, such as a family, community, or tradition of sacred practice. Self-transcendence is positively associated with wellbeing and a sense of meaning and purpose. Philosophers have argued that self-transcendent motivation has a central role in good character, or virtue. Positive psychologists are jus…
Conceptualization and measurement of hope including Black youth
This mixed-methods study used a participatory action approach to develop and test a culturally grounded measure of hope among adolescents. Eighteen adult community leaders participated in interviews, and a youth advisory board provided their perspectives on hope in the southeastern U.S. This information was used to develop the Adolescent Hope Scale. Psychometric testing was conducted using data from an online panel of 311 youth participants (66.2…
One goodness, many goodnesses, and the Divine Ideas Imitation Theory
Some theories of goodness are descriptively rich: they have much to say about what makes things good. Neo-Aristotelian accounts, for instance, detail the various features that make a human being, a dog, a bee good relative to facts about those forms of life. Famously, such theories of relative goodness tend to be comparatively poor: they have little or nothing to say about what makes one kind of being better than another kind. Other theories of g…
Mino-Bimaadiziwin and the Pursuit of Harmony
Academic AbstractTheories of well-being are heavily influenced by Western viewpoints; even when Majority World perspectives are incorporated, psychologists often fail to consider the rich cultural knowledge of the Indigenous peoples of North America. We propose that personality and social psychologists engage in "deep learning" (without appropriation or colonization) of a Native American Majority World perspective on well-being. We present a desc…
A Kantian Approach to Objective Morality and God's Existence
In this article, we explain how Kant upends the terms of the debate concerning the relationship between God's existence and an objective morality by looking at his moral-teleological argument for God's existence in the third Critique. We explain Kant's rejection of external sources of moral normativity and his method of grounding moral authority in the normativity of practical reason. We then turn to Kant's argument justifying a practical belief …
The Virtue of Patience
Many traditions and worldviews have held that patience is a virtue-a habit that is morally praiseworthy. In this essay we orient readers to recent work on what patience is and what patience does. What are the distinctive markers of the disposition of patience? And why have people regarded it as so important to living well? We outline four contemporary views all anchored in historical philosophical traditions and then suggest future directions for…
What is virtue? Using philosophy to refine psychological definition and operationalization
We compare the definition of virtue in philosophy with the definition and operationalization of virtue in psychology. We articulate characteristics that virtue is presented as possessing in the perennial western philosophical tradition. Virtues are typically understood as (a) dispositional (b) deep-seated (c) habits (d) that contribute to flourishing and (e) that produce activities with the following three features: they are (f) done well, (g) no…
Conceptualizing “positive attributes” across psychological perspectives
BACKGROUND: The growth of positive psychology has birthed debate on the nature of what "positive" really means. Conceptualizations of positive attributes vary across psychological perspectives, and it appears these definitional differences stem from standards for "positive" espoused by three normative ethical frameworks: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. When definitions of "positive" do not align with one of these ethical schools,…
The Argument from Good Friendship to Character Realism
Against reductivist character realism
It seems like people have character traits that explain a good deal of their behavior. Call a theory character realism just in case it vindicates this folk assumption. Recently, Christian Miller has argued that the way to reconcile character realism with decades of psychological research is to adopt metaphysical reductivism about character traits. Some contemporary psychological theories of character and virtue seem to implicitly endorse such red…
Is the atonement necessary or fitting
In her impressive Atonement , Eleonore Stump claims that her novel Marian theory of the atonement meets a desideratum for a successful theory that Aquinas's theory does not, namely, showing that Christ's passion and death are essential to the solution to the problem of human sin. Here I suggest reasons to side with Aquinas, who says that Christ's suffering and death are not necessary, but merely a fitting way of solving the problem. If the fittin…
Fluctuating maximal God
This paper explores a variety of perfect being theism that combines Yujin Nagasawa’s maximal God thesis with the view that God is not atemporal. We argue that the original maximal God thesis still implicitly relies on a “static” view of divine perfections. Instead, following the recent re-evaluation of divine immutability by analytic philosophers, we propose that thinking of divine great-making properties (omnipotence, omniscience etc.) as fluctu…
Limited Epistocracy and Political Inclusion
In this paper I defend a form of epistocracy I call limited epistocracy – rule by institutions housing expertise in non-political areas that become politically relevant. This kind of limited epistocracy, I argue, isn't a far-off fiction. With increasing frequency, governments are outsourcing political power to expert institutions to solve urgent, multidimensional problems because they outperform ordinary democratic decision-making. I consider the…
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Limited Epistocracy and Political Inclusion
In this paper I defend a form of epistocracy I call limited epistocracy – rule by institutions housing expertise in non-political areas that become politically relevant. This kind of limited epistocracy, I argue, isn't a far-off fiction. With increasing frequency, governments are outsourcing political power to expert institutions to solve urgent, multidimensional problems because they outperform ordinary democratic decision-making. I consider the…
Fluctuating maximal God
This paper explores a variety of perfect being theism that combines Yujin Nagasawa’s maximal God thesis with the view that God is not atemporal. We argue that the original maximal God thesis still implicitly relies on a “static” view of divine perfections. Instead, following the recent re-evaluation of divine immutability by analytic philosophers, we propose that thinking of divine great-making properties (omnipotence, omniscience etc.) as fluctu…
Is the atonement necessary or fitting
In her impressive Atonement , Eleonore Stump claims that her novel Marian theory of the atonement meets a desideratum for a successful theory that Aquinas's theory does not, namely, showing that Christ's passion and death are essential to the solution to the problem of human sin. Here I suggest reasons to side with Aquinas, who says that Christ's suffering and death are not necessary, but merely a fitting way of solving the problem. If the fittin…
The Argument from Good Friendship to Character Realism
Against reductivist character realism
It seems like people have character traits that explain a good deal of their behavior. Call a theory character realism just in case it vindicates this folk assumption. Recently, Christian Miller has argued that the way to reconcile character realism with decades of psychological research is to adopt metaphysical reductivism about character traits. Some contemporary psychological theories of character and virtue seem to implicitly endorse such red…
What is virtue? Using philosophy to refine psychological definition and operationalization
We compare the definition of virtue in philosophy with the definition and operationalization of virtue in psychology. We articulate characteristics that virtue is presented as possessing in the perennial western philosophical tradition. Virtues are typically understood as (a) dispositional (b) deep-seated (c) habits (d) that contribute to flourishing and (e) that produce activities with the following three features: they are (f) done well, (g) no…
Conceptualizing “positive attributes” across psychological perspectives
BACKGROUND: The growth of positive psychology has birthed debate on the nature of what "positive" really means. Conceptualizations of positive attributes vary across psychological perspectives, and it appears these definitional differences stem from standards for "positive" espoused by three normative ethical frameworks: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. When definitions of "positive" do not align with one of these ethical schools,…
Grounding Moral Obligations in Aquinas's Metaethics
Philosophers across a range of historical traditions and in contemporary metaethics have debated how nature relates to moral obligations. This debate among interpreters of Aquinas has seemed particularly intransigent. The present essay proposes an interpretation of Aquinas's view of moral obligations that embraces elements of both the neoscholastic view and the New Natural Law view, standard moral naturalism and non-naturalism, by holding togethe…
Reappraisal as a means to self-transcendence
Recent work in positive psychology demonstrates the importance of self-transcendence: understanding oneself to be part of something greater than the self, such as a family, community, or tradition of sacred practice. Self-transcendence is positively associated with wellbeing and a sense of meaning and purpose. Philosophers have argued that self-transcendent motivation has a central role in good character, or virtue. Positive psychologists are jus…
Conceptualization and measurement of hope including Black youth
This mixed-methods study used a participatory action approach to develop and test a culturally grounded measure of hope among adolescents. Eighteen adult community leaders participated in interviews, and a youth advisory board provided their perspectives on hope in the southeastern U.S. This information was used to develop the Adolescent Hope Scale. Psychometric testing was conducted using data from an online panel of 311 youth participants (66.2…
One goodness, many goodnesses, and the Divine Ideas Imitation Theory
Some theories of goodness are descriptively rich: they have much to say about what makes things good. Neo-Aristotelian accounts, for instance, detail the various features that make a human being, a dog, a bee good relative to facts about those forms of life. Famously, such theories of relative goodness tend to be comparatively poor: they have little or nothing to say about what makes one kind of being better than another kind. Other theories of g…
Mino-Bimaadiziwin and the Pursuit of Harmony
Academic AbstractTheories of well-being are heavily influenced by Western viewpoints; even when Majority World perspectives are incorporated, psychologists often fail to consider the rich cultural knowledge of the Indigenous peoples of North America. We propose that personality and social psychologists engage in "deep learning" (without appropriation or colonization) of a Native American Majority World perspective on well-being. We present a desc…
A Kantian Approach to Objective Morality and God's Existence
In this article, we explain how Kant upends the terms of the debate concerning the relationship between God's existence and an objective morality by looking at his moral-teleological argument for God's existence in the third Critique. We explain Kant's rejection of external sources of moral normativity and his method of grounding moral authority in the normativity of practical reason. We then turn to Kant's argument justifying a practical belief …
The Virtue of Patience
Many traditions and worldviews have held that patience is a virtue-a habit that is morally praiseworthy. In this essay we orient readers to recent work on what patience is and what patience does. What are the distinctive markers of the disposition of patience? And why have people regarded it as so important to living well? We outline four contemporary views all anchored in historical philosophical traditions and then suggest future directions for…
Anscombe, Anarchism, and Authority
A priori philosophical anarchism says that a right to be obeyed would run up against the duty to act autonomously, so there must be no one with a right to be obeyed. More recently, a parallel criticism of moral testimony has been advanced according to which there can be no right to be believed about moral matters because it would lead us to fail in our duty to form our moral beliefs for ourselves, and thus to bear responsibility for the beliefs a…
A puzzle about loving your enemy
The ideal of loving our enemies figures in a range of traditions and political movements even if it is an ethical principle most of us fail to live up to. That does not keep us from thinking of the person who loves their enemies as exceptionally admirable; and we might think enemy love is good and good for us, not least because of its promise to restore relationships broken by trust and move us toward each other amidst polarization. But if we dig…
Epistemology (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Philosophical Ethics and Theory (6 works) · Medieval Philosophy and Theology (5 works) · Theology and Philosophy of Evil (5 works) · Virtue (4 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (3 works)