Richard B. Miller                                       
Director of the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions
Provost Professor, Department of Religious Studies
Indiana University
Bloomington
PH: 812.855.0261
Fax: 812.855.3315
 

Course Offerings

Projects

Books

Research Materials

Poynter Center

Religious Studies

Ethics Bowl

I am Provost Professor in Religious Studies and Director of the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions at Indiana University.  My work focuses on religious thought and ethics, particularly at the intersections of moral theory, political philosophy, cultural and social criticism, and Western religion.

All of my work falls under the rubric of "social criticism and the ethics of belief." I examine ethical idioms and arguments that arise from religious traditions, and I put those idioms and arguments to critical scrutiny in one or another comparative way. 

My first book addresses theological and philosophical debates about pacifism and just-war theory, leading to the publication, Interpretations of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism and the Just-War Tradition (1991). The winner of a Bross Prize, this work orchestrates a dialectical exchange between pacifists and just-war theorists regarding some putatively shared interests: the presumption against harm, the relation of justice and order, the ethics of civil disobedience, war and civic virtue, public policy and nuclear deterrence, and practical reasoning about the morality of war. I continue to address the ethics of war in response to theoretical disputes, policy questions, and international conflicts. 

Questions about war and practical reasoning opened up methodological investigations about ethical judgment and the moral imagination that I took up in my second book, Casuistry and Modern Ethics: A Poetics of Practical Reasoning (1996).  That work develops an interpretive understanding of practical reasoning in dialogue with new currents in moral theory regarding the use of cases and attention to "moral particulars" in ethical deliberation and social criticism. I argue that practical reasoning must coordinate diverse interdisciplinary tools – including those from law, cultural studies, literature, and political theory – to enrich the moral imagination and to organize our perception of salient particulars of moral experience.

Viewing ethics as a form of interpretive social criticism provided the platform for taking up issues in bioethics and, in particular, the care of children, for my third major project.  Enriched by ethnographic immersion in several pediatric medical contexts, grant support from the Lilly Endowment, and a year-long fellowship in the Program for Ethics and the Professions at Harvard, I wrote Children, Ethics, and Modern Medicine (2003). This work examines parental and professional responsibilities toward persons who are young and ill. I define basic norms that should shape family and professional responsibility in pediatric care with an eye to important cases in American law or moral cases that materialized in my hospital fieldwork. I examine agonizing parental decisions – often informed by religious belief – to prolong treatment, refuse treatment, or demand unconventional treatment for children. I also address institutional obligations in a pediatric hospital and ethical issues in pediatric research. I conclude by providing a basis for liberal social criticism of the family. 

Ideas and arguments around which my research revolved for these projects, especially the notion of rights and liberal social criticism, fed into my fourth book, Terror, Religion, and Liberal Thought (2010). This book draws on liberal political and moral theory to clarify the injustice of 9/11 and to develop the implications of that judgment for thinking more broadly about respect for persons and religious toleration, multiculturalism, and the relationship between religion and ethics. 
 
During 2010-12, I was the Principal Investigator of an interdisciplinary research project, “Virtuous Empathy: Scientific and Humanistic Investigations,” funded by the University of Chicago and the John Templeton Foundation. This project brought together a team of faculty members, a post-doctoral fellow, and a dissertation fellow at Indiana University for a series of formal seminars, informal meetings, symposia, and visiting lectureships to examine empathy’s descriptive and normative aspects. The IU team’s specific interests drew on work in social psychology, brain science, moral theory, history, and the social scientific study of groups and institutions. Working from the notion that empathy designates a psychological state in which one’s thoughts and emotions are conditioned by one’s perceptions of another’s feelings and frame of mind, the team’s core question was this: On what terms, if any, can empathy qualify as a virtue, understood as a habitual disposition of good judgment, feeling, and action, an excellence of character that has personal and civic dimensions? 

The “Virtuous Empathy” project proceeded on the premise that not all versions of empathy are intrinsically good – that empathy has the potential for facilitating either virtue or vice. The IU team thus explored empathy’s connection to moral norms in order to distinguish virtuous empathy from rudimentary and less praiseworthy varieties, e.g., infant reflexes, as well as from empathic responses to undesirable thoughts and feelings. The IU team sought to determine whether virtuous empathy is psychologically realistic – within the reach of demonstrable human capacities and subject to cultivation and habituation. The team also explored empathy’s links to public and social responsibility, especially, but not only, in law, education, the helping professions, and the penal system.  Members of the project pursued all of these aims by coordinating knowledge and methodologies from different disciplines with an eye toward creating a model for future scholarship that bridges the sciences and the humanities. 

I am currently at work on a book that brings together a series of published and unpublished essays into a volume tentatively entitled, Friends and Other Strangers.  This book seeks less to examine friendship and otherness as specific targets of analysis than to explore them as touchstones for thinking for a number of discrete controversies in the academy and public culture – controversies surrounding identity, religion and democratic authority, ethnography and religious ethics, empathy and virtue, public memory, family relationships, war and social criticism, and representations of the body along with its wider dependencies and connections.  Along the way, I aim simultaneously to broaden the field of religious ethics and to re-imagine the work of the humanities in ways that can more readily incorporate insights from religious ethicists’ work.  I am also working on some individual essays on the idea of nature as a basis for social criticism in modern Western thought about religion.

My graduate offerings include From Christian Ethics to Social Criticism (2 semesters); Religion, Justice, and Culture; Religion, Culture, and Medical Ethics; Religion and the Self in Augustine, Kierkegaard, and Freud; War and Peace in Western Religion; Contemporary Religious Ethics; Religion and Social Criticism, and occasional reading courses, e.g., Religion, Ethics, and the Emotions. I also mentor graduate students as Associate Instructors in Religion, Ethics, and Public Life, a large introductory undergraduate course. Those interested in specific course details may consult my course descriptions.  All graduate work in religious thought and ethics at Indiana University is keenly interdisciplinary and includes a monthly workshop of faculty and graduate students who meet to discuss work-in-progress.

In spring 2012 I am teaching D315, "Religion and the Self in Augustine, Kierkegaard, and Freud." In fall 2012 I will teach R330, "From Christian Ethics to Social Criticism I."