Richard B. Miller                                       
Director of the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions
Professor 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 work in religious thought and ethics at the intersections of moral theory, political philosophy, cultural and social criticism, and Western religion. My research ranges between theory and practice and situates itself within the wider contours of the academic study of religion.  Much of my focus is on social and political ethics and some of it turns on issues of moral psychology. 

All of my research and teaching falls under the rubric of “social criticism and the ethics of belief.” I understand that rubric to be multivalent.  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 research has moved through five overlapping phases.  I began by focusing on theological and philosophical debates about pacifism and just-war theory within a culture of moral pluralism, leading to the publication, Interpretations of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism and the Just-War Tradition (1991). The winner of a Bross Prize, this book 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 during the second phase of my research.  The fruit of that work, Casuistry and Modern Ethics: A Poetics of Practical Reasoning (1996), 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 engaging issues in bioethics and, in particular, the care of children, for the third phase of my research.  Enriched by ethnographic immersion in several pediatric medical contexts, grant support from the Lilly Endowment, and a year-long fellowship in political theory and professional ethics at Harvard, I wrote, Children, Ethics, and Modern Medicine (2003).  This work examines parental and professional responsibilities toward patients who are young. 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 during these three phases, especially the notion of rights and liberal social criticism, fed into a recently completed project, Terror, Religion, and the Disquiet of Equal Liberty. 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.  Much of that book was enriched by my work as Director of the Poynter Center.  My research is now entering its fifth phase, focusing on issues of religion and democratic public culture with initial attention to debates about religion and public reason.  

I direct the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions and, with Eric Meslin of the IU Center for Bioethics, I co-edit the IU Press series, Bioethics and the Humanities. For information about programs and initiatives at the Poynter Center, please consult the Poynter Center website. 

Graduate offerings include Virtue and Freedom; 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, and occasional reading courses. 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 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 fall 2009 I will be teaching R170, “Religion, Ethics, and Public Life.” I will post a tentative copy of the syllabus for that course later this summer (You may examine a prior syllabus by consulting my course descriptions.) I am planning to teach a new, in-depth course in spring 2010 on recent work in religious ethics.