Robert Campbell Roberts

Robert Campbell Roberts (born 1942) is an American philosopher and distinguished professor emeritus of ethics at Baylor University. Previously he was a professor of philosophy at Western Kentucky University (1973–1984), and professor of philosophy and psychological studies at Wheaton College (1984–2000). After retirement from Baylor in 2015, he occupied the Chair of Ethics and Emotion Theory in the Jubilee Centre, University of Birmingham UK until 2017, with a joint Chair in the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

Roberts’s published work is mostly in philosophical moral psychology with special interest in the moral import of affective states such as concerns, desires, emotions, and attention. In 1984 he published “Will Power and the Virtues” (Philosophical Review), arguing that some virtues are skills, and in 1988 “What An Emotion Is: A Sketch” (Philosophical Review), arguing that emotions are concern-based construals, a kind of concern-laden “seeing as.” He elaborated this account of emotions in his 2003 book, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge U.P.). In 2013 he developed this view further in explicit reference to moral psychology in Emotions in the Moral Life (Cambridge U.P.). The farther aim of these two books was to prepare the way for an account of the human virtues, which he published in Attention to Virtues: An Affective Grammar (Cambridge U. P.) These three books form a trilogy on affective moral psychology. In 2007, in collaboration with William J. Wood, an epistemologist, Roberts co-published Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology(Oxford U.P.). Roberts’s and Wood’s account of intellectual humility has received attention from philosophers and psychologists. Roberts has also been interested in the nature of ethics as a philosophical discipline, and has advocated a virtue-focused approach, which he distinguishes sharply from most of contemporary virtue ethics.