A Very Bad Wizard ─ Morality Behind the Curtain

In the first edition of A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain – Nine Conversations, philosopher Tamler Sommers talked with an interdisciplinary group of the world’s leading researchers—from the fields of social psychology, moral philosophy, cognitive science, and primatology—all working on the same issue: the origins and workings of morality. Together, these nine interviews pulled back some of the curtain, not only on our moral lives but—through Sommers’ probing, entertaining, and well informed questions—on the way morality traditionally has been studied.

This Second Edition increases the subject matter, adding nine additional interviews and offering features that will makeA Very Bad Wizard more useful in undergraduate classrooms. These features include structuring all eighteen chapters around sections and themes familiar in a course in ethics or moral psychology; providing follow-up podcasts for more than half of the interviews, which will delve into certain issues from the conversations in a more informal manner; presenting instructor resources online, such as class notes and topics and questions for class discussion for each interview; including an expanded and annotated reading list with relevant primary sources at the end of each interview. These readings, which also will be listed online with links to URL sites, will supplement the interviews for instructors who use the book as their primary text.

The resulting new publication promises to synthesize and make accessible the latest interdisciplinary research to offer a brand new way to teach philosophical ethics and moral psychology.

Tamler Sommers is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Houston. His research focuses on moral responsibility, revenge, honor, and the philosophy of punishment. He is the author of Relative Justice: Cultural Diversity, Free Will and Moral Responsibility (2012) and co-host of the Very Bad Wizards podcast. He is currently writing a book in defense of honor.