A Very Bad Wizard (PDF)

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 eight additional interviews and offering features that will make A Very Bad Wizard more useful in undergraduate classrooms. These features include structuring all chapters around sections and themes familiar in a course in ethics or moral psychology; providing follow-up podcasts for some of the interviews, which will delve into certain issues from the conversations in a more informal manner; including an expanded and annotated reading list with relevant primary sources at the end of each interview; presenting instructor and student resources online in a companion website.

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.