The Virtues of Limits

David McPherson

Creighton University

In this talk, David McPherson explores the place of limits within a well-lived human life and discusses his original account of limiting virtues, which are concerned with recognizing proper limits in human life. The limiting virtues that are the focus are humility, reverence, moderation, contentment, neighborliness, and loyalty. This discussion draws from McPherson’s new book The Virtues of Limits (Oxford University Press, 2022).

David McPherson is an associate professor of philosophy at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. He works in the areas of ethics (especially virtue ethics), political philosophy, meaning in life, and philosophy of religion. He is the author of The Virtues of Limits (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2020), as well as the editor of Spirituality and the Good Life: Philosophical Approaches (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He is a recent past president of Philosophers in Jesuit Education. He is currently a Visiting Research Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder for Academic Year 2021-22 and working on his third book monograph titled Spiritual Alienation and the Quest for God.