An Aristotelian in Birmingham — Kristján Kristjánsson

A philosopher and a teacher: Tell us briefly about yourself and your work

I received my PhD in mainstream moral and political philosophy from the University of St. Andrews. However, fate had it that I got a permanent position in an Education department (first at the University of Akureyri and then University of Iceland), and my interest shifted to educational philosophy. Then, after some research fellowship stints at the University of Cambridge, I received a professorship in the newly formed Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham, UK (in 2012) where I am still employed. I later took on editorship of the Journal of Moral Education in 2017. I guess I am now best known for my work on character and virtues at the borderline between moral philosophy, moral psychology, and moral education – for which I received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Humanistic Studies in the Netherlands in 2025, the Kuhmerker Lifetime Award from the Association for Moral Education in 2025, and the Order of the Falcon from the President of Iceland in 2026. I am doing more and more consultancy work (e.g., for OECD) and speaking engagements around the world, and I have published over 200 journal articles and numerous books with publishers like Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Routledge.

What is your understanding of "humour" proper; or, at least, of those features thereof to which you have paid the keenest attention? And how does your work merge with, or is influenced by, your quotidian encounters with a potentially ubiquitous and ambiguous phenomenon such as humour? 

I have not written specifically on humour as such, unless you count the chapter in my just published book, The Kindly Virtues (2026), where I talk about the important role that comedians have in disrupting manner-related norms and appearing “unkindly” in ways that may still be for the benefit of our epistemological and moral states and hence count as overall “kindly”. That said, I do share Aristotle’s controversial view of humour or wit as a moral virtue: more specifically as a medial trait between boorishness and buffoonery. I think I would even go further than Aristotle in defending this virtue. In Aristotle, it occupies a somewhat marginal cross-category position between moral and civic virtues. Aristotle thinks it lacks a unique emotional component, which characterises most moral virtues, and that it is more similar to the civic virtues in mainly aiming at congenial and pleasant human encounters in casual contexts. It is true that humour is often used non-emotionally, say, to defuse a socially embarrassing situation, but I think that it is also often emotionally laden. For example, we feel hurt if our friends do not “get” or “appreciate” our jokes, and I once read a study that showed an incompatible sense of humour to be one of the commonest reasons for the breakdown of marriages. So I think there is reason to take humour very seriously as one of the components of flourishing human lives and flourishing societies. It is no coincidence that the first sign of a regime turning autocratic is often the censorship of certain kinds of humour in public discourse. There is nothing that despots hate more than being made fun of.

Thinkers as different as Nietzsche, Judith Shklar, and Derrida have argued that cruelty is baffling because, even if we want to eliminate it from human life, it always finds a way to re-emerge therein, almost as if it were part and parcel of the same human life. Has cruelty ever played a significant role in your work's purview, and/or your understanding of social and cultural phenomena? 

Again, I have not written directly on the concept of cruelty as such. Our recent empirical and conceptual analysis of phronesis (practical wisdom) did, however explore the relationship between phronesis and the Dark Tetrad traits, some of which include considerable cruelty (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0317842). We were happy to find out that our phronesis construct predicts most of the Dark Tetrad traits negatively (in a census-matching sample of 4,000 US and UK adults), as we would have hoped it does, and also that our instrument predicts this better than Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory. At a more theoretical level, I have often thought about the concept of evil (I even wrote my BA dissertation on it!), and I agree with Julia Annas that we need to define it narrowly as deep alienation from moral goodness, rather than simply as a lack of moral virtue. For example, I think Donald Trump lacks the depth to count as an evil person. Most cases of cruelty are cases of thoughtlessness and moral indifference rather than profound expressions of evil. Finally, to return to my new book, I discuss artworks such as Max Ernst’s 1926 The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard, and the Painter. This painting is clearly offensive to Christians and appears to be in-your-face and cruel. However, Ernst had a “higher purpose” behind his cruelty to Christian viewers, and this brings us back to the question of when it can be overall “kindly” to perform acts that seem to be “unkindly”, even cruel, when viewed in isolation.

Are there two or three works that, when it comes to addressing any of the themes fuelling my own philosophical and literary production, you would describe as true "classics" and, therefore, advise the reader of this blog to familiarise themselves with — the way, say, Plato's Republic or Machiavelli's Prince can be said to be "classics" in politics? And are there any works from the past ten years that you would equally recommend? 

The Owl of Minerva takes her flight at dusk, and it is premature to nominate recent works as “classics”. However, on the topic that I have mentioned a couple of times above, of civic agreeableness versus acts that appear offensive or cruel, I recommend these two short books:

Peterson, A. (2020). Civility and democratic education. Springer.

Stohr, K. (2012). On manners. Routledge.

In general, I think moral philosophers neglect developmental theories at their peril. If they ever mention any such theories, those are usually long outdated (Piaget, Kohlberg, etc.). I think it would do philosophers interested in the issues that occupy your mind, Giorgio, good to read some state-of-the-art developmental psychology such as:

Tomasello, M. (2019). Becoming human: A theory of ontogeny. Harvard University Press.

Thank you for giving me a chance to think about the areas that you have written so well and perspicuously about, Giorgio.