Chapter 8 Moral Identity, Moral Functioning, and the Development of Moral Character

Abstract

We review how the construct of the moral self has arisen within moral development theory and discuss the search for integrative linkages with other domains of psychology, including personality. Next, we describe moral personality and then programs and approaches to developing moral identity in children. Moral schema development and moral information‐processing research is outlined, including mapping expert‐novice differences. Finally, we conclude with two emerging integrative theories, one on educational intervention for moral skill development and the other a neurobiological model of moral functioning which draws on evolutionary themes in the development of a moral brain.

Introduction

There are few more pressing problems before psychological science than to account for human moral functioning. This is because moral agency is crucial to our conception of what it means to be a person (Carr, 2001). The belief in our own moral integrity is so central to our self‐understanding that often we are tempted to shield it from refutation by recourse to sanitizing euphemisms and protective belts of denial, rationalization, and special pleading (Bandura, 1999). Indeed, as Taylor (1989) put it, “being a self is inseparable from existing in a space of moral issues” (p. 112).

The alignment of moral integrity with our sense of self‐identity might be one of those facts about ourselves that is so obvious that it hardly bears examination — something along the lines of fish being the last to discover water. This might go part of the way to explain the odd fact that the moral self does not have a long research tradition in psychology; but there are other explanations as well. These explanations point to paradigmatic doubts about whether the self is a legitimate construct for a behavioral science, and doubts evident in the study of moral development about how “thick” a self must be to render a rationally adequate moral judgment.

It does not help that psychological research is fragmented and that relevant fields of study, or even research programs within fields, do not easily talk with one another. The relevance of findings on, say, motivation, social cognition, or personality is not drawn easily for understanding moral motivation, moral cognition, or moral personality. The literatures on expertise, decision making, and cognitive science more generally provide few explicit guidelines for understanding moral expertise, moral decision making, and moral cognition. Although self‐identity has attracted significant research attention for decades, the frameworks of developmental and social psychologists who study it have often bypassed each other. Similarly research on temperament, attachment, and other developmental processes are often silent on their implications for the moral domain. Research on moral development has availed itself rarely of the theories, constructs, and methods of other disciplines; and these other disciplines rarely speculate on the developmental trajectories that bring one to adult moral functioning. Moreover, those interested in the educational implications of the self divide on the purpose and pedagogy of moral‐character education, and on the very terms of reference for understanding the moral dimensions of selfhood (see Lapsley and Narvaez, 2006). What is virtue, for example, as a psychological construct? How is character to be understood as a dimension of personality?

Fortunately there are signs that the estrangement of the moral self from the main currents of contemporary psychological research is coming to an end. Although the search for integrative linkages is of longer standing (e.g., Lapsley and Power, 1988, Lapsley and Quintana, 1985), there is a discernible increase in the pace and momentum of integrative research on moral cognition and moral self‐identity (Narvaez and Lapsley, in press). Indeed, the ascendance of the moral self now animates integrative research at the intersection of several provinces of psychology, and, along with increasing research into the neuroscientific (Sinnott‐Armstrong, 2008) and evolutionary bases of moral behavior (Narvaez, 2008b), the appearance of handbooks on moral development (Killen and Smetana, 2005) and education (Nucci and Narvaez, 2008), it is now clear that moral psychology is enjoying a renascence of interest in many areas of research.

In this chapter, we review how the construct of the moral self has arisen within developmental studies of moral judgment, and how the search for integrative linkages with other domains of psychology, particularly with social cognition and personality, took on a certain urgency after the marginalization or collapse of the dominant stage‐and‐structure (“Piagetian”) approaches to moral development. We examine theoretical approaches to moral self‐identity and moral personality, along with their developmental accounts, including a broader integrative theory that implicates evolutionary themes in the development of a moral brain.