Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 The Moral Personality
- 2 The Moral Functioning of the Person as a Whole: On Moral Psychology and Personality Science
- 3 Moral Science? Still Metaphysical After All These Years
- 4 Cultural Pluralism and Moral Identity
- 5 Neuroscience and Morality: Moral Judgments, Sentiments, and Values
- 6 Triune Ethics Theory and Moral Personality
- 7 Early Foundations: Conscience and the Development of Moral Character
- 8 The Development of the Moral Personality
- 9 Urban Neighborhoods as Contexts for Moral Identity Development
- 10 Moral Personality Exemplified
- 11 Greatest of the Virtues? Gratitude and the Grateful Personality
- 12 The Elusive Altruist: The Psychological Study of the Altruistic Personality
- 13 Growing Toward Care: A Narrative Approach to Prosocial Moral Identity and Generativity of Personality in Emerging Adulthood
- 14 Moral Identity, Integrity, and Personal Responsibility
- 15 The Dynamic Moral Self: A Social Psychological Perspective
- 16 The Double-Edged Sword of a Moral State of Mind
- 17 Moral Identity in Business Situations: A Social-Cognitive Framework for Understanding Moral Functioning
- 18 The Moral Functioning of Mature Adults and the Possibility of Fair Moral Reasoning
- 19 Moral Personality: Themes, Questions, Futures
- Author Index
- Subject Index
8 - The Development of the Moral Personality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 The Moral Personality
- 2 The Moral Functioning of the Person as a Whole: On Moral Psychology and Personality Science
- 3 Moral Science? Still Metaphysical After All These Years
- 4 Cultural Pluralism and Moral Identity
- 5 Neuroscience and Morality: Moral Judgments, Sentiments, and Values
- 6 Triune Ethics Theory and Moral Personality
- 7 Early Foundations: Conscience and the Development of Moral Character
- 8 The Development of the Moral Personality
- 9 Urban Neighborhoods as Contexts for Moral Identity Development
- 10 Moral Personality Exemplified
- 11 Greatest of the Virtues? Gratitude and the Grateful Personality
- 12 The Elusive Altruist: The Psychological Study of the Altruistic Personality
- 13 Growing Toward Care: A Narrative Approach to Prosocial Moral Identity and Generativity of Personality in Emerging Adulthood
- 14 Moral Identity, Integrity, and Personal Responsibility
- 15 The Dynamic Moral Self: A Social Psychological Perspective
- 16 The Double-Edged Sword of a Moral State of Mind
- 17 Moral Identity in Business Situations: A Social-Cognitive Framework for Understanding Moral Functioning
- 18 The Moral Functioning of Mature Adults and the Possibility of Fair Moral Reasoning
- 19 Moral Personality: Themes, Questions, Futures
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Summary
That moral rationality attaches to selves who have personalities is a notion so commonplace that it is likely to be contested only in certain quarters of academic psychology. Yet ever since Kohlberg's landmark articulation of the “cognitive developmental approach to socialization” (Kohlberg, 1969), there was a way of talking about moral development that scarcely required reference to personality. One could describe the ontogenesis of moral reasoning without invoking the usual indicators of personality, such as traits, dispositions, or character. If anything, personological considerations were regarded as sources of bias, backsliding, and special pleading that had to be surmounted in order to render judgments from the “moral point of view.” Moreover, for Kohlberg, the moral stage sequence could not be used to describe persons or to chart individual differences, and he was opposed to the use of the stage theory as a way to make “aretaic judgments” about the moral worthiness of individuals. Moral stages were not, after all, “boxes for classifying and evaluating persons” (Colby, Kohlberg, Gibbs, & Lieberman, 1983, p. 11). Instead moral stages serve as a taxonomic classification of different kinds of sociomoral operations. They describe forms of thought organization of an ideal rational moral agent – an epistemic subject – and hence cannot be “reflections upon the self ” (Kohlberg, Levine, & Hewer, 1983, p. 36).
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- Information
- Personality, Identity, and CharacterExplorations in Moral Psychology, pp. 185 - 213Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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