Personal And Moral Identity

This edited volume features cutting-edge work in moral psychology by pre-eminent scholars in moral self-identity, moral character, and moral personality.

The subject of personal and moral identity is at the centre of interest, not only of academic research within disciplines such as philosophy and psychology, but also of everyday thinking. This is why the Neth erlands School for Research in Practical Philosophy and the Institute for Ethics of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam took the initiative to bring together scholars from various disciplines, interested in the subject. The expert-seminar on 'Personal and Moral Identity' took place from 12-14 January 1999. Financial contributions from the Vrije Universiteit, the Dutch Scientific Organisation (NWO) and the Royal Dutch Academy for the Sciences (KNA W) made the event possible. The chapters in this book either go back to papers presented at the seminar or were written afterwards by participants, inspired by the discussions that took place during the seminar. We are very grateful to Dr. Hendrik Hutter for his assistance in editing the texts and making the manuscript camera-ready. December 2001, The Editors. 1 Introduction Albert W. Musschenga Although scholars studying the identity of persons usually address diverging issues and have different research agendas, there is a grow ing awareness that one may benefit from insights and results present in other disciplines dealing with that subject. This explains the enthu siastic responses to the invitation of the Netherlands School for Research in Practical Philosophy and the Institute for Ethics of the Vrije Universiteit to participate in a seminar on 'Personal and Moral Identity'.

There is agency in all we do: thinking, doing, or making. We invent a tune, play, or use it to celebrate an occasion. Or we make a conceptual leap and ask more abstract questions about the conditions for agency. They include autonomy and self-appraisal, each contested by arguments immersing us in circumstances we don’t control. But can it be true we that have no personal responsibility for all we think and do? Agency: Moral Identity and Free Will proposes that deliberation, choice, and free will emerged within the evolutionary history of animals with a physical advantage: organisms having cell walls or exoskeletons had an internal space within which to protect themselves from external threats or encounters. This defense was both structural and active: such organisms could ignore intrusions or inhibit risky behavior. Their capacities evolved with time: inhibition became the power to deliberate and choose the manner of one’s responses. Hence the ability of humans and some other animals to determine their reactions to problematic situations or to information that alters values and choices. This is free will as a material power, not as the conclusion to a conceptual argument. Having it makes us morally responsible for much we do. It prefigures moral identity. Closely argued but plainly written, Agency: Moral Identity and Free Will speaks for autonomy and responsibility when both are eclipsed by ideas that embed us in history or tradition. Our sense of moral choice and freedom is accurate. We are not altogether the creatures of our circumstances.

Many questions about moral and legal judgments hinge on how we understand the identity of the agents. The intractability of many of these questions stems, this book argues, from ignoring how we actually connect actions with agents. When making everyday judgments about the morality or legality of actions, we do not use Aristotelian logic but what is termed “character logic”. The difference is crucial because implicit in character logic is an understanding of personal identity that is both coherent and intuitively familiar. A person, as we conceptualize him in moral and legal contexts, is a character of resolve. By unpacking what it means to be a character of resolve, this book reveals what underwrites our most fundamental beliefs about a person’s rights and responsibilities. It also provides a new and useful perspective on a variety of issues about rights and responsibilities that perennially occupy philosophers. This book discusses the following: • How we can make better sense of “human rights” if we think of them as “personal rights”. • How the right to be civilly disobedient, in contrast with ordinary law-breaking, can be justified as a personal right. • What basis we have for holding that someone’s responsibility is diminished. • How it makes sense to hold someone responsible for acting irresponsibly. • How it makes sense to distinguish a juvenile offender from someone who should be tried in criminal court. • What kind of correction we should expect from our correctional institutions and how we should design them to achieve that. By making explicit the axioms of character logic and exploring their origins and justification, the book provides a conceptually powerful tool for interpreting the protocols of a person-respecting society.

This volume examines the psychological, social-relational, and cultural foundations of the most basic moral commitments. It begins by looking at the seminal writings of Augusto Blasi, whose writings on moral cognition, the development of self-identity, and moral personality have transformed the research agenda in moral psychology. This work is now the starting point of all discussion about the relationship between self and morality; the developmental grounding of the moral personality; and the moral integration of cognition, emotion, and behavior. Indeed, it is now widely believed that organizing self-understanding around basic moral commitments is crucial to the formation of a moral identity which, in turn, underwrites moral conduct. Using Blasi's work as a point of departure, a distinguished interdisciplinary and international group of scholars have contributed essays summarizing their own theoretical and empirical research on these topics. This book features new theories of moral functioning that range across several psychological literatures, including social cognition, cognitive science, and personality development. Examining the social-relational, communitarian, and cultural aspects of moral self-identity, it provides a comprehensive account of moral personality. Uniformly integrative, field-expanding, and on the cutting edge of research on moral development and personality, the book appeals to scholars, developmental theorists and graduate students interested in issues of moral development, education, and behavior, as well as cognitive development theory.

Long dormant,the field of moral development is experiencing a comeback. This book will appeal to scholars, developmental theorists and grad. students interested in issues of moral development,moral education,moral behavior & cognitive developmental theor

This volume is the result of an interdisciplinary exchange between philosophers of identity, moral philosophers, philosophers of education, moral psychologists, and post-modern deconstructivists on the subject of personal and moral identity. This interdisciplinary character makes the book special, compared to other publications on the subject. The contributions to the first part of the book reflect on the implications of discussions in philosophy of identity for moral theory and the view of moral identity. In the second part the focus shifts to the philosophical and psychological perspectives on the concepts of self, personal and moral identity and their interrelation. It is argued that both perspectives are needed for giving an account of the emergence of moral identity as part of someone's development into a mature person. The contributions to the third part absorb the criticism of (de)constructivist theories on essentialist conceptions of personal and social identity. This book will be of interest for philosophers and psychologists active in research on identity, self, (moral) development, and related areas.

This book challenges, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity. The author claims that we have a false view of our own nature; that it is often rational to act against our own best interests; that most of us have moral views that are directly self-defeating; and that, when we consider future generations the conclusions will often be disturbing. He concludes that moral non-religious moral philosophy is a young subject, with a promising but unpredictable future.