ABSTRACT

Moral judgment research has tended to obscure the important distinction between primary or spontaneous moral judgment and the more deliberative activity of moral theorizing. Spontaneous moral judgment is an integral aspect of one’s social conduct and self-presentation, and thus reflects a dimension of one’s identity. The link between moral judgment and moral identity, according to our developmental analysis, is that both ensue from the same underlying structures of thought. This interpretation involves a synthesis of ideas from several sources, beginning with Piaget’s proposal that social cooperation is the key to both moral development and personality formation. Insights from James, Baldwin, Mead, Turner, and Csikszentmihalyi elaborate the social and cognitive processes involved. The chapter thus explicates three essential components in an account of moral identity formation: The nature of the social context, the nature of thought, and the logic of the interaction between them.