ABSTRACT
Accounting for moral agency has proven to be a complex and difficult problem for moral psychology. How is it that we move from knowing right from wrong to acting in relation to that moral understanding? Are differences in the tendencies to engage in moral action a function of differences in kinds of people, or differences in kinds of knowledge that people have? Can we even successfully pose such a dichotomy? What I hope to accomplish within this chapter is to examine recent attempts to resolve these questions through work that is being done on what is referred to as the “moral self.” My aim is to explore whether the constructs of moral self and moral identity have utility, or whether in fact such constructs are redundant with a structuralist moral psychology, or even reductionist and mechanistic. Some of what I have to say here is inconsistent with what I have written on this same topic in a recently published book (Nucci, 2001). This inconsistency in my own writing reflects the struggle to avoid the dualism that results from the disjunction of moral motivation from moral judgment (a disjunction that dates back at least to Aristotle). What I argue here is that some forms of what is being argued for with respect to the moral self instantiate such dualism, and are thereby inconsistent with moral psychol-
ogy. In particular, I want to argue against the notion that it is the goal of maintaining self-consistency that motivates individuals to act morally (Bergman, 2002; Blasi, 1993).
