ABSTRACT
Accounting formoral 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 thatmoral understanding?Are differences in the tenden-
cies to engage in moral action a function of differences in kinds of people or
differences in kinds of knowledge that people have? Canwe even successfully
pose such a dichotomy?What I hope to accomplishwithin this chapter is to ex-
amine recent attempts to resolve these questions through work that is being
done onwhat is called themoral self. I explore whether the constructs of moral
self andmoral identity have utility orwhether in fact such constructs are redun-
dant with a structuralist moral psychology, or even reductionist andmechanis-
tic. Unlikemost chapters that one sets out to write, I did not approach this topic
with a conclusion in mind. In fact, some of what I have to say is inconsistent
with what I have written on this same topic in a recently published book
(Nucci, 2001), and it is at odds with some of the statements includedwithin the
Presidential Adress on which this chapter draws. 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). As will become clear in the context of this chapter, I
take issue with the notion advanced by Blasi (1993) and supported by others
(Bergman, 2002) that it is the goal of maintaining self-consistency that moti-
vates individuals to act morally.