ABSTRACT

For both philosophic and empirical reasons, virtues, traits, and moral character have been rather neglected notions in moral psychology. Immanuel Kant's theory of morality was directed toward the discovery of the supreme moral principle that a pure will might act upon. The moral law folk theory is woven into our religious intuitions about what it means to be a person, intuitions deeply influenced by the Judeo-Christian tradition in the West. The notion of moral character, then, is out of step with the sort of Kantian moral rationality that Lawrence Kohlberg builds into principled moral reasoning. It is also out of step with the very core of Kohlberg's research program, which is how to provide the psychological resources by which to combat ethical relativism. In an important monograph Walter Mischel initiated a significant reevaluation of the classical understanding of global traits and their role in the psychological explanation of personality.