The acquisition of virtue can be conceptualized as a self-regulatory process in which deliberate practice results in increasingly higher levels of skillfulness in leading a virtuous life. This conceptualization resonates with philosophical virtue theories as much as it converges with psychological models about skill development, expertise, goal motivation, and self-regulation. Yet, the conceptualization of virtue as skill acquisition poses the crucial question of motivation: What motivates individuals to self-improvement over time so that they can learn from past experience, correct mistakes, (...) and expand their ethical knowledge to new and unfamiliar circumstances? In this paper, it is argued that the motivation to increase one’s level of skillfulness in leading a virtuous life is supported by a specific identity goal, namely the goal to be a moral person. However, this moral identity goal needs to carry specific goal characteristics in order to effectively provide this motivation. It needs to be sufficiently abstract, internally motivated and promotion- rather than prevention-oriented. Research in developmental psychology suggests that the moral identity of children is rather concrete, externally motivated, and prevention-oriented. With development, higher levels of abstraction, internal motivation, and promotion-orientation gain importance providing an important motivational basis for a self-regulated process of virtue acquisition. (shrink)

A dominant view of guilt and shame is that they have opposing action tendencies: guilt- prone people are more likely to avoid or overcome dysfunctional patterns of behaviour, making amends for past misdoings, whereas shame-prone people are more likely to persist in dysfunctional patterns of behaviour, avoiding responsibility for past misdoings and/or lashing out in defensive aggression. Some have suggested that addiction treatment should make use of these insights, tailoring therapy according to people’s degree of guilt-proneness versus shame-proneness. In this (...) paper, we challenge this dominant view, reviewing empirical findings from others as well as our own to question (1) whether shame and guilt can be so easily disentangled in the experience of people with addiction, and (2) whether shame and guilt have the opposing action tendencies standardly attributed to them. We recommend a shift in theoretical perspective that explains our main finding that both emotions can be either destructive or constructive for recovery, depending on how these emotions are managed. We argue such management depends in turn on a person’s quality of self-blame (retributive or ‘scaffolding’), impacting upon their attitude towards their own agency as someone with fixed and unchanging dispositions (shame and guilt destructive for recovery) or as someone capable of changing themselves (shame and guilt productive for recovery). With an eye to therapeutic intervention, we then explore how this shift in attitude towards the self can be accomplished. Specifically, we discuss empathy-driven affective and narratively-driven cognitive components of a process that allow individuals to move away from the register of retributive self-blame into a register of scaffolding ‘reproach’, thereby enabling them to manage their experiences of both shame and guilt in a more generative way. (shrink)

Recent models of wisdom in philosophy and psychology have converged on conceptualizing this intellectual virtue as involving metacognitive processes that enable us to know how to live well and act morally. However, these models have been critiqued by both philosophers and psychologists on the grounds that their conceptions of wisdom are redundant with other constructs, and so the concept of wisdom should be eliminated. In reply, I defend an account of wisdom that similarly conceptualizes wisdom as involving metacognitive processes, but (...) without being subject to the critique that wisdom is redundant. To isolate what’s unique about wisdom, I examine the self-regulatory processes that are relevant for being effective in striving to achieve our goals and draw further insights from the research on skill acquisition and expertise. This framework reveals that the unique contribution that wisdom can make beyond these other processes is in setting and revising our conceptions of living well and the constitutive virtues, and so the concept of wisdom is not redundant. In addition, this account can help to resolve two other areas of contention in wisdom research, which is accounting for the connection between wisdom and moral motivation, as well as the role of emotion in wisdom. A goal-oriented approach provides insight into factors influencing moral motivation due to distinctions in the ways goals are formulated, and for a better understanding of the connection between emotion and wisdom I endorse enactivist accounts that maintain that emotions are embodied appraisals connected to our deeply held cares and values. (shrink)

Psychological research has revealed that there is a strong tendency for people to believe that they have a ‘true self’, and to believe that this true self is inherently morally good. This would seemingly be very good news for virtue theorists, since this may help to promote virtue development. While there are some obvious benefits to people having morality intrinsically tied to their sense of self, in this paper I want to suggest instead that there may also be some significant (...) drawbacks, especially when it comes to motivating virtue development and moral improvement. In part this stems from people’s belief in their own inherent moral goodness being merely assumed (as part of one’s core identity), rather than earned (say through reliably good moral behavior). This disconnection between identity and behavior can result in attempts to reinforce one’s identity as morally good, at the expense of virtuous behavior or self-improvement. (shrink)

First, let me start by thanking all of my commentators for doing a careful reading of my book, providing me with lots of though-provoking responses, and on top of all of that for the significant time commitment in being a part of this symposium. I’m very grateful for all the support! Let me add a further note of thanks to Noell Birondo for taking on the role of editor in bringing all of these wonderful contributions together in this issue of (...) Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. (shrink)

This paper puts forward a novel, two-tiered view of moral agency which captures the key concerns of two competing theories. According to the capacitarian view, in order for someone to be an appropriate target of the reactive attitudes and practices, they must possess an independent, objective capacity for recognizing and responding to moral reasons. According to the moral influence view, this capacity fully depends for both development and maintenance on reactive scaffolding. I will argue that the moral influence view cannot (...) account for the autonomous capacity involved in cases where agents go against the grain of their moral community. At the same time, however, the capacitarian view neglects the role of reactive scaffolding in moral development. My solution is to distinguish responsible agency, understood as reactive scaffolding-sensitivity, from moral autonomy, understood as autonomous moral reasons-sensitivity. However, while the moral influence view cannot explain moral autonomy, it gives a promising account of responsible agency and offers important insights into how we might develop moral autonomy. (shrink)

According to Victoria McGeer’s “scaffolding view” (SV) (McGeer 2019), responsibility is a matter of moral reasons-sensitivity (MRS) which, in turn, requires only a “susceptibility to the scaffolding power of the reactive attitudes, experienced as a form of moral address” (2019: 315). This claim prompts a prima facie challenge: doesn’t this susceptibility lead to doing the right things for the wrong reasons? Although the SV offers a nuanced and sophisticated answer to this challenge, one that moreover respects the social nature of (...) moral knowledge and the fragility of moral motivation, it does not succeed. It redefines MRS to fit our responsibility practices in a way that overlooks our (fragile) capacity for “genuine MRS.” The first and primary objective of this paper is to contrast SV-MRS with genuine MRS. The second objective is to suggest that rather than redefining MRS (which is both unwarranted and costly), we should accept that there is a gap between our practices (and thus responsible agency) and genuine MRS. (shrink)