Moral Agency, Identity and Narrative in Moral Development

Abstract

Many of the research programs within moral development have tended to organize around certain select features of the moral life. For the Kohlberg tradition, it was conflict resolution involving a moral dilemma where competing claims to justice had to be adjudicated fairly by the canons of deliberative reasoning. For Hoffman, it was coming to the aid of bystanders who were in distress. Prosocial reasoning was also a form of bystander intervention – should a farmer give up part of his crop for the sake of poor farmers down the road who were devastated by a flood? Should we donate blood at the risk of inconvenience? More recent research on moral exemplars has tended to focus on volunteering as the target moral behavior of interest. Each of these attributes of the moral life – dilemma-solving, bystander intervention, volunteering – privileges a particular element of human functioning – reason, empathy, identity – to carry much of the explanatory load. In this issue, Pasupathi and Wainryb introduce a new construct – moral agency – to account for another feature of moral life, which is the experience of intentional moral failure, of visiting harm unto others with full knowledge that it is wrong to do so. Moral failure is, of course, a commonplace, and its ubiquity in human life