Selfhood, morality, and the Five-Factor Model of personality

Abstract

We often say that persons need to change themselves. But what is this “self” that needs to change, and why do “selves” seem to be so resistant to change? I have argued elsewhere that who I really am, in an everyday practical sense, is who I really am with respect to the moral evaluation of me. In other words, the everyday self that (often) needs changing is a moral self. In this article, I am offering further indirect evidence for this thesis by exploring an alternative possibility—that who I really am is my personality in the fashionable “Big Five” or “Five-Factor Model” sense—and showing that this suggestion does not bear scrutiny. I argue that although Big-Five theory has identified relatively stable within-person patterns, it has not shown these patterns to be psychologically meaningful, except to the extent that they are morally salient. I argue further that the nature of our diachronic moral selves suggests that moral philosophy needs to take a developmental and educational turn: a turn for which it may, however, not be well equipped.