Ordinary Ethical Reasoning and the Ideal of ‘Being Yourself’

Abstract

The psychological study of ethical reasoning tends to concentrate on a few specific issues, with the bulk of the research going to the study of people's attitudes toward moral rules or the welfare of others. But people's ethical reasoning is also shaped by a wide range of other concerns. Here I focus on the importance that people attach to the ideal of being yourself. It is shown that certain experimental results—results that seemed anomalous and inexplicable to researchers who focused on moral rules and concern for the welfare of others—can be explained quite elegantly as the product of people's attachment to the ideal of ‘being yourself’. The success of this explanation then points to the need for a more general inquiry into the role that the ideal of ‘being yourself ’ plays in people's ethical reasoning.

Acknowledgments

An abridged version of this paper was presented at a meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, where Owen Flanagan served as commentator. I am grateful to Bertram Malle and Phillip Zimbardo for helpful comments on an earlier ancestor of the present paper and to Gilbert Harman and three anonymous reviewers at Philosophical Psychology for comments on the penultimate draft.

Notes

 Note that we can remain strictly neutral about the claim, made by Gilligan (1982) and Haidt (2001) among others, that the Kohlbergian theory is wrong even about the very phenomena it was designed to explain. Our aim is simply to point to a class of phenomena that lie outside the scope of the Kohlbergian theory. Thus, our chief claims are entirely orthogonal to the debate between Kohlberg and his more radical critics.

 With its emphasis on ‘choice’, this sentiment is reminiscent of Sartre's (1956/1943) concept of authenticity. But there are a number of important differences. First, Sartre would deny that we have any antecedently-existing ‘self’ which guides our choices and is reflected in them. Second, Sartre would say that we are in fact always making our own choices, even when we act most inauthentically—the only question is whether we acknowledge the choices we are making.