Moral Self Archive

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/11244/22702

Welcome

The Moral Self Archive is a fully searchable repository, freely available to scholars, students, and the general public. It was originally created and managed by the Self, Motivation and Virtue Project. The SMV Project was a 3-year initiative (Sept. 2014 - March 2018), funded by the Templeton Religion Trust, that supported innovative, interdisciplinary research on virtue and moral development, with a special focus on exploring new ways of measuring virtue and how it develops in humans. Visit the SMV Project website for more details. The Moral Self Archive is now managed by the Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing.

The SMV Project was funded by generous support from the Templeton Religion Trust and the University of Oklahoma.

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If you are interested in submitting work to the Moral Self Archive, please contact Dr. Nancy Snow (nsnow@ou.edu).

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 59

Open Access
2015 Interdisciplinary Moral Forum Program
(2015-03) The Self, Motivation & Virtue Project
Program for the Self, Motivation & Virtue Project's 2015 Interdisciplinary Moral Forum, held on March 12-14, 2015. The Interdisciplinary Moral Forum brought together 57 moral self researchers from around the world and from multiple disciplines. It was held at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Participants included two members from each semi-finalist research team, members of the Core Project Team, and other interested members of the Marquette and Milwaukee academic communities.
Open Access
2016 Self, Motivation & Virtue Project Conference Highlights
(2016-05) The Self, Motivation & Virtue Project
This video features highlights from the 2016 Self, Motivation & Virtue Project Conference, held on May 5-7, 2016 at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. This event was made possible by funding from the Templeton Religion Trust, the Spencer Foundation, and The University of Oklahoma.
Open Access
The Beacon Project: Jump-starting a Field of the Morally Exceptional
(2015-07) Fleeson, William
Open Access
The Beacon Project: Jump-Starting a Field of the Morally Exceptional
(2015-10) Fleeson, William
This article was originally published in the Self, Motivation & Virtue Project's e-Newsletter 03 (October 2015).
Open Access
The Bracing, Empty Self versus the Open, Heart-Minded Self
(2015-07) Narvaez, Darcia
Open Access
Can Virtue Be Measured?
(2014-01) Wright, Jennnifer
In addressing this question, I will define “virtue” as the possession of (a set of) virtue-relevant traits (e.g., honesty, compassion, bravery, generosity, etc.) – “traits” being defined as trait-appropriate cognitive/affective/behavioral responses that are consistently triggered by trait-relevant stimuli in the person’s environment – along with the chronic accessibility of trait-oriented values/goals and trait-relevant identity attributes. Given this account, I explain in this paper how the empirical study of virtue involves the measurement of four things: (1) people’s sensitivity to the presence of (external/internal) trait-relevant stimuli; (2) people’s recognition/generation of trait-appropriate (cognitive/affective/behavioral) responses; (3) the dispositionality of the connection between 1 and 2; and (4) the chronic accessibility of trait-oriented values/goals and trait-relevant identity. The first can be operationalized as people’s ability to perceive (visual/auditory), identify, and generate trait-relevant stimuli; the second, as people’s recognition of both self and other trait-appropriate cognitive/affective/behavioral responses, in naturalistic and artificial/controlled environments – as well as their live/spontaneous generation of the same. “Dispositionality” can be operationally defined along two dimensions: consistency and habituality. Finally, chronic accessibility of trait-oriented values/goals can be operationally defined as people’s explicit/implicit identification of trait-oriented values/goals as important. - See more at: http://www.jubileecentre.ac.uk/474/library#sthash.3FAg81SV.dpuf
Open Access
The Co-Construction of Virtue: Epigenetics, Development, and Culture
(2014) Narvaez, Darcia
Chapter from the book "Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology." Ed. Nancy E. Snow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Open Access
Darwin and the Human Future: New Order out of Chaos
(2016-04) Loye, David
Open Access
Ethical Parenting
(2017-10) Thompson, Ross A.
This article was originally published in the Self, Motivation & Virtue Project’s e-Newsletter 10, October 2017.
Metadata only
Eudaimonic Growth: How Virtues and Motives Shape the Narrative Self and Its Development within a Social Ecology
(2016-05) Bauer, Jack; DesAutels, Peggy
This project investigates how virtues shape people’s life stories within a social ecology of families, social institutions, and cultural master narratives. Life stories allow us to study how virtues serve as motives for action, as themes in a person’s self-identity, and as reflections of cultural belief systems. In this talk we show how life stories portray eudaimonic growth, that is, the development of virtues like wisdom, compassion, authenticity, and self-actualization. We pay special attention to eudaimonic growth in non-idealized circumstances, notably gender inequities of social power and expectations, whether in the family or at work. We are studying these topics in two phases. Phase I, currently in progress, involves life story interviews with 100 adults. First these participants complete an online personality survey that focuses on eudaimonic virtues like wisdom, perspective-taking, compassion, gratitude, moral orientations, and transcending self-interest. Our research team then conducts a life story interview of two-to-three hours with each of these participants. Phase II, in the next academic year, focuses on family stories—interviews with 50 of the target individuals and 2-to-3 family members, all of whom also take an online personality survey, as in Phase I. All interviews are transcribed and analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. These participants are also part of a larger, longitudinal study of University of Dayton alumni. Thus we expect to gain a better understanding of how virtues shape life stories within a social ecology of family and cultural master narratives in the current two years—and how life stories predict eudaimonic growth in the decades to come.
Open Access
Eudaimonic Growth: How Virtues and Motives Shape the Narrative Self and Its Development within a Social Ecology
(2015-03-14) Bauer, Jack; DesAutels, Peggy
This transdisciplinary study will examine how the narration of self, motivation, and eudaimonic virtues like wisdom and compassion develop within a social ecology of family master narratives and social institutions that either foster or constrain the development of such virtues. Drawing from a larger, longitudinal study of character development and life stories in adulthood, we will interview individuals and their families about virtue-relevant events in life, such as conflicts of belief (intrapersonally, interpersonally, and institutionally), virtue-focused projects and activities, and self- and family-defining memories. Narratives will be analyzed qualitatively and critically as well as quantitatively and in relation to other measures of eudaimonic and personal development. We expect that specific virtues will serve as motivational themes in personal and family stories and that these narrative themes will predict specific paths of virtuous self-development. We further expect that specific inequalities in family and social-institutional contexts will correspond to specific conflicts in the development of eudaimonic qualities in individuals’ lives.
Open Access
Existential Feelings in Virtue: A Philosophical-Psychological Investigation
(2015-03-14) Sullivan, Daniel; Achim, Stephan
Discourses on the self and virtue have minimized the importance of emotion in favor of cognitive-developmental perspectives. Yet recent theory and research in philosophy (Kristjánsson, 2010; Slaby & Stephan, 2008) and psychology (Haidt, 2008) find that affect plays a constitutional role in the self, moral judgments, and virtuous behavior. A class of affective phenomena called existential feelings has been identified as vital to self-understanding and motivation (Ratcliffe, 2008; Slaby, Paskaleva, & Stephan, 2014). The present interdisciplinary project investigates the significance of such feelings as a motivational link between the self and virtue. In five studies using cross-disciplinary, innovative methods, we will determine whether positive existential feelings support a sense of emotional connection to others that bolsters virtues of courage, humanity, and transcendence. We will further determine whether existential feelings are negatively impacted by the aging process, and whether this process can be altered to increase virtue in older adults.
Open Access
From 'ordinary' virtue to Aristotelian virtue
(2016-01) Snow, Nancy
In two earlier papers, I began to explore how “ordinary people” acquire virtue. By “ordinary people,” I mean people, not specifically or directly concerned with becoming virtuous, who have goals or aims the pursuit of which requires them to develop virtue. E.g., parents acquire patience and generosity in the course of pursuing their goal to be good parents; those concerned with being peacemakers acquire tact and diplomacy in the pursuit of that goal, and so on. These virtues can be viewed by those who seek them to be of instrumental and not intrinsic value, that is, needed for goal attainment but not necessarily valuable in their own right. Moreover, the virtues so acquired need not be substantially informed by reflective deliberation (Aristotelian phronesis). Are there pathways by means of which possessors of ordinary virtue can develop Aristotelian virtue, by coming to view the virtues they possess as having intrinsic value; and developing their phronetic capacities such that their virtues become informed by practical wisdom? In this essay, I continue the exploration of ordinary virtue with an eye to revealing possible pathways by which ordinary virtue can indeed take on the characteristics of full Aristotelian virtue. In the spirit of empirical collaboration, I suggest these pathways of virtue development as testable hypotheses.
Open Access
The Gestation of Virtue: An Examination of How Experiences in the Womb May Build the Moral Self
(2015-03-14) Cortes, Rodolfo; Barragan Sanchez, Evangelina
This project represents an empirical test of the Co-Investigator’s “Life is a Wonder” model of pregnancy (Barragan Sanchez, 2007). The Life is a Wonder model posits that, if an expecting mother construes her coming baby as a gift, they she will attempt to “interact” with the fetus in order to welcome her or him to the social world. This “invitation to be born” comes in the form of massages that the mother carries out whenever she feels that the baby moving in her belly. In anecdotal experiences in her training sessions with expecting mothers, the Co-Investigator has found that reciprocating the baby’s movement causes the baby to continue to move, and that the more the baby moves, the more emotionally attuned she or he is during the first few years of life. Over the long term, these in-utero experiences with reciprocation are thought to build a self that is responsive, empathic, and committed to other humans. As such, this project aims to scientifically test whether it may be possible that the massage that some mothers do on their abdomens in response to their babies’ movements may drive the emergence of the moral self.
Open Access
Getting Back on Track to Being Human
(2017-05-02) Narvaez, Darcia
Cooperation and compassion are forms of intelligence. Their lack is an indication of ongoing stress or toxic stress during development that undermined the usual growth of compassion capacities. Though it is hard to face at first awareness, humans in the dominant culture tend to be pretty unintelligent compared to those from societies that existed sustainably for thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of years. Whereas in sustainable societies everyone must learn to cooperate with earth’s systems to survive and thrive, in the dominant culture this is no longer the case. Now due to technological advances that do not take into account the long-term welfare of earth systems, humans have become “free riders” until these systems collapse from abuse or misuse. The dominant human culture, a “weed species,” has come to devastate planetary ecosystems in a matter of centuries. What do we do to return ourselves to living as earth creatures, as one species among many in community? Humanity needs to restore lost capacities—relational attunement and communal imagination—whose loss occurs primarily in cultures dominated by child-raising practices and ways of thinking that undermine cooperative companionship and a sense of partnership that otherwise develops from the beginning of life. To plant the seeds of cooperation, democracy, and partnership, we need to provide the evolved nest to children, and facilitate the development of ecological attachment to their landscape. This will take efforts at the individual, policy, and institutional levels.
Open Access
Giving from the Heart: The Role of the Heart and the Brain in Virtuous Motivation and Integrity
(2016-05-07) Karns, Christina; Skorburg, Joshua
To what extent and in what way is the self unified? How does its degree of unification lead to or stymie virtuous motivation and action? This project investigates embodied fluency in value-directed-actions and a drive toward integrity – an alignment between our explicitly endorsed values and automatic responses or actions. Our conceptual model operationalizes integrity as the interaction between implicit associations and automaticity of virtuous actions with self-reported explicit values endorsed by the self, with embodied responses serving as a mediator between integrity and behavior. Prediction 1: If generous values are explicitly endorsed by the self, then generous values should predict deliberative giving behavior. Prediction 2: If generous values are or have become habituated and automatic in some individuals, then implicit associations should predict automatic giving behavior. Prediction 3: Embodied measures of autonomic stress responses and neural reward will assess separate aspects of acting in accord with values. In addition to testing the local associations between measurement domains, the multimodal dataset we will acquire (self-report, implicit association tests, response times, autonomic physiology, electroencephalography) will allow us to statistically test our initial working model of integrated virtue. In this presentation, we will address our progress on data acquisition as well as our progress on a collaborative theory paper. We will reflect on the development of our project from the initial proposal, through feedback from the SMV core project team, up to the present data acquisition and analysis stage and discuss specific issues - both challenging and promising - that have cropped up in this development, as well as some broader themes for research at the interface of neuroscience and moral philosophy.
Open Access
How to Train a Better Scientist: Intellectual Virtues, Epistemic Reasoning and Science Education
(2017-07) Lapsley, Daniel; Chaloner, Dominic
This article was originally published in the Self, Motivation & Virtue Project’s e-Newsletter 09, July 2017.
Open Access
Humility as Opening to Others: Exemplar-Mediated Reconfigurations of the Self
(2016-05-06) Spezio, Michael; Roberts, Robert
The talk will engage distinctive contributions of the virtue of humility to the communal life of L’Arche communities, and of these communities’ practices to our understanding of humility. Long-term, dedicated Assistants in L’Arche feature a remarkable and special kind of openness to other members that facilitates loving encounter consistent with Jean Vanier’s writings on Christian love. The practices in L’Arche work against vices of pride such as arrogance, conceit, snobbishness, and self-righteousness, which all derive from egoistic, atomistic barriers to spiritual communion. These barriers are shields, partitions, divides between persons, counter to the relationships that characterize life in L’Arche. While more or less expected or typical in most human relationships and human systems, there is a striking absence of these dividers in L’Arche. We propose that this absence facilitates what humility is when combined with love: an openness to perceiving and valuing self and other together, in conformity with the mind of the exemplar. The ontology, or fundamental teleological nature of the self that justifies and makes humility possible, in combination with love, is that the self is essentially self-transcendent. In particular, it is made to transcend itself “into” the other, for the sake of the other, in benevolent service. It is also that the value that the vices of pride prescribe for the self is false. We will present several empirical lines of evidence expanding on this analysis. Bayesian cognitive modeling and model selection show that senior L’Arche Assistants unite their self-valuation with their valuing of others in decisions that are both courageous and conventionally costly. Linguistic analyses show that Assistants semantically join valuation of self and other, compared to a control group that is matched for self-reported gender, empathy, prosociality, and personality. Finally, we will present preliminary neuroimaging investigations using dense array EEG to determine whether these reconfigured models of the self associate with default-mode and perceptual networks in the brain.
Open Access
Integrity and its Puzzles
(2017-05) Herdt, Jennifer
This article was originally published in the Self, Motivation & Virtue Project’s e-Newsletter 08, May 2017.
Open Access
Investigating Implicit Aspects of Virtue: Understanding Humility Among Moral Exemplars
(2015-03-13) Van Slyke, James; Graves, Mark
Our research project will investigate the virtue of humility among real world humanitarian exemplars, such as holocaust rescuers and hospice workers. We will use computer technology to analyze interviews with these types of populations to understand the different factors involved in the virtue of humility. Following the work of Aristotle, we believe this virtue is formed as a kind of habit that becomes a natural extension of one’s character. We aim to operationalize and empirically evaluate aspects of the virtue of humility through the computational analysis of implicit semantic processing embedded in the narratives of real world humanitarians. Latent semantic analysis, multi-dimensional scaling, and hierarchical cluster analysis will be used to map self-understanding schemas in these populations and its role in humility while serving others.