A conception of self-formation grounded in the work of Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and David L. Norton

This dissertation addresses the following questions and concerns related to the formation of the moral self: (1) The relationship between certain moral choices and a person's sense of personal or moral identity: specifically, how is it that certain choices, actions, character traits, or goods come to be interpreted as either constituting, or as being inseparable from, one's conscience, one's moral identity, or one's moral self? (2) The relationship between the conception of the good with which one identifies and the conception of the good of one's community of origin: how does one develop a conception of the good, how does one understand one's relationship to that conception, and how does one conception relate to one's origins? (3) The fact that a person's moral identity and capacity for moral judgment must develop over time: if the capacity to make moral judgments develops over time, how are changes in one's conception of the good and of oneself to be reconciled with moral accountability or responsibility?; Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre's conception of "practice" and his discussion of narrative, on Charles Taylor's conception of "articulation," and on David L. Norton's conceptions of "participatory enactment" and "emulation," I argue that self-formation is a practice, the primary activity of which consists in an interpretive analysis and articulation of one's self-understanding in the form of a narrative. That narrative is based in one's evolving and experientially based conception of the good and is critically informed by one's imaginative projection of oneself into the positions of others or of possible future selves and by one's emulation of moral exemplars. I suggest that, in Western societies, the primary good internal to the practice of self-formation is authenticity and that the virtue most conducive to the pursuit of authenticity is a specific form of integrity. Self-formation as a practice requires an on-going commitment to exercising integrity in the pursuit of authenticity.