Journal of Moral Education

ISSN: 0305-7240 (Print) 1465-3877 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjme20

Putting emotion into the self: a response to the 2008

Journal of Moral Education Special Issue on moral
functioning
Kristjn Kristjnsson

To cite this article: Kristjn Kristjnsson (2009) Putting emotion into the self: a response to the 2008 Journal of Moral
Education Special Issue on moral functioning, Journal of Moral

Education, 38:3, 255-270, DOI: 10.1080/03057240903101374

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057240903101374

Published online: 11 Aug 2009.

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Journal of Moral Education

Vol. 38, No. 3, September 2009, pp. 255270

Putting emotion into the self: a response to the 2008 Journal of

Moral Education
Special Issue on moral functioning
Kristjn Kristjnsson

University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland

This paper takes as its starting point the Journal of Moral Education Special Issue (September, 2008, 37[3]) Towards an integrated model of moral
reasoning. Although explicitly post-Kohlbergian, the authors in this Special Issue do not, I argue, depart far enough from Kohlbergs impoverished notion of
the role of the affective in moral lifeor when they do so depart, they incorporate emotions as mere intuitive thrusts in an essentially polarised two-system
view of the moral self. Prior to that complaint, I sketch an account of two contrasting self-paradigms: a dominant cognitive, anti-realist (constructivist)
paradigm and an alternative realist and emotion-based one. I explore the implications of the latter paradigm, which I endorse, for our understanding of the
emotional self: a self imbued with and constituted by (potentially rationally grounded) emotions. I finally contrast that understanding with the one
permeating the Special Issue and elicit some educational implications of the alternative paradigm.

Introduction

An authors personal motivations for writing academic papers are rarely stated explic-itly at the outset. Allow me to break that rule by
revealing that what prompted me to write the present piece was the publication of Journal of Moral Educations (JME) September
2008 Special Issue Towards an integrated model of moral functioning. Synthesising and attempting to advance the current state of

play in post-Kohlbergian moral psychology and moral education, most of the authors in this Special Issue seem to agree that what is
needed to progress beyond Kohlbergs one-dimensional rationalist model is a new paradigm of moral selfhood that combines rationalist
and sentimentalist elements: namely, considers human beings motivated by reason and emotion. Exhilarated by the promise of this
suggested enterprise, but at the same time slightly irritated by how little it delivered (or perhaps, more charitably, that it did not deliver
quite as much as it promised), I sat down to reflect. My direct

*School of Education, University of Iceland, Stakkahl, IS-105 Reykjavik, Iceland. Email: kk9@hi.is

ISSN 0305-7240 (print)/ISSN 1465-3877 (online)/09/03025516 2009 Journal of Moral Education Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/03057240903101374 http://www.informaworld.com

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256
K.
Kris
tjn
sson

e that the integrated model is not integrated enough in that it still marginalises emotion within the moral self or, at best,
understands emotion as distinct fromif complementary toreason. Prior to that, I would like to invite the reader on a
rollercoaster ride through the landscape of recent self-research. The general concerns that I have about some received
wisdoms underlying that research do, in the end, carry over into misgivings about the Special Issue.

Two self-paradigms
resp
onse
to
som
e of
the
poin
ts
mad
e in
this
time
ly
Spec
ial
Issu
e
awai
ts
the
penu
ltimate
secti
on.
Ther
eI
argu

Recent years have witnessed an unprecedented outpouring of writings about the human self and the nexus of concepts
revolving around it (such as self-concept, self-esteem and self-confidence). These writings have been initiated by
academics from various quarterspsychological, philosophical and educational, as well as sub-camps within those
quartersand have been brought to bear on diverse issues, including many that would be of interest to readers of this
journal. It is difficult to pinpoint anything singular in the prodigious plurality of discursive traditions generated by recent
self-research. As always, academics from diverse fields tend to be more concerned with sailing off in their own
directions than with interacting constructively with one another. Nevertheless, if one tries to trace some general patterns
of conver-gence in the sea of divergence, what seems to have been gradually evolving is an overarching cognitive,
constructivist (anti-realist) self-paradigm. One must be careful about terminology; cognitive needs to be understood
narrowly here to denote cold self-processes that exclude the affectiveas distinct, for example, from the use of
cognitive in such locutions as cognitive theories of emotion, in which the cognitive is also meant to embrace hot
sentiments. This explains, among other things, how moral psychologists have come to debate whether it is the cognitive
construction of moral selfhood or the availability of moral emotions that bridges the notorious gap between moral
knowledge and moral action (see, e.g., Blasi, 1999, versus Montada, 1993).

In the remainder of this section I try to pinpoint in brief outline some of the features of what I call the dominant
paradigm of self-research, to signal my concerns regarding it and to suggestagain in a skeletal forman alternative
paradigm that, while remaining cognitive on a broader understanding of the term, would be essen-tially emotion-based
and realist. As I have on previous occasions aired similar sugges-tions under the banner of Aristotelianism (see, e.g.,
Kristjnsson, 2006, 2007), I would be tempted to call the alternative paradigm Aristotelian. I refrain here for two
reasons, however. The first is that Aristotle did not operate with a distinct concept of self; at least not the same concept
that is at issue in contemporary discussions. He was interested in the self qua soul (the form of the body), part of which
even survives death, and the self qua moral character: a set of substantive character states that are more enduring even
than our knowledge of the sciences (Aristotle, 1985, p. 25 [1100b1214]). Neither of these concepts coincides
completely with the self of todays personality psychology, for instance, a self that has little to do with an

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Putting emotion into the self 257

Table 1. The dominant self-paradigm versus the alternative self-paradigm

(b) Self-creation
Cognitive, exploratory
Cognitive and affective
(c) Emotional selves
Self-relevant emotions
The
domi
nant
parad
igm
The
altern
ative
parad
igm

Self-relevant emotions psychologically

psychologically and morally

and morally central

peripheral

(d) The self as moral

Constituted essentially by
(a)
What
selve
s are

Constituted essentially by
character
(dispositional) actions

Antirealis
m
(selfh
ood
as
Reali
sm
(nonconst
ructe
d
selfh
ood
as

(dispositional) emotions
(e) Self-respect
Cognitive and formalist
Cognitive and affective (protected by

(protected by a conception of
pridefulness)

dignity and rights)

const
ructe
d
identi
ty)

(f) Self-esteem and selfConstituted essentially by selfConstituted by self-relevant emotions

the
cogni
tive
objec
t of
identi
ty)

confidence
relevant beliefs

(g) Multicultural selves

Distinguished by

Disti
nguis
hed
by
inco
mpati
ble
belief
s

(i) Self-change
Enacted via cognitive
Enacted via emotion-driven search for

reconstructions of identity
objective truth

inco
mme
nsura
ble
belief
s
and
emoti
ons
(h)
Selfpatho
logie
s
Caus
ed by
confli
cting
belief
s
Caus
ed by
confli
cting
emoti
onal

imperishable soul and is supposed to penetrate even deeper into the core of a persons psyche than moral character does,
encompassing only those character traits that are truly identity-conferring. The second reason is that the majority of
modern self-researchers would categorically repudiate the strong substantive realism underlying Aristotles selfparadigm (if we dare call it that). In fact, many of them would be will-ing to board almost any train that took them in a
direction oppositional to such real-ism. The alternative self-paradigm that I sketch below is not meant to carry
Aristotles heavy ontological baggage and should therefore appeal to others than those already wedded to his outlook.
Nevertheless, the alternative paradigm remains tantalisingly Aristotelian in spirit, if not in letter.

I summarise some of the fundamental differences between the dominant and alternative paradigms in Table 1. To do
justice to all the nuances involved, I have considerably more work ahead of me than I propose to undertake in this
paper. For present purposes, I elaborate briefly on those differences only in so far as they help shed light on the specific
issues that are subjected to more careful scrutiny in the following sections.

(1) What selves are

enga
geme
nts

According to the anti-realism stance that pervades contemporary self-research, there is no useful distinction to be drawn
between selfhood and identity or between ones actual selfhood and ones self-concept. My identity consists of my
conception of the

258 K. Kristjnsson

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core commitments, ideas and traits that make me what I am: the characteristics that cannot be changed without a change
in my self-identity. The underlying assumption is that people tend to act in line with the attributes that they interpret
themselves as having or attribute to themselves. What people call the self is a cognitive construc-tion. Thinking that
there is some substantive basis of the selfsome actual selfhood beneath the self-attributionsis simply a preEnlightenment anachronism. Realising that their notion of selfhood seems to undermine ordinary conceptions of selfunder-standing and self-deception (for how can we understand or be deceived about our selves unless there is some
underlying reality that our beliefs can capture or miss?), todays anti-realists tend to invoke various coherence criteria of
narrative unity or reflective equilibrium to which our self-beliefs must adhere in order to produce understanding
rather than deception (see e.g. Polkinghorne, 1988). Others at the radical postmodern fringes of anti-realism go further
and ask us to relinquish the notion of self-understanding altogether (see, e.g., Gergen, 1991). The lingering problem with
all those self-limiting ordinances is that it seems possible for me to have a perfectly internally coherent conception of
myself as a loving father and husband, when it is clear to everyone else from my actual reactions and actions that I am a
brutal tyrant. The realist alternative here is to suppose that ones identity or self-concept has actual selfhoodones de
facto states of characteras its cognitive object and that when it gets things right ones identity corresponds with ones
selfhood (see, e.g., Flanagan, 1996). There is no need to equate this actual selfhood with a substan-tive, metaphysical
self along Aristotelian or Cartesian lines, if one is adverse to the ontological commitments of such an equation. After all,
David Hume, the great sceptic of all things substantive, advanced a perfectly down-to-earth version of an everyday
moral selfthe self as the subject of moral agency and the object of moral evaluationin Book II of his Treatise
(1978): a self that constitutes an objective feature of a person and is constantly amenable to third-party seconding or
correction.

(b) Self creation(c) Emotional selves

As a genre that renounces the affective and embraces the cognitive, the dominant paradigm understands self-creation in
terms of an exploratory journey of selfing in which persons negotiate their identities by trying out different life plans
and life commitments through interaction with others. The individual then rationally chooses the alternative that best
accords with his or her preferences. Self-related emotions (more specifically and exclusively the so-called self-conscious
emotions) do play a role in this journey, but only a subsidiary one as compared to the honing of the cogni-tive faculties,
and after the construction of an identity, they remain psychologically and morally peripheral. The alternative paradigm,
in contrast, harks back to Aristotles notion of emotions being implicated in all our states of character, be they vicious or
virtuous, and of self-creation as enactedin its early stages at leastvia sentimental habituation rather than critical
inquiry. For non-Aristotelians, it is salu-tary to recall that on Humes account, the moral self is not only constituted, but
also originally produced, by emotion (an idea to which I return later). According to this

Putting emotion into the self 259

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alternative paradigm, various types of self-relevant emotions continue, after the initial self-creation process, to be
psychologically and morally central in our engagements all emotionally laden to a larger or smaller degreewith the
world, other people and ourselves.

(d) The self as moral character(e) Self-respect

Once the self has constructed its moral character, the dominant paradigm considers the morality of the self to be
demonstrated essentially through intentional actions. Unfortunately, those have been shown, in Milgram-type
experiments (Milgram, 1974), to be seriously lacking in robustness and reliability, which gives succour to the
situationist slogan that there is no such thing as moral character. Such experiments present less of a problem for the
alternative paradigm, in which moral character is understood more in terms of dispositional emotional reactions than in
terms of actions. After all, peoples reactive attitudes to what they have done tend to be more permanent and predictable
than are the actions themselves (especially those performed on the spur of the moment or under compulsion). Similarly,
self-respect the extent to which one follows a moral code and is disposed to avoid behaving in a manner unworthy of
oneselfrisks becoming conceptually impoverished and moti-vationally undernourished if understood along dominant
cognitive lines as adherence to formal principles of human rights and dignity. What is lacking there is sensitivity to the
affective dimension of self-respect and how it is protected by ones desire to avoid shame and to experience pride in
oneself as a moral agent.

(f) Self-esteem and self-confidence(g) Multicultural selves

Since the 1980s, more has been written in psychological and educational circles about self-esteem and self-confidence
than about almost any other subject. Yet the psychological status of both these psychological states is clouded in
mystery. Within the dominant paradigm, self-esteem is understood in terms of beliefs relating to the general ratio of
ones achievements to aspirations and self-confidence in terms of beliefs in what one can achieve in the future. Yet my
belief that I am the worlds hand-somest philosopher does not raise my global self-esteem if I am concerned only with
being the worlds best philosopher. Moreover, it is hardly enough to believe that I can learn a new language if I am
lacking in motivation or the fortitude to take the plunge. The alternative view would focus on the relationship between
self-esteem and pride and between self-confidence and courage. In a similar vein, it does not do full justice to the
vagaries of multicultural selfhoods to understand them as the battlefields of incommensurable beliefs: say, the belief
that you should find yourself independently through an inward gaze and then express joyfully what you have found,
versus the belief that you should immerse yourself in culturally embedded interdependence and be willing to sacrifice
your own life for the welfare of the group. What is missing here is an appreciation of the extent to which emotional
engagements steer the exploratory journey and help adjudicate the eventual outcome.

K. Kristjnsson

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Self-pathologies(i) Self-change

Selves sometimes go astray and lose their footing. They become excessively medica-lised, torn asunder by internal
conflicts or taken in by extremist rhetoric that leads to their destruction. Those are some of the potential pathologies of
modern selfhood. The dominant paradigm typically explains such pathologies as resulting from cognitive dissonances,
and self-change in terms of cognitive reconstructions of identity. The defect in the dominant paradigm and the advantage
of the alternative one is, once again, that the latter does, while the former does not, shed light on the emotional
iconographies and trajectories that move the cognitive barometersometimes in the wrong direction. Furthermore,
because the alternative paradigm is also a realist self-account, it can explain the motive to self-change as an emotiondriven search for objective truth about the self and its actual potentialities, rather than as a search for subjective
epiphanies.

The preceding comparisons between the dominant and the alternative self-paradigms have been somewhat elliptical and
short on specifics. Before turning the alternative paradigm to good account as a critique of recurring themes in the JME
Special Issue, it will be useful to flesh out its notion of the emotional self: that is, the human self in so far as it is
informed and sustained by emotions.

The emotional self

It is salutary to consider why research on the self, on the one hand, and on emotions, on the other, has occupied parallel
furrows of late without significant cross-fertilisation.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the pioneers of psychological self-research included self-feelings as an important
facet of the self. As noted, however, psycholo-gists have recently tended to equate self with identity and to understand it
exclusively as a cognitive structure. That would not have created a rift between self research and emotion research,
except for the fact that most psychologists have simultaneously embraced a biological, natural-kind approach to
emotions, or at least to the basic emotions that matter most for our everyday moral life: emotions such as anger, fear,
sadness and happiness (cf. Bosma & Kunnen, 2001; Tracy & Robins, 2004, 2007). According to such a natural-kind
approach, each of the basic emotion concepts carves nature at its joints (to use the Platonic phrase) and manifests
itself uniformly across cultures. These emotions constitute natural kinds because each one allegedly has a distinctive
pattern of inter-correlated outputs: autonomic nervous system arousal caused by a homeostatic mechanism within the
brain, facial movements and behaviour. Which output is considered of greatest importance, then, usually corre-sponds
conveniently with the research interests of the given theorist. As natural kinds, the emotions in question are believed to
form categories with firm boundaries, scien-tifically discovered but not cognitively constructed by us. Among the
popular refrains of current natural-kind theories is that the basic emotions on which the theories focus are modular.
The supposed modularity of emotions means that they are informationally encapsulatedthat they are controlled by
information processing

Putting emotion into the self 261

that is rapid, strictly feed-forward, largely unconscious, most likely innate and not susceptible to direct modification by
any higher cognitive processes. Hence, the gaping gulf between emotion and the self.

The natural-kind approach is susceptible to a number of well-known objections and what follows here is merely a
starter kit of problems (see further in Kristjnsson, 2007, Ch. 4). (a) The problem of non-correspondence. Despite years
of intensive research, none of the individual biological outputs used to measure emotion has managed to distinguish
consistently between supposed instances of the basic emotions. Moreover, strong correlations between the various
biologically driven outputs (e.g. neural, facial, behavioural) of each emotion have failed to materialise.

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(b) The problem of basicness. The long tradition in emotion research of trying to iden-tify a group of basic emotions
has yielded no unanimous results, probably due in part to the disparate search criteria that relate to such diverse
domains as evolutionary history, developmental priority, universality, prevalence, forcefulness and moral significance.
The number of basic emotions listed by leading researchers ranges from two to eleven and a comparison of a number
of such lists does not locate a single emotion that figures on all of them (cf. Solomon, 2002). (c) The problem of the
irrelevance of language. If emotions are hardwired into our brains at birth, there is no intrinsic role for language in the
emergence of basic emotional responses. Language simply creates semantic typologies that may have little relevance
to the functioning of the nervous system. Because the basic emotional appraisals are preconscious, linguistic
awareness no longer presents, on this account, a vital step in differentiating emotions. These contentions, however,
make the flesh of any decent philosopher or anthropologist creep. (d) The problem of involuntariness. If the basic
emotions are modular, they are, in a strict sense, involuntary, which means that emotion manage-ment is a much more
restrictive enterprise than recent theories of emotional literacy and emotional schooling will have us believe.

Some psychologists have been partly won over by objections to a comprehensive natural-kind approach. It has thus
become fashionable to assume that there are two kinds of emotion abroad in human psychology. On the one hand are
the pan-cultural basic or affect-programme emotions; and, on the other, the cognitively complex emotions, intimately
related to peoples linguistic repertoires. Among the cognitively complex emotionswhich make up the numbers on the
peripheries of emotion researchare, for instance, the self-conscious emotions. Notably, the majority of philosophers
reject this distinction (which bears striking similarity to that made by Hume between the direct and indirect emotions
in Books I and II, of his Treatise [1978]). The standard philosophical approach of late is to understand all emotions as
including a cognitive core element (belief, judgement)or even to be exhausted by their cognitive content. Such a
cognitive approach to emotion is not without prob-lems of its own, however: (a) The problem of emotional
recalcitrance. An emotion, such as fear, is often felt in apparent default of the allegedly necessary cognition, namely
that one is in harms way (take fear of spiders); and (b) The problem of individuation. We may ask what distinguishes
those cognitive elements that can form the basis of an emotion from those that can not and how we can distinguish
clearly between different

262 K. Kristjnsson

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emotions if what matters is not mere difference in felt quality or physical expression. The only viable response to this
problem seems to be to acknowledge that proper analysis of emotions cannot avoid being normative. Moulding badlymoulded mean-ings necessarily involves normative regimentation. This does not mean that the conceptual specifications
of particular emotions that result from such regimentations are merely stipulative; they should be supported by nonarbitrarily chosen arguments, derived in various ways from our theory of human nature and of the world in which we
live. But the arguments will necessarily invoke normative criteria, not merely non-evaluative ones (see Kristjnsson,
2007, Ch. 4).

Contemporary cognitive theorists are often accused of being overly focused on the cognitive component of emotion and
ignoring or underestimating the affective element. If we accept as a defining feature of a cognitive theory that it
relegates to a side issue the way emotions feel, then Aristotleoften pictured as the emotional cognitivist par excellence
provides us with a conciliatory middle-ground proposal. He specifies all emotions as being necessarily accompanied
by pain or pleasure, which are sensations rather than beliefs or judgements. For Aristotle, the sensations of pleasure or
pain provide the material conditions or physiological substrates of emotions whereas the relevant cognitions provide
their formal conditions. It would take me too far afield here to argue for the superiority of Aristotles middle-ground
proposal over the natural-kind approach; I have done that elsewhere (Kristjnsson, 2002, 2006, 2007) and will simply
assume as much for the remainder of this discus-sion. What matters for present purposes is that, given such an
assumption, it is an untenable idea that the self and emotion constitute separate compartments, tightly shut off from one
another because of an essential difference in nature. The alternative self-research paradigm sketched in the previous
section would take its cue from that very fact and draw a complex picture of the nature of self-relevant emotions as
forming at least three distinct, if partly overlapping, categories.

First in line are self-constituting emotions: emotions that define who we are. Any emotion that can, in principle, be selfconstituting for a given individual, as long as it exemplifies some of his or her core commitments in life, is truly
identity-conferring. For person X, compassion with the victims of world poverty may be such an emotion; for person Y
begrudging spite: pain at other peoples deserved good fortune. All people will experience a number of such emotions
and if they stop experiencing them, they will have undergone a radical self-changebut also a number that are not selfconstituting: I feel excited when I listen to a certain pop song today, but I may have grown tired of it tomorrow, and I
will be the same person although my emotional reaction to the song has dwindled. So although all emotions are in a
platitudinous sense self-related simply because they are felt by the self, not all are self-constituting.

Second, some emotions are self-comparative; they involve the self as an indirect object. All emotions include a
comparative element: comparison with a baseline of expectations. One cannot, for instance, feel begrudging spite
towards a person without having an idea of the lot that similar persons could have expected in similar circumstances.
However, my begrudging spite need not include any comparisons

Putting emotion into the self 263

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with myself: I may simply grudge the fortune of other persons and would prefer that the fortune be taken away from
them. If begrudging spite turns self-comparative, it typically develops into another emotion, namely envy. This is not to
say that begrudging spite is not often elicited by envy or that the two do not frequently co-occur; what I am noting is
simply that begrudging spite is not, whereas envy is, necessarily self-comparative. I have elsewhere identified and
explored a number of such salient self-comparative emotions as reactions to ones own fortune or misfortune
(Kristjnsson, 2006, Ch. 3.3).

Third in line, and most intimately connected to the self, are the self-conscious emotions, first identified by Hume as
pride and humility (1978, Book II; notice that he gives both terms more extended senses than ordinary language
would allow at his time or ours). Self-conscious emotions is not a highly felicitous label (Keshen, for one, prefers to
talk about self-esteem feelings, 1996, p. 4), although I shall not break with tradition by coining a new one, for those
emotions not only involve consciousness about the self; they areto use the language of intentionalityabout the self.
The self is, in other words, their direct attentional and intentional object.

There are discordant views if and to what extent self-conscious emotions involve inferences about other peoples
evaluations of the individual, precisely how many of those emotions there are and how they should be individuated.
Hume made do with two; contemporary listings tend to include at least guilt, shame and embarrassment on the negative
side and pride (sometimes divided into hubristic and achievement-oriented pride) on the positive side (Leary, 2007;
Tracy & Robins, 2004, 2007). I shall not become embroiled in the former debate here and, although I take an implicit
stand on the latter below, I reiterate the earlier point that all such conceptual regi-mentations are normative and subject
to philosophical rather than pure psychological inquiry.

It may be helpful to divide the self-conscious emotions first into feelings of self-enhancement and self-diminution (cf.
Keshen, 1996) and then each of the two into emotions that do or do not attribute responsibility to the self. That would
leave us with four main self-conscious emotions: pride (pleasurable self-enhancement feeling relating to a fortune for
which I am responsible, such as passing a difficult exam); self-satisfaction (pleasurable self-enhancement feeling
relating to a fortune for which I am not responsible, such as being born handsome); shame (painful self-diminution feeling relating to a misfortune for which I am responsible, such as failing an exam); and self-disappointment (painful selfdiminution feeling relating to a misfortune for which I am not responsible, such as being born ugly).

It complicates matters somewhat that the word pride in English is ambiguous in at least three senses. One involves the
episodic emotion mentioned previously; another is pride as expressed in such locutions as X is a proud person,
which does not mean that X has a disposition to experience pride often, but rather that X is a prideful person (concerned
about self-image); a third is the sense of pride in locu-tions such as Pride prevented X from doing that vile thing,
where pride seems to be used synonymously with self-respect. It also muddies the water that there is an entrenched
distinction in the literature between shame and guilt, where guilt is

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supposed to focus on specific behaviour which does not pass muster, but shame on failings of ones global character
(see, e.g., Tracy & Robins, 2004, 2007). Although there are myriad counter-examples that have people feeling guilty
about their global lack of moral integrity or ashamed because of a particular transgressionand research into the
difference between so-called shame societies and guilt societies seems to indicate that guilt is better understood as a
special case of shame than as an independent emotiontoo much intellectual energy may have been spent carving out
the exact boundaries between vaguely different manifestations of emotional self-diminution (Kristjnsson, 2002, Ch. 3
4).

It is easy to get bogged down in the minutiae of emotion individuation. What is more important for present purposes is
to consider the general ramifications of the above account of the various types of self-relevant emotions. The first and
most obvious thing to note is that the rift between self research and emotion research has hurt both fields (Tracy &
Robins, 2004, p. 118). Whether one approaches emotions from the perspective of the self or vice versa, one reasonably
ends up with an integrative notion of an emotional self that has various significant moral, psychological and educational
implications. Hume even went as far as to claim that it is precisely the existence of self-conscious emotions that, by
turning our attention to their intentional object, produces the idea of a self; more precisely the idea of a moral self that
is, in contradistinction to the idea of a substantive metaphysical self, non-fictitious. He describes this generating process
in details that need not concern us here (1978, pp. 277286), except to observe that if Hume is right, emotions can be not
only self-constituting, but actually (take notice, moral educators!) self-creating. Recently, some attempts have been
made in psychological circles to rebrand this Humean idea, albeit in a watered-down form as a genealogical link
between emotion and identity (self-concept) formation (see various articles in Bosma & Kunnen, 2001; Vleioras, 2005).
At the same time, some moral psychologists have started to elicit the significance of the self-conscious emotions for
moral life (Hart & Matsuba, 2007). Those are, however, still voices from the academic backwater.

Let me conclude this section by mentioning two more potential implications of the alternative emotion-based selfparadigm. It should, first, put paid to the strange notion looming in moral psychology that moral emotions and the
existence of a rationally grounded moral self are distinct options between which we must choose in order to explain why
some people actually act on the moral knowledge they possess. If the alternative self-paradigm that I have sketched
holds good, this gambit turns out to be illusory; the moral self is a self imbued with potentially rationally grounded
emotion (Kristjnsson, in press). Second, this alternative paradigm may pave the way for a solution to the riddle of the
psychological status of self-esteem. Notice that there are no words available in English for dispositional traits of pride
and shame; being prideful or being shameful differ in meaning from being disposed to experience frequently and
intensely pride and shame, respectively. We would probably say about such persons that they had high or low selfesteem, which seems to indicate that there is an intimate link between self-conscious emotions and self-esteem. Perhaps
Keshen

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Putting emotion into the self 265

(1996) was not far off the mark when he categorised the self-conscious emotions under the rubric of episodic selfesteem (p. 3).

The moral culture of the self (and why the JME Special Issue disappoints)

Dewey kept reminding us of the necessity to attend to the educational repercussions of the moral culture of the self
and authors in the JME Special Issue are alert to the need for any good moral psychology to carry an educational
message (see, e.g., Lapsley & Hill, 2008, p. 325). Kohlberg was, of course, the leading moral psycholo-gist in the
modern era as well as an enthusiastic moral educator. The Special Issue was published in observance of the 50th
anniversary of his PhD dissertation.

Now, Kohlberg was obviously not a self-theorist in the literal sense, but if we translate his Kantian rationalism and his
cognitive developmental approach into contemporary self-talk, it falls snugly into line with that of the dominant selfparadigm outlined above: the moral self is a social construction; self-constituting interactions are mediated by cognitive
schemata; and these schemata constitute structures of action (see Reeds helpful overview, 2008, pp. 360362). The
tenor of the Special Issue is post-Kohlbergian and this gives the reader a good sense of where the centre of gravity lies
in current theories of moral psychology and moral education that are still between paradigms (Frimer & Walker, 2008,
p. 352). The crest of the Kohlbergian wave has been broken, but a new one is not yet fully in sight: a new
comprehensive model of moral functioning.

Blasi (1999) had tried to solve the Kohlbergian gappiness problem (the non-correlation between stages of moral
reasoning and moral behaviour) with his moral-self solution. But it is almost as if Blasi had mistaken himself into
thinking that he was resisting Kohlberg merely by asserting to his rationalist demands with sufficient reluctance; Blasis
solution is still a cognitive one in a rather narrow sense of cogni-tive. The idea underlying most of the contributions to
the Special Issueand animating the whole project towards a new integrated modelis that we need to depart less
faint-heartedly from Kohlberg and to embrace the affective more explicitly than Blasi allows, while still maintaining a
vigil against the perils of pure moral non-cognitivism. Is it possible to have the best of both worlds? My own view is
that we probably can, but that the suggestions made in this Special Issue reveal a somewhat impoverished notion of the
affective.

Let me begin on a positive note, however. It is pleasantly surprising to see Frimer and Walker (2008) tackling the not
so-much-like-under-pressed tofu topic of the ontological status of the self and underwriting a realist account of the
non-shattered self as a persisting psychological unit (pp. 344346). It is also heartening to see them refer to the research
done by Michael Chandler and his colleagues: a veritable oasis in the psychological anti-realist desert (see especially
Chandler et al., 2003).

From that note to a less conciliatory one. There have been some attempts made in recent moral psychology to repackage
Humean Treatise-Book-I sentimentalism for modern consumption. Best known is perhaps Jonathan Haidts (2001)
version of Humean feeling theory with an evolutionary twist, in his piece on the emotional dog

266 K. Kristjnsson

and its rational tail. The main contention there is that moral reasoning does not cause moral judgement (nor, in turn,
moral action) at all, but that moral judgement is rather the result of quick, affective and automatic (mostly unconscious)
intuitions, including emotions, followed by slow ex-post facto moral reasoning. This is meant to explain why moral
action co-varies with moral emotion more than with moral reason-ing. We naive humans erroneously think, however,
that the after-effect (reasoning) produces the cause (intuition/emotion). This whole process is then given an evolutionary gloss by Haidt, as an invaluable adaptive mechanism. If this account of the role of emotion in moral life is
supposed to be Humean, it is obvious that Haidt has never progressed beyond Book I in Humes Treatise (1978). For in
Books IIIII, Hume describes the indirect emotions (pride, humility, love and hate), with target objects (ourselves and
other people) outside of themselves, that form the basis of the moral sentiments. Nor does Haidt take any account of the
findings of contemporary cognitive theories of emotion. Bad as Haidts neo-sentimentalist mixture is on its own, as
compared, say, with that of sophisticated neo-sentimentalists such as Ronald de Sousa (2001), it will cause no less than
serious moral indigestion if the topmost froth of neo-sentimentalism and the last dregs of Kohlbergianism are gulped
down together. I am not saying that this is the necessary outcome of the Special Issue, but I feel that some of its authors
come seriously close to endorsing Haidts primitive understanding of the affective realm.
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The overarching idea of the Special Issue is this: there are two systems underlying moral behaviour: a conscious, rulebased, explicit, analytical and rational system, on the one hand; and an implicit, intuitive, experiential, automatic and
tacit system, on the other. The latter system includes emotions. Those systems already interact in various ways;
successful moral education consists of making them interact more harmoniously in order to make up an integrated moral
self or personhood (see espe-cially Frimer & Walker, 2008; Lapsley & Hill, 2008; Narvaez & Vaydich, 2008).
Admittedly, the experiential system is not necessarily equated with Haidts evolu-tionary intuitionist model. In contrast
to his model, Lapsley and Hill (2008) suggest, for instance, that automaticity may be located at the backend of
development as the outcome of repeated experience and instruction (p. 324). What worries me, however, is the image of
emotion as steam rising automatically from internal kettles and of the moral self as the battleground of two systems
where the desired end-product is some sort of armistice or dialectical harmony between two essentially opposing
elements. This internal-kettles view comes out clearly in Narvaez and Vaydichs (2008) paper when they discuss the
affectively-rooted moral orientations emerging from human evolution (p. 305). Lapsley and Hills two-systems view
seems to be somewhat more subtle with regard to the nature of emotions and they clearly state that is a model of moral
cognition that articulates both the deliberative and automatic processes that underlie moral behaviour (p. 315).
Neverthelessand despite their repeated empha-sis on integration and complementaritythey subscribe to a separation
between rational and affective systems. In contrast, the upshot of the alternative Aristotle-inspired paradigm of the self
that I have proposed in this paper is that of a unified moral self of rationally grounded emotion.

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Putti
ng
emot
ion
into
the
self
267

To
ment
ion
brief
ly
two
othe
r
cont
ribut
ions
to
the
Spec
ial
Issu
e,
Hast
e
and
Abra
ham
s
(200
8)
do
well
to
emp
hasis

e how the moral self can engage or do culture, rather than simply being moulded by culture. But when they start to
describe in detail how individuals reconstruct their identities, the proposed triangular model (individ-ual sensemaking; society; interpersonal dialogue) seems to leave little space for affec-tive engagement. To be fair to them, Haste
and Abrahams mention other perspectives on morality that could also be subjected to cultural analysis but that they
leave out of reckoning here; one of them being Humean with an emphasis on moral emotions (pp. 377378). They seem
to think, however, that this Humean perspective has been revived in moral psychology by Haidts sentimentalism. As I
noted earlier, Haidt is not Hume (or if he is, then he is Hume on steroids). Finally, the re-evaluation of Kohlbergs Just
Community approach (Oser et al., 2008) shows scant sensitivity to the emotional roots of justice: namely to the fact that
childrens sense of justice does not have its origin in lofty political insights but arises, rather, from the promptings of
deep-seated emotions about deserved and undeserved outcomes (Kristjnsson, 2006).

My complaint about the Special Issue, in a nutshell, is this: most of the contribu-tors either cling to the cognitive
(narrowly-construed) remnants of Kohlbergianism, with only a marginal role for emotions; or when departing from
Kohlbergianism, they try to incorporate emotions as intuitive thrusts in an essentially polarised two-systems self. A step
is taken away from the dominant self-paradigmand that is surely to be applaudedbut not towards the alternative
paradigm that I have advocated.

Educational ramifications

As a moral educator, it worries me to think of the impact that the two-systems self-view with its impoverished notion of
emotion may have for the burgeoning practice of Aristotle-inspired sentimental education at school. I have written at
some length on earlier occasions (Kristjnsson 2002, 2006, 2007) about the ideal nature and contours of such education
and do not wish to repeat myself here. Recall simply that two of the most popular trends in moral education succeeding
Kohlbergs develop-mentalism are avowedly Aristotelian in origin: character education, based broadly on the tenets of
virtue ethics, and social and emotional learning, derived from the concept of emotional intelligence. Devout
Aristotelians may grumble that those trends have rushed off too quickly in their own homemade directions. Character
educationists seem at times to be overly concerned with the inculcation of a body of set traits but concerned too little
with the development of critical moral wisdom (phronesis), and EQ-theorists typically fail to heed Aristotles warning
that emotional competence without moral depth is the mere calculated cleverness of a knave. Never-theless, those two
approaches have unleashed an unprecedented interest in methods of moral coaching that include sentimental education
as an essential element.

Long before the resurgence of interest in Aristotelian sentimental education, the astute Scottish philosopher John
Macmurray (1935) wrote about the need for proper training of young peoples emotions. He referred to it as the
development of

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268 K. Kristjnsson

sensuous discrimination and co-ordination: the refinement of sensuality (p. 71). Macmurray realised, just as Aristotle
had, the enormous influence of the parentchild and teacherchild relationships on this process of sensitisation. This is
why Aristotle has aptly been named the founder of the ethics of care (Curzer, 2007). One could also, for the same
reason, call him the founder of attachment theory. Aristotle famously foregrounds behavioural strategies of habituation
in early childhood, to teach children to feel the right things at the right times towards the right people; yet it is clear that
the eventual aim of sentimental habituation is to help the young gradually actualise their own phronesis, in order to reevaluate and possibly revise the dispositions with which they were originally inculcated, and to infuse them with
personal moral value (see further in Kristjnsson, 2007, Ch. 5).

This Aristotelian picture of sentimental education may seem to be quite compat-ible with Lapsley and Hills (2008)
account of the education of System 1 processes (namely our intuitive, experiential, automatic and tacit ones) as the
outcome of repeated experience, of instruction, intentional coaching and socialisa-tion (pp. 324325). Yet three things
must be borne in mind here. First, Aristotles habituation is not invoked as a method to train only some mental processes
the intuitive and automatic onesbut all processes. Every disposition we have, to act as well as to react, is seen as the
outcome of original habituation. Second, the idea of the policing by one system (e.g. rational) of another (e.g. irrational)
is foreign to Aristotles moral ideals. Virtuous agents have no emotions to control as they are the manifestations of their
own properly felt emotions. The fully virtuous person thus constantly desires, feels and acts in the right medial way,
according to Aristo-tles theory of the golden mean of reaction and action (Kristjnsson, 2007, pp. 26 28). Third,
equally foreign to Aristotle is the idea that hot emotions need a cool moral principle, such as justice, to lend them
moral worth and that when exploring young peoples moral selves, we need to concentrate on pure cognitive constructions of their sense of purpose (e.g. Stanford Center on Adolescence, 2003) rather than their affective dispositions. All
in all, there is no hint in Aristotle of any two systems at work, be they complementary or competing. The emotional life
is not another or alien aspect of human life, let alone subordinate or subsidiary to some independently grounded
reason. It is at the very core of our single moral system.

Returning to the Aristotle-inspired, if not strictly Aristotelian, alternative self-paradigm sketched in the opening
section, it would have various other educational implications apart from the foregrounding of sentimental education. I
shall bring this paper to a close by simply mentioning one: the retrieval of the notion of self-understanding as an
educational value. When people understand themselves, according to the alternative (realist) self-paradigm, they
discover objective truths that have hitherto eluded them. Such discoveries are characterised by a sense of
accomplishment. When people understand themselves according to the dominant (anti-realist) paradigm, they choose or
re-choose their identities: re-determine them-selves. Self-understanding is then characterised by unexpected or unforced
shifts in our understandingor by non-rational existential jumps into the unknown. As there

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Putting emotion into the self 269

is no real self to be understood, what can be understood is only ones self-construct which may be chosen and
polished.

Although self-understanding, in the realist sense, is a good thing, it is not necessar-ily pleasant. We may learn things
about ourselves and our relationships with others that shame and embarrass us (which also harmonises with the old
Socratic concep-tion of self-understanding as the realisation of ones own ignorance). Nevertheless, self-deceptions are
disabling, according to the alternative paradigm, because they undermine the self-transformative value of objective
truth. Interestingly, the method of self-reflection may not always be the most appropriate one to achieve selfunderstanding. It is not only the case that there may be absolute psychological constraints on the degree of reflective
self-comprehension that finite beings such as ourselves can achieve; psychological experiments have shown that
encouraging self-reflection can sometimes lessen accuracy in self-understanding by prompting ratio-nalisation and
slanted intellectualising (Wilson, 1985). Perhaps this finding provides evidence for the Aristotelian insight that the best
way forward for young peoples self-understanding is not through an inward gaze and self-work but through sustained
serious engagement with others.

That final insight, however, paves the way for another paper than the one I was going to write at this time. Let me
simply conclude by expressing my hope that the JME Special Issue will act as a bellwether for a paradigm change in
moral psychology and moral education. Nevertheless, as they stand, I doubt that the ideas it represents constitute the
next big leap forward in the field.

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