In this paper, I explore the characteristic reason that motivates a virtuously honest person to perform honest actions. I critically examine previous accounts of honesty's characteristic motivating reason, including Christian Miller's pluralistic account, which allows various virtuous motivating reasons to count as honesty's motivation. I then…

This article argues for a unique role of imagination and mental images in the moral education of students. Imagination is rendered here as a capacity oriented toward realizable and salient goals; mental images are understood as particular future-oriented self-representations (FOSRs) devised by and held in imagination. FOSRs have four moral…

To make a convincing argument, people are nowadays expected to speak the language of economics. Neoliberalism has become notorious for making an economic worldview dominate politics, yet it offers only a partial and ideologically inclined explanation for the zeitgeist of today. This paper expands upon the term, or ideology, of economism as a…

Self-determination theory, like other psychological theories that study eudaimonia, focuses on general processes of growth and self-realization. An aspect that tends to be sidelined in the relevant literature is virtue. We propose that special focus needs to be placed on moral virtue and its development. We review different types of moral…

Post-truth trades on the corruption of argument and evidence to protect ideological commitment and social identity. We distinguish two kinds of post-truth environments, epistemic bubbles and echo chambers, and argue that facets of post-truth are countered the more science (and general) education encourages the development of intellectual virtues…

Research suggests that children begin to internalize moral rules during the adolescent years when self-reflection and the desire to integrate and prioritize different core values is strongest (Blasi, 1983). Until then, they rely mostly on extrinsic forms of motivation in which they adopt the norms and rules of society, which they obey to avoid…

This paper addresses three basic questions about moral motivation. Concerning the nature of moral motivation, it argues that it involves responsiveness to both reasons of morality and the value of persons and everything else of value. Moral motivation is thus identified as reason-responsive appropriate valuing. Regarding whether it is possible for…

Research on the Happy Victimizer Phenomenon has mainly focused on preschool and schoolchildren, with a few studies also including adolescents and young adults. The main finding is that young children, despite knowing that harming someone is wrong, ascribe positive feelings to perpetrators and offer hedonistic justifications, interpreted as a lack…

A crisis we face is that moral character seems to be declining in significance in everyday life and is not particularly relevant in evaluations of current political leaders. A case for character, however, can be mounted through the study of moral exemplars; in demonstrating that character is a viable construct and not an artifact of situational…

In a rapidly expanding academic literature on gratitude, psychologists, philosophers and educational theorists have argued that gratitude is not just of great psycho-social importance but also of moral significance. It would therefore seem to follow that the promotion of gratitude is also of moral educational significance. In this regard, recent…

This paper aims at connecting Self-Determination Theory (SDT) with research on moral identity. It is argued that SDT provides a unique and integrative framework for addressing important questions that have guided research on moral identity for many years: What is a moral identity? How is it linked to moral action? How do moral identities develop?…

This dissertation aims to understand the motivations and influences that drive male and female students' participation in experiences that research demonstrates to have a positive impact on students' moral reasoning development while in college. Moral reasoning is an important aspect of student development that contextualizes how students make…

The UK's 2016 decision to exit the European Union and the discussion surrounding it indicate that public understanding of British identity has important consequences, one way or another. Defining British identity will be an important task in the years to come. The UK government not long ago provided some guidance on the matter of British identity…

The literature focusing on Christian home schooling has been entirely ignored in the educational context of China, because practising home schooling is illegal and such families have strong religious beliefs. In particular, in China, studies grounded in empirical research and dealing with the development of Christian home schooling are negligible.…

Moral identity research to date has largely failed to provide evidence for developmental trends in moral identity, presumably because of restrictions in the age range of studies and the use of moral identity measures that are insensitive to age-related change. The present study investigated moral identity motivation across a broad age range (14-65…