We often say that persons need to change themselves. But what is this “self” that needs to change, and why do “selves” seem to be so resistant to change? I have argued elsewhere that who I really am, in an everyday practical sense, is who I really am with respect to the moral evaluation of me. In other words, the everyday self that (often) needs changing is a moral self. In this article, I am offering further indirect evidence for this thesis by exploring an alternative possibility—that who I really am is my personality in the fashionable “Big Five” or “Five-Factor Model” sense—and showing that this suggestion does not bear scrutiny. I argue that although Big-Five theory has identified relatively stable within-person patterns, it has not shown these patterns to be psychologically meaningful, except to the extent that they are morally salient. I argue further that the nature of our diachronic moral selves suggests that moral philosophy needs to take a developmental and educational turn: a turn for which it may, however, not be well equipped.
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