Moral Formation Across the Life-Course: A Social Cognitive–Relational Developmental Perspective

Abstract

I argue that metatheories that inform social cognitive approaches to personality and relational developmental systems overlap in significant ways to provide an integrative framework for understanding moral formation across the lifecourse. Social cognitive theory describes how cognitive-affective units of early personality are solidified into autobiographical memory as a result of parental dialogic scaffolding. Goals, plans, and expectations of the moral self-as-agent are then folded into narrative form by young adulthood to create a moral identity that is action-guiding for the life-course. But moral identity will need to be fortified by features of moral wisdom to better confront the permanent adversities that invariably confound attempts to live a life that is good for one to live. Moral wisdom is held to be both personological (aligning with knowledge-and-appraisal aspects of personality architecture) and metacognitive (aligning with standard accounts of metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulation processes).

It seems, as one becomes older/That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be mere sequence---Or even development

--T.S. Eliot (East Coker)

The Organismic Past

Moral development has a distinguished place in the history of developmental science. For at least three decades, roughly from the early 1960s to the close of the 1980s, it was the leading edge of the cognitive developmental paradigm that drove the research agenda across the entire discipline. This paradigm was associated with Jean Piaget’s epochal research on children’s reasoning across an astonishing range of epistemological topics, including moral judgment (Piaget, 1932), and it was associated as well with paradigmatic claims about the nature of development.

The orthogenetic principle famously asserted, for example, that development was not mere change (which might concern the behaviorist) but was revealed instead in certain patterns of organization of increasing complexity that contribute to successful adaptation to intellectual and social environments. Development moved from a state of globality to a state of increasing specialization; from lack of differentiation to increasing differentiation and then hierarchical integration (Werner, 1957).

This movement from simplicity to complexity, from instability to stability, from disequilibrium born of contradiction, perturbation, and conflict to an agile equilibrium that resolves, adapts, and integrates led naturally to the claim that development should exhibit organization, pattern, and direction over time which can then be modeled as a series of stages. The search for stages of cognitive and social cognitive development was distinctive of this classical period, and so were arguments about stage properties and the very nature of change. Was developmental (vs. mere) change continuous or discontinuous? Should we be looking for quantitative or qualitative change, differences in amount or differences in kind? What happens when we reach the endpoint, the final stage, does development come to a stop, but if so, what happens next? ¹

Moral Stage Theory

Piaget’s (1932) pioneering work on moral judgment hardly fussed at all about the nature of change across the two broad stages of heteronomy and autonomy that he identified. When this paradigm was taken up by Lawrence Kohlberg in his 1958 dissertation and later by his team at Harvard University in the 1960s and beyond, not only were additional stages of moral reasoning identified but the stage concept itself took on more exacting properties (Kohlberg, 1971, 1984; Kohlberg et al., 1983). True developmental stages, on this view, must possess certain properties. Stages must describe qualitative differences in reasoning. Stages must unfold in a constant order of succession and be described in terms of an underlying thought-organization that underwrites the manifestation of a “logically and empirically related cluster of responses in development” (Kohlberg, 1969, p. 353). True “hard” stages are structural-developmental (meaning that structure and content are differentiated) as opposed to Piaget’s “soft” ideal-typical or age-developmental moral stages.

Stage reasoning organized around a structural inner logic that unfolds developmentally in an invariant sequence turned out to be the hard core, in Lakatos’s (1978) sense, of Kohlberg’s moral stage theory, something that had to be defended at all cost lest the theory be falsified. He argued, for example, that “the most important validity criterion of a stage test is evidence for it meeting the criterion of invariant sequence” (Kohlberg, 1984, p. 300). This implies no stage skipping and no stage regression. The second most important criterion is “structured wholeness.” This implies that moral judgments across a range of issues should reflect one’s current stage of reasoning.

Yet over time, empirical anomalies piled up to undermine these hard-core assumptions. There was evidence of stage regression, for example, and moral judgements did not seem to reflect an inner logic but varied instead by type of dilemma or mode of assessment; or else it was possible for structural competence to be undermined by performance factors. Efforts to repair the theory required frequent alteration of stage scoring. It also required jettisoning Stage 6 as an empirical reality but letting some of its principled moral properties (e.g., preference for universality) seep down nonetheless into newly created B-substages of conventional reasoning, and this to preserve the ability of moral reasoning to defeat ethical relativism (see Lapsley, 2005a, 2005b for a review).

Although the moral stage theory was always controversial (e.g., Gibbs, 1979, 2007; Krebs & Denton, 2005; Modgil & Modgil, 1986; Phillips & Nicolayev, 1978), it became much harder to defend when repairing its theoretical and empirical anomalies relied upon seeming ad hoc stratagems that reduced its scope and provided few options for anticipating novel lines of inquiry. It assumed a defensive crouch, and claims that it was a degenerating research program were hard to resist (Lapsley, 2005b; Locke, 1979).

Of course, Kohlberg’s theory was not the only stage theory to be put on its heels. Indeed, the entire cognitive developmental stage tradition, including Piagetian theory, was besieged by alternative and rival conceptions of cognition. The collapse of the grand Piagetian edifice took Kohlberg’s moral stage theory down with it. The result was that interest in stages of any kind was put on the margins of developmental science; and there was a palpable feeling that we were at the “end of an era” with respect to moral stage theory (Krebs & Denton, 2005, p. 639) and that the field of moral development had come to a crossroad (Lapsley & Carlo, 2014; Lapsley & Narvaez, 2005).

After the Crossroad

Yet the fall of the dominant paradigm had a liberating effect on developmental science. What happened next was sustained articulation of relational-developmental systems metatheory to supplant organismic models (e.g., Lerner & Lerner, 2019; Overton, 2013) and a surprising upsurge of empirical research across a wider range of topics using a greater diversity of methods (e.g., Killen & Smetana, 2023; Malle & Robbins, 2025). Research that documented the startling moral capacities of young children was of particular interest insofar as it undermined traditional cognitive developmental assumptions that preschool age children, and certainly infants, were too egocentric to be anything other than pre-moral.

Instead, as Thompson (2012) argued, the foundations of later moral understanding were located in earlier developmental periods, in young children’s developing theory of mind, for example, in the formation of their conscience, in their growing moral awareness and understanding of emotions. It is revealed in their prosocial empathic responding, in their ability to make differentiated judgments across domains of social reasoning (Kochanska et al., 2010; Smetana et al., 2014; Smetana & Yoo, 2023; Spinrad et al., 2023). Some proto-moral capacities are evident in infancy (Emde, 2016; Emde et al., 1991; Hamlin, 2013; Sommerville, 2015), and the emergence of the moral self is now comfortably located in the toddler “age of responsibility” (Krettenauer, 2022; Krettenauer in press). Indeed, the importance of morality for self-identity is almost certainly in place by age 8 (Heiphetz et al., 2018).

Thompson (2012) suggests that these early emerging moral capacities point the way to a life-span moral development theory. Later developments in theory of mind, for example, could underwrite children’s later metacognitive awareness of those factors that influence their own judgments, the judgments of others, and representations of relational obligations. The moral self of childhood is father to moral identity of adolescence and beyond (Kingsford et al., 2018; Krettenauer, 2022; Lefebre et al., 2024). The mutually responsive orientation of parent–child relationships so critical to early sociopersonality development (Thompson, 1998), including the development of conscience (Kochanska & Murray, 2000), points to the fundamentally relational and dialogic basis of moral formation across the lifespan. Indeed, it points to a common mechanism: the development of the moral person is inextricably relational no matter where one looks in the lifespan.

Moral Formation: Social Cognition in Relational Development (SC-RD)

I follow up on these themes to sketch a lifecourse model of moral formation. This model will trade on insights from two meta-theoretical perspectives: (1) the Relational Developmental Systems (Lerner & Lerner, 2019; Overton, 2013) that prominently guide mid-range theoretical work in contemporary developmental science, including character development (Lerner, 2018a, 2018b; Nucci, 2018); and (2) Social Cognitive-Affective metatheory (CAPS, Mischel & Shoda, 1998) and the related Knowledge and Appraisal Personality Architecture metatheory (KAPA, Cervone, 2004) that guide conceptualizations of personality and dispositional coherence.

My general argument is this: social cognitive theory is ideally suited for conceptualizing the dispositional coherence of persons who must routinely confront and navigate the innumerable and inevitable moral challenges across the life-span. Moral formation, the development of character, and the excellences of virtue are under constant construction, formation, and reformation from infancy to senescence. Flourishing and failure, virtue and vice, the vicissitudes of character are constant companions on that journey. Moreover, the consilience of social cognitive theory with relational developmental systems metatheory opens up new possibilities for articulating how this looks across a life-span of moral formation. The main burden of this paper is to draw out this integrative linkage.

Ethical Resources: Taylor (1989) and Kekes (1995)

Yet something else is required. In addition to strong metatheory to better understand both personality (social cognitive theory) and development (RDS), we also need additional philosophical resources to assist with understanding what we mean by moral personality and by moral development, at least in the sense required for the present SC-RD model that is built for the life-course.

In the classical era, no such alternative was needed. Morality was decidedly a deontological matter. It was understood in developmental psychology (and in ethics) mostly along Kantian lines. At the highest stages, one spoke a Kantian dialect. Moral judgments issue categorical imperatives. These imperatives impose obligations, prescribe duties, and have universalizable intent. Prescriptive obligations following from the very meaning of moral terms like ought and good (Hare, 1999). One does the right thing because it is the right thing to do. Hence, moral judgments are automotivating. And discerning the right thing to do is a procedural matter to better ensure impartiality—reasoning from the original position after donning the veil of ignorance is a famous example suggested by philosopher John Rawls (1971). In the classical era moral development was for decision-making, quandary-solving, and action-guidance. It was concerned with the questions “what shall I do?” and “what does the moral law require?” and “what is my duty?”

Yet this “morality system” does not exhaust the ethical domain (Williams, 1985). It is not morality simpliciter. Kantian-inspired moral development is ill-suited to provide resources for a life-span moral psychology that is concerned with the complexities of personal moral life, the entanglements of particular situations, relationships, and emotions, and the general Aristotelian project of how to live well the life that is good for one to live. Taylor (1989), among others (e.g., MacIntyre, 1984; Narvaez & Lapsley, 2009; Pincoffs, 1986), is critical of modern moral philosophy’s preoccupation with universality, with obligation to others, and with the right thing to do while at the same time neglecting more particular questions concerning how to be, how am I going to live my life, what kind of life is worth living, and what kind of life fulfils my promise, uses my talents, and is rich and meaningful for the sort of person I am or claim to be.

To answer questions like these, Taylor (1989) insists on the necessity of orienting frameworks (or “horizons of significance”) that provide a vision of the good and the very ground of self-identity. Indeed, for Taylor (1989) selfhood is oriented and constructed within a space of moral questions. Morality and selfhood are inextricably linked. He insists on the necessity of (what he calls) strong evaluation that ranks desires and aspirations along a continuum—some are more worthy, higher, and meaningful than others—and strong evaluation like this is a necessary feature of self-identity (Abbey, 2023). Blasi’s (1984) influential take on moral identity, from a psychological perspective, also trades on the necessity of strong evaluation to the extent that morality is deemed more crucial and more valuable to self-understanding than other self-defining identifications.

But moral formation is a life-long journey with detours, blind alleys, and false starts. There are times in our lives when moral formation “ceases to be mere sequence, or even development,” in the words of the epigram. We get lost along the way, and falling short of the moral line to gain is commonplace. Consequently, our lives must normally confront what philosopher Kekes (1995) calls the permanent adversities of contingency, conflict, and evil. As Kekes (1995, p. 79) put it, the permanent adversities “are in us as well as outside of us. It is human agency itself that is permeated by contingency, conflict and evil, so no effort of ours could succeed in getting rid of them.”

Moreover, the most prominent constructs that address life-span development—purpose, wisdom, generativity, even moral identity itself—have scant things to say about permanent adversities and the challenge it poses to living a life of moral decency (Lapsley, 2025a). Still, we can cope with these adversities even if we cannot defeat them, but to do so will require developing a suite of second-order metacognitive (knowledge and appraisal) skills that fortify strong evaluation and constitute (what Kekes calls) moral wisdom. Showing how this works within the context of the SC-RD model is another goal of this paper.

Outline of the Argument

I first make the case that social cognitive personality metatheory and relational developmental systems metatheory overlap in significant ways and provide, as a result, a robust framework for understanding moral formation across the life-course (Lapsley & Hill, 2009). I next argue that social cognitive theory has resources for coping with the permanent adversities that frustrate adult moral functioning. In particular, Cervone’s (2004) Knowledge and Appraisal Personality Architecture (KAPA) theory can be usefully deployed to describe the suite of metacognitive skills that underlie the cultivation and work of moral wisdom (Lapsley, 2025a). I will sketch in broad outline what a life-span theory of moral formation might look like, and along the way draw attention to an overriding goal of moral personality development across the life-course, which is the cultivation and deployment of moral wisdom understood as metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulation processes.

Social Cognitive-Developmental Relations Metatheories

Developmental and personality psychology have rarely been on the same page when it comes to describing personality (Lapsley, 2016a, 2016b). Personality psychologists traditionally search for stable patterns of inter-individual variability by mapping persons into a taxonomy of broad disposition traits—the Big Five comes to mind (McCrae & Costa, 1999). Moreover, issues concerning cross-situational trait-consistency and the possible distinction among global, local, and mixed traits are also an abiding concern of philosophers of moral character (Doris, 2002; Harman, 2000; Miller, 2014). Hence, trait-talk about personality is pervasive, and the core assumption that personality (including character, its moral dimension) is constituted by qualities that are invariant across situations is widely shared.

Developmental Science Perspectives

Developmentalists, for their part, rarely invoke trait concepts. Indeed, the Big Five is strongly rejected as an option for developmental science (Lerner, 2018a; Lerner & Lerner, 2019). Developmental science is also not very interested in tracking between-person variability or mean-level individual differences in displays of behavior or emotion (Cervone, 1991, in press). Instead, developmentalists investigate intra-individual transformations of some skill, concept, or behavior, typically as a result of reciprocal, bi-directional transactions with elements of situations and contexts. Systems perspectives are de rigueur in developmental science. As I will note presently, these features are also associated with social cognitive approaches to personality.

Moreover, when developmentalists take up matters of personality they do so with an armamentarium of constructs not entirely shared with personality theorists. For example, when Damon's (1983) Social and Personality Development was published, one looked in vain for the word “trait” in the subject index. Instead, topics such as individuation and autonomy, adolescent self-understanding, and the development of personal identity were considered the basis of personality.

Similarly, Lerner (2018a, 2018b) and Nucci (2018) characterized character as complex developmental systems marked by reciprocal, dynamic person-context relations. Both models reject concepts common to the character tradition. For example, Nucci’s model has little use for traits or virtues while Lerner’s is hostile to traits, typologies, characteristic adaptations, and variable-centered analyses. According to Nucci (2018), character is located within an overall self-system that includes (1) an overall sense of personal moral agency, (2) a unique personal (moral) identity, and (3) a character system that includes basic moral cognition, other-regarding social-emotional skills, self-regarding executive control of emotions and desires, and discourse skills that underwrite a capacity for critical engagement with one’s social context. Lerner (2018a, 2018b) articulates a four-facet person-context relational view of character that includes (1) mutuality (mutually beneficial relations between person and context), (2) coherence (practical reasoning), (3) specificity (specific character virtues develop in specific contexts of mutually beneficial relations which are best charted by means of (4) idiographic methods.

Social Cognitive Perspectives

My own take on moral personality will bear similarity to developmental systems but with an emphasis on social cognitive mechanisms. For example, Dweck (2017) grounds motivation, personality, and development on basic human needs (acceptance, predictability, competence) and compound needs (for trust, control, self-esteem/status, self-coherence) that are driven forward as goals in development by cognitive-affective mental representations she calls BEATs—beliefs, emotions, action-tendencies. This is clearly a social-cognitive approach to personality development (cf. Dweck & Leggett, 1988). So is the goal perspective proposed by Freund and colleagues (Freund et al., 2000). On their view, “Goals organize, structure, and integrate thought, emotions, and behavior into meaningful action units” (Freund et al., 2000, p. 314) and central for understanding personality development across adulthood. And not a word about traits.

Similarly, Cantor (1990) describes the cognitive carriers of dispositions in terms of schemas, life tasks, and strategies. Social cognitive schemas channel social perception, guide appraisal of social situations, access task-relevant memories, and calibrate appropriate affective responses. Life tasks are social cognitive representations for life strivings. Strategies are procedural blueprints for implementing them. Moreover, Cantor (1990; cf. Freund & Hennecke, 2015) elaborates a further distinction with respect to goals: goal setting involves a decision about which ends to pursue and goal focus refers to the salience of the outcomes and the paths to achieve them. For most of us, these action-guiding outcomes are of long-term superordinate value—what Taylor (1989) might call the horizon of significance. ² Moreover, maintaining an outcome focus in the pursuit of goals will influence our reaction to inevitable barriers and failures—what Kekes (1995) might call permanent adversities. These social cognitive perspectives are crucial to any life-span model of moral formation, and they also channel the philosophical resources afforded by Taylor (1989) and Kekes (1995) that I recruit for the present model.

There are, of course, compelling accounts of life-span personality development that are built on the foundation of Big Five trait dimensions (e.g., McAdams, 2015). But social cognitive theory is a preferable option for my purposes for three reasons. First, unlike reliance upon the trait adjective lexicon, social cognitive theory specifies social cognitive mechanisms to account for the coherence of personality and hence is more amenable for psychological specification. Second, this account builds context into the very work of social cognition and so elides the troubling implications of trait-inconsistency across situations. ³ Third, social cognitive theory shares important affinities with relational developmental systems metatheory. I take this up in the next section.

Social Cognition and Relational Development

CAPS Model

The cognitive-affective processing system (CAPS) metatheory emerged in response to the oft-observed finding that the self-same person will display trait-inconsistency across situations of different kinds (Cervone & Shoda, 1999; Mischel & Shoda, 1995). Our strong intuition that personality is stable and invariant collides with empirical evidence that it is otherwise. Context is not supposed to trump enduring dispositional aspects of character, understood as stable traits, yet considerable evidence of cross-situational variability could not be ignored. How to think about this “personality paradox” has attracted much debate in personality science and character ethics (Mischel, 2004).

The CAPs metatheory reconciles the apparent antinomy between person and context by conceptualizing persons as an organized coherent system that necessarily includes elements of situations, events, and context (Mischel & Shoda, 1998). Traditional accounts of personality that focus on broad-band, global, context-free traits give way to accounts of dispositions that are “situationally-hedged, conditional, and interactive with the situation in which they were expressed” (p. 4).

Hence, the “personality system is intrinsically contextualized and interactive with the social world” (Mischel & Shoda, 1998, p. 408). The personality system itself contains mental representations of cognitive-affective units (CAUs), what Dweck (2017) called BEATs, which includes a person’s construal of self, people, relationships, enduring goals, beliefs, expectations, self-regulatory competencies, and emotional states. These CAUs are interconnected and organized, and people differ in the organization of interrelationships among these units and in the accessibility of these networks for social information-processing and, for my purpose, the appraisal of the moral landscape. There is no expectation that behavior should be consistent across situations if they have functionally different elements. As put it:

In this social cognitive view of personality, if different situations acquire different meaning for the same individual, as they surely do, the kinds of appraisals, expectations and beliefs, affects, goals, and behavioral scripts that are likely to become activated in relation to particular situations will vary (p. 5).

Two additional points are of interest. First, although social cognitive mental representations are responsive to psychologically meaningful aspects of situations, this does not imply that individuals are merely reactive to environmental triggers in the manner of behaviorist S-R psychology. Instead, the person is an active agent, selecting and transforming situations. According to Mischel & Shoda (1998),

The situation needs to be embedded in a model that recognizes the self-generated nature of much human behavior: people do not always merely react to situations, but have a continuous mental life that includes their goals and future-oriented plans and their strategies for self-regulation, as well as their ruminations and imagined scenarios (p. 411).

Goals, future-oriented plans, and strategies for self-regulation are elements of any social cognitive model of moral formation, particularly as individuals confront the permanent adversities across the life-course .

Finally, although the social cognitive approach to personality underscores the ability of persons to make fine-grained discriminations among situations, with the possibility that behavior will vary across psychologically disparate situations, this does not render behavior unpredictable. “When closely observed,” (p. 8) writes, “individuals are characterized by stable, distinctive, and highly meaningful patterns of variability in their actions, thoughts, and feelings across different types of situations.” He continues: “These if…then situation-behavior relationships provide a kind of ‘behavioral signature’ of personality that identifies the individual and maps on to the impressions formed by observers about what they are like.” Such close observation of individuals to discern their distinctive behavioral signature across situations will recommend idiographic methods of assessment (Cervone & Shoda, 1999; Cervone, in press).

Knowledge and Appraisal

My goal in describing the CAPS metatheory is to support a claim that the social cognitive approach to personality locates personality invariance, that is, one’s stable behavioral signature, within the maelstrom of apparent situational variability, thereby accounting for personality’s alleged situationism problem and also bridging judgment-action gap issues in moral development. ⁴ In addition, I wanted to show that social cognitive approaches are better options for describing moral formation across the life-course given certain common themes in the Social Cognitive and Relational Developmental Systems metatheories. I will take this up in the next section, but here I want to draw specific attention to Cervone’s (2004, 2005, 2022; Cervone & Little, 2015) Knowledge and Appraisal Personality Architecture (KAPA) model. The KAPA model is an important extension of CAPS, with implications for understanding moral personality (Cervone & Tripathi, 2009) and virtue theory (Ahrens & Cloutier, 2019; Snow, 2015).

The KAPA model “is designed to characterize psychological systems that underlie cross-situational coherence and consistency in experience and action” (Cervone & Tripathi, 2009, p. 35). It draws a distinction between knowledge structures and appraisal processes. Knowledge structures consist of enduring mental representations about self, persons, and one’s social world, representations that people draw upon when interpreting events. It includes beliefs (how one construes current and prospective circumstances and oneself), goals (selecting, organizing, and pursuing goal-relevant actions), and standards (evaluating “the Good” in ethical, moral, and achievement domains).

Appraisal processes are interpretive. It refers to dynamic meaning construction that occurs within a given encounter, including subjective beliefs about social situations and the relevance of personal attributes to them. On this account, individuals “critically appraise the relevance of circumstances to their well-being, their capacity to cope with challenges in the environment, and the social and moral appropriateness of alternative courses of action” (Cervone & Tripathi, 2009, p. 36).

Later, I will appropriate the KAPA framework to help make the case that lifespan moral formation will require a suite of second-order, metacognitive skills to counter the permanent adversities that invariably confound well-meaning attempts to live a life that is good for one to live (Lapsley, 2025a). The KAPA model will provide a way to ground these metacognitive skills into the architecture of personality by means of its knowledge structures (as metacognitive knowledge) and appraisal (as metacognitive regulation) processes. Put differently, the formation and reformation of moral persons across the life course will be influenced by the ability to deploy second-order knowledge and appraisal processes when faced with the permanent adversities to the moral life. Taylor’s strong evaluation, Keke’s moral wisdom, and neo-Aristotelian phronesis are also, I contend, made of these things.

Metatheoretical Alignments

One advantage of CAPS-KAPA informed social-cognitive starting points in framing a conception of moral formation for the life-course is the way it aligns with many aspects of relational developmental systems (RDS) metatheory. Some examples include the following: Both RDS and social cognitive metatheory conceptualize persons as active, self-creating agents who are self-organizing and self-regulating. Just as RDS sweeps away essentialist “Cartesian splits” (e.g., subject-object, self-other, nature-nurture, and reason-emotion), CAPS-KAPA collapses the split between person-context. Context is baked into the very notion of personality coherence. Hence, both metatheories assert that person-and-context and what is social-and-cognitive are mutually implicative and indissociable. Both insist on the relational basis of personality. Both metatheories seek to better understand intra-individual change and variability and are committed to idiographic ways of assessing it. Both are suspicious of typologies and traits and hold out for coherence rather than consistency as behavioral features of personality and character. Both look for the stable behavioral signature in the sweeping, dynamic interactions of social life at different levels of the “developmental manifold,” as Gottlieb (2007, p. 1) put it. Both endorse holism and systems perspectives.

Finally, developmental and social cognitive metatheories have similar ideas about the basic units of personality. These include goals, expectations, future-oriented plans, life tasks, strategies for self-regulation, BEATs, schemas of self and other beliefs, attitudes, standards, and emotions. How these cognitive-affective units become organized, re-organized, altered, and changed within overlapping developmental systems should figure prominently in life-course perspectives of moral formation.

Social Cognitive Theories of Moral Personality

What would a social cognitive theory of moral personality look like, and how might it develop over the life-course? We have attempted the former with reference to Augusto Blasi’s pioneering work on moral self-identity and the latter by reference to the dialogic basis of autobiographical memory in early life, a model that will require extension for the life-course (Lapsley, 2016a, 2016b; Lapsley & Narvaez, 2004).

Social Cognition and Moral Self-Identity

The moral dimension of personality is traditionally denoted as character, but significant literature has focused on moral self-identity as the organizational driver of our personal engagement with the world (Goering et al., 2024; Hertz & Krettenauer, 2016; Lefebvre & Krettenauer, 2019). The alignment of selfhood and morality has both a philosophical and psychological source.

Philosophical Source

The philosophical source is articulated by Taylor (1989) who does not think it possible to address identity questions without an orienting ethical framework. Indeed, “doing without frameworks is utterly impossible for us” (p. 27) because without them we could not make sense of our lives. Taylor (1989) defines identity (somewhat along Eriksonian lines) as the “commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose” (p. 27). It is not possible to answer identity questions like these without strong evaluation, without making qualitative distinctions along dimensions of worth and value, but these questions must be answered for oneself rather than solved in universal terms as the deontologist might require.

Hence, frameworks orient us in moral space, and all individuals have them although not always explicitly. “Living within such strongly qualified horizons,” Taylor (1989) writes, “is constitutive of human agency, that stepping outside of these limits would be tantamount to stepping outside of what we would recognize as integral, that is, undamaged human personhood” (p. 27). ⁵ Taylor’s (1989) argument that identity hinges on strong evaluation of things that have fundamental value was inspired by Frankfurt’s (1988) account of second-order desires and the “importance of what we care about” for defining those features indicative of persons (Abbey, 2023).

Hence, a person, on this account, has the capacity to reflect upon desires and motives and to form judgments with respect to them. A person cares about the sort of desires, characteristics, and motives one has and wants effectively to instantiate these in one’s life (as “second-order desires”). Two points to make here: (1) Augusto Blasi’s (1984, 1988, 2005) influential account of moral identity was also influenced by Frankfurt’s understanding of persons; and (2) both strong evaluation and second-order reasoning still require psychological specification. I will later tie them (along with practical reasoning) to metacognitive processes associated with the KAPA model of personality.

Psychological Source

Blasi’s (1984) account of moral identity was an attempt to bridge the moral judgment-action gap. He argued that one is motivated to act on moral judgments to the extent that morality is important, essential, and central to self-understanding. One develops a moral identity, on his view, when one identifies the self with morality, when being a moral person is what one cares about and as a result, morality is the very ground of our personality. Moreover, insofar as we are motivated to behave in self-consistent ways, failure to follow through on what moral duty requires, failure to bridge the judgement-action gap, is to put one’s self-respect at risk, indeed, our very sense of selfhood. This basic Blasian sense of moral identity has been reworked in terms of social cognitive theory (Aquino et al., 2009; Lapsley, 2016a, 2016b; Lapsley & Narvaez, 2004; Narvaez & Lapsley, 2009).

For example, if moral identity is formed when morality is central, important, and essential to one’s self-understanding, then moral schemes (or other cognitive-affective units) that are central, important, and essential should also be those that are chronically accessible for appraising the social and interpersonal landscape. Highly accessible moral schemas provide a dispositional readiness to discern the moral dimensions of experience, as well as to underwrite the discriminative facility in selecting situationally appropriate behavior.

A moral person, on this account, is one for whom moral constructs are chronically accessible and easily activated by contextual primes, making the accessibility and chronicity of moral schemes the cognitive carriers of moral dispositions. However, insofar as identities of persons are plural, complex, and multifaceted, moral identity itself may well need to compete with other personal identities that constitute the self-system, and interact dynamically with changing contexts and their eliciting conditions, so while almost everyone thinks that morality is important, it is possible for other identity commitments to take priority over moral ones under certain circumstances (Aquino et al., 2009; Aquino & Freeman, 2009).

A social cognitive perspective on moral self-identity will have the same advantages as other social cognitive theories of personality. For example, understanding personality as a system composed of cognitive-affective units is in contrast to some approaches in moral psychology that tend to segregate moral cognition and moral emotions. Moreover, a social cognitive model of moral personality accounts for situational variability in the display of a virtue. The discriminative facility when enacting situationally appropriate behavior is driven by schema accessibility that arises either through chronicity or situational priming, and while persons and contexts interact in complex ways a stable behavioral signature is evident for all that.

There is robust literature that attests to the empirical viability of the moral identity construct. But I noted earlier that the construct is undergoing significant reappraisal and extension, including consideration of its early developmental source (Krettenauer, in press). I would add two additional and related considerations. First, the traditional Blasian framework still considers moral identity in the deontological context of making decisions, resolving the motivation to act, sorting out what to do. Most extant research addresses whether moral identity, variously measured, predicts (or moderates) behavior. This is not unimportant, but these are still questions addressed within the “morality system.” The second consideration concerns the related need to push moral identity into another role entirely, one built for the life-course, which is its role in living out regulative ideals about how to live a life of moral decency. I next provide a sketch of what the challenge of moral identity will look like beyond its initial formation and for the rest of the life-course, with these considerations in mind.

Moral Self-Identity and Development

The inextricable connection between selfhood and morality suggested by Taylor is not a developmental argument. Existing in a space of moral questions that require strong evaluation in light of an overriding framework is not something that occurs to toddlers and children. Although there is increasing evidence that moral self-identity concerns are evident in early and middle childhood, its trajectory for the life-course is far from clear. What would the development of moral self-identity look like from a social cognitive perspective, and how can it be built for the life-course?

McAdams’s (2015) account of personality development provides a helpful way forward. Although his account is not grounded by social cognitive theory (other than grouping social cognitive constructs under the heading of characteristic adaptations), he does suggest that personality “thickens” across the lifespan by the emergence of three overlapping waves of self-development: as actor, agent, and author. Hence, during the toddler years and early childhood, the self-as-actor learns the script (so to speak) about how to calibrate one’s emotional performance for the requirements of an audience. This social actor gives way throughout childhood to the motivated self-as-agent who takes the lead in enacting or pursuing goals, purposes, and intentions, writing the script as well as performing it. By adolescence and young adulthood, the art of personality development takes an authorial turn when interest turns to drafting identity-creating narratives replete with plots, settings, characters, chapters, dramatic arc, and denouement, narratives that will be subjected to continuous updating and revision throughout the life-course. McAdams (2015, p. 240) writes, “You are an extended prose narrative featuring a main character,” and the developmental imperative is to keep the story going. Of course, keeping the story going must sometimes give rise to concerning questions about which part is authentic biography and which part is consoling fiction. Our all-too-human capacity for self-deception sometimes makes it hard to know the difference.

Narrative is a powerful metaphor for conceptualizing lifespan personality development (Hammack & Toolis, 2019; but see Strawson, 2004), and the story is often of a main character whose self-identity sometimes struggles to keep faith with morality, virtue, and sound character. The narrative will require continuous editing and updating of frameworks and horizons of significance that give substance and meaning to one’s identity as an orientation to the good. It will bring forward in sharp relief how strong evaluation keeps us focused on the kind of life worth living. As Taylor (1989, p. 50) puts it:

My sense of myself is of a being who is growing and becoming…It is not only that I need time and many incidents to sort out what is relatively fixed and stable in my character, temperament, and desires from what is variable and changing, though that is true. It is also that as a being who grows and becomes I can only know myself through the history of my maturations and regressions, overcomings and defeats. My self-understanding necessarily has temporal depth and incorporates narrative (emphasis added).

In other words, the narrative of maturations and regressions, of overcomings and defeats, is a story of how one confronts the permanent adversities and as a result, and along the way, possibly earn the moral wisdom reserved for age “To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort,” as Eliot (1943, p. 54) might put it. What is the social cognitive take on how the story begins and how characters confront the permanent adversities?

Social Cognitive Development of the Moral Self

The social cognitive story begins in early life when the self-as-actor first comes to construct cognitive-affective mental representations and the way these are consolidated in dialogical engagement with caregivers; and then grows into the self-as-agent with goals, schemes, life-tasks, and strategies—the units of personality favored by social cognitive theory. The self-as-author will take up the narrative thereafter to guide the character of the moral self across the moral landscape of adulthood with its inevitable landmines but better equipped, one hopes, with the metacognitive knowledge and appraisal skills needed to confront permanent adversities.

Early Development

Our approach to the development of social cognitive moral constructs draws attention to the emergence and elaboration of event representations in the young toddler (Lapsley & Narvaez, 2004). Event representations have been called the “basic building blocks of cognitive development” (Nelson & Gruendel, 1981, p. 131). They initially encode the prosaic routines and rituals of family life but then are progressively elaborated into broader knowledge structures as the result of shared dialogue with caregivers who help children review, structure, and consolidate memories in script-like fashion (Fivush et al., 1992). The foundation of early sociopersonality development is laid down in the construction of generalized event representations, prototypic knowledge structures, behavioral scripts, and episodic memory (Thompson, 1998).

But the key characterological turn is how these early social cognitive units are transformed into autobiographical memory (Fivush, 2022; Nelson, 1993). Autobiographical memories, too, like event representations, are coached within a web of interlocution with caregivers. Parents teach children how to construct narratives by the questions they ask of past events (“Where did we go yesterday?” “What did we see?” What did we do next?”). In this way parents help children identify the key features that are to be remembered, their sequence, causal significance, and timing (Reese & Fivush, 1993; Schneider & Bjorklund, 1998).

There is every reason to think that the representation of morally relevant events is consolidated in young children’s autobiographical memory in a directly analogous way. Parental interrogatories (“What happened when you pushed your brother?” “Why did he cry?” “What should you do next?”) enable children to organize events into personally relevant autobiographical memories, which provides, in the process, as part of the self-narrative, action-guiding scripts (“I share with him” “I say sorry”) that become overlearned, frequently practiced, routine, habitual, and automatic. Moreover, such interrogatories might also include moral character attributions as well, so that the ideal or ought self becomes part of one’s self-understanding, becomes part of one’s autobiographical narrative.

In this way, parents help children identify morally relevant features of their experience and encourage the formation of social cognitive schemas (scripts, prototypes, goals) that are easily primed, easily activated, and, over time, chronically accessible. Clearly, the quality of relationships matters to this process. Parents who help children review, structure, and consolidate memories in an elaborative way, that is, who embed events in a rich contextual background (rather than simply asking direct questions), tend to have children who have more sophisticated representations of their past (Reese & Fivush, 1993). The mutually responsive orientation between caregivers and children that favors the development of conscience by age three also foreshadows the emergence of the moral self in later childhood (Kochanska et al., 2010).

Once again, the formation of moral self-identity in childhood and throughout development is inescapably relational and dialogic. It yields narrative forms that make understandable the intentional motivated goals of the self-as-agent. According to Nelson and Fivush (2022), “Narratives not only provide a particular structure to human experience, but narratives also provide specific cultural frames, ways of understanding the world. These kinds of master narratives provide particular narrative arcs and express both universal and culturally specific evaluative frameworks by which to understand the world” (p. 76). The language of cultural frames, master narratives, and evaluative frameworks make psychological sense of Taylor’s (1989) claim that identity is inextricably linked with moral frameworks and horizons of significance.

Confronting Moral Adversity

Human agency is beset with impediments to moral decency. Kekes (1995) calls these impediments the permanent adversities—contingency, conflict and evil—because they can only be controlled by intentional effort but never eliminated from human life. The contingency of external circumstances refers to things out of our control that frustrate the ambitions that drive our life forward, the purposes we set out for ourselves, including our desire to live a good life. Moreover, the ambitions, values, purposes, and identities that we pursue invariably conflict. Choosing one course of action or one set of commitments premised on one set of values leaves other highly sought values unrealized. All conceptions of a good life face the permanent adversity of incompatible and incommensurable values, purposes, and identities, which is not resolved simply in the act of choosing.

And then there is evil. What Kekes (1995) has in mind is the wickedness that pervades our choices and life projects though it be cloaked as good intentions. Imagine someone committing the self to ostensibly moral stances, that is, constructing a moral identity, but one that is insensate to the moral harm required to live it. In fairness, most individuals who do evil do not pursue it as a conscious deliberate policy. Rather, as Kekes (1995, p. 68) puts it, “They certainly do evil, but disguise its nature from themselves.” He writes:

Their own cruelty is seen by them as justice, selfishness as claiming their due, hatred as just condemnation, envy as commitment to equality, or fanaticism as being principled. They know that cruelty, selfishness, hatred, envy, and fanaticism are evil, but they do not know that their own actions exemplify these evils. And they do not know it because they foster or allow something in themselves that precludes them from seeing the true nature of their conduct (p. 68).

Moral identity, then, is not an unqualified good if it lacks the capacity to be self-accountable, self-transparent, and resistant to self-deception (Blasi, 2005). Indeed, moral identity might come in two forms. Moral commitments can be the unreflective product of what Kekes (1995) calls a fortuitous character: commitments that reflect conventional understandings of good and evil or one that takes a “legislative” approach to natural human tendencies with respect to a conception of a good life. For example, Blasian moral identity could be formed in a way that does not recognize our vulnerability to permanent adversities or, if aware, could harbor the illusion that we can maintain our integrity even if we are defeated by them. Perhaps this form of moral identity is serviceable in the short term, or as the first draft of our narrative self, to get us off the dime as we enter adulthood, but it is not built for the life-course.

Facing up to challenges across the life-course will require something more. It will require cultivation of a deliberative form of moral identity, rather than a fortuitous one, a form of moral identity that takes a “judicial” stance on legislative moral commitments by passing judgment on them. The judicial stance of deliberative moral identity will subject our conception of a good life to critical examination with the aim of developing a character that is worthy of it (Kekes, 1995). To fortify moral identity like this, to move it from the conventional fortuitous kind that legislates first-order desires in the service of a good life, moving this to the deliberative kind that exercises judicial oversight with the aim of developing the life that is good to live, will require what Kekes (1995) calls moral wisdom.

Moral Wisdom is Personological and Metacognitive, and Moral Identity Needs it

Moral wisdom, on Kekes’s (1995) view, is a second-order virtue. It involves the knowledge, evaluation, and judgment required for living in accord with a conception of a good life lived well. The knowledge component is of the permanent adversities, of the sources of good and evil in our lives and how it affects our character. Evaluation and judgment are recruited to exercise control over our desires. Knowledge, evaluation, and judgment are required to control the permanent adversities, and, for my purposes, move moral identity from the kind that is fortuitous and “legislative” to forms that are deliberative and “judicial.”

Two features of moral wisdom should be emphasized. First, it is personological, that is, the knowledge, evaluation, and judgment aspects of moral wisdom are aligned clearly with knowledge and appraisal processes described in Cervone’s (2004) KAPA account of personality architecture. Second, moral wisdom is metacognitive. For that matter, so is the second-order feature of desires (Frankfurt), strong evaluation (Taylor), moral identity consistency (Blasi), and practical reasoning itself (phronesis). Although metacognitive themes are quite common in moral psychology (e.g., Blajovic & Rizzo, 2020; Kristjánsson et al., 2020; Stichter, 2024), their invocation is typically metaphoric or imprecise and not anchored to well-attested specification of the construct in the literature of developmental and educational psychology where it does heavy lifting (Kuhn, 2022; Schraw & Moshman, 1995).

Metacognitive Moral Wisdom

On the standard account metacognition has two components: (1) metacognitive knowledge and (2) metacognitive regulation processes (Schraw & Moshman, 1995). Metacognitive knowledge is declarative (knowing that), procedural (knowing how), and conditional (knowing when or how). Metacognitive control processes include planning, selection, and evaluation. I have attempted to provide a psychological specification of Kekes (1995) notion of moral wisdom by translating its various operations into these metacognitive components in Lapsley (2025a).

For example, metacognitive wisdom knowledge is declarative (knowing that contingency, conflict, and evil are moral adversities), procedural (knowing how to align values to conceptions of a good life), and conditional (knowing when and under what circumstances to connect particular situations to judgments of good and evil). Metacognitive wisdom regulation includes planning (deciding what forward-looking steps to take to strength or weaken enduring patterns in our deliberative character), selection (selecting appropriate situations that afford cultivation of virtues while avoiding situations that trigger vices), and evaluation (regulative evaluation of desires in light of the agent’s character and orienting ethical framework).

Hence, one must strategically plan the steps to move a fortuitous character to a deliberative one; select the contexts where virtue can be exercised and strengthened; and evaluate the desirability of our substantive desires in light of our character and conception of a good life. All of the various ways of capturing second-order reflection in moral psychology, including practical reasoning and strong evaluation, trade on these elements of metacognition, which serve as their psychological specification for future research.

Lacunae and Limitations

The general goal of this article was to establish the desiderata for a life-span developmental model of moral formation. There are, of course, a number of issues that will require additional reflection. It must first be said that Krettenauer and Stichter (2023) have similarly attempted a life-span model of moral identity that deeply integrates philosophical notions of virtue with psychological considerations of self-regulation, skill development, and expertise. The acquisition of virtue, on their view, is a self-regulative process that requires deliberative practice so that one becomes better skilled at living a virtuous life. The motivation to practice and cultivate the skills of virtue is driven by the identity goal of wanting to be a moral person. But moral identity as a self-regulative goal must have certain characteristics to be maximally effective as a motivation to virtue. For example, sufficiently abstract moral identity goals are more action-guiding than are specific goals. Moral identity goals that issue from internal self-direction and with the aim of seeking out and promoting the experiences that support virtue skill acquisition are more effective than are goals driven solely by external considerations or goals that aim only to avoid that which is proscribed (Krettenauer, 2021).

Although the SC-RD and self-regulative perspectives are sourced from different philosophical and psychological traditions they are not obviously antithetical and, indeed, there are several clear lines of possible convergence. Both focus on moral identity as key to understanding the characterological basis for pursuing the life that is good for one to live. Self-regulative goals could be one way to operationalize what the SC-RD perspective (following Taylor, 1989) calls moral frameworks or the horizon of significance that pulls the agent along in moral formation. Both perspectives carve out a role for metacognitive processes, although how they play out in either perspective will require greater specification. Finally, both perspectives highlight the welcome theoretical turn towards life-span considerations in moral psychology (for another example, see Lockwood et al., 2025).

Narrative

The concepts of narrative, strong evaluation, and moral wisdom feature prominently in the present account and each invite further reflection. For example, not everyone is sold on the necessity of narrative as a way to describe elements of self-understanding. Strawson (2004) denies what he calls the psychological Narrativity thesis that human beings typically see their lives in terms of narrative; and the ethical Normativity thesis that living good lives and attaining full authentic personhood requires narrative identity.

Strawson draws a distinction between Diachronics who tend to think of their lives as a developmental unity with a continuous past and future, and Episodics (like him) who do not. Episodics are not very interested in their past, their future, or with questions about what they have done with their life. The first movement of Burnt Norton (Eliot, 1943, p. 14) seems to describe them: “Time past and time future/What might have been and what has been/Point to one end, which is always present.”

Although Episodics possess autobiographical memories and recognize that the way they are now is in some sense a cumulative product of past experiences, nonetheless, from the perspective of the present self-apprehending “I,” an Episodic would deny that such memories of the past are experienced as having happened to “me.” As Strawson (2004, pp. 448–449) puts it, “Self-understanding does not have to take a narrative form, even implicitly. I’m a product of my past, including my very early past, in many profoundly important respects. But it simply does not follow that self-understanding, or the best kind of self-understanding must take a narrative form, or indeed a historical form.”

Moreover, even a Diachronic temporal style does not necessarily entail narrativity, or at least the upper-case Narrativity of concern to Strawson (2004). Instead, lower-case narrativity is a natural way for individuals to bring developmental and temporal unity to their experience of past and future. In a Socratic aside, Strawson (2004, p. 440) acknowledges “After all, there’s a clear sense in which every human life is a developmental unity…any human life can be the subject of an outstanding biography that possesses all of the narrative-unity-related virtues of that literary form.” If (lower-case) narrative structure requires only this sort of developmental unity, then it “is trivially true of all human beings” insofar as “even dogs and horses can be subject of excellent biographies” (p. 440).

What seems to move acceptable (but “trivially true”) developmental unity forms of (lower-case) narrative to problematic and rejected (upper-case) Narrative is that the latter requires that one’s life must be lived or construed as such. “One must have some sort of relatively large-scale coherence-seeking, unity-seeking, pattern-seeking, or more generally form-finding tendency when it comes to one’s apprehension of one’s life” (Strawson, 2004, p. 441, emphasis in original). It is this form of Narrativity that Strawson rejects.

If Strawson (2004) is on to something, then Episodics will not recognize their own moral formation in the present article to the extent that it trades on form-finding Narrative rather than developmental unity narrative. How much the present article requires Narrative (rather than narrative) is up for discussion. Yet, from an RDS perspective, the distinction between Episodics and Diachronics may be another “Cartesian split” that is better considered a dialectical unity. Moreover, insofar as RDS affirms that individual differences and contextual variability are commonplace one should not expect (psychological) normativity in the experience of narrative forms. Strawson (2004) seems to affirm as much. He notes, for example, that Episodic and Diachronic temporal styles “are not absolute or exceptionless” (p. 431). Episodics can sometimes feel that emotionally charged past events have actually happened to them or that certain events are in their future. Diachronics may sometimes lack an Episodic link to an otherwise well-remembered part of one’s life. “Many factors,” he writes, may induce variations in individuals” (p. 431). He continues:

Individual variation in time-style, Episodic or Diachronic, Narrative or non-Narrative, will be found across all cultures…one’s exact position in Episodic/Diachronic/Narrative/non-Narrative state-space may vary significantly over time according to what one is doing or thinking about, one’s state of health, and so on; and it may change markedly with increasing age (p. 431).

On this point, there is common ground. Strawson (2004) raises fascinating and important questions about the role of narrative in understanding personality development; and of course, this has implications for the way I use it to make the case for moral formation across the lifespan. But I can readily agree with Strawson (2004) that Episodics, and others for whom the language of narrative has little resonance, can and do live normal, non-pathological lives of integrity and responsibility. What moral formation across the life-course looks like for them will require another kind of investigation.

Strong Evaluation

Flanagan (1990) raises two related objections to Taylor’s notion of strong evaluation. First, strong evaluation overestimates the degree of articulateness and reflection required for personhood and identity. “Identity and goodness,” he writes, “do not require reflectiveness to any significant degree, nor is distinctly ethical identification the indispensable font of all modern identity” (p. 37). He invokes Tolstoy’s “noble peasants” as an example of how it is possible to live lives of moral decency while accepting the rhythms of conventional life without undue second-order reflection.

Flanagan’s (1990) second objection is to Taylor’s insistence that strong evaluation is the very condition of personhood. The two objections are related. Strong evaluation is too intellectualistic for morally good lives (weak evaluation is just fine) and cannot be considered the very definition of what it means to be a person. My use of the term is not as ambitious as Taylor’s. I make no claim that strong evaluation is fundamental to the ontology of personhood. I do claim that second-order reflective processes in various moral psychologies, including Frankfurt’s second-order volitions, Taylor’s strong evaluation, Blasi’s moral identity, and neo-Aristotelian practical wisdom, are better understood in terms of metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulation, and, indeed, metacognition is increasingly prominent in philosophical accounts of virtue (Lepock, 2014; Stichter, 2024).

But what about weak evaluation? Flanagan (1990) is undoubtedly correct that many of us will attempt to live a good life without the guidance of strongly articulated moral frameworks. Similarly, not a few young adults will make identity choices that are conventional and possibly ill-considered, choices (in the language of Kekes) that yield a fortuitous character rather than a deliberative one. But the lifespan is long and replete with challenges unforeseen from the perspective of youth. Moral formation that is fit for purpose would seem to require, when faced with permanent adversities, and when faced with the question of a life good to live, a second-order judicial stance on the identity choices one has legislated. This deliberative, judicial stance is strong evaluation.

Moral Wisdom

Finally, when Kekes (1995) argued that good lives must find ways to cultivate moral wisdom in order to tame (but not defeat) permanent adversities, he did not, of course, have any of the psychological approaches to wisdom in mind. This would have been quite the challenge given the surfeit of models, frameworks, and theories that have emerged in the last few decades (e.g., Sternberg & Glück, 2019; Sternberg & Jordan, 2005). Although there is no canonical model that compels consensus, the so-called Common Wisdom Model (Grossman et al., 2020) and the 6P Framework (Sternberg & Karami, 2021) are promising efforts to that end, although much is still disputed (Kristjánsson et al. (2020). How does moral wisdom connect to this literature?

The 6P Framework is a high-level abstract orientation to wisdom with six components: Purpose of wisdom, wisdom-related environmental Press, Problems requiring wisdom, characteristics of wise Persons, Processes of wisdom, and Products of Wisdom. Theories of wisdom, in other words, take up Purpose, Press, Problems, Persons, Processes, and Products. At this level of generality, moral wisdom could certainly find safe harbor, particularly under Purpose and Process (Lapsley, 2025a). That said, the 6P Framework considers the Person component to be a secondary component of wisdom, although it is here where moral wisdom would be most likely needed.

For its part, the Common Wisdom Model underscores “perspectival metacognition” as a critical component of wisdom. Hence, moral wisdom and common wisdom share metacognition as a core feature, although in different ways. In the Common Wisdom Model, perspectival metacognition is described in terms of a suite of intellectual virtues (e.g., humility, open-mindedness, and owning limitations). In this article, Kekes’s moral wisdom is given psychological translation in terms of metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulation processes. As noted earlier, this translation has the advantage of anchoring the metacognition of moral wisdom to well-attested literature in educational and developmental science, which opens up possibilities for working out educational implications for moral wisdom thus understood (Lapsley, 2025b).

Summary and Conclusions

I argued that moral formation takes on dispositional coherence to the extent that moral self-identity is built for the long haul. It emerges in early life as the cognitive-affective units of the self-as-actor are organized into autobiographical memory within the web of interlocution with caregivers who draw attention to the moral features of early experience in dialogical exchanges. Goals, plans, expectations, and strategies are increasingly organized by the moral self-as-agent, an organization that takes narrative form by young adulthood.

But moral self-identity at this point is not necessarily ready to navigate the benefits and burdens of adulthood if it results in a fortuitous character who prefers legislative approaches to organizing first-order desires. Moral formation that is fit for purpose will require strong evaluation to navigate the moral hazards of the life course. The moral self that is fortuitous and legislative will need to give way to one that is deliberative and judicial, which is to say, one that takes a second-order stance on desires with the aim of developing a character faithful to the ethical frameworks that define self-identity.

The fortification of moral identity can be described as the acquisition of moral wisdom. Moral wisdom is required to control and respond to the adversities that haunt human agency. I made the argument that moral wisdom is both personological and metacognitive, personological in the social-cognitive sense that it reflects the knowledge-and-appraisal features of personality architecture, and metacognitive in the sense that its deliberative planning, selection, and monitoring activities can be specified psychologically in terms of consensus accounts of metacognitive knowledge and regulation processes.

Finally, but of crucial importance, this article made a case for understanding moral self-identity in terms of social cognitive approaches to personality, and for understanding its formation across the life-course in terms of relational developmental metatheory. There is sufficient thematic overlap in metatheoretical assumptions between the two paradigms to make them partners in trying to understand moral formation across the life-course: or at least enough to keep the conversation going for the road ahead.