CHAPTER 8: HOW IS MORAL CHARACTER DEVELOPED?
8.1 Moral Development
It is the gradual and progressive development of an individuals’ understanding,
grasping of the wrong and the right principles, conscious, ethical and religious
values, social attitudes and their behaviors.
It implies that as humans grow older and become more experience, our grasp of
moral right and wrong also develops.
Moral development is the process through which children develop proper attitudes
and behaviors toward other people in society, based on social and cultural norms,
rules, and laws.
Aristotle’s Moral Development
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Aristotle believed that many things were needed for optimal moral development,
but one of the most important was a role model or exemplar that one can imitate,
cultivating morally appropriate habits that become moral virtues over time.
For Aristotle, virtues are settled dispositions—states of character—that concern
belief, desire, feeling, and action. Virtues are habitual and excellent ways of being
and acting in the world.
To become virtuous we should acquire the right sort of habits and desires
in childhood; but more generally to become virtuous, we must do virtuous acts.
As Aristotle puts it, “We become builders…by building, and we become harpists
by playing the harp. Similarly, then, we become just by doing just actions,
temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions”
(Nicomachean Ethics 1103b). And we do this in part by emulating a moral
exemplar, by observing how one lives and then seeking to do likewise.
For an action to be fully virtuous, it is not just that the act has particular qualities,
but also that the agent who performs the act does as well.
One must know that he/she is doing the virtuous action and must decide for to do
it, This, must be done from a stable character (“a firm and unchanging state”). The
latter two conditions can be achieved, according to Aristotle, by frequently
performing virtuous actions, in imitation of some moral exemplar.
8.1 Moral Development
It is the gradual and progressive development of an individuals’ understanding,
grasping of the wrong and the right principles, conscious, ethical and religious
values, social attitudes and their behaviors.
It implies that as humans grow older and become more experience, our grasp of
moral right and wrong also develops.
Moral development is the process through which children develop proper attitudes
and behaviors toward other people in society, based on social and cultural norms,
rules, and laws.
Aristotle’s Moral Development
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Aristotle believed that many things were needed for optimal moral development,
but one of the most important was a role model or exemplar that one can imitate,
cultivating morally appropriate habits that become moral virtues over time.
For Aristotle, virtues are settled dispositions—states of character—that concern
belief, desire, feeling, and action. Virtues are habitual and excellent ways of being
and acting in the world.
To become virtuous we should acquire the right sort of habits and desires
in childhood; but more generally to become virtuous, we must do virtuous acts.
As Aristotle puts it, “We become builders…by building, and we become harpists
by playing the harp. Similarly, then, we become just by doing just actions,
temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions”
(Nicomachean Ethics 1103b). And we do this in part by emulating a moral
exemplar, by observing how one lives and then seeking to do likewise.
For an action to be fully virtuous, it is not just that the act has particular qualities,
but also that the agent who performs the act does as well.
One must know that he/she is doing the virtuous action and must decide for to do
it, This, must be done from a stable character (“a firm and unchanging state”). The
latter two conditions can be achieved, according to Aristotle, by frequently
performing virtuous actions, in imitation of some moral exemplar.
