Articulation, Narrative, Integrity, and the Practice of Self-Formation in the Work of Charles Taylor, Alasdair Macintyre, and David L. Norton

This dissertation addresses the following questions and
concerns related to the formation of the moral self: (1)
The relationship between certain moral choices and a
person's sense of personal or moral identity:
specifically, how is it that certain choices, actions,
character traits, or goods come to be interpreted as either
constituting, or as being inseparable from, one's
conscience, one's moral identity, or one's moral self? (2)
The relationship between the conception of the good with
which one identifies and the conception of the good of
one's community of origin: how does one develop a conception of the good, how does one understand one's
relationship to that conception, and how does one
conception relate to one's origins? (3) The fact that a
person's moral identity and capacity for moral judgment
must develop over time: if the capacity to make moral
judgments develops over time, how are changes in one's
conception of the good and of oneself to be reconciled with
moral accountability or responsibility?
Drawing on Alasdair Macintyre's conception of
"practice" and his discussion of narrative, on Charles
Taylor's conception of ·~rticulation," and on David L.
Norton's conceptions of "participatory enactment" and
"emulation," I argue that self-formation is a practice, the
primary activity of which consists in an interpretive
analysis and articulation of one's self-understanding in
the form of a narrative. That narrative is based in one's
evolving and experientially based conception of the good
and is critically informed by one's imaginative projection
of oneself into the positions of others or of possible
future selves and by one's emulation of moral exemplars. I
suggest that, in Western societies, the primary good
internal to the practice of self-formation is authenticity
and that the virtue most conducive to the pursuit of authenticity is a specific form of integrity. Selfformation
as a practice requires an on-going commitment to
exercising integrity in the pursuit of authenticity.