Ethical Development and the Varieties of Self-Knowledge

Within virtue ethics, there has been a growing interest in topics surrounding moral education and ethical development. It is often taken to be a truism that self-examination and self- knowledge play an important part in ethical development. This perception might explain why little attention has been paid to problematizing and understanding the role that self- examination and self-knowledge play in such development. This alleged truism, namely, that self-examination and self-knowledge are important for ethical development has come under attack in recent years from scholars inspired by research in social psychology and cognitive science. Research on depressive realism, for instance, has been used to claim that a certain dose of self-deception is necessary for a flourishing life. Research on associative learning, priming influences, and automatic processes has shown that our behavior is shaped by such a myriad of unconscious influences that the project of knowing oneself appears futile. Even within virtue ethics there has been a slowly growing distrust about the relevance of self-examination and self-knowledge for the development of virtue. It has been objected that the self-centered nature of self-examination is an impediment to the development of virtue, which is outward-oriented. It has also been suggested that in making self-knowledge central for ethical development one ends up portraying such development as excessively intellectual, failing to accommodate virtuous agents who are not very good at knowing themselves. In the dissertation I respond to these challenges. I show that coming to know yourself, in particular coming to know the unconscious mental states that inform your life, is an essential xipart of ethical development. A central part of the argument consists in showing that there is an internal connection between self-examination, self-knowledge and rational agency. In showing this I make perspicuous why self-knowledge should be taken to be, not just one of the many tools that allow us to develop ethically, but a capacity that underwrites any such tool. Examining the relationship between self-examination, self-knowledge and ethical devel- opment is particularly pressing for moral philosophers whose work is, like the work of most virtue ethicists, informed by historical figures. These philosophers have been influenced by thinkers who, for the most part, wrote before the 20 th century, a century that saw signif- icant contributions from psychotherapists, cognitive scientists and social psychologists to our understanding of the relationship between self-examination, self-knowledge and ethical development. Engaging with the literature on psychotherapy and psychology allows me to offer a textured account of ethical development that is empirically informed. At the same time that the dissertation establishes that self-examination and self-knowledge play an important role in ethical development, it investigates a distinction that has been central to epistemology but whose ethical significance has been overlooked: the distinction between what one might call first- and third-personal self-knowledge. In highlighting the ethical significance of this distinction the dissertation puts in contact the work that episte- mologists have done on self-knowledge and first-person authority with the work that ethicists have done in moral education and ethical development. Thus, although the dissertation is mainly a contribution to moral philosophy it also sheds some light on epistemology. The dissertation defends the thesis that knowing oneself first-personally, as opposed to third-personally, is essential for developing virtue. In arguing for this thesis I am attempting to do justice to an insight that is central to most forms of psychotherapy but which has been neglected within vi