A model of moral identity: applications for education

The purpose of this chapter is to build an intellectual bridge between moral psychology and education. Our hope is that the findings from moral psychology will inform and explain best practices in moral education. With that end in mind, we briefly and selectively review the moral education and character education literature highlighting some of the challenges these domains have faced. Next, we review the moral identity literature and offer our own model of moral identity formation emphasizing the "characteristic adaptations" (i.e., moral orientation, moral self, moral emotions, and social relationships and opportunities) of the model. Finally, we illustrate and explain how some of these "characteristic adaptations" have been or could be used in the development of successful moral education programs, and provide specific examples for application of our model in the domain of sex education.

Hermeneutics and Psychology: A Review and Dialectical Model

The authors encourage psychologists to transcend the simple but often made a contrast of quantitative and qualitative epistemologies by reissuing a call to consider a hermeneutical realist perspective. The authors recognize that such calls are not new and have largely gone unheeded in the past, perhaps because of how a more radical hermeneutical perspective has been conceptualized and communicated. Rooted in P. Ricoeur's (1981) philosophy of distanciation, the authors propose a dialectic of understanding and explanation that values both quantitative and qualitative methodologies by (a) tracing the philosophical development of hermeneutics as a paradigm for knowing, (b) demonstrating useful hermeneutical applications to psychology as a whole and to some specific subdisciplines, and (c) illustrating how a hermeneutic realist approach is beneficial to the multicultural study of virtue.