The preceding chapters have dealt with issues of social cognition and moral reasoning. Morality, however, is more than a matter of understanding what is right. It requires that one act in ways that are consistent with one's moral judgment. This, in turn, requires that one's moral understandings be translated into a sense of personal responsibility.

One of the open questions in contemporary moral psychology is how to account for the linkage between objective judgments of moral obligation and personal responsibility. In philosophy, a distinction is made between deontic judgments of what is morally obligatory and aretaic judgments of the moral worthiness of individuals and their actions. Since the question of moral action turns on the notion of personal responsibility, accounts of moral action often evolve into aretaic evaluations of what it means to be a good person. In everyday language, the term “character” is used to convey such aretaic judgments. A person of good character is someone who attends to the moral implications of actions and acts in accordance with what is moral in most circumstances. This everyday usage of the term character captures an important feature of what is ordinarily meant by a good person. It is also at the core of the current interest in character education.

While some notion of moral agency is necessary for a complete moral psychology, it has been clear to most psychologists for decades that the traditional character construct has fundamental flaws and cannot serve as the basis for an account of moral action.