At the end of the previous chapter I suggested that moral reflection involves more than a grasp of moral concepts or theories and the ability to make moral judgements on that basis: specifically, that it involved the capacity to ask certain questions of oneself. My focus there was on the many ways in which our own character (and weakness) may remain dark to us and how serious moral reflection requires a certain capacity for self-scrutiny. But an aspect of such questioning that I did not so much highlight there is the essentially personal nature of such reflections on at least some occasions. What a person is attempting to find out about in such reflection on such occasions, I shall argue, is something about themselves, about their particular character. But the point here is not, or so I shall now argue, restricted to finding out the ways in which we might fall short of the character we imagine ourselves to possess. Beyond this, such reflection may involve finding out the kind of moral character we possess. To talk in terms of kinds of character is to suggest that in a given situation agents with different moral characters might appropriately reach different moral judgements about how to act. In this chapter I shall advance the case for thinking that moral reflection and judgement might, at least sometimes, be personal in this more radical sense.
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