Self-narrative implications for moral self-governance and conscience

Self-narratives generate self-fulfilling motivation or “momentum” that can support or undermine self-governance. Therefore, people can improve their self-governance by shaping their self-narratives through the intersubjective and sometimes challenging process of “narrative work”. This paper explores some implications of this theoretical framework for the moral agency of self-narrators. I claim that narrative work is useful (and sometimes essential) for succeeding in ‘everyday’ struggles for moral self-governance, especially when making or strengthening a moral commitment or when changing a long-standing moral judgment. I then connect with recent conceptualisations of conscience which claim that the value of conscience depends on it being responsive to our best reflective moral judgments. I argue that the strength of one’s conscience does not just reflect the internalisation of moral values, as these conscience theorists claim, but the momentum of the self-narratives in which those values are embedded. In my view, self-narrative work is an important tool for shaping and empowering conscience because it offers a way of controlling both the internalisation of moral values and the narrative momentum of the self-narratives in which those values are internalised.