Morality is Nothing But The Story We Tell About Ourselves

The narrative roots of moral agency 

2nd March 2026

Marya Schechtman 

| Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois.

Moral identity is often treated as a hidden core of inner values, but philosopher Marya Schechtmanargues something far more disruptive: who we are morally just is the ongoing narrative we live out over time. This is not a story for us alone; it must make sense to those around us if we are to be held accountable for our actions. By moving morality from internal rules to an evolving, accountable life-story, Schechtman shows how responsibility and remorse depend on the narrative structures we build—and why our moral agency fails when our life stories stop making sense.

While discussing the case of “Mr Thompson,” a patient with acute Korsakoff syndrome, a neurological disorder that erodes memory formation, Oliver Sacks concludes, “It might be said that each of us constructs and lives a ‘narrative’ and that this narrative is us, our identities.” This thought, that the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are, is widely held in philosophy, psychology, and everyday thought. Usually, (though not always), it is meant to express the somewhat more specific claim that a person’s self-narrative constitutes their moral identity or character.

At first glance, the popularity of this idea is puzzling. People’s self-narratives are notoriously unreliable. Often, we remember the past in ways that put us in a good light, exaggerating virtues and triumphs, and conveniently forgetting failures and unlovely behavior. Sometimes we take up the narrative of “victim” or “loser,” seeing everything that happens to us through that lens. Self-understanding can be infiltrated by oppressive master narratives.

Critics point out that life narratives are by their nature selective (including only some of what has happened to us), interpretive (inviting us to give what is included a particular meaning and significance rather than presenting it neutrally), and reconstructive (representing past events in a way that suits the narrative rather than as they actually happened). Self-narratives are seen as suspect not only because we are not reliable storytellers, but also because the narrative form necessarily deforms the truth of our lives.

If the narrative view of self insists that whatever story someone constructs about themselves is automatically true simply because it is their story, the critics have a point. People can be, and often are, self-deceived. Any account of self that implies that self-deception is logically impossible faces serious difficulty. But the claim that we constitute our moral identities through our self-narratives need not have this implication. To show why, it will be necessary to explain what it could mean to claim that our self-narratives constitute our identities, if not that we are whoever we say we are.

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We are scaffolded into the practice of self-narration largely through social reminiscing.

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It is useful to begin by considering why someone might think that self-narrative constitutes moral identity in the first place. Here it is useful to distinguish between two claims: first, that having a self-narrative is necessary to being a moral agent, and, second, that the content of the stories we construct about ourselves determines the truth of our moral character. Understanding the reasons for thinking the first claim is true suggests a way of interpreting the second that avoids the implausible implication that our moral identity is whatever we think it is.

The claim that having a self-narrative is essential to moral agency starts with the observation that agency requires us to have a sense of ourselves as continuing over time. The basic idea is nicely expressed in Kathleen Wilkes’sobservation that “experiencing remorse and contrition, accepting responsibility, accepting praise and blame,… Emotions such as love or hate, envy or resentment,” all require that we “have a life, or self, with duration. We are, and must consider ourselves as, stable intentional systems.” Deciding what I ought to do now requires me to have relevant information about how I got to my present circumstances, and to appreciate that what I do now will have implications for the future. The most central elements of our moral lives and character unfold over time, and we need to track their unfolding to be full-blown moral agents. This tracking is, in essence, a simple narrative that presents a connection between actions and consequences.

Even if moral agency does require this kind of simple narrative, however, that does not yet show that it requires an extended life narrative of the kind taken to constitute moral identity in most narrative views. Psychologist Robyn Fivush’s developmental account of the self provides reasons for thinking that it does. Fivush argues that the ability to self-narrate is an acquired capacity that emerges in the pre-school years and develops over a lifetime. We are scaffolded into the practice of self-narration largely through social reminiscing.

Fivush and her collaborators studied how caregivers regularly rehearse events of the day with young children, prompting them to take their scattered recollections and fashion them into simple narratives, connecting events to one another, to affect, to consequences, and to their socio-cultural environment. After a day at the park, for instance, the following sort of prompted recollection might occur: “Where did we go today? That’s right, to the park. It was fun, wasn’t it? And you played on the slide. You wanted to climb the tower, but I said not until you’re bigger and you got mad. Then what happened? Right, you threw wood chips, and I said we had to go home and you were sad. Next time you get mad, what will you do instead?” 

The details of this interactive narrative construction will vary among caregivers and cultures, but the fundamental practice remains the same. Through these reminiscences, Fivush says, children are taught to organize their experiences according to socio-cultural schemas, and so to experience and articulate their histories, emotions, and motivations in ways that are intelligible to others in their social world. As they get older, children begin to form self-narratives spontaneously, and these narratives become increasingly complex, including more speculation about the emotions and motives of others, and stretching over longer periods of time. Eventually, around adolescence, most of us develop a complex form of autobiographical memory that “links past events together into a personal history that relates self through past, present, and future, essentially forming a life narrative.” This does not imply that we ever consciously articulate a narrative of our entire lives to ourselves or anyone else, but rather that we learn the basic shape of a human life in our culture, including the typical biological and cultural milestones, and internalize an understanding of ourselves as living such a life among others. This requires us to track our life’s progress as a background psychological process.

Fivush speculates that humans developed self-narration for social-cultural reasons. To coordinate and engage effectively with others, we need to be intelligible to them, and broadly predictable. Acting as a moral agent plausibly requires understanding one’s own actions and motivations and being able to explain them to others. Learning the narrative practices of our culture makes this possible by providing common templates for organizing experience and a shared understanding of the logic of human motivations and actions. The suggestion is not that we are indoctrinated into a set of cultural templates for thinking and acting which we must dutifully instantiate to establish ourselves as agents. It is rather that being inducted into a set of narrative practices allows us to express ourselves intelligibly to others in word and deed, so that where we do reject, dissent, or disagree with cultural norms, we are able to effectively express our reasons for these deviations to others.

This understanding of the connection between self-narrative and agency provides constraints on identity-constituting narratives. The stories we construct about ourselves confer moral agency only to the extent that they are largely intelligible to those with whom we interact. If I self-narrate in such a way that my actions and/or my explanations of them literally fail to make sense to those around me, I will not be able to engage them effectively. This is a coarse-grained constraint, which admits of degrees. The level of intelligibility required does not, for instance, preclude recognizing those from very different cultures as moral agents. Despite deep differences in narrative style, enculturated humans can usually make themselves understood to one another at a basic level, even if mutual understanding is incomplete.

So far, this shows at most that self-narrative might play a role in making us moral agents. It does not yet speak to the question of whether and how the content of one’s self-narrative might constitute the truth of one’s moral identity, nor to the worries about self-deception raised earlier. To see how the picture of self-narrative developed here helps with these questions, we must recognize that this view does not understand a self-narrative as a complete story someone tells about who they are, like a manuscript to be pulled out and consulted as needed. It is understood instead as an ongoing form of (largely implicit) self-tracking that is developed and refined over a lifetime. It is also important to the view that moral agency requires not only that one has a narrative which is intelligible as a story of a life, but one which is intelligible as a story of their life. The relevant narrative is not in the first instance something one tells, but something, as Oliver Sacks says, that one lives. It unfolds in one’s interactions with others and in the explanations one gives for what one does. I cannot just construct any story about my life and engage effectively with other people.

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Our values and principles, and so our moral identities, are refined, supplemented, strengthened and altered through our interactions with others.

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This means that if I select, interpret, and reconstruct past actions in my narrative in a way that displays bias or distortion as described by critics of the narrative view, the explanations I give and stories I tell will be challenged by others. Such challenges need not be accepted at face value. Others will have their own biases and distortions, and the fact that they find my self-narrative flawed does not automatically mean they are right.

Challenges to one’s self-narrative do, however, require a response. If I am given evidence that things did not happen as I remember them, I need either to revise my narrative, offer a credible account of why I maintain my version of the past, or willfully ignore compelling evidence. If I think I show leadership and you tell me I’m bossy, we may not need to determine who is ‘right’, but I need to consider why we are diverging. It may be that we simply disagree about definitions, and perhaps our socio-cultural framework makes such disagreement intelligible. We can then find a way forward, which might include anything from ending our relationship to reaching a mutual understanding. Whatever the resolution, negotiating challenges of this kind will involve either refining or reaffirming one’s self-narrative. Since these kinds of interactions are ubiquitous in human life, our narratives are always evolving.

It is self-narrative understood in this sense which can be said to constitute someone’s moral identity. It is common to think of moral identity as a set of core principles or values to which someone is internally committed. The narrative view described above suggests, however, that moral identity is more active, dynamic, and externally directed than this. The interactions that make up moral life take place in a social world, and to have a moral identity, one’s choices and actions need to be comprehensible to others. This is a precondition of participating in moral transactions.

We can make ourselves comprehensible either by instantiating shared norms in our actions or by acting on alternative principles in a way that we can make intelligible to others. The ways in which we explain our actions and motivations, as well as the ways in which we respond when our self-narratives are challenged, do not just display our character as moral agents. Our values and principles, and so our moral identities, are refined, supplemented, strengthened and altered through our interactions with others.

The claim is thus not that whatever stories we tell about ourselves are true just because we tell them. It is rather that the particular way in which we undertake the ongoing activity of deploying, revising, and updating our background understanding of who we are, the principles and values on which we act, and the meaning of what we have done is our moral identity. In this way, our self-narratives, or better our self-narrations, constitute our identities while not only allowing for but, in an important sense, requiring the possibility of self-deception.