The moral psychology of emulation through entangled phronesis

Whilst philosophical argument remains the gold standard regarding what one can aspire to argue for normatively, to have interdisciplinary credibility and potential impact in real-world contexts, theory must be answerable to empirical evidence. Taking heed of this maxim, this paper expounds a new neo-Aristotelian theory of emulation qua moral role modelling by synthesising a previous philosophical argument with insights from current developmental moral psychology and neuroscience. By advancing three hypotheses derived from the aforementioned argument, I argue that emulation is a two-phase process of moral virtue and phronesis (practical wisdom) development, where pre-phronetic ‘habituated emulation’ evolves into phronetically-informed ‘complete emulation’. Through doing so, I further establish the centrality of phronesis to the emulative process by refining how the psycho-moral mechanism of ‘entangled phronesis’ drives it. Representing the aligned moral-psychological states of role model and learner, I make clear how entangled phronesis stimulates emulation by enabling complex normative information to be shared and acquired through a developmentally sensitive combination of modelled virtuous action, verbal reason-giving and non-verbal mind reading.