Our personalities are not morally neutral. Temperament can make us act more or less morally and we thus have an ethical obligation to improve our personalities argue Andrea Lavazza and Mirko Farina.

In many languages, to have character, means to have a bad temper. Common sense thus seems to indicate that character and personality are strongly related. The relationship between these two features is typically investigated by disciplines such as moral philosophy and experimental psychology. Clarifying the relationship between personality and character may also have significant ethical implications. In this short essay, we critically reflect on these issues and argue that contrary to the received view, there isn’t a clear divide between a biologically inherited personality and a character shaped by personal efforts. Accordingly, modifying one’s personality traits can help in enhancing one’s character. Since there exist morally compelling reasons to do so, we argue that we are required to change our personality for the best. [1]

Personality may be understood as that complex organization of ways of being, including knowing and acting, that gives unity, coherence, continuity, stability and planning to the individual's relations with her peers and the environment around them. In a more precise sense though, following Cloninger, we may describe someone’s personality as consisting of two distinct but interacting psychobiological dimensions: temperament and character. [2]