Moral identity is often treated as a hidden core of inner values, but philosopher Marya Schechtman argues 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.