The graded engagement model of admiration

Abstract

Admiration is often described as having a singular motivational profile – the disposition to imitate. This article provides a developmental assessment of admiration’s action-potential, proposing a series of stages between (1) naïve imitation, a basic mimetic impulse, and (2) non-imitative virtuous actions. The process is marked by an increasing ability to represent the actions and desires of another, becoming the middle term between the learner and the exemplar. This developmental assessment is necessary because the leading accounts of moral development today lean on the idea of imitation as essential to the process of virtue acquisition without providing an explanation of how imitation works, psychologically speaking. Moreover, these accounts treat imitation as a static disposition, rather than one that matures over time. Insight regarding this developmental progression can provide us with a better sense of how to educate using exemplars in order to advance a learner from admiration to moral virtue. This article also fills in gaps in the admiration literature concerning how we regard inimitable excellences and contends that it may not be beneficial to emulate an exemplar’s motivations, in addition to her actions.

Admiration and motivation: key factors in managing PTSD among firefighters

“…Specifically, the results demonstrate a positive correlation between firefighters’ feelings of admiration and their motivation. This relationship can be attributed to the tendency for individuals to emulate characteristics of admired figures, suggesting an active process rather than a passive one [ 8 , 27 ]. Consequently, feelings of admiration are implicated in bolstering motivation levels.…”

Entangled phronesis and the four causes of emulation: Developmental insights into role modelling

“…This enduring debate has been particularly lively in the present journal (e.g. see Croce and Vaccarezza, 2017; Kristjánsson, 2017; Little, 2021), and I intend this paper to contribute to it by ameliorating a predominantly methodological gap in the literature – by introducing new concepts and processes which further disambiguate the method of emulation qua role modelling. More precisely, by providing a developmentally sensitive step-by-step account of how the morally immature potentially develop moral virtue and phronesis by emulating moral role models, I seek to extend the conceptual and methodological repertoire of neo-Aristotelian character developmental theory.…”