The moral psychology of emulation through entangled <i>phronesis</i>

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.