Who engages with moral beauty?

Abstract Aristotle considered moral beauty to be the telos of the human virtues. Displays of moral beauty have been shown to elicit the moral emotion of elevation and cause a desire to become a better person and to engage in prosocial behavior. Study 1 (N = 5380) shows engagement with moral beauty is related to several psychological constructs relevant to moral education, and structural models reveal that the story of engagement with moral beauty may be considered a story of love and connectedness; it is uniquely predictive of caring for, being empathic of, loving, and valuing benevolence toward others. Study 2 (N = 542) demonstrates that the personality trait of engaging with moral beauty moderates susceptibility to elevation. These studies suggest that encouraging students to engage with moral beauty might increase their desire to become better persons and to do good. Convergent with other research showing that moral emotions motivate moral behavior, we suggest that moral education programs increase their focus on developing engagement with moral beauty. Keywords: moral beautyelevationvirtuesmoral education Acknowledgement We would like to thank Jesse Graham, Spassena Koleva, Pete Ditto, Matt Motyl and Sean Wojcik for their help in data collection. We also thank the Social Science Division at LCSC, and its chair Bill Clouser, for support; and thank Wendy Diessner for feedback on an earlier draft. This project/publication was made possible, in part, through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to the second author. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.