The moral psychology of emulation through entangled phronesis

Whilst philosophical argument remains the gold standardregarding what one can aspire to argue for normatively, to haveinterdisciplinary credibility and potential impact in real-worldcontexts, 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 bysynthesising a previous philosophical argument with insightsfrom current developmental moral psychology and neuroscience.By advancing three hypotheses derived from the aforementionedargument, I argue that emulation is a two-phase process of moralvirtue and phronesis (practical wisdom) development, where pre-phronetic‘habituated emulation’ evolves into phronetically-informed‘complete emulation’. Through doing so, I furtherestablish the centrality of phronesis to the emulative process byrefining how the psycho-moral mechanism of ‘entangledphronesis’ drives it. Representing the aligned moral-psychologicalstates of role model and learner, I make clear how entangledphronesis stimulates emulation by enabling complex normativeinformation to be shared and acquired through adevelopmentally sensitive combination of modelled virtuousaction, verbal reason-giving and non-verbal mind reading.