People can find their true selves outside moral pursuits

Pursuing a life of moral excellence is often seen by philosophers and psychologists as allowing a person to not only live by good and just principles, but also to live an authentic life that brings them closest to their true self. This view is taken to reflect the priority that people should give to being as moral as possible. The results of four preregistered studies (N = 2,911) suggest people do not always hold this view and highlight a tension within it: how can morality both constrain human behavior and afford the freedom to be one’s truest self? We find people resolve this conflict by preferring a balance of life pursuits across several value domains where aesthetic pursuits uniquely afford freedom from convention. We then adapt a personal change paradigm from prior work and develop a novel paradigm to examine whether people’s intuitions about the true self also reveal that a broader set of values—not just moral ones—inform judgments of the true self. We find no differences in true self judgments following the loss of an aesthetic versus moral quality. However, when directly comparing life paths, the pursuit of aesthetic excellence is seen as offering greater access to one’s true self than the pursuit of moral excellence. These findings offer insights into the myriad paths a person can take in life while pursuing autonomy, authenticity, and closeness to their true self.