The educational salience of emulation as a moral virtue

A foundational principle of neo-Aristotelian character education is that virtue can be cultivated, in particular through the emulation of moral role models, such as teachers. Yet despite the pedagogical appeal of role modelling, what emulation involves remains methodologically unclear. In this paper, I suggest that part of this ambiguity lies in a category mistake: the misconceptualisation of emulation as a mere emotion, rather than, as I argue, a virtue in its own right. Predominantly composed of virtuous emotion and necessarily entailing virtuous action, I propose a componential account of the virtue of emulation which I synthesise with Aristotle’s theory of “four causes”. Through doing so, I make visible how emulation operates in different ways depending on one’s degree of phronetic development and suggest a new concept—entangled phronesis—as the mechanism underpinning emulation. I then consider what these insights illuminate about role modelling in classroom contexts.