ABSTRACT
In Pakistan in early 2009, seventh-grade Malala Yousafzai started an anonymous blog with the BBC. In this blog, she discussed the Taliban’s growing presence in the Swat Valley. Soon after she began her blog, the Taliban banned girls from schools in the area. Malala wrote about the fighting in the area, her daily life, and her boredom without schooling. Finally, the schools re-opened, and Malala’s blog ended. Shortly after this, she was asked to be in a documentary for the New York Times and was interviewed on many television programs in the area and around the world. Malala became a Taliban target, culminating in an assassination attempt in late 2012, because of all this publicity. Malala was shot in the head. After months in hospitals and numerous surgeries, Malala made a full recovery. She and her family moved to the UK, where she continues to strongly advocate for women’s education. In 2014, Malala became the youngest recipient in the history of the Nobel Peace Prize. One year after the assassination attempt on Malala Yousafzai, Jeff Smith was trying to remove
a stump from his yard in Oregon using his old tractor. His muddy boot slipped off the clutch, and the tractor flipped over. Smith was pinned to the ground, and was having trouble breathing beneath the 3,000-pound tractor. When his two daughters, 14 and 16, heard him screaming, they ran out to help. Seeing that their father could not breathe, they worked together to lift the machine off of their father enough to allow him to breathe until a neighbor was able to remove the tractor with his own heavy machinery (Dolak, 2013). These two stories, while occurring in vastly different circumstances, display a common theme:
ordinary people can do the extraordinary when they do good. More famous examples include Mother Teresa living in extreme poverty to help the needy, Mohandas Gandhi fasting for weeks to free India from colonial rule, and Martin Luther King steadfastly preaching non-violent protest amidst the violence of the civil rights era. These individuals all began as average people, but were morally transformed by their circumstances and their goals. Moral transformation is the idea that people shift from one moral role to another simply by changing their self-perceptions from weak to strong. These cases involve the transformation into heroes, but moral transformation also involves journeys that end in villainy and victimhood. This chapter explores the six different types of moral transformation of the self, which are rooted in the theory of dyadic morality.
