The social, intellectual, and moral movement known as multiculturalism has been enormously influential in psychology. Its ability to reshape psychology has been due to its ethical force, which derives from the attractiveness of its aims of inclusion, social justice, and mutual respect. The cultivation of cultural competence, presented as a developmental process of acquiring self-awareness, cultural knowledge, and skills, is an important emphasis in the multicultural literature. The authors place the cultural competence literature in dialogue with virtue ethics (a contemporary ethical theory derived from Aristotle) to develop a rich and illuminating way for psychologists to understand and embody the personal self-examination, commitment, and transformation required for learning and practicing in a culturally competent manner. According to virtue ethics, multiculturalism can be seen as the pursuit of worthwhile goals that require personal strengths or virtues, knowledge, consistent actions, proper motivation, and practical wisdom. The authors term the virtue of multiculturalism openness to the other and conclude by describing how attention to cultural matters also transforms virtue ethics in important and necessary ways.

paraphrase a point made by Gadamer (1982), in order to understand a speaker, we have to understand what it would be like to be that speaker.Tolerance of others may be an aid to initiating civil conversation, but the virtue of dialogue is in its transformative potential, which prima facie seems the opposite of tolerance. As any academic knows, a good dialogue is a fight to the death.Finally, while the idea of "openness to the other" sounds very positive, I wonder whether the harm done by defining our fellow humans as "others" outdoes the subsequent call for "openness" toward them. Might cultural dialogue not be better served if we considered all humans as part of a single speech community, with various dialects of the same language, whose speakers can thereby exert meaningful influence upon one another?In sum, the virtue model of ethics is relevant to our cultural concerns as psychologists but certainly does not resolve them. Instead, because it is soundly based in the idea of personal character, its value lies in bringing to light the very dilemmas involving human similarity and difference that have troubled psychologists since the inception of the field. I do not believe that these dilemmas are going anywhere soon. REFERENCES