Practical moral philosophy

This is a follow-up on an earlier post.

There should be a practical branch of human knowledge about how in fact to attain moral excellence and act well. This discipline would be related to theoretical moral philosophy in, very roughly, the way engineering is related to physics. We might call this practical moral philosophy. This is distinguished from applied ethics. For instance, the military sub-branch of applied ethics may tell us, for instance, what it is permissible for us to tell the enemy when we are tortured, but applied ethics is itself primarily a theoretical discipline, and does not give us much help in knowing just how to withstand torture.

Practical moral philosophy subdivides into two studies: (1) how to attain moral excellence and act well oneself, and (2) how to lead others to moral excellence and good action. The study of the second is a recognized part of contemporary philosophy: it is the study of moral education. But the first has not, I think, been sufficiently developed, at least by analytic philosophers. It has, however, been deeply developed within religious traditions, again with a subdivision into the helping oneself (I do not know the name for this discipline, but within the Christian tradition, many of the practitioners of the discipline are called "spiritual writers") and helping others ("pastoral theology"). (A difference is that in the religious traditions the goal can go beyond natural moral excellence.)

It is not completely clear that this is really a branch of philosophy. Perhaps it is a branch of psychology? It is, indeed, related to "positive psychology". Still, it is not just a branch of psychology in that it depends crucially on the ethical judgment of what moral qualities are in fact excellent and what actions are in fact right.