Practical Wisdom: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives [1 ed.] 0367423758, 9780367423759

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Practical Wisdom

“Practical wisdom is central to the virtue ethical tradition, but has been neglected in the debates over the psychology of ethical virtue and educational methods of fostering it. This volume should transform those debates by turning their attention away from behavioural outcomes and towards sound practical reasoning and judgment.” – Jonathan Webber, Cardiff University, UK “De Caro and Vaccarezza have put together a nice collection of interesting essays, each of which adroitly integrates perspectives from both psychology and philosophy on a variety of topics integral to the study of practical wisdom. This volume should be on the “wish list” of any scholars working on practical wisdom and moral psychology.” – Audrey L. Anton, Western Kentucky University, USA

Featuring original essays from leading scholars in philosophy and psychology, this volume investigates and rethinks the role of practical wisdom in light of the most recent developments in virtue theory and moral, social, and developmental psychology. The concept of phronesis has long held a prominent place in the development of Aristotelian virtue ethics and moral education. However, the nature and development of phronesis is still in need of investigation, especially because of the new insights that in recent years have come from both philosophy and science. The chapters in this volume contribute to the debate about practical wisdom by elucidating its role in empirical psychology and advancing important new research questions. They address various topics related to practical wisdom and its development, including honesty, ecocentric phronesis, social-cognitive theory, practical wisdom in limited-information contexts, Whole Trait Theory, skill models, the reciprocity of virtue, and challenges from situationism. Practical Wisdom will interest researchers and advanced students working in virtue ethics, moral psychology, and moral education. Mario De Caro is Professor of Moral Philosophy at Roma Tre University and regularly a visiting professor at Tufts. He is Hilary Putnam’s literary executor and was a Fulbright fellow at Harvard. With David Macarthur, he edited Naturalism in Question (2004) and Naturalism and Normativity (2010) and is working at Liberal Naturalism. Maria Silvia Vaccarezza is Assistant Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Genoa (Italy), and Secretary of Aretai – Center on Virtues, based at the same University. The journals where she has published lately are Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, and Journal of Value Inquiry.

Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory

Virtue, Narrative, and Self Explorations of Character in the Philosophy of Mind and Action Edited by Joseph Ulatowski and Liezl van Zyl The Authority of Virtue Institutions and Character in The Good Society Tristan J. Rogers Getting Our Act Together A Theory of Collective Moral Obligations Anne Schwenkenbecher Love, Justice, and Autonomy Philosophical Perspectives Edited by Rachel Fedock, Raja Rosenhagen, and Michael Kühler From Value to Rightness Consequentialism, Action-Guidance, and the Perspective-Dependence of Moral Duties Vuko Andrić Practical Wisdom Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives Edited by Mario De Caro and Maria Silvia Vaccarezza Virtues, Democracy, and Online Media Ethical and Epistemic Issues Edited by Nancy E. Snow and Maria Silvia Vaccarezza For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Ethics-and-Moral-Theory/book-series/SE0423

Practical Wisdom Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives

Edited by Mario De Caro and Maria Silvia Vaccarezza

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Mario De Caro and Maria Silvia Vaccarezza to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-42375-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-02955-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-85496-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Permission Introduction

vii 1

M A R I O D E CARO AN D MA RIA SILVIA VACCA R EZ Z A

1

The Reciprocity of the Virtues

8

DA N I E L C . RU SSE L L

2

The Priority of Phronesis: How to Rescue Virtue Theory From Its Critics

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M A R I O D E CARO, MA SSIMO MARRA FFA , AN D MAR IA SILV IA VAC CA R E Z Z A

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Flirting With Skepticism About Practical Wisdom

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C H R I S TI A N B . MIL L E R

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Phronesis and Whole Trait Theory: An Integration

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N A N CY E . S NOW, JE N N IFE R CO L E WRIGH T, AND M I C H A E L T. WA RRE N

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Differentiating the Skills of Practical Wisdom

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M ATT S TI C HTE R

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Practical Wisdom and Generalization: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation on the Effects of Limited Information C L AU D I A N AVARIN I, A L L E GRA IN DRACCO L O, AND R I C CA R D O B RUN E TTI

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The Developmental Science of Phronesis

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DA N I E L L A P SL E Y

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Species-Typical Phronesis for a Living Planet

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DA RC I A N A RVAE Z

List of Contributors Index

181 187

Permission

Chapter 5 of this book draws from chapters in Stichter, Matt, The Skillfulness of Virtue: Improving Our Moral and Epistemic Lives, Cambridge University Press (2018), reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press © Cambridge University Press.

Introduction Mario De Caro and Maria Silvia Vaccarezza

This volume collects essays from philosophers and psychologists who offer new perspectives and accounts of the traditional virtue of phronesis, or practical wisdom. Within the Aristotelian tradition, practical wisdom is the main intellectual virtue responsible for the attainment of a good life, and the wise person, whose main exemplification is the good statesman, is the model toward which one should aim. Aristotle defines phronesis as the intellectual virtue of the “practical” side of the rational soul, that is, the one whose object is “what can be otherwise” (NE VI.7, 1141 a1). Its aim is the attainment of truth in action: Although virtuous ends are set for an agent by their ethical virtues – that is, the excellences of the appetitive part of the soul – the deliberation needed to determine the right mean each virtue consists in, as well as to discern which particular action better instantiates that virtue in each case, pertains to practical wisdom: It is wisdom that has to do with things human, and with things one can deliberate about; . . . the good deliberator is the one whose calculations make him good at hitting upon what is best for a human being among practicable goods. Nor is wisdom only concerned with universals: to be wise, one must also be familiar with the particular, since wisdom has to do with action, and the sphere of action is constituted by particulars. (NE VI.7, 1141b8–17) Thus, there can be no virtue without practical wisdom, and vice versa: Again, the “product” [i.e., happiness] is brought to completion by virtue of a person’s having wisdom and excellence of character; for excellence makes the goal correct, while wisdom makes what leads to it correct. (NE VI.12, 1144 a7–9) Ever since Aristotle wrote Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, the nature and role of practical wisdom have probably been among the most extensively discussed issues in moral philosophy, so much so that a reader

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might wonder what could possibly be added to its study by a new collection. Have not two millennia’s worth of ink been enough to investigate all there is to practical wisdom once and for all? At the heart of this collection lies the conviction that they have not, for at least two main reasons: the resurgence of virtue ethics within contemporary moral philosophy and its recent dialogue with psychology. Over the last decades, the resurgence of an ethics of virtue within the philosophical landscape has given discussions on practical wisdom new prominence: How should we conceive of the role of this central virtue within contemporary virtue ethical theories? Should we assign it the same importance Aristotle ascribed to it, or should we resize (if not downsize) its role and scope? In an ethics of virtues, what should have priority: the individual virtues or phronesis that orchestrates them? Recently, there has been much discussion on whether the prominence of practical wisdom supports ethical particularism. Many influential works by neo-Aristotelian thinkers – especially in the 1980s and 1990s – have advanced the view that practical wisdom grounds a particularistic ethics. This radical view equates the possession of virtue with perception, ruling out any role in ethics for general knowledge and principles. In his essay “Virtue and Reason,” for example, McDowell identifies practical knowledge with a “reliable sensitivity,” which in turn is “a sort of perceptual capacity” (1998: 51). On these readings, then (cf. Sherman 1989; Broadie 1991), phronesis is a form of knowledge of particulars that makes general knowledge and principles in ethics at best redundant, if not outright detrimental. More moderate readings have rebutted this claim and restated the role of phronesis as the master, orchestrating virtue responsible for perceiving the moral salience of particulars (see Russell 2009; Annas 2011; Kristjánsson 2015a, b), without thereby denying the importance of generalizations in ethics or even the role of ethical theory. A second important debate among contemporary virtue ethicists concerns the controversial claim that, since all ethical virtues are rooted in practical wisdom, acquiring practical wisdom implies becoming fully virtuous in every respect, which means that if one has one virtue, one necessarily possesses them all. This is the so-called “unity (or reciprocity) of the virtues” claim. What is at stake here is more than making a historical or philological point since some of the questions under discussion are very relevant for defining which form a viable ethics of virtues should take. These are questions like: Does phronesis require an overall virtuous character? Or does it, on the contrary, cause it? Does the reciprocity of virtues need to be actual or is it merely an ideal? Even more recently, a fertile interdisciplinary dialogue with several branches in psychology has taken place, giving rise to a different set of questions related to the empirical reliability of the Aristotelian account of practical wisdom (Jones et al. 2013; Besser Jones and Slote 2015; Snow 2015; Annas et al. 2016; Masala and Webber 2016).While cognitive

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psychology has started investigating the cognitive and affective processes that allegedly underlie practical wisdom, from a developmentalpsychological point of view the fundamental issue at stake concerns how this virtue can be acquired: Is it a skill to be trained? And, if so, which components or subskills need to be acquired to become practically wise? As noted by Darnell et al. (2019), the last two decades have seen many attempts by philosophers and social scientists alike to introduce the issue of phronesis into psychological inquiry (Fowers 2005; Schwartz and Sharpe 2010) and educational sciences (Carr 1995; Kristjánsson 2015a, b). Moreover, phronesis has been analyzed by developmental psychologists (Lapsley and Narvaez 2004; Lapsley and Hill 2009) as the ideal multicomponent notion that could potentially replace the three constructs (moral reasoning, moral identity, and moral emotions) traditionally adopted to explain and predict the knowledge–action gap in moral psychology and education (Darnell et al. 2019). However, it is fair to say that presently the nature and development of phronesis are far from being fully explored, so much so that no single and widely endorsed empirical model of phronesis is available to date. There is still much to be done to promote a fertile and constructive interdisciplinary engagement between moral psychologists and philosophers. Borrowing a thought from Robert Frost’s famous poem “The mending wall,” Daniel Lapsley (this volume: p. 140) describes this interdisciplinary dialogue thus: Repairing the wall, passing the stones from one side to the other, is an occasion for constructive engagement to achieve a common purpose. . . . Repairing a common wall at spring mending time is not unlike the give-and-take of interdisciplinary engagement across the philosophical and empirical boundary of moral psychology. It is to these lively, often intertwined, debates – which touch substantive, methodological, and metatheoretical issues – that the chapters in this volume offer a set of original solutions. The volume cannot but start with a reconstruction of practical wisdom and its functions. The three chapters that open the volume are philosophical in nature and propose as many alternative views on the role of practical wisdom. However, given that the purpose of this collection is not only to offer new responses to old questions and challenges but to do so in synergy with empirical accounts of moral character, the three chapters root their proposals in specific moral-psychological views. In Chapter 1, perhaps the most distinctively Aristotelian in spirit of the whole collection, Daniel C. Russell offers new insights on an old topic central to any discussion on practical wisdom – namely, the reciprocity of the virtues. His main concern in this analysis is to move the focus from a conception of reciprocity as having all the virtues to what he takes to be

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“the key insight” on this issue – that is, that it is an idealization of what it takes to find the right mean between excess and deficiency with respect to emotions and actions. A challenging goal indeed, which requires interdependent virtues to be achieved: Like controlling dynamics at tempo, being both forthright and tactful in telling an uncomfortable truth is not to do two discrete things at the same time. Fusing both at once is part of what it is to do either of them well. (p. 8) Russell’s proposal, in short, is that the role of the idealization of reciprocity is “to highlight that interdependence,” rather than to provide a generalization of what virtuous people are like. In particular, achieving an interdependent task is conceived as achieving tasks with interactivity between distinct elements. And practical wisdom “is the name we give to those competencies by which we manage interactivity both within any given virtue (the mean) and between different virtues (reciprocity).” In Chapter 2, Mario De Caro, Massimo Marraffa, and Maria Silvia Vaccarezza defend a “virtue molecularist account” in virtue theory by arguing for the conceptual, epistemological, and ontological priority of practical wisdom, conceived as skill, over individual virtues. Their aim is to show how such account is better equipped than rival theories to address three challenges that come to virtue theory from contemporary social and cognitive psychology. First, they argue that virtue molecularism can rebut the so-called “situationist challenge” better than alternative virtue-theory accounts. Second, they consider a possible anti-rationalist objection to the importance they attribute to practical wisdom, which could make virtue molecularism seem to appeal to an obsolete hierarchical vision of the mind. Against this charge, De Caro, Marraffa, and Vaccarezza claim that “virtue molecularism not only implies declarative, procedural and conditional knowledge, but also a concurrent affective orientation to virtuous ends, as well as a cognitive-emotional ability to perceive the moral requirements at stake in a given situation” (p. 40). Third, they argue that virtue molecularism is immune to the “automaticity challenge,” which is instead effective against more traditional skill-based accounts of the individual virtues. Christian B. Miller’s Chapter 3 advances an “eliminativist” account of practical wisdom. The chapter begins by mapping out responses to two related issues – namely, the relationship between practical wisdom and the moral virtues, and the functions of practical wisdom. Miller identifies three main models: (i) the “Standard Model,” according to which practical wisdom “is distinct psychologically from the moral virtues, but which is necessary for them to count as virtues” (p. 53), an example of which can be found in Russell (this volume); (ii) the “Socratic Model” proposed by De Caro et al. (2018; see also De Caro, Marraffa and Vaccarezza,

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this volume), which sees practical wisdom as not distinct psychologically from, and prior to, the moral virtues; (iii) the Fragmentation Model, according to which each moral virtue has its own distinctive profile which serves the functions of practical wisdom for that virtue. Following this latter approach, and analyzing honesty as a case study, Miller advances his own paradigm, that is, the eliminativist approach, which denies that “there actually is a distinct character trait of practical wisdom above and beyond the various capacities” and claims that “[o]n metaphysical grounds, practical wisdom does not exist” (p. 66). The two following chapters locate practical wisdom within different psychological frameworks. In Chapter 4, Nancy E. Snow, Jennifer Cole Wright, and Michael T. Warren integrate “a broadly neo-Aristotelian conception of virtue with Whole Trait Theory” (p.  70), with the aim of developing a measurable conception of practical wisdom. They start from a working definition of phronesis as “that form or forms of reasoning which are necessary for being virtuous and for living a virtuous life,” which allows them to identify four roles of phronesis: action guidance, the regulation of a multiplicity of virtues within character, emotion regulation, and reflection on one’s life as a whole. They then show how the five functions of phronesis from Russell’s (2009) work – comprehension, sense, intelligence, deliberative excellence, and cleverness – can be integrated with the recent “Whole Trait Theory,” thus connecting socialcognitivist theories and trait theories that explain personality. In Chapter 5, Matt Stichter expands on his previous work, and specifically on his virtue-as-skill thesis (Stichter 2018), to draw connections between his account of self-regulation and the psychological research on goal pursuit and outcomes for well-being so as to sketch a picture of practical wisdom’s components, or subskills. He begins by identifying the object of the exercise of practical wisdom with “one’s current conception of a flourishing life, including the conceptions of virtues that are constitutive of it, and then by extension the compatibility of other goals with that conception” (p. 96). He then unpacks and discusses the various stages of self-regulation – namely, goal setting and goal striving – and applies this framework to the specifically moral kind of self-regulation, that is, the cases where self-regulation aims at moral goals and standards, in connection with the quest for well-being. In light of this background and by adopting a bottom-up approach, he identifies two main functions of practical wisdom with respect to moral self-regulation: to critically reflect on inherited moral standards and to reflect on the goals one sets for oneself. He concludes by raising concerns for “conceptualizing wisdom as a singular skill” (p. 107), claiming that the kinds of refection wisdom requires may still be too varied to be the result of the exercise of a single skill and may instead be the product of several interrelated skills. In Chapter 6, Claudia Navarini, Allegra Indraccolo, and Riccardo Brunetti analyze two complementary functions of practical wisdom: on

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the one hand, adapting general rules to particular situations, and on the other, “using the limited information available in a given context, and supplied by possible rules, to judge the situation as a whole” (p.  115). Their experimental study aims to identify improper generalizations in cases where information available to the agent is limited; to do so, it extends the “Halo effect” to perceived moral character. The results they discuss pave the way for arguing that “practical wisdom, as the synthetic ability to grasp the moral sense within the situation, can prevent generalization from deviating from its possible moral function” (p. 115). The two final chapters of the volume deal with practical wisdom acquisition from a developmental-psychological standpoint. In Chapter 7, Daniel Lapsley begins by recalling the components of practical wisdom (comprehension, sense, intelligence, and cleverness), as well as its functions, to explore the various psychological constructs currently being invoked to account for practical wisdom’s functions and features. Then, he turns to developmental psychology in order to identify the “developmental trajectory” of practical wisdom, in the spirit of a “principle of developmental adequacy” (p. 139), and offers an understanding of phronesis in terms of metacognition, metalogical and meta-rational capacities, attentional and encoding processes, and processes underlying the development of moral self-identity. Finally, Darcia Narvaez in Chapter 8 argues that a sound discussion of practical wisdom cannot do without an understanding of which kind of organisms humans are, the qualities that help them lead a full life, and the “kinds of action and capacities” that make a human “a proper member of its species” (p. 161). Assuming principles of species-typicality and ecological realism, Narvaez focuses on two neglected species-typical features contributing to practical wisdom: “the grounding or biosocial ecology of development and the expansive imagination or worldview of transpersonal transrationality” (p. 160). We hope that this volume will be of interest both to students at various stages of their work and to academics who work at the crossroad between psychology and philosophy, particularly those interested in the topic of practical reason and character, broadly conceived.

References Annas, J. (2011). Intelligent Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Annas, J., Narvaez, D. and Snow, N. E. (eds.). (2016). Developing the Virtues: Integrating Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Besser Jones, L. and Slote, M. (eds.). (2015). The Routledge Companion to Virtue Ethics. London: Routledge. Broadie, S. (1991). Ethics With Aristotle. New York: Oxford University Press. Carr, W. (1995). For Education: Towards Critical Educational Inquiry. Buckingham: Open University Press. Darnell, C., Gulliford, L., Kristjánsson, K. and Paris, P. (2019). Phronesis and the Knowledge-Action Gap in Moral Psychology and Moral Education: A New Synthesis? Human Development, 62(3): 101–129.

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De Caro, M., Vaccarezza, M. S. and Niccoli, A. (2018). Phronesis as Ethical Expertise: Naturalism of Second Nature and the Unity of Virtue. Journal of Value Inquiry, 52: 287–305. Fowers, B. (2005). Virtue and Psychology: Pursuing Excellence in Ordinary Practices. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Jones, M., Lewis, P. and Reffitt, K. (eds.). (2013). Character, Practical Wisdom and Professional Formation across the Disciplines. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Kristjánsson, K. (2015a). Aristotelian Character Education. London: Routledge. Kristjánsson, K. (2015b). Phronesis as an Ideal in Professional Medical Ethics: Some Preliminary Positionings and Problematics. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 36(5): 299–320. Lapsley, D. K. and Hill, P. L. (2009). The Development of Moral Personality. In D. Narvaez and D. K. Lapsley (eds.), Personality, Identity and Character: Explorations in Moral Psychology (pp. 185–213). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lapsley, D. K. and Narvaez, D. (2004). A Social-Cognitive Approach to the Moral Personality. In D. K. Lapsley and D. Narvaez (eds.), Moral Development, Self and Identity (pp. 1–20). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Masala, A. and Webber, J. (2016). From Personality to Virtue: Essays on the Philosophy of Character. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDowell, J. (1998). Virtue and Reason. In J. McDowell (ed.), Mind, Value and Reality (pp. 50–73). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Russell, D. C. (2009). Practical Intelligence and the Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schwartz, B. and Sharpe, K. E. (2010). Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books. Sherman, N. (1989). The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtues. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Snow, N. (ed.). (2015). Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology and Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stichter, M. (2018). The Skillfulness of Virtue: Improving Our Moral and Epistemic Lives. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

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The Reciprocity of the Virtues Daniel C. Russell

One cannot be good, in the strict sense, without wisdom, or wise without virtue of character. But then the argument that the virtues are separate from each other comes undone .  .  . since as soon as there is wisdom, which is a single thing, there will be all the virtues. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VI.13, 1144b31–4, 1145a1–21

People who are learning to play a musical instrument are often surprised to discover that it is hard to play louder without also playing faster. Controlling dynamics while controlling tempo isn’t like talking while driving, two discrete things done at the same time. Instead, the tasks are interdependent; one doesn’t know how to control dynamics, in a skillful way, without controlling dynamics at tempo. To understand musical skill, it is not enough to enumerate the several competencies involved. We must also appreciate their interdependence.2 Competencies in dynamics and tempo aren’t separable from each other, and if Aristotle is right, neither are the virtues. To have any virtue requires practical wisdom (phronēsis); but wisdom brings all the virtues with it, so to have any virtue is to have all the virtues. This is an idealization known nowadays as the reciprocity of the virtues.3 And reciprocity is an idealization – an instructive simplification, I’ll go on to argue (Section 3), but a simplification nonetheless. We know that nobody is virtuous in every way. (And of course, Aristotle did too.)4 No surprise, reciprocity has drawn a lot of attention, focused chiefly on the very idea of having all the virtues, that the virtues form a set.5 That exclusive focus risks missing a key insight – what I argue is the key insight – of this idealization, and that is the distinct significance of the interdependence of the virtues. That is why it is wisdom that makes them a set: It takes wisdom to find the “mean” of a virtue; but we never have to find just one mean at a time, and the virtues aren’t discrete. Like controlling dynamics at tempo, being both forthright and tactful in telling an uncomfortable truth is not to do two discrete things at the same time. Fusing both at once is part of what it is to do either of them well.6

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The role of the idealization of reciprocity is to highlight that interdependence, and with it the distinctive challenges for wisdom and development that interdependence brings. We can begin with Aristotle’s version of reciprocity, as well as the interdependence of virtues it serves to highlight (Section 1), before looking at how interdependence creates challenges all its own for learning and development (Section 2). Then we’ll be in a position to see how the idealization of reciprocity, and perhaps idealization more generally, might help us better understand the nature of virtue (Section 3). One more thing I must say up front: When I say that reciprocity is an idealization, I do not mean that it is an ideal for us to “approximate to.” In fact, one of my goals in this chapter is to deny exactly that (Section 3.1).

1 The Reciprocity of the Virtues 1.1 Aristotle on Reciprocity The reciprocity of the virtues stems from a particular way of understanding the kinds of things that virtues are.7 For Aristotle, a virtue in the broadest sense is an attribute by which a living being is fit for the mode of life proper to its kind.8 In the strictest sense, a virtue is an attribute of beings that live by choosing – humans – that fits them for living well through choice.9 Or, as Aristotle puts it, virtue finds a “mean” of acting and feeling on the occasions one should, about the things one should, toward the people one should, for the purposes one should, and in the manner one should.10 Finding the mean takes wisdom. Virtues have good standing goals, like being forthright with the truth, but calling that goal good is a truism – like saying an archer’s goal is to hit the target – since as yet it is indeterminate.11 Practical wisdom is for discerning in a particular case just what such a goal would actually amount to, turning a good but indeterminate goal into a determinate goal that is still good.12 Sometimes we speak loosely of virtues, though, and call some people forthright, even when “blunt” or “brusque” would be more accurate, just because they strike us as stereotypically “forthright.” Aristotle calls attributes like these “natural virtues,” and in this looser sense, even children and animals have their virtues.13 To say that virtue finds a mean, though, is to say that one chooses and acts so as to suit the situation at hand. Virtues of that sort – what Aristotle calls “genuine virtue” and “virtue in the strict (literally, chief) sense” – are intelligent, and not dispositions to stereotypical behavior. But in that case, no intelligent virtue floats in a vacuum; forthrightness that isn’t tactful and benevolent isn’t the excellence of forthrightness, but just bluntness – it doesn’t look where it’s going, so to speak, but bungles and blusters its way through.14 In order for wisdom to find even one

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mean, it has to be ready to find the mean of other virtues too.15 And it is at this point that Aristotle draws the conclusion in the epigram: So it is clear from what we have said that one cannot be good, in the strict sense, without wisdom, or wise without virtue of character. But then the argument that the virtues are separate from each other comes undone, which one might make on the grounds that the same person is not naturally suited for all the virtues and therefore will acquire one virtue before another. This is what happens with natural virtues, but not with those virtues by which one is said to be good without qualification, since as soon as there is wisdom, which is a single thing, there will be all the virtues. (NE VI.13, 1144b30–1145a2) Nowadays, we call this idealization the reciprocity of the virtues. An idealization is just what it is, since it simplifes away the limitations of our wisdom in the actual world, where often in fnding the mean we can do no more than avoiding doing the worst,16 and where we might do better at fnding the mean of generosity than the mean of courage, say, or at fnding the mean of fairness than the mean of generosity.17 And again, Aristotle knows it. The reciprocity of the virtues is not a generalization of what virtuous people are like. So then, what is the use of this idealization? From this point on, I have to set aside what Aristotle’s own use of it is, because I find it too hard to tell. Instead, I will argue that its best use is to highlight the distinct challenge of fusing interdependent tasks, like playing louder at tempo. First, though, I want to develop the idea that the virtues are interdependent in a way that’s worth highlighting, before taking a closer look at interdependence in Section 2. 1.2 The Mean, Reciprocity, and Interdependence Beverly has chaired an oral exam for Allan, a graduate student in her department. He passed, but the examiners agree that while he is smart and hardworking, Allan will probably struggle with advanced work in the discipline and should consider leaving the program. How should Beverly get this message across to Allan?18 Think about why Beverly should need to get this message across in the first place: Allan deserves to know the truth, to make an informed decision about how to spend these valuable years of his life. So the manner in which she should tell Allan the news is one that will serve the purpose for which she should tell him. To tell the truth as one should and for the purpose one should are elements of the “mean” of forthrightness, and these elements are interdependent – they cannot be understood one by one, but only together – as are all the other elements of the mean. At the level of a single virtue, doing the things one should, at the time one should, regarding the person

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one should, for the purpose one should, and in the manner one should are a matter of fusing interdependent tasks, like playing louder at tempo. We can take this thought further: Since the purpose for which Beverly should give Allan the news is to help Allan, the mean of forthrightness must also include giving the news in a constructive way. If Beverly gives Allan the news for the purpose she should, then she cannot just make sure the message sinks in, come what may; that would be thoughtless and cruel, not helpful. Nor can she just give Allan the news as she herself would want to hear it, which might be obtuse and unsympathetic; nor in an offhand way, which would be tactless and unfeeling; nor so as to minimize her own discomfort, which would be cowardly and self-indulgent. And so on. To tell the truths one should, to the persons one should, when one should, in the manner one should, and for the purpose one should – to find the mean of forthrightness – one must tell the truth in a way that is also thoughtful, tactful, benevolent, courageous, and temperate.19 And of course, these further goals are also indeterminate: Beverly won’t find the mean of tact by making the message so soft that it doesn’t sink in; and so on. Finding the mean of forthrightness and finding the mean of tact are not discrete tasks to be done merely simultaneously, but interdependent tasks to be fused. This point, of course, corresponds to the thesis that the virtues are reciprocal, which reflects the interdependence of virtue on a second level: To find even one mean, it is not enough to find just one mean. The thesis that virtue finds a mean is a thesis about interdependence within a virtue, and the reciprocity of the virtues is a thesis about interdependence between virtues. Interdependence on the second level arises from the elements on the first level. Beverly cannot be forthright as she should be without also delivering the news kindly and courageously; she cannot deliver the news with the kindness or courage that she should without also being forthright.20 For all these reasons, I am going to understand the reciprocity of the virtues as the thesis that to have any virtue is to have every virtue because the virtues are interdependent. More precisely, I am going to understand that thesis as an idealization that serves to capture the interdependence between virtues. I now want to look at the distinctive challenges that interdependent tasks present for human cognition and learning (Section 2), before considering more carefully how the idealization of reciprocity illuminates those challenges (Section 3).

2 Interdependence and Cognitive Load 2.1 Interdependence as Element Interactivity Interdependent tasks, of the sorts I have sketched here, can be understood as tasks with “element interactivity.”21 An “element” is a subtask – like

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controlling dynamics – and any two elements “interact” insofar as successfully managing one element includes managing the other element as well; for example, part of controlling dynamics is doing so at tempo. By definition, interacting elements cannot be mastered or fully understood in isolation. Despite the technical label, element interactivity is so familiar that it can be easy to forget. The neurologist Oliver Sacks described patients who had lost the proprioceptive ability to monitor the orientation and posture of their bodies, with an effect akin to splitting up a jazz combo into soundproof rooms: Lacking proprioception, a person might learn to close his fingers around a fork but struggle to hold it with the right pressure.22 We carry out tasks with element interactivity all the time, fusing the elements with such fluidity that they merge into one single, simple task. Interdependence is all around us, but usually it is hidden in plain sight. No surprise, element interactivity can also make new tasks very hard to learn, like learning to play a musical instrument – or to ride a unicycle, as Adam Morton observes: Some people can ride unicycles and some cannot. Of the people who cannot, some have a weak sense of balance – but some who cannot ride unicycles can walk tightropes. Some of them are physically uncoordinated – but there are people who are physically coordinated and have a reasonable sense of balance who can only with great difficulty learn to ride the unicycle. And there are a few who have only average balance and coordination for whom after half an hour of falling off it suddenly clicks, and from then on they can jump on and go.23 The challenge, even for someone who has each of the competencies required, lies in fusing those competencies, because none of them works in the particular way the unicycle demands unless they all work that way together. It’s not as though tightrope-walkers fall over on the unicycle because they lack a “unicycle-riding faculty,”24 or have the faculty of balancing-while-tightrope-walking but not balancing-while-unicycleriding. The problem is not a missing element but a missing interaction. In fact, the diffculty of a task can be understood as a function of the elements and interactions to be learned; even where elements are few, interactivity can make a task very diffcult.25 Another way to put the point is that for tasks with interacting elements φ and ψ, any specification of what it is to do φ well must include what it is to do φ well while doing ψ well. To control dynamics well includes doing so at tempo; to balance well on a unicycle includes coordinating so as to maintain balance. And as we saw earlier, virtue is high in element interactivity, on two levels (Section 1.2): To act forthrightly is, one, to tell

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the truths one should, to the people one should, in the way one should, at the times one should, for the purposes one should; and two, to do all these things in a way that is also fair, tactful, kind, sympathetic. Practical wisdom is the name we give to those competencies by which we manage interactivity both within any given virtue (the mean) and between different virtues (reciprocity). Between-virtue interactivity is important to appreciate, so the idealization of reciprocity has a useful purpose to serve in highlighting that interactivity. But the question remains just what that idealization is supposed to tell us about virtue in the world in which we find ourselves, since ours is patently not a world in which to have any virtue is to have them all. Before tackling that question (Section 3), though, we need to understand better just what accounts for the gap between those worlds. This brings us now to considering the distinctive demands of learning to do well at tasks with high element interactivity, and to these two questions: What are the cognitive demands of learning such tasks (Section 2.2), and what cognitive demands are involved in drawing on our learning of such tasks beyond the particular contexts in which we happened to learn them (Section 2.3)? 2.2 Complex Tasks and Learning When a task is high in element interactivity – when it is complex, for short – it makes sense to speak of “understanding” the task.26 For instance, memorizing the names of different components within an electrical circuit is a simple task; students can learn those names in isolation, so there is nothing about the names for students to understand in a deep way. By contrast, the role of a component within an electrical circuit as a whole is something for students to understand, because that role cannot be understood except in relation to the other components that make up the circuit.27 Naturally, learning the role of an electrical component within a circuit is also more difficult than just learning its name. Complex tasks have a higher “cognitive load” than simple tasks – they consume much more attention.28 We can think of the total cognitive load of learning a task as a pie sliced three ways: “intrinsic” load, the attention that is required in virtue of the element interactivity – the sheer complexity – of the task being learned; “extraneous” load, or the attention that is consumed by distracting features of the learning environment; and crucially, “germane” load, which is the residual attention (if any!) that can be allocated to learning the task at hand.29 Because attention – “working memory”30 – is limited (in both capacity and duration), the combination of intrinsic and extraneous loads must leave enough working memory to be used for germane load, or else we can’t learn. Germane load is complementary with intrinsic load and extraneous load, so the sum of intrinsic and extraneous loads determines how much of total working memory remains for germane load.31

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Notice then that extraneous load – sloppy instruction – becomes more detrimental when intrinsic load is greater, because less working memory is left for germane load.32 So, for instance, learning simple tasks, where intrinsic load is low, is less sensitive to variations in extraneous load. However, even when extraneous load is low, the greater the intrinsic load the less working memory is left for germane load – and thus less for sufficiently deep learning. Notice also that intrinsic load depends on the element interactivity of the task; so the practical question for learning complex tasks is how to reduce intrinsic load to leave enough attentional “space” for germane load. However, intrinsic load isn’t fixed but will be different for different people, because what is an “element” for one person is not for another.33 For an experienced electrician, understanding the dynamics of a familiar type of circuit has become something simple – the circuit as a whole is now an element, grasped all at once – but for a beginner it is still complex, a throng of elements and interactivities. Likewise, playing louder at tempo is simple for an experienced musician, complex for a beginner; holding a fork is simple for most of us, complex for someone lacking in proprioception; and so on. This is why element interactivity is easy to forget, when it is (Section 2.1): The elements have fused into a single element. But now we seem to face a paradox: To understand the elements of a complex task is to understand them all together, but for beginners the cognitive load of grasping the elements and their interactivities all together exceeds the total working memory – human attention just isn’t a big enough “pie.” Paradoxically, beginners would already have to be experts just to get started!34 This is a very old paradox. In fact, it is at least as old as Aristotle: One learns to write or play a musical instrument only by doing those things, but in that case one must already know how to do them in order to learn how.35 Fortunately Aristotle’s proposed solution still stands up too, and that is to distinguish between doing something in a beginner’s way and doing it in an expert’s way.36 Beginners need to learn without yet understanding: For example, by learning the elements at first in isolation, and gradually introducing their interactions, students can learn a complex task as a series of simpler tasks, reducing the intrinsic cognitive load of learning at each step so as to arrive in time at understanding.37 So, how exactly does deferring the goal of deep understanding help learners arrive at that goal in the end? Recall that the intrinsic load of a complex task is relative to one’s knowledge, because as knowledge increases the number of elements shrinks. By breaking a complex task down into elements and interactivities, “structured knowledge” begins to form:38 what this component does and that component does, then what they contribute by doing those things together, and so on. For instance, Edwina Pollock and colleagues found that beginning student electricians performed better, both in practical applications and in conceptualization,

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when they broke down the elements and interactions of circuits in this way, than did beginners who studied elements and interactions all together; just as important, varying the presentation made little difference for intermediate student electricians.39 So, as beginners build up structured knowledge – or what are called “schemas” – they grasp what had been several elements and interactivities now as a single element, or “chunk.”40 And because more advanced students have more schemas – they grasp more chunks – they can manage more complex tasks than beginners can. What beginners have to process deliberately with scarce working memory, more experienced learners have stored as schemas they can retrieve automatically from long-term memory, reducing intrinsic load.41 For the more experienced, element interactivity has shrunk. In short, tasks with higher element interactivity require a learning process with lower element interactivity.42 Notice, then, that the complex structure of a task is consistent with – and given the limits of working memory, actually requires – the piecemeal nature of learning that task. That is to say, the process of acquiring a competency for a complex task cannot mirror the intrinsic structure of that task. I’ll argue in Section 3 that an idealization of virtue can help us appreciate the element interactivity of its intrinsic structure, since this can be so easily obscured by the piecemeal nature of ongoing development. 2.3 Transfer of Learning Managing cognitive load is also crucial for transferring what one learns – learning in a way that prepares one for contexts beyond those in which one first happened to learn. Someone who can control dynamics at tempo, in just the one song he has memorized, hasn’t really learned to control dynamics at tempo. Someone who is forthright in just one context, or is forthright except when compassion is required, really doesn’t have the excellence of forthrightness.43 There are different ways of defining transfer of learning, though, and with them different ways to understand the management of the associated cognitive load. On a very simple definition of transfer, students transfer what they have learned in one context insofar as they apply it directly in novel contexts.44 In order to increase later transfer, initial learning must be high in germane load, forcing students to build up and draw upon structured knowledge in order to make progress.45 When learners receive a lot of real-time prompts and feedback, they progress quickly because they can see exactly what to do to solve the next problem; but because they’re just following directions, they don’t learn very deeply – they don’t build up schemas – and so they struggle with novel problems. Likewise, students progress quickly when they encounter variations on familiar problems, but this doesn’t give them practice at interpreting new situations as relevant to what they’ve learned somewhere else. In order for

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initial learning to be good preparation for later direct application, germane load must be very high: highly variable challenges, fewer external prompts, less immediate feedback. Reducing element interactivity (Section 2.2) is therefore all the more important, so as to leave more working memory available for handling greater germane load.46 On a subtler definition, though, transfer also includes the ability to draw upon prior learning to construct more sophisticated approaches to novel problems.47 For example, students who haven’t learned much that they can directly apply to some new problem – protecting bald eagles from extinction, say – still may have learned how to ask better questions: What are the eagles’ natural predators, say, or how have the threats to the eagles’ survival changed over time?48 In addition to transferring a static schema, students can develop a dynamic capability to construct schemas for making sense of new experiences.49 Now, to appreciate the cognitive demands of constructing schemas in situ, imagine the following two-player card game: nine cards, numbered 1 through 9, are displayed face up, and players take turns drawing cards until one of them wins by collecting three cards that sum to 15.50 So, if the first player chooses 5 and the second player takes 3, then the first player shouldn’t choose 7 (5 + 7 + 3 = 15, but 3 has been taken). And so on. Question: Does this game sound like child’s play? It is, actually, provided you look at it from the right perspective: Arrange the cards three by three so that they sum to 15 in every direction, and the game is exactly tic-tac-toe. This is just a trivial example, but it demonstrates that how hard a problem is to solve depends on the perspective one takes on it. But it also illustrates that even when the right perspective makes a problem easy, finding the right perspective – that is, constructing the right schema – for a novel problem can be extremely difficult.51 And this is just tic-tac-toe! Finding a useful perspective for – bringing meaningful structure to – the elements of a new situation becomes only more difficult with the introduction of element interactivity.52 However we define transfer of learning, the chief problem posed by complex tasks is again one of managing a greater intrinsic load than we can handle all at once. So, as with learning complex tasks, so too with transferring our learning of them: The process of developing in the task cannot, given cognitive limitations, mirror the complex structure of the task. 2.4 Complex Tasks and Virtue Humans have potentialities for acquiring transferable competence in complex tasks. Of course, virtue involves complexities that are nothing like electrical circuits, but we might reasonably conjecture that virtue also develops by exploiting the mind’s same developmental potentialities,53 including those for building up structured knowledge – learning from experience – for making complexity more tractable (Section 2.2) in

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a range of relevant contexts (Section 2.3). For any given virtue, the mean presents a throng of elements – at the right time, in the right manner, etc. – and as we mature, we must come to grasp that mean as fewer and fewer elements, across an array of different situations: that this too is a situation calling for forthrightness, and here and now, forthrightness would be this. And between the virtues, we must also come with maturity to grasp that this situation that calls for forthrightness is also one that calls for benevolence, and here and now, benevolent forthrightness would be this. It would take us too far afield to ask now whether the virtues do in fact develop by exploiting these same potentialities. But even if this optimistic conjecture is warranted, still neither learning nor transfer “just happens.” Virtue is very high in element interactivity – both within and between virtues – and therefore high in intrinsic cognitive load.54 High intrinsic load leaves less space for germane load, but transferability requires learning from the sort of practice and experience that is high in germane load. Worse, the environment in which we develop is typically high in extraneous load – missing feedback, misleading feedback, bad advice, bad examples, traumatic experiences, false friends.55 Character development combines high intrinsic load with high extrinsic load, leaving little precious space for germane load – for learning. My point is not to be pessimistic about the possibility of virtue. People do learn to find the mean, and that within an interconnected web of means; they do learn to communicate difficult truths well, in ways that are benevolent, courageous, and fair-minded. But it should be clear that finding the mean, both within and between the virtues, is a remarkable achievement; and the remarkability of that achievement brings us back to a couple of points about the idealization of reciprocity. One is that complexity, competence in managing complexity, and the transfer of competence all present special challenges that are important to pinpoint and understand in their own right. Idealizations that pinpoint these special challenges enrich our understanding of just what it is to manage complexity well in choice, action, and emotion – of what the virtues are. The other point is that managing complexity well isn’t the same thing as always getting all the elements right; for us, it can’t be that. What virtue looks like at any moment for someone constrained by the scarcity of attention for managing complexity – that is, for any of us – will bear no resemblance to how virtue would look in a world where that resource abounded. One of the most important dimensions of managing complexity well is to manage the fact that we can never be equal to all the complexity there is to be managed. For us, part of wisdom is recognizing when one is out of one’s depth in the first place, for instance by surrounding oneself with trusted friends and colleagues. And when one is out of one’s depth, part of wisdom is then deciding how to proceed. Sometimes the thing to do is to make up the shortfall; what’s less obvious, though, is that that is not always the thing to do.56 This costs time, attention,

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and energy; in Beverly’s case, it may cost more than she can give, at least without missing the opportunity to tell Allan the news when Allan needs to hear it. Perhaps she should find someone else who would deliver the news better, if she can; perhaps she must do it herself and can only try to avoid doing the worst.57 Sometimes the wisest thing one can do is to take precautions in light of the fact that, right now anyway, one is not wise in all the ways one needs. It’s too bad that sometimes the best choice is only the least bad one, but when that is the best choice, making it is a strategy for managing complexity well, within the world as we find it. In a word, the reciprocity thesis should illuminate something worth appreciating about the nature of virtue in our world, but it can’t do so by resembling virtue in our world. So we come now to the question we posed at the outset: Just what kind of idealization is reciprocity?

3 Idealization and the Reciprocity of the Virtues 3.1 Idealization, Approximation, and Alien Worlds I said at the outset that the reciprocity of the virtues is an idealization – an instructive simplification, I hope to show, but a massive simplification nonetheless – since, as we know too well, human character isn’t like that.58 And now that we’ve explored both the complexity that good character must handle well (Section 1) and the cognitive demands of learning to handle complexity (Section 2), we can better appreciate why our world cannot be like that. A world in which “as soon as there is wisdom there will be all the virtues” is a world in which wisdom is not bounded by the constraints of human cognition. Or as I said earlier, the reciprocity of the virtues is not a generalization of what virtuous people are like. (By the way, because reciprocity isn’t a generalization, it cannot be rejected out of hand – as it so often is – on the grounds that it is a false generalization.) It isn’t an abstraction either; an abstraction of something states its variables but assigns them no values. Instead, reciprocity is a counterfactual case, and it is a particular case: the case in which the variable of human attention is assigned a value of “boundless.” In fact, every idealization is a counterfactual particular.59 Even Galileo’s classic idealization of gravity’s effect in a frictionless world was a counterfactual particular case, namely the case in which friction has a value of zero. If an idealized situation is just another situation, then what makes that idealized situation especially worth thinking about? Idealizations simplify strategically, so as to make it easier to see something that would otherwise be obscured. (In fact, we can think of idealization as a mental tool for reducing cognitive load!) For Galileo, setting friction at zero made the effect of gravity easier to understand; and because gravity is a constant, the effect in a frictionless world would be the same in the actual world

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as well, so the law that describes the effect of gravity in the idealized case will also describe that effect in the cases we’re trying to understand.60 Eureka! However, the fact that gravity and friction do not interact was crucial for Galileo’s idealization61 – and it is here that its similarities to reciprocity cease. Imagine for the moment that in the actual world, gravity and friction did interact somehow – like dynamics and tempo, or balance and coordination – so that any description of what gravity contributes to a body’s motion must specify how it interacts with friction’s contribution. If gravity and friction were related like that, then an idealized world of zero friction would be a world without one of the very circumstances that makes gravity what it is in our world, and so a law describing its contribution in that counterfactual particular would not describe its contribution anywhere else. That idealization would not make gravity’s actual effect easier to see. Instead, it would show us a world where gravity is just a different force altogether!62 For brevity’s sake, I will call an idealization like that an alien world. For elements that interact in the actual world, an idealization in which they are independent is an alien world. Since gravity and friction are of course discrete, a frictionless world is counterfactual but not alien where gravity is concerned. By contrast, though, the idealized world in which “as soon as there is wisdom there will be all the virtues” (Section 1.1) is an alien world. In that world, either there is no complexity for practical wisdom to manage (Sections 1.2 and 2.1) or there are no cognitive constraints on wisdom (Sections 2.2 and 2.3); but in our world, the facts of both complexity and human cognitive limitations are among the very circumstances to which wisdom must be the response (Section 2.4). That is to say, in a complex world, human wisdom and cognitive constraints cannot be discrete. They have to interact. Otherwise, it isn’t really wisdom, and therefore it isn’t really virtue either. We are almost in position to see why, as I said at the outset, reciprocity is not an ideal for us to approximate to. But first, to see what I mean by “approximation,” consider again Galileo’s frictionless idealization. Imagine real-world cases of motion arranged as data points in a series, in order of decreasing friction; because gravity is a constant, the counterfactual case of zero friction would be the case at the limit of this series. Of course, no real-world case ever attains that limit, but nonetheless, as real-world cases approximate to the idealized condition – as friction approaches zero – those cases also approximate to the idealized outcome. We might have thought that the idealization of reciprocity is like that too: Of course we never get all the way to the ideal, the thought might have gone, but still we improve “by approximating to it.” But now the problem is clear: Virtue in an idealized world of zero cognitive constraints is just a different thing from what virtue can be in ours. The problem is

20 Daniel C. Russell not that the idealization is “too far away” or that we never “attain” it. The problem is that there is no series of real-world cases that has that idealization for its limiting case. The reason why not is straightforward: One of the things that makes virtue what it has to be in our world is the very need to manage the unavoidable incompleteness of our character owing to the limits of our cognition. In other words, virtue and cognitive constraints are not discrete. They interact. So “approximation” isn’t a useful way to understand the idealization of reciprocity. Rather, virtue is whatever it has to be in order to help us do well given that we humans have to contend with the burdens of cognitive load. We can do well only in response to the world as we find it, but one of the things we find is that we can never have all the resources of character we need. The strategies for doing well in our world must therefore include strategies for managing that very scarcity of resources. In a world in which resources are unavoidably constrained, the strategies for managing complexity that are wise may bear no resemblance to strategies that would be wise in the alien world in which the scarcity of cognitive resources wasn’t among the very things for wisdom to respond to. Therefore, to think about doing well in our world in terms of approximating to that alien world would be to miss precisely those features of our world that make doing well, for us, what it actually has to be. So if the use of the reciprocity of the virtues is not in generalization, and not in abstraction, and not in approximation either, then what is its use? 3.2 Reciprocity Highlights Interdependence While it is true that the reciprocity of the virtues does not resemble virtue as it is in our world, it is through its very dissimilarities that it makes certain features of real-world virtue easier to appreciate. One of these, of course, is the importance in our world of handling complexity well in choice, action, and emotion. It takes wisdom to harmonize the interdependent tasks inherent in virtuous action, and so interdependence is crucial to pinpoint.63 But it is much harder to pinpoint interdependence between elements by focusing on cases in which some of the elements themselves are missing. Some people cannot ride a unicycle because they have poor balance or coordination; but to understand the distinctive challenge of the complexity of unicycle-riding, we need a case that lets us see how balance, coordination, and other elements have to interact with each other in order for any of them to be attuned to riding the unicycle. Likewise, the idealization of the mean makes it easier to see the interdependence of acting when one should, in the manner one should, and so on, all of which go into specifying a good but indeterminate goal. And reciprocity makes it easier to see that specifying even one good but indeterminate goal requires managing its interdependence with other good but indeterminate goals. The interdependence of the virtues is as important to see as it is easy to overlook, so idealizations like these are invaluable.

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The idealizations of the mean and reciprocity also help to clarify the sorts of changes that can constitute improvements in character. For one thing, they help us see that part of improving in character is to become better at managing the complexity inherent in doing well. For another thing, we see that we cannot understand the overall quality of character by “adding up” individually good attributes, since acting virtuously is a matter of finding the mean, the elements of which all interact, and interact with other virtues and all their elements. One does better in choice, action, and emotion not one mean at a time but in the interdependence of them. It is because interdependence both within and between virtues is so easy to overlook that the idealizations of the mean and reciprocity are so useful. In fact, overlooking interdependence can lead to entirely different ways of looking at virtue. Suppose Beverly, who is usually forthright, fails in this case, and doesn’t break the bad news to Allan in the right way. Overlooking interdependence, we might say that Beverly has the virtue of being-forthright-in-circumstances-with-features-X-Y-Z but also the vice of not-being-forthright-in-circumstances-with-features-W-X-Y; or that when it comes to forthrightness, Beverly has neither virtue nor vice but a jumble of dispositions, some better and some worse.64 Note the assumption: Variations in our actions all correspond to elements (dispositions, traits) in our character. But this is no more informative here than a like assumption would be for unicycle-riding, and anyway it obscures what may be the actual failure: Even though Beverly is forthright, benevolent, and courageous, generally speaking, she may still struggle with fusing forthrightness, benevolence, and courage in just that way that suits the situation she finds herself in with Allan. Of course, this does not make overall assessment of her forthrightness something simple – that’s the point, actually; character is much more complicated than “does well at this but not that.” Appreciating the interdependence of character makes overall assessment much more informative and textured, precisely because the assessment is complicated rather than simple.65 But not so fast. If the reciprocity of the virtues helps us appreciate the interdependence of the virtues, doesn’t it do so precisely by obscuring the very cognitive constraints that make the virtues what they have to be? The answer is, yes – and so it is important to understand more precisely how idealizations work, to avoid mistaking the factors they ignore for factors that don’t matter. One by-product of this discussion of reciprocity as an idealization – I hope – is to encourage those of us who study virtue to explore the method of idealization, more than we have done so far, so I’ll close with a few words about that method. 3.3 Idealization as a Method in Virtue Theory Idealizations are mental tools that help us understand our world (Section 3.1), but they do not all help in the same way, and the differences

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matter. Many idealizations help us understand the world because, despite simplifying it, they still resemble the world in some relevant way.66 Galileo’s idealization is like that: True, bodies in a frictionless world don’t move as bodies do in ours, but what gravity contributes to motion in that world it also contributes in ours; so for understanding that contribution, the relevant resemblance holds. Idealizations like that help us understand our world through being, as one philosopher has put it, a “credible surrogate” for our world.67 Recall, though, that an idealization that isolates real-world features can resemble the real world only if those features do not interact but are discrete.68 When features are not discrete, idealizations that isolate one feature from another cannot resemble reality in regards to that very remaining feature (that is why I called them “alien worlds”). But then the puzzle is, how can we better understand our world by contemplating a world that is alien to ours in exactly the respect we are trying to understand? The answer, I think, is to remind ourselves that idealizations are just mental tools that we use to guide our thinking about the real world – and those tools themselves need not resemble the real world at all.69 Put another way, our understanding needs to resemble our world, but that doesn’t mean the aids to our understanding have to resemble it. In fact, the reciprocity of the virtues suggests an even stronger claim: Some idealizations illuminate the world precisely in virtue of not resembling it!70 In a world of boundless cognitive resources, a person with any virtue would be missing no virtue, and would be ready to combine virtues in any context. In a world like that, the nature of the task is visible in the acquiring of the competence – and therein lies the value of imagining that world, where the nature of the task is easier to see. Because our cognitive resources are limited, though, an idealization that resembled our world would have to show virtue as piecemeal and incomplete, and therefore wouldn’t help reveal the interdependent nature of virtue. Only an idealization that doesn’t resemble our world in that respect will do. Notice, then, that although the idealization of reciprocity starts with an alien world, it doesn’t leave us wondering what that world could show about ours, in view of the gap between them. On the contrary, the point of the idealization is to draw our attention to precisely that gap, and what we learn from the ideal is exactly why virtue can’t be ideal – and what it has to be instead. I do not mean to suggest reciprocity as a general template for idealization in virtue theory. Mental tools have multiple uses. But one of the main points I do hope to make in this chapter, beyond those concerning the reciprocity of the virtues specifically, is that idealization is one thing for a system with discrete features, and something else entirely for a system with interdependent features – of which there is no clearer example than human character.71

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Notes 1. All translations are my own. Nicomachean Ethics will be abbreviated NE. 2. See also Annas (2011: 87). 3. The more common label “unity of virtue” would be better reserved for the much stronger thesis that the virtues are all the same (see NE VI.13, 1144b17–30). Also, observe that reciprocity does not say that to be virtuous is to be perfectly virtuous. 4. NE III.6, 1115a20–2: “some who are cowardly in military enterprises are generous, and so they bear the loss of wealth courageously”; IV.1, 1121b21– 4: “Some people with labels like these – like ‘cheap,’ ‘tight,’ ‘mean’ – although they’re all deficient about giving, still they don’t go after or even want to accept things that belong to other people; for some of them, this is due to a sense of propriety, and a refusal to do anything shameful.” See Curzer (2012: 313) for discussion. 5. For a recent discussion, see Toner (2014). 6. Sreenivasan (2009: 202) calls this the “mutual porosity” of the virtues. 7. Vaccarezza (2017). 8. Metaphysics V.14, 16, 20; cf. Physics VII.3. See Hutchinson (1986), Parry (2014), Russell (2015a). 9. NE I.7, 13, II.5. 10. II.6–9, VI.1. 11. NE VI.1, 1138b18–34. 12. VI.12, 1144a6–9; 13, 1145a2–6. 13. NE VI.13, 1144b1–9. 14. NE VI.13, 1144b8–17. 15. VI.12, 1144a29-b1. 16. IV.9. 17. See note 4 above. 18. I have adapted the example from Morton (2006: 119f). 19. Cf. Annas (2011: 84–86). 20. Cf. Aquinas, Disputed Questions on the Cardinal Virtues, article 2, reply to objection #9: “when a person is engaged in an act of a given virtue, he must also be engaged in acts of other virtues at the same time.” 21. Sweller (2006: 13f), Sweller et al. (2011: chaps. 5, 15). 22. Sacks (1985). See also Merleau-Ponty (1962). 23. Morton (2006: 123). 24. Morton (2006: 124), rejecting this idea. 25. Sweller et al. (2011: chap. 5). 26. Hence Sweller et al. (2011: 62): “Information is ‘understood’ when we are able to process multiple, interacting elements simultaneously in working memory.” See also Sweller (1994: 311). 27. Pollock et al. (2002: 62f). 28. Sweller (2006). 29. See Sweller (1994: 307, 310, 2006: 13f, 20), van Merriënboer et al. (2006: 343f). 30. Baddeley (1992). 31. Sweller (2006: 20, 2010), Sweller et al. (2011: chaps. 5, 15). 32. Sweller (1994: 310). 33. See especially Sweller (1994: 306). 34. Pollock et al. (2002: 64), van Merriënboer et al. (2006: 346f). 35. Aristotle, NE II.4. 36. Cf. Annas (2011: chaps. 3, 5).

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37. Pollock et al. (2002: 82f). See van Merriënboer et al. (2003), Sweller (2006: 17f, 22), Sweller et al. (2011: chap. 16). 38. Sweller (2006: 22). 39. Pollock et al. (2002: 66–82). In fact, explanatory information that helps novices can actually crowd the attention of more advanced learners, becoming extraneous (the “expertise reversal effect”). See Kalyuga et al. (2001), Kalyuga et al. (2003), Renkl and Atkinson (2003), Sweller et al. (2011: chaps. 8, 12–13), Chen et al. (2017). 40. Sweller (1994: 299), Sweller et al. (2011: 22f). The seminal work on schemas is Chi et al. (1982). 41. On memory, see Sweller (2006: 16, 18), Sweller et al. (2011: chap. 2). On automaticity, see Sweller (1994: 296–299). On retrieval, see Ericsson and Kintsch (1995). 42. Sweller et al. (2011: chap. 16). 43. Cf. Annas (2011: 84). 44. Evidence for transfer on this definition has been controversial. Detterman (1993) is extremely pessimistic; Nisbett et al. (1987) are more optimistic and, I think, more measured. 45. See van Merriënboer et al. (2006), Sweller et al. (2011: 212–216). 46. Otherwise, too much working memory is devoted to extraneous frustration and not enough to learning (Kirschner et al. 2006). 47. Here, evidence for transfer has been much greater: Greeno et al. (1993), Bransford and Schwartz (1999), Lobato (2003, 2006), Rebello et al. (2005), Schwartz et al. (2005). This second definition also represents a shift from investigating single-trial transfer as construed by researchers, to a subtler investigation of how subjects learn through practice to construe novel situations as similar to others already encountered. (The similarity to the shift within personality theory – from the researcher’s construal to the subject’s – is uncanny.) See Mischel (1968), Ross and Nisbett (1991). For discussion, see also Russell (2009: chaps. 8–9, 2015a, 2015b). 48. See Bransford and Schwartz (1999). 49. Rebello et al. (2014). On this approach too, there seems to be a tradeoff between quick learning and learning that develops this dynamic capability. See Bransford and Schwartz (1999: 78–80), Schwartz et al. (2005). 50. Page (2007: 36–41). 51. By a useful “perspective,” Page (2007: chap. 1) means an assignment of structure-imparting designations to a set of elements. And he demonstrates (p. 48) that as the number of elements increases, the perspectives that make the problem simple become an infinitesimal proportion of the possible perspectives, the great majority of which make it incomprehensible. 52. It can also be difficult to let go of familiar schemas that are not helpful in a novel situation; see Bransford and Schwartz (1999: 80–82). 53. See Russell (2015a, 2015b), and references. 54. In fact, intrinsic load can be stated as a function of element interactivity (Sweller 2010). 55. This problem is not peculiar to virtue. Actually, it is the very problem to which skill is the answer (Hogarth 2001). 56. See Russell (2018). 57. See Aristotle, NE II.9. 58. It is difficult to describe idealizations in much detail, without begging important questions against different theories of idealization. So for now I’ll just call them instructive simplifications until I can say more in Section 3.3. 59. See Cartwright (1989: 187f, 190–192).

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60. See McMullin (1985), Funkenstein (1986: chap. III.C), Cartwright (1989: chap. 5), Mäki (1992). 61. See Funkenstein (1986: 154), Cartwright (1989: 189–191). 62. In fact, Funkenstein (1986: 155ff) argues that Aristotle thought that the forces at work in real-world motion did interact, and that is why he did not use Galileo-style idealizations to describe those forces. 63. And interdependence is regularly overlooked, as it is, for example, by Peterson and Seligman (2004), and in other free-floating catalogues of virtues as “admirable” traits or “strengths.” 64. On the former, see especially Doris (2002) and Adams (2006); on the latter, see Miller (2014: chap. 2). 65. The special demands of interdependence will often explain why, as Badhwar (1996) observes, a person’s virtues can vary considerably between different areas or “domains” of life. 66. For discussion of different types of simplifying idealizations that illuminate through resemblance, see Weisberg (2007), and Mäki (2011) expanding on Musgrave (1981). 67. Mäki (2009). 68. See Knuuttila (2009: 65). 69. Knuuttila (2009, 2011). 70. See also Morgan (1997, 1999). 71. My work on this chapter was supported by the Eudaimonia Institute at Wake Forest University. My thanks to Jim Otteson, Adam Hyde, and everyone at the Institute. Thanks also to Mark LeBar for many helpful conversations on the issues I’ve discussed here, and to Maria Silvia Vaccarezza for her helpful comments. Lastly, thanks to Maria Silvia and to Mario De Caro for graciously inviting me to contribute to this volume.

References Adams, R. M. (2006). A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Annas, J. (2011). Intelligent Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baddeley, A. (1992). Working memory. Science, 255: 556–559. Badhwar, N. (1996). The limited unity of virtue. Nous, 30: 306–329. Bransford, J. D. and Schwartz, D. L. (1999). Rethinking transfer: A simple proposal with multiple implications. Review of Research in Education, 24: 61–100. Cartwright, N. (1989). Nature’s Capacities and Their Measurement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chen, O., Kalyuga, S. and Sweller, J. (2017). The expertise reversal effect is a variant of the more general element interactivity effect. Educational Psychology Review, 29: 393–405. Chi, M. T. H., Glaser, R. and Rees, E. (1982). Expertise in problem solving. In R. J. Sternberg (ed.), Advances in the Psychology of Human Intelligence, vol. 1. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Associates. Curzer, H. (2012). Aristotle and the Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Detterman, D. K. (1993). The case for the prosecution: Transfer as an epiphenomenon. In D. K. Detterman and R. J. Sternberg (eds.), Transfer on Trial: Intelligence, Cognition, and Instruction. New York: Ablex Publishing. Doris, J. (2002). Lack of Character. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Ericsson, K. A. and Kintsch, W. (1995). Long-term working memory. Psychological Review, 102: 211–245. Funkenstein, A. (1986). Theology and the Scientific Imagination. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Greeno, J. G., Moore, J. L. and Smith, D. R. (1993). Transfer of situated learning. In D. K. Detterman and R. J. Sternberg (eds.), Transfer on Trial: Intelligence, Cognition and Instruction. New York: Ablex Publishing. Hogarth, R. (2001). Educating Intuition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hutchinson, D. S. (1986). The Virtues of Aristotle. Abingdon, UK: Routledge Press. Kalyuga, S., Ayres, P., Chandler, P. and Sweller, J. (2003). The expertise reversal effect. Educational Psychologist, 38: 23–31. Kalyuga, S., Chandler, P., Tuovinen, J. and Sweller, J. (2001). When problem solving is superior to studying worked examples. Journal of Educational Psychology, 93: 579–588. Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J. and Clark, R. E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41: 75–86. Knuuttila, T. (2009). Isolating representations versus credible constructions? Economic modelling in theory and practice. Erkenntnis, 70: 59–80. Knuuttila, T. (2011). Modelling and representing: An artefactual approach to model-based representation. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 42: 262–271. Lobato, J. E. (2003). How design experiments can inform a rethinking of transfer and vice versa. Educational Researcher, 32: 17–20. Lobato, J. E. (2006). Alternative perspectives on the transfer of learning: History, issues, and challenges for future research. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 15: 431–449. Mäki, U. (1992). On the method of isolation in economics. Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, 26: 319–354. Mäki, U. (2009). MISSing the world: Models as isolations and credible surrogate systems. Erkenntnis, 70: 29–43. Mäki, U. (2011). The truth of false idealizations in modeling. In P. Humphreys and C. Imbert (eds.), Models, Simulations, and Representations. Abingdon, UK: Routledge Press. McMullin, E. (1985). Galilean idealization. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 16: 247–273. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. Abingdon, UK: Routledge Press. Miller, C. (2014). Character and Moral Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mischel, W. (1968). Personality and Assessment. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Morgan, M. S. (1997). The technology of analogical models: Irving Fisher’s monetary worlds. Philosophy of Science, 64: S304–S314. Morgan, M. S. (1999). Learning from models. In M. S. Morgan and M. Morrison (eds.), Models as Mediators: Perspectives on Natural and Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morton, A. (2006). Moral incompetence. In T. Chappell (ed.), Values and Virtues: Aristotelianism in Contemporary Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Musgrave, A. (1981). “Unreal assumptions” in economic theory: The F-twist untwisted. Kyklos, 34: 377–387. Nisbett, R. E., Fong, G. T., Lehman, D. R. and Cheng, P. W. (1987). Teaching reasoning. Science, 238: 625–631. Page, S. (2007). The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Parry, R. (2014). Episteme and techne. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/episteme-techne/. Peterson, C. and Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pollock, E., Chandler, P. and Sweller, J. (2002). Assimilating complex information. Learning and Instruction, 12: 61–86. Rebello, N. S., Cui, L., Bennett, A. G., Zollman, D. A. and Ozimek, D. J. (2014). Transfer of learning in problem solving in the context of mathematics and physics. In D. H. Jonassen (ed.), Learning to Solve Complex Scientific Problems. Abingdon, UK: Routledge Press. Rebello, N. S., Zollman, D. A., Allbaugh, A. R., Engelhardt, P. V., Gray, K. E. and Hrepic, Z. (2005). Dynamic transfer: A perspective from physics education research. In J. P. Mestre (ed.), Transfer of Learning from a Modern Multidisciplinary Perspective. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Renkl, A. and Atkinson, R. K. (2003). Structuring the transition from example study to problem solving in cognitive skill acquisition: A cognitive load perspective. Educational Psychologist, 38: 15–22. Ross, L. and Nisbett, R. E. (1991). The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill Education. Russell, D. C. (2009). Practical Intelligence and the Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Russell, D. C. (2015a). Aristotle on cultivating virtue. In N. Snow (ed.), Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Russell, D. C. (2015b). From personality to character to virtue. In M. Alfano (ed.), Current Controversies in Virtue Theory. Abingdon, UK: Routledge Press. Russell, D. C. (2018). Practical unintelligence and the vices. In P. Kontos (ed.), Evil in Aristotle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sacks, O. (1985). The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. New York: Summit Books. Schwartz, D. L., Bransford, J. D. and Sears, D. (2005). Efficiency and innovation in transfer. In J. P. Mestre (ed.), Transfer of Learning from a Modern Multidisciplinary Perspective. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Sreenivasan, G. (2009). Disunity of virtue. Journal of Ethics, 13: 195–212. Sweller, J. (1994). Cognitive load theory, learning difficulty, and instructional design. Learning and Instruction, 4: 295–312. Sweller, J. (2006). How the human cognitive system deals with complexity. In J. Elen and R. E. Clark (eds.), Handling Complexity in Learning Environments: Theory and Research. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Sweller, J. (2010). Element interactivity and intrinsic, extraneous, and germane cognitive load. Educational Psychology Review, 22: 123–138. Sweller, J., Ayres, P. and Kalyuga, S. (2011). Cognitive Load Theory. New York: Springer Publishing. Toner, C. (2014). The full unity of the virtues. Journal of Ethics, 18: 207–227.

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Vaccarezza, M. S. (2017). The unity of the virtues reconsidered: Competing accounts in philosophy and positive psychology. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 8: 637–651. Van Merriënboer, J. J. G., Kester, L. and Paas, F. (2006). Teaching complex rather than simple tasks: Balancing intrinsic and germane load to enhance transfer of learning. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20: 343–352. Van Merriënboer, J. J. G., Kirschner, P. A. and Kester, L. (2003). Taking the load off a learner’s mind: Instructional design for complex learning. Educational Psychologist, 38: 5–13. Weisberg, M. (2007). Three kinds of idealization. The Journal of Philosophy, 104: 639–659.

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The Priority of Phronesis How to Rescue Virtue Theory From Its Critics Mario De Caro, Massimo Marraffa, and Maria Silvia Vaccarezza

This chapter has two main aims. The first is that of advancing a novel account in virtue theory – “virtue molecularism” – that presupposes the conceptual, epistemological, and ontological priority of practical wisdom, conceived as skill, over individual virtues. The second aim is to address three potentially fatal challenges to virtue theory developed over the last decades by showing how virtue molecularism can respond to them. More specifically, we will first argue that virtue molecularism can resist the so-called “situationist challenge” better than alternative virtue-theory accounts (Section 1). Second, we will defend the priority of practical wisdom from the “anti-rationalist challenge” by dismantling the obsolete dualistic picture of the mind upon which this challenge relies (Section 2). Finally, we will contend that, by conceiving of practical wisdom as a skill or expertise, virtue molecularism is immune to the “automaticity challenge,” which instead is effective against more traditional skill-based accounts of the individual virtues (Section 3).

1 Against the Situationist Challenge: Virtue Molecularism In the last couple of decades, virtue theories have been at pains to confront the “situationist challenge” (so called since it derives from the “situationist” conception in social psychology). This challenge appeals to a vast amount of empirical evidence that strongly suggests that situational factors, even very trivial ones, condition our choices and actions much more than stable and cross-situational traits such as moral virtues. On this basis, it has been argued that such traits are explanatorily irrelevant and even that they do not exist at all (Doris 1998, 2002; Harman 1999). Let’s analyze this challenge more in detail. Despite conceiving of virtues as coordinated character traits, standard contemporary virtue theory1 assigns to each individual virtue a specific sphere of concern in which that virtue is supposed to exert a stable and reliable causal power that can enable appropriate moral responses by the agent. Let’s call this emphasis on single virtuous traits “virtue atomism” (see De Caro and Vaccarezza 2020):

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Mario De Caro et al. Virtue atomism. Moral virtues, although reciprocally connected, exist and operate as ontologically distinct global character traits.

By assigning primacy to a plurality of individual character traits, virtue atomism presupposes the cross-situational identity of the acts that fall within the scope of each specifc virtue, as well as their stability and reliability, despite their being performed in different, and sometimes very different, circumstances. Whether one is the captain of a sinking ship, the witness of an abuse of power, or a shy student who just graduated from high school and who must draw on all her strength to pack up and move away from home to cultivate her talent at a faraway college, all acts of courage are identical according to the virtue atomist, and the very same virtue – if truly acquired – has to be reliably manifested in all these situations. According to the situationist challenge, however, empirical evidence strongly suggests that, given the innumerable situational conditionings we all are continuously infuenced by, all we can have are much narrower local traits, whose scope is limited to “such and such” sets of circumstances.2 But if this is correct, a very unwelcome consequence follows for the advocates of virtue theory: the unconstrained proliferation of virtues. Depending on all the possible, even small, contextual variables, there would have to be an innumerable amount of, say, courage-related virtues: “courage while you go sailing with friends,”“courage while you are the captain of a ship,” “courage when you witness a crime,” “courage when you leave home to enroll in college” (possibly even “courage when you leave home to enroll at a faraway college”), and so on. In short, if situationism is correct, the virtue ethicist would have to accept a massive proliferation of virtues due to the countless potentially relevant situations and conditionings that agents may encounter. In order to defend virtue theory, one would have to assume that character development is such that virtuous agents can master an endless database of specifcations regarding practically relevant possible situations and subtly tune their behavior accordingly each time. Clearly, this is a very convoluted and implausible conjecture that endangers the very idea that virtues are relevant psychological traits – and even that they exist. Theories that conceive of virtues as ontologically distinct traits are thus exposed to a serious charge of implausibility. If one wishes to affrm the fragmentation of character traits (i.e., virtue atomism), how could one make sense of the fexibility required to deal with ever-changing circumstances of action without risking the disintegration of those traits? Undoubtedly, situationists raise a major challenge to virtue atomism. After that, however, they move a step further by arguing that, in the concrete situations of action, not much of our behavior (if any) is determined by our character. In our view, this is a much less convincing claim. We will argue that, instead of moving the source of behavior from character to situations (as situationists propose), we need a much more flexible notion of character, one on which an agent’s character is constituted not by a set

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of discrete and independent traits but by a unified ethical expertise that enables her to face specific, and frequently unique, situations. To put it differently, we argue that virtue atomism goes astray when it conceives of moral domains as compartmentalized spheres and of a virtuous person as one who has become skilled in each of these areas by means of specific training. Instead, we claim, the functioning of the virtues should be understood in light of a framework that explains how virtue in general, rather than individual virtues, works. In this perspective, a promising view can be developed by applying the so-called “skill model of virtue” to the general virtue of phronesis, that is, practical wisdom.3 More precisely, our view assigns conceptual and ontological priority to a general skill that amounts to a unified ethical expertise, and it treats the traditional virtues as mere expressions of this general expertise insofar as it is exercised in different ethical domains. In past works, we have called this view virtue molecularism (De Caro et al. 2018; De Caro and Vaccarezza 2020): Virtue molecularism. The only trait a virtuous moral agent really possesses is practical wisdom (phronesis) as ethical expertise – a trait that is manifested at various degrees in different domains and whose description can be given in terms of clusters of traditional virtues, though its ultimate nature is unitary. This view attributes the following two features to the ethically competent agent: 1. Expertise within a specific moral domain, which consists of (i) Affective orientation to virtuous ends within that domain. (ii) Metacognitive moral knowledge, that is, high degree of declarative, procedural, or conditional knowledge, within that domain.4 (iii) Fine-tuned perception, in a significant number of cases, of the moral requirements imposed by situations that are practically relevant to that domain. 2. Openness to new domains and situations, by means of (i) Acknowledgement of one’s shortcomings within the domains of expertise and other domains. (ii) Intention to improve oneself, by aiming at an overall virtuous character, in the domains and situations where one’s moral expertise is lacking. The difference between virtue molecularism, which we advocate, and traditional virtue atomism should be clear. The latter is a virtue-oriented virtue ethics since it takes the various moral virtues (as many as can be) as

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its focus and considers phronesis to be a derivative notion; the former, on the contrary, is a phronesis-oriented virtue ethics that assigns conceptual and ontological priority to phronesis over the individual virtues. In other words, virtue molecularism sees the meta-virtue of phronesis as an everextending and nuanced skill, one that can improve within each domain and through different domains but that can also be lacking in the face of unprecedented situations. Virtue molecularism has at least two important advantages over virtue atomism. First, it does not share the latter view’s very dubious claim mentioned earlier that in order to be, say, generous, one has to display generosity in each and every relevant circumstance, no matter how different those circumstances may be. According to virtue molecularism, ethical expertise is a nuanced but unitary sensitivity to specific situations, rather than a fragmented set of skills each of which focuses on a self-enclosed moral field. From this perspective, ethical expertise admits of degrees and can vary from a situation to another, for example, for lack of experience. However, provided that the relevant features of expertise listed earlier apply, an agent will be considered as virtuous overall – and consequently be seen as having the relevant individual virtues – even if there are cases in which she is morally at fault. The second advantage of virtue molecularism is that, differently from the various versions of virtue atomism, it does not get tangled up with either of two very unattractive views: the traditional “unity of the virtues thesis” (or “virtue unitarianism”), according to which the possession of one single genuine virtue implies the possession of all the others, and the newer but equally unappealing “virtue disunitarianism,” the view according to which there is no connection or reciprocity among virtues at all. Virtue atomism cannot do away with this traditional conundrum since, once the virtues are conceived as ontologically distinct traits, the question of their mutual (in)dependence cannot but arise, and each version of this view fatally ends up being tethered to one of these unpalatable views. Traditional versions of virtue atomism end up accepting unitarianism (Irwin 1988; Annas 1993, 2011; Russell 2009). According to this view, individual virtues are all rooted in and coordinated by practical wisdom, which is the capacity to prevent conflicts between each of the virtues’ requirements. This thesis leads to a very unrealistic portrait of the virtuous agent as perfectly virtuous, and makes it impossible – again, unrealistically – to attribute genuine virtue to someone who is morally lacking in some specific respect. To put it differently, according to the unity of the virtues thesis, agents are either fully virtuous or utterly wicked since, in order to genuinely possess a single virtue, one needs to possess all the others. Considering the implausibility of the unitarianism, some have defended versions of virtue atomism that are instead committed to disunitarianism, affirming that agents may have some (ununified) virtues and lack others (Foot 1978; Williams 1982; Walker 1993; Badhwar 1996) – that is, that

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agents may be locally but not necessarily globally virtuous. However, this approach, though apparently more appealing than the previous one, also leads to problematic results, such as the idea that being completely wicked in one moral domain has no influence on others, which is blatantly counterintuitive and contrary to ordinary experience. (Hitler was very respectful of animals: Does this virtuous attitude of his make him a virtuous person?) One of the advantages of virtue molecularism over its competitors is that it can avoid both virtue unitarianism and virtue disunitarianism. This is because it is committed to an intermediate view that in order to have moral expertise one has to possess a cluster of some connected virtuous traits that support each other, which is possible even if some other virtuous traits are missing. This is more easily seen if one assumes the perspective of moral interpretation, that is, of the interpersonal practice of virtue and vice attribution. As we have argued extensively elsewhere (De Caro and Vaccarezza 2020), in order to see someone as moral, we must attribute a substantial degree of virtuosity to them – otherwise that agent would not look moral at all. Should we meet someone who excels in one moral domain (take respect for animals as an example) but is completely flawed in others (e.g., they exhibit cruelty toward some humans), we would not regard that person as virtuous at all. On the other hand, it is clear that our attribution of virtues to another agent does not have a holistic character, either. When we interpret other agents as moral, we never imagine that they possess all the virtues – we do not see them as saints. In sum, it is the possession of a cluster of virtuous traits that allows for virtue attribution, a requirement that preserves both the need for an integrated character and the possibility of flaws in some moral domains.5 By reconfiguring this old debate, virtue molecularism does better than rival approaches in accommodating the experimental evidence regarding the frequent lack of cross-situational consistency without excluding character from its moral-psychological account. When non-virtuous actions signal that someone lacks a whole cluster of traits, the subject is to be considered morally unexpert overall; however, other lacunae can be ascribed to insufficient experience in some domains and do not compromise the subject’s overall ethical expertise. Someone’s shortcomings in some domains only signal that one is – unsurprisingly – not a moral saint, but these shortcomings are not in themselves enough to assess one’s moral-psychological outlook. Let’s now return to the situationist challenge. Virtue molecularism is well equipped against this challenge because it firmly rejects its strong, if often implicit, commitment to behaviorism. As noted by Webber (2006, 2007), such a commitment emerges clearly from Doris’s (1998, 2002) and Harman’s (1999) assumption that global traits such as virtues – assuming they exist – should be “reliably manifested in trait-relevant behavior across a diversity of trait-relevant eliciting conditions that may vary widely in their conduciveness to the manifestation of the trait in question.” In this light, global traits would “reliably give rise to the

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relevant kind of behavior, across the full range of situations in which the behavior would be appropriate, including situations that exert contrary pressures” (Webber 2007: 2). However, as Webber notes, conceiving of global traits in these purely behavioristic terms fails to account for the complexity of real-life situations, which normally contain conflicting invitations to action. As a matter of fact, and contrary to the behaviorist account, concrete situations often present opportunities for different, and sometimes conflicting, traits to manifest themselves. Be that as it may, virtue molecularism excludes this behaviorist account since it holds that practical wisdom, conceived as ethical expertise, matters much more than overt actions and behavior to the definition of the virtuous character. As stated earlier, what really matters in order to be ethically expert is that an agent displays a significant cluster of (traditionally called) virtues – that is, a minimum threshold of expertise in some domains – together with a cognitive and affective orientation toward virtuous ends as well as the will to self-improve through reflection and self-development. Needless to say, most of these features are unobservable, and consequently the behaviorist approach of the situationist’s challenge cannot address them. Once again, virtue molecularism appears to be better equipped than virtue atomism against the situationist challenge.

2 Against the Anti-rationalist Challenge: Dismantling the Hierarchical Mind In the previous section, we replied to the situationist challenge to virtue theory by developing the molecularist account. In this section, we will consider another challenge that could be specifically directed against one of the main commitments of virtue molecularism, that is, the claim that practical wisdom has conceptual, epistemological, and ontological priority over individual virtues. As we have seen, virtue molecularism attributes centrality to practical wisdom and, in doing so, emphasizes the role of cognition and rationality in our moral life by insisting on the crucial role played by metacognitive moral knowledge (i.e., the high degree of declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge in the moral domain). However, this centrality of cognition and rationality posited by the virtue molecularist paradigm may appear doubtful to some, who may try to articulate an anti-rationalist objection along the following lines: By attributing such an important role to practical wisdom, virtue molecularism appeals to an obsolete vision of the mind – the “hierarchical view” – according to which rationality and cognition play a much more fundamental role than emotions and other noncognitive states in our mental life. This hierarchical view of the mind, the objection could proceed, has been falsified by contemporary cognitive science and neuroscience and, consequently, virtue molecularism, which relies on it, is untenable.

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To assess the merit of this objection, first, we have to consider the argument against the hierarchical view of the mind. This view postulates a gradual ascent from the lower psychological levels (such as instinctive drives, tensions, and animal automatisms), through increasingly higher psychological levels, up to a vertex that is able to both impart order to this hierarchy of functions and coherently direct the “noblest” functions that constitute rational self-consciousness. This has also been called “Victorian picture” (Reynolds 1981), because it conceives of reason and emotions as opposed to one other, attributing a clear primacy to the former (De Caro and Marraffa 2016). To the extent that the Victorian picture presents automatic and unconscious functional repertoires as lower psychological levels – positing increasingly higher psychological levels up to a hypothetical vertex that controls and manages the lower layers – it perfectly fits the conception of emotions exemplified by Descartes’s (1649) still influential theory of the passions of the soul. According to this Cartesian view, the rational and conscious mind cannot be mistaken per se – our errors are due to the influence played on it by the passions, that is, the emotional, visceral, impulsive-instinctual, animal motions that originate in the opaque machinery of the body. Moreover, and most importantly for us here, the primacy of rational consciousness is not limited to the cognitive realm but extends to the moral realm: that is, lapses of morality derive from the (negative) influence of the passions on rationality. This hierarchical view of the mind, along with its Cartesian corollary, still underlies some strands in the so-called “dual process” approach to cognition (De Oliveira-Souza et al. 2011: 310). Dual-process models hold that there are two types of process: one (type 1) that is fast, automatic, and unconscious; the other (type 2) that is slow, controlled, and conscious. Some of these models go further in suggesting that underlying these two types of processes, there are two architecturally and evolutionarily distinct neurocognitive systems. According to the dual-system theories, System 1 (S1) is fast, parallel, unconscious, not easily altered, universal, impervious to verbal instructions, (partly) heuristic based, and (mostly) shared with other animals; in contrast, System 2 (S2) is slow, serial, conscious, malleable, variable (both by culture and by individuals), responsive to verbal instruction, influenced by normative belief, and can involve the application of logically sound rules.6 Dual-system models of moral judgment can be interpreted as new versions of the traditional hierarchical view of the mind, as is clearly shown by Joshua Greene (2014a). According to Greene, the different intuitions evoked by the “sacrificial trolley-type” dilemmas (where harmful actions promote the greater good) reflect the competition of two distinct neurocognitive systems. In the “footbridge dilemma” – when pushing someone in front of a trolley will save five lives – S1 (a circuit including the amygdala and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex) outputs a strong negative

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affective response that leads people to disapprove the harmful utilitarian action in agreement with the deontological perspective favoring the rights of the individual over the greater good; as a result, S1 prevails on S2 (the frontoparietal control network, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that enables cost–benefit reasoning in line with a utilitarian judgment). By contrast, in the switch dilemma – in which, in order to save five lives by sacrificing one, one has only to move a lever – the extent of the affective reaction is not such that S1 prevails, which allows S2 to take control of the decision process. Greene (2008, 2014b; see also Singer 2005; Wiegman 2017) suggests that this dual-system model provides reasons to prefer utilitarian/consequentialist moral theories to deontological ones. In his opinion, whereas deontological judgments are seen as unwarranted rationalizations of emotional aversions to harming others, utilitarian judgments result from regions linked to reason, and are therefore justified. According to Greene, therefore, if a moral belief is based on an automatic affective process, its justification is undercut (see Kauppinen 2018: §5.3). Just as in the classic hierarchical picture of the mind, what comes from the emotions brings us astray, differently from what is connected with reason. Before assessing the anti-rationalist argument against virtue molecularism, however, it is important to notice that the conflictual dialectic of reason and emotions that characterizes the hierarchical view of the mind has also been given a very different interpretation by the moral sentimentalists, who argue that emotions have a primacy over reason (Kauppinen 2018: §2.1). Indeed, situationists implicitly endorse an image of the mind of this kind, and place it at the heart of their challenge to the existence of virtues. It is precisely due to our emotions’ liability to external influences and conditionings that we are supposedly unable to stick to our moral convictions and are led astray by situational factors. It should be noted, however, that this alternative interpretation offers what amounts to simply another “hierarchical view of the mind” that inverts the order of the levels: In this case, the hierarchy places the emotional level above the rational/cognitive one. Haidt’s (2012) social intuitionist approach to moral judgment offers a recent example of the overturning of the hierarchical view of the mind. For Haidt, moral judgments are analogous to aesthetic judgments: In seeing an action or hearing a story, one has an instant feeling of approval or disapproval, which is expressed in our moral statements. These feelings can be characterized as affect-laden intuitions in that they appear in consciousness automatically and effortlessly, with a positive or negative affective valence but without any awareness of having gone through steps of searching, weighing evidence, or inferring a conclusion – that is, without any involvement of reason. Differently from Greene, Haidt views S2 moral reasoning as nothing more than “the rational tail of the emotional dog.” In fact, for Haidt, S2 does not cause the conscious moral judgments

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but rather constructs post hoc justifications of such judgments, which are made on the base of S1 moral intuitions (Haidt 2001; Wheatley and Haidt 2005). What is important to stress here is that Haidt’s model also presents reason and emotions as at odds with each other, and also puts them in a hierarchical order. In fact, Haidt simply overturns the traditional hierarchy of the mind, giving priority to the emotional level over the rational one. This corresponds to what occurs with situationism – and with its objection against virtue molecularism mentioned at the beginning of this section, according to which this view would place undue emphasis on cognition and rationality. All in all, Greene’s model and Haidt’s model are excellent representatives of the two opposite versions of the hierarchical conception of the mind – one rationalist and the other sentimentalist in spirit. It would be a significant mistake, however, to assume that these views are the only ones currently available. At present, the psychological literature on emotions and on reason strongly suggests that no substantial hierarchy exists between reason and emotions, which means that it may be time to toss the hierarchical view of the mind – both in its rationalist and in the sentimentalist versions – into the overflowing dustbin of obsolete scientific ideas. In what follows, we will defend our approach from the anti-rationalist challenge without buying into an overturned but equally hierarchical view of the mind. As can be seen in its rationalist version, the hierarchical view of the mind motivates a theory of error that posits a nonrational psychological domain, crowded by passions, instincts, emotions, that can be clearly demarcated from the operations of rational consciousness – a system of determinants of conduct opposed to rationality. However, if we give up this hierarchical view – if we abandon the division of the mind into upper and lower levels – the folk concept of emotion breaks down, which means that it turns out not to be a natural kind. And this is exactly where contemporary psychology of emotions points to. A natural kind is a category that groups together a collection of objects whose properties are correlated by a causal mechanism that permits projection and induction (Boyd 1999).7 The claim that emotions do not form a natural kind has been convincingly defended by Griffiths (1997, 2003, 2004a, b), who argues that the psychological states and processes encompassed by the folk concept of emotion are not sufficiently similar to one another to allow for a unified scientific psychology of the emotions: “Like memory, emotion is a collection of different psychological processes” (Griffiths 2013: 216). The proper method for studying the emotions, then, is to focus on subclasses of emotions whose members share a dimension of scientifically relevant similarities. An example of the application of such a method is Ekman’s (1999) psychoevolutionary theory of emotions, which aims to offer a unitary account of a number of basic emotions (e.g., anger, fear, disgust, sadness,

38 Mario De Caro et al. surprise, and joy) by positing an underlying causal mechanism. More precisely, these emotions are biologically based and pancultural packages of short-term, coordinated, and automated responses to events in the environment, which include measurable physiological change, facial and vocal expressions, and action tendencies. These fast and mandatory responses are assumed to be automatically elicited and coordinated by a computational mechanism termed the “affect program.” According to Griffiths, basic emotions are the only natural kinds so far discovered in the affective domain (see also DeLancey 2002). However, besides basic emotions, folk psychology also recognizes other types of emotions that appear to require a distinct scientific psychology. This is the case for “the complex emotion episodes that figure in folk-psychological narratives about mental life, episodes such as the evolving jealousy and anger of a person in an unraveling sexual relationship” (Griffiths 2003: 39). Emotion episodes involving guilt, resentment, envy, shame, jealousy, loyalty, embarrassment, and so on rest on psychological mechanisms that are different from the affect programs. At the moment, however, there is no substantive theory of those emotional responses. It is important to notice that this fragmentation and reconfiguration may apply not only to the superordinate category of emotion, but also to the subclass of basic emotions, such as “anger,” “fear,” “disgust,” “happiness,” and “sadness.” In this regard, Scarantino and Griffiths (2011) argue that we should not designate basic emotions with folk terms, since these terms do not capture basic emotions as conceived by psychoevolutionary theory. Indeed, some of these categories lack the features that Ekman regards as the markers of a basic emotion.8 Yet these markers do apply to some members of the “anger,” “fear,” “disgust,” “happiness,” and “sadness” categories – one example is the kind of fear produced by sudden loss of support.9 So, actually, there is as much need for pluralism in the theoretical treatment of subordinate categories of emotions as there is in the treatment of the superordinate category of emotion: “some instances of anger, disgust or surprise may be adequately accounted for in the affect program framework, but others may require other theoretical perspectives, and the same holds for episodes of guilt, shame, or embarrassment” (Griffiths and Scarantino 2005: 449). Within this pluralist framework, “emotion” turns out to be an arbitrary label that brings together quite diverse phenomena. Something analogous to what happens in the psychology of emotions also occurs in the psychology of reason. Here, too, the sciences of the mind have brought about the fragmentation and reconfiguration of what is traditionally meant by “reason.” In this new perspective, reflective reason is seen as a hodge-podge of different procedures and abilities that, in some circumstances, spontaneously generate errors – a conception of error that is completely at odds with the Cartesian one mentioned

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earlier. In Kahneman and Tversky’s “biases and heuristics” program, for example, people who have not been trained in formal disciplines do not have the correct principles for reasoning and decision-making; they get by with much simpler principles (the “heuristics”) that sometimes get the right answer, and other times do not. In the latter case, the heuristic gives rise to bias, a performance that deviates from that attainable through the application of the appropriate normative standards (Kahneman et al. 1982). The set of biases now numbers into the hundreds (Wheeler 2020: §7.1). From this perspective, a bias is an error that is intrinsic to ordinary reflective processes. Moreover, we also have good evidence that, far from being in a hierarchical relationship (whatever direction that relationship is supposed to have), emotions and reasons work synergistically, without any order of priority. Okon-Singer et al. (2015), for example, have convincingly argued that the distinction between the “emotional” and the “cognitive” brain is fuzzy and context-dependent. . . . [E]motion and cognition are deeply interwoven in the fabric of the brain, suggesting that widely held beliefs about the key constituents of “the emotional brain” and “the cognitive brain” are fundamentally flawed. In fact, examples of the nonhierarchical interaction between cognition and emotion are offered by mental phenomena such as memory, attention, control, drive, and motivation, and increasingly also in regard to neuropsychiatric disorders such as anxiety disorders, depression, schizophrenia, substance abuse, chronic pain, and autism (Pessoa 2008; De Oliveira-Souza et al. 2011; De Caro and Marraffa 2016; De Caro and Vaccarezza 2020). This strongly suggests that the hierarchical model of the mind – in both its rationalist and its sentimentalist versions – is obsolete and should be replaced by a nonhierarchical model, in which the traditional “vertical” distinction between automaticity (emotions) and intelligence (reason) is superseded by a new “horizontal” distinction between a set of intuitive, unconsciously operating systems, on the one hand, and a refective system whose operations are partly conscious, on the other.10 Summarizing what we have said in this section, nowadays there are plenty of reasons to think that the fundamental claims of both hierarchical conceptions of the mind are wrong. More specifically, it can be convincingly argued that (i) emotions and reasons are not natural kinds, (ii) errors in moral judgments cannot be simplistically attributed to the interference of emotions with reason (as stated by the traditional Cartesian view, incorporated into the rationalist hierarchical view of the mind), and (iii) no clear hierarchy (in either direction) holds between reason and emotions. It is time, then, to abandon both incarnations of the faulty

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hierarchical conception of the mind – both rationalist and emotivist – and endorse a nonhierarchical view. This is a critical shift in our conception of the mind, and not one that ethicists, and virtue theorists in particular, can afford to ignore. In particular, virtue molecularism appeals to a nonhierarchical view of the mind, and this makes it immune to the serious criticisms that can be moved against moral views that appeal to either the rationalist or the emotivist hierarchical view. As we have seen, virtue molecularism attributes an important role to rational cognitive factors, especially metacognitive moral knowledge. But this emphasis on practical wisdom does not imply a rationalist stance; on the contrary, it rejects the hierarchical mind and attributes a fundamental role to emotions in ethical expertise. More specifically, it sees emotions as crucial both in the process of formation of moral character (De Caro et al. 2018) and in the attunement with an agent’s concrete situation that makes it possible for her to see what moral options are in play. As said in the previous section, virtue molecularism not only implies declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge, but also a concurrent affective orientation to virtuous ends, as well as a cognitive-emotional ability to perceive the moral requirements at stake in a given situation. Summarizing, according to virtue molecularism, in order to have ethical expertise, one needs to develop an integrated sensitivity to the moral features of a situation, which requires both cognitive and affective skillfulness.11 Emotions synergically contribute with actions and reflective capacities to the broader enterprise of virtue acquisition, aimed at adopting the right evaluative attitudes toward the world. And this – contrary to what is stated in the rationalist objection to virtue molecularism – does not amount to holding the obsolete view that moral judgments exert a top-down regulatory influence on affective phenomena. On the contrary, virtue molecularism sees virtue acquisition as a deeply integrated developmental path along which processes usually taken as unintelligent show their own way to increase sensitivity to values.

3 Against the Automaticity Challenge: Phronesis as Expertise In the previous sections, we have discussed the challenge that situationists move against virtue theory, arguing that, unlike traditional virtue atomist versions, the virtue-molecularist version of virtue theory is not vulnerable to it. Second, we have defended virtue molecularism from a second, antirationalist challenge, and argued that emphasizing practical wisdom does not imply taking an overly rationalistic stance on virtue acquisition and on the moral life in general. Recently, however, a third challenge has been raised that may seriously affect some versions of virtue theory including virtue molecularism. This challenge questions the intelligence (and hence, the moral import) of the virtues insofar as they are conceived of

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as skills, on the ground that they thereby involve a problematic degree of automaticity. Because virtue molecularism itself proposes a skill account of practical wisdom, the challenge could prove fatal to it as well. In other words, just as the anti-rationalist challenge targeted virtue molecularism’s emphasis on practical wisdom, the automaticity challenge attacks its second main commitment, namely, the idea that practical wisdom should be seen as a skill or expertise. In order to discuss this final challenge, first we have to summarize what the virtue-as-skill account in general consists in. Several contemporary philosophers conceive of virtues as skills.12 Influential virtue-atomist neo-Aristotelians such as Julia Annas (2011), John Hacker-Wright (2015), and Matt Stichter (2007, 2018) have suggested that the skill model is the most suitable one for explaining the acquisition of a virtue – a process that requires practice and repetition up to the achievement of a certain degree of automaticity that signals that its owner has become an expert in that field. From this perspective, acquiring a virtue is analogous to developing a practical skill, such as being able to play a musical instrument, drive a vehicle, or cook well enough. These skills include a training stage of mechanical repetition of gestures, which must be internalized and assimilated, and an expertise stage, where one can act autonomously and almost automatically without any further need for direct instruction. In skill acquisition, effortful actions become effortless. Let’s think about some familiar examples. When learners get their provisional driving license and start to become familiar with driving a car under the watch of an instructor, they must pay attention to every detail and perform every action with maximum concentration, to learn, for example, how to shift gears and effectively start the car uphill, or how to parallel park. But an experienced driver no longer reflects on the steps these actions need, so much so that in some cases she is not even able to accurately describe them: This is clear, for example, when parents who act as their teenagers’ driving instructors realize that they cannot provide all the required verbal explanations. The same holds for cooking experts, who have assimilated their abilities to the point that they cannot answer beginners who ask them for the exact proportions of the various ingredients of a recipe other than by saying “just eyeball it.” According to the virtues-as-skills account, something analogous happens when a child acquires a virtue, for example, generosity. In a preliminary stage, the exercise of this virtue requires that the beginner follow explicit instructions that enable her to detect the needs of others and to address them adequately. The fully virtuous agent, however, displays an autonomous, almost automatic, ability to grasp the details of a situation that pertains to the sphere of generosity and to act accordingly without explicit reflection. Think of a child in primary school, who needs the help of teachers or caregivers to notice that, say, a new classmate is being left alone and that a friendly action – say, sharing her snack – would be

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fitting. Let’s suppose that the training of this child is successful and that at some stage of her moral development she grows up into a generous adult. In this case, we can expect her to be, in general, sensitive to the needs of others; when a new colleague joins her company, she does not have to think about whether and how to be welcoming and helpful since she automatically acts in a friendly way, for example, by making sure the newcomer gets help in settling down in the new city. In other words, the virtuous person develops a sensitivity to moral reasons such that she needs to weigh them with deliberation only in situations that are particularly challenging or uncharted. Following John McDowell (1998: 17), we may call this the “silencing power of virtue”: a power that makes certain reasons for acting almost invisible to a virtuous agent. To return a wallet to someone who has lost it, an honest person does not need to evaluate the moral reasons that suggest performing that action. Against this view of how the virtues should be conceived, those who raise the automaticity challenge hold a broadly sentimentalist account of moral judgment and cognition – not unlike the anti-rationalists mentioned in the previous section – that aim to offer “an empirical refutation of rationalist models of moral judgement” (Sauer 2012: 256). The idea of these authors is that, because of their automaticity, habits cannot encompass deliberation and cannot count as rational. In response to this challenge, several virtuetheorists have offered accounts of moral habits according to which, after a history of practice and repetition – and despite their being nondeliberative and largely constituted by automatic processes – these habits can count as intelligent and bring about virtuous actions (Sherman 1999; Pollard 2003; Snow 2006; Sauer 2017). In arguing for this thesis, most of these authors have focused on the reasons that underlie moral actions and on the longterm goals that are encompassed by habits, holding that it is the rationality of such reasons and goals that makes the related automatic processes intelligent, even if deliberation-free (Fridland 2015; Kurth 2018; Stichter 2018: 46). Thus, these authors defend the rationality of habits from the sentimentalist attacks by sticking to an intellectualistic account. In our view, however, both the sentimentalist and the intellectualist accounts of morality are unsatisfactory. In fact, both the defenders and the opponents of the rationality of habits – who respectively attribute priority to intelligent (rational) action over automatic (emotion-based) behavior and vice versa – implicitly presuppose one of the two versions of the “hierarchical view” we have shown to be obsolete in the previous section. But how can a skill model resist either of these views? In the last section, we contended that emphasizing practical wisdom does not amount to embracing rationalism. Here, we will argue that the same holds for conceiving of practical wisdom as a skill or expertise. Interesting remarks in this direction have already come from a more balanced version of the skill model of virtue put forward by Stichter (2018) and from the criticism offered by Rees and Webber (2014)

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against the views that, without further analysis, identify the automaticity of virtuous actions with their skillfulness. These proposals look promising to us; however, we also argue that a skill model of automatic virtuous actions can most effectively reply to the automaticity challenge only if it turns on ethical expertise in general rather than on the individual virtues. Rethinking the relation between unconscious processing and conscious reflection – between emotions and cognition – in light of the nonhierarchical conception of the mind makes it possible for the molecularist versions to build a strong case against the automaticity challenge to the virtues-as-skills view. Atomistic versions tend to hold that each virtue is an independent skill that agents should cultivate and exercise separately, and to some extent independently from the other virtues. To accommodate the nonhierarchical interaction between emotions and cognition, they are compelled to say that emotion and cognition are entangled at the level of every single virtuous trait. Besides poorly accounting for the unification and integration of moral agency, virtue atomism thus seems to compartmentalize cognitive and affective processes into independent domains, which produce an implausible picture of the mind. Rebutting the automaticity challenge requires offering a credible account of the intrinsic integration of conscious and unconscious, emotional and cognitive factors. But according to virtue atomism, this integration occurs at the level of fragmented skills, which amounts to a quite implausible, scattered kind of integration. By contrast, the molecularist version of the virtues-as-skills view offers a conceptual toolkit for neutralizing the automaticity challenge. Thus, in this last section we will defend the final element of our molecularist view, that is, the primacy of phronesis conceived as ethical expertise. Conceiving of practical wisdom as expertise means extending the skill model of virtue from the individual virtues to what has traditionally been called “phronesis.” Aristotle himself implicitly suggests this move when he compares the possession of phronesis to having an eye, that is, to a form of expertise: “The wise men, because they have an eye formed by experience, see correctly” (EN VI, 11, 1143b14). In this light, practical wisdom should be understood as a general ethical expertise, that is, as a unified skill that can constantly improve since becoming an expert implies a progression from a restricted and procedural practice to a distinctive openness and flexibility. Rather than identifying each virtue with a different skill, we must focus on general ethical expertise as the most fruitful way to account for the nature and function of the virtue of phronesis (which is, indeed, a meta-virtue). As we wrote in De Caro and Vaccarezza (2020: 13), We propose reformulating the whole issue in terms of the acquisition, possession and mutual attribution of a general ethical expertise

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Mario De Caro et al. that implies the possession of a cluster of virtues and that potentially could be extended to an increasing number of moral domains, giving rise to other virtuous clusters.

The idea that practical wisdom can be adequately expressed as the possession of a general expertise is strongly supported by various psychological studies, which suggest that ethical expertise consists not in a single skill linked to specifc domains but rather in a sort of global “automation” of moral behavior. According to Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus (1986, 1991), for example, skill acquisition consists of fve stages. In the novice stage, individuals follow context-free rules. Advanced beginners rely on maxims that take contextual features into account. With the competent performer stage, choice of perspective and emotional involvement comes into play. Profcient performers experience the situation in light of a particular perspective. The fnal level, that is, that of expertise, implies possessing an intuitive form of decision-making, one which moves beyond rule-following and implies understanding situations effortlessly (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986: 28). Some psychological findings regarding expert agency fit the model of phronesis as ethical expertise particularly well. In the first place, as Narvaez and Lapsley (2005) note, expert (skillful) agents (i) have a different set of representations, that is, a broader, richer, and more organized network of representations that contains a large amount of declarative knowledge about the domain and well-organized and interconnected units of knowledge; (ii) compared to nonexperts, they see the world differently, that is, perceive different possibilities of action, more easily seizing the morally relevant opportunities in the environment (e.g., they can ask: “What is my role in this situation? What should I do? What does the context allow?”); (iii) they have a different set of skills, knowing which knowledge to access, which procedures to apply, how to apply them, and when it is appropriate to do so. In other words, experts have greater conditional knowledge; they are able to apply complex rules and heuristics in solving a problem and use automated routines; their tacit or intuitive knowledge is well trained and complements their explicit knowledge. All of this determines a fundamental behavioral difference between the expert and the nonexpert: In normal conditions, the expert makes decisions quickly and automatically, has a broader base of declarative and procedural knowledge that increases the speed of processing, and is able to direct her attention by triggering automatic use of skills, which are dependent on the objectives she has. A feature of the model of phronesis as ethical expertise that fits well the findings of contemporary psychology is that phronetic skill is not seen as an “all or nothing” concept but as one that involves varying levels of extension. This means that phronesis requires practice to be retained and a considerable amount of experience in different contexts, for the

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“accuracy of the intuitive judgments that arise in expertise is due to the great familiarity the expert has in operating in these kinds of situations” (Stichter 2018: 30). Also, skill is gradually acquired through the experience of new cases, and thus phronesis gradually extends to new domains through deliberate practice (Stichter 2018: 25). Mainstream virtue ethicists resist the idea of transferring the skillview from the virtues to phronesis and indeed it is not obvious that the phronesis-as-skill account is the correct one (see, e.g., Stichter 2018: 129 onwards). However, as we have argued elsewhere (see De Caro et al. 2018; De Caro and Vaccarezza 2020), this view has several advantages, both as a theory of virtue in its own right and in response to empirical challenges, such as the automaticity challenge that we are discussing here. Think about the three very plausible features listed earlier that, according to Lapsley and Narvaez, an expert has to have: (i) complex representations, (ii) context-sensitive perception, and (iii) a set of skills. It is clear that being skilled in one single field, as the traditional account has it, would not meet all three conditions, and consequently would not count as being an expert in Lapsley and Narvaez’s sense. More precisely, such a case would at most satisfy the first of the three conditions (that concerning a refined set of representations within the domain at stake), but it cannot encompass a fully context-sensitive perception of a situation unless one was skilled in all moral fields, which in traditional terms would amount to the acquisition of all the relevant virtues through specific training for each of them. Virtue molecularism, on the other hand, can account for all three features of expertise outlined by Lapsley and Narvaez. As for the first feature (complex representations), virtue molecularism can accommodate it as easily as any other virtue-as-skill account. The second feature (context-sensitive perception) is explained because, for virtue molecularism, developing moral expertise means becoming increasingly attentive to the overall context in order to acquire a unified moral sensitivity.13 The same holds for condition (iii) of the Lapsley and Narvaez model of expertise, which requires an expert to display a complex set of skills: Although it may well require subskills to be in place – for example, refined perception, action readiness – a traditional virtue is, by definition, a single skill. Analogously, our ethical expertise encompasses a plurality of skills as different contexts and domains are involved, despite being a unified skill (a meta-skill, in fact). More specifically, our focus on phronesis helps to defend the rationality of virtue – that is, the need for genuine virtues to be pervasive, integrated, and oriented toward a rationally endorsed life-plan – in a nonintellectualistic fashion. This idea is preserved since we see virtue as a single and gradually improving ethical expertise, whose description can be given in terms of clusters of traditional virtues, but whose nature is unitary. Thus, virtue molecularism contends that the features of ethical expertise fit much more easily into general phronetic expertise (which

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increasingly strengthens and expands to new and different domains) than into the acquisition of single distinct, domain-related skills, as claimed by virtue atomism. Support for the primacy of practical wisdom as expertise also comes from an accurate analysis of the cognitive processes underlying phronesis. As Lapsley argues (this volume), several processes have a strong claim on phronesis, and help explain its leading role. First, metacognition accounts for its status as a meta-virtue, since it explains “the way it monitors the recruitment and application of requisite virtues at the right time, in the right way, for the right ends” (Lapsley, this volume). The very fact that metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive control processes (including skills of planning, monitoring, and evaluation) are typically assigned to phronesis supports in our view a reassessment of the mutual relations between phronesis and the virtues, one where the latter are seen as derivative from – if not as mere expressions of – the former. Second, social-cognitive theories in personality science, such as Walter Mischel’s “Cognitive-Affective Personality System” and Daniel Cervone’s “Knowledge and Appraisal Personality Architecture,”14 help explain the functioning of moral perception and of the construal of a situation in light of its ethically relevant features, which, again, is commonly seen as a constitutive component of phronesis (Darnell et al. 2019). Finally, other social-cognitive theories (Aquino and Reed 2002; Aquino et al. 2009) hint at the primacy of phronesis in shaping moral self-identity, given its role in sketching a blueprint of the good life. In this chapter, we have proposed to conceive of the phronetic agent as a moral expert in a virtue-molecularist framework. This approach makes it possible to see the virtuous mind as nonhierarchical and integrated, in terms both of interaction between cognitive and affective functions and of flexibility across domains. We present the virtuous mind not only (and not mainly) as one that displays automation of moral behavior (as claimed both by the supporters of the automaticity challenge and by some virtue theorists), but also as one that tends toward moral progress and that has developed an orientation toward virtuous ends that directs action to a possible realization of the good life, as well as a reliable moral sensitivity. In short, our virtue-molecularistic framework helps defend virtue ethics from some of the most challenging criticisms it faces. It fares better than its rivals in accommodating empirical evidence concerning behavioral inconsistencies through different situations, the structure of personality, and the interaction between cognition and emotion, as well as between automatic and intelligent processes.15

Notes 1. This label is intended to cover a wide range of mainstream virtue theories, ranging from the most traditional in spirit (e.g., Annas 2011; Russell 2009)

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3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

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to those more strongly influenced by empirical results (Stichter 2018). A notable exception to the standard paradigm is the “mixed traits framework” recently advanced by Christian B. Miller (2013, 2017). However, despite challenging the traditional views, Miller moves in an opposite direction than that defended in this chapter, since he aims to get rid of practical wisdom altogether (see Miller, this volume). So far, virtue ethicists have made interesting attempts to meet this challenge (see, e.g., Alfano 2013; Miller 2014, 2017; Snow 2010). However, as we will presently argue, without replacing virtue atomism with a more integrated and nuanced paradigm (like the one we propose in this chapter), the situationist challenge cannot be surmounted. Recently, a number of virtue ethicists have developed empirically informed accounts that conceive of virtues as consisting of, or as analogous to, skills. The identity view is advanced by Stichter (2018) and the analogy view by Annas (2011). While this move has rebutted much empirical skepticism over the virtues, it has also raised other relevant problems that we will encounter in Section 4, where we discuss the whole issue more in detail. In this section, we only discuss the possible application of the skill model to phronesis itself. See Daniel Lapsley’s chapter in this volume. Gulliford and Roberts (2018) have proposed an interesting functional analysis of virtues that conceives them as divided into three big clusters (respectively, unified around intelligent caring, willpower, and humility). This is an interesting proposal, but here we are not committed to any specific identification of the clusters of virtues that are necessary for moral interpretations (it may even be that such clusters vary depending on the concrete situation in which an interpretation occurs). For a review of dual-process and dual-system theories, see Evans (2008), Evans and Frankish (2009), Frankish (2010), Carruthers (2014), Evans and Stanovich (2013a, b). Projectability is the guarantee that we can apply certain properties to still unobserved cases and to new phenomena that our theory had not explicitly predicted. Natural kinds (such as chemical elements and biological species) play a crucial role in inductive reasoning since members of a determinate natural kind tend to share many basic properties. Therefore, the discovery that a member belonging to a kind has a certain property offers some reason to believe that other members will also share that property. These are distinctive universal signals; distinctive physiology; automatic appraisal, tuned to distinctive universals in antecedent events; distinctive developmental appearance; presence in other primates; quick onset; brief duration; unbidden occurrence; distinctive thoughts, memories, images; and distinctive subjective experience (Ekman 1999: 56). Consequently, as an alternative to the use of folk terms, Scarantino and Griffiths (2011: 449) suggest modified versions of the folk categories, making it clear that what is referred to is not the whole folk category, but only a part of it (e.g., fearb or fearbasic). The reference here is to Carruthers’s (2014, 2015) revision of the dual-system framework. He makes a case against the hierarchical construal of the S1/S2 distinction by marshaling evidence that the properties typically used to distinguish S1 from S2 crosscut one another (e.g., unconscious intuitive processes can be slow, controlled, and conform to the highest normative standards, while conscious reflective processes can employ heuristics and do not necessarily lead to improvement). In view of this, Carruthers abandons the S1/S2 distinction and develops a nonhierarchical dual-system framework that distinguishes an intuitive system and a reflective (i.e., working memory involving) system.

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11. We have developed an account of emotional skillfulness in De Caro et al. (2018). 12. Some of these accounts tend to take an intellectualistic stance, while others take an anti-intellectualistic one. See Stanley (2011) and Annas (2011) for the intellectualistic approach, and Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986, 1991) for the anti-intellectualistic one. 13. For analogies and differences between our view and McDowell’s (1998) “single sensitivity thesis,” see De Caro and Vaccarezza (2020). 14. These two social-cognitive approaches to personality offer accounts of cognitiveaffective appraisal mechanisms. See, for example, Cervone and Shoda (1999). 15. We would like to thank Magdalena Bosch, Steve Ellenwood, Kristján Kristjánsson, Christian B. Miller, Leonardo Moauro, and participants to the eighth annual conference of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues for some useful comments on previous versions of this chapter.

References Alfano, M. (2013). Character as Moral Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Annas, J. (1993). The Morality of Happiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Annas, J. (2011). Intelligent Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Aquino, K. and Reed, A. I. I. (2002). The self-importance of moral identity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83: 1423–1440. Aquino, K., Freeman, D., Reed, A. I. I., Lim, V. K. and Felps, W. (2009). Testing a social-cognitive model of moral behavior: The interactive influence of situations and moral identity centrality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97: 123–141. Badhwar, N. K. (1996). The limited unity of virtue. Nous, 30(3): 306–329. Boyd, R. (1999). Homeostasis, species, and higher taxa. In R. Wilson (ed.), Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carruthers, P. (2014). The fragmentation of reasoning. In P. Quintanilla (ed.), La coevolución de mente y lenguaje: Ontogénesis y filogénesis. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Carruthers, P. (2015). The Centered Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cervone, D. and Shoda, Y. (1999). Social-cognitive theories and the coherence of personality. In D. Cervone and Y. Shoda (eds.), The Coherence of Personality: Social-Cognitive Bases of Consistency, Variability, and Organization (pp. 3–36). New York: Guilford Press. Darnell, C., Gulliford, L., Kristjánsson, K. and Paris, P. (2019). Phronesis and the knowledge-action gap in moral psychology and moral education: A new synthesis? Human Development, 62: 101–129. De Caro, M. and Marraffa, M. (2016). Debunking the pyramidal mind. A plea for synergy between reason and emotion. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 524(8, 1): 1695–1698. De Caro, M. and Vaccarezza, M. S. (2020). Morality and interpretation: The principle of Phronetic Charity. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 23(2): 295–307. De Caro, M., Vaccarezza, M. S. and Niccoli, A. (2018). Phronesis as ethical expertise: Naturalism of second nature and the unity of virtue. Journal of Value Inquiry, 52(3): 287–305. DeLancey, C. (2002). Passionate Engines: What Emotions Reveal about Mind and Artificial Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford UP.

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De Oliveira-Souza, R., Moll, J. and Grafman, J. (2011). Emotion and social cognition: Lessons from contemporary human neuroanatomy. Emotion Review, 3: 310–312. Descartes, R. (1649). The passions of the soul. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984, vol. 1, pp. 325–404. Doris, J. M. (1998). Persons, situations, and virtue ethics. Noûs, 32: 504–530. Doris, J. M. (2002). Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dreyfus, H. and Dreyfus, S. (1986). Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer. New York: The Free Press. Dreyfus, H. and Dreyfus, S. (1991). Towards a phenomenology of ethical expertise. Human Studies, 14: 229–250. Ekman, P. (1999). Basic emotions. In T. Dalgleish and M. Power (eds.), Handbook of Cognition and Emotion (pp. 45–60). Chichester, UK: Wiley. Evans, St. B. T. (2008). Dual-processing account of reasoning, judgment, and social cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59: 255–278. Evans, St. B. T. and Frankish, K. E. (2009). In Two Minds: Dual Processes and Beyond. New York: Oxford UP. Evans, St. B. T. and Stanovich, K. E. (2013a). Dual-process theories of higher cognition advancing the debate. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8: 223–241. Evans, St. B. T. and Stanovich, K. E. (2013b). Theory and metatheory in the study of dual processing reply to comments. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8: 263–271. Foot, P. (1978). Virtue and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frankish, K. (2010). Dual-process and dual-system theories of reasoning. Philosophy Compass, 5: 914–926. Fridland, E. (2015). Automatically minded. Synthese, 194: 4337–4363. Greene, J. D. (2008). The secret joke of Kant’s soul. In D. Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders, and Development (Vol. 3, pp. 35–80). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Greene, J. D. (2014a). The cognitive neuroscience of moral judgment and decisionmaking. In M. S. Gazzaniga (ed.), The Cognitive Neurosciences V (pp. 1013– 1023). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Greene, J. D. (2014b). Beyond point-and-shoot morality: Why cognitive (neuro) science matters for ethics. Ethics, 124(4): 695–726. Griffiths, P. E. (1997). What emotions really are: The problem of psychological categories. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Griffiths, P. E. (2003). Basic emotions, complex emotions, machiavellian emotions. In A. Hatzimoysis (ed.), Philosophy and the Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Griffiths, P. E. (2004a). Emotions as natural kinds and normative kinds. Philosophy of Science, 71: 901–911. Griffiths, P. E. (2004b). Is emotion a natural kind? In R. C. Solomon (ed.), Thinking about Emotion: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotion (pp.  23–249). Oxford: Oxford UP. Griffiths, P. E. (2013). Current emotion research in philosophy. Emotion Review, 5: 215–222. Griffiths, P. E. and Scarantino, A. (2005). Emotions in the wild: The situated perspective on emotion. In P. Robbins (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (pp. 437–453). Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

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Gulliford, L. and Roberts, R. (2018). Exploring the “unity” of the virtues: The case of an allocentric quintet. Theory & Psychology, 28(2): 208–226. Hacker-Wright, J. (2015). Skill, practical wisdom, and ethical naturalism. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 18: 983–993. Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108: 814–834. Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind. New York: Pantheon. Harman, G. (1999). Moral philosophy meets social psychology: Virtue ethics and the fundamental attribution error. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 99(3): 315–331. Irwin, T. H. (1988). Disunity in the Aristotelian virtues. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, suppl. vol.: 61–78. Kahneman, D., Slovic, B. and Tversky, A. (eds.). (1982). Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kauppinen, A. (2018). Moral sentimentalism. In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, URL = . Kurth, C. (2018). Emotion, deliberation, and the skill model of virtuous agency. Mind & Language, 33(3): 1–19. McDowell, J. (1998). The role of Eudaimonia in Aristotle’s Ethics. In J. McDowell (ed.), Mind, Value, and Reality (pp. 3–22). Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Miller, C. B. (2013). Moral Character: An Empirical Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, C. B. (2014). Character and Moral Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, C. B. (2017). The Character Gap: How Good Are We? New York: Oxford University Press. Narvaez, D. and Lapsley, D. K. (2005). The psychological foundations of everyday morality and moral expertise. In D. K. Lapsley and F. C. Power (eds.), Character Psychology and Character Education (pp. 140–165). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Okon-Singer, H., Hendler, T., Pessoa, L. and Shachman, A. J. (2015). The neurobiology of emotion–cognition interactions: Fundamental questions and strategies for future research. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, https://doi.org/10.3389/ fnhum.2015.00058. Pessoa, L. (2008). On the relationship between emotion and cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9: 148–158. Pollard, B. (2003). Can virtuous actions be both habitual and rational? Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 6: 411–425. Rees, C. F. and Webber, J. (2014). Automaticity in virtuous action. In Nancy E. Snow and Franco V. Trivigno (eds.), The Philosophy and Psychology of Character and Happiness (pp. 75–90). London: Routledge. Reynolds, P. (1981). On the Evolution of Human Behavior: The Argument from Animals to Man. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Russell, D. C. (2009). Practical Intelligence and the Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sauer, H. (2012). Educated intuitions. Automaticity and rationality in moral judgment. Philosophical Explorations, 15(3): 255–275. Sauer, H. (2017). Moral Judgements as Educated Intuitions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Scarantino, A. and Griffiths, P. E. (2011). Don’t give up on basic emotions. Emotion Review, 3: 444–454. Sherman, N. (1999). Character development and Aristotelian virtue. In D. Carr and J. Steutel (eds.), Virtue Ethics and Moral Education (pp. 35–49). London: Routledge. Singer, P. (2005). Ethics and intuitions. The Journal of Ethics, 9: 331–352. Snow, N. (2006). Habitual virtuous actions and automaticity. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 9(5): 545–561. Snow, N. (2010). Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory. New York: Routledge Press. Stanley, J. (2011). Know How. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stichter, M. (2007). Ethical expertise: The skill model of virtue. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 10(2): 183–194. Stichter, M. (2018). The Skillfulness of Virtue: Improving our Moral and Epistemic Lives. New York: Oxford University Press. Walker, A. D. M. (1993). The incompatibility of the virtues. Ratio, 6: 44–62. Webber, J. (2006). Virtue, character and situation. Journal of Moral Philosophy, 3(2):193–213. Webber, J. (2007). Character, global and local. Utilitas, 19(4): 430–434. Wheatley, T. and Haidt, J. (2005). Hypnotically induced disgust makes moral judgments more severe. Psychological Science, 16: 780–784. Wheeler, G. (2020). Bounded rationality. In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, URL = . Wiegman, I. (2017). The evolution of retribution: Intuition undermined. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 98: 490–510. Williams, B. (1982). Conflicts of values. In B. Williams (ed.), Moral Luck (pp. 71–82). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Flirting With Skepticism About Practical Wisdom Christian B. Miller

1 Introduction Despite the prominence of practical wisdom (phronesis) in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and despite the dramatic revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics in the past 50 years, comparatively little has been said by philosophers about this master virtue. My own work on character during the past 15 years is no exception, and some critics have rightly commented on this omission.1 I have to confess that this neglect was intentional on my part. I have never felt like I had a good handle on either the structure of practical wisdom in the psychology of the virtuous person or on what specifically the functions of practical wisdom are supposed to be. When I read the existing contemporary literature, I came away bewildered by the diversity of proposals, and basically threw up my hands. But rather than continuing to avoid talking about practical wisdom, I hope to use this opportunity to confront my bewilderment head-on and try to make some progress clarifying both the structure and functions of practical wisdom, at least in a preliminary way. To help with this task, I will focus in some detail on the virtue of honesty, rather than just keeping the discussion at a more abstract level by focusing on virtue as such. My plan is as follows. In Section 2, I note some widely accepted claims about practical wisdom as understood from a broadly Aristotelian perspective, and then lay out three models for thinking about its structural relationship to the moral virtues. Section 3 then turns to the diversity of functions that have been ascribed to practical wisdom. After distinguishing these functions, this section raises three important concerns about whether practical wisdom, at least as standardly construed, is up to the task of carrying them out. Section 4 explores these concerns in more detail with a case study of the virtue of honesty. Finally, Section 5 ends with some tentative suggestions about how to move past the Standard Model of practical wisdom, and indeed past practical wisdom in general. I started this chapter with bewilderment about how to think about practical wisdom. I end it by calling for its elimination.

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2 Mapping the Options Let us begin with what I take to be some areas of broad agreement among Aristotelians about practical wisdom.2 Here is one claim: 1. Practical wisdom is a character trait.3 Among the implications of this claim is that practical wisdom is not an action or set of actions. Rather it is a psychological disposition or cluster of such dispositions. Furthermore, as a character trait, practical wisdom is to some extent under our voluntary control, such that we are responsible at least to a degree for possessing it (or not) as well as how we exercise it (or not). Another claim that seems to show up frequently, following Aristotle, is that: 2. Practical wisdom is a virtue, and furthermore it is an intellectual virtue.4 So practical wisdom is an excellence, but it is not a moral but rather an epistemic or intellectual excellence. This is important in light of the third claim: 3. Practical wisdom is necessary for the possession of the moral virtues.5 If practical wisdom were a moral virtue, then it would be necessary for its own possession, which seems fraught with peril. So it makes sense to consider it to be a different kind of virtue. Plus many of its functions seem to ft with those of an intellectual virtue. Finally, it is commonly held that: 4. Practical wisdom is not sufficient for the possession of the moral virtues.6 On one leading approach, for instance, a moral virtue must be oriented toward good ends, and that function is accomplished via some other psychological capacities besides practical wisdom, such as the person’s emotions. Practical wisdom might have a role to play when it comes to these ends, but it won’t be all of the story. With these widely held claims in place, a picture about the structure of practical wisdom naturally falls into place. We can describe this picture as follows: The Standard Model of PW: Practical wisdom is a character trait which is distinct psychologically from the moral virtues, but which is necessary for them to count as virtues.

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Aristotle himself seems to hold the Standard Model, as do many contemporary philosophers working on practical wisdom such as Daniel C. Russell and Kristján Kristjánsson.7 But while it deserves to be called the Standard Model, it is clearly not the only way to think about the structural relationship between practical wisdom and the moral virtues. For instance, Mario De Caro, Maria Silvia Vaccarezza, and Ariele Niccoli have recently criticized the Standard Model and argued that it should be replaced with the following: The Socratic Model of PW: Practical wisdom is not distinct psychologically from the moral virtues; rather “when one is virtuous, what one really possesses is the single virtue of practical wisdom.”8 On this view, a fully virtuous person does not possess an array of distinct traits in her psychology corresponding to honesty, compassion, courage, and all the rest. Rather, she just possesses one unifed trait, practical wisdom, which manifests itself in all the different moral domains. So metaphysically speaking, there is just one virtue, practical wisdom, “while the other virtues are descriptions of such expertise in each different moral feld.”9 The Socratic Model can be seen as one end of a spectrum for thinking about the structural relationship between practical wisdom and the virtues. It collapses them all into one master virtue. At the other end of the spectrum is the following: The Fragmentation Model of PW: Practical wisdom is not distinct psychologically from the moral virtues; rather each moral virtue has its own distinctive capacities which serve the functions of practical wisdom for that virtue.10 On this model, there is a practical wisdom component to honesty, and a distinct practical wisdom component to compassion, and so forth. But there isn’t a separate character trait, above and beyond honesty, compassion, and all the rest, which is the “practical wisdom trait.” Just as the ends of each moral virtue are distinct, so too would be the psychological capacities which are doing the “practical wisdom” work that needs to be done in each particular virtue. It should now be clearer why the Standard Model can be seen as an intermediate position between two ends of a spectrum. Unlike both the Socratic and the Fragmentation models, it maintains that practical wisdom is a distinct virtue from the moral virtues. Moving away from the Standard Model in one direction will lead to all the moral virtues becoming one master virtue of practical wisdom. Moving away from the Standard Model in the other direction will lead to practical wisdom

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being embedded in a distinctive way in each moral virtue, without having its own separate existence. The Standard Model tries to thread the needle.

3 The Functions of Practical Wisdom So there seems to be one leading model for thinking about the structural relationship between practical wisdom and the moral virtues. The same cannot be said, however, about the functions of practical wisdom. What is its role supposed to be with respect to these virtues? When it functions properly, what does it accomplish? Unfortunately there is little consensus to be found here among philosophers working on practical wisdom. Let me run through a number of the options I see in the contemporary literature, starting with this: The Handling Conflicts Function: When two or more moral virtues lead in opposing directions, practical wisdom will decide how best to resolve the conflict.11 Thus, in Nazi-at-the-door cases, practical wisdom might help decide between what honesty demands (telling the truth to the Nazi) and what compassion demands (protecting the Jewish family).12 Another function sometimes ascribed to practical wisdom is purely instrumental. A virtue will include an attachment of some kind to an end. With respect to this end, there could be: The Instrumental Function: Practical wisdom decides the best means to pursue in achieving the ends of the moral virtues.13 For instance, a compassionate person might see someone with a broken leg and no one else around to help him. So using her practical wisdom, she can fgure out what the best way is to get the injured person to the hospital, perhaps by driving him herself rather than waiting for an ambulance to come. But this instrumental function is controversial. On one reading, Aristotle reserves it for the trait of cleverness instead.14 Still, even if this is right, there is a closely related function that practical wisdom can play: The End-Specification Function: Practical wisdom adopts the general end of a virtue and specifies it more precisely for the particular situations that the virtuous person encounters.15 Thus, using the same example, a compassionate person might have an end of helping promote the well-being of others. When she confronts the injured stranger, her practical wisdom can take this general end

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and adapt it into the more specifc goal of helping alleviate the pain of this particular person. From there, she can work out the best means of doing so. So far, these functions have assumed that the ends of the virtues are themselves not set by practical wisdom. But not everyone agrees about that. Some philosophers ascribe the following function instead: The End-Setting Function: Practical wisdom fixes or at least plays an important role in fixing the ends of the moral virtues.16 Hence the fact that our compassionate person cares about the well-being of others in the frst place is impacted by her practical wisdom identifying this as a worthwhile end to have. These are four rather different functions that have each been ascribed to practical wisdom in various places in the contemporary literature. But there are more. Here is another one: The Justification Function: Practical wisdom provides good reasons to justify the choice of ends adopted by the virtues.17 Hence the compassionate person is able to justify why helping others and promoting their well-being is important. And here are two more functions having to do with reasons:18 The Knowing Reasons Function: Practical wisdom ensures that a virtuous person is aware of the objective normative reasons which bear on a given action. The Motivating Reasons Function: Practical wisdom ensures that a virtuous person’s motivating reasons correspond, in content and in motivating strength, to the objective normative reasons which bear on a given action. To use our example one more time, the compassionate person would recognize the reasons in favor of driving the injured person in her own car, as opposed to calling for an ambulance and waiting for it to arrive. Given the second function, she would be motivated to do this as well in a corresponding manner. Hopefully this brief review substantiates my claim that there is a huge diversity of functions being ascribed to practical wisdom in the contemporary literature. And I don’t claim that this list is exhaustive; other functions have been specified as well.19 It is important to note that these different functions are not just spread across the writings of different authors. Often, several of them can be found in the work of the very same philosopher. As an illustration, take Daniel C. Russell’s Practical Intelligence and the Virtues, which is arguably the leading philosophical treatment of practical wisdom in the last

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50 years. There we find at least the following functions ascribed to practical wisdom: The End-Setting Function: “phronesis unlike cleverness grasps the very nature and content of virtuous ends.”20 The End-Specification Function: “phronesis is a kind of thought about what virtuous action amounts to in particular circumstances.”21 The Instrumental Function: “The conception of practical intelligence I develop is an Aristotelian one, on which it is an excellence of deliberating not merely about the means to virtuous ends.”22 The Justification Function: “an excellence of deliberating [about] the reason to adopt those ends in the first place.”23 The Knowing Reasons Function: “the state of the practical intellect when it decides in accordance with what there is most reason to do.”24 The Handling Conflicts Function: “this phronesis must be the same one for each of the virtues, if it is to perform its role of balancing and integrating them so as to produce action that is good in a complete, overall way.”25 Russell is not alone. Robert Roberts and Jay Wood seem to ascribe at least the following to practical wisdom, in fact on the very same page of their book: The End-Setting Function: “practical wisdom is an ‘aiming’ virtue: it posits ends or an end to be achieved through the actions that it guides.”26 The End-Specification Function: “the determiner is the person of practical wisdom, the agent who interprets and applies the formulas (if such there be) and judges what is particularly to be done in these situations.”27 The Instrumental Function: Practical wisdom “is a power of deliberation . . . the compassionate person deliberates how best to help somebody in trouble.”28 To this they also add a function not listed earlier: The Perception Function: The compassionate person also “notices people’s troubles where less compassionate people do not notice, and spontaneously and involuntarily wants to help.”29 And then a few pages later we also fnd: The Handling Conflicts Function: “completely general practical wisdom is a disposition to adjudicate well in the concrete circumstances of life, between the concerns characteristic of intellectual practices and more broadly human concerns.”30

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These two lists offered by Russell and Roberts and Wood are, in my mind, extraordinary. They also help to motivate three concerns about practical wisdom as understood by the Standard Model.31 First, if practical wisdom is supposed to do all these jobs, then what is left over for the moral virtues to do? Practical wisdom would fix the ends, justify them, specify them for particular situations, determine the best means to realize them, identify the objective reasons, and make sure motivation follows suite. That’s an awful lot, and it is not clear what else would remain to be done. We can state this concern as follows: The Subsumption Concern: What is left of a moral virtue once the various roles of practical wisdom are factored out? There does not seem to be anything else to having a moral virtue besides just having practical wisdom. This concern is pressing for the Standard Model, since it takes practical wisdom to be psychologically distinct from each instance of a moral virtue in a person’s psychology. Yet what this distinction amounts to, once we have clarifed the functions of practical wisdom, is far from clear. To be fair, few philosophers seem to ascribe all the functions above to practical wisdom. For instance, we already noted that it is common to reserve the End-Setting Function to some other aspect of a moral virtue, say the person’s emotional attachments and dispositions. This would be welcome news for the Standard Model, since then there could be a psychological basis for driving a wedge between a moral virtue and practical wisdom. But it also gives rise to a second concern: The Arbitrariness Concern: What justification is there for ascribing certain functions to practical wisdom and not others, when it comes to the moral virtues, such that the list of functions does not end up being arbitrary or ad hoc? Take the Knowing Reasons Function, whereby practical wisdom is supposed to ensure that a virtuous person is aware of the objective normative reasons which bear on a given action. I have little doubt that a (fully) virtuous person is expected to be aware of such reasons. But why think that that is part of the job of practical wisdom? Put another way, on what basis should we decide whether this function is part of practical wisdom’s job description or not? Is it largely a matter of stipulation on the part of whatever philosopher is offering his or her account, or is there some wellmotivated criteria to use to decide what counts as a function of practical wisdom and what is a function of something else? Suppose this concern can be addressed as well. Perhaps there is a way to develop an account of practical wisdom whereby it does not subsume the virtues completely, and at the same time the account gives a principled

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justification for the list of functions it is able to come up with. Even then, a third concern would loom: The Unity Concern: If there are multiple functions ascribed to practical wisdom, why think that they would all be carried out by a single character trait, given how diverse the functions tend to be? Handling Conficts is one function that enjoys wide support in the literature. But now combine it with, say, the Instrumental Function, the EndSpecifcation Function, or the Motivating Reasons Function. Why think that the very same virtue would both handle conficts between competing moral virtues, and also determine the best means to virtuous ends, or specify virtuous ends, or align motivation with objective reasons? Those seem like very different functions that would be handled by different areas of our psychological architecture. To lump all of them under the heading of one intellectual virtue, as opposed to a range of distinct intellectual dispositions, seems artifcial and forced. Or so says the Unity Concern. To both illustrate these concerns in greater detail and try to make them more forceful, let me move the discussion from the moral virtues in general, to the specific virtue of honesty.

4 Honesty and Practical Wisdom Almost nothing has been said by philosophers about the virtue of honesty in the last 50 years, and in my current work I have been trying to do something about this unfortunate omission. In several recent papers and a book manuscript, I have developed a detailed account of the nature of this virtue, including its motivational and behavioral components.32 There is no way I can spell out that account here, much less try to motivate it. Instead I will just briefly highlight a few aspects of my view which, I hope, will helpfully connect to the larger issues about practical wisdom which are central to this chapter. Furthermore, I hope that many of the points I make in this section will not be limited just to my account of honesty, but will have clear analogs for competing accounts as well. On my view, to be an honest person involves more than just being disposed to exhibit a certain pattern of behavior, although that is undoubtedly very important. Motivation matters too, as do relevant emotions and cognitive processes. But let us start with behavior. The core of my approach is the following: (H1) The virtue of honesty is the virtue of being disposed, centrally and reliably, to not intentionally distort the facts as the agent sees them.

60 Christian B. Miller Thus, an honest person would not tell a lie on purpose or give a highly misleading answer to a question. If she were to, then she would be intentionally distorting the facts by her lights. The last part is important. One does not have to be omniscience to be honest (thank goodness!). People thousands of years ago were mistaken about the shape of the Earth, but they were not being dishonest when they said that the Earth is flat. On the other hand, if someone back then believed the Earth is flat but lied in order to get others to believe it is round, he would have been doing something dishonest even though his statement was true. Suppose someone reliably (both over time and across situations) is disposed to not engage in intentional fact-distorting behavior from his own perspective. That would not make him an honest person. For suppose his motivation for refraining is purely self-interested – he just wants to not get punished, or to get rewards in the afterlife, or to make a good impression on his girlfriend. Then in my view, and I suspect most views, his failure to be virtuously motivated leads to a failure to be virtuous with respect to honesty. What then does honest motivation look like? Here I adopt a pluralist approach.33 Let’s suppose moral motives come in three main kinds,34 which can be characterized roughly as follows: 1. Egoistic motives, where the aim is to benefit yourself in some way. 2. Altruistic motives, where the aim is to benefit someone else for his or her own sake, regardless of whether you benefit in the process. 3. Dutiful motives, where the aim is to do the morally right thing, broadly understood to include being motivated to do one’s duty, follow an obligation, obey God’s commands, and the like. As I already indicated, purely egoistic motives would be off-limits from counting as honest motives. But beyond that, I do not think we need to narrow things down any further. Consider these cases, for instance: “Why didn’t you cheat on that take-home test for your philosophy class when you would not have gotten caught and it would have helped your grade?” “Because it would have been wrong.” “Because it would have been disrespectful to Professor Miller.” “Because it would have been taking advantage of Professor Miller.” “Because Professor Miller trusts me.” “Because it would have been dishonest.” “Why didn’t you just leave out the bit about going to the casino when your wife was asking you what you did last night, since you know she really doesn’t like you going there?”

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“Because it would have been wrong.” “Because it would have been disrespectful of her.” “Because I love her.” “Because she trusts me.” “Because it would have been dishonest.” In both cases, we can imagine different people giving each of these answers. If they were in fact motivated in each of these ways, my view is that this would in no way detract from their overall honesty. Different forms of dutiful motivation, as well as different forms of altruistic motivation, are perfectly acceptable as honest motives.35 Hence I adopt a pluralist approach to honest motivation. Combining this with the behavioral characterization in (H1) earlier, we get the following: (H2) The virtue of honesty is the virtue of being disposed, centrally and reliably and for good or virtuous motivating reasons of one or more kinds VIR1 through VIRN, to not intentionally distort the facts as the agent sees them. Now I don’t think (H2) captures all there is to the virtue of honesty. Other conditions need to be spelled out. But I do think it captures some of the central features of the virtue. That will be good enough for my purposes here. A final aspect of my view that will be relevant to this chapter is that honesty sometimes conflicts with other virtues. Nazi-at-the-door cases illustrate this well. The honest thing to do with respect to the Nazi is to tell him the truth about where the Jewish family is that you are hiding. To reply by saying that you don’t know, or that they are across town, or that they have already been captured, is to intentionally distort the facts from your perspective. It would be an instance of dishonest behavior.36 Yet overwhelmingly my students and others with whom I discuss this case hold that it would be obligatory to lie to the Nazi in order to protect the Jewish family in the basement. I feel the pull of this claim too. Fortunately there is a natural way to understand this reaction in terms of conflicting virtues. While honesty would favor telling the truth, the virtue of compassion could favor doing what is reasonable to protect the family, including lying on their behalf. Given this conflict between compassion and honesty, something else will need to get involved to settle the dispute. What is this something else? We could call it “practical wisdom,” but for now I want to avoid that term. Rather in the remainder of this section, I want to take the above points about honesty and use them to clarify different jobs that need to be accomplished by something in an honest person’s psychological architecture in order for her to reliably manifest the virtue of honesty in her daily life.

62 Christian B. Miller One job we have just seen is to resolve conflicts between honesty and other virtues, should they arise as in Nazi-at-the-door cases. Another job is to have certain ends or ultimate goals set for her which she has evaluated and deemed appropriate, and which can bear on her acting honestly. Given my pluralist approach, those goals could include: Being an honest person. Not lying to other people. Not violating the trust of others. Not damaging relationships with friends. Not hurting those I love. These goals can each lead to behavior we would readily call honest, and more than one of them might be needed in order to count as an honest person across a wide enough array of situations. For instance, the goal of not damaging relationships with friends would be too narrow in scope (unless someone takes herself to be friends with everyone!), but could be combined with the goal of not lying to other people. Indeed, when it comes to her friends, these two goals could motivationally reinforce each other and strengthen her resolve to not lie. With these general goals in place, another job is to properly connect them to more specific goals when in the relevant situations. For instance, if the goal is to be honest, then the person needs to both (i) realize that cheating on his federal income taxes in 2020 would be dishonest and (ii) connect that realization with his goal of being an honest person. If this is accomplished, he can form the more specific goal of not cheating on his taxes in 2020. A fourth job is to identify what means there are to achieving the more specific goals. Using the same example, one such means would be to make sure to accurately report his donations to charity. Another means would be to not complete his taxes at all (which would also prevent him from cheating!). Closely related here is the job of calibrating the means and goals to the objective moral reasons which pertain to the situation. Accurately reporting the donations is a good means of achieving the person’s end of not cheating on his taxes in 2020. Not completing his taxes at all is a bad means. The honest person would be able to discern this. That is the perceptual aspect of determining the relevant reasons. The honest person would also be motivated accordingly. That is the motivational aspect of responding appropriately to the relevant reasons. So these are two more jobs that need to be carried out well by an honest person. There are no doubt other jobs that could be delineated as well. For instance, depending on one’s view of whether virtue requires wholeheartedness or is instead compatible with the presence of opposing temptation, one might think that something needs to play the role of resisting temptation to lie, cheat, or steal. But let us draw a halt to the job postings for now.

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At this point, having distinguished these different jobs, the central issue becomes determining what it is in the honest person’s psychology that carries them all out. In considering this issue myself, I do not feel any pull toward thinking that it would be a single character trait which is distinct from honesty. Why don’t I feel that pull? Because of at least three concerns that would have to be addressed right off the bat: The Subsumption Concern: If this distinct character trait is supposed to take on all the jobs with respect to the virtue of honesty that were outlined earlier, then there doesn’t seem to be anything else left over that would distinguish the trait from the virtue of honesty. This trait would just be the virtue of honesty. The Arbitrariness Concern: Suppose one holds that only some of these jobs are carried out by the distinct character trait. Perhaps a third character trait is invoked as well to handle the remaining jobs. Then it is natural to worry about arbitrariness. On what basis would one assign functions to different character traits, short of mapping each function individually onto its own trait? In other words, either the distinct trait should have all the functions (which leads back to the Subsumption Concern), or it should have just one function. Anything in-between these ends of the spectrum seems hard to justify in a principled way. The Unity Concern: If there are multiple functions ascribed to the distinct character trait, then the final concern that naturally arises is that it is not clear how one such trait would be equipped to carry them all out, given how diverse the functions tend to be. For instance, why think that one character trait would handle the job of giving a specification of the honesty-relevant goals for particular situations, as well as the job of identifying the relevant normative reasons or calibrating them motivationally? Hence I do not see much reason to look to one distinct character trait as a promising explanation for what carries out these important jobs with respect to the virtue of honesty. Note that throughout this section I have deliberately refrained from using the term “practical wisdom.” But now the connection should be obvious. On what I have called the “Standard Model” of practical wisdom, it is precisely this one distinct character trait which would be responsible for carrying out some or all of the functions delineated in this section for the virtue of honesty. In addition, it would also handle conflicts between honesty and other moral virtues. Hence given the concerns articulated earlier, I do not see much reason to look to practical wisdom (as understood by the Standard Model) to provide a promising explanation for what carries out these important jobs with respect to the virtue of honesty. If not the Standard Model, then where should we look instead? In the final section of this chapter, I offer

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a few tentative suggestions. It is here that I flirt with ditching practical wisdom altogether.

5 Moving Beyond the Standard Model The Standard Model is not the only structural model of practical wisdom. In Section 2, we also encountered the Socratic Model and the Fragmentation Model. Does one of them look to be more promising than the Standard Model? Let us take the Socratic Model first. Recall it held that: The Socratic Model of PW: Practical wisdom is not distinct psychologically from the moral virtues; rather “when one is virtuous, what one really possesses is the single virtue of practical wisdom.”37 Clearly this model has some advantages over the Standard Model. Because it does not claim that practical wisdom is a distinct trait from the moral virtues, the Subsumption Concern does not arise. Rather, the view is all about subsuming the virtues under the heading of one master virtue of practical wisdom. Similarly, there is no Arbitrariness Concern either. Because the view ascribes all the functions to practical wisdom, it does not have to pick and choose. Nevertheless, the Socratic Model still falls prey to the Unity Concern. It is hard to believe that one intellectual virtue would be responsible for such incredibly diverse tasks as the Handling Conflicts Function, the Instrumental Function, the End-Specification Function, the End-Setting Function, the Justification Function, the Knowing Reasons Function, and the Motivating Reasons Function. Indeed, in the case of the main advocates of the Socratic Model, the problem is magnified since they include a number of additional functions not on this list, including “acknowledgement of one’s lacks within other domains” and “openness to new domains and situations.”38 One response the Socratic Model might give at this point is to claim that practical wisdom is, strictly speaking, not a character trait itself but rather a helpful label for a collection of more specific character traits, each of which carries out one of these functions. This is, indeed, the kind of positive view I will sketch at the end of this section. But note that by denying the actual existence of practical wisdom as a virtue, this approach will end up being of no help to the Socratic Model.39 Let us turn to the other end of the spectrum: The Fragmentation Model of PW: Practical wisdom is not distinct psychologically from the moral virtues; rather each moral virtue has its own distinctive capacities which serve the functions of practical wisdom for that virtue.

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So rather than practical wisdom writ large, we would have honest practical wisdom, courageous practical wisdom, just practical wisdom, and so forth. On the surface, this model might seem to adequately address all three of the concerns for the Standard Model. The Subsumption Concern may not arise because there is not one practical wisdom trait into which all the moral virtues collapse. Arbitrariness isn’t a concern because all the functions would be ascribed to each virtue. And Unity might not seem too bothersome because again there isn’t one master virtue trying to do a whole bunch of different tasks. But on closer inspection, we can readily see that some of these concerns would still remain. For instance, if all the functions of honest practical wisdom are not carried out by a distinct character trait or set of traits from the virtue of honesty itself, then honesty would be subsumed under honest practical wisdom. This time the Subsumption Concern would be arising at the individual virtue level. Similarly, the Unity Concern would quickly reemerge. If all the jobs of practical wisdom with respect to honesty are being carried out at the level of the virtue itself, then it is hard to see what would unify them and why “honest practical wisdom” wouldn’t just become a label for a grab-bag of different tasks. Finally, note that the Fragmentation Model by its very nature will not be able to accommodate one of the most widely accepted functions of practical wisdom, namely the Handling Conflicts Function. Since practical wisdom on this model is restricted to each individual moral virtue, there is no space for a stand-alone virtue of practical wisdom to intervene and resolve conflicts between the virtues, as in Nazi-at-the-door cases.40 Summing up, it seems to me that the Standard Model, the Socratic Model, and the Fragmentation Model each face serious difficulties. But I do not take these difficulties to be decisive. Much more work needs to be done to consider potential replies. Furthermore, it is commonplace in philosophy that every leading view on some issue has costs. Take the leading positions in normative ethics or in meta-ethics, for instance. None of them is immune from serious difficulties. So it should be no surprise when we find out that the same holds for various models of practical wisdom. What these concerns do accomplish, in my case at least, is to leave me dissatisfied with the available menu of options. Rather I am hopeful that there might be another way to go. Fortunately, there is: Practical Wisdom Eliminativism: We should reject the appeal to one intellectual virtue, practical wisdom, which is supposed to carry out some or all of the functions associated with practical wisdom. Instead for each function, we should appeal to a distinct trait that corresponds to that function.

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So in this view, we should jettison practical wisdom altogether, and replace it with: A set of capacities for carrying out the Handling Conflicts Function, A set of capacities for carrying out the Instrumental Function, A set of capacities for carrying out the End-Specification Function, A set of capacities for carrying out the End-Setting Function, A set of capacities for carrying out the Justification Function, A set of capacities for carrying out the Knowing Reasons Function, and a set of capacities for carrying out the Motivating Reasons Function. These sets of intellectual capacities are each distinct from each other, and also from the individual moral virtues. Arguably they are all necessary for the possession of a moral virtue. But they are not constituents of the virtue itself, thereby rendering the view distinct from the Fragmentation Model. One tempting thought at this point is to just label the collection of all these capacities “practical wisdom.” As we saw earlier in this section, such a move might be tempting for the advocate of the Socratic Model in particular. My reaction to this suggestion is positive. Or more precisely, it is positive so long as we are clear that this is just a matter of convenient labeling. Since the previous list of capacities is long and scattered, it is practically useful to have a single label to use to refer to all of them at once. We can use “practical wisdom” as that label if we so desire. At the same time, and again why the proposal here is distinct from the Socratic Model, the eliminativist is denying that there actually is a distinct character trait of practical wisdom above and beyond the various capacities on the list. On metaphysical grounds, practical wisdom does not exist. Because of this, the Subsumption Concern does not arise. Arbitrariness is not an issue either because there isn’t any assignment of functions to practical wisdom going on. Finally Unity is not a concern because on this model no trait of practical wisdom is to be found which carries out various functions. The Eliminativist view would represent a significant departure from the tradition of thinking about practical wisdom in the history of western ethics. It would also be less parsimonious than the Standard Model or the Socratic Model, leaving us with an array of different capacities. To me these are not very troubling consequences. I will leave it up to others to see if they agree.

6 Conclusion As I have noted, I began this chapter with bewilderment when thinking about the structural relationship and alleged functions of practical wisdom with respect to the moral virtues. At this point, I can’t say that the

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bewilderment has completely gone away. But by taking seriously Practical Wisdom Eliminativism, I begin to see a way forward.41

Notes 1. See, for example, Snow 2019. 2. Given limitation of space, I won’t be able to consider how other approaches – such as Humean or Nietzschean ones – tend to conceive of practical wisdom. 3. Russell 2009: 13; Roberts and Wood 2007: 305; Kristjánsson 2014: 155; Darnell et al. 2019: 112; Van Zyl 2019: 78. 4. Roberts and Wood 2007: 305; Kristjánsson 2014: 155; Darnell et al. 2019: 112; Van Zyl 2019: 78. 5. Kristjánsson 2014: 155; Darnell et al. 2019: 112, 115–116; Van Zyl 2019: 77, 82–84. 6. Russell 2009: x; Kristjánsson 2014: 155, 162; Darnell et al. 2019: 112. For practical wisdom as necessary and sufficient for moral virtue, see Zagzegbski on Aristotle (1996: 211–212). 7. See Russell 2009 and Kristjánsson 2014. As Kristjánsson writes, following Aristotle, “Every moral virtue thus requires both a moral component concerned with the proper passions, desires and pleasures, and an intellectual component consisting of the sort of knowledge and intellectual guidance that only phronesis can provide” (2014: 155). See also Darnell et al. 2019. For helpful framing of the Standard View, albeit with the aim of rejecting it, see De Caro et al. 2018. 8. De Caro et al. 2018: 294. For a sympathetic mention of a similar view, see Russell 2009: 26 fn. 44. 9. De Caro et al. 2018: 294. 10. I am not aware of anyone who has advocated this view, although it is quite possible that I have missed someone. 11. Russell 2009: 25–26, 31; Roberts and Wood 2007: 312; Zagzebski 1996: 221–224; Kristjánsson 2014: 155, 162; Darnell et al. 2019: 119–120. 12. An alternative way to understand cases like this is that practical wisdom can decide which of the virtues applies in this situation, and which one is irrelevant. Thanks to Maria Silvia Vaccarezza for suggesting this. 13. Russell 2009: x; Roberts and Wood 2007: 306; Kristjánsson 2014: 155, 162; Darnell et al. 2019: 113. 14. Russell 2009: 7, 24; Roberts and Wood 2007: 306; Van Zyl 2019: 79. For additional complications, see Darnell et al. 2019, who interpret and endorse Aristotle as holding that practical wisdom is “a combination of cleverness and natural virtue” (113). 15. Russell 2009: x, 7–11, 21–22, 25, 361; Roberts and Wood 2007: 306; Vaccarezza 2018: 253–255; De Caro et al. 2018: 295; Van Zyl 2019: 79. 16. Russell 2009: 7–10, 34; Roberts and Wood 2007: 306; Kristjánsson 2014: 155; Vaccarezza 2018: 253–255; Darnell et al. 2019: 113. For extensive discussion of whether Aristotle ascribed this function to practical wisdom, see Moss 2011. 17. Russell 2009: x and Kristjánsson 2014: 155. 18. See in particular Sosa 2009: 281–282. See also Russell 2009: x–xi, 16, 29, 361; Kamtekar 2004: 482; Darnell et al. 2019: 113–114, 118–120, 122; Van Zyl 2019: 80–81. Curzer interprets Aristotle as holding that practical wisdom centrally has to do with knowing “why virtuous acts are virtuous” (2012: 309, see chapter 14 for extensive discussion). This sounds like it would fall under the heading of the Knowing Reasons Function, but if not then it would be yet another function to add to the list.

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19. For instance, in the Aristotelian tradition, practical wisdom has often been associated with finding the mean. Indeed, Darnell et al. 2019 claim that, “The briefest definition of phronesis would thus be excellence in ethical deliberation about the mean” (114). See also Zagzebski 1996: 220–221 and Russell 2009: 19, 30–31. Zagzebski also provides accounts of a number of epistemic and moral notions in which practical wisdom plays an important function (232–255). Vaccarezza includes “acknowledging the moral relevance of a contingent situation” (2018: 254). For yet another function of practical wisdom, see Curzer’s interpretation of Aristotle on practical wisdom, whereby “the role of practical wisdom is to provide a concrete account of the happy life” (2012: 311, although if this function is already captured by the Knowing Reasons Function, then it would not be a distinct one in its own right). A few sentences later, Curzer also writes that “Practical wisdom provides a list of virtues plus detailed descriptions of their aspects and applications” (311), which also sounds like an additional function. For yet more functions, see Russell 2009: 21, 24 and De Caro et al. 2018: 295. 20. Russell 2009: 7. See also 8–10, 34, 361. 21. Ibid., 7. See also 8–11, 21–22, 25. 22. Ibid., x, emphasis his. 23. Ibid., xi, emphasis his. 24. Ibid., 16. See also 29, 361. 25. Ibid., 25. See also 31. 26. Roberts and Wood 2007: 306. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., emphasis theirs. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 312. 31. For additional concerns beyond these, see De Caro et al. 2018. 32. See Miller 2017, 2019, 2020, forthcoming. 33. For more detail, see Miller 2020 and forthcoming. 34. There may be others as well, but that’s a topic for another occasion. 35. There are complications here about mixed motives and about the strength of motives, which I discuss in Miller forthcoming. 36. Not everyone agrees about this. Some argue, for instance, that distorting the facts would not be an instance of lying in this case, because the Nazi has no right to the truth in the first place. I say much more about this case in Miller forthcoming. 37. De Caro et al. 2018: 294. 38. Ibid., 2018: 295, italics removed. 39. For a related point, see Russell 2009: 23–24. 40. For additional criticism relevant to the Fragmentation Model, see Annas 2011: 87–88. 41. I am very grateful to Maria Silvia Vaccarezza and Mario De Caro for inviting me to be a part of this volume, and to Maria Silvia for helpful comments. Work on this paper was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Templeton Foundation.

Works Cited Annas, J. (2011). Intelligent Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Curzer, H. (2012). Aristotle and the Virtues. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Darnell, C., Gulliford, E., Kristjánsson, K. and Paris, P. (2019). Phronesis and the Knowledge-Action Gap in Moral Psychology and Moral Education: A New Synthesis? Human Development, 62: 101–129. De Caro, M., Vaccarezza, M.S. and Niccoli, A. (2018). Phronesis as Ethical Expertise: Naturalism of Second Nature and the Unity of Virtue. The Journal of Value Inquiry, 52: 287–305. Kamtekar, R. (2004). Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character. Ethics, 114: 458–491. Kristjánsson, K. (2014). Phronesis and Moral Education: Treading beyond the Truisms. Theory and Research in Education, 12: 151–171. Miller, C. (2017). Honesty. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong and C. B. Miller (eds.), Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character (pp. 237–273). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Miller, C. (2019). The Virtue of Honesty, Nazis at the Door, and Huck Finn Cases. Belgrade Philosophical Annual, 32: 51–66. Miller, C. (2020). Motivation and the Virtue of Honesty: Some Conceptual Requirements and Empirical Results. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 23: 355–371. Miller, C. (forthcoming). Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue. New York: Oxford University Press. Moss, J. (2011). ‘Virtue Makes the Goal Right’: Virtue and Phronesis in Aristotle’s Ethics. Phronesis, 56: 204–261. Roberts, R. C. and Jay Wood, W. (2007). Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Russell, D. (2009). Practical Intelligence and the Virtues. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Snow, N. (2019). Commentary on the Character Gap: Situational Influences and Helping Behavior. Journal of Philosophical Research, 44: 201–212. Sosa, E. (2009). Situations against Virtues: The Situationist Attack on Virtue Theory. In C. Mantzavinos (ed.), Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Philosophical Theory and Scientific Practice (pp. 274–290). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vaccarezza, M.S. (2018). An Eye on Particulars with the End in Sight: An Account of Aristotelian Phronesis. Metaphilosophy, 49: 246–261. Van Zyl, L. (2019). Virtue Ethics: A Contemporary Introduction. New York: Routledge. Zagzebski, L. (1996). Virtues of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Phronesis and Whole Trait Theory An Integration Nancy E. Snow, Jennifer Cole Wright, and Michael T. Warren

1 Introduction Phronesis, or practical wisdom, is integral to certain well-known conceptions of virtue, especially that of Aristotle. Philosophers who are interested in virtue, and in practical reason more generally, have studied phronesis for some time. More recently, as virtue has attracted the attention of psychologists, they, too, have contributed to the discussion. Our attempts to understand phronesis are contextualized by our larger interest in virtue measurement. In a coauthored book on virtue measurement, we worked to integrate a broadly neo-Aristotelian conception of virtue with Whole Trait Theory (WTT).1 In Section 2, we sketch our conception of phronesis, focusing on what we endorse as the four key roles for and five parts of phronesis. We integrate WTT with most of our account of phronesis in Section 3. We hope thereby to contribute to the development of a measurable conception of phronesis that does justice to or at least acknowledges its philosophical richness and complexity, and to push thinking about phronesis into new territory.

2 Phronesis as We Understand It Our conception of phronesis is essentially Aristotelian. Aristotle holds that we cannot have virtue without phronesis and cannot have phronesis without virtue. Hence, the reasons for studying phronesis are not only to understand it in its own right, but also to deepen our grasp of virtue. Some philosophers, for example, Driver (2001), do not think that phronesis is required for virtue. We leave their views aside, and take it as given, as neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists do, that phronesis is required for virtue.2 Since Aristotle’s remarks on phronesis in the Nicomachean Ethics are sometimes sparse and difficult to interpret, we have been guided in our thinking by the work of more recent commentators. Our primary source has been the seminal work of Russell (2009). His comments in chapter one of that work on the roles and parts of phronesis have been very helpful.3 We have also taken on board certain aspects of Darnell, Gulliford,

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Kristjánsson and Paris (2019). We do not know whether these authors would agree with our uses and modifications of their views.4 Let us begin with a very brief working definition of phronesis, upon which we will expand: Phronesis or practical wisdom is that form or forms of reasoning which are necessary for being virtuous and for living a virtuous life. This working defnition is general enough to allow for four distinct roles for phronesis to emerge when attempting to be virtuous, being virtuous, and living a virtuous life. We frst discuss the four roles, then turn to what we have elsewhere presented as the fve parts. 2.1 Four Roles for Phronesis The four roles are (1) action guidance; (2) the regulation of a multiplicity of virtues within character; (3) emotion regulation; and (4) reflection on one’s life as a whole. By “action guidance,” we mean that phronesis or practical wisdom is internal to each virtue, and guides action in accordance with that specific virtue. As we noted, Aristotle thinks that one cannot have virtue without phronesis nor phronesis without virtue. Phronesis is the kind of wisdom that guides virtuous action to its appropriate end. For example, to be successfully generous, I must have phronesis, for practical wisdom enables me to deliberate about actions in ways that, ceteris paribus, allow me actually to hit the target of virtue. If I want to give my friend a meaningful birthday gift, I will think about what she wants, values, prizes, and so on, and will purchase and bestow the gift accordingly. Practical wisdom is the constellation of cognitive processes that enables my generous action to be successful in achieving my goal of giving her a meaningful gift. Though there is disagreement among commentators as to the exact processes that constitute practical wisdom, we take the inclusive view that it is deliberation about ends as well as means, and includes the perceptual abilities needed to know when virtuous action is called for. Aristotle and subsequent commentators allow a second role for phronesis – one that occurs at a higher level than the action guidance that is internal to each virtue. That role is to regulate a multiplicity of virtues within a person’s character. This regulative role is likely manifested in a variety of ways. Most obvious, perhaps, is the role of adjudication in cases of conflicting virtues.5 Suppose that a student asks for extra time in turning in an assignment. The teacher wants to be merciful and allows her the extra time, but she also wants to be fair or just in her treatment of other students. Phronesis, in its regulative role, enables the teacher to think through the situation, assessing all of the relevant facts, issues, and considerations, and arrive at a solution. This is not to suggest that

72 Nancy E. Snow et al. adjudicating among conflicting virtues is always easy, that a solution is obvious, or that there is always only one virtuous solution in any given case. It is to state that phronesis provides the skill in reasoning needed to see the factors relevant for a virtuous decision, consider and weigh them appropriately, and eventually, arrive at a conclusion about what a virtuous action would be. Another perhaps less obvious role is that of blending or integrating multiple virtues. For example, the teacher of our previous example need not always choose whether to be fair or merciful, but might learn to preempt such challenging student requests by creating a fair yet merciful course policy that allows late assignments, but with a minor deduction for each day the assignment is late. Another role is that of checking and balancing the operation of virtues as they interact within one’s character. Consider, for example, proper pride and humility. Phronesis can regulate the interaction of these two virtues such that they temper, or check and balance, the operations of each other. When humility threatens to become excessive, that is, to degenerate into a vice, proper pride, called forth by phronesis, can check it. For example, if, through dwelling too much on her deficiencies, a person sees herself slipping into self-denigration, she can, through the use of phronesis, remind herself of her strengths, and engender a renewed sense of proper pride. Similarly, if, through dwelling too much on strengths, she tends toward improper pride or arrogance, a salutary reminder of her limitations, again called up through the use of phronesis, can engender some humility. On such occasions, her use of phronesis might well be aided by advice from friends. We will touch on the topic of social uses of phronesis in a moment. Emotion regulation is the third role for phronesis. This has not been widely recognized in the literature on phronesis, but has recently been flagged by Darnell et al. (2019). The insight here is that having appropriate emotional responses is as integral to having a virtuous character as is acting in the right way, for the right reasons, at the right time, and so on. We can see that emotion regulation is indicative of character and is guided by phronesis by considering an example. Suppose that I am standing outside a skyscraper that is on fire. Firefighters are attempting to control the blaze and rescuing victims. By hypothesis, there is no action I can take that will help, other than keeping out of the way. My emotions matter as expressions of my character.6 Watching the blaze with glee is a morally bad response, for it indicates cruelty and taking pleasure in the suffering of others. A more subtle point should be made, however. Even if I am feeling an appropriate emotion, such as compassion for the victims, I can overreact or underreact. That is, my compassion can be too intense or too mild. If I overreact, my emotions could spiral out of control. My compassion could become too intense and emotionally crippling.7 By contrast, an

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underreaction – feeling too little – could be caused by a failure to register the gravity of the situation, by a failure to identify appropriately with the victims, or by other failures of perception. Alternatively, it could simply be caused not by a cognitive deficit but by an emotional flaw, for example, by desensitization to the suffering of others – a kind of callousness. In sum, phronesis ensures that we have appropriate emotional responses, that is, that our emotion fits the situation at hand, in two respects: first, by regulating our emotions such that we get our emotion right – we feel compassion instead of cruel glee; and second, that our compassion is neither too intensely nor too weakly felt.8 If we see the sense in these remarks, we should also be able to acknowledge that phronesis regulates emotions concomitantly with the virtuous actions we perform. An act is not generous unless we do it wholeheartedly, and not in a miserly or grudging way. Phronesis also helps us to overcome fear and perform the courageous action. A final and more expansive point about the role of phronesis in regulating emotions is this. Phronesis not only regulates emotions accompanying our virtuous actions. One might even argue, with Kristjánsson (2018) among others, that emotion is integral to our virtuous dispositions such that our disposition to be generous, for example, is pervaded by wholeheartedness and positive feelings about giving to others, and our courage is not deflated by fear, but is, instead, bolstered by confidence, resolve, and steadfastness. Phronesis regulates our emotions in this broader sense in which it integrates appropriate emotions with other elements of virtuous dispositions, such as motivations, cognitions, and desires. A final role that we see for phronesis is reflection on one’s life as a whole. We believe that a person who stops to reflect on her life, saying to herself, for example, “That’s not the kind of person I want to be,” or “That’s just not who I am,” is being guided by phronesis. Reflections of this type enable us to identify or dis-identify with certain traits. For example, a mother might realize that she has become impatient and sharp with her children; upon reflection, she decides that she does not want to be that way. Phronesis enables her to make the decision to cultivate patience and kindness, and thereby, to strive to become a better parent. As we note elsewhere (Snow et al. 2020; Wright et al. 2021), our position on this point falls short of two views found in the Aristotelian literature: the “grand end” view and the “blueprint” view. The grand end view has it that phronesis informs and is informed by an explicit and comprehensive conception of the good, which is available only to philosophers and experienced statespersons, not to ordinary people (see Darnell et al. 2019: 19; Kraut 1993: 361). The weaker blueprint view has it that an explicit conception of the good informs and is informed by phronesis, but is available to ordinary persons who have been raised well. The blueprint orders the ends and aims of one’s life as a whole, and is, ideally, “on call” to guide one’s actions (see Darnell et al. 2019: 20).

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There is considerable complexity in the interpretation of these two positions. Kraut (1993: 362), a proponent of the “grand end” view, writes that, What is essential to the Grand End view is a thesis about the justification of decisions: if a person of practical wisdom is asked to state his reasons for making a decision, then the full justification must begin with a substantive and correct conception of happiness. Such a conception of happiness is, presumably, available only to those who have engaged in refection on what happiness is. Kraut (1993: 362), in his review of Sarah Broadie’s book, Ethics with Aristotle (1991), continues: “What is strikingly original and controversial about Broadie’s interpretation is that this is precisely what she denies. A practically wise person, on her reading, does not need a conception of happiness in order to make good decisions.” Broadie (1991: 199–201) argues against the grand end view, contending that: The person of practical wisdom would have (on such a theory) to be a philosopher or to have absorbed the teachings of philosophers. How else would he or she come by that comprehensive vision? Aristotle sees the activities of philosophy and theoretical science as perfecting the life of practical virtue so as to render it a life of complete (or perfect) human happiness. . . . But in NE VI he shows no sign of holding that practical virtue itself, which includes practical wisdom, necessarily presupposes a command of philosophical ethics. We fnd the grand end view too elitist for the project of understanding how phronesis contributes to the virtue of ordinary people, which is what we are interested in measuring. Consequently, we have left it aside. Though the blueprint view is more appealing, we depart from it for two reasons.9 First, we wish to allow roles for phronesis in the lives of those who do not yet have a fully articulated comprehensive vision of their good, nor have come to an explicit ordering of their ends and aims. In other words, we wish to allow roles for phronesis in the kinds of refections that construct the blueprint. Going back to the mother in our previous example, we can say that she is in the process of creating a blueprint for the kind of mother she wants to be. Phronesis helps her to do that. We can imagine that eventually, her refections will expand, to include thoughts about how to balance work and home life, for example. She need not have a blueprint that guides her. Instead, we believe that phronesis enables her to construct the blueprint – an ever-evolving, emerging vision of the person she wants to become and how she chooses to live her life. Second, we believe that even those who have not been raised well can come, through time and effort, to form a virtuous conception of the good life and can act in pursuit of it. We believe that phronesis has important

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roles to play in their efforts, and thus, in the project of moral repair – of coming to realize the moral failings in one’s life, and taking steps to overcome them, as well as coming to realize the moral failings in others’ lives and taking steps to forgive them. In other words, we reject the blueprint view because we want to leave open the possibility that those whose upbringing has exposed them to vice and inculcated it within them can nonetheless come to acquire virtue. They do this through phronetic reflections on the kind of person they are and the kind of person they want to become. We offer two examples of how this might work. Consider first a young man who did not have a good father. Looking back on his life, he identifies his father as a negative role model, vowing not to be that way with his own children. Though this person was not well raised in the sense that an appropriate parental role model was lacking, his reflections allow him to realize that lack and choose not to replicate it in his own life, though simply reflecting on this and making that choice is not going to be enough for him to actually avoid replicating it – there is a lot of hard developmental work (the actual cultivation of virtue) that will need to also be done. We regard this as phronesis at work in his life. A second example concerns someone who did not use phronesis and made serious errors. Suppose a young woman, born into a troubled home environment, becomes involved with drugs and prostitution and lands in prison. It is not inconceivable that, at some point, she takes a hard look at her life and thinks she can do better. Perhaps her reflections are motivated by a desire to get out of prison, to improve her lot in life, and are aided by encouragement from others who are benevolent and supportive. Here, too, phronesis is at work. Especially in her case, we should note the social dimensions of phronesis. Our young woman is guided and supported in her reflections by others. This reminds us of an important point: Neither virtue nor phronesis develop in a social vacuum. Our environment – the social supports that we have – can help or hinder the development of both virtue and phronesis. Social supports go well beyond the individuals in a person’s life, and include the social power structures and institutions that shape her environment. Many complex questions arise here that are beyond the scope of this chapter, for example, what incentives or disincentives are there for people to be virtuous in a hostile world? Is it easier for white people than for people of color to be virtuous in a world that valorizes whiteness and disparages blackness, or for heterosexual and/or cisgender people to be virtuous in a world that disparages same-sex and transgender individuals? Or, adding a layer of complexity, under what conditions do obstacles incentivize people who are disparaged to be perseverant, resilient, to “go high” when others “go low”? An obvious objection to the foregoing remarks is that phronesis is necessary for virtue, and virtue for phronesis. Aristotle believes we cannot

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have one without the other, and that both are formed through good upbringing and correct habituation. But if so, the kinds of reflections described above, especially in the young woman’s case, would not count as phronesis, according to Aristotle. In response, we opt to depart from Aristotle’s conception as too narrow a description of how both virtue and phronesis develop, for it implies that unless one has had the benefit of a good upbringing, virtue is simply out of reach.10 We think this overlooks the fact that individuals possess critical thinking capacities, in particular, the ability to look at their own lives and those of the people around them and make moral evaluations. A view of phronesis and virtue that is more amenable to our perspective is that taken by Russell. Unlike Aristotle, who views the reciprocity thesis as a claim about attributions of virtue, Russell (2014: 215–216; 2009: chapter 11) argues that we should regard it as a claim about the “natural makeup of the virtues” (2009: 362) and an ideal to which we should aspire. Thus, virtues, unified by phronesis, ideally develop together in a balanced and integrated way (Russell 2009: 372). Interpreted as an aspirational ideal, we should expect improvement in one virtue to contribute to, and even require, improvement in others as virtuous sensitivities develop and mature (Russell 2014: 216). Anecdotal evidence bears witness to the fact that even those who have not had good upbringings are able to assimilate and critically assess social norms and expectations. This evidence, though anecdotal, is real and compelling. Inspirational stories abound of people who found themselves caught in negative cycles of drug abuse, crime, and so on, and were able, through critically assessing their lives, beliefs, desires, habits, and behavior, to pull themselves out of the morass and set themselves on better life paths.11 Sometimes, epiphanic experiences were in play – a person woke up and saw her life for what it was, was disgusted by it, and resolved to do better. As mentioned earlier, supportive others – counselors, friends, and family – can help. We believe that phronesis is implicated in these critical awakenings and assessments – that when a person takes a critical look at a life not well lived and seeks to change, phronesis is directing her toward a good. Consequently, though we endorse the view that phronesis is necessary for virtue, we believe it also has crucial roles to play in guiding those who are not yet virtuous – but desire to be – toward virtue attainment. We frankly go beyond the letter of Aristotle in this regard, noting again how sparse his comments about virtue development are. Strict interpreters of Aristotle might disagree with this extension of his thought, but we find it consistent with the spirit of Aristotle’s work to think that phronesis has roles to play in guiding the not yet virtuous to goodness, and that this is a part of the broader role for phronetic reflection on one’s life. Relevant to this discussion is the notion that neither virtues nor phronesis is necessarily binary constructs in the sense you either have phronesis or you don’t; you’re either compassionate or you’re not. Rather, they are continuous/scalar constructs, with some people possessing virtues/

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phronesis to a higher degree than others. Jayawickreme and Fleeson (2017a: 76–77), proponents of WTT, make a similar point in arguing that WTT can apply to the study of individual virtues.12 As in the case of the young woman in prison, at least on some occasions, even people who engage in criminal activity enact phronesis, although her average level of phronesis is quite low relative to other people’s averages. If we assume that everyone has at least a small degree of phronesis and/ or a small degree of each virtue, then we don’t violate Aristotle’s claim that virtue is necessary for phronesis and vice versa, as both are available to us at least to some extent at any point in our development as adults. 2.2 Five Parts of Phronesis Russell (2009: 20–25) believes that phronesis is actually a suite of five different virtues of the practical intellect: comprehension, sense, intelligence, deliberative excellence, and cleverness. In our forthcoming book (Wright et al. 2021), we interpret these as parts of phronesis. We note that what we take to be the parts of phronesis are not well understood, owing to ambiguities in the interpretation of Aristotle’s texts. Because of these imprecisions, we believe that the parts are not good candidates for measurement and left them aside in our book. Here, however, we seek to deepen and expand our conception of phronesis, while acknowledging that we are going beyond factors that are readily measurable. Comprehension (sunesis, eusunesis) is the ability to “read” a situation, or to reflect correctly about a person’s words or actions, and is a crucial part of deliberation (Russell 2009: 20–21). Sense (gnōmē) is the discrimination of what is reasonable and appropriate. Russell (2009: 21) remarks that in Greek as in English, the cognates of “sense” are both “sensible” and “sensitive.” According to Russell (2009: 21), “Aristotle emphasizes that a person with sense has sympathy (sungnōmē), and, as Robert Louden has remarked, this suggests an ability to see things from another’s point of view in deliberating about what is reasonable or appropriate” (Russell 2009: 21). To us, this sounds like perspective-taking. Nous or intelligence is more complex, as it “appears in both theoretical and practical reasoning” (Russell 2009: 22). Aristotle compares intelligence in practical reasoning to visual perception; those with intelligence have acquired through experience something like a perceptual capacity that gives them insight into how best to act virtuously.13 It involves problem-solving abilities that are built up over time through experience (Russell 2009: 22–23). Deliberative excellence (eubolia) is grasping the correct end in one’s deliberations and how to take the right steps toward them (Russell 2009: 24). Unlike phronesis as a whole, which has a grasp of the global human good, deliberative excellence allows us to aim for more specific goods.

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Cleverness (deinotēs) is good means–ends reasoning (Russell 2009: 24–25). Whereas someone can have cleverness without phronesis (someone can be clever without being virtuous), she cannot have phronesis without cleverness. Cleverness, as Aristotle conceives of it, can be directed toward ends that are good, bad, or neutral. As part of phronesis, it is always directed toward good ends. There is considerable ambiguity in the parts of phronesis. One could well ask, for example, whether cleverness is included in deliberative excellence or is separate from it. We do not have ready answers to questions such as this and understand that some overlap in the parts emerges from our discussion. We conceptualize the parts as falling into two groups: comprehension, sense, and intelligence, which have mainly to do with our abilities to perceive virtue-relevant stimuli; and deliberative excellence and cleverness, which mainly have to do with our abilities to formulate virtuous ends and the means to attain them. Instead of attempting to sort through these conceptual issues in more detail, we offer the following practical example of how the parts work together in everyday life. Consider the case of three friends who are celebrating the birthday of one of them.14 That friend, Trisha, is quite sensitive about aging. The group has been teasing her, but one member of the group, Charles, mercilessly teases her, to the point where she is on the verge of tears. A third friend, Susan, possesses phronesis, perhaps as part of a virtue, compassion, that enables her to be benevolently sensitive to the experiences and feelings of others, and uses it to redirect the situation. Susan reads the situation and understands that Charles’s teasing is upsetting Trisha. Thus, she uses comprehension. By putting herself in Trisha’s place, Susan is able to get an idea of what she is feeling and why – this is an exercise of sense. Let us state that by hypothesis, Susan has some experience of life in general and of her two friends in particular, and this experience enables her to possess nous, which gives her insight into situations such as these, and into this situation in particular, as well as the ability to solve the problem the situation presents – namely, how to stop Charles from teasing Trisha, soothe her, and enable her to enjoy her birthday dinner.15 Here Susan’s deliberative excellence and cleverness come into play. Deliberative excellence enables Susan to grasp the good to be sought in the situation, namely, to put the birthday celebration back on track by solving the problem just described. Deliberative excellence and cleverness provide her with the abilities to do that – to take the means needed to achieve the ends of stopping the teasing, soothing Trisha, and resuming a happy birthday celebration. Presumably, this will involve Susan using some well-chosen words to redirect Charles’s conversation, thereby bringing the teasing to a halt, refocus Trisha’s attention to more positive topics, thereby soothing her, and guide the entire conversation and tone to a happier celebration of Trisha’s birthday. Susan’s behavior is virtuous – she is

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preventing one friend from upsetting another, is assuaging the hurt feelings of the one who is upset, and is saving the social occasion. All of the parts of phronesis contribute to her doing this. We turn now to a discussion of how the roles and parts of phronesis can be integrated within WTT.

3 Integrating Phronesis With Whole Trait Theory WTT is a relative newcomer on the psychological scene. Developed primarily by psychologists Will Fleeson and Eranda Jayawickreme, WTT unites two different, yet important psychological approaches to explaining personality: social-cognitivist theories and trait theories.16 Socialcognitivist theories focus on the explanatory power of social-cognitive processes and mechanisms, that is, on the internal processes by means of which people perceive, think about, and respond, both cognitively and affectively, to situations. Trait theories focus on the predictive power generated by traits as individual difference variables, that is, that people can be meaningfully said to differ in their possession of a trait, such as extraversion or conscientiousness (Ashton and Lee 2009; McCrae and Costa 2006). WTT combines the situational variability and flexibility – cognitivism – with the predictive power of trait theory. It is called “whole trait” theory because it weds the “descriptive side” of a trait, represented by the frequency with which a person behaves in a trait-appropriate manner over time and in different situational circumstances, and the “explanatory side,” which involves the underlying social-cognitive systems that are responsible for producing this person-specific distribution of traitappropriate responses. For example, extraversion can produce a distribution of consistently friendly behaviors over time and in varying circumstances and is explained by such social-cognitive variables as the desire to get to know new people and beliefs that people are receptive to friendly overtures. According to WTT, every person will display some degree of intrapersonal variability in trait-expression between situations and over time. Even a very friendly person, for example, will be friendlier toward some people and in some contexts than others; a shy person will fluctuate in the degree to which her shyness is expressed, and so on. That variability can be explained as a function of the way each person’s social-cognitive systems analyze, interpret, respond to, and interact with the situational stimuli she encounters. Our focus here is on aspects of the explanatory side of traits. As we note in our forthcoming book, our position is that virtues are a subset of traits whose structures and processes align with those postulated in WTT. WTT holds that traits are robust dispositional capacities for trait-appropriate behavior, and that behavior is typically manifested to the degree to which there is reason for it to be. Whether there is reason for a trait to be manifested depends upon the presence or absence of situationally encountered

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stimuli that are “trait-relevant” (i.e., that call for the exercise of the trait). Trait manifestation is typically the result of the perception of trait-relevant stimuli (the “input”), which is processed by social-cognitive systems (the “intermediates”) and results in the production of a set of situationspecific trait-appropriate responses (the “output”). Thus, in order to reliably manifest a trait, the person must be disposed to accurately perceive whatever trait-relevant stimuli are present in the surrounding external and internal environments and process them in such a way as to produce trait-appropriate responses. In what follows, we show how phronesis can be integrated with both the perceptual aspects of WTT, as well as elements of the intermediate social-cognitive systems. 3.1 Phronesis and Perception (the “Input”) Let us first discuss phronesis and perception. According to both WTT and Aristotelianism, the person herself must perceive any virtue-relevant features of the situation as being trait-relevant. Recall that comprehension is the ability to “read” a situation or to reflect correctly about a person’s words or actions (see Russell 2009: 20–21), and that Aristotle compares nous or intelligence in practical reasoning to visual perception. As we noted earlier, possessors of intelligence have acquired through experience a kind of perceptual capacity affording them insight into how best to act virtuously (see Russell 2009: 22–23). Both components, we believe, are at work in all four roles for phronesis, albeit in different ways. When we consider the action-guiding role of phronesis, that is, how phronesis directs actions specific to a virtue, such as generosity or compassion, toward a desired end, we can see that comprehension, or the ability to “read” a situation, and sense, or the discrimination of what is reasonable and appropriate, are crucial for correctly identifying stimuli that are trait-relevant. In addition, Aristotle’s remarks on nous or intelligence provide a direct parallel between visual perception and the correct perception of trait-relevant stimuli. The correct identification of traitrelevant stimuli is overtly a part of WTT. Consequently, we can conclude that the WTT framework is capacious enough to accommodate both comprehension and nous in shaping the kind of perception needed for phronesis to inform virtuous actions, with the reminder that comprehension pertains mainly to perception, whereas nous, though compared to visual perception by Aristotle, goes beyond comprehension by involving a component of problem-solving ability that is built up over time and experience. Comprehension, as we understand it, is the ability to “read” a situation, for example, to pick up on social cues, that enables us to identify facts calling for the exercise of a virtue. Comprehension enables us to see, for example, that someone is being bullied and is on the verge of tears and that a compassionate response is called for. Nous is the capacity, built up over time and experience, that enables us to perceive the situation as

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calling for a certain kind of compassionate response, that is, one that will solve the problem at hand, namely, provide actual comfort to the one in distress. Both comprehension and nous can be accommodated by WTT. We should add a caveat: Though WTT is broad enough to allow roles for parts of phronesis in accurately perceiving virtue-relevant stimuli, explaining how phronesis shapes the perception of virtue-relevant stimuli is not its aim. WTT makes no explicit mention of phronesis, but, instead, seeks to explain the perception of all trait-relevant stimuli, including those relevant to traits that are typically not considered to be virtues, such as shyness, or to traits that are typically considered to be vices, such as cruelty. Our point here is that WTT is a hospitable empirical framework that can accommodate elements of phronesis, among other mechanisms, in explaining how trait-relevant stimuli are perceived. The second role for phronesis is regulative – adjudicating among the virtues that comprise an individual’s character. Remaining simply at the level of perception, we can hypothesize that the same parts of phronesis that enable us accurately to perceive stimuli relevant to a single virtue, such as justice, will also enable us accurately to perceive stimuli relevant to other and possibly conflicting virtues, such as mercy. That is, a virtuous individual will not use different faculties to perceive facts relevant to different virtues – phronesis is “one” (see note 5). That said, both WTT and Aristotelianism would agree, we think, that different individuals might be more sharply attuned to stimuli relevant to some virtues than to others. Owing to one’s life history – in particular, to the number of occasions on which the opportunity to exercise a specific virtue arises – someone could be more attuned to stimuli relevant to compassion than to courage, for example. By being “more attuned to” stimuli relevant to a specific virtue, we mean that the person has developed a heightened receptivity to certain stimuli because of her life experiences – we might want to think of this receptivity as involving comprehension and sense. A person who has been on the receiving end of many injustices could be more aware of and receptive to factors relating to justice and injustice than someone who has not been treated unjustly. These experiences develop her justicerelated sensitivities more fully than those of some other people. It could also be true that her abilities to perceive factors relating to possibly conflicting virtues, such as mercy, are underdeveloped in relation to her abilities to perceive justice-relevant stimuli. In such cases, the imbalances in the development of her perceptual capacities could affect her subsequent reasoning in adjudicating conflicting virtues. The language we have used in the last two sentences could be misleading. We do not mean to suggest that there are different perceptual capacities dedicated solely to perceiving stimuli relevant to specific virtues, that is, capacities that enable us to perceive stimuli relevant to justice, different capacities that allow for the perception of stimuli relevant to mercy, and so on. Phronesis is “one” in the following sense. Phronesis is

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composed of five parts (what Russell calls a “suite” of intellectual virtues or capacities), but these capacities are unified and not differentiated in response to specific virtues.17 Phronesis plays four different roles in the lives of virtuous people, but again, these roles apply to all of the moral virtues. Yet, depending on one’s life experiences, one’s unified phronetic capacities could be more closely attuned to factors relevant to the virtues with which one has had the greatest familiarity. The third role for phronesis is emotion regulation. Here again, we think the parts of phronesis already mentioned – comprehension and intelligence – allow us to perceive stimuli relevant to virtuous emotional response, and, as suggested earlier, that WTT can accommodate comprehension and intelligence as understood by Aristotle within its framework. However, we think another part of phronesis is important to the perception of stimuli that are relevant to emotion regulation, namely, sense – the discrimination of what is reasonable or appropriate. Sense is sympathy, which, as noted previously, requires the ability to take another’s perspective in reasoning or deliberation. We believe that the ability to take another’s perspective – to understand and even to feel what he or she is going through – is relevant to the phronetic role of emotion regulation. In other words, to regulate our emotions in response to stimuli, we need more than comprehension, which enables us to correctly read situations, or even intelligence, which is perceptual skill that has been honed by experience. We need to be able to discern the emotions of others. This is facilitated by being able to take their perspectives and understand what they’re going through. We think that the discrimination of what is reasonable and appropriate is crucial for a virtuous response, in terms of both action and emotion – we need to be able to discern whether others are reacting well in their circumstances and calibrate our own actions and emotional responses accordingly. We note, too, that we are now going beyond the realm of “mere” perception into that of judgment. We regard this as a salutary reminder that we can attempt to separate the perceptual and interpretative components of WTT and discuss how phronesis can be accommodated by each type of component, but in actual life, the processes of perception, interpretation, judgment, and so on, are not readily separable. No doubt proponents of WTT would agree. Numerous psychological studies of emotion regulation can be cited that presumably can be taken on board by WTT.18 Also, contemplative practices such as compassion meditation are effective in modulating emotions in ways motivated by virtuous goals.19 We highlight here one set of studies that we believe illustrates Aristotle’s notion of “sense” as perspectivetaking. The social neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner and his colleagues have demonstrated the relevance of cognitive reappraisal to emotion regulation.20 Cognitive reappraisal is the ability to mentally transform the meanings of stimuli that affect us. This reappraisal allows us to regulate our emotional responses to the stimuli. Ochsner has shown that emotion

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can be regulated through two pathways: bottom-up, by which emotion is elicited in direct response to the properties of a stimulus, as when negative affect is experienced upon viewing an aversive photograph; and top-down, as occurs when I tell myself that a stimulus is bad and generate unpleasant thoughts that elicit negative affect. Ochsner and his colleagues have discovered that we can both upregulate and downregulate emotional responses through cognitive reappraisal. We upregulate when we increase our affective responses, and downregulate when we decrease them. Notably, each form of regulation can be exercised with respect to both negative and positive emotions. Finally, Ochsner and his colleagues have studied self- and situationfocused cognitive reappraisal, both of which are effective in regulating emotion. In the self-focused strategy, when one encounters emotionally charged stimuli such as a sick person in a hospital, emotions can be upregulated by imagining oneself or a loved one directly involved in the scene, or emotions can be downregulated by taking a clinical, detached, third-person perspective that psychologically distances the self from the scene. Using the equally effective situation-focused strategy, when one encounters the scene of a sick person in a hospital, negative emotions can be upregulated by vividly imagining the plights of those involved getting worse, or such emotions can be downregulated by imagining the involved parties’ predicaments taking a turn for the best. As noted earlier, we think that these cognitive reappraisal mechanisms sound very much like sense. We realize that what Aristotle actually meant by “sense” is vague and open to interpretation. That said, it seems that cognitive reappraisal fills the functional role of emotional regulation that Aristotle had in mind for phronesis, and that sense, construed as perspective-taking, as we and the commentators we’ve followed – Russell (2009) and Louden (1984) – understand it, is at least relevant to fulfilling that role. Is WTT able to take on board the Ochsner studies on cognitive reappraisal? That is, would those findings fit within the WTT framework? We see no reason why they would not, though cognitive reappraisal mechanisms would likely be considered parts of the interpretative system (one of the intermediate systems) rather than perceptual processes that take in trait-relevant stimuli. That said, as should be clear from the instructions that Ochsner gave to participants in his studies, perception and interpretation are closely intertwined. What one perceives depends on the interpretative framework one uses. Both perception and interpretation bear heavily on the phronetic role of emotion regulation – a topic we will rejoin when we discuss the integration of phronesis with the interpretative system of WTT. The last of the four roles for phronesis is informing reflection on one’s life as a whole. Writing simply in terms of perception, we can see that both comprehension and intelligence have roles to play, though what is perceived as virtue-relevant stimuli could be quite complex. To see this,

84 Nancy E. Snow et al. consider how it is that we reflect on our lives as a whole. We do this by thoughtfully reviewing our own lives and decisions, often in comparison with what others have done or with what we have done in the past. So, for example, when we say, “That’s not the kind of person I am,” or “That’s not the kind of person I want to be,” we might be forming a mental comparison with someone else whom we negatively judge and from whom we want to distance ourselves, or we might be remembering another time in our lives when we were “different” people – when we thought, felt, and acted differently from how we think, feel, and act now.21 In both kinds of case, we withhold normative endorsement, and seek to put ourselves on another path. In such cases, the perceptions relevant to phronetic reflection are not necessarily external stimuli, though they might be. Witnessing a deplorable act of bullying could well prompt me to reflect, “That’s not the kind of person I want to be.” However, some stimuli that induce reflection could be internal – I might think back on my life and remember embarrassing or shameful incidents in which I behaved badly, and think to myself, “That’s not the kind of person I am.” This kind of reflection could be functioning in several ways. For example, I could be distancing myself from who I once was, denying that I now have the negative qualities I possessed in the past. The judgment of distancing entails that I no longer normatively endorse the negative qualities and bad behavior I formerly found acceptable (perhaps I didn’t even bother to think about this in the past). This is the first and essential step toward a normative endorsement of virtue. The judgment, “That’s not the kind of person I am,” is a claim to being a better self – to possessing, being committed to forming, or at least expressing the desire to form a new and better moral identity. These observations move us away from the simple point that some of the stimuli that prompt phronetic reflection on our lives as a whole are internal and not external, and into the realm of interpretation. WTT can take on board not only the point about perception of internal stimuli, but also the broader interpretative comments offered in the previous paragraph. To move more deeply into the discussion of how phronesis can be integrated with WTT, we need to turn directly to phronesis and WTT’s intermediate systems. 3.2 Phronesis and Social-Cognitive Systems (the “Intermediates”) Perception alone is not responsible for producing virtuous responses. Perceptions must be interpreted for virtuous actions and emotional responses to ensue. For WTT, interpretation is explained by adverting to five social-cognitive systems – the “intermediate” systems. These are the core systems used by WTT to explain traits. They are organized into five subsystem types: interpretative, motivational, stability-inducing, temporal, and random processes.22 Of these, the first two form the essential

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core of the trait. None of these system-types function in isolation, but instead, are an interconnected, dynamic system. A brief explanatory word about each is in order. The interpretative system consists of a range of interrelated perceptual, cognitive, and affective states, mechanisms, processes, capacities, and structures that determine the manner in which trait-relevant information is analyzed and interpreted, resulting in implications for behavior. For example, perspective-taking is a capacity located in the interpretative system. We believe that phronesis can be integrated mainly with the interpretative system, though the motivational system and possibly also the temporal system have roles to play. The motivational system consists of a range of interrelated motivational states, mechanisms, processes, capacities, and structures associated with desired and feared trait-relevant end-states. These end-states are what we desire, fear, strive toward and away from, and are committed to or against, and they create the directional impetus for trait manifestation. For example, goals and values are structures in the motivational system. The system of stability-inducing processes is a set of interrelated states, mechanisms, processes, capacities, and structures (some of which are external to the trait itself) that guide the individual toward her typical trait manifestation. It helps to establish and determine the chronic accessibility, that is, the ease and range of activation, of the trait, that contributes to its dispositional stability. For example, habits are stabilityinducing structures. The temporal system, at its most basic level, “accounts for influences of past events on the present, such as inertia or cycles” (Jayawickreme, Zachry and Fleeson 2019: 4). These influences exert consistent patterns of influence on trait-expression over time. They might be internal, such as hormonal cycles, or external, such as seasonal weather conditions. For example, people find it harder to be friendly or behave generously when exposed to extreme heat or cold (Anderson and Anderson 1984). At a higher order level of meta-cognitive processing, experiences of past and anticipation of future events exert an influence on present trait manifestation, introducing both stability and cyclical fluctuation, as when one consistently becomes depressed or angry on a particular day of the year because it is the day a loved one died. As previously observed, we believe that WTT can accommodate the five parts of phronesis and its four roles mainly through the interpretative system. It includes what Cattell (1971) called “crystallized” structures, such as propositional, episodic, and procedural (“know how”) knowledge, schemas, prototypes, scripts, roles, and episodes (Cattell 1971; Cantor 1990). These structures allow us to store past experiences and use them to perceive and process new instances of trait-relevant stimuli efficiently. It also includes what Cattell (1971) called our more “fluid” capacities for analyzing, reasoning, problem-solving, and

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perspective-taking. Included here would also be basic capacities for social cognition  – for example, emotional intelligence and “theory of mind” (Astington 2003; Goleman 2006). The interpretative system is central to how stimuli in a person’s environment are perceived as trait-relevant and interpreted as calling for trait-appropriate responses. Thus, the interpretative system would naturally encompass the parts of phronesis that we have already discussed in connection with perception: comprehension, sense, and intelligence. If so, an interpretative element is already “built into” our perception of virtuerelevant stimuli. This makes perfect sense. We do not typically receive uninterpreted stimuli – that is, stimuli of which we cannot make sense. The vast preponderance of stimuli is interpreted by us and is made intelligible to us by interpretation. This point is consistent with the views of ethicists such as Aristotle (1985) and McDowell (1979) who think that the virtuous person perceives the world in a way that is already informed by virtue. Comprehension, sense, and intelligence are essential capacities that enable us both to perceive and to interpret stimuli as virtue-relevant. We have already remarked on how these parts of phronesis facilitate perception with respect to all four phronetic roles. Each can be easily assimilated into both the crystallized knowledge structures and the fluid capacities of the interpretative system. Recall that comprehension is the ability to “read” situations, that sense is sympathy or perspective-taking, and that intelligence is a perceptual capacity akin to vision that is developed with experience and affords heightened insight into situations calling for virtue. Surely crystallized knowledge structures, such as schemas, prototypes, scripts, roles, and episodes, are the basic elements on which the development of these parts of phronesis depends. These knowledge structures are built up in our cognitive repertoire over time and with experience and provide the building blocks of knowledge that enable us to lead our lives. We are able to “read” situations and make judgments about how best to respond through our knowledge of schemas, such as that of the good father, and of scripts, such as scripts that give us knowledge of good parenting practices. We are then able to “read” a situation in which a parent is behaving well or badly toward a child. Our ability to perceive and interpret that situation as calling for a virtuous response thus depends on the knowledge structures we have built up through our life experience. These structures, of course, are not normatively neutral, but are informed by the mores of our culture. Virtuous responses should be calibrated accordingly. Similar remarks apply to sense and intelligence. We cannot have sympathy for or take the perspective of others unless we have basic knowledge of life in society, of what counts as a good or bad situation for someone to be in. Crystallized intelligence affords us this basic knowledge. Intelligence is honed by deeper life experiences, by exposure to new and different knowledge structures, or expanding experiences with familiar ones in ways that allow us to add nuance and depth

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to what we know, thereby revising our initial understanding of a script, schema, or social role, for example. It almost goes without saying at this point that whatever interpretative work is done by comprehension, sense, and intelligence is done not only in relation to crystallized knowledge structures, but also in connection with fluid capacities – analyzing, reasoning, problem-solving, and perspective-taking. Perspective-taking is directly relevant to sense, as are emotional intelligence and theory of mind. All three – perspective-taking, emotional intelligence, and theory of mind – are needed for a solid grasp of social roles, schemas, scripts, and so on, and thus, are relevant for comprehension and intelligence, as well as sense. Two parts of phronesis – deliberative excellence and cleverness – were not mentioned in connection with perception, because they have more to do with reasoning processes than with the perception of virtue-relevant stimuli. Deliberative excellence, as we’ve seen, is the ability to know the correct ends in deliberation and how to take the right steps toward them (Russell 2009: 24). Whereas phronesis as a whole allows us to grasp the global human good, deliberative excellence enables us to aim for more specific goods. Cleverness is good means–ends reasoning and can be used to pursue ends that are good, bad, or neutral (Russell 2009: 24–25). As we mentioned earlier, one can be clever without having phronesis but one cannot have phronesis without cleverness. Cleverness is the reasoning involved in the execution of a plan; when coupled with phronesis, that plan is directed toward a genuinely good end. It should be clear that both deliberative excellence and cleverness can be subsumed under the types of fluid capacities already mentioned – especially the abilities to analyze, reason, and solve problems. Perspectivetaking, emotional intelligence, and theory of mind (as well as comprehension and intelligence) provide us with accurate appraisals in the social sphere. Accurate appraisals (a sort of crystallized knowledge) are then the subject matter of deliberative excellence and cleverness, which allow us to identify good ends and appropriate and efficacious means of working toward them. According to the integrated picture we endorse, the parts of phronesis are nicely explained in terms of perception interacting with the interpretative system, and even more precisely, with the crystallized knowledge structures and fluid capacities that are parts of that system. However, before turning to a renewed examination of the four roles for phronesis in terms of the interpretative system, an important point must be made. The motivational system is another feature of the explanatory side of WTT. The motivational system includes desires to attain certain ends and to avoid others. Desired ends are interpreted as good, and aversive ends as bad. The ends in question can be morally good, morally bad, or morally neutral. WTT is capacious enough to admit, but is not limited to, the kinds of goods of interest to virtue ethics. That is, WTT can admit that

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possessors of phronesis are motivated to pursue, at the most general level, global human goods, and, at more specific levels of their own lives, goods that relate to global human goods. For example, possessors of phronesis are motivated to pursue the good of social affiliation at a very general, global level, and, at a more specific level, in their pursuit of family life, friendships, relationships with colleagues, neighbors, and fellow citizens, and so on. The pursuit of such goods is essential to neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, and phronesis enables agents to pursue these goods in reasonable, intelligent, and, barring difficulties beyond the agent’s control, largely successful ways. The point, however, is that phronesis cannot exist unless it is motivated by the desire to be virtuous and to pursue the kinds of goods that virtue enables us to attain. Consequently, we can use the WTT framework of perception and the interpretative system to explain much about phronesis, but unless we specify the motivational component (for which reference to the motivational system is required), we will have missed a necessary feature of phronesis – its integral connection with virtue and virtuous motivation. Having made this point, let us now revisit the four roles for phronesis, focusing especially on information gained from our discussion of the interpretative system and our remarks about motivation. We can now see that the guidance of virtuous action – the first role for phronesis – depends not only on our abilities to perceive virtue-relevant stimuli, but also on our abilities to deliberate about the kinds of actions we should take to respond virtuously in any given circumstance and to use cleverness to execute our plans for virtuous action. WTT’s interpretative system, incorporating as it does such factors as crystallized knowledge structures and fluid reasoning processes, offers a framework that can readily explain how deliberation and the means–ends reasoning integral to plan execution occur. The same structures and deliberative processes are at work in the second role for phronesis – its regulative role with respect to multiple virtues. Here what is deliberated about is more complex than deciding on a single action – should a person act justly or with mercy in a particular case? Should she take more pride in herself and her abilities, or be humbler? However, there is no reason to posit separate knowledge structures or reasoning capacities – the same ones identified by WTT are as applicable to these questions as to the question of what the virtuous action in any given situation is, and how best to carry it out. The same contention is apt for the third role for phronesis – emotion regulation. When considering Ochsner’s studies on cognitive reappraisal and its roles in emotion regulation, we can see that the same reasoning faculties that guide our virtuous actions and the regulation of multiple virtues in our characters have simply been applied to emotion. Cognitive reappraisal mechanisms are forms of deliberation about how best to emotionally react; they function to help us execute

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or carry out appropriate emotional responses, and thereby allow us to regulate our emotions. In all three cases, our faculties of thought remain the same; what has changed is our attentional focus, or the subject to which we apply our faculties of reasoning. For all three roles, virtuous motivation – the desire to perform the virtuous action, or to appropriately regulate multiple virtues, or to calibrate our emotional responses in accord with virtue – gives these reasoning processes their character as phronesis. Phronesis is strengthened and built up over time through its use in these various roles. We also endorse the view that the same interpretative knowledge and processes are at work with respect to the fourth role for phronesis – reflection on one’s life as a whole, and that virtuous motivation – the desire to be a virtuous person and to lead a virtuous life – shapes phronesis in this role, as it does in the other three. However, in this role for phronesis, the focus of our attention is more complex than in the other cases. We are reviewing our lives as wholes, thinking about respects in which we fall short as people and need to improve, or respects in which we’ve done well and seek to continue and sustain our strengths. This is part and parcel of the construction of a moral identity. At the outer limits of this kind of reflection, we construct temporal narratives of our lives – of how we see our lives unfolding throughout our past, during our present, and into our futures. This kind of reflective construction of a narrative identity requires sophisticated use of our interpretative reasoning capacities.23 Here we think that not only the interpretative and motivational systems, but also the temporal system, have roles to play. We have commented on the first two systems, but how does the temporal system impact the construction, through phronetic reflection, of narrative identity?24 Earlier we remarked that, at a higher order level of meta-cognitive processing, experiences of past events can exert an influence on present trait manifestation. The example we gave was a person consistently becoming depressed or angry on a particular day of the year because it is the anniversary of the death of a loved one. The sense of temporality, we believe, has important roles to play in the kind of phronetic reflection that shapes our construction of a narrative identity. Memories of past events, episodes, and even longer temporal periods can influence present reflection on who we are and who we want to become with respect to virtue. We can remember a past episode of wrongdoing with shame, and resolve to do better, or can remember ourselves at a longer interval of past time – observing upon reflection, for example, how impulsive and immature we were as a young person, and how we are calmer and more settled now. Moreover, we can imaginatively project the kind of person we want to be into the future, perhaps envisioning ourselves having the virtues we desire and living our lives accordingly. We can use that imaginative projection of ourselves to plan for more imminent future events. If we can imagine ourselves

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as more patient individuals after we retire, we might also be able to imagine ourselves being more patient now, and plan to be calmer and more patient during meetings, with friends and family, and so on. In other words, our phronetic reflections on our lives can take us back and forth through time, revisiting our past experiences with an eye to diagnosing our strengths and our weaknesses, and imagining ourselves with an enhanced moral identity into the future. These “mental time travels” enable us to construct a narrative identity and thus give shape and meaning to our lives.25 Our moral identities are, of course, central to the narrative identities we construct for ourselves.

4 Conclusion In sum, we believe that the four roles for phronesis and its five parts, as we understand them, can be readily integrated into the WTT framework. This wedding of philosophical concepts to an empirical psychological theory bodes well for the measurement of aspects of phronesis, as well as of virtue. Our discussion here moves well beyond issues of measurability, illustrating that seeking to understand philosophical concepts in terms of psychology can inspire us to think more deeply about significant issues of moral reasoning and development. Here we scratch the surface of a number of rich and complex ideas relating to our understanding of phronesis. We invite others to continue the conversation.

Notes 1. We expand on material from our forthcoming book (Wright, Warren and Snow 2021) in what follows. See also our discussion of practical wisdom in Snow, Wright and Warren (2020). 2. For more on this topic, see Russell’s (2009: p. xi) defense of “hard” virtue ethics (according to which phronesis is required for virtue), as opposed to “soft” virtue ethics (according to which it is not required). 3. Russell (2009: 20–25) believes that phronesis is actually a suite of five different virtues of the practical intellect: comprehension, sense, intelligence, deliberative excellence, and cleverness. In our forthcoming book, we interpret these as parts of phronesis. We note that what we take to be the parts of phronesis are not well understood, owing to ambiguities in the interpretation of Aristotle’s texts. Because of these imprecisions, we believe that the parts are not good candidates for measurement and left them aside in our book. Here we reverse course, in an effort to show more fully how phronesis can be integrated into WTT. 4. Our view also has affinities with that of Schwartz and Sharpe (2006), who hold that practical wisdom plays a role in: relevance – identifying the relevant virtue for the situation; conflict – adjudicating among two or more virtues that suggest quite different courses of action; and specificity – translating the virtue into appropriate action. 5. We realize that there is an impressive amount of literature on the question of whether the virtues conflict. Concerns about conflicting virtues challenge what is called the “unity of virtues” thesis or “reciprocity” thesis. This thesis,

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as held by Aristotle, maintains that the virtues are united by practical wisdom such that one cannot possess any virtue without possessing all of the others. Walker (1993), for example, disputes the reciprocity thesis on the ground that virtues can conflict. He advances the “incompatibility” thesis, according to which the capacity to have some virtues, such as truthfulness, precludes the capacity to have others, such as tact. Badhwar (1996) also disputes the reciprocity thesis, advancing the “limited unity of virtues” thesis. She argues that the virtues have only a limited unity such that they are not reciprocal across domains, and but only within domains, and denies the possibility of genuinely conflicting virtues within domains. We discuss these issues at some length in chapter four of our forthcoming book, where we advance the “integration” thesis. This is the thesis that virtues develop concomitantly in response to the circumstances of daily life. We contend that it makes better sense of the unity of virtues within character than other theses about the relation of virtues within a person’s character. By using this example, we do not mean to imply that emotions are important only when action is not an option. We simply wish to draw attention to the importance of phronesis for emotion regulation. We recognize the complexity of compassion – it is a complex bundle of affect, cognitions, motivation, and desire, and when appropriate, behavior. We recently learned of research showing that “compassion fatigue” may be better described as empathic distress fatigue (Klimecki and Singer 2012), since different brain systems are involved in empathy and compassion, and they have different correlates (Klimecki, Leiberg, Ricard and Singer 2014). Empathic concern seems to be intrinsic to compassion by signaling that a compassionate response is appropriate. But if empathy remains unchecked by phronesis – that is, if self-regulation fails to modulate one’s empathy – it may devolve into empathic distress, which predicts failures to act prosocially (Eisenberg, Fabes and Spinrad 2006). We acknowledge that when virtue becomes “second nature,” much of the emotion-regulating action of phronesis might be automatic, taking place below the level of conscious processing, and need not take a slow, deliberative form. See Russell (2009: 27–30) for a discussion of various blueprint views held by philosophers, and (2009: 27, n. 46) for a critique of Kraut (1993) and Broadie (1991). Russell’s (2009: 29–30) position is that phronesis requires that one have a conception of the good life, but not that it requires that one implement that conception of happiness through one’s actions on specific occasions. In this, he agrees with Broadie (2007: 123–126). Mentioning a good upbringing raises the difficult question of just what that is, and whether a good upbringing is even possible in the world today, especially in western industrial nations, where life is characterized by a hectic pace, fragmented relationships, and other factors that can disrupt the kind of attention that children need early in their development (see, e.g., Narvaez 2014). For examples, see Wright, Coen and Hoffmann (2015). Similarly, Cokelet and Fowers (2019) conceptualize virtues as scalar (rather than binary) traits. We note that interpreting nous as a kind of perception is one among different stances; others relate it to an ability to know the first practical principles, and thus to grasp universal truths, either by intuition or by induction from particular cases. See Russell (2009: 21–23) for discussion of various interpretations. The example is adapted from one originally used by Peter Goldie in On Personality and is later used by Snow (2010) to illustrate how virtue can be

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Nancy E. Snow et al. a form of social intelligence. In the example used by Snow (2010), there was a fourth friend who was too self-absorbed and obtuse to know what was going on. This description is not meant to suggest that only Susan’s phronesis comes into play in the situation. We assume that Susan possesses virtues, such as compassion, into which phronesis is integrated. Instead, our description is meant to highlight the roles that various aspects of phronesis play. See, for example, Fleeson and Jayawickreme (2015) and Jayawickreme and Fleeson (2017a, 2017b, and 2019). We understand the conceptual claim about the structure of phronesis (that it is unified) to be compatible with the notion that someone can excel in certain parts (e.g., sense) but falter in other parts (e.g., cleverness). Individuals with autism come to mind in particular, as they may struggle to take others’ perspectives yet come up with clever means of achieving their goals. Perhaps different people have different phronetic characters (i.e., distinct constellations of the five parts), and for different people the five parts might in fact be unified to a greater or lesser degree. For example, situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, and response modulation. Attentional deployment and response modulation in particular seem relevant to the up- and downregulation of emotions that are already activated and/or called-for by the situation. See, for example, McRae and Gross (2020). See, for example, Kral, Schuyler, Mumford, Rosenkranz, Lutz and Davidson (2018) and Lutz, Brefczynski-Lewis, Johnstone and Davidson (2008). This paragraph draws on Snow (2013: 345–346). Of course, reflection can also be more positive, involving thinking about positive exemplars and/or instances in our past when we were at our best. Such reflections would engender affirmative thoughts such as “That is the kind of person I am,” and “That is the kind of person I want to be.” These statements would also fit the claim that such reflections are normative endorsements of virtue. To avoid overly cumbersome language, we refer to these as “systems.” The system of random processes is mainly a theoretical construct, necessary for the statistical modeling of trait manifestation. We leave it aside, since it is less relevant than other systems to trait manifestation. See the work of psychologist Dan McAdams (1993, 2013), the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (1981), and the collaborative work of psychologist Jack Bauer and philosopher Peggy DesAutels (2019, 2020) for insights on narrative identity and its importance for virtue. Notably, narrative identity extends beyond the temporal system and plays a key role in the interpretative, motivational, and especially the stabilityinducing systems. See Suddendorf, Addis and Corballis (2009) and Suddendorf and Corballis (1997, 2007) for the notion of “mental time travel.” They do not relate this phenomenon to the fourth role for phronesis, as we do here. In addition, we are aware that memory and imaginative projection have roles to play in the other roles of phronesis, but think they are of special interest and importance in reflections on one’s life as a whole and the construction of one’s narrative identity.

References Anderson, C. A. and Anderson, D. C. (1984). Ambient temperature and violent crime: Tests of the linear and curvilinear hypotheses. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 91–97.

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Aristotle. (1985). The Nicomachean ethics (T. Irwin, Trans.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Ashton, M. C. and Lee, K. (2009). The HEXACO-60: A short measure of the major dimensions of personality. Journal of Personality Assessment, 91(4), 340–345. Astington, J. W. (2003). Sometimes necessary, never sufficient: False-belief understanding and social competence. In B. Repacholi and V. Slaughter (eds.), Individual differences in theory of mind: Implications for typical and atypical development (pp. 13–38). New York, NY: Psychology Press. Badhwar, N. K. (1996). The limited unity of virtue. Nous, 30(3), 306–329. Bauer, J. and DesAutels, P. (2019). When life gets in the way: Generativity and the development of non-idealized virtues in women’s life stories. Journal of Moral Education, 48(1), 126–145. Bauer, J. and DesAutels, P. (2020). Toward an integrated psychology and philosophy of good life stories. In N. E. Snow and D. Narvaez (eds.), Self, motivation, and virtue: Innovative interdisciplinary research (pp.  127–146). New York, NY: Routledge. Broadie, S. (1991). Ethics with Aristotle. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Broadie, S. (2007). Aristotle and beyond: Essays on metaphysics and ethics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cantor, N. (1990). From thought to behavior: “Having” and “doing” in the study of personality and cognition. American Psychologist, 45, 735–750. Cattell, R. B. (1971). Abilities: Their structure, growth and action. Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin. Cokelet, B. and Fowers, B. (2019). Realistic virtues and how to study them: Introducing the STRIVE-4 model. The Journal of Moral Education, 48(1), 7–26. Darnell, C., Gulliford, L., Kristjánsson, K. and Paris, P. (2019). Phronesis and the knowledge-action gap in moral psychology and moral education: A new synthesis? Human Development, 62(3), 101–129. Driver, J. (2001). Uneasy virtue. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Eisenberg, N., Fabes, R. A. and Spinrad, T. L. (2006). Prosocial development. In N. Eisenberg (Vol. Ed.), W. Damon and R. M. Lerner (Series Eds.) (eds.), Handbook of child psychology: Vol. 3. social, emotional, and personality development (6th ed., pp. 646–718). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Fleeson, W. and Jayawickreme, E. (2015). Whole trait theory. Journal of Research in Personality, 56, 82–92. Goldie, P. (2004). On personality. New York, NY: Routledge. Goleman, D. (2006). Emotional intelligence. New York, NY: Bantam. Jayawickreme, E. and Fleeson, W. (2017a). Does whole trait theory work for the virtues? In W. Sinnott-Armstrong and C. B. Miller (eds.), Moral psychology: Virtue and character (pp. 75–103). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jayawickreme, E. and Fleeson, W. (2017b). Whole trait theory can explain virtues. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong and C. B. Miller (eds.), Moral psychology: Virtue and character (pp. 121–129). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jayawickreme, E., Zachry, C. and Fleeson, W. (2019). Whole trait theory: An integrative approach to examining personality structure and process. Personality and Individual Differences, 136, 2–11. Klimecki, O. M., Leiberg, S., Ricard, M. and Singer, T. (2014). Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(6), 873–879.

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Klimecki, O. M. and Singer, T. (2012). Empathic distress fatigue rather than compassion fatigue? Integrating findings from empathy research in psychology and social neuroscience. In B. Oakley, A. Knafo, G. Madhavan and D. S. Wilson (eds.), Pathological altruism (pp.  368–383). New York: Oxford University Press. Kral, T. R. A., Schuyler, B. S., Mumford, J. A., Rosenkranz, M. A., Lutz, A. and Davidson, R. J. (2018). Impact of short- and long-term mindfulness meditation training on amygdala reactivity to emotional stimuli. NeuroImage, 181, 301–313. Kraut, R. (1993). In defense of the grand end ethics with Aristotle. Sarah Broadie. Ethics, 103(2), 361–374. Kristjánsson, K. (2018). Virtuous emotions. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Louden, R. (1984). On some vices of virtue ethics. American Philosophical Quarterly, 21, 227–236. Lutz, A., Brefczynski-Lewis, J., Johnstone, T. and Davidson, R. J. (2008). Regulation of the neural circuitry of emotion by compassion meditation: Effects of meditative expertise. PLoS ONE, 3(3), e1897. MacIntyre, A. (1981).  After virtue: A study in moral theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. McAdams, D. P. (1993). The stories we live by: Personal myths and the making of the self. New York, NY: Guilford Press. McAdams, D. P. (2013). The redemptive self: Stories Americans live by. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. McCrae, R. R. and Costa, P. T., Jr. (2006). Cross-cultural perspectives on adult personality trait development. In D. K. Mroczek and T. D. Little (eds.), Handbook of personality development (pp. 129–145). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers. McDowell, J. (1979). Virtue and reason. The Monist, 62(3), 331–350. McRae, K. and Gross, J. J. (2020). Emotion regulation. Emotion, 20(1), 1–9. Narvaez, D. (2014). Neurobiology and the development of human morality: Evolution, culture, and wisdom. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Co. Russell, D. C. (2009). Practical intelligence and the virtues. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Russell, D. C. (2014). Phronesis and the virtues: Nicomachean ethics VI. 12–13. In R. Polansky (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (pp. 203–220). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Schwartz, B. and Sharpe, K. E. (2006). Practical wisdom: Aristotle meets positive psychology. Journal of Happiness Studies: An Interdisciplinary Forum on Subjective Well-Being, 7(3), 377–395. Snow, N. (2010). Virtue as social intelligence: An empirically grounded theory. New York, NY: Routledge Press. Snow, N. (2013). ‘May you live in interesting times’: Moral philosophy and empirical psychology. Journal of Moral Philosophy, 10(3), 339–353. Snow, N.E., Wright, J. C. and Warren, M. T. (2020). Virtue measurement: Theory and applications. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 23, 277–293. https://doi. org/10.1007/s10677-019-10050-6. Suddendorf, T., Addis, D. and Corballis, M. (2009). Mental time travel and the shaping of the human mind. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 364(1521), 1317–1324.

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Suddendorf, T. and Corballis, M. C. (1997). Mental time travel and the evolution of the human mind. Genetic Social General Psychology, 123, 133–167. Suddendorf, T. and Corballis, M. C. (2007). The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans? The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30, 299–313. Walker, A. D. M. (1993). The incompatibility of the virtues. Ratio, 6(1), 44–60. Wright, J. C., Coen, O. and Hoffmann, H. (2015). On the value integration of successfully reformed ex-convicts: A comparison with moral exemplars. The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 1–19. Wright, J. C., Warren, M. T. and Snow, N. (2021). Understanding virtue: Theory and measurement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

5

Differentiating the Skills of Practical Wisdom Matt Stichter

1 Introduction Like many virtue theorists, I consider virtues to be constitutive of living a flourishing life. But, in this chapter, I draw on self-regulation theories in psychology (i.e., theories pertaining to goal setting and goal striving) to get a more in-depth perspective on the relationship between flourishing and the virtues that are constitutive of it. In terms of goal setting, presumably most people have some conception of a flourishing life, as the cultural and social environment in which we are raised already furnishes us with ideas about what it is to live well, as well as some conceptions about what counts as virtues and vices. Virtues and vices give us more concrete goals to aim at in terms of how to behave (or how not to behave) in order to flourish, and this helps us in striving to be moral. A conception of flourishing also helps us to integrate the other nonmoral goals and projects we might strive for, such that they are supportive of, or at least do not detract from, flourishing. However, even if one reliably guides one’s activities by this initial conception of a flourishing life, this is clearly not sufficient for flourishing or virtue, as one’s inherited views of these may be mistaken and actually undermine one’s attempt to flourish. Also, insofar as virtue theorists make the normative claim that people ought to acquire virtues, the virtues must be guided by a morally appropriate conception of living well – not just any conception will do. Otherwise one might be pursuing an overall corrupt conception of morality. Thus, I argue that we need to exercise practical wisdom (i.e., phronesis), in terms of making apt value judgments, in order to critically reflect on our conceptions of a flourishing life. In other words, I take the object of an exercise of practical wisdom to be one’s current conception of a flourishing life, including the conceptions of virtues that are constitutive of it, and then by extension the compatibility of other goals with that conception. However, despite having argued for a fairly narrow conception of wisdom (relative to other wisdom constructs), the kinds of refection wisdom requires may still be too varied to be the result of the exercise of a single skill, and may instead be the product of several interrelated skills.1

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Before diving into wisdom, I begin with a brief overview of my framework drawing on self-regulation theory in psychology, which covers both the considerations involved with setting goals and striving to accomplish those goals.2 I further connect this to skill acquisition, as improving one’s skillfulness is essentially a complex form of self-regulation. As I defend elsewhere the “virtue-as-skill” thesis, this approach can shed further light on the nature of skill and thereby virtue (though technically my claims about the role of wisdom in flourishing does not require adopting the skill model).3 Following that, I briefly describe how I conceptualize moral self-regulation, and then draw further connections between this account of self-regulation and the psychological research on goal pursuit and outcomes for well-being. All of these components I take to be relevant to gaining a better understanding of wisdom as a critical reflection on our conceptions of living a flourishing life.

2 Self-Regulation – Goal Setting4 Self-regulation can be broken down into two main phases of goal setting and goal striving, where a goal is a desired or valued state of affairs, which one works to achieve. Goals can also include adopting standards of behavior that one wants to live by.5 As such, some goals may be temporary, while others are enduring (e.g., wanting to be a certain kind of person).6 Crucially, goals have an important affective dimension, as psychologist Albert Bandura (1999: 176) explains, because “self-regulatory control is achieved by creating incentives for one’s own actions and by anticipative affective reactions to one’s own behavior depending on how it measures up to personal standards.” In terms of self-reactions, achieving a goal is usually a source of self-satisfaction, while failing to do so can lead to self-censure. Furthermore, the strength of the self-reaction, in terms of the motivation it provides for self-regulation, depends in part on how the goal is valued. Goals that are highly valued can provide stronger affective self-reactions, and thus stronger motivation to self-regulate, compared to goals that are only minimally valued or valued for impersonal, externally imposed reasons.7 As Sheldon and Elliot (1999: 495), in their research on goal striving and well-being, point out: “Goals are unique cognitive structures, in that they are invested with motivational energy and have a substantial degree of functional autonomy.” The value that a goal has (i.e., its desirability), however, is not the only factor to affect motivation. The above assumes a situation where you believe that the desired outcome can be achieved by acting. If instead someone believes that they are not capable of achieving the desired outcome, she will have little motivation to self-regulate. As Bandura (1999: 180–181) notes: Among the self-referent thoughts that influence human motivation, affect and action, none is more central or pervasive than people’s

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Matt Stichter judgments of personal efficacy. . . . Unless people believe that they can produce desired results by their actions, they have little incentive to act or to persevere in the face of difficulties.

“Perceived self-effcacy” then refers to people’s beliefs about what they think they are capable of achieving, and self-effcacy beliefs can strengthen or undermine one’s motivation to engage in self-regulation. Thus, goal setting is both a matter of perceived desirability and feasibility. It’s also important to note that many of our goals are highly complex or fairly abstract, that is, superordinate (for instance, “become a philosopher”), such that it will be difficult to strive for them without having more context-specific, subordinate goals to aim at (for instance, “apply to graduate school”), and this gives rise to a hierarchical organization of these connected goals.8 This could happen because the goal is complex and requires many intermediary steps to accomplish (as is common, e.g., when trying to master a skill) or because the goal is abstract and thus requires a more concrete specification to act on.9 Furthermore, the relationship between these different levels on a goal hierarchy need not be merely one of means to an end, as sometimes the lower order goals provide the constitutive elements of a higher order goal. For example, this is the way many virtue theorists view the relationship between virtues and living well. Virtues are not merely means to the end of living well, but rather they are constitutive of what it is to live well. Finally, it should be noted that many of our goals are shared with others, such that our striving is done in concert with others.10 This is true of many nonmoral goals (e.g., goals of an organization) and moral goals (e.g., achieving the demands of justice).

3 Self-Regulation – Goal Striving Once you have committed yourself to realizing a goal, this marks a transition from goal setting to goal striving. This distinction is important as deciding whether to commit to a goal in the first place, or later whether to maintain commitment to that goal, requires a consideration of somewhat distinct factors from the activities associated with striving to achieve a goal (e.g., planning and acting). In short, in phases of goal setting you are undecided about your goal commitments, whereas phases of goal striving assume a decided goal commitment that you are now trying to realize. In goal striving, you’ll likely start planning what steps to take to achieve that goal, whether this means trying to figure out what needs to be done, how you are going to do it, when and where you will take action, and so on. Switching from the setting of a specific goal into striving to achieve it takes us from the vertical hierarchy of goal organization into a horizontal (or temporal) perspective on action, which is represented by the Rubicon model of action phases. Action phase theory separates goal setting and

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striving into four distinct phases: (1) choosing a goal to commit to; (2) planning how to achieve the goal; (3) taking action to implement the plan; and (4) evaluating one’s progress with respect to the goal (and, if need be, the appropriateness of the goal itself) in light of incoming feedback. Phases 1 and 4 are concerned with goal setting (or “motivation”), whereas phases 2 and 3 are concerned with goal striving (or “volition”). The first phase involves what I’ve already discussed regarding the initial setting of goals. It matters here how the goals are spelled out, as more specific and proximate goals (as compared to vague or distant goals) allow for better planning before acting, and better feedback after acting. The second phase is essentially a planning phase, wherein you are trying to figure out what needs to be done to achieve the goal, how you are going to do it, when and where you will take action, and so on. The third phase is that of taking action. In this phase, one of the things you have to deal with is potential conflicts with other goal commitments that you have. Situations can afford opportunities to advance more than one of our goals, and often it will be the case that promotion of one goal requires bypassing opportunities to pursue another goal. This can give rise to the need for self-control, in terms of not getting derailed from a more valued goal (e.g., “apply to graduate school”) when it conflicts with a less valued but more immediately rewarding or easy-to-execute goal (e.g., “watching another show on Netflix”). The fourth phase is a consideration of feedback on both your goal commitment and the strategies you took to realize that goal. While this phase has potential implications for future planning, as success supports taking the same strategy in the future while failure will require some replanning, what is primary in this phase is a return to concerns about motivation and goal setting. Having taken action to implement your goal provides you with new information to consider, in terms of feedback on both the desirability and feasibility of the goal. So in this phase you will be questioning whether to maintain your goal commitment, based on whether you achieved it and, if so, whether it had the outcome you hoped for (i.e., desirability), or if not, whether you could do things differently next time (i.e., feasibility). Finally, if you have accomplished a subgoal, it may be time to replace it with a new (and likely more difficult) subgoal that gets you closer to achieving a desired superordinate goal.11 With this overview of self-regulation in place, we can see how skill acquisition is a sophisticated form of self-regulation, as skills enable us to achieve desired goals in domains of high complexity.12 Skills not only help us in goal striving, but often skill development becomes a constitutive goal in itself (e.g., aspiring to be a great writer, musician, or chess grandmaster).13 In committing yourself to acquiring a skill, you begin internalizing standards about what counts as a good performance, which then guide your ongoing efforts to learn the skill. Improving your level of skill requires not the mere repetition of things you already know how

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to do, but continually striving to do things that you currently cannot do, and this is referred to as “deliberate practice.” Deliberate practice requires having specific goals in mind for improvement, rather than the vaguer goal of “getting better.” There need to be specific aspects of your performance that you go about planning how to improve, which then structures the kind of practice in which you engage.14 As you engage in deliberate practice, you seek out feedback about your performance, in the hopes of identifying and correcting errors. You keep monitoring your progress as you practice. If you do not seem to be progressing, you may need to redesign your practice sessions. If instead you keep up a steady progression, then at some point you achieve your current subgoal. At that point, it is time to set out to strive to accomplish the next, more difficult subgoal. This is how you incrementally improve your current level of skillfulness, such that you can gradually master a domain of great complexity.

4 Moral Self-Regulation The self-regulation framework described earlier also applies to specifically moral goals and standards.15 People have moral standards (justified or not) that they have internalized while growing up, and which to some extent now guide their self-regulation.16 How well such standards can guide us depends on a variety of factors. One such factor is the activation of self-sanctioning processes: insofar as we feel that an action violates our moral standards, this will trigger self-sanctions – either helping to deter the action ahead of time or triggering feelings of guilt or shame about it after the fact (and presumably a different course of action in the future). Likewise, when we feel that we are keeping to our moral standards, our actions can provide us with a positive self-evaluation. These positive or negative self-evaluations provide further motivation to engage in future acts of self-regulation. In addition, how well such standards can guide us also depends on how those moral values rank relative to one’s other goals. For example, one would expect problems to arise if moral standards are viewed as merely externally imposed standards, for which failure to comply is punished. As Daniel Batson (2017: 35) points out: “Learned in this way, such standards are apt to create obligations rather than desires – oughts rather than wants. . . . They are accepted as self-standards but not as part of the core sense of self.” This sort of approach is unlikely to lead people to place much desirability on the maintenance of moral standards. This problem can also arise due to inaccurate self-knowledge regarding one’s own values and interests, wherein instead of adopting goals that match up well to these, as Sheldon and Elliot (1999: 483) point out, one “may instead choose goals dictated by others, by transient impulses or incentives, or by introjected ‘shoulds’ or ‘oughts.’” The consequence of this, they argue, is

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that “Because external and introjected goals tend to be less representative of enduring interests and values, the volitional strength (Gollwitzer 1990) behind them is likely to fade when obstacles are encountered” (Sheldon and Elliot 1999: 484). Usually, a highly desirable goal can sustain goal striving even when feasibility is low, but the less desirable the goal, the more likely obstacles will derail goal striving.

5 Goals and Well-Being Much work has been done in psychology to highlight the connections between goal pursuit and well-being.17 This research shows that goal progress and goal attainment promote well-being, but also, importantly, that some goals have much stronger associations with well-being than others. This often has to do with the different factors affecting the desirability of goals. For example, goals that one pursues autonomously, wherein one endorses the goal internally rather than feeling it to be imposed by some external authority, are viewed as more desirable. In addition, some goals seem directly related to satisfying important human needs, such that their satisfaction brings greater well-being.18 Moreover, goals that represent enduring values with which we identify, such as important personal or social projects, produce more well-being in their attainment due to their high desirability.19 Relatedly, Fowers et al. distinguish between a goal for which the means to achieving it are separable from the goal itself (i.e., an instrumental relationship between means and goal), such as having multiple means to get to a specific destination in the city where what matters primarily is efficiency (e.g., walking, bus, subway, taxi); versus goals for which the actions taken to achieve them are inseparable from the goals themselves (i.e., a constitutive relationship). A paradigm case of this is how many virtue ethicists typically see virtuous activity as partially constituting what it is to live well.20 Some of these factors are also accounted for in Sheldon and Elliot’s (1999: 482) work on the self-concordance of goal-systems, wherein concordance is “the degree to which stated goals express enduring interests and values.” When goals are not concordant, this affects both goal striving (i.e., reducing goal motivation and thus progress) and the outcomes of goal attainment (i.e., not as fulfilling). By contrast, there’s a potentially self-reinforcing cycle in adopting more “concordant” goals. Sheldon and Elliot (1999: 483–484) explain that “Because the developing interests and deep-seated values that such goals express are relatively enduring facets of personality, self-concordant goals are likely to receive sustained effort over time.” So self-concordant goals are more desirable, providing more sustained motivation, leading one to put more effort into striving for such goals, and this leads to higher rates of goal progress and attainment. Thus, self-concordant goals provide higher well-being outcomes both because that cycle leads to higher rates of progress and attainment

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and because there’s a more substantial contribution to well-being from having a more desirable goal satisfied. Questions of self-concordance, and the other distinctions in goal adoption, would then be of great relevance with respect to how people internalize moral goals, and to whether they are likely to be motivated to follow through on them.

6 Wisdom and Flourishing21 Within this framework of self-regulation, there are two important roles for wisdom. First, we need a critical reflection on our inherited moral standards, to try to ensure that we’re being guided by justified moral standards. That is, by the time we reach adulthood and are cognitively developed enough to engage in reflection, we have already inherited moral standards and conceptions of living well from our cultural and social context (e.g., including parents, religion, community, friends, social media, cultural norms), which guide us to some extent. However, we will have to critically reflect on them to know whether we ought to be guided by these standards and conceptions, or whether they stand in need of revision. Furthermore, insofar as our conceptions of living well are socially embedded, this would be a reflection carried out with others. For example, revising conceptions of justice or fairness would be a topic for communities, not just individuals. Second, as noted previously in the discussion of well-being, it will be important that we reflect on the goals we’ve set for ourselves (including our constitutive goals, such as virtues), and the activities we’re engaged in, to see if they reflect (or are at least are consistent with) our values. In other words, it is important that our values and activities are integrated, both for reasons of consistency and for well-being outcomes. Furthermore, I will argue that many aspects traditionally associated with wisdom can already be found in the workings of self-regulation and the exercise of skill. I suggest that we ought to take a “bottom-up” approach to conceptualizing wisdom, such that we see what generic knowledge, basic self-regulatory abilities, and virtuous skills each contribute to living well, such that we can see what specific role is left for wisdom to play.22 What I take to be unique to exercises of wisdom is this reflection on one’s current conception of what it is to live well (i.e., flourishing), which includes the goals that are constitutive of living well (i.e., the virtues), and by extension the compatibility of other goals with that conception. I suggest this approach in contrast to starting with the concept of a wise person in a “top-down” fashion, insofar as it incorporates too wide of an array of characteristics (knowledge, capacities, attitudes, skills, dispositions, strategies, etc.) in a conceptualization of wisdom, such that it will make it difficult to isolate what contribution wisdom specifically makes to living well. A related problem is that a top-down approach can

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bring with it a tendency to postulate new competencies for achieving wise behavior, and this risks obscuring existing psychological mechanisms that may already account for what is being attributed to wisdom.23 Instead we need a conception of wisdom that is specific enough so we know how to train it, how to engage in deliberate practice with it, and when someone is failing to live well then we can more easily identify whether it’s actually a problem with someone’s wisdom development, rather than with their self-regulatory abilities, their knowledge base, or skill development. For example, to some extent, I agree with Stephen Grimm’s (2015) approach in defining wisdom in terms of knowing how to live well.24 He further breaks down this knowledge into three components: (1) Knowledge of what is good or important for well-being. (2) Knowledge of one’s standing, relative to what is good or important for well-being. (3) Knowledge of a strategy for obtaining what is good or important for well-being. (Grimm 2015: 140) In one sense, I’m in complete agreement, as all of these would be necessary for someone to be wise in practice. However, these represent merely the three basic functions of any goal-directed system – including a system as simple as a thermostat (which has a goal, a mechanism to check for discrepancies between the goal state and the current state, and a mechanism to move toward the goal state). Of course, I don’t think there are wise thermostats, but what we have here is a difference in the content of the goal, and as a result far greater complexity in achieving each of three conditions. So this three-fold distinction, while relevant, does not focus on wisdom’s specifc contribution to living well. Grimm’s (2015: 145) second condition, as he puts it, “helps to explain the significance of the Delphic admonition to ‘Know Thyself.’” Selfinquisitiveness, in particular, could be an especially important epistemic virtue.The reason for this is its fundamental role in self-regulation broadly. In order to self-regulate effectively, you need to know a fair amount about yourself (strengths, weaknesses, preferences, biases, goals, limitations, etc.), for what one often has to regulate are one’s own thoughts, feelings, responses, and so on. Furthermore, accurate self-knowledge helps one address questions of desirability (given one’s preferences) and feasibility (given one’s abilities and limitations) with respect to goals. However, a virtue of self-inquisitiveness would still be distinct in its operation from wisdom. With regard to his third condition, we can again draw on the distinction between goal setting and goal striving. In discussing conditions 1 and 3, Grimm (2015: 145) claims that “a wise person knows, not just which possibilities are especially good or valuable, but also how to realize these

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possibilities. A wise person has effective strategies, at least of a general kind, for achieving his or her ends.” While I agree on this characterization of a wise person, it doesn’t follow that knowing what is good and having effective strategies are both the result of exercising wisdom. In other words, what I want to draw attention to in Grimm’s distinguishing of these two components is that the former (i.e., knowing the ends) is a matter of goal setting, whereas the latter (i.e., knowing effective means) is a matter of goal striving. These phases then involve two very different sorts of concerns (despite some overlap in content), and each will require different types of knowledge and skills to do well. Thus, I do not think it is the work of a singular capacity (i.e., to both know what is good and to know effective strategies). As a result, I would reserve the term “wisdom” for Grimm’s first component of knowing what is good. I view knowing how to achieve such goods as skillfulness in the moral virtues, as becoming skillful is a process of acquiring the knowledge of how to achieve a desired goal in a complex domain.25 The relevance of the distinction between goal setting and goal striving with respect to wisdom is also important for Jason Swartwood’s (2013) argument that wisdom is an expert skill.26 Swartwood characterizes wisdom generically as a kind of understanding, specifcally understanding how one should act all things considered. Swartwood (2013: 515) defnes this kind of “understanding” in terms of abilities to identify what features of the situation are most relevant to respond to, knowing what response is then called for, and knowing strategies for overcoming obstacles. Skill acquisition also involves this kind of learning how to act well, and in practice requires a lot of self-regulating abilities. So here we agree at least that knowing how to act well in a domain requires these abilities, and that we should expect acting well in the moral domain to require the same.27 However, all of this is captured already by self-regulation and skill, so we’re not yet describing anything unique to wisdom. Swartwood further draws on the recognition-primed model of decisionmaking, which tries to explain how extensive past experience allows skilled decision makers to recognize “the type of situation this is, what to expect from the situation (expectancies), suitable goals, typical courses of action (COAs), and relevant cues” (Ross et al. 2006: 406). Swartwood (2013: 525) draws on an example of firefighters to illustrate how this works in practice, given that firefighters have to balance multiple goals (such as putting out fires, rescuing people, preventing property damage), stating that: Some of these more specifc goals compete with each other: a frefghter will sometimes have to decide, qua frefghter, between securing someone’s safety and getting the fre under control. Thus expert decision makers in areas of complex choice and challenging performance (including both frefghting and all-things-considered

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decisions) will often have to specify which particular goal in a situation constitutes the supreme end of their domain. This response does show that much of what has been attributed to wisdom can be found in skill, insofar as some skills involve an attempt to balance multiple goals. However, what’s being described here is all taking place in the context of goal striving. Firefghters have a superordinate goal of “combating fres well,” and in the goal hierarchy there will be multiple goals that constitute what it is to fght fres well (such as those mentioned by Swartwood – stop the fre from spreading, save innocent lives, prevent property damage, etc.). The challenge posed to frefghters (and of course others working in complex domains) is that these subordinate goals have to be balanced against one another relative to the particular context at the time of action. You are going to have to, at the very least, prioritize which goals to accomplish frst or to devote more resources to achieving. This contextual decision to “specify which particular goal in a situation constitutes the supreme end” takes place during the action phase (phase 3) and is a volitional concern about how best to adhere to one’s preexisting goal commitments in the situation. It does not involve a reexamination of one’s goal commitments, as it is still a question of how best to achieve one’s existing goals in the moment. In other words, in specifying the particular goal to pursue in a situation qua the practice of frefghting, the frefghter is not wondering “do frefghters really need to save lives” or “do I really want to be a frefghter?”28 Wisdom, by contrast, requires refection on our values, goals, and practices, not on how to balance existing goals in particular situations (which is going to be the work of other virtuous skills). Wisdom as I am describing it here is a matter of goal setting in the frst action phase, as well as the fourth phase of refection after acting – the two phases concerned with goal commitment and motivation. You are determining what goals to set for yourself, what those goals consist in (such as setting more proximal subgoals that, e.g., determine what living well more specifcally consists in), and how valued those goals are relative to your other goal commitments.29 Daniel C. Russell (2009: 80) makes a similar claim as Swartwood, in that wisdom is about making indeterminate ends determinant in specifc situations, such as “What would be benevolent in this case?” Or in other words, wisdom is about specifying the goal in a particular situation (as in “this is what counts as benevolent”), rather than the details of how to achieve the goal (such as fguring out how one can best go about doing the act that counts as benevolent). This way of putting it sounds like Swartwood’s two aspects of understanding; so in the firefighter example, it is one thing to decide that securing someone’s safety takes highest priority in the situation, and another to fgure out how best to go about

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securing that person’s safety. Russell (2009: 329) seems to be suggesting as much when he claims that an exercise of wisdom is one that “specifes the hitting of that goal in a way that takes the various goals or ‘targets’ of the other virtues into account in an overall way,” which is similar to how the frefghter has to take into account the other goals of controlling the fre and reducing property damage. In addition, when referencing Aristotle, Russell (2009: 79) says that “the physician does not deliberate (obviously) about whether her mark is to heal her patient, nor, yet, about what medicines or procedures to use, but frst about what constitutes healing in the case at hand.” So we see with these examples that skills can also involve making judgments about what counts as the determinant end in a specifc situation, in the way described by Russell and Swartwood. But again, this is different from the distinction I am defending here, where what is unique about wisdom is that it involves identifying which ends constitute living well, rather than what constitutes achieving those ends in specifc situations. With the latter, you are trying to apply the conceptions of virtue you already have and if necessary to make them more determinant to the specifc circumstances you are acting in now (during goal striving). But with wisdom, it is a refection that takes place during goal setting (before or after action). Granted, Russell in his overall account does make a place for getting the right goals and separates this from specifying goals in particular situations. He (2009: 375) notes that there is another sense in which we construct ends besides making indeterminate ends determinant in particular contexts, which is that we can choose to adopt certain ends through refection on what living well consists in. It is this latter sense that I’m arguing characterizes the specific role of wisdom, whereas the previous sense of making ends more determinant in particular contexts is part of skillfulness in general (and thus the function of moral virtues with respect to the moral domain). Finally, the exercise of wisdom should presumably also be accompanied by changing one’s behavior or practices to be consistent with revisions in one’s goals. This is a challenge in itself, and is related to a problem referred to as the “knowledge–action gap” with respect to acting morally, and has been discussed by a number of researchers in moral psychology.30 However, this form of personal transformation will require abilities beyond that of wisdom, such as having effective self-regulation skills, as well as some degree of the relevant intellectual and moral skills. In other words, what is important to emphasize here is that those other elements of selfregulation and skill are not part of the exercise of wisdom itself. While those other elements are needed to act in accordance with wisdom, they also have separate functions independent of the exercise of wisdom.31

7 The Skill(s) of Wisdom So far my main goal has been to get clearer about what essentially characterizes wisdom. But I’m leaving it open exactly what skills might be

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needed for people to be able to express wisdom – that is, to aptly reflect on their conception of living well, the constitutive ends of it, and whether one’s other goals are consistent with it. I take it that until we’re able to get a more concrete understanding of what mechanisms actually help to shape the kind of reflection and integration needed for living well, we may have to withhold judgment for now as to whether wisdom is a singular skill or instead requires a set of interrelated skills. However, one concern I have with conceptualizing wisdom as a singular skill is whether it is specific enough to generate the kind of feedback one would need in order to improve one’s skillfulness in it. In other words, even narrowing the scope of wisdom as I have done so far, having the target of wisdom being knowing how to live well is still fairly abstract, and it won’t necessarily be easy to get feedback as to whether your reflections on living well have led you to change in ways that actually get you closer to your goal. Feedback from changing your priorities in life may be a long time in coming. Just as we need to think in terms of moral virtues as constitutive ends of living well, so too we may need to think in terms of there being a set of intellectual virtues that are constitutive of expressing wisdom. This is, I take it, at the very least a concern we need to take seriously when thinking of skillfulness in expressing wisdom. Another reason fueling this suspicion comes from a further distinction in how I’ve characterized exercises of wisdom so far. There are a couple of aspects of exercising wisdom that look like they can be done even when one keeps one’s conception of living well fixed. Both fleshing out the constitutive ends of living well (in terms of shaping your conceptions of the moral virtues), and testing your other goals and projects for consistency with these ends involve holding (temporarily) your conception of living well as fixed. That’s not to deny that the flow of feedback can go the other way, as a kind of “reflective equilibrium.” It’s just that someone can be reflective in the sense of actively trying to figure out how to better live up to their conception of living well, and striving to integrate their other goals and projects with this conception, without actually questioning their received view of living well.32 This exercise of wisdom is still crucial for living well and is still a matter of goal setting, but lacks the aspect of critical reflection on one’s inherited moral values and beliefs about living well. In terms of goal setting, presumably most people already have “living well” as a superordinate goal, and the social environment in which you are raised likely furnishes you with one or more conceptions of what it is to live well. In that sense, some of the subordinate goals on that goal hierarchy are also already feshed out. However, consistently applying this inherited conception of living well is clearly not sufficient for virtue, as one could be an exemplar with respect to an overall corrupt conception of morality. This is why virtue has to incorporate wisdom, so that there is some critical refection on one’s moral standards.33 Otherwise we could not make the normative claim that people ought to acquire virtues, as

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there would be no constraint on what conception of morality those moral skills would be realizing. So a central (though different) role of wisdom must be a critical reflection and revision of one’s current conception of living well.34 Thus, I suspect that there might be at least two distinct skills required for expressing wisdom.35 Another example of thinking of wisdom as involving multiple intellectual skills comes from Valerie Tiberius’s (2013) account of what she calls “wise refection,” which is a form of refection that helps us solve questions of value in an appropriate way. Two methods she recommends for wise refection are imagination and perspective taking, whereby we can try to picture what things will be like for us if we choose one way or another or put ourselves in the shoes of other people to see what things are like from their perspective. (Tiberius 2013: 233) I take it that critical refection on an existing conception of living well and perspective-taking (perhaps also imagination) in regards to other ways of living are separate skills, such that we might need multiple intellectual skills to refect on our conceptions of living well.36 While I have ended with a more speculative discussion, hopefully in highlighting what is unique to wisdom, I have drawn attention to that which requires more research.

Notes 1. While I do not assume that there is a single correct conception of flourishing, as flourishing depends on both subjective and objective features, critical refection should still enable us to separate out better from worse conceptions. Furthermore, reflection on our conceptions of flourishing and virtues, and the value of the activities we are engaged with, cannot be carried out in complete isolation from the social, political, legal, and economic circumstances in which we find ourselves. These contexts play a role in shaping our views of flourishing and virtues, as well as having a material impact on our well-being, and so awareness of the impact of those social structures must also be part of our critical reflection. This more robust form of phronesis is of crucial importance given the social dimensions of any flourishing human life. 2. Self-regulation is thus much broader in scope than the concept of “selfcontrol,” which is merely one aspect of self-regulation that can occur during goal striving. 3. For an overview, see Stichter (2017). 4. This article draws from chapters in Stichter, Matt, The Skillfulness of Virtue: Improving Our Moral and Epistemic Lives, Cambridge University Press (2018), reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press © Cambridge University Press. 5. Control theory, or cybernetics, has long studied the processes involved with goal-oriented systems, including in machines and in animals (as goals can

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6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

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be the result of programming or instinct, as well as choice). The basic stages to any form of regulation involve having: (1) a goal; (2) a representation of the current state affairs; (3) a way to compare (1) and (2) to see if the goal is currently being met; and (4) if the goal is not being met, there is an action the system can take to bring the current state of affairs closer to the goal (and the system must also repeat stages [2] and [3] to know when the goal has been achieved). Of course, those are just the most basic elements of a goal-directed system, and more complex goals and systems will add additional layers of processes to this initial picture, as I will go on to describe. Valerie Tiberius (2018), in her account of well-being, refers to such enduring goals as “values.” It’s worth noting that the affective reactions are a form of information about whether you are maintaining your standards, and can help guide action in at least two important ways. First, anticipation of violating a personal standard can trigger feelings of self-censure ahead of time, like in feeling a guilty conscience when contemplating an act that would violate a moral standard, which can then help us to regulate our actions by both alerting us to the violation and giving us a disincentive to go through with that action. Second, the feelings of self-censure after we have acted in violation of a standard (i.e., guilt or shame) can also bring the violation to our attention, and motivate us to do better in the future. Of course, it doesn’t always work out this way in practice, as there are many cognitive mechanisms that interfere with these processes. This is different from a consideration of how valued the goal is (which involves a comparison between goals on different goal hierarchies –e.g., goals involving academic success might clash with goals of having fun). In this sense, you want to be looking at subgoals that are more concrete for feedback, rather than trying to see how the act you’re about to take contributes to the most abstract level on the goal hierarchy. For example, you should think in terms of whether telling a hard truth to your friend is compatible with honesty and kindness, rather than thinking in terms of whether doing so would allow you to judge that you had lived well when you’re on your death bed. Or to use a skill example, a player in a game who is trying to decide what move to make next is probably not going to be well served by thinking in terms of which move right now will most contribute to her eventually getting inducted into the hall of fame. Thanks to Blaine Fowers for pushing this point. The presentation of these phases in temporal order, where one sets goals and then strives for them (and where that’s divided into four distinct phases), is just frequently how things work out. One can jump around between the phases in a different order. Furthermore, we can sometimes strive toward imprecise goals, where the striving actually helps us to get clearer on our goals. It is important to note that a skill necessarily involves some flexibility in how one goes about achieving the outcome to cope with changes in one’s environment (which is part of what makes the domain complex), as well as a broad view of the outcome (such as in learning how to speak a language, rather than memorizing a single phrase). So not all acquired abilities are necessarily skills (e.g., learning to tie your shoes). The need to acquire sophisticated competencies such as skills arises when dealing with complex issues, since the skills enable one to handle the complexity by progressively developing one’s abilities (via deliberate practice). As such, my view is similar to that of Ellen Fridland (2014), as she claims that “skills as the subclass of abilities, which are characterized by the fact that they are refined or developed as a result of effortful attention and control to the skill itself.”

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13. So skills can be sources of intrinsic, rather than merely instrumental, value. Also, setting out to behave skillfully as a goal will, like all goals, furnish motivation to achieve and maintain that goal. This is relevant to those who might see skills as lacking a motivational component, which is sometimes cited by those who reject the idea that virtues can be conceptualized as skills. 14. See Horn and Masunaga (2006: 601). 15. I resist postulating new types of competencies for specifically moral selfregulation whenever possible. 16. It is important to note that moral self-regulation only requires having some moral standards or other to conform to, rather than necessarily having the correct moral standards. So, by “moral standards” we do not intend to set up a contrast here with “immoral standards.” In this sense, everybody has some moral standards that guide self-regulation, even if they are corrupt or unjustifiable. It would then be part of the role of practical wisdom (phronesis) to help guide reflection on what moral standards we ought to be adopting as goals (or in other words, helping to shape our conception of a flourishing life and the virtues that are constitutive of it). 17. For the purposes of this chapter, I am just going to focus on connections drawn between goal pursuit and some accounts of well-being, as discussing implications for all the rival accounts of well-being would be beyond the scope of this chapter. 18. On this point, Fowers et al. (2010: 141) state that “Of particular interest, Self-Determination Theory differentiates between the intrinsic and extrinsic content of goals. SDT investigators have consistently found that stronger endorsement of extrinsic goals (usually stipulated as financial success, social recognition, and physical attractiveness) is negatively related to well-being and positively associated with anxiety, depression, narcissism, and symptoms of physical illness. In contrast, the more participants espoused intrinsic goals (usually stipulated as personal growth, interpersonal intimacy, and societal contribution), the greater their subjective well-being.” 19. Bedford-Petersen et al. (2018) propose that “most conceptions of well-being can agree that well-being involves success in one’s personal projects and that personal projects should be a central construct for well-being assessments.” They also found that “Success in current personal projects predicted not only the most commonly considered types of well-being in psychology, satisfaction with life and lack of negative affect (though not presence of positive affect); it also predicted the subjective sense of flourishing, meaning in life and purpose in life.” 20. Fowers et al. (2010) draw on Aristotle’s notion of Eudaimonia in connection with constitutive goal activity. They claim that “Aristotle suggested that constitutive activity is necessary for eudaimonic well-being, but that both instrumental and constitutive activity can contribute to hedonic wellbeing. This suggests a model in which eudaimonic and hedonic well-being form two different aspects of living well. Several studies have documented a two-dimensional structure of well-being comprised of a meaning or growth dimension and a positive affect dimension” (143). 21. With kind permission from the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, this chapter draws on my article: Stichter, Matt, “Practical Skills and Practical Wisdom in Virtue,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 94:3 (2016), 435–448, copyright © Australasian Association of Philosophy, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com on behalf of Australasian Association of Philosophy. 22. For example, I am tempted to think that there’s actually no role left over for a putative virtue like integrity to play, once we understand self-regulation,

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even though I think it still makes sense to talk of people having or lacking integrity – but as a commentary on their ability to self-regulate. Daniel Lapsley (2019) recently made this kind of critique about Darnell et  al.’s (2019) recent claim that a neo-Aristotelian understanding of phronesis (i.e., practical wisdom) can overcome the knowledge–action gap and furthermore can likely be operationalized as a multicomponent construct. Lapsley (2019) argues that they mostly ignore the contributions of socialcognitive theory (and other psychological theories) to this endeavor, and in reply Lapsley argues that “For phronesis to be treated seriously as a psychological construct it will need to show that what it explains (and how it does so) has advantages over extant psychological theory.” As such, I also agree with Grimm (2015) that there’s not a different form of “theoretical” wisdom – though I would resist his move to say that there is a derivative form of wisdom present in other skill domains, as this is just a matter of having expertise. Furthermore, I think this approach also preserves an important distinction for Aristotle between two types of intellectual virtues – phronesis (practical wisdom) and techne (cleverness, or expertise). See Swartwood (2013). De Caro et al. (2018) have also made a similar argument. According to Darnell et al. (2019) this seems to be represented by the “Constitutive function: this is the ability, and eventually cognitive excellence, which enables an agent to perceive what the salient features of a given situation are from an ethical perspective, and to see what is required in a given situation as reason(s) for responding in certain ways. In the phronimoi this means that, after having noted a salient moral feature of a concrete situation calling for a response, they will be able to weigh different considerations and see that, say, courage is required when the risk to one’s life is not overwhelming but the object at stake is extremely valuable, or that honesty is required when one has wronged a friend.” This does sound like it takes place in the goal-striving phase, so in that respect I would not label it as wisdom. Furthermore, it’s ambiguous as to whether the “constitutive” function applies only when there’s only one salient feature of a situation – such that you see the “salient moral feature” and then respond to it. Though they might engage in this kind of refection after a difficult day on the job. According to Darnell et al. (2019), the “integrative” function appears to operate in goal setting: “Integrative function: this component of phronesis involves integrating different components of a good life, especially in dilemmatic situations where different ethically salient considerations or virtues appear to be in conflict . . . it is she who will be best-placed to weigh such considerations in a way that manifests due concern for all of them and to integrate them alongside everything else that she deems valuable in life overall. This is what the integrative function of phronesis enables one to do.” Integration appears to involve a refinement of what one’s goals are – say, with respect to what conception of honesty (or compassion) one is trying to live up to, in order to settle a conflict between goals. But the situation-specific aspect of it is then misplaced, because that would be operative in the moment of dealing with some concrete situation. Situations may be complex and throw a curveball into one’s attempt to balance goals, such as with Swartwood’s firefighter example, but that takes a different skill set to address than refining one’s conceptions of virtues and living well. See Darnell et al. (2019).

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31. It’s worth noting again here that it’s part of self-regulation in general to be motivated to take steps to get closer to a goal (or desired state of affairs). Factors of desirability and feasibility affect the motivation to self-regulate with respect to a particular goal, including moral goals. These considerations should be central for addressing the so-called “knowledge–action gap” with respect to acting morally. But in that sense, I suspect that there isn’t actually a unique gap with respect to acting morally. That is, there’s nothing special about moral self-regulation that should cause a knowledge–action gap that couldn’t also occur with respect to nonmoral goals. Any gap is likely the result of a failure of more basic self-regulatory factors, rather than the lack of a special moral capacity for acting on moral knowledge. Perhaps I’m a bit cynical, but I suspect that part of the problem here is that while people seem to set moral goals for themselves (e.g., “be honest”), they are likely to leave it at having set a mere goal intention, without further setting implementation intentions on how best to achieve that goal, or otherwise treating the goal as complex enough to require skill acquisition and thus practice. Or worse, moral goals may be viewed as external obligations to fulfill, rather than desired for themselves, in the way Batson suggested. 32. I wouldn’t be surprised if people are more resistant to revising their conception of living well than the other two related aspects, as this may be more threatening to their identity. 33. Even if there is not one singular correct set of moral standards, critical refection should enable us to separate out better from worse standards. 34. I say “part” because wisdom also has a role to play in evaluating the ends of various nonmoral practices, to see if they are ends worth pursuing given one’s conception of living well. 35. Darnell et al. (2019) discuss a conception of living well as a “blueprint” and make a similar point about not raising the standards too high for wisdom: “Blueprint: by a blueprint, we have in mind more what one might call moral identity, on the earlier-explained accounts, than a full-blown grand-end outline of the good life. Phronetic persons possess a general conception of the good life (eudaimonia) and adjust their moral identity to that blueprint, thus furnishing it with motivational force.” However, their account is ambiguous as to whether a blueprint needs to meet a certain threshold of justification to count. Furthermore, their attempt to fit moral identity here is puzzling, as that’s different from both having a conception of living well (which presumably anyone has) and being motivated to act morally (which depends on one’s ability to self-regulate). 36. This is an area in moral psychology that needs more research, to better understand the mechanisms by which people can effectively and accurately refect on, and change, conceptions of living well. Likely these conceptions are often strongly rooted in one’s self-identity, such that they can be hard to revise.

References Bandura, A. (1999) “Social cognitive theory of personality”, in L. A. Pervin and O. P. John, eds., Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research. New York: The Guilford Press, pp. 154–196. Batson, C. D. (2017) “Getting cynical about character: A social-psychological perspective”, in C. B. Miller and W. Sinnott-Armstrong, eds., Moral Psychology: Virtue and Character, Vol. 5. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 11–44.

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Bedford-Petersen, C., DeYoung, C. G., Tiberius, V., and Syed, M. (2018) “Integrating philosophical and psychological approaches to well-being: The role of success in personal projects”, Journal of Moral Education, 48(1), pp. 84–97. Darnell, C., Gulliford, L., Kristjánsson, K., and Paris, P. (2019) “Phronesis and the knowledge-action gap in moral psychology and moral education: A new synthesis?”, Human Development, 62, pp. 101–129. De Caro, M., Vaccarezza, M. S., and Niccoli, A. (2018) “Phronesis as ethical expertise: Naturalism of second-nature and the unity of virtue”, Journal of Value Inquiry, 52, pp. 287–305. Fowers, B. J., Mollica, C. O., and Procacci, E. N. (2010) “Constitutive and instrumental goal orientations and their relations with eudaimonic and hedonic wellbeing”, The Journal of Positive Psychology, 5(2), pp. 139–153. Fridland, E. (2014) “Skill learning and conceptual thought: Making a way through the wilderness”, in B. Bashour and H. Muller, eds., Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implications. New York: Routledge, pp. 13–77. Gollwitzer, P. M. (1990) “Action phases and mind-sets”, in E. T. Higgins and R. M. Sorrentino, eds., Handbook of Motivation and Cognition, Vol. 2. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 53–92. Grimm, S. G. (2015) “Wisdom”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 93(1), pp. 139–154. Horn, J. and Masunaga, H. (2006) “A merging theory of expertise and intelligence”, in K. A. Ericsson, ed., The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 587–612. Lapsley, D. (2019) “Phronesis, virtues and the developmental science of character”, Human Development, 62, pp. 130–141. Ross, K., Shafer, J., and Klein, G. (2006) “Professional judgments and naturalistic decision making”, in K. A. Ericsson, ed., The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 403–419. Russell, D. C. (2009) Practical Intelligence and the Virtues. New York: Oxford University Press. Sheldon, K. M., and Elliot, A. J. (1999) “Goal striving, need satisfaction, and longitudinal well-being: The self-concordance model”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3), pp. 482–497. Stichter, M. (2016) “Practical skills and practical wisdom in virtue”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 94(3), pp. 435–448. Stichter, M. (2017) “Virtue as skill”, in N. Snow, ed., Oxford Handbook of Virtue. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 57–84. Stichter, M. (2018) The Skillfulness of Virtue: Improving our Moral and Epistemic Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swartwood, J. (2013) “Wisdom as an expert skill”, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 16, pp. 511–528. Tiberius, V. (2013) “In defense of reflection”, Philosophical Issues, 23: Epistemic Agency, pp. 232–243. Tiberius, V. (2018) Well-Being as Value Fulfillment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Practical Wisdom and Generalization A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation on the Effects of Limited Information Claudia Navarini, Allegra Indraccolo, and Riccardo Brunetti1

1 Introduction: The Two Dimensions of Wisdom From the Aristotelian perspective, practical wisdom has a problem-solving nature. Since moral life often deals with decision-making issues, practical wisdom might be crucial to understanding many moral acts, which are very seldom black-and-white, therefore require a proper problem-solving activity. As Aristotle says,“virtue makes the goal right, phronesis the things toward the goal” (Nicomachean Ethics, VI 12.1144a6–9),2 thus revealing the inescapability of practical wisdom for ethical life. Delving into the Aristotelian theory of phronesis and its relations to moral virtues (Coope, 2012), however, is far beyond the aims of this chapter. Suffice it to say, two nuclear common grounds in contemporary scientific studies about practical wisdom are the originally Aristotelian aspects of right deliberation (Wiggins, 1976) – in any way this may be characterized – and situational insight (Roberts & Wood, 2007) or perceptiveness (Hursthouse, 2006). The deliberative dimension of practical wisdom is commonly recognized and mostly associated with a particularizing-deductive activity, but it also displays a situational-intuitive component, involving a particular kind of generalizing process. This “situated generalization” can be seen as another, though less obvious, dimension of practical wisdom (Leathard & Cook, 2009). The first aim of this chapter is therefore to illustrate and value these dimensions as two essential features of the virtue of practical wisdom. These elements often suffer from misunderstandings and ambiguities, due to confusing uses of the terms particularization and generalization. If the terms particular and its opposite general or, sometimes, universal refer – respectively – to the changing multiplicity of contingencies and to the more stable status of categories and principles, the (a) particularizing and (b) generalizing activities refer logically to different reasoning patterns: (a) the process of getting from categories or principles to specific

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situations, by consistently applying the general statement to the situation, like in syllogism and deductive thought; (b) the process of elaborating the results of concrete occurrences or observations into general statements such as principles, rules, or models, like in inductive thought. Logically speaking, the reasoning patterns should lead to evidence or certainties in (a) and to probabilities in (b). In what follows, we will therefore use (a) with the logical top-down meaning and (b) with the logical bottomup one.3 Dealing with the situation hic et nunc, practical wisdom focuses – on the one hand – on the particular by applying, or better by adapting, the general ethical rules to concrete situations (Schwartz & Sharpe, 2010). On the other hand, practical wisdom might also work in the opposite direction, using the limited information available in a given context, and supplied by possible rules, to judge the situation as a whole (HackerWright, 2015; De Caro et al., 2018; De Caro & Vaccarezza, 2020), thus showing a sort of modeling tendency. Obviously, the generalizing process can have very different outcomes, also departing from practical wisdom. For instance, it can have a negative impact on the moral evaluation of the character and behavior of others, potentially leading to prejudice. Therefore, the second aim of our chapter is to draw a distinction between generalizations that are improper and those that are properly related to wisdom. In other words, we will maintain that practical wisdom is required to comprehend and judge moral situations as a whole, when limited information may otherwise lead to unjust or improper generalizations. Before discussing the discerning power of practical wisdom, however, we will give evidence of the existence of the improper moral generalizations, as opposed to the proper ones. To observe them empirically, we designed a study aimed at extending the Halo effect – transferring physical features into emotional or personality traits – to perceived moral character, specifically to some virtues. We asked participants to evaluate the moral virtues of unknown people, after being administered nonmoral information about them. As we will show, our results prove that the Halo effect does work for virtues. Generally speaking, the more positive the appearance (physical traits and expression), the more virtuous the character attributed to the subject. In the last part of the chapter, we will consider how practical wisdom, as the synthetic ability to grasp the moral sense within the situation, can prevent generalization from deviating from its possible moral function.

2 Particularization Traditionally, practical wisdom is attributed with a particularizing functioning in the above mentioned meaning.4 According to this function, we act wisely if we can derive what is good here and now from moral

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principles and general moral rules, by choosing the right means to reach the moral goal (Chappell, 2006).5 2.1 Deduction and Adaption Let us consider a simple fictional situation: Charlie comes back from school and knows that, after resting half an hour, he must start doing his homework. The general rule at stake is “It is just and good to do one’s duty.”6 Therefore, Charlie chooses to watch a short documentary because he realizes that a longer one, or a movie, would prevent him from ending his homework on time. He makes an inferential statement about the proper means and actually acts accordingly because he is a wise person. He behaves this way regularly, acting consistently with his moral standards. Had he been unwise – or less wise – he could have spent his afternoon watching tv or playing videogames, notwithstanding his general knowledge of the moral rules and duties at stake. In this case, the consistency between the general moral rule and the actual situation accounts for his practical wisdom. Most theorists of phronesis have highlighted this inferential dimension as essential (Samek Lodovici, 2018; McKeever & Ridge, 2006), even when recognizing the limitations of a merely deductive use of practical wisdom. Therefore, practical wisdom may be understood not only – but also – as a matter of applying rules. Admittedly, simply applying the moral rule to specific contexts is only a basic degree of the particularizing dimension of practical wisdom. This is why, in our introduction, we preferred the term adaption to application for describing the top-down inferential process of practical wisdom. To understand this difference, let us imagine introducing additional elements in the previous situation: Charlie comes back from school and knows that, after resting half an hour, he must start doing his homework. However, he is very upset, because he has been bullied by older schoolmates that morning: they made fun of him all the time and he just cannot stand the idea of going back to school the following day. He realizes that his present condition has a strong negative impact on his mental concentration. Besides, he needs some time to think about what happened, what to do now, whether and how to talk to his parents. He also needs more rest and relief than usual in order to manage his emotions, therefore decides to make an exception and skip his homework that afternoon. He will try to do what he can later in the evening once he has calmed down.

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In doing so, Charlie does not contradict his practical wisdom, he confrms it instead. He was able to adapt the moral rule to the situation in a realistic, fexible way, so as to reach a deeper inferential level.7 Swartwood (2020) defnes this more comprehensive notion of practical wisdom as “a grasp . . . of what one ought to do . . . all-things-considered . . . in particular situations” (p. 72). To be sure, subjects cannot reach full-blown practical wisdom until they regularly adapt the moral rules and principles to detect what the particular situation requires. This attitude will lead to take into consideration several concurring elements in a situation, to decide – often in a very short time – what to do all things considered, and to do so effectively. The rule appears violated, but it is in fact adapted to pursue a greater good, thus preserving its overall meaning (Campodonico, 2018; Stichter, 2016). The adaptability of practical wisdom is undoubtedly a consequence of experience. This aspect brings about the recurrent analogy between the virtuous subject and the skilled person in performing some task, like playing chess (Stichter, 2016; Swartwood, 2013; Rozmarynowska, 2019). However, Stichter claims that the analogy between the virtuous person and the skilled performer has a limit precisely in the role of practical wisdom, which is necessary for the virtuous but not for any skilled performer (Stichter, 2016): The latter – Stichter argues – is a worse performer if they make mistakes out of ignorance than voluntarily (because it means that they lack something in their skill), while the former is a worse virtuous agent if they make moral mistakes voluntarily than out of ignorance (because it means they meant to). Within the virtue-as-skill model, thus, experience reinforces the adaptability of rules by means of practical wisdom. This feature – adaptability – makes practical wisdom also very suitable to solve moral dilemmas (Vaccarezza, 2018b). However, some people who are admirable, who are exemplars of practical wisdom, might behave sometimes in a seemingly shocking, revolutionary manner (Zagzebski, 2015). Their way of violating certain common expectations is not only an adaptation of rules, but a genuine generation of new rules, that are valid as long as these “surprising (f)acts” proceed from exemplars of practically wise people. We therefore believe that some moral decisions and actions require something different from rule adaptation, and of course from deduction. They require something more creative, which is not entailed in already posited principles, although it is not contradictory to them (Rozmarynowska, 2019). Notably, their possible validity for others makes this process a generalizing one, which brings us into a further explanation of practical wisdom functioning.

3 Generalization After considering phronesis in its top-down particularizing dimension, we want to focus on the bottom-up generalizing process as another important

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component of practical wisdom. Few studies have addressed this topic so far, and almost always indirectly (Ricoeur, 1990; Carr, 2016). First of all, this was due to the confusing use of the term, as already clarified. Second, the bottom-up dimension of practical wisdom has been mostly overlapped with its rule-adaptive function, which, as seen previously, could be otherwise understood as a refined form of particularization. 3.1 Intuition and Induction Admittedly, generalization associated with phronesis plays a significant role in some un-intellectualist accounts, such as Audi’s (1997) approach to practical wisdom: Any theory of justification that admits a plurality of basic standards faces this kind of problem [:] . . . the need for practical wisdom in deciding how to balance competing intuitive considerations, such as those of fidelity and those of beneficence. Practical wisdom requires maturity and, admittedly, may not rule out all prejudice and subjectivity, even in experienced people. (p. 269) Also, Moss (2011) offers a cognitive approach – that she calls Practical Empiricism – allowing the wise agent a global reading of the situation, primarily based on practical induction. First of all, she assumes that, by means of habituation, the agent has pleasant perceptions or experiences of the good, which correspond to Aristotelian nous; then, “[t]hrough the work of phantasia these repeated perceptions or experiences give rise, just as in the theoretical realm, to a generalized representation: an appearance of virtuous activity as good” (p. 37). Finally, “the intellectual grasp . . . forms the fnal stage of practical induction” (ibidem). These interpretations add some novelty as compared to the particularizing process of deduction and adaption, since they involve the acquisition of ethical rules that derive from experience. However, they do not really admit a creative search for solutions on the part of practical wisdom: The final moral judgment is either directly caught (intuition) or observationally estimated (induction), and this does not fully account for the kind of innovation sometimes requested to practical wisdom. 3.2 Abduction and Moral Abduction Induction and intuition are not the only ways of addressing moral generalization. Peirce traces back the issue to the notion of abduction, which might correspond better to the process we are describing (Frankfurth, 1958). In summary, it may be defined as a syllogistic-like structure, in which, by observing a “result” in the light of a possible “rule,” we come

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to interpret the former as a “particular” case of the latter. In this sense, it is the reversal process of syllogism. According to Peirce’s original version, “[a]bduction is the process of forming explanatory hypothesis. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea” (Peirce, CP 5.172). From a logical point of view, it can be described by the following schema: “The surprising fact, C, is observed. But if A were true, C would be a matter of course. Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true” (Peirce, CP 5.189).8 According to the later Peirce’s writings, abductive reasoning is indeed the first step in scientific argumentations, followed by a deductive step in which other principles and rules are applied to verify the abduction (whether A is true), and finally by an inductive stage to set the experimental design.9 More recently, the meaning of abduction has shifted from generating hypotheses to justifying hypotheses and has usually referred to the Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE). In other words, authors like Adler (1994), Fricker (1994), McMullin (1996), and Lipton (2004) apply this notion to any situation or event without a deductive or statistical explanation, because they neither descend by any general principle nor are the replication of what usually happens. Admittedly, abduction might seem quite close to inductive reasoning and might be considered a subcategory of it, but, to highlight the differences, Douven (2017) clarifies that both are ampliative, meaning that the conclusion goes beyond what is (logically) contained in the premises (which is why they are non-necessary inferences), but in abduction there is an implicit or explicit appeal to explanatory considerations, whereas in induction there is not; in induction, there is only an appeal to observed frequencies or statistics. Following a criterion of reasonability, the IBE assigns the interpretation that appears as the most sensible and likely, although alternatives are surely possible. Despite abduction being used mostly in the epistemology of science, it comes very helpful in moral discourse. To take a hypothesis which reasonably, and at the same time creatively, explains a combination of specific characters is very common in everyday moral life. Abductive reasoning might successfully fit to virtue discourse in general, precisely because many virtuous behaviors and judgments are neither deductive nor strictly inductive, as Harris’s reflections about the virtue of inquisitiveness and moral imagination in business ethics have suggested (Harris, 2011). This mental pattern appears particularly suitable to describe practical wisdom: By definition, phronesis allows to choose creatively what to do – and how – moment by moment, not only by using existing rules, but also by generating the right moral rule all things considered (Swartwood, 2013). And this is precisely what abduction – which we will call moral abduction from now on – does. Admittedly, when applied to morality, this mental process appears more consistent with Peirce’s version of hypothesis generation, for its creative impact, than to the interpretation

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extended to explanation, therefore we endorse here the original restricted notion (Yu & Zenker, 2018). Also, we maintain that the Peircean notion of surprising fact does not reduce morality to situation management, as the counter-situationist criticism widely discussed. Conversely, practical wisdom appears so apparently abductive that it might even prevent such a cognitive process from overestimating the probability of simpler or easier explanations, which could represent a limit of abductive judgments.10 Notably, we believe the Principle of Phronetic Charity advanced by De Caro et al. (2018) and De Caro and Vaccarezza (2020) works very similarly to this mental pattern, precisely in the way it addresses the globalizing function of phronesis. Applying Donaldson’s Principle of Charity to morality, they notice that “when we see someone as moral, we have to attribute to them a substantial degree of virtuosity – otherwise that agent would not look moral at all” (De Caro & Vaccarezza, 2020, p. 9). Such a generalizing hypothesis is submitted to reevaluation as the interactions with them deepens, therefore the preliminary charitable attribution of ethical decency is assessed and rationally adjusted via the actual engagement with one another according to the Principle of Phronetic Charity. This may lead, alternatively, to the confirmation, upgrading or downgrading of the preliminary hypothesis, until new facts require further revision, and so on. (p. 10) What matters most, here, is that the attribution of ethical expertise, therefore a certain amount of practical wisdom, starts on empirical grounds or better, on factual situational grounds. It is the singular occurrence of one’s virtuous behavior that generates the hypothesis of their practical wisdom, that is, of their overall good character. And – not counting the investigations we may carry out voluntarily to test our first impression – it is the subsequent facts that eventually generate new hypotheses. These are, in our view, examples of moral abduction, namely of the ability of inventing ever new solutions to interpret facts and perform moral judgments. To draw some preliminary conclusions on this point, we might venture that practical wisdom, because of its creative and fast connecting power, is suited to grasp the larger picture, by relying on the particular, in an abductive way. 3.3 Possible Biases in Moral Abduction Some may resist this possibility of rising from experience to moral assessment; from a noncognitivist moral viewpoint, they may object that moral generalizations can only lead to changing standards. This objection is not trivial, since moral general judgments can be affected by different

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variables, both moral and nonmoral. For example, we are biased toward believing that certain characteristics of behavior or personality go together. As already mentioned, this kind of bias can be included in what is termed Halo Effect (Asch, 1946; Thorndike, 1920), namely the tendency to use the evaluation of unrelated aspects to make judgments about something or someone. Previous studies have shown that someone’s facial appearance can affect the evaluation of their personality (Naumann, Vazire, Rentfrow, & Gosling, 2009), “moral beauty” (Cui, Cheng, Lin, Lin, & Mo, 2019), trustworthiness (Wilson & Eckel, 2006), and intelligence (Talamas, Mavor, & Perrett, 2016; Zebrowitz, Hall, Murphy, & Rhodes, 2002). We might therefore consider whether there is a Halo Effect linking nonmoral judgments to moral ones, and specifically if this effect might be extended to the attribution of virtues. If the Halo Effect can also impact our evaluations about someone’s moral virtues, then we definitely need a way to identify and avoid incorrect moral generalizations, which will turn out to be practical wisdom. Unfortunately, within moral and positive psychology we still cannot count on an instrument, such as a validated questionnaire, to measure practical wisdom in its different components (Swartwood, 2020).11 Practical wisdom has shown to be one of the less operationalizable constructs for empirical research, and if this is true for its particularizing component, it is even truer for the generalizing one. This notwithstanding, we can investigate the “incorrect generalizations,” precisely the bottom-up process that might be at the basis of stereotypes and prejudice. Just like the particularization of moral rules and principles can generate unmoral or immoral statements and actions, especially when practical wisdom is not employed, the moral generalization occurring after concrete events – without practical wisdom – can lead to false moral judgments, rules, and principles. In a word, the processes of particularizing and generalizing within morality, that is to say, of adapting and abducting moral rules, are not necessarily conductive of the good for the person and the community.12 Obviously, assessing “incorrect generalizations” does not imply that the subjects enrolled in the study have proved to be unwise persons or that some of them are less wise than others, since we did not evaluate their level of practical wisdom. What we hypothesize, though, is that practical wisdom can affect the generalization process to preserve moral judgments from stereotypes and prejudice, therefore it should be developed as a preventive and protective factor against these “incorrect generalizations.” In further studies, we are going to extend the results of the present study by replicating the experiment through fictional stories, and subsequently combining the findings of experiment 1 (physical features) with those of experiment 2 (fictional stories), in order to design an experiment 3 which could also involve social networks. Hopefully, this will also allow a new insight into some moral mechanisms linked to fake news, while confirming the generalizing function of practical wisdom.

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4 The Present Study In line with our hypothesis, the aim of the empirical study we designed was to demonstrate the existence of incorrect moral generalizations by measuring how aesthetical traits, both stable (e.g., attractiveness) and transitory (e.g., emotional expression), can influence moral evaluations. First, we ran a pilot study to select a set of picture portraits, featuring both attractive and unattractive persons. Subsequently, we carried out the experiment, in which we used this set of pictures to reproduce the typically limited information available in a daily context, such as in a social network, and we evaluated how participants judged character virtues in such a situation. All participants, both in the pilot and in the experiment, reported normal or corrected to normal vision and were naïve as to the purpose of the study, which has been approved by the Ethics Review Board of Università Europea of Rome (Italy). In both studies, stimulus presentation, conditions, randomization, and the recording of responses were controlled by a custom-made script in Psychopy 3.0 programming environment, running on a 15’ 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro laptop computer.

4.1 Pilot Study The pilot was designed to select stimuli for the experiment: We were aiming to put together a stimuli set of attractive and unattractive men and women, featuring different facial expressions. Participants were 20 undergraduates, who took part in the pilot for course credit (9 males; mean age = 19.90 years; SD = 1.37; range = 18–22 years). The visual stimuli consisted of faces of 60 actors of UK reality television shows, male and female, that were completely unknown to the participants. Moreover, the decision to use actors of a reality show allowed us to have many different natural expressions of the same actor. We chose 3 emotional expressions for each of the actors: positive (happy), neutral, and negative (sad), for a total of 180 faces. The faces were presented at the top center of a gray (50%) display. Participants were presented with a series of faces and their task was to judge the attractiveness of the person in the picture, by answering a simple question like “How beautiful you think this person is?” on a 7-point Likert scale that was displayed along with the picture, at the bottom center of the display. The pictures and questions were displayed until participants gave the response. In keeping with the results of this pilot study, we selected a total of 20 subjects for the experiment: the 5 men and 5 women with the highest scores and the 5 men and 5 women with the lowest scores. For each of these selected subjects we included three expressions in the final set (positive, neutral, and negative), resulting in a total of 60 pictures.

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Finally, all participants declared to ignore the identity of the persons portrayed. 4.2 Experiment Thirty undergraduates took part in the experiment for course credit (16 males; mean age = 22.03 years; SD = 2.47; range = 18–28 years). Following the pilot study, the visual stimuli they received consisted of the selected faces divided in attractive and unattractive (10 in each category, according to the results of the pilot), featuring 3 emotional expressions each: positive (happy), neutral, and negative (sad), for a total of 60 pictures. The faces were presented at the top center of a gray (50%) display. The participants were presented with a series of pictures of faces and were asked to judge five moral virtues (honesty, courage, respect, wisdom, and hope), and one control value (“Simpatia” – likeability) of the person in the picture, by answering questions like “How honest is the person in the picture?” or “How courageous is the person in the picture?” on a 7-point Likert scale. The six questions were displayed along with the face, at the bottom center of the display. The pictures and questions were displayed until participants finished giving their responses. Each trial ended after participants had answered all of the six questions, and, after that, another picture was presented until all of the 60 faces were judged. The order of presentation of the pictures was randomized. A 2 × 2 × 3 × 2 Anova was conducted on the average rating for each of the six values, with the within-factors of “Stimuli gender” (male and female), “Attractiveness” (attractive and unattractive faces), “Expression” (positive, neutral, and negative), and the between-factor of “Participants’ gender” (male and female), producing the following results. 4.3 Likeability The analysis revealed a significant main effect of “Expression” [F(2, 56) = 35.044, p < .001; ηp2 = .556]. Bonferroni post hoc showed that Positive facial expressions were judged nicer than neutral (p < .001) and negative ones (p < .001); we found a significant interaction between “Stimuli gender,” “Attractiveness,” and “Participants’ gender” [F(1, 28) = 6.158, p = .019; ηp2 = .180]. Bonferroni post hoc revealed that male participants judged unattractive females less likeable than attractive females (p = .015); results showed also a significant interaction between “Stimuli gender” and “Expression” [F(2,56) = 5.370, p = .007; ηp2 = .161]. Bonferroni post hoc revealed that sad females were judged less nice than sad males (p = .026). Moreover, happy males were judged nicer that neutral (p < .001) and sad (p < .001) males; happy females were judged nicer than neutral (p< .001) and sad (p < .001) females; finally, neutral females

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were judged nicer than sad females (p = .037). Moreover, we found a significant interaction between “Attractiveness” and “Expression” [F(2, 56) = 1.035, p = .021; ηp2 = .128]. Bonferroni post hoc showed that, with a neutral expression unattractive faces were judged less nice than attractive ones (p = .007), while unattractive faces were judged nicer with happy expressions than when featuring neutral (p < .001) and sad ones (p