Differentiating the Skills of Practical Wisdom

Abstract

Despite practical wisdom being central to accounts of virtue, there are still many competing conceptions of it, partly because it has been assigned so many roles to play in generating moral knowledge and acting in accordance with that knowledge. I argue that to get clear on what practical wisdom specifically consists in, we need to disentangle the different roles assigned to this concept. First, several elements attributed to practical wisdom can already be accounted for by virtues of self-regulation. Second, on a skill model of virtue, we find several other elements already present in the development of skill acquisition and expertise. This allows us to then narrow down to what is unique to practical wisdom. Practical wisdom requires thinking about your goals and actions relative to an overall conception of what it is to live well as a person, as well as critical reflection on your conception of living well. Furthermore, even after having refined the scope of practical wisdom in this way, it is unlikely that being practically wise will be the product of a single intellectual virtue. Rather, practical wisdom may end up consisting in the exercise of several intellectual virtues, working in connection with each other.