Phronesis (Practical Wisdom) as the Key to Professional Ethics in Coaching

Abstract

I understand coaching as a multi-faceted profession; and the theoretical assumption undergirding this short paper is that the professional ethics of coaching is best grounded in a general virtue ethical approach to the professional ethics, centered around the ideal of phronesis (practical wisdom) in an Aristotelian sense. For Aristotle (1985), we seek evidence not only in the theories of “the wise” but also the views of “the many.” I would thus be inclined to ground a virtue ethical approach to coaching empirically in the extensive research already conducted at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues into various professionals, and to ground it theoretically in recent efforts to revive an Aristotelian concept of phronesis as excellence in ethical decision-making (see further in Kristjánsson, 2024).