2019/01/01 by Catherine A. Darnell, Liz Gulliford, Kristján Kristjánsson +1 · 1 citation
Neuroscience · Decision Sciences · Psychology · Mathematics · #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Ethics in Business and Education #Emotions and Moral Behavior #Phronesis #Epistemology #Scrutiny #Action (physics) #Sociology #Moral disengagement #Virtue ethics #Moral psychology #Virtue #Dimension (graph theory) #Viewpoints #Construct (python library) #Psychology #Political science #Philosophy #Computer science #Mathematics #Law
paper · doi:10.1159/000496136
openalex publication_date 2019/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This article has two aims. First, to offer a critical review of the literatures on two well-known single-component solutions to the problem of a gap between moral knowledge and moral action: <i>moral identity</i> and <i>moral emotions</i>. Second, to take seriously the rising interest in Aristotle-inspired virtue ethics and character development within the social sciences: approaches that seem to assume that the development of <i>phronesis</i> (practical wisdom) bridges the gap in question. Since phronesis is a multicomponent construct, the latter part of this article offers an overview of what those different components would be, as a necessary precursor to operationalising them if the phronesis hypothesis were to be subjected to empirical scrutiny. The idea of a neo-Aristotelian multicomponent solution to the “gappiness problem” invites comparisons with another multicomponent candidate, the neo-Kohlbergian <i>four-component model</i>, with which it shares at least surface similarities. Some space is thus devoted to the proposed theoretical uniqueness of a phronesis-based multicomponent model vis-à-vis the neo-Kohlbergian one. Our main conclusion is that – weaknesses in its developmental psychological grounding notwithstanding – operationalising the phronesis model for the purposes of instrument design and empirical inquiry would be a feasible and potentially productive enterprise.