Book Review: Practical Wisdom by Barry Schwartz
Good Judgment > Rules & Incentives
Title: Practical Wisdom. The Right Way to do the Right Thing
Author: Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe
Year: 2010
In short
Practical wisdom is a guide to making the right choices in concrete everyday situations (as opposed to in the abstract; it's what Aristotle talked about, not Plato's Theory of Forms)
Rules and incentives alone cannot do justice to the complexity of the world that requires nuanced judgment, i.e. deciding between a multitude of relevant principles by looking closely at the specifics of a situation; rules and incentives can also be counterproductive
Key characteristics of practical wisdom are knowing the aims of a particular practice, deliberation, empathy, perception, emotional intelligence, experience
Practical wisdom is linked to happiness through having the discretion to contribute to a calling that serves others
Summary
Aristotle's word for practical wisdom was phronesis. He saw it as a practical guide for specific situations that we all find ourselves in everyday life, as opposed to Plato's concept of understanding the ideas, such as what is 'good', something only philosophers could hope to achieve after years of training.
Rules and incentives are not sufficient to guide behavior. They cannot spell out what to do in complex situations. What's needed in addition is practical wisdom: how to decide between the right choices that clash or between bad and worse.
"Rules and incentives may improve the behavior of those who don't care, though they won't make themwiser. But in focusing on the people who don't care - the targets of our rules and incentives - we missthose who do care. We miss those who want to do the right things but lack the practical wisdom to dothem well. Rules and incentives won't teach these people the moral skill and will they need. Even worse,rules can kill skill and incentives can kill will. (12)
Key characteristics of practical wisdom:
Knowing the aims of the practice one is involved in (eg a cleaner in a hospital is aware of the hospital's patient health and reducing pain)
Deliberation (reflecting, weighing options, considering the particulars filtering them out in a sea of noise),
Empathy
Perception (being aware of what's going on)
Emotional Intelligence
Experience (ie wisdom is a craft; you become wise by making wise choices)
When we make a moral/social decision, we may provide a rule as an explanation. But why exactly do we pick that rule and not another rule that may have pointed in the opposite direction, that's where practical wisdom comes in.
It's understandable that rule talk, and not wisdom talk, dominates. The latter is about shades of gray, and nuance and is context-dependent. We are skeptical about emotion, framing, story-telling, and personal character traits, but all of these matter in making wise choices.
Modern psychology confirms Aristotle: we are born (but not hardwired) to be wise (demonstrating the characteristics of wisdom) just as we are born equipped to learn a language. But how well we master it, is a matter of cultivation, of practice.
Categorizing with nuance and with a view to the purpose is important for practical wisdom, eg if this salt removes wine stains it might remove raspberry juice stains but when I offer a child a drink the two will not be in the same 'stain' category. The same process of categorization is necessary for making sense of concepts of fairness or lying.
"Framing is pervasive, inevitable, and often automatic. There is no "neutral" frame-free way to evaluate anything." (63)
Being wise means choosing the right frame.
Frequently, emotion drives moral decisions, and reason is used post hoc to justify intuition. Careful deliberation is possible when one takes a step back but may not be practical in everyday situations when there is no time/ space for it.
Emotion is also critical for practical wisdom because it fuels action.
Our brains use pattern recognition to make sense of the world. A wise decision involves understanding how this case is similar and how it is different from other cases from the past. But this pattern recognition is hard to verbalize. One may refer to a specific rule, which may only shed some, perhaps distorted, light on the result of the pattern recognition.
Cognitive networks may also be relevant for moral decision-making:
recognizing similarities and differences between cases allows for moral improvisation
fast and automatic process
explanation for how different moral decisions might not be based on different values/rules but rather based on different experiences (implication: make the other person see what you see)
sometimes more lengthy deliberation must be involved because the pattern is very new and learning/trial-and-error must take place
Making better moral decisions / practical wisdom is based on experience: building up the right patterns over time through trial and error
Modern cognitive science has given us clues about how such experiences create cognitive networks that give us the categories, emotions, and intuitions we need to be morally skillful. The right experiences to contain variety, trial, and error, and feedback from mistakes. People need to be encouraged to experiment. Doing the same thing again and again may create a powerful network, but not a wise one.(p. 106)
"Unprincipled" is an epithet. But like rules, good principles, unleavened by judgment, can be obtuse and even dangerous. They can make us dumb to the nuances of context. A good principle can blind us to other good principles with which it needs to be balanced. (118)
Improvisation: At the beginning of the Iraq war Lieutenant Colonel Chris Hughes was faced with an angry crowd of citizens in the city of Najaf. Instead of firing warning shots, he decided and ordered his men to kneel down with rifles facing the ground. This improvised sign of respect helped calm the crowds so that his
soldiers could retreat. Nobody had taught Hughes this. The trend in the US military has been in the opposite direction, ruling out all improvisation by removing flexibility in practicing decision-making: military leaders are good at cooking by recipe but not able to cook a meal with the ingredients provided. Same with teachers:
"Forcing teachers to do right by rote risks driving the wisdom out of the practice and driving out the wise practitioners." (176)
The war on will:
"Aristotle thought that good people do the right thing because it is the right thing. Doing the right thing because it's the right thing unleashes the nuance, flexibility, and improvisation that moral challenges demand and moral skill enables. Doing the right thing for pay shuts down the nuance and flexibility."(182)
Carol Dweck distinguishes between performance goals and mastery goals. With the former, you want to prove your ability. With the latter, you want to improve your ability.
Incentives can change the question:
Case of parents being late at picking up their kids. The daycare centre introduced a fine but that only increased the rate of parents being late. The fine was interpreted as the price for being late and they accepted that price. Incentives/disincentives can do that, they can change the question from "Is this right or wrong" to "Is this worth it?"
Case of Swiss referendum on nuclear waste dump site: 50% of people agreed to one in their community it was their duty of the by half. They now had two reasons to be in favor: their sense of duty and money. But they did not add up, they competed
Case of children solving a puzzle, either with reward or without. Without it was more fun for them
There is potential harm, even if the incentives work. Incentives like money, prizes, or awards can "crowd out" the pleasure people get from an activity (drawing or solving puzzles). They can crowd out the moral motives that drive an activity (day care or nuclear waste). And they can crowd out the inclination people have to be helpful to others. (195)
A practice is defined by a common intrinsic goal to which the practice is dedicated and by a set of criteria of excellence that the participants establish together.
Once external goals, such as money, become dominant with participants, the practice itself is endangered, or rather: the practice stops
In a doctoral program "doctors said they don't teach, they meant they don't just lecture and tell. ... to create situations where students would learn through practice with the help of mentors" (263)
Practical wisdom cannot be 'taught' in any narrow sense. It is embedded in practices like medicine, law, banking, etc., and needs to be practiced like we practice a craft. Mentors can support that process by sharing their own experiences, coaching, and being a safety net. Real system changers who want to create institutions in which practical wisdom is built up over time go one step further and seek to create cultures & organizational set-ups/processes that encourage wisdom in everyday practice.
Wisdom is linked to happiness:
Like Aristotle, we consider wisdom to be the " master virtue." Without moral skill, many of the othercharacter strengths and virtues that Seligman identifies as essential to happiness would not do the job.Without such know-how, these strengths would be more like unruly children, leading to well-meaningactions that leave disaster in their wake-recklessness, not courage; indecisiveness, not patience; blindloyalty, not commitment; cruel confrontation, not helpful honesty. Practical wisdom is the maestro. It'swhat conducts the whole symphony. Seligman suggests that "authentic happiness" may only beachievable indirectly, as a by-product of living an engaged and meaningful life. And the two spheres of lifeSeligman singles out as most likely to pro vide such positive emotion, engagement, and meaning are thesame two Ed Diener's research turned up: close social relations with others and participation inmeaningful work. (280)
Virtuous cycle: we are happiest in our jobs when they are a calling, ie when they have meaning and give us discretion--> discretion in our jobs gives us the opportunity to build wisdom --> wisdom helps us serve others, higher meaning --> makes us happy.