Phronesis and the Knowledge-Action Gap in Moral Psychology and Moral Education: A New Synthesis?

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: moral identity and moral emotions. 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 phronesis (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 four-component model, 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.