Political Institutions and Practical Wisdom

To be good citizens or statespersons, we need practical wisdom—the moral skill and will to know how to do the right thing in particular situations. Institutions work best when they cultivate practitioners who have the wisdom and judgment to choose the right aims and pursue them in the best way possible. Practical wisdom can be destroyed, however, when institutions rely too heavily on rules and incentives that encourage people to compete for extrinsic rewards or to avoid punishments. This book focuses on the ethical implications of institutional failures and identifies competitive utility-maximizing as a frequent source of such failures. Practical wisdom is often squeezed out of institutions by the market forces unleashed by neoliberalism. In the political sphere, hyper-partisanship is an expression of excessive competition, and it can undermine the deliberation necessary for a healthy democracy. There is, however, an alternative. A citizens’ democracy would aim at human flourishing. This book calls on social scientists to recognize the ethical foundation of our work, integrate the moral dimension of politics in our analyses, and accord greater attention to first-person perspectives in our ontologies. The cultivation of practical wisdom in politics, work, and everyday life is our best response to the pressures arising from market forces that threaten to destroy institutions and drive human activities toward catastrophic outcomes.