Wisdom, Action, and Knowledge

An important debate in the current philosophy of wisdom is whether propositional knowledge is necessary for wisdom. Most of the debate, however, has been focused on discussing wisdom as a character trait. This paper contributes to the debate by discussing wisdom as a property of actions and defends what I shall call the knowledge view: propositional knowledge is necessary to explain wise actions. The standard view among philosophers (e.g., Kekes 1983, 2020; Nozick 1981; Whitcomb 2011; Grimm 2015; Tsai 2022) is that wisdom is a virtue which is intimately connected to wellbeing – be it in terms of being in a cognitive state, the contents of which are the goals of wellbeing and the ways to reach them, and/or an ability to perform actions appropriate to reaching the goals of wellbeing. In line with the standard view, I shall take wise actions to be those that somehow relates to the goals of wellbeing. Both consequentialism and Aristotelianism describe how such a relation can pan out. I shall not take sides and, for the sake of the paper, assume both and see how my thesis stands irrespective of which side of the debate one decides to take. With this thought, I’ve organised the paper as follows. §1 discusses the two modal features of wise actions: counterfactual robustness and rational robustness. §2 argues that knowledge explains these two modal features. §3 examines two epistemic accounts vogue in current philosophical literature that may plausibly explain wise actions. §4 discusses whether knowledge is also sufficient to explain wise actions.