The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.
Cicero
By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.
Confucius
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Isaac Asimov
In March 2020, in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Scott McMillan, a 56-year-old lawyer in La Mesa, California, put the following message on Twitter: “The fundamental problem is whether we are going to tank the entire economy to save 2.5% of the population which is (1) generally expensive to maintain, and (2) not productive.” This followed an earlier tweet from then President Donald Trump: “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.” There was an instant reaction against McMillan’s tweet with people calling him a “liberal”, a “right-wing nut,” and a “Nazi.” He received several death threats.[1]
This is just one example of the myriad moral dilemmas triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, which has thrown previous moral assumptions into disarray. It has also given a jump-start to our collective moral consciences. One of the more wrenching dilemmas, indeed, has been the timing for re-opening the economy. In the early days, before a vaccine or effective treatments were available, to control the pandemic governments around the globe closed schools and “non-essential” businesses. As expected, this resulted in massive amounts of unemployment and economic hardship, especially among the poor and infirm. The longer a community is in lockdown, the better chances of controlling the pandemic, but also the bigger the economic pain.
This tradeoff was painfully evident in China, which for three years followed a Zero Covid policy. While the rest of the world was shedding restrictions, China’s rules were becoming more entrenched, along with the patterns of pandemic life under a government insistent on eliminating cases. The sudden lockdowns even in big cities such as Shanghai, left residents stranded at their homes, hotels, offices, or even malls, without food or medicine. While deaths from covid infections were low – not zero – the economic and psychological impact were substantial. The infections and deaths soared after the government relaxed its Zero Covid policy, following widespread protests.
We all faced moral dilemmas during that time: Should I visit a sick relative even though I could get infected and infect others? Should I tell my boss that my colleague is not vaccinated even though he told me in confidence? Should I vote to make facemasks optional at my son’s school? In all these choices we face moral uncertainty: it is not clear what morally and ethically to do.
In the end we all need to make choices, for which we use – consciously or unconsciously – our own “moral calculus.” As we saw in Idea 7, we often make moral judgments without weighing concerns such as fairness, law, human rights, or ethical values. Instead, moral reasoning is a post hoc rationalization of decisions based on intuition and emotion. For example, Scott McMillan’s proposed “solution” to the lockdown dilemma was to effectively sacrifice the “expensive to maintain” and “not productive” (supposedly the elderly and the infirm, along with the low-skilled or uneducated) for the sake of the economy.
As it happens, his moral calculus was not only callous but flawed. While the coronavirus is most threatening to the elderly and immunocompromised, no one is safe. In the US more than half of patients who were hospitalized were under age 65, and one in five were aged 20 to 44; hundreds of young adults were killed. And being elderly, infirm, or uneducated does not mean that you are unproductive. In fact, the low-wage workers who throughout the pandemic kept supermarket shelves open, collected garbage, and made food deliveries can be counted among the real heroes. Many of these workers have no choice but to be out and about; isolation was a marker of privilege. No one should deem McMillan’s moral calculus ethical or fair.
How then, should we go about deciding which of the alternative courses of action is the right one, or at least the one that is more ethical? This is a difficult question that applies not only to the moral dilemmas associated with the pandemic, but to all situations that can have a global reach and that we will probably face in the future. One obvious “candidate” is climate change, the impact of which we are already confronting. As in the case of the pandemic, technology itself is not going to spare us from the dire consequences, at least in the short-term, making some tradeoffs between harms and benefits unavoidable. What should guide our decisions?
Moral uncertainty
So how do we make “difficult” choices around morality? Let’s think about the notion of impartiality. That is, the idea that we should all be treated the same, independently of gender, age, nationality, or religious beliefs. This notion is at the core of standards of justice and law. It can be found in most religious and philosophical systems of morality, from the golden rule in Christianity to the teachings of Confucius to the political philosopher John Rawls’s landmark theory of justice.[2] This is an insight that emerges within communities of intelligent, deliberating and negotiating beings, and it can override parochial impulses such as that of McMillan and Trump.
For all its universal appeal, however, impartiality says nothing about specific choices, nor does it endorse any moral principles, virtues, or ideals. For instance, it fails to give guidance in situations where the interests and well-being of several parties collide, as is often the case in the covid pandemic. Modern moral philosophers offer two sorts of alternatives, one based on utilitarianism, a philosophy championed by the British Jeremy Bentham, and the other based on deontology, an ethical philosophy usually associated with Immanuel Kant.
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According to utilitarianism, only the consequences are important. For instance, the right action is the one that results in the greatest utility, or happiness, for the greatest number. Thus, murder is wrong because it does not maximize good for the greatest number.
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In contrast, for deontology, the acts themselves matter: the right action is the one that conforms to a certain idea of duty, regardless of consequences. Kant concluded that the expected consequences of an act are themselves morally neutral, and therefore irrelevant to moral deliberation. This rule seeks to base action on a maxim or precept that could be universalized. Thus, by Kant’s principles, it is always wrong to kill an innocent person on purpose, even to save the world.
Most people see the value in the utilitarian option of harming one if it protects scores of others. In addition, it makes sense to implement those policies or take those actions that will benefit the majority, as utilitarianism would prescribe. One related approach is known as Effective Altruism. At its core, effective altruism is devoted to the question of how one can do as much good as possible with the money and time available to us. Followers of this philosophy are committed to spend a significant portion of their income and riches in the most cost-effective charities possible. (Some have referred to this movement as “greed in the service of good”, as it encourages bright young people to amass wealth to donate to efficient charities. It is popular among high-tech billionaires like Sam Bankman-Fried, accused of financial fraud). [3]
For all their seemingly intuitive appeal, utilitarianism and deontology do not come naturally to us. Consider the classical trolley problem:
A runaway trolley is heading down the tracks toward five workmen who will be killed if the trolley proceeds on its present course. You are on a footbridge over the tracks that is in between the approaching trolley and the five workmen. Next to you on this footbridge is a stranger who happens to be very fat. If you do nothing the trolley will proceed, causing the deaths of the five workmen. The only way to save the lives of these workmen is to push this stranger off the bridge and onto the tracks below, where his fat body will stop the trolley, causing his death. Should you push the stranger onto the tracks in order to save the five workmen?
In different variations, the trolley problem has been used extensively in empirical research in moral psychology. This is not just a theoretical exercise in morality. The problem arises, for example, in discussing the ethics of autonomous vehicle design, which may require programming to choose whom or what to strike when a collision appears to be unavoidable. The same issue applies to “smart” weapons and other autonomous systems that rely on Artificial Intelligence.
People, however, are not machines. Most people answer that it is not right to push the fat guy over the bridge, even to save the five workers. This is not what utilitarianism stipulates, according to which we have the obligation to push the fat guy. Moreover, we all tend to give more weight or “utility” to the lives of relatives and friends than that of strangers. In fact, utilitarian decisions seem to be easier for people who have suffered brain damage. More explicitly, damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex – a region in the forebrain associated with emotional response – can blunt a person’s emotional response to sacrificing a single person to save many others.[4]
This suggests that our moral decisions are driven by two different kinds of processes that can be in competition with each other: the emotional and the intellectual (see Idea 7). This conflict is the reason why doing the right thing often entails inhibiting natural impulses. Yet, this is not the main problem with utilitarianism. Sometimes this moral theory can lead to dubious prescriptions. For example, if slavery or torture is beneficial for the population, it could theoretically be justified by utilitarianism. Utilitarian theory seems to overlook the rights of minority groups.
Over the course of the pandemic, analyses of federal, state, and local data have shown that Blacks and Hispanics in the US have experienced a disproportionate burden of cases and deaths compared to their white counterparts[5] One of the main reasons is that they also, disproportionately, represent workers for which virtual or remote work is not an option. If most of the population finds these trade-offs acceptable, a utilitarian may agree that keeping businesses open at the height of a pandemic is an ethical choice. Not much different than what McMillan was proposing.
Deontology can also present practical problems in its application. Suppose that your mother is in the hospital after getting infected with covid. One day you receive a message from the doctor that she is not doing well, and that she is in pain and in distress. The hospital has a no-visitors policy (itself utilitarian: sacrificing the well-being of a patient for the wider good) except for end-of-life compassionate visits. As she is rapidly deteriorating the doctor allows one visitor, and your mother has requested that you visit her. Since you are her only child, you feel it is your duty to comply. You are afraid of getting infected (this was before vaccines were available) and pass the virus to your spouse and children. The latter risk could be reduced if you quarantine yourself, but you are still worried that if you die your family will suffer. What should you do?
According to Kant, the consequences should be irrelevant if you decide it is your moral duty to visit your mother, such as getting infected and dying and your family suffering (let’s try and park an emotional response to one side for a moment). However, also relevant to deontological reasoning is Kant’s categorical imperative: “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.” This simply means that if you do an action, then everyone else should also be able to do it. You may be taking precautions during your visit so as not to infect yourself and others, but you doubt that everyone else will be as careful as you are; even a small portion of infected people can spread the disease widely. Perhaps then you have a duty to set an example and stay away. What would you do in a similar circumstance?
Navigating the moral landscape without getting lost
In the last idea, I argued that we should think of morality in terms of the well-being of conscious creatures. In his 2010 book The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris talks about a hypothetical space of “real and potential outcomes whose peaks correspond to the heights of potential well-being and whose valleys represent the deepest suffering.”[6] In this space, every decision and thought is translated into movements across the landscape and, therefore, into different forms of human flourishing or suffering. I find this an apt metaphor for describing our moral deliberations. There are different forms in which we may “navigate” the moral landscape. Some may use an absolute moral code as a “compass,” others may apply rules like utilitarianism to guide them.
Following the dictates of absolute moral codes and rules can simplify our moral choices. What is more, rules like utilitarianism and deontology can provide different lenses through which to see our dilemmas, different screens to use in assessing them. When facing a moral dilemma, we can ask ourselves, “What’s the greatest good we can achieve?” We can also ask, “What is the highest rule that should be followed here?” Furthermore, when we consider doing to others as we would want them to do us, we quickly recognize that there are several “others.”
Yet rules cannot be rigidly applied. The dilemmas discussed above suggest that it may be impossible to reduce morality to one principle from which we can derive all obligations and duties. In fact, it would be imprudent to rely on rules exclusively. “Rules are like a road map that gets us to the right city, but not to the right street,” write psychologists Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe. “However, in order to know the right thing to do, we need the right street. We need to know what this friend needs, not what friends in general need. And we need to know what she needs at this moment, not in general. This is why rules are no substitute for practical wisdom.”[7]
There is, in fact, a moral system in which practical wisdom plays a central role: virtue ethics. In contrast to utilitarianism and deontology, which focus respectively on consequences and duties, the crux of virtue ethics is in the heart or character of the person. At its center is the fundamentally important question: “What sort of person ought I to be?” As such, virtue ethics entails a much richer moral psychology than its rivals do, based as they are on a formulaic approach to ethics.
Virtue ethics dates back, at least, to Plato and Aristotle. According to Aristotle, in his work Nicomachean Ethics, ethics is not just about establishing moral rules and following them, it is about performing a particular social practice well – being a good friend, or parent, or citizen, or politician. This means figuring out the right way to do the right thing in a particular circumstance, with a particular person at a particular time. If we master all that, the idea is we flourish as human beings.
Making wise choices
Surely the key to making these nuanced choices is wisdom. But what exactly is wisdom? There are as many definitions of wisdom as there are religious perspectives. The notion of wisdom is not only found in the Hebrew and Christian religions (e.g., 2 Chronicles 1:11-12), but also in Mesopotamian religion and mythology, in Zoroastrianism, in Indian and Chinese religions and in Islam. There are also, of course, philosophical perspectives. Probably the most influential is that of the ancient Greeks, in particular Aristotle, who considered wisdom the most important virtue.[8]
In its modern usage wisdom denotes the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, and insight. For instance, the Oxford English Dictionary defines wisdom as “Capacity of judging rightly in matters relating to life and conduct; soundness of judgement in the choice of means and ends; sometimes, less strictly, sound sense, esp. in practical affairs: opp. to folly.” This definition, however, does not specify what are the attributes and virtues associated with wisdom. Further, is wisdom something that can be taught? Is there a way to measure wisdom?
These questions have captured the interest of psychologists and educators, who in the last few decades have tried to make the notion of wisdom more objective and operational. For example, research in the last two decades or so has revealed many similarities in the popular understanding of wisdom across cultures and historical time. Wisdom: (i) addresses important and difficult questions and strategies about the conduct and meaning of life; (ii) includes knowledge of the limits of knowledge and the uncertainties of the world; (iii) represents a truly superior level of knowledge, judgment, and advice; (iv) constitutes knowledge with extraordinary scope, depth, measure and balance; (v) involves a perfect synergy of mind and character; that is, an orchestration of virtues and knowledge; (vi) represents knowledge used for the good or well-being of oneself and that of others; and (vii) is easily recognized and manifested [9]
Wisdom is generally understood as not just the ability to acquire and transmit knowledge, but also the use of intelligence and experience to attain a common good. Modern societies have become extremely adept in the generation and transmission of information; our ancestors could not have possibly dreamed that ordinary humans would be able to access practically unlimited amounts of information. Yet having more access to information has not translated into more wisdom, and often, just the opposite (Idea 11). And while some level of intelligence is needed for wisdom it is certainly not sufficient. As we saw in Idea 6, our collective IQ increased during the last century but so did worldwide conflict and belief in bizarre conspiracies.
Learning from real-life dilemmas
Can everyone be wise? Is wisdom something that can be taught or is an innate trait beyond the reach of most people? Well, depends on what definition of wisdom you adopt. In the last years, several theoretical conceptions of wisdom have been operationalized and tested. Interestingly, most of the modern research on wisdom has been undertaken not by philosophers or religious thinkers, but by psychologists and educators. Currently, there are four main lines of research:[10]
Wisdom as a personal characteristic (based on the work of Erikson)
Wisdom as the endpoint of human development and mature thought (based on the ideas of Piaget)
Wisdom as an expert system in the “fundamental pragmatics of life”, and
Wisdom as a balance among intra-personal, interpersonal, and extra-personal interests over the short and long terms.
These approaches offer valuable, and I believe complementary, insights about wisdom. The approach that I find most useful in practice, nonetheless, is wisdom as expertise in the “pragmatics of life.” Some critics complain that this approach focuses too much on expertise to the detriment of what really matters: the common good. Indeed, what distinguishes wisdom from any other expertise is its concern for other beings. “Wisdom,” writes the psychologist Blaine Flowers, “is inherently ethical because wise decisions and well-considered actions are those that help individuals to pursue their valued aims in the best kind of way, not merely as a matter of the pragmatic management of situations.”[11]
This is fine, but even if we aim for the common good, as we should, we will need to develop some expertise to reach our life goals. We have seen that the wise person is not born but made; no one is born an expert in every field but must master the craft through extended learning and experience. Thus, this approach to wisdom can offer valuable guidance in our search for wisdom (although I’d rather change the name as I argue in Box 8).
Box 8: Wisdom as Expertise in the “Art of Life” One way of thinking about wisdom is as an expertise in the “pragmatics of life.” To achieve this expertise, we need, among other things, knowledge about human nature, life’s goals and obligations, the social and complex nature of the human life cycle, and the limits of one’s own knowledge. A wise person should also be able to manage uncertainty; the fact that human information processing is limited, and that the future cannot be fully known in advance. A wise person also needs to acknowledge and be tolerant of other people’s values and life priorities. This suggests several conditions under which wisdom is likely to develop:1 • Just like with any expertise, wisdom involves a process of learning, practice, and the motivation to strive toward excellence. Practice is particularly important; you can learn chess by reading books, but you become an expert only by playing. Likewise, one becomes wise by confronting difficult and ambiguous situations, using one’s judgment to decide what to do, doing it, and getting feedback. That is, one becomes a wise practitioner by practicing being wise. • Wisdom-related knowledge and judgment are not just another variant of intelligence. Practical intelligence is what enables you to know the right thing to do in order to achieve your goals. It is silent, however, on the question of what your goals should be; it does not tell you what to aim at. Practical intelligence is an important part of practical wisdom, but it is only one component. • As with any other high-level expertise, guidance by mentors, teachers and experts is helpful. Wisdom is also a collaborative product. It is wise not to act alone on critical decisions but to share them with loved ones or close friends. • In general, people use “rules of thumb” to make fast, unconscious decisions (see Idea 10). Wise people, however, should also be sensitive to context. Wisdom requires detailed knowledge of the other people involved in a situation. For instance, we need to know our friend well to figure out what advice to give her; just following a generic rule will not do. There is no basis on which to use judgment to decide what to do in a given case unless we know the particulars of the case. I consider this approach to wisdom one of the most fruitful, one that can serve to inform and guide our lives. My only qualm, however, is its title. I consider living itself is an art – in fact, the most important and at the same time the most difficult and complex art to be practiced by mankind. Thus, I’d rather call this approach as expertise in the “art of life.” 1. Baltes, P. B. & Staudinger, U. M. (2000). Wisdom: A meta-heuristic (pragmatic) to orchestrate mind and virtue toward excellence. American Psychologist, 55. Also Baltes, P. B.; (2004). Wisdom as orchestration of mind and virtue. Max Planck Institute for Human Development. unfinished book. https://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/pb/PB_Wisdom_2004.pdf.
But how do we know we have made a wise decision? This is not an easy question to answer; even the wisest of decisions can have bad outcomes. The first step is to recognize when a decision is not wise. Throughout the pandemic we all have witnessed innumerable examples of ordinary citizens, as well as public health and government officials (even a president!), acting unwisely, and the huge human cost that this entails. Hardly anyone would consider injecting bleach to combat covid a wise decision or sacrificing the elderly and infirm for the sake of the economy as Scott McMillan proposed.
Consider the dilemma again of visiting your sick mother, discussed earlier. How should you respond to your mother’s request that you visit her? As an only child, you may reasonably have a strong impulse to visit and comfort her. Yet you must be wise and consider the consequences that yourself getting infected would have on other people, including your children.
Another key aspect of wisdom is that it is collaborative; your decision to visit your mother should not be yours to make alone. You should consult with doctors and other experts, and with your loved ones and explain your reasoning.
Wisdom is also about resisting social pressure. Countless experiments have revealed that even the most normal, well-adjusted people can be swayed by figures of authority and their peers to make terrible decisions (see Idea 5 on the Stanford Prison Experiment). These effects help explain all sorts of choices we might think are unwise, from the dangerous antics of gangs of teenage boys, to the rejection of life-saving vaccines. Your relatives and/or peers may pressure you to visit your ailing mother even if you think it isn’t wise.
While gaining wisdom, it is important that you also be open to criticism and advice. Getting feedback after a decision is a key factor in acquiring expertise, and wisdom is no exception. The only way to improve our decisions is to assess the impact they are having so we can “fine-tune” them for next time. This is the also best way to know, in hindsight, if we have made an unwise decision. Only fools reject or ignore feedback and constructive criticism.
Probably the most important factor in wisdom is “cognitive humility,” being aware of our own cognitive limitations and biases. For example, we easily become overwhelmed by complexity and by information overload. In fact, our collective inability to deal with complexity seems to be one of the main factors in the proliferation of conspiracy theories (see Idea 11). Given our limited capacity for knowledge, this means that we often must trust the advice of experts, especially to make critical decisions in areas for which we are not proficient. Even so, you must have a good understanding of what qualifies as an expert (see Idea 12). If you decide to visit your mother you should get advice on how best to protect yourself from a qualified medical specialist, and not from a shaman or a talk show host.
Rules and guidelines: Useful but not to be applied blindly
Not everyone is wise, or thinks for the common good, which is why we have rules to guide and govern the behavior of people. One reason the US has suffered more covid deaths than other countries is the resistance to regulations and guidelines regarding using facemasks indoors and vaccination mandates, despite the overwhelming evidence that vaccines are safe and offer great protection against hospitalization and death.
But not all rules and regulations aim for the common good, and they can be used to control or discriminate against certain groups of people. In Iran, for example, it is obligatory for all women to wear a headscarf, called a hijab, in public. Iranian law states that “anyone who explicitly violates any religious taboo in public” should be imprisoned for up to two months or flogged with 74 lashes. The so-called “morality police”, recently disbanded after a young woman died in their custody, oversaw the enforcing of this law. This is a harsh punishment for a law that does not bring any benefit to the population, which is why acts of civil disobedience have increased in Iran.
Box 9: Teaching Wisdom
As we have seen, wisdom is the ability to use knowledge, understanding, experience, common sense and insight to make sound decisions and sensible judgments. Currently, however, our educational institutions focus on developing cognitive skills, not virtue or character. Efforts can, and should, be made to nurture practical wisdom in our society. What could a “wisdom curriculum” look like? The psychologist Robert J. Steinberg and colleagues developed a curriculum program, “Teaching for Wisdom”. The program “was designed to facilitate the development of wise and critical thinking skills in middle school children through the infusion of these skills into a history curriculum.”1 They propose six “procedures” for teaching of wisdom, and they are as relevant to people of any age – we are never too old to learn new ways!:
Step 1: Encourage students to read classic works of literature and philosophy (Western or otherwise) to learn and reflect on the wisdom of the sages
Step 2: Engage students in class discussions, projects, and essays that encourage them to discuss the lessons they have learned from the literary and philosophical works they’ve read, and how these lessons can be applied to their own lives and the lives of others
Step 3: Encourage students to study not only ‘truth’ but values, as developed during their reflective thinking
Step 4: Place an increased emphasis on critical, creative, and practical thinking in the service of good ends that benefit the common good
Step 5: Encourage students to think about how almost any topic they study might be used for better or worse ends, and about how important that final end is
Step 6: Remember that a teacher is a role model.
1. Steinberg, R. J. et al. (2007). Teaching for wisdom: what matters is not just what students know, but how they use it. London Review of Education, 5, 2, pp. 143-158
This example illustrates why we should not accept rules unconditionally. In fact, even the application of ethical rule-based systems such as utilitarianism and deontology require that we use some level of judgment and knowledge. For example, opening the economy before a treatment for a pandemic is found would inevitably result in the death of thousands of people. However, if most of the population benefits, utilitarianism allows for this trade-off.
But how exactly do you calculate the trade-off between a death and economic activity? Should you use life expectancy as a metric to favor those who can live the longest? Why not use productivity instead? The most “valuable” members of society during the pandemic are those who are willing to risk their lives for the chance to work, not the well-off who hunker down in their houses until a vaccine or treatment is found. As the pandemic clearly illustrates, the calculus involved in designing policies that balance lives and livelihood is complex.
This shows that even the best-intentioned rules can have negative repercussions if applied thoughtlessly or indiscriminately. In other words, they are no substitute for personal wisdom.
To conclude: Make the pursuit of wisdom your life philosophy
The most hazardous landscape that we must travel is not physical, but moral. Having better technology is not going to help us traverse the moral landscape. We have the knowhow to build rockets to travel to Mars, but not the ability to get along with our fellow humans.[12]
As we saw, the wise person not only knows the right thing to do but also wants to do it. This may be, alas, one of the most formidable obstacles to the development of wisdom in our society. Acquiring knowledge is the easy part (although see Box 9). The day-to-day commitment to live a moral, ethical life aiming for the common good is the hard part. It is like reading a book with recipes for a healthy diet and lifestyle. You may be able to memorize it cover to cover, but you will never achieve the desired results unless you change your eating and exercise habits for good. In the same way, achieving wisdom requires that you alter your whole approach to life. This is a decision that no one can make for you and for which no clear blueprint exists.
The best way to develop your own wisdom is to gain knowledge about yourself and the world around you. Recognize, though, that human understanding is limited and flawed; we cannot understand every topic. The key is to strengthen your ability to think critically so you can navigate through uncertainty. Recognize that rationality takes many forms – different disciplines see the world in varied ways. Be willing to learn from your mistakes and from those made by others. The solution to our hardest problems, like climate change, comes not from asserting our knowledge over others, but from creatively combining knowledge to produce innovation.
Probably the most compelling reason to aspire for wisdom, even if it seems hard or beyond your reach, is that it feels good. After all, wisdom represents the highest possible level of human functioning (see Idea 14). The pursuit of excellence can also give you a sense of direction and purpose in life. In fact, achieving wisdom is much more than developing an expertise in life; it is a “full-fledged” philosophy of life. Having the opportunity to develop one of your own is the most valuable lesson that I hope you can get from this book.
[1] “He urged saving the economy over protecting those who are ‘not productive’ from the coronavirus. Then he faced America’s wrath,” by Marc Fisher, The Washington Post, March 25, 2020. [2]Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Belknap Press. [3]“The do-gooder movement that shielded Sam Bankman-Fried from scrutiny,” by Nitasha Tiku, The Washington Post, Nov 17, 2022. [4]Koenigs M., et al. (2007). Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgements. Nature, Letter, Published online 21 March, 2007 [5]Artiga, S., Hill, L. & Haidar, S. (2021). COVID-19 Cases and Deaths by Race/Ethnicity: Current Data and Changes Over Time, KFF, Published Oct 8, 2021. [6]Harris, S. (2010). The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. Free Press. p. 7. [7]Schwartz, B. & Sharpe, K. E. (2006). Practical wisdom: Aristotle meets positive psychology, Journal of Happiness Studies, 7, 377-395, p.384 [8]Pierre Hadot (2002). What is Ancient Philosophy? The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass. [9]Baltes, P. B.; (2004). Wisdom as orchestration of mind and virtue, Max Planck Institute for Human Development. unfinished book. A draft copy can be downloaded from: https://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/pb/PB_Wisdom_2004.pdf. [10]Sternberg R. J. (1990), Wisdom: Its nature, origins, and development. New York: Cambridge University Press. See also Sternberg, R. J. (1998) A balance theory of wisdom. Review of General Psychology, 2, 347-365. [11]Flowers, B. J. (2006). Virtue and psychology: Pursuing excellence in ordinary practices, American Psychological Association, p.116. [12]Arguably the best example of this is the case of Elon Musk, the creative force behind Tesla and SpaceX, which have revolutionized the development of electric cars and space travel, respectively. However, Musk showed poor judgment after he acquired Twitter, and used the platform to spread misinformation and conspiracy thinking.
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