Philippa Foot (1920-2010)

 Wisdom as virtue 

Philippa Foot (1920-2010) was an important English philosopher who wrote important essays on moral philosophy. She was born to an influential family in England (her grandfather had been president of the USA) and studied at Oxford University. Afterwards she taught at several universities in the USA and later went back to England to teach at Oxford. She died at the age of 90.

Foot is known for her work to revive Virtue Ethics, which is an approach that focuses on the moral person (as opposed to focusing on moral actions), and on the virtues that make a person a moral person.  The following text is from her book Virtues and vices, and other essays in moral philosophy (1978), from the first essay “Virtues and vices.” Here she explains that practical wisdom is a virtue, and not just an intellectual virtue but also a moral virtue. This is because wisdom is not just a matter of knowing how to achieve your goals (ends) but also to have good goals.

Wisdom, as I see it, has two parts. In the first place, the wise person knows the means to certain good ends; and secondly he knows how much particular ends are worth.

Wisdom in its first part is relatively easy to understand. It seems that there are some ends belonging to human life in general, rather than to particular skills such as medicine or boatbuilding, ends having to do with such matters as friendship, marriage, the bringing up of children, or the choice of ways of life. And it seems that knowledge of how to act well in these matters belongs to some people and not to others. We call those who have this knowledge wise, while those who do not have it are seen as lacking wisdom.

So, as both Aristotle and Aquinas insisted, wisdom is to be contrasted with cleverness because cleverness is the ability to take the right steps to any end, whereas wisdom is related only to good ends, and to human life in general rather than to the ends of particular arts.

[…] The second part of wisdom, which has to do with values, is much harder to describe, because here we meet ideas which are curiously elusive, such as the thought that some pursuits are more worthwhile than others, and some matters trivial and some important in human life. Since it makes good sense to say that most men waste a lot of their lives in ardent pursuit of what is trivial and unimportant, it is not possible to explain the important and the trivial in terms of the amount of attention given to different subjects by the average man. But I have never seen, or been able to think out, a true account of this matter, and I believe that a complete account of wisdom, and of certain other virtues and vices, must want until this gap can be filled.

What we can see is that one of the things a wise person knows and a foolish person does not is that such things as social position, and wealth, and the good opinion of the world, are too dearly bought at the cost of health or friendship or family ties. So we may say that a person who lacks wisdom “has false values”, and that vices such as vanity and worldliness and avarice are contrary to wisdom in a special way. There is always an element of false judgment about these vices, since the person who is vain, for instance, sees admiration as more important that it is, while the worldly person is apt to see the good life as one of wealth and power.