of practical wisdom or ethical decisionmaking, is that we neither can nor should ignore the dispositional aspect that feeds into every decision. If we think about how ethical choices or actions happen, they cannot be separated from our dispositional stances, or who we are in the world. When we think about who we are, a far more specific historically and culturallyembedded figure emerges, not a vanilla person who simply weighs up a list of choices and makes a cost-benefit analysis. It is this relationship of wisdom with socio-culturally embedded practice to which the ‘practical’ in Aristotle’s ‘practical wisdom’ refers. Yet, it is generally conflated with what we might call ‘wisdom’, missing the key social reference. All this is not to say we do not deliberate, or that we never approach situations intentionally or reflectively. A dispositional stance is not automatic. Rather, even deliberation occurs within a dispositional frame of reference grounded in our social world. PERSONAL FRAMES OF REFERENCE I can explain this with a simple example from my own life. While a dispositional frame of reference is something we are not usually conscious of, certain events or experiences could make us more conscious of it. I am originally from India and as I started getting acclimatised to the UK, to Lancaster specifically, there were many occasions where my cultural frame of reference was problematised. Those of you who have studied at Lancaster may be aware of the free bus to the Sainsbury’s supermarket from campus every Wednesday. During my PhD studies, my mother was visiting, and we took the bus into town. For the return journey, you are required to have a receipt showing you have spent at least £5 to travel for free. On this occasion, I had spent £40, but had only one receipt. The bus driver refused to let both myself and my mum on, saying we needed two receipts, no matter how much I had spent on the one I had. I was left with no choice but to not take the bus, because travelling without my mother was not an option at all. I was conscious of an ethical problem here, because the act of refusing to allow myself and my elderly mother on the bus was strange to me from a cultural perspective. It made me conscious of my dispositional stance towards this situation, because I realised this stance might not match this new setting. The bus driver was sticking to rules in a rather mechanical way. It made me think that back in India they would take a more relational rather than a rules-based approach in a comparable situation. There, relationality would take precedence, not the rules. This might create different sorts of problems, but what I am really trying to highlight is that practical wisdom can take many different forms. The specific form that practical wisdom takes relates to the dispositional orientation developed within a culture. If I had not experienced two different cultures, would I have thought anything of the bus driver’s decision? Even if I had, would I make sense of it in the way that I did with my Indian frame of reference? THINK LOCAL We need to think about wisdom or ethical decision-making in general, not in terms of conscious deliberation or deliberative thinking in relation to universal rules and codes. Rather, we must think of it as something that manifests in culturally or locally meaningful ways. We also need to build in a sensitivity towards local ways of being, seeing and acting, rather than framing anything that does not conform with dominant or Western frames as peculiar or corrupt. If we do this, we will discover practical wisdom – or rather diverse forms of it – in the local. In a world where we are increasingly going global, this appreciation of the local is not simply important, but imperative. Dr Sylvia D’souza is an International Lecturer in Business Management in the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology. The article, Recovering Aristotle’s Practice-Based Ontology: Practical Wisdom as Embodied Ethical Intuition, by Dr Sylvia D’souza and Professor Lucas Introna, of Lancaster University Management School, is published in the Journal of Business Ethics. s.dsouza@lancaster.ac.uk FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 41
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