Enacting Phronesis: some deliberations about enactive ethics

Enactivists have made several forays into the domain of ethical thought over the past decades: their proposals vary in foci and ambition (Colombetti and Torrance in Phenomenol Cogn Sci 8:505–526, 2009, Fourlas and Cuffari in Topoi 41:355–371, 2022, as reported by Di Paolo and De Jaegher (Linguistic bodies: the continuity between life and language, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2022), Pescador Canales and Mojica in Topoi 41:257–274, 2022). Rather than survey that terrain, this paper goes back to basics and revisits a seminal series of lectures by Varela on ethical expertise from 1999 that is standardly cited as a cornerstone for these sundry efforts. It reviews and questions some of the core claims and assumptions Varela makes in his attempt to bring enactivist ideas to bear on moral psychology and ethical expertise. His analysis is revealed to be lacking in crucial respects. Specifically, Varela mischaracterizes and undervalues Aristotle’s contributions to virtue ethics and fails to take stock of a pivotal Aristotelian lesson about what is required for being an ethical agent at all. This paper attempts to rectify that omission. It also considers, afresh, reasons why we should take a neo-Aristotelian approach to virtue ethics and phronesis then seriously today. Doing so, ironically, puts us in a position to directly respond to the concerns Varela raised about the unhealthy dominance of rule-based ethical approaches in Western thought. Finally, the paper shows that if we are interested in understanding how to enact phronesis at least one variety of enactivism—namely, radical enactivism—provides a promising framework for helping us to do so. This is because radical enactivism recognizes the existence of both contentless and contentful modes of cognizing and the need to understand how they interact and influence each other in complex ways.