Phronesis, affordance, and executive function: Situating values within moral psychology.

This article focuses on the Aristotelian virtue of phronesis—practical wisdom or good judgment—and its integration with contemporary psychological concepts, particularly executive functions (EFs), to explain moral perception and action. It presents a five-aspect model of phronesis, derived from classical sources including Aristotle and Aquinas (who termed it prudentia), that combines cognitive skills, knowledge-action coordination, evaluative content (values), cognitive content, and sociocultural content to guide moral decision-making within a value-laden environment of moral affordances. The authors argue that phronesis enables individuals to discern and actualize morally fitting actions by flexibly engaging EF-related skills without reducing moral wisdom to cognitive processes alone, emphasizing the role of values in motivating and constraining moral choices. This framework situates moral expertise as developing through practice and interaction with situational affordances, allowing for both automatic and deliberative moral responses while addressing the dynamic interplay between subjective values and objective features of the environment.