Managing conflicts is a complex endeavor that requires balancing competing values. Today more than ever, conflicts and dilemmas tend to assume a tragic form, given the exceptionally critical times we live in. As individuals, we are required to make wise choices, both for prudential and ethical reasons, as well as to manage conflicts between self-interest and the promotion of collective goods; politicians must take decisions that will affect present and future generations.

In this project, I address this pressing issue by advancing a new paradigm in virtue ethics, centered on the role of practical wisdom (PW) understood as ethical expertise (EE), as crucial to moral development and decision-making, especially in situations of conflict among values. The project has interdisciplinary nature: besides advancing a new ethical paradigm, I want to 

(i) investigate the psychological underpinnings of PW and accommodate it within a credible psychological framework; 

(ii) explore the implications of the paradigm outside ethics; in particular, I want to test the hypothesis that cultivating EE can help to address cross-domain conflicts of values (i.e., in cases when protecting an epistemic or aesthetic value implies violating an ethical requirement); 

(iii) design an educational model to develop EE.