Jason Swartwood

Saint Paul College
  •  1739
    In this dialogue, I illustrate why moral arguments from analogy are a valuable part of moral reasoning by considering how texting while driving is, morally speaking, no different than drunk driving.
  •  1478
    Doing Practical Ethics supports the deliberate practice of philosophical skills relevant to understanding, evaluating, and developing arguments in forms commonly used in the field of practical ethics. Each chapter includes an explanation of a specific moral reasoning skill, demonstration exercises with sample solutions that offer students immediate feedback on their initial practice attempts, and extensive sets of practice exercises. It is suitable for any ethics course that centrally features a…Read more
  •  1358
    Can we measure practical wisdom?
    Journal of Moral Education 49 (1): 71-97. 2020.
    Wisdom, long a topic of interest to moral philosophers, is increasingly the focus of social science research. Philosophers have historically been concerned to develop a rationally defensible account of the nature of wisdom and its role in the moral life, often inspired in various ways by virtue theoretical accounts of practical wisdom (phronesis). Wisdom scientists seek to, among other things, define wisdom and its components so that we can measure them. Are the measures used by wisdom scientist…Read more
  •  1211
    Fanciful Examples
    with Ian Stoner
    Metaphilosophy 48 (3): 325-344. 2017.
    This article defends the use of fanciful examples within the method of wide reflective equilibrium. First, it characterizes the general persuasive role of described cases within that method. Second, it suggests three criteria any example must meet in order to succeed in this persuasive role; fancifulness has little or nothing to do with whether an example is able to meet these criteria. Third, it discusses several general objections to fanciful examples and concludes that they are objections to …Read more
  •  1008
    Wisdom as an Expert Skill
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (3): 511-528. 2013.
    Practical wisdom is the intellectual virtue that enables a person to make reliably good decisions about how, all-things-considered, to live. As such, it is a lofty and important ideal to strive for. It is precisely this loftiness and importance that gives rise to important questions about wisdom: Can real people develop it? If so, how? What is the nature of wisdom as it manifests itself in real people? I argue that we can make headway answering these questions by modeling wisdom on expert skill.…Read more
  •  988
    Philosophical Foundations of Wisdom
    In Robert Sternberg & Judith Gluek (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Wisdom, Cambridge University Press. pp. 10-39. 2019.
    Practical wisdom (hereafter simply ‘wisdom’), which is the understanding required to make reliably good decisions about how we ought to live, is something we all have reason to care about. The importance of wisdom gives rise to questions about its nature: what kind of state is wisdom, how can we develop it, and what is a wise person like? These questions about the nature of wisdom give rise to further questions about proper methods for studying wisdom. Is the study of wisdom the proper subje…Read more
  •  779
    A Skill-Based Framework for Teaching Morality and Religion
    Teaching Ethics 18 (1): 39-62. 2019.
    One important aim of moral philosophy courses is to help students build the skills necessary to make their own well-reasoned decisions about moral issues. This includes the skill of determining when a particular moral reason provides a good answer to a moral question or not. Helping students think critically about religious reasons like “because God says so” and “because scripture explicitly says so” can be challenging because such lessons can be misperceived as coercive or anti-religious. I …Read more
  •  771
    Cultivating Practical Wisdom
    Dissertation, University of Minnesota. 2013.
    Practical wisdom (hereafter simply “wisdom”) is the intellectual virtue that enables a person to make reliably good decisions about how, all-things-considered, to live and conduct herself. Because wisdom is such an important and high-level achievement, we should wonder: what is the nature of wisdom? What kinds of skills, habits and capacities does it involve? Can real people actually develop it? If so, how? I argue that we can answer these questions by modeling wisdom on expert decision-making s…Read more
  •  417
    This is a reading intended for Introductory Ethics courses that helps student think through basic questions about Religion and Morality. Instructors can find my suggestions for how to use the paper, along with class exercises, in Jason Swartwood, (2019) “A Skill-Based Framework for Teaching Morality and Religion,” Teaching Ethics, 18 (1): 39-62. Instructors can profitably assign students to read sections 1-4 of "Religion and Moral Reasons" and then discuss the application to religious reasons u…Read more
  •  242
    Youth Prisons: Abolition or Reform?
    Public Philosophy Journal 5 (1). 2023.
    Active and targeted reforms at the local and state levels have had success reducing youth incarceration rates. While most agree the work is not done, reform of the youth incarceration system has had important successes. At the same time, activists and advocates have increasingly rejected the goal of reforming youth prisons in favor of abolishing them. I outline some objections to prominent abolitionist arguments. Specifically, I show why arguments that focus on the racist historical origins of t…Read more
  •  93
    Despite increased philosophical and psychological work on practical wisdom, contemporary interdisciplinary wisdom research provides few specifics about how to develop wisdom (Kristjánsson 2022). This lack of practically useful guidance is due in part to the difficulty of determining how to combine the tools of philosophy and psychology to develop a plausible account of wisdom as a prescriptive ideal. Modeling wisdom on more ordinary forms of expertise is promising, but skill models of wisdom (An…Read more
  •  81
    Wisdom revisited: a case study in normative theorizing
    Philosophical Explorations 14 (3): 277-295. 2011.
    Extensive discussions of practical wisdom are relatively rare in the philosophical literature these days. This is strange given the theoretical and practical importance of wisdom and, indeed, the etymology of the word "philosophy." In this paper, we remedy this inattention by proposing a methodology for developing a theory of wisdom and using this methodology to outline a viable theory. The methodology we favor is a version of wide reflective equilibrium. We begin with psychological research on …Read more
  •  16
    A person with practical wisdom reliably grasps how to live and conduct themselves. But what is practical wisdom, how can we get it, and how can we study it? This chapter will introduce some prominent philosophical arguments and answers to these questions. After distinguishing practical wisdom from other types of wisdom, the chapter explains why studying wisdom requires combining both philosophy and empirical science. To illustrate the contribution of philosophy, the chapter describes a core…Read more