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A virtuous character includes values (with social flourishing as a compass) and the disposition to act on them in a stable way. Thus, even though virtue ethics emphasizes the agent's whole moral inner life rather than the rightness of their isolated actions, virtues can also be interpreted as inspiring principles or creating general prescriptions to act, i.e. doing what is honest, generous, just; or not doing what is dishonest, mean, unjust (Hursthouse 1999; Hartman 2006). However, the application of those general prescriptions is dependent on time, place, and culture (Sanderse 2012; Russell 2015), i.e. the agent requires the ability to perceive, sense, and deliberate how to act from virtue in each particular situation (Hartman 2006), as clearly illustrated by Yearley (1990, p. 14): “I do not act benevolently in order to be benevolent (…). I act benevolently because the situation I face fits a description of a situation that elicits my benevolence.” Therefore, virtues provide the appropriate reasons and emotions to decide what to do in each situation we face (and why). This is especially convenient for contexts marked by complexity, novelty, rapid change, and uncertainty, as socioecological challenges are. In these situations, a predefined set of rules or a focus on the (unforeseeable) consequences of behaviors may be a doubtful foundation for knowing how to act.

The variety of skills needed to act virtuously across very different situations involves all kinds of virtues at play. However, Aristotle conceives virtues as interrelated and interdependent (Jacobs 2017) through one virtue: the virtue of practical wisdom or phronesis. Understood as a meta‐virtue, since no other virtue can be exercised without it (Hursthouse 1999), phronesis can be defined as “the knowledge of which acts are virtuous in which situations” (Curzer 2012, p. 12). Aristotle highlights that, unlike scientific or theoretical knowledge, practical wisdom “is concerned with human affairs and what can be deliberated about (…). Nor is practical wisdom knowledge of universals only. On the contrary, it must also know particulars. For it is practical, and action is concerned with particulars” (NE 1141b).

Since phronesis is so central to virtuous choice, it deserves special attention when it comes to the ES of virtue, as we will develop in Section 4.4.