What Is Advice?

Advice is a ubiquitous social practice, and one that raises complex ethical challenges in our personal and professional lives. Despite this, few contemporary philosophers have paid it serious attention. One must dig deep into the archives, and think laterally about contemporary scholarship, to find a body of ethical reflections on advising. This chapter provides a critical overview of philosophical treatments of advice from antiquity to the modern day. It explores how thinkers have approached six key questions: What is advice? Why take advice? Why give advice? How should one advise? What are the qualities of a good advisor? and What should the advice relationship be like? It identifies foundations for a theory of the ethics of advising and several questions that such a theory should resolve.