Commentary from Georgi Gardener

Abstract

Kidd argues that vice epistemology is fruitfully developed as critical character epistemology. Kidd argues that current epistemology disproportionately focuses on epistemic goods, such as virtue. Foregrounding aphotic and unpropitious facets of social-epistemic life, including vice, is a needed corrective. Social inequalities, including in distributions of epistemic traits and expectations about those traits, can be more pernicious when overlooked. For some groups, character traits are noticed but the perceived valence is switched or downplayed. Kidd suggests that ‘gendered vices become especially salient to women seeking to improve their epistemic predicament’. Kidd writes, ‘women were, or would always become, marked by the “Feminine Vices”, like submissiveness and superficiality’. Women’s submissiveness can be non-salient even to those injured by that submissiveness or seeking to improve their situation.