Epistemic Virtue and Justified Belief

Abstract

Abstract A major presupposition of ethics is that our moral lives can be conducted well or poorly. Our intellectual lives—our questioning and judging, our reflection and inference, our criticism and responses to criticism—can also be conducted well or poorly. We value moral virtues as features of character that govern our overall behavior; but there are also intellectual virtues, such as openmindedness and rigor, that may govern much of our cognitive behavior. Vittue ethics has always been an important theoretical approach in moral philosophy and, in the past few decades, has received renewed attention; it should be no surprise that virtue epistemology has also been explored and developed in recent years.1 Virtue epistemology is interesting and important in its own right, but there is also value in comparing it with virtue ethics. Does it have a similar range of resources and problems? And are there important points still to be learned from the right kind of comparison? I think the answer is “yes” in both cases, and my main effort here is to make some comparisons and bring out some difficulties for virtue epistemology in at least some of its forms. I’ll start with the concepts of (non-intellectual) virtue and of action from it, proceed to the concepts of epistemic virtue and of belief from it, and then explore some major connections between epistemic virtue and, on the other side, justified belief and knowledge. The last section will consider the extent to which the concept of epistemic virtue provides a basis for understanding justification and knowledge independently of a more particularistic, or at any rate non-trait-based, approach.