Sentimentalist Virtue Epistemology

Abstract

Virtue ethics and virtue epistemology have been reviving in recent decades. There are currently two main competing branches of virtue ethics: the neo-Aristotelian and the sentimentalist or neo-Humean. But the two main forms of virtue epistemology, reliabilism and responsibilism, both take inspiration from Aristotle: the former from his work on intellectual virtue, the latter from his work on ethical virtue. In neither case is Hume in the picture, but we hope to show the reader that virtue epistemology in fact has a lot to learn from Hume and from sentimentalism. Here, we explore an alternative to both reliabilism and responsibilism: personalism. Personalism recognizes two categories of epistemic virtues that have been undervalued by reliabilists and responsibilists. It recognizes natural epistemic virtues that operate at the level of the person, and acquired epistemic virtues for which the agent herself is not responsible.