The Possibility of Virtue Ethics in Information Literacy

Abstract

Virtue ethics has recently enjoyed a resurgence in contemporary scholarship, especially concerning its practical and epistemic dimensions. Librarians have also been part of these recent conversations, especially in information literacy. For example, in his recent book Virtue Information Literacy: Flourishing in an Age of Information Anarchy, Wayne Bivens-Tatum underscores the need to cultivate intellectual virtues to navigate through the world of anarchy. Intellectual or epistemic virtues such as open-mindedness, intellectual humility, epistemic modesty, etc., are all necessary for information users to flourish in an age where information is readily available. While affirming the virtue ethics framework for information literacy, in this paper, I will present potential problems to the virtue ethics framework by calling into question the object of intellectual or epistemic virtues, namely consideration of truth. Librarians adopting the virtue ethics framework should consider the metatheoretical assumptions of the framework itself and understand the inherent challenges it poses, one of which is that virtues are goal oriented.