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Anglo‐American philosophy has recently seen two simultaneous virtue‐theoretic revivals — one in ethics and the other in epistemology. One might naturally assume that these are two manifestations of a single resurgent conception of normativity, but in fact virtue epistemology has thus far been built upon a far more conventional conceptual foundation than the best work in virtue ethics. The real promise of virtue epistemology lies not in resolving puzzles that already preoccupy epistemologists but in inducing a fundamental shift in the scope, ambitions and agenda of epistemology. The aim of this chapter is to argue in favor of a fundamental shift of this sort. The guiding thought is that if we are to locate a telos of theoretical reflection with reference to which we can identify virtuous intellectual dispositions or capacities, we should look not towards the conventional epistemological goals of true belief or propositional knowledge, but towards fully actualized understanding. The chapter closes by showing how this change in view makes possible a unified account of ethical and epistemic virtues.

This chapter offers an alternative to the standard success-oriented epistemological theories by arguing that the highest epistemic good is a state which includes much more than the achievement of true beliefs and the avoidance of false ones. Indeed, it includes much more than knowledge: it requires understanding of important truths. For some of the intellectual virtues are best understood as directed at understanding rather than truth or knowledge. Whether the goal of the intellectual virtues is truth or understanding, reliable success cannot be necessary for the possession of an intellectual virtue given that some of the most impressive intellectual giants such as Aristotle, Newton, and Galileo are not noted for their success. The intellectual virtues should therefore be understood in terms of the values at which they aim, not the values they reliably bring about. The upshot of giving up success oriented approaches in epistemology will provide greater clarity in understanding intellectual virtues.

This chapter first identifies what is extremely valuable and distinctive in the approach to Ethics Glover takes in Humanity. It then goes on to argue that Glover's approach is incomplete, because it is insufficiently empirical and, more importantly because it lacks a conceptual framework capable of identifying the full range of topics for empirically informed Ethics research. The needed conceptual framework must incorporate social moral epistemology, which focuses on the interaction between the moral‐epistemic virtues and vices of individuals and the moral‐epistemic functions of institutions. Through the use of historical examples of the sort Glover appeals to in Humanity, this chapter shows that work in Ethics must pay more attention to the ethics of believing and to the role that institutions play in the formation of systems of belief.

Focusing on racial and sexual oppression and their interrelation, chapter 1 provides an analysis of active ignorance and of three epistemic vices that support it: epistemic arrogance, laziness, and closed-mindedness. I argue that structural active ignorance can be corrected only by developing epistemic virtues such as epistemic humility, curiosity/diligence, and open-mindedness. I further argue that the overcoming of active ignorance requires beneficial epistemic friction in interactions with significantly different epistemic others, and I offer two regulative principles for achieving such friction: the principle of acknowledgment and engagement, and the principle of epistemic equilibrium.

This chapter points out that standard versions of virtue epistemology accept and are motivated by the same central problems in epistemology — such as analyzing the concepts of knowledge and justification, and addressing skeptical challenges — which motivate contemporary epistemology. The only significant difference is that virtue epistemology claims that the concepts of knowledge and justification must be analyzed in terms of virtues. What motivates virtue ethicists, however, is not what is motivating other ethicists. The contemporary census amongst ethicists has a different set of problems than the ones motivating virtue ethicists. Virtue epistemologists should mount a similar challenge to their contemporaries: instead of focusing on static states such as beliefs and evaluating whether or not they are justified, they should focus their efforts on evaluating and regulating the activities of inquiry and deliberation, and the role which virtues play in such evaluation and regulation.

A weak unity thesis about epistemic virtues holds that there is a core epistemic value – true belief – and that processes, traits, or actions are epistemic virtues by virtue of their relations with this core value. According to veritistic unitarianism, justification is a distinct epistemic value from truth but derives its value from that of true belief. This is explicit in reliabilism and implicit in many varieties of foundationalism and coherentism. Deontological evidentialism rejects veritistic consequentialism but has trouble accounting for evidence‐gathering virtues. The claim that “pragmatic” epistemic virtues are unrelated to truth is examined but found unpersuasive or readily accommodated with minor tweakings of the veritistic perspective.

This chapter discusses democracy's ethics of belief and asks how we can reconcile our decision-making responsibilities, as morally momentous as they can seem to be, with our epistemic and cognitive vulnerabilities. More specifically, it considers the virtues of decision making of citizens by identifying instances of reckless or inattentive reasoning about politics. The chapter begins from the recognition that it is not possible for us to be well informed about the component parts of the modern democratic state. It insists that theory of citizenship owes us an account of permissible ignorance about political life. After considering the cognitive economy of democracy and the protective function of principles, the chapter presents a collection of counternormative cases that illustrate our intuitions about what constitutes negligent deliberation regarding justice's verdicts. It also describes three epistemic virtues—virtues of truth that bear on our limited decision making.

A virtue is a special kind of capacity to get things done, one that is sensitive to the situation in which it is employed, the state of the agent, and the changes at which it aims. These three are usually inseparable This inseparability is essential to the use of virtue as a normative category, and is a central reason why we need this category of evaluation. The chapter discusses intellectual virtues under three requirements. They are learnable; they are topics of evaluation, and they are sensitivities to features of a person’s environment and her capacities to manage information derived from it. The chapter pays attention to what is called in this chapter ‘paradoxical virtues’, virtues whose simple descriptions make them sound like vices. The chapter thinks these are particularly prevalent among virtues of limitation-management. Throughout the chapter emphasizes the multiple-realizability of virtues, and connect this both with their resistance to situationist challenges and their irreplaceability for normative purposes.

This chapter introduces virtue epistemology, a theory of knowledge based on an evaluation of the character traits of the agent. Knowledge is then a state of belief arising out of acts of epistemic virtue, where epistemic virtue is an acquired character trait such as epistemic responsibility and epistemic conscientiousness. The chapter extends these ideas to describe an organizational epistemic culture that is virtuous. A virtuous epistemic culture is defined by an authentic motivation for knowledge, buttressed by norms that uphold epistemic virtues such as open-mindedness, intellectual courage, intellectual integrity, and epistemic responsibility. The chapter also examines epistemic vices that diminish or distort motivation for knowledge and that compromise reliable success in attaining knowledge. Specifically, the chapter looks at epistemic injustice, epistemic conformity, closed-mindedness, confirmation bias, intellectual dogmatism, learning myopia, attributional biases, and organizational defensive routines.

This chapter provides an epistemology for virtue ethics—target-centred virtue epistemology, arguing that we all need the epistemic virtues rather than relying on the wisdom of a virtuous agent. It thus contrasts target-centred virtue epistemology with qualified agent virtue epistemology. Epistemic virtues are understood in terms of their epistemic targets rather than primarily in terms of virtuous epistemic motives. The chapter argues that virtue epistemology is a branch of virtue ethics, and that epistemic virtues should be understood as not isolated from ethical virtue but are instead ‘virtues proper’. It discusses too the evidential status of “moral intuitions” in relation to target-centred virtue epistemology, and deleterious social factors in the transmission of beliefs such as the network and contagion social epistemic models, in relation to personal epistemic virtue.

In this chapter, Karen Frost-Arnold provides a close analysis of the epistemological challenges posed by context collapse in online environments and argues that virtue epistemology provides a helpful normative framework for addressing some of these problems. “Context collapse” is the blurring or merging of multiple contexts or audiences into one. Frost-Arnold identifies at least three epistemic challenges posed by context collapse. First, context collapse facilitates online harassment, which causes epistemic harm by decreasing the diversity of epistemic communities. Second, context collapse threatens the integrity of marginalized epistemic communities in which some types of true beliefs flourish. Third, context collapse promotes misunderstanding, as understanding relies on background knowledge which, in turn, is often context sensitive. Frost-Arnold then argues that we can cultivate and promote the epistemic virtues of trustworthiness and discretion in order to address some of these problems.

Remaining objections to care and virtue-theoretic knowing are mitigated by appealing to the resources in each other. Epistemic agency is thus interwoven with ethical agency (and vice versa) thus establishing relational humility to be a ‘hybrid’ virtue. This questions whether (and how) moral virtues can be distinguished from intellectual virtues or whether they collapse into each other. Once again, the Mahābhārata suggests a resolution through its intriguing explication of truth through the thirteen characteristics that are said to constitute both satyācāra (practice of truth) as well as satyākāra (forms of truth). However, for a feminist epistemology, this ethico-epistemic agency must have a political dimension. The Mahābhārata’s distinctive take on care ethical agency in terms of the triad of dvaidha, yukti, and prajňā, when read as political agency suggests fascinating and surprisingly contemporary notions of ‘the political’ in terms of the agonism of Chantal Mouffe and aesthetic judgements of Hannah Arendt.

Re-posting fake news on social media exposes others to epistemic risks that include not only false belief but also misguided trust in the source of the fake news. The risk of misguided trust comes from the fact that re-posting is a kind of credentialing; as a new kind of speech-act, re-posting does not yet have established norms and so runs an additional risk of “bent credentialing.” This chapter proposes that other-regarding epistemic virtues can help us mitigate the epistemic risks that come with re-posting—specifically the virtue of epistemic trustworthiness. It further considers how an epistemically trustworthy person should regulate her re-posting behavior in light of the psychological evidence that retracting false beliefs is far more difficult than might be supposed. Behaving in an epistemically trustworthy way requires being responsive to the real risks that our actions expose others to, as well as recognizing the real ways that others depend on us.

This chapter analyzes stupidity as a problem for epistemology. Its proper home belongs to virtue epistemology, as a specific epistemic vice, which has to be studied along the lines of both reliabilist virtue epistemology and of responsibilist virtue epistemology. The author distinguishes between two kinds of stupidity: stupidity proper and foolishness. The former is a defect in the competence of an agent, as well as in the performance of judgment, and it is generally studied as a failure of rationality along intellectualist lines. The second is a failure to evaluate properly the nature of the epistemic goal, and is a form of epistemic indifference, which involves an insensitivity to epistemic values and norms. This chapter analyzes their varieties, and suggest that the boundaries between stupidity and foolishness are often less clear than it is suggested by the author’s taxonomy.

How do epistemic virtues apply to groups? This chapter demonstrates how a Stoic account of epistemic virtues is well-poised to be smoothly extended from individuals to groups. The Stoic distinction between the telos of our lives and the skopos of our actions shows that both must be applied to groups; a natural extension of the individual epistemic skopos to the group epistemic skopos allows for a focus either on the beliefs of its members or the beliefs of the group as a whole. In response to the objection that groups cannot have beliefs so they cannot aim at true group belief, it is demonstrated that the Stoic view of epistemic agency clearly allows for group beliefs. Further, the individual epistemic telos, a disposition to believe well, can also straightforwardly apply to groups, leaving open the possibility of group epistemic virtues.

This chapter relocates the debate about the theoretical virtues to the empirical level and argues that the question of whether the virtues (and what virtues, if any) have epistemic import is best answered empirically, through an examination of actual scientific theories and hypotheses in the history of science. As a concrete example of this approach, the chapter discusses a case study from the mid-nineteenth-century debate about the transmissibility of puerperal fever. It argues that this case shows that the virtues are at least sometimes epistemic, but also that neither scientific realists nor anti-realists get it quite right: the virtues, even if epistemic, are not necessarily truth-conducive, but neither are they merely pragmatic. It also argues that the discussion of puerperal fever shows that the virtue question, as it is currently featured in the scientific realism debate, ought to be reformulated. We should examine not just whether a given scientific theory has virtues or not, but rather how debates among competing theories, all of which have some virtues, get resolved.

Environmental virtue ethicists recognize the importance of the moral virtues for addressing environmental problems. In addition, I argue that there are at least two important intellectual virtues required in the process of developing and implementing environmentally sustainable systems of living: creativity and open-mindedness. A high degree of creativity is needed in the search for environmentally sustainable solutions, whether that be in developing new technologies, in imagining more efficient economic systems, or in reconsidering our current ways of living. But creativity on its own is not sufficient for implementing these solutions; open-mindedness is also essential. Open-mindedness allows us to appreciate and understand the sustainable solutions developed by others and to consider how those approaches might be implemented in our own context. These two intellectual virtues work in tandem to allow both a wide-ranging search for new ideas and the change in ways of thinking needed to make them a reality.