Virtue – Intellectual Virtues
PLAN
• Varieties of Virtue: Moral and Intellectual Virtues
• The Conflation Problem
(a) Driver’s Negative Arguments
(b) Driver’s Positive Proposal
• Outcome: Remaining Questions
•So far we’ve been cashing out being a morally admirable person
as being a morally virtuous person
•While virtue theorists working in ethics tend to focus on moral
virtues, those working in epistemology try to understand
intellectual/epistemic virtues
•Ethicists = mroal virtues
•Epistemologists = intellectual virtues and knowledge
•Interesting to see where the lines between these lie
•Some Possible Examples [?/Provisional]:
•Actual list given by how we attempt to identify virtues
•Moral Virtues: Compassion; Courage; Honesty;
Loyalty;Temperance; Justice; Generosity; etc...
•Intellectual Virtues: Inquisitiveness; Intellectual Courage;
Intellectual Rigour; Intellectual Perseverance; Open-Mindedness;
etc...
•Since we’re focusing maonly on MV in this unit then the main
question we trying to answer is: how are these two lists related?
•Perhaps the goal of education is to instill these traits in
people: make them inquisitive and intellectually
persevering
■If so then we have reason to want to know what the
intellectual virtues are
•Baehr gives us a possible answer
•Three Options:
•a) The Reductive Thesis:
There is no principled distinction between moral and
intellectual virtues. Intellectual virtues just are moral
virtues.
■The alleged list of IV are just examples of MV rub out
the line
•b) The Subset Thesis: Intellectual virtues are moral virtues,
but they form a distinguishable sub-set of moral virtues.
■Agree that IV are just MV BUT there is something
different about IV
■IV’s have something in common with each other
which sets them apart (special quality)
•c) The Independence Thesis: Intellectual virtues are distinct
from moral virtues.
