What should a virtue theory of argumentation say about fallacious reasoning? If good arguments are virtuous, then fallacies are vicious. Yet fallacies cannot just be identified with vices, since vices are dispositional properties of agents whereas fallacies are types of argument. Rather, if the normativity of good argumentation is explicable in terms of virtues, we should expect the wrongness of bad argumentation to be explicable in terms of vices. This approach is defended through analysis of several fallacies, with particular emphasis (...) on the ad misericordiam. (shrink)

This article argues that intellectual character vices involve non-instrumental motives to oppose, antagonise, or avoid things that are epistemically good in themselves. This view has been the recent target of criticism based on alleged counterexamples presenting epistemically vicious individuals who are virtuously motivated or at least lack suitable epistemically bad motivations. The paper first presents these examples and shows that they do not undermine the motivational approach. Finally, having distinguished motivating from explanatory reasons for belief and action, it argues that (...) our epistemic practice of vice attribution supplies evidence in favour of motivational accounts of vice. (shrink)

The demarcation of pseudoscience has been one of the most important philosophical tasks since the 1960s. During the 1980s, an atmosphere of defeatism started to spread among philosophers of science, some of them claimed the failure of the demarcation project. I defend that the more auspicious approach to the problem might be through the intellectual character of epistemic agents, i.e., from the point of view of vice epistemology. Unfortunately, common lists of undesirable character features are usually based on a (...) priori reasoning, and therefore might be considered artificial or too vague. When we base our position on contemporary behavioural sciences, we can see that the epistemic character of believers in pseudoscience is for the most part determined by two related factors. Firstly, these epistemic agents show a higher level of cognitive laziness. By this I mean an inability or unwillingness to engage in reflective thinking and a reluctance to account for counterevidence. Secondly, they yield more easily to metacognitive overconfidence. This can be broadly understood as so-called “knowledge illusion”, the inability to recognize one’s own intellectual limits. The deficiency usually stems from a misunderstanding of the division of cognitive labour and of the agent’s role in epistemic society. I find the proposed epistemological approach to pseudoscience crucial. Only if we understand the descriptive aspects of the problem, can we think of normative solutions to it. (shrink)

On the basis of psychological research, a group of philosophers known as 'situationists' argue that the evidence belies the existence of broad and stable (or 'global') character traits. They argue that this condemns as psychologically unrealistic those traditions in moral theory in which global virtues are upheld as ideals. After a survey of the debate to date, this article argues that the thesis of situationism is ill-supported by the available evidence. Situationists overlook the explanatory potential of a large class of (...) global character traits, namely, vices that do not involve other-directed malevolence, such as laziness, cowardice, and selfishness. A detailed discussion of the relevant empirical studies bearing on moral psychology shows that the behavioral patterns observed in these studies are consistent with the widespread possession of such non-malicious vices. This means, contrary to the situationist thesis, that the empirical record is fully compatible with the common existence of global character traits. (shrink)

Why are mistaken beliefs about Covid-19 so prevalent? Political identity, education and other demographic variables explain only a part of individual differences in the susceptibility to Covid-19 misinformation. This paper focuses on another explanation: epistemic vice. Epistemic vices are character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. If the basic assumption of vice epistemology is right, then people with epistemic vices such as indifference to the truth or rigidity in their belief structures will tend to be (...) more susceptible to believing Covid-19 misinformation. We carried out an observational study (US sample, n = 998) in which we measured the level of epistemic vice of participants using a novel Epistemic Vice Scale. We also asked participants questions eliciting the extent to which they subscribe to myths and misinformation about Covid-19. We find overwhelming evidence to the effect that epistemic vice is associated with susceptibility to Covid-19 misinformation. In fact, the association turns out to be stronger than with political identity, educational attainment, scores on the Cognitive Reflection Test, personality, dogmatism, and need for closure. We conclude that this offers evidence in favor of the empirical presuppositions of vice epistemology. (shrink)

Recognizing that truth is socially constructed or that knowledge and power are related is hardly a novelty in the social sciences. In the twenty-first century, however, there appears to be a renewed concern regarding people’s relationship with the truth and the propensity for certain actors to undermine it. Organizations are highly implicated in this, given their central roles in knowledge management and production and their attempts to learn, although the entanglement of these epistemological issues with business ethics has not been (...) engaged as explicitly as it might be. Drawing on work from a virtue epistemology perspective, this paper outlines the idea of a set of epistemic vices permeating organizations, along with examples of unethical epistemic conduct by organizational actors. While existing organizational research has examined various epistemic virtues that make people and organizations effective and responsible epistemic agents, much less is known about the epistemic vices that make them ineffective and irresponsible ones. Accordingly, this paper introduces vice epistemology, a nascent but growing subfield of virtue epistemology which, to the best of our knowledge, has yet to be explicitly developed in terms of business ethics. The paper concludes by outlining a business ethics research agenda on epistemic vice, with implications for responding to epistemic vices and their illegitimacy in practice. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in analytic philosophy that engages with non-Western philosophical traditions, including South Asian religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. However, thus far, there has been no engagement with Sikhism, despite its status as a major world religion with a rich philosophical tradition. This paper is an attempt to get a start at analytic philosophical engagement with Sikh philosophy. My focus is on Sikh ethics, and in particular on the theory of vice (...) and virtue that can be gleaned from Sikh scripture. According to this theory, the five major vices have a unified source in the vice of haumai. Haumai is a kind of false conception of oneself as singularly important, and correspondingly, a false conception of the world as revolving around oneself, as a world of objects there for one’s use. Vice, then, comes down to the failure to recognize the importance of others. The corresponding picture of virtue is that virtue consists in a recognition of the importance of others, through the recognition of an ultimate reality on which all are One. After reconstructing the Sikh theory of vice and virtue, I conclude with some comparative remarks on Sikh and Western ethics. (shrink)

Advance directives are intended to extend patient autonomy by enabling patients to prospectively direct the care of their future incapacitated selves. There has been much discussion about issues such as whether the future incompetent self is identical to the agent who issues the advance directives or whether advance directives can legitimately secure patient autonomy. However, there is another important question to ask: to what extent and in what conditions is it ethically appropriate for one to limit the liberty or agency (...) of one’s future incompetent self by issuing an advance directive? -/- In this paper, I use a virtue-ethical approach to explore this question, focusing on the case of an advance directive for the future self with moderate dementia. First, I examine virtuous attitudes with regard to autonomy and argue that one can manifest vices or ethically undesirable character traits in trying to intervene in the future self’s life. In particular, I argue that this case can manifest vices such as disdainfulness, intellectual arrogance, and self-dictatorship, which is the vice of trying to control one’s life to an excessive degree, and that a self-dictator fails to give due moral consideration to the future self’s liberty or agency. I then introduce the Daoist idea of wu-wei, which recommends embracement of what happens in one’s life, as one of the possible remedies for the overemphasis on the value of autonomy and control. (shrink)

Although critics often argue that the new atheists are arrogant, dogmatic, closed-minded and so on, there is currently no philosophical analysis of this complaint - which I will call 'the vice charge' - and no assessment of whether it is merely a rhetorical aside or a substantive objection in its own right. This Chapter therefore uses the resources of virtue epistemology to articulate this ' vice charge' and to argue that critics are right to imply that new atheism (...) is intrinsically epistemically vicious, and it ends with some remarks about the rationality of allowing such intrinsically vicious doctrines to feature within public debate about important matters concerning science, religion, and politics. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the neo-Aristotelian conception of “friendships of character” appears to misrepresent the essential nature of "genuine", or "true", friendship. We question the neo-Aristotelian imperative that true friendship entails disinterested love of the other “for their own sake” and strives at enhancing moral virtue. We propose an alternative conception of true friendship as involving affective and motivational features which we call closeness, intimacy, identity, and trust. Even on this minimal construal, however, friendship can turn vicious when (...) one of its characteristics becomes overpowering and thereby destroys the very goods for which the friendship was originally sought. (shrink)

I introduce the concept pathophobia, to capture the range of morally objectionable forms of treatment to which somatically ill persons are subjected. After distinguishing this concept from sanism and ableism, I argue that the moral wrongs of pathophobia are best analysed using a framework of vice ethics. To that end I describe five clusters of pathophobic vices and failings, illustrating each with examples from three influential illness narratives.

Although the discipline of vice epistemology is only a decade old, the broader project of studying epistemic vices and failings is much older. This paper argues that contemporary vice epistemologists ought to engage more closely with these earlier projects. After sketching some general arguments in section one, I then turn to deep epistemic vices: ones whose identity and intelligibility depends on some underlying conception of human nature or the nature of reality. The final section then offers a case (...) study from a vice epistemic tradition that emerged in early modern English natural philosophy. (shrink)

The topic of fake news has received increased attention from philosophers since the term became a favorite of politicians (Habgood-Coote 2016; Dentith 2016). Notably missing from the conversation, however, is a discussion of fake news and conspiracy theory media as a market. This paper will take as its starting point the account of noxious markets put forward by Debra Satz (2010), and will argue that there is a pro tanto moral reason to restrict the market for fake news. Specifically, we (...) begin with Satz’s argument that restricting a market may be required when i) that market inhibits citizens from being able to stand in an equal relationship with one another, and ii) this problem cannot be solved without such direct restrictions. Our own argument then proceeds in three parts: first, we argue that the market for fake news fits Satz’s description of a noxious market; second, we argue against explanations of the proliferation of fake news that are couched in terms of “epistemic vice”, and likewise argue against prescribing critical thinking education as a solution to the problem; finally, we conclude that, in the absence of other solutions to mitigate the noxious effects of the fake news market, we have a pro tanto moral reason to impose restrictions on this market. At the end of the paper, we consider one proposal to regulate the fake news market, which involves making social media outlets potentially liable in civil court for damages caused by the fake news hosted on their websites. (shrink)

This paper begins with a discussion the role of less-than-admirable epistemic emotions in our respectable, indeed admirable inquiries: nosiness, obsessiveness, wishful thinking, denial, partisanship. The explanation for their desirable effect is Mandevillian: because of the division of epistemic labour individual epistemic vices can lead to shared knowledge. In fact it is sometimes essential to it.

Recent findings in experimental philosophy have revealed that people attribute intentionality, belief, desire, knowledge, and blame asymmetrically to side- effects depending on whether the agent who produces the side-effect violates or adheres to a norm. Although the original (and still common) test for this effect involved a chairman helping or harming the environment, hardly any of these findings have been applied to business ethics. We review what little exploration of the implications for business ethics has been done. Then, we present (...) new experimental results that expand the attribution asymmetry to virtue and vice. We also examine whether it matters to people that an effect was produced as a primary or side- effect, as well as how consumer habits might be affected by this phenomenon. These results lead to the conclusion that it appears to be in a businessperson’s self-interest to be virtuous. (shrink)

I sketch out a specific form of vice epistemology that I call critical character epistemology.

The aim of this chapter is to understand more precisely what kind of irrationality involved in procrastination. The chapter argues that in order to understand the irrationality of procrastination one needs to understand the possibility and the nature of what I call “top-down independent” policies and long-term actions. A policy or long-term action) is top-down independent if it is possible to act irrationally relative to the adoption of the policy without ever engaging in a momentary action that is per se (...) irrational. involved in procrastination one needs to It argues that procrastination is one of the corresponding vices of an overlooked virtue; namely, “practical judgment.” On this account, procrastination turns out to be a failure of instrumental rationality that can be so characterized without assuming the correctness of any further norms of practical rationality. Thus this account of procrastination also constitutes an important objection to Christine Korsgaard’s claim that a purely instrumental conception of rationality is incoherent. (shrink)

Mandevillian intelligence is a specific form of collective intelligence in which individual cognitive shortcomings, limitations and biases play a positive functional role in yielding various forms of collective cognitive success. When this idea is transposed to the epistemological domain, mandevillian intelligence emerges as the idea that individual forms of intellectual vice may, on occasion, support the epistemic performance of some form of multi-agent ensemble, such as a socio-epistemic system, a collective doxastic agent, or an epistemic group agent. As a (...) specific form of collective intelligence, mandevillian intelligence is relevant to a number of debates in social epistemology, especially those that seek to understand how group (or collective) knowledge arises from the interactions between a collection of individual epistemic agents. Beyond this, however, mandevillian intelligence raises issues that are relevant to the research agendas of both virtue epistemology and applied epistemology. From a virtue epistemological perspective, mandevillian intelligence encourages us to adopt a relativistic conception of intellectual vice/virtue, enabling us to see how individual forms of intellectual vice may (sometimes) be relevant to collective forms of intellectual virtue. In addition, mandevillian intelligence is relevant to the nascent sub-discipline of applied epistemology. In particular, mandevillian intelligence forces us see the potential epistemic value of (e.g., technological) interventions that create, maintain or promote individual forms of intellectual vice. (shrink)

I survey some points of contact between contemporary vice epistemology and feminist philosophy of science.

In this paper, I argue that the widely held view that Aristotle's vicious agent is a principled follower of a wrong conception of the good whose soul, just like the soul of the virtuous agent, is marked by harmony between his reason and non-rational desires is an exegetical mistake. Rather, Aristotle holds – consistently and throughout the Nicomachean Ethics – that the vicious agent lacks any real principles of action and that his soul lacks unity and harmony even more than (...) the soul of the uncontrolled agent. (shrink)

This is a response to Earp and colleagues' target article "If I could just stop loving you: Anti-love biotechnology and the ethics of a chemical break-up". I argue that the authors may indulge in the vice of in-principlism when presenting their ethical framework for dealing with anti-love biotechnology, and that they mis-apply the concept of harm.

I argue that racism is essentially a civic character trait: to be a racist is to have a character that rationally reflects racial supremacist sociopolitical values. As with moral vice accounts of racism, character is my account’s primary evaluative focus: character is directly evaluated as racist, and all other racist things are racist insofar as, and because, they cause, are caused by, express or are otherwise suitably related to racist character. Yet as with political accounts of racism, sociopolitical considerations (...) provide my account’s primary evaluative standard: satisfying the sociopolitical standard of racial supremacy is what makes racist character racist. (shrink)

In this paper, we focus on the propensity toward identifying natural kinds with successful scientific categories in contemporary discussions of natural kinds within the philosophy of science. Success in this case is understood as the fulfillment of epistemic interests or goals in a given field of scientific research. The prevailing view is that, in order to have a theory of natural kinds that successfully captures current scientific practice, the relevant epistemic interests are the current interests of scientists working in a (...) particular field. In contrast, we concur with the Franklin-Hall (2015) that a wider range of possible interests needs to be taken into account, in order to avoid making natural kinds too dependent on the current stage of research. But unlike Franklin-Hall who suggests looking for an intersection between the interests and goals of current epistemic agents and our neighboring epistemic agents (the categorical bottleneck view), we advocate the view that all these different interests and goals need to be taken into account, and thus our view takes into account a much wider range of categories. (shrink)

Defining the capital vice of sloth (acedia) is a difficult business in Thomas Aquinas and in the Christian tradition of thought from which he draws his account. In this article, I will raise three problems for interpreting Aquinas's account of sloth. They are all related, as are the resolutions to them I will offer. The three problems can be framed as questions: How, on Aquinas's account, can sloth consistently be categorized as, first, a capital vice and, second, a (...) spiritual vice? These two questions lead to a third, namely, how is the condition of sloth possible, given Aquinas's moral psychology and the nature of the will? The resolution of these interpretive issues can help do two things. It can help explain the apparent inconsistency between traditional (ancient and medieval) and contemporary conceptions of this vice, and —if Aquinas's account is right— it can help us diagnose contemporary moral and spiritual maladies that may either go unnoticed or be confused with distinctively modern "virtues" like diligence and industriousness. (shrink)

Ian James Kidd investigates how social forces shape epistemic character. I outline his proposed 'critical character epistemology' and I critically assess his discussion of the roles of salience in sustaining epistemic vice. -/- I emphasise how patterns of salience affect how social position—race, gender, class, and so on—shapes epistemic character. I dispute Kidd’s claim that all epistemic vices are salient. Instead, I argue, epistemic vice is camouflaged by ubiquity. Similarly, I dispute his claim that ‘normed-vices’ are particularly salient. (...) -/- . (shrink)

In Vices of the Mind, Cassam provides an accessible, engaging, and timely introduction to the nature of epistemic vices and what we can do about them. Cassam provides an account of epistemic vices and explores three broad types of epistemic vices: character traits, attitudes, and ways of thinking. Regarding each, Cassam draws insights about the nature of vices through examining paradigm instances of each type of vice and exploring their significance through real world historical examples. With his account of (...) vices in hand, Cassam turns to addressing three questions in the remainder of the book: how can we be responsible for our epistemic vices? how can we be aware of our epistemic vices? And how can we address our epistemic vices? -/- This book provides an excellent introduction to the debates about epistemic vices and is easy to engage regardless of one’s philosophical background. In being the first book-length treatment of epistemic vices, Vices of the Mind is sure to shape the debates surrounding epistemic vices for some time. In what follows we provide brief chapter summaries and raise several challenges to the account Cassam defends in the book. (shrink)

History teems with instances of “man’s inhumanity to man.” Some wrongs are perpetrated by individuals; most ghastly evils were committed by groups or nations. Other horrific evils were established and sustained by legal systems and supported by cultural mores. This demands explanation. I describe and evaluate four common explanations of evil before discussing more mundane and psychologically informed explanations of wrong-doing. Examining these latter forms helps isolate an additional factor which, if acknowledged, empowers us to diagnose, cope with, and prevent (...) many ordinary and serious moral wrongs. In so doing, I do not assert that the explanations of first call are never appropriate. I claim only that their role is smaller than many of us reflexively suppose, and that the role of the later feature I identify is more significant, in part, because it supports and amplifies the more mundane and psychologically informed factors prompting wrong-doing. (shrink)

Gratitude, the proper or fitting response to benevolence, has often been conceptualized as a virtue—a temporally stable disposition to perceive, think, feel, and act in certain characteristic ways in certain situations. Many accounts of gratitude as a virtue, however, have not analyzed this disposition accurately, and as a result, they have not revealed the rich variety of ways in which someone can fail to be a grateful person. In this paper, I articulate an account of the virtue of gratitude, and (...) I use this account to explore various vices that can manifest in its absence. (shrink)

Philosophers often give procrastination an anemic description—a preference, a confl ict, a case of irrationality. Presumably, this is done in order to make it susceptible to analysis. But if one makes use of ethical theory, particularly one with an accompanying account of moral psychology, no arid depiction of procrastination is necessary. An ethical theory that is robust enough—such as traditional virtue ethics—can meet procrastination head on, unhindered by its complex emotionality and opaque intentionality. It can then place it alongside similarly (...) complex behavior, comparing and contrasting until we have some account of the darker alleyways of our nature and the limits of our self-control.That the term vice is out of favor gives us no reason to deny that procrastination is a moral phenomenon. (shrink)

It is plausible that being an evil person is a matter of having a particularly morally depraved character. I argue that suffering from extreme moral vices—and not consistently lacking moral vices, for example—suffices for being evil. Alternatively, I defend an extremity account concerning evil personhood against consistency accounts of evil personhood. After clarifying what it is for vices to be extreme, I note that the extremity thesis I defend allows that a person could suffer from both extremely vicious character traits (...) while possessing some modest virtue as well. By contrast, consistency theses rule out this possibility by definition. This result does not suggest that extremity accounts are flawed, however, since, as I argue, the thesis that evil people must lack moral virtue altogether effectively defines evil people out of existence and prematurely privileges skepticism about evil personhood. Ultimately, I contend that an extremity account is most consistent with common intuitions about putative evil persons as well as plausible assumptions about aretaic evaluations of character quite generally. (shrink)

We are witnessing increasing use of the Internet, particular social media, to criticize (perceived or actual) moral failings and misdemeanors. This phenomenon of so-called ‘online public shaming’ could provide a powerful tool for reinforcing valuable social norms. But it also threatens unwarranted and severe punishments meted out by online mobs. This paper analyses the dangers associated with the informal enforcement of norms, drawing on Locke, but also highlights its promise, drawing on recent discussions of social norms. We then consider two (...) crucial conditions that online public shaming must meet in order to be justifiable: proportionality and accountability. We argue that these requirements are in fact frequently violated, rendering most cases of online public shaming unjustified. While the use of online public shaming against others’ vices has some apparent virtues, it is currently rarely justified, given its own vices. (shrink)

In this chapter, after a review of some existent empirical and philosophical literature that suggests that human beings are essentially incapable of changing their mind in response to counter-evidence, I argue that motivation makes a significant difference to individuals’ ability rationally to evaluate information. I rely on empirical work on group deliberation to argue that the motivation to learn from others, as opposed to the desire to win arguments, promotes good quality group deliberation. Finally I provide an overview of some (...) epistemic virtues and vices crucial to the politico-epistemic activities of arguing, debating, and listening to a contrary point of view. (shrink)

This paper draws a distinction between ‘right MacIntyreans’ who are relatively optimistic that MacIntyre’s vision of ethics can be realised in capitalist society, and ‘left MacIntyreans’ who are sceptical about this possibility, and aims to show that the ‘left MacIntyrean’ position is a promising perspective available to business ethicists. It does so by arguing for a distinction between ‘community-focused’ practices and ‘excellence-focused’ practices. The latter concept fulfils the promise of practices to provide us with an understanding of the best work (...) for humankind and highlights the affinities between MacIntyre’s concept of a practice and Marx’s conception of good work as free, creative activity. The paper concludes with a suggestion that we reflect on the best forms of work so that we can strive to ensure the very best activities, those most consonant with our flourishing, one day become available to all. (shrink)

This Chapter challenges the common claim that vicious forms of argumentative practice, like interpersonal arrogance and discursive polarisation, are caused by martial metaphors, such as ARGUMENT AS WAR. I argue that the problem isn’t the metaphor, but our wider practices of metaphorising and the ways they are deformed by invidious cultural biases and prejudices. Drawing on feminist argumentation theory, I argue that misogynistic cultures distort practices of metaphorising in two ways. First, they spotlight some associations between the martial and argumentative (...) domains while occluding others, resulting in a sort of myopia. Second, those cultures interfere with a phenomenon I label normative isomorphism – the capacity of some structural metaphors to enable (and often encourage) a transfer of normative chracater traits from the source domain to the target domain. Crucially, the normative status of character trait often changes across domains—traits that are virtuous in the martial domain are often vicious in the argumentative domain, and vice versa. Sexist myopia tends to deform practices of metaphorising by interfering with normative isomorphism by privileging the transfer across domains of traits that recapitulate invidious cultural constructions of masculinity in terms of aggression, domination, and violence. Basically, the problem isn’t the metaphors, but the cultures. (shrink)

Addiction and certain varieties of interpersonal attachment share strikingly similar psycho-behavioral structures. Neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers have often adduced such similarities between addiction and attachment to argue that many typical cases of romantic love represent addictions to one’s partner and thus might be appropriate candidates for medical treatment. In this paper, I argue for the relatively neglected thesis that some paradigmatic cases of addiction are aptly characterized as emotional attachments to their objects. This has implications for how we should understand (...) the nature of addiction and for the ethics of attachment more broadly. (shrink)

The reward system of science is the priority rule. The first scientist making a new discovery is rewarded with prestige, while second runners get little or nothing. Michael Strevens, following Philip Kitcher, defends this reward system, arguing that it incentivizes an efficient division of cognitive labor. I argue that this assessment depends on strong implicit assumptions about the replicability of findings. I question these assumptions on the basis of metascientific evidence and argue that the priority rule systematically discourages replication. My (...) analysis leads us to qualify Kitcher and Strevens’s contention that a priority-based reward system is normatively desirable for science. (shrink)

The Mahāyāna Buddhist thinker Śāntideva tells his audience to give out alcohol, weapons and sex for reasons of Buddhist compassion, though he repeatedly warns of the dangers of all these three. The article shows how Śāntideva resolves this issue: these gifts, and gifts in general, attract their recipients to the virtuous giver, in a way that helps the recipients to become more virtuous in the long run. As a consequence, Śāntideva does recommend the alleviation of poverty, but assigns it a (...) much smaller significance than is usually supposed. His views run counter to many engaged Buddhist discussions of political action, and lend support to the “modernist” interpretation of engaged Buddhist practice. (shrink)

There is much of interest in Cassam’s ground-breaking Vices of the Mind. This discussion focuses exclusively on one aspect of his view, namely, his account of what it takes to be properly criticisable or blameworthy for one’s epistemic vices. This critical discussion consists of two sections. The first provides an overview of Cassam’s account of responsibility and criticisability for intellectual vices. The second raises a problem for that account whose formulation is due to Battaly and proposes a solution which, at (...) least in part, could also be adopted by Cassam himself if he were prepared to make some small changes to his view. This solution generates a highly disjunctive account of criticisability and responsibility for possessing an epistemic vice. Although such heterogeneity might seem wholly unsatisfactory, it receives a plausible explanation when the account is put within the context of a Strawsonian approach to the practice of holding people responsible for their epistemic vices. (shrink)

A basic way of evaluating metaphysical theories is to ask whether they give satisfying answers to the questions they set out to resolve. I propose an account of “third-order” virtue that tells us what it takes for certain kinds of metaphysical theories to do so. We should think of these theories as recipes. I identify three good-making features of recipes and show that they translate to third-order theoretical virtues. I apply the view to two theories—mereological universalism and plenitudinous platonism—and draw (...) out their third-order virtues and vices. One lesson is that there is an important difference between essentially and non-essentially third-order vicious theories. I also argue that if a theory is essentially third-order vicious, it cannot be assessed for more standard “second-order” theoretical virtues and vices, like parsimony. This motivates the idea that third-order virtues are distinct from second-order ones. Finally, I suggest that the relationship between truth, progress, and third-order virtue is more complex than it seems. (shrink)

A review of Rebecca DeYoung's book, "Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies", 2nd ed.

Vice epistemology, as Quassim Cassam understands it, is the study of the nature, identity, and significance of the epistemic vices. But what makes an intellectual vice a vice? Cassam calls his own view “Obstructivism” – intellectual vices are those traits, thinking styles, or attitudes that systematically obstruct the acquisition, retention, and transmission of knowledge. -/- I shall argue that Cassam’s account is an improvement upon virtue-reliabilism, and that it fares better against what I call Montmarquet’s objection than (...) its immediate rivals. Nevertheless, I contend that it does not go far enough — Montmarquet’s objection stands. -/- I conclude that either the objection needs to be answered in some other way, or else proponents of Obstructivism need to explain why their account of the nature of the intellectual vices does not have the counterintuitive consequences it appears to have. Alternatively, another account of the nature of the intellectual vices needs to be sought. (shrink)

The list of the seven capital vices include sloth, envy, avarice, vainglory, gluttony, lust, and anger. While many of the seven vices are more complex than they appear at first glance, one stands out as more obscure and out of place than all the others, at least for a contemporary audience: the vice of sloth. Our puzzlement over sloth is heightened by sloth's inclusion on the traditional lists of the seven capital vices and the seven deadly sins from the (...) fourth century onward. For hundreds of years, these seven vices were distinguished as moral and spiritual failings of serious and perennial importance. By contrast, recent studies, as well as the popular imagination, typically associate sloth with, or even define it as, laziness. But is laziness in fact a moral failing? (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show how concern with agency, expressed in the idea that history is the doing of agents, shapes both Kant’s and Hegel’s conceptions of history and, by extension, the roles they accord philosophical historiography.

In line with the tradition running from Ancients through Christian thought, Kant affirms the idea of moral freedom: that true freedom consists in moral self-determination. The idea of moral freedom raises the problem of moral freedom: if freedom is moral self-determination, it seems that the wicked are not free and therefore not responsible for their wrongdoings. In this essay I discuss Kant's solution to this problem. I argue that Kant distinguishes between four modalities of freedom as moral self-determination and that (...) the problem of moral freedom disappears when these distinctions are brought to light. (shrink)

It has been argued recently that knowledge is the norm of practical reasoning. This norm can be formulated as a bi-conditional: it is appropriate to treat p as a reason for acting if and only if you know that p. Other proposals replace knowledge with warranted or justified belief. This paper gives counter-examples of both directions of any such bi-conditional. To the left-to-right direction: scientists can appropriately treat as reasons for action propositions of a theory they believe to be false (...) but good approximations to the truth for present purposes. Cases based on a variant of Pascal’s Wager and actions performed by a skeptic also illustrate the point. To the right-to-left direction: in certain circumstances, it can be unreasonable for a scientist to reason from propositions of a theory she knows to be true. (shrink)