[MUSIC] Today, I'm going to talk about virtue epistemology, and the lecture will be divided into four parts. In part one, I'm going to talk about what is virtue epistemology? How we should understand this approach in epistemology? And also, what are some of its advantages? Why might this approach in epistemology be attractive? In part two, I'm going to talk about two kinds of intellectual virtue. On the one hand, there are what virtue epistemologists call character virtues. And on the other hand, there are what we call faculty virtues. And it's important to get straight on this distinction, and so I am going to talk about that in part two. And then in part three, we'll look at how the two kinds of virtue are related. And then finally in part four, I want to talk about the particular virtue of intellectual humility, and how it fits into the broader virtue theoretic framework. Okay, so part one: what is virtue epistemology? Well, epistemologists tend to understand virtue epistemology on an analogy with virtue ethics, and so it's going to be important to just talk a little bit first about virtue ethics, and then we can talk about virtue epistemology as an analogy to that. So a little bit about virtue ethics. Well, ethics in general is concerned with various sorts of issues. So for example, one main issue in ethics is what actions are right, or what is the nature of right action? What makes for right action? Another kind of question in virtue ethics is what sort of things are valuable, or what sort of things are worth having or worthy of pursuit. So for example, if you ask, what are the most valuable things in life? You might say, money, you might say, having nice things. Some people think it's experience various kinds of pleasure, or maybe you might think education is valuable, reputation is valuable, maybe you think friends are valuable. So that's another sort of main question in ethics: what sorts of things are valuable. A third question is what makes for a good life, or a desirable life or a life worth living? What does it mean to flourish or thrive as a human being? So that's sort of questions about what kind of life should I lead, what does a good life look like? And then finally, in ethics we're concerned about what makes for a good person, or in other words what makes for a virtuous person? So what does that consist in, what does that look like? Now different ethical theories tend to make one of these questions most fundamental. And then once you got an answer to that fundamental question, whatever you think it is, then you can go on to answer the other questions, by referring back to what you think is most fundamental. So for example, in ethics there are deontological theories such as Immanuel Kant's theory, which tends to focus on the issue of right action. What makes a right action? Only when he's got the answer to that most important question, does Kant then go on to talk about what's valuable, what kind of life should I lead, what kind of person should I be, or what makes for a good person. And these tend to be in terms of which actions are right. So, for example, a good life would be a life full of right action, understood in this Kantian way. Now, consequentialist theories, such as Mill's utilitarianism, they make the question of what's most valuable the fundamental question. So, what things in life are most valuable, and then you can understand something like right action in terms of well, the right action is the thing that promotes that which is most valuable, or a good life is that which contains many valuable things. So you get the idea that the fundamental question is then on value, and then goes on to answer the other questions in terms of value. Okay, well that brings us to virtue theory. As you can imagine, virtue theories focus on the question of what makes for a virtuous person. So they're going to make that question about what makes a virtuous person, that's going to be the fundamental question. And then we're going to go on to answer questions about right action, a good life, what things are valuable in terms of the answer we give to the virtue question. So for example, we could understand a right action as roughly the sort of action that a virtuous person would perform in the circumstances. Or we could understand a good life as a life that a virtuous person would lead, and which would have the sorts of things that are necessary to lead a virtuous life, things like that. So what we're doing here is, we're taking with these different theories, we're taking different approaches to what you might think of as the direction of explanation. So some theories think you make, for example, the notion of right action fundamental. And then you explain other things, like what makes for a good person, or what makes for a good life, in terms of right action. Virtue theory makes the concept of a virtuous person fundamental, and then it attempts to explain other things like right action, a good life, valuable things, in terms of a virtuous person. So that's virtue ethics, so virtue ethics is understood as taking that sort of direction of analysis or direction of explanation in a way that makes virtues fundamental. So now, we can talk analogously about virtue epistemology. So, consider various issues that are of concern in epistemology. We might ask, what makes a belief justified or reasonable or rational to hold? Actually, epistemologists usually want to make a distinction between rationality and reasonableness and justification. But for our purposes, let's say those are roughly in the same ball park, the same sort of thing, and that's one set of questions. And the question is, what makes a belief a good belief in the terms of being justified or reasonable or rational? But another kind of question would be, what sorts of things are intellectually valuable? So for example, what sort of things should we pursue as intellectual beings? So you might say truth, you might say reasonableness, you might say knowledge, you might say wisdom. These are various candidates for epistemic or intellectual goods or values, and we might take that as fundamental. We could ask what makes for a good intellectual life, or what makes for intellectual flourishing, so to speak. What does that look like, or finally, we could ask what does an intellectually virtuous person look like? What does that consist in? So again as you can imagine, virtue epistemology is going to take that last question about what makes for an intellectually good or virtuous person as fundamental, and then it's going to try to understand intellectual goods, the intellectual properties of belief, these sorts of things, by referring back to our answer about what makes for intellectual virtue.
