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ABSTRACT
Despite the now considerable literature on intellectual virtue, there remains relatively little philosophical discussion of intellectual vice. What discussion there is has been shaped by a powerful assumption—that, just as intellectual virtue requires that we are motivated by epistemic goods, intellectual vice requires that we aren't. In this paper, I demonstrate that this assumption is false: motivational approaches cannot explain a range of intuitive cases of intellectual vice. The popularity of the assumption is accounted for by its being a manifestation of a more general understanding of vice as an inversion or mirror image of virtue. I call this the inversion thesis, and argue that the failure of the motivational approach to vice exposes its limitations. I conclude by suggesting that recognizing these limitations can help to encourage philosophical interest in intellectual vice.
Notes
1 Where discussed, vice is often treated as derivative from, or an aid to the development of, a theory of virtue: see the seminal works by Zagzebski [Citation1996] and Baehr [Citation2011]. Fricker [Citation2007], Swank [Citation2000], Baehr [Citation2010], and Battaly [Citation2010] are all relatively early exceptions to this rule. Roberts and Wood's Intellectual Virtues [Citation2007], whilst oriented around virtue, contains excellent discussion of numerous vices.
2 Two theorists who reject a motivational approach are Swank [Citation2000] and Cassam [Citation2016]. Swank's analysis is premised upon an under-developed and unconvincing distinction between epistemic traits and ‘personal traits’. Cassam, meanwhile, approaches the analysis of character vices from a consequentialist perspective, whereas I am interested in a responsibilist analysis. This is not the place to explore the merits and demerits of these two frameworks, although in sections 3 and 4 I touch upon my reservations about employing virtue-theoretic language to describe purely consequentialist phenomena.
3 I also suspect that modelling vice on reliabilist terms will be more straightforward, as explored in Battaly [Citation2014].
4 Reliabilists largely focus on classic epistemological issues (see, for example, seminal texts by Sosa [Citation2007] and Greco, [Citation2010]), issues which many responsibilists now concede responsibilism is ill-suited to address, at least alone [Roberts and Wood Citation2007; Baehr Citation2011].
5 Not all responsibilists talk exclusively in terms of motivations; Baehr, for example, talks of a ‘love’ of epistemic goods [Citation2011: 101]. What all such accounts share, however, is the claim that virtue involves some kind of positive orientation towards the epistemic good. I use ‘motivation’ as a less unwieldy catch-all, and one that ties in with the literature on vice.
6 Baehr [Citation2012] is the only theorist to analyse this grounding relation in any detail. He claims that the virtuous agent must ‘reasonably believe’ that their proximate ends are ‘suitably related’ to the ultimate ones, where suitable relations might include relations of epistemic reliability, of constituting the (partial) fulfilment of the ultimate ends, and so on. I am warier of the intellectualism in this account than Baehr is, despite his attempts to offset it, but sustained elaboration of this grounding relation need not concern us here. I trust that the picture I have presented, whilst simple and stylized, is sufficiently clear to proceed.
7 Baehr and Montmarquet might accept this, since both make the appropriate motivational state sufficient for virtue. Zagzebski thinks that the virtuous agent will also be reliably successful in producing epistemic goods, so might maintain that the appropriate proximate motivations are necessary, too, in so far as they are necessary for this reliability. The value of proximate ends here is still not intrinsic, but is derived from their good consequences.
8 At times, Battaly suggests that other blameworthy psychological features, notably a faulty conception of the epistemic good, might also be sufficient to ground vice [Citation2014, Citation2016a]. However, her examples of people with a faulty conception of the good are generally people who take some set of epistemic bads to be good, such as people ‘caring too much about upholding the party line or upholding the views in which he is already invested’ [Citation2016a: 210]. Accordingly, this is really another way of specifying the same motivational approach: these people are motivated by epistemic bads; they just don't realize it.
9 Both Mills [Citation2007] and Medina [Citation2013] offer important discussion of such cases.
10 Compare the ethical case: willing the suffering of innocents, say, is intrinsically bad even if you only wish to use that suffering as a means to some end (as is discussed, for example, by Hurka [Citation2001]).
11 I don't claim that all people who do such things are vicious, and are so because they lack the appropriate epistemic orientation. However, these examples offer support for my case just so long as it is granted that this is one plausible story about their characters.
12 If one is motivated by the bad, I take it, one is thereby not motivated by the good.
13 Like almost all virtue epistemologists, each of these theorists focus primarily on virtue, and none elaborate upon vice in any great detail (one exception being Baehr [Citation2010]). This picture has thus been pieced together from various suggestive comments that each has made. Whilst I therefore don't take any of them to necessarily be committed to the details of this account, I nonetheless think that the picture they indicate is highly significant, given these theorists’ influence within virtue epistemology and the paucity of actual developed and avowed vice theories.
14 Again, to undermine the view that vicious agents will necessarily not be motivated by epistemic goods, all that matters is that this is one plausible story about their motivational structures. Many actual politicians who fit Dave's profile, for example, will not deserve this relatively charitable analysis.
15 One could argue that they acted in this way only because of a prior failure to be sufficiently motivated by the epistemic good, which led to their forming these problematic beliefs. Even if this were necessarily the case, and I am sceptical that it is, ascriptions of vice are assessments not of one's overall character, but rather of particular aspects of it. The question at hand, then, is that of whether Dave and Galileo are intellectually vicious at this point, in this respect. If vice requires inappropriate motivations, then we'd be forced to say ‘no.’
16 Similarly, recall my contention that, in spite of his unreliability as an intellectual agent, Oliver's intellectual character is not flawed or problematic in a way appropriate for intellectual vice. This is at least in part, I suggested, because his unreliability is not tied to deeper evaluative commitments and the like.
17 Philip Pettit has recently made a similar point about good and evil [Citation2015]. Whilst ascriptions of goodness often presuppose that the agent controlled for the good effects of their acts, ascriptions of evil generally require only that they allowed bad things to happen.
18 One notable virtue theorist who clearly didn't take this position is Philippa Foot [Citation1978], who suggests that virtues are bulwarks against the natural human drift towards badness. A similar idea regarding intellectual virtues features in Roberts and Wood [Citation2007: 82].
19 Testimonial injustice [Fricker Citation2007], epistemic self-indulgence [Battaly Citation2010], and epistemic malevolence [Baehr Citation2010] are some recent examples.
20 See Roberts and Wood [Citation2007: 235] on the plethora of vices that correspond to humility.
21 After all, a further implication of the Galileo and Dave cases is that the appropriate orientation towards epistemic goods cannot be straightforwardly sufficient for virtue.
22 I am grateful to audiences at Cardiff, Edinburgh, Manchester, and Sheffield for providing feedback that greatly improved this paper. I would also like to thank a number of people for reading and providing helpful comments on various drafts: Simon Barker, J. Adam Carter, Jules Holroyd, Holly Lawford-Smith, James Lewis, two anonymous referees for the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and, repeatedly, Miranda Fricker.